TUCKER 3
7/20
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mainstreams racism white nat'l and now fascism? (see umberto eco)
see wedge culture war
see PUTIN
prolly some neglect for routine BS
html onslaught
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https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/tucker-carlsons-history-pro-kremlin-anti-ukraine-propaganda
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gmail 3/22
Townhall
... we were the largest producer of oil and gas," explained Marc Morano, author of Green Fraud and executive editor of Climate Depot.
Beijing's Energy Policies Benefit Chinese Industry, While US Sacrifices Its Own ... - The Epoch Times
The Epoch Times
That's according to Marc Morano, executive director of ClimateDepot.com, a project of the Washington-based think tank Committee for a Constructive ...
Natural Gas Prices Continue Climbing After Ukraine Invasion, Nord Stream 2 Cancellation
The Epoch Times
Marc Morano, the proprietor of Climate Depot, told The Epoch Times that the G7 statement was “laughable,” given that up to 40 percent of European ...
Fossil fuel apologists blame everyone but Putin. Because of course they do. | Red, Green, and Blue
Red, Green, and Blue
...Carlson (who's been defending Putin) hadMarc Morano on his show to –what else – blame Biden and climate concern for the Russian invasion.
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msnbc 2 22 says he makes gop policy/POV?!
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-2656832200/
~KBB
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-2656827634/
no lnx vid
Tucker Carlson tries to gaslight his way out of having pushed Putin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda for a month
David Neiwert and Daily Kos March 02, 2022
Tucker Carlson is utterly baffled that people would think he is rooting for Vladimir Putin and Russia in its war on Ukraine. “You know, it’s such an awful thing to say,” he said on his Fox News show Monday, after playing a clip of Congressman Eric Swalwell saying he and other Republicans were on Putin’s side. “We hesitated to play that, even—it’s very common, you hear it every day. The question is: Why are they saying that? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Gaslighting, of course, has become Carlson’s specialty. In reality, Carlson spent most of the month prior to the invasion praising Putin and echoing Russian propaganda: running down Ukraine, deriding it as a “State Department client state”—not a democracy, but “a tyranny”—and claiming that Russia just wants to keep its borders secure, everything the fault of Joe Biden. So much so that he became the hero of Russian state television, where his rants were translated and replayed, and he was praised as an astute American.
Now that the horror is hitting home, Carlson suddenly has realized that he backed the wrong horse and is scurrying hard to dig his way out. The first step in that, of course, is gaslighting his audience about what he had been saying just the week before, and blaming the war on Putin now—yet somehow it’s still all Joe Biden’s fault. Those clips have yet to appear on Russian TV.
The major tone shift occurred Friday, a day after the invasion: “It’s a tragedy, because war always is a tragedy, and the closer you get to it, the more horrifying it seems,” he said. He also squarely put the onus on Russia and Putin: “He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine.”
“Vladimir Putin started this war,so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it,” [CYA?] he said. “He fired the first shots.”
It’s a sharp and complete reversal of his previous arguments. On Feb. 17, he spouted Russian propaganda in claiming that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation. He also attacked U.S. officials who provided military aid to Ukraine.
“These people are so ghoulish,” Carlson said. “Of course they’re promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”
This narrative became a staple of Carlson’s defense of Russia’s war. On his Feb. 22 show, he again spouted Putin’s propaganda: “The point here is to defend democracy. Not that Ukraine is a democracy. It’s not a democracy. Ukraine’s president has arrested his main political opponent, he has shut down newspapers and television stations that have dared to criticize him. So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny. But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”
The next day, he again dismissed Ukraine as “a State Department client state,” claiming that Democrats wanted Americans to “wholeheartedly support jumping with both feet into a highly complicated conflict in a part of Eastern Europe where we have no national interests.”
The most noteworthy part of that Feb. 22 episode, however, washow Carlson defended Putin against his “haters” by comparing him to American liberals, who he clearly saw as far more nefarious:
It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, ‘What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?’ These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So do why does permanent Washington hate him so much?
The day after the invasion began, on Feb. 24, it was more of the same. The invasion, he claimed, demonstrated that Biden was a foreign-policy failure who had promised he would keep it from happening, making Putin’s war a “humiliating defeat for Joe Biden.”
Russian state media promptly began re-airing Carlson’s rants with translated subtitles, particularly the Putin-didn’t-call-me-a-racist episode. His attacks on Ukraine’s legitimacy also received heavy play. They also replayed Carlson’s Feb. 24 interview with ex-CongresswomanTulsi Gabbard, who told him: "Sanctions don't work. This is the whole problem with the Biden administration: They are so focused on how do we punish Putin."
The clips became the topic of Russian TV news talk shows, where Carlson was uniformly praised. “Excellent performance,” the editor of a Russian national defense journal commented. “We can only have solidarity with this view.”
Of course, Carlson is hardly alone in spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Fox News. On Feb. 24, just before bombs began falling on Ukraine, host Laura Ingraham interviewed ex-president Donald Trump by phone, who praised Putin—“I do know him very well. We’ve had many, uh, times together. I got along with him fantastically”—and ranted at length that the invasion was Biden’s fault, and the war never would have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.
Near the end of the interview, Ingraham asked Trump about the speech given earlier that day by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, describing it as “a kind of really pathetic display” and described Ukraine’s United Nations ambassador as “looking like a defeated man.”
And despite the seeming change in tone, Carlson’s “pivot” still found him ardently defending Russian propaganda, and serving as its useful tool. Angry that authorities and platform owners in the U.S., Canada, and in Europe are taking action against the Kremlin-owned American news outlet Russia Today and other agitprop producers like Sputnik—both of whom also heavily replayed his pro-Russia rants—Carlson fumed that it all constituted “moral blackmail,” gaslighting away his previous remarks: “No one in America takes pride at the sight, feels anything but revulsion at the sight, of Russian troops within Ukraine.”
Sure enough, RT promptly retweeted Carlson’s clip: “Tucker Carlson defends media freedom as Senators use their power to shut down free speech on social media—especially so-called ‘Russian propaganda.’”
As Lis Wahl, a former anchor at Russia Today, explained to The Daily Beast, the distinction between a propaganda operation like RT and what’s aired on Fox News has essentially vanished:
While the American voices Russian media uses to influence Western audiences hail from the far-left and the far-right, the poison of disinformation asymmetrically originates on the ideological right. Research has demonstrated that followers of the former president stick to hyper-partisan and conspiracy-laden sources such as Breitbart, Info Wars, and Fox News. During Trump’s election and throughout his presidency, the rightwing ecosystem grew more conspiratorial, extreme, and anti-democratic. It is during this time that Russian media and right-wing media became indistinguishable.
Today, the chief purveyors of pro-Russian disinformation in the U.S. are now on Fox News. I have warned that quite often the pro-Putin claims on Fox and RT essentially mimic each other. But much of the American public, and even many in the mainstream media, fail to realize the extent to which this disinformation has become part of the fabric of the new media landscape, and therefore, American political discourse.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-says-ketanji-brown-jacksons-nomination-part-effort-humiliate-and-degrade
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an 2 22
Fox News' Tucker Carlson is still defending his support of Russian President Vladamir Putin while dismissing the importance of Ukraine.However, key Republican voters appear to have a different opinion on the critical topic.
On Monday, February 21, the conservative political commentator fired back at Democratic critics during his segment of "Tucker Carlson Tonight." In response to the disapproval of his desire to speak with Putin, he said:
“We won’t be quiet, and not just because this is a news organization,” Carlson said on Monday evening. “Because we’re Americans, and we can talk to anyone we want. We can have any opinion we feel like having. That is not treason, it is not un-American. It’s the whole point of America."
Despite Carlson's claims, Politico is shedding light on a key group of Republican voters who strongly disagree with Carlson. Per Politico, Andrew Futey, who serves as the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America president and an active voice in Republican politics, explained the perspective of Ohio Ukrainians.
"Ohio’s Ukrainians are well-organized and politically active — a Midwestern constituency with a strong working-class element that actually votes in part on foreign policy, and punches above well above its size in their state’s politics, according to many Ukrainian Americans I recently spoke to in Ohio. There aren’t specific polls on Ukrainian voting patterns in the state, but traditionally these voters made up a “Reagan Republican-like community,” says Andrew Futey, president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a nonpartisan national nonprofit that advocates for Ukrainian-American interests."
Futey also noted that “isolationismabsolutely, absolutely is not something the community grasps or will ever support."
Andy Fedynsky — the director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland Ohio — also argues otherwise. Speaking to Politico, he refuted Carlson's arguments explaining why Ukraine is far more important than the conservative commentator realizes.
“Most of the history of Ukraine is never a history of taking someone else’s land, but rather defending its own,” said Bohdan Danylo, the bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, St. Josaphat Cathedral.
“If we, as a birthplace of democracy — and this democracy that is still standing, United States of America … if we think that today those principles are not defended by peace-loving and freedom-loving Ukrainians, we are mistaken,” Danylo also said.
Lubomir Zhybak, a Ukrainian pastor in Youngstown,Ohio had also sounded off about Carlson's rhetoric. In a letter he reportedly sent via Fox News' "Viewer Feedback" platform, he wrote, "The reason why I am writing to you is to express my disdain at your seemingly biased anti-Ukrainian statements that you recently made on your shows regarding the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia. I think your comments not only offend us, Ukrainians, but also the millions of Ukrainian people who have been murdered by the Soviets and Russians throughout the course of history."
As a critical battleground state for the Republican Party, candidates have to consider how the Ukrainian controversy could impact the midterm elections for the party. Although Carlson is a dominant voice among conservatives, he could be doing more harm than good with his relentless dismissal of Ukraine.
note rubber glue inverse bizarroworld:
an 2 22
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) recently expressed concern about a new lawsuit referencing his "Stop the Steal" rhetoric which could subsequently impact his chances of re-election in the 2022 midterm elections. After fighting to push Trump's self-serving agenda, now, according to The Daily Beast, the Republican senator claims he's focused on the will of the American people.
On Monday, February 21, Cawthorn appeared on "The Tucker Carlson Tonight" where he shared his disdain of the critics calling him out in his own state.
“I’m sure that you were as puzzled as I was following Jan. 6 when they started saying that we were insurrectionists, seditionists, traitors. I thought they were just trying to get a flashy headline,” Cawthorn said.
However, the lawmaker also explained how this was part of a so-called “plan.”
Per The Daily Beast, the lawsuit focuses on the 14th Amendment, which includes a clause designed to prohibit former Confederates from holding public office. It states that no individual “having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress... to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
“What is going on here is that they are actually very close to being able to subvert the will of over 700,000 Americans,” Cawthorn claimed.
However, Cawthorn appears to believe every constituent in his district is rallying behind him.
“And make no mistake, Tucker: This is not just about a 26-year-old from western North Carolina in a wheelchair," Cawthorn said. "This is about the future of our very nation. If they’re able to set this precedent in North Carolina, they will be able to keep anybody who had valid and legitimate concerns about what happened in the 2020 election from being able to ever hold office.”
Unsurprisingly, Carlson backed Cawthorn's assessment as he attempted to distort Democratic lawmakers' motives.
“I think your analysis is so smart. You’re exactly right,” the Fox News host gushed. “That’s why they called the rioters ‘insurrectionists.’ And so many conservative officeholders and news organizations have ignored it. They’re so embarrassed. They don’t see what this is really about, which is ending democracy.”
beef sparked by?
Tucker Carlson nails ‘liberal’ pollster Frank Luntz: He ‘has no business advising the GOP’
May 1, 2021 | Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | CONST CONSERVATIVE
Fox News host Tucker Carlson shredded liberal pollster Frank Luntz in his opening monologue on Friday, calling him a “conventional liberal” who the Republican Party looks to for answers when “he has no business advising the GOP.”
“Year after year on issue after issue, the leadership of the Republican party fails to represent its voters,” he noted on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He contended that part of the reason for that is that Luntz is “the Republican Party’s longest-serving message man.” He has close ties to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy out of California as well and, according to Carlson, that adds to his influence within the GOP, “dressing up” his own opinions in what he described as “social science.”
“He’ll conduct something called a ‘focus group,’ that’s a moderated conversation between several people that has, in fact, no actual relevance to anything. It’s just random people yammering. Your 90-second exchange with the UPS guy this morning meant more than a Frank Luntz focus group,” the Fox News host said.
“Yet purely on the basis of that irrelevant conversation, Luntz manages to make pronouncements about the country and how the Republican Party should respond to it. Most of those pronouncements, as you can imagine, tend to comport perfectly with his own views, as well as with the views of Google executives,” Carlson accusingly stated.
(Video Clip: Fox News)
Many of Luntz’s alleged clients are left-leaning big corporations and yet he frequently speaks at Republican events, and conservatives turn to him for wisdom on current polls and the state of politics. His talking points are very liberal in nature and sound far more like they come from the Democratic Party than the GOP. He has also appeared to be anti-Trump at times.
Carlson knocked Luntz for his comments about Trump supporters and immigration. He also went after him for his seemingly anti-Second Amendment stance on guns, and his views on law and order.
In a clip shared by Carlson, Luntz told Newsmax that: “They [Trump voters] believe in immigrants and immigration. They are pro-immigration and honestly, I was a little surprised because of what I see reported in the media. Trump supporters support the DREAM Act. They support the ability of these people, who were brought here through no fault of their own, [having] the ability to earn the path to citizenship … We need these people, we actually have an economy that’s expanding, that’s growing.”
Luntz further stated on gun control, speaking with CBS in another clip: “The public wants guns out of the schools, not in the schools. And they’re not asking for a security official or someone else. I don’t think the NRA is listening, I don’t think that they understand. Most Americans would protect [their] Second Amendment rights and yet agree with the idea not every human being should own a gun. Not every gun should be available at any time, anywhere for anyone.”
“Who does that sound like? It sounds a lot like Joe Biden, a man Frank Luntz has been friends with for a long time,” Carlson pointed out.
And on law and order, Luntz was heard saying: “Well I was critical that he [Trump] used the words law and order. He’s assuming that we have the same politics as 1968 … Donald Trump doesn’t realize that you can govern in a strong, stable, successful way and still use language that is warm and kind and empathetic.”
Carlson then slammed Luntz over his shilling for Big Business, claiming he has been “toadying for big corporations” such as Purdue Pharma,the maker of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin which has been blamed for furthering the opioid epidemic.
“For decades, Frank Luntz has told elected Republicans what to say and precisely how to say it. Luntz massages language for politicians,” Carlson intoned.
“He does it now. Just this week, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the NRCC, invited Luntz to Florida for its so-called ‘policy summit,’ where he was asked to weigh in on the ‘hot topics.’ Luntz’s job was to tell Republicans – officeholders, people with power – how to think about the most important issues of the day. We didn’t hear the presentation, but there’s no doubt it was compelling,” the Fox News host quipped.
“Frank Luntz is a smooth salesman,” he added. “That why he’s been around for a while. The problem with Frank Luntz is that his views, his personal views, are very different from those of your average Republican voter.”
“Frank Luntz is a conventional liberal. His main clients are left-wing corporations like Google. When Frank Luntz gives advice to congressional Republicans, he’s got Google’s perspective in mind. That’s a huge problem,” Carlson posited.
“This is the guy Republican leaders went to just this week for, quote, ‘messaging guidance on hot topics.’ And you wonder why you no longer recognize the party that you vote for,” he concluded.
Luntz snarked back in a now-deleted tweet, saying, “That explains all the angry, misspelled messages in my inbox tonight.”
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SEE UMBERTO ECO DEF OF FASCISM ON SCHIZO ENEMY:
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-ads-tucker-carlsons-hungary-vs-soros-documentary-have-been-viewed-millions-times
NO LNX PIX TWT
Facebook ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization -- the season finale of Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation “documentary” series -- have garnered more than 5.2 million impressions.
A new Media Matters analysis has found that Fox Nation -- the streaming service for Fox News “superfans” -- has run at least 56 ads since January 27 promoting the episode, which relies on antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to attack George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. The ad data is not available through the Facebook Ad Library because Fox Nation isn’t running these promotions as political ads, which is the only type Facebook’s Ad Library archives or provides data for. However, external data from Pathmatics reveals that Fox Nation spent more than $48,000 on the ads, earning more than 5.2 million impressions.
Hungary vs. Soros is the latest installment in the “Tucker Carlson Originals” series, which has a shameful record of using shock and awe tactics to push antidemocratic propaganda. Despite Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist brand, the streaming service has heavily relied on the prime-time host to promote and grow the platform.
The “documentary” calls upon antisemitic stereotypes to demonize Soros and puff up the far-right nationalist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has embraced authoritarian tactics and faces reelection in April. Carlson simultaneously pushes many of the same talking points about Soros that Orbán used in his 2018 election campaign. As my Media Matters colleague Nikki McCann Ramirez noted, Carlson portrays Soros in the series “as an insidious, unseen political kingmaker who seeks to destroy the national sovereignty of Hungary and transform its culture by leveraging his money and control of the media" against a backdrop of menacing synth chords and black and white images of Soros.
Facebook is allowing Fox Nation to run ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros despite its authoritarian and antisemitic undertones. In fact, Fox Nation has run at least 56 ads related to the episode, with at least 44 still active at the time of publication. (The other 12 ads are no longer shown in Facebook’s ad library.)
The ads, which have been seen millions of times by Facebook users, include one of four texts that attack Soros for “unchecked political power” and/or praise Orbán for being Soros’ “newest foe.” Additionally, all the ads link to Fox Nation’s website, where users can subscribe to watch it.
Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_2
Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_1
Some of the ads also include a promotional 15-second video of the episode.
CitationFrom the February 11, 2022, Facebook ad from Fox Nation
Before Fox Nation started running paid advertisements for Hungary vs. Soros, several Fox Facebook pages shared posts promoting it, including pages associated with The Five, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Fox Nation.
It was also repeatedly promoted on Fox News itself, not only on Carlson’s show, but also during his interviews on The Five and Fox & Friends.The Fox News website featured an ad for it on its homepage and published an article on the piece. Fox Nation also sent out a promotional email that said, “George Soros is waging cultural and political warfare on the West, but he’s met his match in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.”
The right-wing fixation on Soros is a problem across the Fox brand. According to a transcript analysis from Kinetiq video database, Fox News mentioned “Soros” a total of 435 times between January 1, 2021, and February 8, 2022, with the coverage ramping up starting in November. With Facebook’s long history of profiting from the spread of harmful content, it is unsurprising that the platform is enabling the promotion of this production to millions.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/
no lnx vid twt?
Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report
[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022
This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.
It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.
"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."
The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”
The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”
The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.
In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”
The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.
Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:
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Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.
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Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"
The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.
an 222
no lnx
The Trumpified GOP has a whole new generation of power brokers and 'kingmakers': report
Alex Henderson February 04, 2022
The fact that so many well-known right-wing Republicans endorsed Joe Biden during the United States’ 2020 presidential race —from former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina to Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain — speaks volumes about how dramatically former President Donald Trump remade the GOP in his image, and how alienated they fell from the party. The GOP landscape is radically different from what it was during the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, and journalists Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay describe that landscape in an article published by Axios on February 4.
“Paths to power and winning elections inside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years,” Swan and Markay explain. “Why it matters: 14 of the Republican Party's top consultants and operatives across the country spoke in detail with Axios about how profoundly primary races have changed since 2014 — the last pre-Donald Trump midterm election and the last midterms in which a Democrat occupied the White House.”
The reporters continue, “What we found: Those sources — whose clients range from as Trumpy as they come to establishment Republicans — described a clear shift in the party's power brokers. They spoke of changes to the ecosystem across four categories: institutional upheaval, endorsements, conservative media and donors.”
Swan and Markay go on to list Republicans who “had the power” in the past — a group that includes the National Review, the National Rifle Association, the Drudge Report, Heritage Action and the “Koch network,” among others.
But their “who has the power now” list is much more MAGA.That list includesTrump and his “family and former aides” as well as Breitbart News,Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro’s the Daily Wire, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and the Susan B. Anthony List.
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Swan and Markay also mention “online influencers, including Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.”
“Most of these changes weren't gradual,” the Axios journalists note. “They were triggered by the shockwave of 2016. Much of the institutional GOP worked against Trump in 2016. Much of the heft they believed their endorsements carried evaporated as voters saw in real-time how Trump had little need for them and ultimately obliterated them.”
A Republican consultant, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Axios, “You wouldn't know that these groups were paper tigers — unless you ever ran against one of them."
In 2020, Never Trump conservatives hoped that if Trump were voted out of office, the Republican Party would return to a pre-MAGA brand of conservatism. But a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, that obviously isn’t going to happen.
“Many movement conservative brands are shadows of what they used to be,” Swan and Markay emphasize. “Many of the major conservative think tanks supported policy positions — such as reforming Social Security or free trade — that Trump obliterated and proved elderly GOP voters didn’t actually support.”
an 222
Carlson donated to Marjorie Taylor Greene in gun giveaway promo to 'blow away Democrats’ socialist agenda'
David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement
Fox News host **Tucker Carlson** made a campaign donation to **U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene** last September as part of a gun giveaway for an assault-style rifle reportedly “loved...
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/tucker-carlson-and-george-soros/
an 1 22
Earlier this week, fans of thehighest-rated host in U.S. cable news were told that one of the most recognizable and demonized Jews in public life is waging a "political, social and demographic war on the West." Hungary, they were told, is this monstrous figure's "main hunting area," but all of North America and Europe are in his sights, and only through the widespread embrace of aggressive conservative nationalism can he be defeated.
In fairness, not all of that is made clear at first. For the first quarter of Fox News host Tucker Carlson's new documentary short, "_{Hungary vs Soros: The Fight for Civilization}_," it's hard to tell why it was made. Yes, over the last several years Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's proudly "_{illiberal}_" Hungary has become the centerpiece of American conservative vision-boarding. Yes, many on the U.S. right would _{love}_ to emulate Hungary's pronatalist policies to encourage early marriage and large families; its crackdowns on press and academic freedom, including the defunding of university gender studies; its effective ban on Muslim immigration, and its actual bans on same-sex marriage, adoption and LGBTQ content for minors. It's no secret that Soros remains one of the right's foremost villains, _{blamed}_ for everything from protests against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation to Donald Trump's election loss to migrants seeking entry to America.
But all that aside, the latest "Tucker Carlson Original" looks and feels, at least at first, like old news: a tighter, better produced, chalkboard-free remake of Glenn Beck's three-hour 2010 anti-Soros series, "_{The Puppet Master}_," which was widely condemned as antisemitic and is sometimes credited for helping drive Beck's _{departure}_ from Fox the following year.
Carlson's reboot, which wasn't aired on Fox News proper but its seedier online streaming service, Fox Nation, includes many of the same ingredients as the original. There's the same sort of ominous soundtrack and grayed-out coloring when Soros appears on screen, and the same fixation on Soros as a "globalist" who is allegedly erecting a new world order through his sprawling web of influence and his control of media "storylines."
There's a familiar framing, early in the film, of Soros as being amoral in some difficult-to-specify way. In Beck's version, an opening quote from Soros noted that his mother, in pre-Holocaust Hungary, had been "ashamed of being Jewish." In Carlson's, within the first minute or so we see a clip of Soros telling an interviewer he doesn't believe in God. While Carlson doesidn't repeat Beck's use of ghoulish medieval _{puppet}_ props, he deploys the same metaphor, accusing Soros of using his money and NGO network "to oust democratically elected leaders and install ideologically-aligned puppets into positions of power." And, _{like Beck}_, Carlson cites as evidence Soros's support for various Eastern European "color revolutions," without acknowledging to his audience that those revolutions were almost entirely peaceful protests against communist or post-communist dictatorships.
There are some notable differences in Carlson's update. In establishing Hungary under Orbán as the last bulwark against Soros's allegedly creeping empire, Carlson turns into something of a Budapest tour guide, marveling at airport advertisements encouraging people to have more children, the city's architecture and anti-Soros street signs. ("Will George Soros attack our country again?")
He works in some combat reporter-style helicopter footage as he tours the Hungarian border fence, and lingers long on the faces of two hapless teenage-looking refugees who were caught trying to enter the country, and who Carlson darkly suggests probably aren't Syrian, as they claim. He even stops to appreciate Budapest's "mostly conservative" graffiti, like a wall spray-painted with "Fuck Liberals" (in English) and a symbol that looks a lot like the white supremacist _{rendering}_ of the Celtic cross.
But the big reveal begins about a quarter of the way through, when Carlson first mentions "nationalism." Orbán was once the beneficiary of Soros's philanthropy, Carlson says, but now understands him as a threat after becoming "a Hungarian nationalist." This is likely to fly under the radar for most viewers, but that is effectively the documentary's guiding theme: Orbán is "the sort of man, the sort of political leader, who has taken these populist nationalist instincts and turned them into effective policy." Furthermore, "Soros opposes Orbán because Soros opposes nation states" and the upcoming Hungarian elections "will be the defining battle in the war between George Soros and Viktor Orbán, in the battle between globalism and nationalism."
None of that rhetoric is anything new when it comes to Orbán, who's made Hungarian national sovereignty the defining issue of his political identity. But it definitely says a lot about Carlson, and how he's helping to mainstream one of the most contentious and troubling ideologies of the contemporary right.
Last November, hundreds of right-wing academics and thinkers gathered in Orlando for the highbrow National Conservatism conference. Much of the three-day gathering focused on trying to develop a new conservative coalition along post-liberal lines. As _{I wrote in The New Republic}_ earlier this month, the National Conservatives see classical liberalism — meaning old-fashioned, small-L liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights and private property, and is embraced by many staunch conservatives as well — as the root of modern society's problems.
A society ordered around unfettered personal and market freedom, they argue, makes it too difficult to raise families according to "traditional" values. A widespread commitment to multicultural pluralism, in their view, has led to an oppressive cultural imperialism where individual countries are prohibited from protecting their borders or upholding their historical cultures. They'd like to see newly empowered national governments that embrace official or public religion, use state power to coerce people into leading virtuous lives (according to their standards) and reassert the sort of proud, unapologetic nationalism that reigned before the horrors of World War II.
Besides academics and writers, the National Conservatism movement has recently been _{adopted}_ by former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, and is influential enough that the November conference drew a number of leading Republican politicians and contenders, including sitting senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and wannabe-senator J.D. Vance.
Many of the intellectuals heading up the postliberal/National Conservatism movement are Roman Catholic "_{integralists}_," who ultimately want to see the country governed according to a conservative Catholic vision of the "common good" (with most details about what that means left strategically vague). Other leaders are avowed nationalists, seeking to reclaim the term from what they see as its unfair association with the likes of Nazi Germany. A number of them have made that case prominently in books published in the last four years, including First Things editor R.R. Reno's "_{Return of the Strong Gods}_," National Review editor Rich Lowry's "_{The Case for Nationalism}_," and National Conservatism conference organizer Yoram Hazony's "_{The Virtue of Nationalism}_."
In both of those camps within right-wing intellectual circles, Hungary has emerged as the most practical model they can aspire to: It's the sort of nationalist "Christian democracy,"as Orbán _{calls}_ it, that they believe stands the best chance of replication in the U.S. (at least until there's enough support for the right-wing Catholic utopia sometimes described, _{jokingly or not}_, as the _{Empire of Guadalupe}_). As abundant media coverage has noted, the U.S. right has cheered on most of Orbán's most controversial policies. His government has assiduously courted their support, including through private institutions' offer of visiting fellowships and scholarships to numerous conservative academics and thinkers and Orbán's personal invitation to figures like American Conservative writer Rod Dreher that they consider Hungary their "_{intellectual home}_."
Those overtures have reaped undeniable benefits. Fulsome statements of support have flowed in from the likes of Dreher (who plays a starring role in the Fox Nation documentary) and Carlson, who broadcast his top-rated prime-time show from Budapest for a week last August. Orbán's reelection bid has drawn the endorsement of Donald Trump and many of his acolytes, all the way down to, just this week, the New York Young Republicans Club. In tangling with critics about the endorsement on Twitter this Thursday, the club's vice president taunted his foes by writing, "We're literally unifying the international right. …I'm not here to argue. I'm here to win.")
Orbán's regime also had a major presence at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando.There was a promotional table offering free conservative Hungarian books and magazines; a panel on "international nationalism" featuring Orbán's political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), who enjoys a sizable American following; and a plenary address from Dreher on "What Conservatives Must Learn from Orbán's Hungary." (They must learn to unashamedly embrace "state power" in defense of conservative values and build a "conservative deep state" to ensure that entrenched right-wing policies can survive the unfortunate results of electoral defeat.)
Most of Carlson's viewers are unlikely to know much about all the ideological furniture in the background, or to care about it. But he's doing his best to bring them the Cliff Notes version, breaking the ideas discussed by Ivy-educated right-wing elites in Orlando into digestible bite-sized chunks, and delivering them, airplane-style, into mainstream conservative discourse.
One of those chunks is the rehabilitation of nationalism as a conservative virtue. Another is the idea that it's not just acceptable but commendable to use family policy as a means of engineering a country's racial makeup.
For years, Hungary had one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. Combined with high emigration— mostly to other European Union nations — it was losing 32,000 people from its population annually. Orbán's government _{sought}_ to address this by unveiling an aggressive suite of pronatalist policies in 2019, including interest-free loans to families that are forgiven with the birth of a third child, subsidies for minivans, and a lifetime exemption from income tax for mothers who have four or more kids.
Policies like these have enjoyed support from some conservative quarters for years. In 2007, the international right-wing coalition World Congress of Families called for similar measures while warning about what it called "demographic winter." This was the idea that European countries were producing too few children, leading to both "the graying of the continent" and the creation of dangerous population vacuums that would be filled with immigrants too difficult to assimilate. At the time, as I reported in _{The Nation}_, most of the racial hand-wringing was couched in euphemistic terms. But these days that subtext has become text, and sometimes the flashing headline, with the proliferation of conspiracist narratives about "white genocide" and the "Great Replacement," or Trump-era activists _{calling}_ for a "white baby challenge."
In this new context, Orbán has been embraced by some on the right for framing his pronatalist policies as an intentional barricade against Muslim immigration, saying that while other countries were buoyed by immigration, Hungary didn't merely "need numbers" but _{rather}_ "Hungarian children," or that Hungary didn't "want our colour, traditions and national culture to be _{mixed}_ with those of others." Katalin Novák, the stylish and combative former family minister who became the face of Hungary's pronatalist campaign, _{warned}_ that countries that abandon tradition will find themselves "condemned to [demographic] death." Conservatives on this side of the Atlantic swooned, with Breitbart dedicating regular coverage to Hungarian pronatalism, the National Review_{**cheering**}_:{that Orbánwas "redefining the possibilities for modern social conservatism," and Carlson }
:{ the plan as a model of family values during a 2019 interview with Hungary's foreign minister.}:
Orbán is not quite that blunt in Carlson's new special — the second half of which focuses on Hungary's pronatalist initiatives as part of the country's battle against Soros — but unlike other countries that choose to, in Carlson's words, "import new citizens from the rest of the world," the prime minister says Hungarians "would not like to leave this country to the migrants, we would like to leave it to our grandchildren." Carlson nods along with this, visiting a series of large Hungarian families as they beam at each other on playgrounds or buy new cars with government subsidies, before cutting to a black-and-white clip of a grim-faced Soros, saying that he's very concerned about the direction Hungary is headed. The unsubtle takeaway is that these amorphous questions of shifting populations and changing family structures is actually deliberate "demographic war," with Soros as general of the opposing army.
That's not an original idea either. It's the encapsulated _{narrative}_ within or beneath the Great Replacement or white-genocide conspiracy theories, which hold that liberals — and specifically Jewish liberals — want to bring large numbers of immigrants and refugees into the U.S. or Europe to "replace" the white population there. That narrative has been the direct _{inspiration}_ for numerous mass murder events, including the El Paso Walmart shooting, the mosque murders in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the assault on worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, where the killer _{blamed}_ a Jewish group for aiding refugees.
In September Carlson finally _{introduced}_ the term "the great replacement" to his audience — after hinting or gesturing at it for months — calling it a "policy" to "change the racial mix of the country" through "the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries."
In the documentary released this week, Carlson illustrates this premise with a series of images intended to land more powerfully than words: a back-and-forth contrast between scenes of white people strolling amid the old-world beauty of Budapest streets or boating on the Danube, and scenes of Black and brown people, almost exclusively in situations of violent chaos, surging against fences, fighting with cops or, at their most benign, crying on the street. Toward the end of the documentary, the video cuts rapidly and repeatedly between second-long shots of white couples on park benches and footage of a crowd of shirtless Black men, shouting in a foreign language and lunging at the camera.
The next shot is meant to come as a relief: Orbán, back at the interview table, saying that he hopes his administration's work will "be enough to convince the people that it's a reasonable decision to support us, and not give the country to George Soros."
Carlson's larger point appears to be that a similar decision, one with apocalyptic or civilization-scale consequences, faces Americans as well.
{{VAXXER:
https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-guest-claims-coronavirus-vaccines-are-effective-if-you-want-kill
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-hosts-rally-behind-ron-desantis-push-provide-covid-drugs-dont-work
cf trms govt stopped shipping 2 do not work omicron (3rd hard to get?)
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/see-right-wing-diatribes-falsely-comparing-vaccine-mandates-nazis
See the right-wing diatribes falsely comparing vaccine mandates to the Nazis
In fact, the Nazis withheld vaccines from conquered populations — and spread propaganda that vaccines were bad
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD & JOHN KERR
PUBLISHED 01/28/22 no lnx vid
Right-wing media personalities have relentlessly pushed a disgusting set of talking points comparing present-day vaccine requirements to the atrocities of Nazi Germany — a comparison that is not only wrong in ethical terms, but also contrary to the actual history of Nazi policies on vaccines.
The commentators spreading this message have included Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, Infowars’ Alex Jones; podcast host Joe Rogan; religious right broadcaster David Brody; YouTuber Steven Crowder and his co-hosts; One America News Network host Dan Ball; and others. (And just to top it off, Fox host Will Cain has compared vaccine requirements to life under East Germany’s post-war communist regime.)
In fact, Nazi Germany overturned the mandatory vaccination laws it had inherited from the earlier Weimar Republic. The regime also deliberately withheld vaccines from conquered peoples, with Adolf Hitler explaining that providing such benefits would “would result only in an enormous increase in local populations.” Furthermore, Hitler told his chief of staff to propagandize against vaccines for this very reason: “No inoculations and other preventative measures for the natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous.”
Oddly enough, Fox News’ Carlson has pursued a dual-pronged approach: On the one hand, he has fearmongered against “eugenics” and warned that “whites would go last” in line for the vaccines. But at the same time, he has compared universal vaccine requirements to “what the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments.” And, of course, Fox News is waging a propaganda campaign telling its own viewers that the vaccines are dangerous, while the company also practices a strict vaccine and testing regimen for itself.
And in a truly outrageous comparison, multiple right-wing hosts including Jones and Brody have invoked the Nuremberg Code, a set of medical ethics adopted in the wake of Nazi war crimes including medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. These claims about vaccines have circulated online since mid-2020, before the COVID-19 vaccines had even become widely available.
In fact, the codes do not declare that medical care such as vaccines “could never be imposed on anyone,” as Carlson claimed— if that were true, it would prohibit all the other vaccine requirements that already exist for schoolchildren. Instead, the Nuremburg Code was formed in response to the gruesome and evil medical experiments the Nazi regime forcibly conducted on concentration camp prisoners, who were often murdered immediately afterward if the experiment itself did not kill them.
As a result, the Nuremberg Code’s text governs the circumstances of any medical experiments on human subjects, and says they must involve only subjects who have consented and be conducted under circumstances that would “avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.” The COVID-19 vaccines are no longer experimental, precisely because they went through vigorous testing on volunteer subjects as required by medical ethics.
And just to make it clear how outrageous this comparison really is — and how people like Carlson, Jones, and Brody are trafficking in sheer historical ignorance — consider exactly the sort of conduct the Nazis committed, to which the Nuremberg Code was written in response:
For the benefit of the German Army, whose frontline soldiers suffered greatly from gas gangrene, a type of progressive gangrene, doctors at the Ravensbruck concentration camp performed studies to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs in curbing such infections. They inflicted battlefield-like wounds in victims, then infected the wounds with bacteria such as streptococcus, tetanus, and gas gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting infection by rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wound, and they tied off blood vessels on either side of the injury to simulate what would happen to an actual war wound. Victims suffered intense agony and serious injury, and some of them died as a result.
In short, to compare a vaccination campaign providing the public with lifesaving drugs to the genuine war crimes against captive subjects that gave birth to the Nuremberg Code is simply a moral abomination.
=== }}
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no lnx
Echoing ‘Vladimir Putin’s talking points’ is putting Fox News at odds with ‘pro-Ukraine’ Republicans: conservative
Fox News' Tucker Carlson speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida,
Alex Henderson January 28, 2022
During the George W. Bush years, the right-wing media, including Fox News, were quick to parrot neoconservative talking points. But Fox News has since taken a much more Trumpian turn, and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, often promotes MAGA isolationism and a hypernationalist “America first” ideology. That isolationism, Never Trump conservative David Frum stresses in an article published by The Atlantic on January 28, is putting Fox News pundits at odds with more hawkish conservatives when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
:{
}:
“Night after night,” Frum explains, “the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraineand opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine.”
Frum continues, “Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders in the House and the Senate urge more support for Ukraine. That list includes not only traditionalists such as Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but also, many legislators who got close to former President Donald Trump, such as Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.”
President Joe Biden has had a much more hawkish tone with Russia and President Vladimir Putin than Trump, and Frum notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “backed the Biden Administration’s approach, as have the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.”
“Broadly, Republican elected officials and the think tanks that advise them are staunchly pro-Ukraine; conservative talkers, especially on TV and social media, are varying degrees of anti-Ukraine,” Frum observes. “Russia-Ukraine is becoming a trial of strength, not only between Putin and NATO, but between different parts of the conservative world…. As powerful as Fox News messaging is, scenes of violence after Russian aggression sends Ukrainian refugees streaming westward to safety would be powerful too.”
Frum adds, “Americans are never eager to get involved in other people’s fights, but they remain deeply committed to a vision of their country as a force for good in the world.” many twt
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Watch: Tucker Carlson compares COVID-19 vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan experiments
Meaghan Ellis January 22, 2022
Fox News' Tucker Carlson recently compared COVID vaccine mandates to medical experiments that were conducted during the times of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The conservative primetime host made the controversial remarks on Friday, January 21 during his discussion with Dr. Robert Malone, an anti-vaccination virologist and immunologist known for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. Their discussion came just hours after a Texas federal judge struck down President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate.
While discussing the ruling, Carlson criticized the president's vaccine mandate and compared it to the Nazi experiments that were performed on captives held in concentration camps in Germany and the human procedures that were conducted during the period of Imperial Japan.
“After watching what the imperial Japanese army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments, I thought that American physicians agreed that compulsory medical care was unethical, it was immoral, and it could never be imposed on anyone. When did we forget that?”
Malone responded in agreement with Carlson saying, “Apparently, about a year ago was when we must have forgotten that… Thank you for bringing up the Nuremberg Trials, Tucker.”
Carlson's latest remarks align with a history of similar remarks made by Fox News hosts. Back in November, Fox Nation hostLara Logan compared the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to Josef Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death” who used human beings in Auschwitz for grotesque experiments. Shortly after Logan made the remarks, the network decided to sever ties with her.
aha note QRF fits in with narrative of defensive; less benign interp is that they waited to see if there was an opening for force/guns
no lnx
New report details Tucker Carlson's promotion of a man now facing Capitol riot sedition charges
Meaghan Ellis January 14, 2022
Fox News' Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted a man said to be a member of the Oath Keepers and who is now facing sedition conspiracy charges for his participation in the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
According to Media Matters, Carlson interviewed Thomas Caldwell, of Berryville, Virginia, on his Fox News primetime show and his Fox Nation podcast given him and his wife a platform to depict themselves as "victims of overzealous prosecution for the events of January 6."
During their multiple discussions, Carlson described Caldwell as simply being a “disabled veteran” and seemed to downplay the potential that he had serious criminal exposure.
However, the indictment offers details that paint a relatively different picture of Caldwell's involvement. Caldwell, who reportedly goes by the name "Commander Tom," was charged along with nine others for involvement in the far-right extremist, anti-government organization. The indictment alleges Caldwell marched to the Capitol and was "stationed" outside of the federal building on Jan. 6.
READ: Here's what it would really mean to prosecute Trump]
Per Media Matters:
"As noted in the indictment, Caldwell was stationed outside Washington, D.C., on January 5, standing ready to distribute weapons to his fellow militia members at the direction of Rhodes. He allegedly helped coordinate the Oath Keepers’ so-called “quick reaction force.” The indictment states that the militia had “amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among ‘quick reaction force’ (‘QRF’) teams, and planned to use the firearms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”
The indictment continued with more allegations against Caldwell and members of the organization. "The government’s case claims Caldwell sought boats to assist the QRF, saying he wrote in a message that they could have “heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms,'” Media Matters reports. "It also alleges that 'on January 5, 2021, Caldwell and others drove into Washington, D.C., around the Capitol, and back to their hotel in Virginia' where the Oath Keepers had stockpiled weapons. The indictment says that 'Caldwell described the trip as ‘recce,’ or a reconnaissance mission.'”
The indictment also contends, “The QRF teams were prepared to rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power. The QRF teams were coordinated, in part, by Thomas Caldwell and Edward Vallejo.”
READ: The radical right's takeover of the Supreme Court is complete]
The latest report comes amid charges filed against Caldwell on Thursday, January 13. If convicted on sedition charges, which are common in cases involving Caldwell could face a maximum of 20 years behind bars.
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-unloads-sesame-street-after-learning-puppet-character-has-race
mma
...This right-wing media campaign to excuse the Capitol attack is seemingly reflected by views among the rank-and-file GOP: A recent CBS News/YouGov poll finds that Republican voters have become less disapproving of the events of January 6 than they once were. While the vast majority still say they disapprove, a deeper look finds that this opinion has become spread between those who “strongly disapprove” and a plurality who only “somewhat disapprove.” Moreover, only 21% of Republicans will describe the riot as an “insurrection,” while 47% describe the people who entered the Capitol as having been motivated by “patriotism,” and 56% say they had been “defending freedom.” Moreover, 38% of Republicans say that political violence could be justified over election results.
Indeed, much of the response to January 6 has depended on the source’s view about whether such an event could succeed — or only result in ignominious defeat. Far-right activist and talk show host Charlie Kirk, in the days following January 6, deleted a tweet in which he had boasted that his organizations were sending “80+ buses full of patriots” to Washington in order to “fight for this president.” A Turning Point Action spokesperson claimed that the organization had sent only seven buses, but it also later emerged that at least one suspect in the Capitol insurrection had traveled to D.C. on one of Turning Point Action’s buses.
It is also worth looking at what Kirk now has to say about political violence. When an audience member at one of Kirk’s events asked this past October, “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk responded that the questioner was “playing into all their plans,” because their opponents were “trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties.”(Others pointed out that Kirk’s supposed objection to violence was based on its high probability of failure instead of any moral qualms.)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has created a propaganda series claiming that the attack was a false flag operation mounted by government elements in order to persecute conservatives, has also for long time cultivated a parallel narrative in which the insurrectionists were just regular citizens who “talked about the Constitution, and something called their rights.” Moreover, Carlson has claimed, they “were correct” that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against Trump — and “if a mass of people show up angry at the Capitol, you should at least pause for a second,” and “maybe we should address their concerns." [vid]
CARLSON (HOST): What was January 6? Well, there was destruction of property, which we’re totally opposed to, but what motivated it? Why were all those people there?
Well, for the most part, a year later, it’s very clear, January 6 was essentially what it appeared to be. Thousands of ordinary American citizens, voters — people who believe in our democracy far more fervently than Liz Cheney ever has — came to Washington because they sincerely believed democracy had been thwarted.
They believed the presidential election was unfair, and they have a right to believe that and by the way, in many ways, they were correct. The presidential election was unfair and you don't have to get into anything about voting machines to believe that.
…
OK, if someone broke the law, punish that person. That applies to BLM activists as much as it does to QAnon people. We're for enforcing the law, fairly, equitably. But we also think that as you do that, if a mass of people show up angry at the Capitol, you should at least pause for a second if you believe in democracy and ask, what are they angry about? Maybe we should address their concerns.
And on New Year’s Eve, right-wing site American Greatness— whose contributors have spread lies about the 2020 election and attacked Capitol Police officers — upped the ante with a piece titled “Of Reichstags and Bastilles.” Repeating a series of false claims that there was “overwhelming evidence of widespread voter fraud in multiple swing states,” contributor Eric Lendrum declared that “thus, the protesters were justified.”
The piece also claimed that Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was killed by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to climb through a broken window leading to the Speaker’s Lobby, was “an actual hero … who was willing to give her life for her country—and ultimately did just that, albeit in a far more tragic way.” (Babbitt had posted online the day before the Capitol attack that “Nothing will stop us,” further adding: “They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours… dark to light!”)
Lendrum concluded his piece with a declaration that conservatives should “stop trying to qualify their stances on January 6 with an obligatory disavowal,” and instead openly celebrate the actions of that day as “a reaction to a long train of abuses and usurpations perpetrated against the American people by an entrenched elite class that has infected our institutions.”
The only course of action at this point is to be just as firm in our stance as the Left is. If they truly want to address January 6 by making dramatic historical comparisons, then so should we. If their aim is to make January 6 their Reichstag Fire, then we should go forward celebrating the events of that day as our Storming of the Bastille; a day where a symbol of the degeneration of our ruling class into total corruption and tyranny was challenged, and the elites were shown just what happens when millions of freedom-loving citizens finally grow sick and tired of a boot perpetually stomping on their necks.
Another peculiar set of visuals and commentary came Monday night on the far-right One America News....
HANNITY PICKS UP GT REPLACEMENT
fox officially fascist on pat purge
someone said roger ailes ran tight ship had to be in total control thus fired beck when got too big; rupert et all have LOST control so tucker conspir fascist; still spooked by newsmax oann?
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-praises-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones
12 21
made top 12 climate BS for shrink humans UN
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-latest-fox-nation-documentary-produced-same-team-patriot-purge
no lnx vid
Tucker Carlson's latest Fox Nation documentary produced by the same team as “Patriot Purge”
WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ
PUBLISHED 12/16/21
The latest episode of Tucker Carlson Originals titled The Trial of Kyle was co-written, edited, and produced by Scooter Downey, who previously worked on the controversial Patriot Purge series, a fascist propaganda reel that promoted conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Downey has a background directing white nationalist films with prominent members of the far right, including Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern, and Theodore Beale (aka “Vox Day”).
Downey and Carlson’s controversial three-part Patriot Purge, which embraced many of the far-right figures involved in planning the January 6 attack and promoted debunked conspiracy theories about the day’s events, was so poorly received that Fox News apparently tried to distance itself from the product. It also did not go over well with some insiders at the network. Anchors Bret Baier and Chris Wallace reportedly brought their grievances to senior Fox News executives. (Baier later sheepishly ducked questions about the series from his colleague and Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, and Chris Wallace recently resigned from the network after working there for 18 years.) Two longtime Fox contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.
Downey’s latest Fox Nation riff is a continuation of Carlson’s bromance with Kyle Rittenhouse, who gave his first interview to Carlson after being found not guilty on charges including intentional homicide after killing two men during last year’s unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. It is reminiscent of the hero worship of Rittenhouse that is currently prominent within the right-wing media echo chamber. The Tucker Carlson Originals episode starts with Carlson providing a definition of “anarcho tyranny,” claiming the trial was the opening shot of a Bolshevik-style revolution.
Video file
CitationFrom the December 16, 2021, edition of Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Originals: The Trial of Kyle
Carlson goes on to assert that “for most Americans, Kyle Rittenhouse is more meme than man.” After they shake hands and express mutual admiration for each other, the video cuts to a freeze frame and record scratch sound, followed by Rittenhouse’s voice-over: “That’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.”
Video file
CitationFrom the December 16, 2021, edition of Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Originals: The Trial of Kyle
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Oh, Kyle Rittenhouse. It is so nice to meet you.
KYLE RITTENHOUSE: Tucker, it is really good to meet you.
CARLSON: I can’t believe you’re here.
RITTENHOUSE: Big fan of your show.
CARLSON: Well, we’re fans of yours, as you know.
RITTENHOUSE: Yeah.
[START VOICEOVER]
RITTENHOUSE: Yeah, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.
CARLSON: For most Americans, Kyle Rittenhouse is more meme than man. But in real life, Rittenhouse is a working-class kid from the least privileged sector of our society.
[END VOICEOVER]
Carlson later echoed the viral remarks he made on his Fox News show after the unrest in the summer of 2020, saying, “If authorities had done what Kyle Rittenhouse did -- worked to prevent chaos -- there would have been no riot in Kenosha. There would have been no need for a 17-year-old to take a rifle and try to maintain order.”
Video file
CitationFrom the December 15, 2021 edition of Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Originals
Carlson has been at the forefront of driving Rittenhouse’s status as a right-wing teenage deity. As a platform, Fox Nation continues to rely on the team that gave us Patriot Purge and is hinging its success on this content.
Carlson’s ‘baseless conspiracy theory’ about the Jan. 6 rioters has been forcefully debunked
December 10, 2021
January 6, 2021 was among the most horrifying days in U.S. history — a day in which a violent mob of far-right insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol Build in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying now-....
an 11 21
After the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on Friday afternoon, right-wing trolls — many of whom are elected members of Congress — were ecstatic at this prime opportunity to trigger the liberals.Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina, and Paul Gosar of Arizona — all Republicans more interested in trolling than governance — made showily public offers of an internship to Rittenhouse. Cawthorne even took it to the next level, instructing his supporters to "be armed and dangerous."
Never one to be out-trolled, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia let loose with some truly unhinged tweets about "radical Marxists" who are trying to start "a race war," proclaiming that "gun rights are the only thing holding back the Communist Revolution the Democrats are waging." And on the Senate side, Ted Cruz of Texas attacked the "corrupt corporate media," skillfully targeting the very people he needs to amplify his message and get that sweet trolling attention.
Right-wing pundits joined in on all the gleeful trolling, as well.
Ann Coulter tweeted a meme equating Rittenhouse with superheroes, and Donald Trump Jr., forever trying and failing at being a Twitter wit, wrote, "The Rittenhouse jury just gave Biden his second colonoscopy of the day." Multiple right-wingers on social media wrote songs to honor Rittenhouse. On Friday, popular and t**rollish YouTuber Steven Crowder**celebrated the verdict by insisting, "it's so wrong that we teach young men that violence is immoral," and encouraged viewers to follow in Rittenhouse's lead by taking up arms against Black Lives Matter protesters. Tucker Carlson, King of the Trolls, will host Rittenhouse on his Fox News show and insisted that he's "not a racist person." This claim is impossible, of course, to square with the photos taken earlier this year in a Wisconsin bar where Rittenhouse partied with Proud Boys and flashed white supremacist signs at the camera.
All of these provocations worked as intended: They got attention and garnered liberal outrage. "Liberal tears" are the most valuable commodity in Republican circles these days, and nothing brings forth tears like senseless violence. For those who subsist on liberal outrage, the dunks were easy and plentiful, because it turns out those silly liberals really do make frowny faces over the celebration of political violence.
The right is reacting to this verdict like they're sports fans whose team just vanquished a rival team in the Superbowl. The excitement on the right was palpable, but also measurable. As an analysis from Raw Story shows, Facebook exploded with conservative celebrations of the verdict, with "18 of the top 20 most engaged page links in the world" originating with conservative American pages. And the pleasure of the moment was explicitly tied to joy over how upset liberals — or at least those perceived as liberals — were. Right-wing figurehead Dan Bongino, who is reliably one of the most popular figures on Facebook, posted a link claiming Chuck Todd "nearly cries" after the verdict. The post garnered over 3,000 shares and 68,000 reactions, the majority of which were the "laughing" emoji.
It's not just that this behavior is tasteless. It also illustrates how violence is the logical endpoint of the right-wing obsession with trolling liberals. If your goal is provoking a reaction, then violence is surely the most efficient way to do it. Unlike mean tweets and "f*ck your feelings" T-shirts, violence simply cannot be ignored. By celebrating this violence, congressional Republicans and right-wing media are openly inviting more of it, because the reward of upsetting people on the left is just so delicious. The distinction between right-wing trolling and violence is collapsing.
To be certain, the escalation of violence-as-trolling has been going on for a while now. As Eric Boehler wrote in his Press Run newsletter, "The flashpoints of Republicans and conservatives promoting political violence have become ceaseless, to the point of frightening normalization," to the point where polling data suggests "that as many as 21 million Americans think that the use of force is justifiedto restore Donald Trump to the presidency."
Much of the month has been dominated by a story about Gosar tweeting out a fan-made video that depicts him murdering President Joe Biden and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The Democratic-controlled House responded to this unsubtle threat by censuring Gosar and stripping him of his committee assignments, but nearly all Republicans stood by Gosar. The excuse used to defend Gosar's behavior was that he was just trolling liberals for fun. Gosar's digital director even put out a statement saying, "Everyone needs to relax. The left doesn't get meme culture. They have no joy."
However, right-wing "joy" is not mutually exclusive from violence.
Gosar's tweet wasboth trolling to get a reaction from the left and a threat of violence. Trolling is a crucial aspect to both amplifying violent threats and helping conservatives hype each other up for more violence. That's why Gosar doubled down by retweeting the video minutes after being censured for it. The message is clear: If you love outraging the left, then violence is the swiftest way to do it.
Even Rittenhouse's behavior prior to killing two people at a Kenosha, Wisconsin protest last year embodies this troll logic. As Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times observed, Rittenhouse's presence at the protest was clearly a provocation. Rittenhouse carried a showy AR-15 "in part because the rifle "looked cool," and the gun "seemed to invite conflict." Popular right-wing troll Drew Hernandez was at the protest that night, an
that, when some protesters saw Rittenhouse and other men with guns, "they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try and start some conflict with them."
In other words, Rittenhouse's AR-15 functioned both as a troll and as a deadly weapon. The distinction between trying to "trigger the liberals" and actually pulling the trigger on liberals collapsed completely the night Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. He certainly got what every right-wing troll wants, which is an outraged and dramatic reaction from people he perceived as liberals. The result was two dead bodies — and another opportunity for GOP leaders to troll some more, further reinforcing the idea that, for those who live for triggering the liberals, nothing works better to get a reaction than actual violence.
"Patriot Purge,"
Tucker Carlson’s 'nakedly fascist propaganda' leads to resignations, internal outrage, public fury — and a silent Murdoch
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 22, 2021
Two longtime Fox News contributors very publicly quit the far right wing cable channel this weekend over "Patriot Purge," a January 6 revisionism series created by the network's star anchor, Tucker Carlson. But other veteran Fox News anchors internally were so outraged their concerns went all the way to the head of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, who did nothing to stop its release and is reportedly refusing to comment.
Conservatives Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, the latter a staple on other news outlets as well, resigned in protest Sunday night. NPR reports the pair "pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."
"It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the War on Terror 2.0," Goldberg tells NPR. "It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw."
Goldberg's and Hayes' "resignations reflect larger tumult within Fox News over Carlson's series 'Patriot Purge' and his increasingly strident stances, and over the network's willingness to let its opinion stars make false, paranoid claims against President Biden, his administration and his supporters."
But NPR also reports that Chris Wallace, the top anchor at Fox News for nearly two decades, and Bret Baier, another top Fox News anchor and the network's chief political correspondent, were so outraged they "shared their objections with Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and its president of news, Jay Wallace. Those objections rose to Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of the network's parent company, Fox Corporation. Through a senior spokeswoman, Scott and Wallace declined comment. Murdoch did not return a request for comment through a spokesman."
At HuffPost senior reporter Christopher Mathias says "Patriot Purge" is "the most nakedly fascist piece of propaganda Carlson has ever produced. And it comes at adangerous moment: The insurrection is on its way to becoming as noble an enterprise as the Boston Tea Party for large parts of the American right."
"Carlson's insurrection agitprop sparked a similar wave of warnings from many experts on fascism and misinformation," Mathias adds. "Propaganda like this, they argued, could one day render the shocking events of Jan. 6 as amere preview of the right-wing violence to come."
Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics," described “Patriot Purge" as “an overarching fantasy about the insurrection that goes like this: It was not an insurrection," she wrote for CNN. “To the extent there was violence, it was stirred up by members of the government and left-wing agitators.All of it was orchestrated so that the full force of federal law enforcement could be unleashed against Trump supporters, marking them as enemies of the state." FALSE FLAG
Goldberg and Hayes at their conservative website The Dispatch describe Carlson's "Patriot Purge" as "a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda."
Earlier this month Rolling Stonesaid "Patriot Purge" is both "profoundly dishonest" and "profoundly dangerous."
11 21 an
at Fox News, far-right opinion host Tucker Carlson has not only been a supporter of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán and promoted the racist, anti-Semitic Great Replacement theory — he has also been an apologist for the insurrectionists who violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 in the hope of stopping Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over then-President Donald Trump. And Carlson's coverage of January 6 is so beyond the pale that two conservative journalists, according to National Public Radio, have left Fox News because of it.
Those conservatives, NPR's David Folkenflik reports, are Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. Goldberg is known his years as a National Review editor.And Hayes was with the now-defunct Weekly Standard, whose Bill Kristol started The Bulwark with fellow Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes following the Standard's demise.
"Two long-time conservative Fox News commentators have resigned in protest of what they call a pattern of incendiary and fabricated claims by the network's opinion hosts in support of former President Donald Trump. In separate interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications andconspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."
Goldberg and Hayes, Folkenflik notes, became "mainstays" of Bret Baier's "Special Report" when Fox News hired them in 2009. And together, Goldberg and Hayes started the conservative website The Dispatch.
Goldberg, interviewed by NPR, said of "Patriot Purge," Carlson's three-part series, "It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country, and this is the War on Terror 2.0. It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That, for me and for Steve, was the last straw."
Speaking to NPR, Hayes was vehemently critical of Fox News for airing promotional videos for Carlson's "Patriot Purge" series.
"I thought it was irresponsible to put that out into the public airwaves," Hayes told NPR. "The trailer (for the series) basically gave people the impression that theU.S. government was coming after all patriots — half of the country, in the word of one of the protagonists in the piece. And that the federal government was going to be using the tools and tactics that it used to go after Al-Qaida. And that's not happening. That's not true."
Hayes continued, "It's a narrative that's contradicted by certainly the vast collection of legal documents charging those who participated in January 6, the broad reporting by a wide variety of news outlets on what happened on January 6 then and in the time since — andcontradicted in part by Fox News' own news site and the reporting that people on the news side have done."
READ:Trump lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election gets named to US Election Assistance Commission cleta
Goldberg also told NPR,"Being a Fox contributor is kind of a brass ring in conservative and right-wing circles, and I was well-compensated. I'm not looking to be a martyr or ask for pity or any of that kind of stuff. But it's a significant financial hit, for sure.And it's also cutting yourself off from a very large audience. We don't regret the decision, but we found it regrettable that we had to make the decision."
mAD AT TRUMP FOR not paying legal fees of 1/6 ?
rehab ali alex w/ special? mma
===
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-promotes-his-revisionist-january-6-special-interviewing-writer-who
:{ Carlson promotes his revisionist January 6 special by interviewing a writer who called a DC police officer a crisis actor:(style="box-sizing:border-box;fill:#ffffff;;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:
11/02/21 9:02 AM EDT
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-vaccinated-spread-covid-just-unvaccinated-theres-no-difference
badash n c r m
an 10 21
stuart Stevens is calling out News Corp founder and chief Rupert Murdoch as a "domestic threat" in response to a stunning preview clip from Fox News' top personality, Tucker Carlson, that falsely paints Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection as a false flag operation by Democrats.
"If Rupert Murdoch were applying for American citizenship today, there would be ample evidence to classify him as a domestic threat and deny citizenship," Stevens says of Murdoch, an Australian-born naturalized U.S. citizen. "He's a dangerous man who should be treated as the anti-democratic propagandist he is."
Stevens is known as one of the top Republican strategists who became a never-Trumper and co-founded The Lincoln Project. Murdoch owns News Corp, the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and numerous other outlets across the globe. He became a U.S. citizen in 1985 to meet the requirements to purchase and own TV stations.
The clip of Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 insurrection (below) is being called "fucking insane" by fellow never-Trumper Tim Miller, a former GOP strategist.
"I'd like to focus in on the fact that Fox is hosting one of the main architects of the Stop The Steal insurrection Ali Akbar Alexander for this 1/6 special," Miller adds. "Going full Newsmax."
In a scathing strike against Carlson, former Obama HUD deputy assistant secretary Brandon Friedman compared the Fox News personality to a radio station**known for helping to incite the Rwandan genocide**in which more than one million people died and up to half a million women were raped.
Here's the clip, which is loaded with falsehoods and anti-American, anti-democracy propaganda:
10 21 no lnx twt
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) recently shed light on the damaging effects of Fox News host Tucker Carlson's rhetoric. On Thursday, October 21, the Democratic lawmaker took to Twitter with an audio clip of a Trump supporter attacking him for his remarks praising the U.S. Capitol Police officer who killed Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt.
With the disturbing audio clip, Swalwell discussed what he describes as "the Tucker Carlson effect. "Listen to this. It's the Tucker Carlson effect," Swalwell explained. "Tucker attacks me. His fans respond with threats to kill my family. And Tucker knows exactly what he's doing."
The unnamed man leveled a disturbing verbal attack toward the California lawmaker in a lethal, racist rant. "Here's some intelligence motherfucker. They just showed you on Fox News on Tucker Carlson saying Babbitt,that unarmed veteran, that white woman that was shot by a cop... You said he was a brave officer shooting a serious threat. He was a coward bitch who shot an unarmed white woman. If she would have been some black nigger crackhead, you guys have had that cop's head on a stick."
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}:
"You people are a disgrace to God, our country, and our people. You are the enemies of the United States people, motherfucker. You atheist, Communist faggots are the threat to our democracy, our Constitution, and our way of life," he said.
:{
}:
The irate man went on and seemed to level a threat toward Swalwell and his family as he concluded with praises to former President Donald Trump. He added, "As for these foreign invaders you're lettin' into this country, I hope they chop you, your family up and feed them to their dogs. You did you fucking bitch. There's your free speech for today, asshole, from Trump Nation!"
Almost immediately after Swalwell shared the audio clip, Twitter users quickly sounded off. With a link to a similar case, former federal prosecutor Chris Alberto quickly noted that these types of verbal threats are considered a violation of federal law.
"These threats against Mr. Swalwell & his family violates federal law," Alberto wrote. "The [FBI] should visit this guy ASAP. While expressing disagreement and nonviolent dissent are protected speech, threats of violence fall into the scope of federal criminal statutes."
Others also weighed in with their concerns....
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-has-been-defending-alex-jones-years-0
no lnx vid
tucker Carlson has been defending Alex Jones for years
WRITTEN BY NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ & ALICIA SADOWSKI
PUBLISHED 10/14/21
On September 30, a Texas judge handed down three major rulings against conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder Alex Jones, declaring him liable for damages related to lawsuits brought against him by family members who lost children in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
For years, Jones pushed baseless conspiracy theories about the tragedy, including claiming that the shooting was staged with the use of actors and “the whole thing was fake.” His long history of conspiracy-mongering and bizarre behavior should have mostly relegated him to the fringes of most political discourse.
But Jones’ raving and ranting are still working their way into the broadcast of the most prominent conservative media figure in the country: Tucker Carlson.
Within the last year, some of Carlson's monologues have mirrored Infowars broadcasts and he has gone to bat for Jones’ cronies when they face legal trouble. Carlson has been a long-time defender of Jones in cases where the Infowars host has been banned from social media platforms for producing content that violated their policies against violence and hate speech. But the relationship extends far beyond that, back to the beginnings of Carlson’s prime-time slot. Below is a partial list of the ways in which Carlson’s broadcast has intersected with Jones and Infowars.
2017
Carlson said filmmaker Spike Lee’s claim that New Orleans levees may have been blown up in order to hurt Black people is “crazier than anything… Alex Jones has ever said.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 9/28/17]
After playing a clip of Hillary Clinton questioning then-President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship to Russian government officials, Carlson defended Jones: “Next time someone says, you know, Alex Jones is crazy, he’s a conspiracy nut. OK. Nuttier than that?” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 11/17/17]
2018
Carlson suggested that Jones was incorrectly labeled a “nutcase.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 2/8/18]
Carlson claimed that Jones was right about a supposed plot by Democrats to seize guns: “Well, you've heard the line about a million times at this point. Nobody wants to take your guns away. Settle down, paranoid nutcase, tinfoil-hat Alex Jones guy.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 5/3/18]
Carlson drew a false equivalence between the White House blocking CNN from covering an event and YouTube penalizing Jones for spreading misinformation. Carlson also suggested that Jones is no more “radical” than Bill Maher or Rosie O’Donnell. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 7/26/18]
Carlson noted that Twitter was the only major social media platform that at the time hadn’t banned Jones while warning that “doesn't mean that freedom of speech is safe on the platform.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/13/18]
Carlson launched into a passionate defense of Jones after his social media accounts were suspended: “This isn't about Alex Jones or any one person; it's about the central principle of our society, and it's at stake here.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/17/18]
Carlson lamented that “noncompliant voices” like Jones’ are “being silenced” on social media. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/20/18]
Carlson framed Jones as a “casualty of the crusade against free expression” and complained that conservatives were not rising to his defense. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/27/18]
Carlson said that he was “nauseous” that no media figures on the “mainstream right rose to the defense of Alex Jones.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/31/18]
Carlson warned that because Jones was banned “from all tech platforms” and “nobody said anything,” technology companies will be policing more language on their platforms. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 9/12/18]
Carlson said Google was successful at “suppressing unwanted videos,” such as those from Jones. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 10/3/18]
Carlson attacked Twitter for participating in a “coordinated purge of Alex Jones and Infowars.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 10/18/18]
Carlson called Jones’ ban from tech platforms a “terrifying loss for free speech” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 11/14/18]
2019
Carlson complained that Jones was “systematically crushed by the Big Tech companies just for saying things they disliked.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 1/9/19]
Carlson hosted Jones ally and then-Infowars host Roger Stone to whine about “efforts to silence Alex Jones” and say they’re indicative of an attempt to “criminalize free speech.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 1/15/19]
Carlson defended Jones, Laura Loomer, and the white nationalist website VDare. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 2/26/19]
Carlson claimed other media outlets dismissed conservatives’ fears of gun regulation, immigration, illegal voting, and censorship as illegitimate: “You're a conspiracy nut, they'll say. You believe in crazy things on the basis of zero evidence, you and Alex Jones.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 3/25/19]
Carlson said that CNN was “way less reliable than Alex Jones.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 3/26/19]
Carlson complained that other media personalities were silent when “the big tech companies colluded to silence broadcaster Alex Jones.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 4/29/19]
Carlson suggested that when Facebook banned Jones, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos and other extremists it was “fascism.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 5/3/19]
Carlson framed Facebook’s banning of Jones and Infowars as part of its “efforts to suppress political dissent.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 6/4/19]
Carlson warned his audience that “Facebook is ready to ban you just like they already banned Alex Jones.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 6/13/19]
Carlson claimed that Facebook’s community standards “explained to users that they were not allowed to advocate violence unless it was toward Alex Jones or someone else Facebook didn’t like.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 7/11/19]
2021
Carlson cited and aired footage of the January 6 Capitol insurrection shot by Infowars staffer Samuel Montoya, who was arrested in April for his involvement in the events. Carlson repeatedly defended Montoya as a “journalist” and cast him as a victim targeted for his political beliefs. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 4/14/21]
Carlson invoked Jones’ name to fearmonger about vaccine and testing requirements: “There are no vaccine passports. That's insane. That's Alex Jones stuff. And by the way, just so you know, as proof, if you want to get a job, you'll need your vaccine papers.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 4/27/21]
After criticizing the scientific potential of “human engineering” of cells, Carlson asked, “Why do we laugh at Alex Jones again? Sincere question.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 6/22/21]
Carlson praised Jones' COVID-19 commentary, saying Jones understands more about science than a member of the White House’s COVID-19 Response Team. [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/2/21]
Carlson commended Jones for suing the Federal Aviation Administration over the grounding of Fox News drones capturing images of the border in Del Rio, Texas: “Good for him.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 9/17/21]
an 10 21
WI brewery sues school boards for indulging 'Tucker Carlson-watching zombies' and ignoring science
October 17, 2021
On Wednesday, Oct. 6, the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC announced it would be helping lend financial support to a class-action lawsuit filed against the Waukesha School Board and th
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-guest-pfizer-vaccine-available-us-not-fda-approved
mma921
After the Anti-Defamation League again called for Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s firing due to his promotion of the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, Carlson’s first response was to tell a podcast interviewer, “Fuck them.” His second was to use his prime-time show to blame a Jew for the resettlement of Afghan refugees in “your” neighborhood, echoing the apparent motivation of the alleged perpetrator of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.
Carlson is the nation’s most prominent advocate for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that elites are trying to gain and entrench their power by using mass immigration to systematically replace white people with people of color in the U.S. and other Western countries. This noxious viewpoint was once limited to internet fever swamps, but Carlson has helped make it increasingly mainstream in the Republican Party.
On Thursday, Carlson drew cheers from white nationalists with his most unambiguous endorsement of the theory yet. He explicitly referenced “great replacement,” while alleging that President Joe Biden wants to “change the racial mix of the country” by replacing “legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries” for political gain.
The next night, just hours after ADL called for his firing, Carlson singled out Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros for his role in promoting the resettlement of Afghans “without the consent of the people who live there,” through the group Welcome.US.According to Carlson,Soros’ motivation is that he “hate[s] this country and want[s] to destroyit.”
“It doesn't matter what you want, you're just a citizen,” Carlson spat. “Shut up. George Soros is richer than you, he decides what you get.”
Carlson added that Soros and the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who are honorary co-chairs of the group, “have no idea who we are because they know nothing about the country.” He concluded by promising more reporting in the future about what he learned in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán, the country’s autocratic leader touted by Carlson, has waged a years-long war on Soros and his organizations. [vid?]
soros has long been a
for his role in funding progressive political candidates and organizations (including Media Matters). Those attacks often feature antisemitic overtones.
Carlson’s chyron described Welcome.US as “Soros’ Afghan Resettlement Org,” and his commentary suggested that Soros is playing a lead role. But in reality, Soros’ Open Society Foundations is one of more than 250 “organizations, leaders, and businesses" involved in the group. Other partners include such notorious America-hating radical organizations as the American Red Cross, Save the Children, the Episcopal Migration Ministries, and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and charities from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are also helping with the effort to resettle Afghan refugees.
But Carlson isn’t focusing his fire on any of those myriad nonprofit and faith groups involved in resettling Afghans. He chose to focus his fire very specifically on Soros, while portraying refugee resettlement as part of a plot to destroy the country. There’s a very dark history to that brand of attack.
Carlson feigned confusion as to why the ADL would concern itself with his “great replacement” commentary in his initial comments to the podcaster. But as the group’s initial letter calling for Carlson’s firing explains, that conspiracy theory provided motivations for a series of hate-fueled mass shootings -- including the 2018 attack on worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 people. The alleged gunman, a white nationalist, had accused the Jewish refugee resettlement organization HIAS shortly before the attack of bringing Central American “invaders” into the U.S, and he claimed that Jews were “committing genocide” against his people after being captured at the scene.
Now Carlson is offering virtually the same claim from Fox’s 8 p.m. hour, simply swapping Soros in for HIAS and leaving references to Jews implicit.
In 2018, Fox executives at least pretended to care about the network serving as a platform for vile rhetoric that echoed the alleged shooter. After Fox Business triggered a firestorm shortly after the attack by rebroadcasting Judicial Watch research director Chris Farrell’s false claim that Soros had masterminded a caravan of Central American migrants headed for the U.S. border, Farrell was permanently banned from Fox News and Fox Business.
But there were no repercussions for more prominent Fox personalities who propagated that same lie. And Fox executives all the way up to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch have since become even more invested in and supportive of Carlson using his platform to spew blood-soaked conspiracy theories.
no lnx vid
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/murdochs-want-tucker-carlsons-blood-soaked-conspiracy-theories
The Murdochs want Tucker Carlson’s blood-soaked conspiracy theories
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 09/23/21
Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show is a toxic combination of Infowars-style conspiracy theories and Stormfront-esque xenophobia because that’s what network founder Rupert Murdoch, parent company CEO Lachlan Murdoch, and network CEO Suzanne Scott want in their 8 p.m. hour. Fox executives keep making excuses for Carlson’s malignant commentary, he correctly interprets their defenses as a green light to be ever more extreme, and all the other stakeholders in the network are willing to go along with it.
Amid a gleefully dishonest Wednesday night screed, Carlson accused Democrats of wanting “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration, adding, “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” That is, in fact, what white supremacists call that conspiracy theory.
Video file
CitationFrom the September 22, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
When Carlson similarly claimed in April that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World,” the Anti-Defamation League called for his firing, with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt noting in a letter to Scott that Carlson was invoking a “classic white supremacist trope” that has “lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes.” But Lachlan Murdoch sent a letter in response claiming that Carlson had actually “decried and rejected replacement theory” and been simply talking about voting rights. Carlson responded by putting the “great replacement” theory at the center of his show, creeping closer and closer to the line until last night’s broadcast, which definitively destroyed Murdoch’s defense.
Fox’s response thus far has been to promote Carlson’s latest invocation of the bigoted conspiracy theory his boss had previously claimed he rejected.
Also on Wednesday, Carlson hosted a guest, Navy Cmdr J.H. Furman, who suggested that the vaccines for COVID-19 might be more dangerous than the virus that causes it. Furman has written a memo arguing that mandating the COVID-19 vaccines “may compromise U.S. national security due to the unknown extent of serious vaccine complications,” which was picked up by right-wing media outlets. During his appearance, he told Carlson’s audience that the coronavirus “has a harm rate, or a mortality rate of 0.001%. Compare that with the VAERS harm rate where COVID vaccination harm over the last 20 months has taken almost half of the total harm's totals in the VAERS database, the 20-years long VAERS database.”
Video file
CitationFrom the September 22, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
In May, Carlson began promoting the lie that thousands of Americans have died in the “single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history,” citing data from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. When journalists debunked his claim, noting that VAERS data is publicly sourced without verification, Lachlan Murdoch stood by him, falsely claiming that Carlson was saying “nothing the CDC itself isn’t saying.” Carlson’s program has continued peddling the VAERS falsehood ever since as part of what seems like his single-minded devotion to limit vaccinations. His campaign, and that of his right-wing media colleagues, has had devastating consequences.
The Murdochs or Scott could have stepped in after Carlson started parroting blood-soaked white supremacist conspiracy theories or lying to his viewers about the safety and effectiveness of a safe, effective vaccine that Rupert Murdoch and more than 90% of Fox full-time employees have apparently taken. But this is the kind of network that they want to run, so they’ve made him its face.
There’s no signal from the Fox Corp. board, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan, that the network should change course. And chief political anchor Bret Baier and the rest of Fox’s “news” division seem content to look the other way and continue cashing their paychecks.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-fully-embraced-white-supremacist-replacement-theory-and-fox-personalities
Fox News personalities, guests, and elected Republican Party officials appearing on the network have launched nativist attacks that resemble the explicit white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory pushed by host Tucker Carlson.
In an interview with NPR, historian Kathleen Belew explained that the nativist arguments stem from the “great replacement theory,” which imagines “nonwhite people or outsiders or strangers or foreigners will overtake the United States via immigration, reproduction and seizure of political power.”
Fox prime-time star Tucker Carlson has long pushed the theory with full corporatesupport from Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch. In the process, he has gained praise from white nationalists while the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly called for his firing.
Fox's decision to enable Carlson’s white supremacist rhetoric has led to more Fox hosts and guests pushing similar talking points. But it's not a completely new look for the rest of the network. Back in 2019, the manifesto of the El Paso, Texas, mass shooter closely echoed nativist Fox talking points. And Fox News personalities responded to that shooting by defending their dehumanizing rhetoric and denying that white supremacy was a problem in the United States. The only question now is what tragedy will ensue this time.
Here are a few examples from just one week in September of the kind of rhetoric Fox airs, echoing nativist and the “great replacement” conspiratorial claims.
9/19/21
- Fox’s Carley Shimkus claimed that the Biden administration looks at illegal immigration as “a political opportunity, especially when it comes to Mexicans, because Mexicans typically vote Democrat.” Fox News, *The Big Sunday Show*, [9/19/21]
- ## 9/20/21
- Co-host Brian Kilmeade commented on Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, saying that “8 to 14 million would have been instantly legalized” and “that would have benefited, in theory, Democrats when it comes to voting because they were the ones who got it." Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/20/21]
- Fox & Friends hosted Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton to complain that the Biden administration “want[s] illegal immigration, they want what that brings.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/20/21]
- Host Pete Hegseth argued, “Democrats don't care about protecting you or me or the border or our nation. They only care about protecting themselves, their political position, and their livelihood. And that's why they're ignoring the border. It doesn't affect them, except they hope in the future at the ballot box.” Fox News, *Fox News Primetime*, [9/20/21]
- Guest Charlie Kirk warned that through encouraging illegal immigration, the Biden administration is “trying to fulfill Barack Obama’s promise” of “a fundamental transformation of America.” Fox News, *Fox News Primetime*, [9/20/21]
- Guest and white nationalist Stephen Miller said that the Biden administration’s “goal is as much immigration as quickly as possible, as fast as possible, to destroy the working class.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [9/20/21]
- ## 9/21/21
- Tom Homan, Fox contributor and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fearmongered that migrants will “compete with low-level wage jobs and middle-class jobs. So this is not good for the American worker.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [9/21/21]
- Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum emphasized the number of migrants compared to the population of Del Rio: “Del Rio has a population of 35,000 people — 35,000 Texans live there. Now, they’ve got 12,000 -- as many as 20,000 at one point -- refugees living in their town." Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [9/21/20]
- Host Pete Hegseth called Haitian migrants coming into the U.S. a “full-scale invasion" of the country, warning that the migrants are “coming to a neighborhood near you. … They’re coming to our backyard.” Fox News, *Fox News Primetime*, [9/21/21]
- Host Tucker Carlson declared that Biden’s immigration policy is an “attempt to change the demographics of the United States in order to give permanent power to the Democratic Party. That's all it is, no matter what they tell you.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [9/21/21]
- ## 9/22/21
- America’s Newsroom hosted residents of Del Rio, Texas, who discussed their frustrations with what they called a “planned" crisis: “What frightens us is we have a madman and racist making -- who’s using people to advance his political agenda, to collapse our border, and change our style of government, and that's scaring us.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [9/22/21]
- Co-host Jesse Watters opened The Five by fearmongering about a “large scale" release of migrants in the U.S. *The Five*, [9/22/21]
- Host Pete Hegseth accused the Biden administration of “releas[ing] thousands of residents of Bidenville” and complained that “family units and pregnant women [are] being allowed to stay, meaning more anchor babies and more illegals.” Fox News, *Fox News Primetime*, [9/22/21]
- Frequent Fox guest Victor Davis Hanson accused Democrats of being “unhappy with the present electorate” and allowing Afghan refugees and other migrants to “change the demography” of the country and “change the electorate” for the advantage of the Democratic agenda. Fox News, *Fox News Primetime*, [9/22/21]
- Host Tucker Carlson called Biden’s immigration policy “the great replacement” and “eugenics.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [9/22/21]
- Host Sean Hannity suggested that Democrats were offering citizenship to migrants “in the hopes that they’ll vote for Democrats.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [9/22/21]
- Hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity said that the Democratic National Committee voter registration desks were set up at the border. Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [9/22/21]
- Ingraham said the Biden administration is overseeing a “purposeful resettlement of -- it’s going to be millions of illegal immigrants" and complained that migrants get benefits like public schooling and health care. Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [9/22/21]
- ## 9/23/21
- Jesse Watters claimed that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “[let] the truth slip” and revealed that Democrats want “the votes” from immigration and amnesty. Fox News, *The Five*, [9/23/21]
- Pete Hegseth said that the Biden administration was encouraging migrants to come to the U.S. because “they want more illegals" and warned viewers that migrants were being flown “to the destination of their choice, maybe your hometown.” Fox News, *Fox News Primetime*, [9/23/21]
- On Sean Hannity’s show, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said -- without any pushback -- of Haitian migrants, “There are some folks that probably think this is the equivalent of an invasion.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [9/23/21]
- Host Laura Ingraham claimed that Democrats are “panicked that men of color are beginning to turn away from the Democrat Party. They need a new constituency. They hope [for] a constituency that may be dependent on the government.” White nationalist Stephen Miller agreed, adding, “This is all about … cheap labor for Biden’s wealthy backers, ... and it’s about new votes.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [9/23/21]
- ## 9/24/21
- Fox & Friends guest Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) complained that the Democrats’ “grand strategy” is to “change America” and “replace the American electorate with third world immigrants.” He continued that Democrats will then give immigrants citizenship and “enfranchise them with a vote and have a permanent majority.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/24/21]
- Faulkner Focus guest Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) claimed that Democrats have a “broader political agenda” to encourage illegal immigration to the size of “one of the largest cities in America.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [9/24/21]
- Tucker Carlson Tonight guest Horace Cooper attacked the Biden administration for shirking its “number one responsibility … to protect us from invasion.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [9/27/21]
- Ingraham Angle guest Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said that Democrats “want to flood the United States with cheap labor and they want to grant amnesty to all of these illegals that are coming into our country and turn them into Democrat voters. That’s their last great hope for keeping the majority in the midterm election.” (Banks' communications director is Tucker Carlson's son.) Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [9/24/21]
Luciano @ Mediaite: ‘Oh, F*ck Them’: Tucker Carlson Responds to the ADL Calling for Him to Be Fired Over Replacement Theory Rhetoric.
an 921 dtr blame vax death dad?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/tucker-carlson-2655075564/
921 ah
Fox News' Tucker Carlson has a new conspiracy theory about the United States armed forces and COVID-19 vaccine. On Monday, September 20, Carlson voiced his disapproval about the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. According to Carlson, the vaccine mandate appear to be an attempt to rid the armed forces of individuals who do not share President Joe Biden's political views.
On Tucker Carlson Tonight, the primetime host also criticized U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin's order requiring all active-duty members to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19.
"The memo directs the Secretaries of the Military Departments to immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19," the August 25 release said.
Carlson argues that the order is "specifically designed to separate the obedient from the free."
"Can't have any of the latter category," Carlson said as he described vaccination as a "political purity test" being incorporated despite "zero scientific basis."
The Fox host also attempted to push back against the military's vaccination requirement arguing that most service members are "young healthy people" who have an "extremely low risk of dying from COVID."
"The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who does not love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately," Carlson said. "It's a takeover of the U.S. Military."
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/romney/
~ tucker orban
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure
Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.
The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now,Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”
In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.
Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda
Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.
Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)
Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:
[vid]
paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’sall driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.
There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.
There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]
During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.
In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight.The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeadeclaiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.”
During an interview withU.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”
Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, hostSteve Hiltondid a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.
Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with the**Green New Dea**l and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest.This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.
Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.
officially authoritarian?
yikes omg
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/josh-hawley-love-america/
Sen. Hawley's Orwellian 'Love America Act' is part of the fascist campaign to rewrite history
no lx
Chauncey DeVega and Salon August 06, 2021
Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.
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Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:
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}:
Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.
In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.
Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating;Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.
For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.
The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.
Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)
For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:
:{
}:
RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that thePledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.
Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.
For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.
Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potentialsurveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:
... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"
These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.
White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.
As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."
Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and theJim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.
It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.
Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary,where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.
In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:
In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...
[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.
Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":
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This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.
Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.
For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.
Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.
To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activistAntonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks,"he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.
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see big wapo
MADE UP origin story
no lnx
ucker Carlson attacked his own first grade teacher — now she's speaking out in response
Meaghan Ellis July 14, 2021
Tucker Carlson's first-grade teacher is speaking out against the scathing remarks he made about his time in her class. Speaking to The Washington Post, 77-year-old Marianna Raymond pushed back against her former student's assessment of her.
In his 2018 memoir titled, "Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution," Carlson recalled his time at the prestigious La Jolla Country Day School and how he grew to detest his first-grade teacher. According to The Washington Post, Carlson "caricatured her [Raymond] as 'a parody of earth-mother liberalism' who 'wore long Indian-print skirts. . . . She had little interest in conventional academic topics, like reading and penmanship.'"
The publication also highlighted the excerpt from his book where he "recalled her sobbing theatrically at her desk, saying, 'The world is so unfair! You don't know that yet. But you'll find out!'"
Carlson claimed educators should "stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . Mrs. Raymond never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics."
However, in comments to the Post, Raymond argues otherwise. She insists Carlson's assessment is highly "embellished." Speaking briefly to the publication, Raymond said, "That is the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard." The former teacher also admitted that she found Carlson's claim relatively shocking because he remembered him as being "very precious and very, very polite and sweet."
Raymond said she was completely unaware of her former student's claims until she was contacted for comment by the publication.
Per The Washington Post:
"Raymond said in an interview that she never sobbed at her desk, didn't wear an Indian skirt, and didn't advocate her political views. She said that not only did she teach Carlson reading at La Jolla Country Day School— with a student body that was "very affluent and White" — but that she also was then hired to tutor him at his home."
In wake of the latest developments, the Fox News network has also spoken out. As expected, the network is continuing to stand by Carlson.
In a brief statement to The Washington Post, a representative defended the primetime host saying, "Tucker Carlson is an important voice in America which deeply resonates with millions of viewers via our powerful primetime lineup and two in-depth shows on FOX Nation – we fully support him."
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// jnz
https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/cnn-infowars/
an 721
no lnx twt vid
Tucker Carlson sounds increasingly frantic as Fox News refuses to corroborate his claim about the NSA
Tucker Carlson
Fox News
Cody Fenwick June 30, 2021
Fox News host Tucker Carlson dropped a bombshell allegation on his Monday night show: The National Security Agency, he said, was "monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air."
He added: "We have confirmed that."
Has it, in fact, been confirmed? Throughout the day Tuesday, many observers noted that the serious accusation seemed surprisingly absent from the dominant narratives on the rest of Fox News, even though it would seem to be a major story of interest beyond just the single hour Carlson hosts if it were true. But it appeared the news division of the network — traditionally considered separate from opinion shows like Carlson's — couldn't back up the claim.
On Fox News' website, an article repeated Carlson's allegations. Yet it didn't provide any new reporting, it just printed a transcript of Carlson's show. The headline on the article simply attributed the claims about the NSA to Carlson himself, though the front page of the website seemed to promote his claim as true with a different headline: "Tucker Carlson blasts Biden's NSA for spying on him to get show off the air."
And then on Tuesday evening, the NSA itself directly contradicted Carlson's central claim:
After that statement was posted, Carlson responded on air, sounding increasingly frantic about the situation, calling it "beyond Orwellian":
Carlson noted that the statement didn't specifically deny that the NSA had read his emails. On Monday, he suggested that he had confirmed the claim that NSA read his private messages because the whistleblower had "repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails." Of course, that wasn't all he said — he had alleged, and claimed he had confirmed, that the NSA was planning to leak his communications to force him off the air. That's what the NSA denied, and it's not clear if Carlson is retracting that claim.
Reached for comment, Fox News did not answer questions about whether the news section had corroborated Carlson's claim about the NSA or whether Fox News stood by his allegations in light of the NSA's denial. Instead, a spokesperson directed AlterNet to Carlson's comment about the matter on his Tuesday night show.
It is possible that, despite not being a target for intelligence collection, Carlson's correspondences were picked up by the NSA because he was communicating with another person who is being lawfully surveilled by the NSA, likely someone outside the U.S. (This wouldn't even necessarily implicate Carlson in any wrongdoing at all — members of news organizations have a legitimate interest in speaking with people who may attract the U.S. government's surveillance.) There are procedural safeguards in place designed to protect U.S. citizens who end up picked up in lawful surveillance in this manner, though critics argue that these safeguards are insufficient to protect civil liberties.
It's not clear if Carlson is still standing by his claim that the NSA is monitoring his communications and planning to reveal them in order to push him out of his job. That's an extreme claim and would be an egregious abuse of power. On Tuesday, Carlson was more focused on the simple allegation that the NSA had read his emails, or at least was refusing to deny that they had, and he compared the experience to "living in China." He accused the Biden administration of overreach by targeting right-wing terrorism.
But while it's convenient for Carlson to try to blame Biden, the nature and power of the U.S. national security state are products of bipartisan agreement. They've developed in large part in the aftermath of 9/11 when conservatives like Carlson cheered the power of the state. Republicans could have worked to roll back these powers when they had greater control in Washington, D.C. under Donald Trump, but they never did, even when they were rhetorically outraged about government surveillance, because they like having these powers.
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trust fund baby?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/tucker-carlson-2653560927/
Far-right Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson had a major hissyfit on Thursday night, June 24 in response to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley's comments during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Gen. Milley told Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida that the history of racism is something that should be studied, inspiring Carlson to say that Milley is "not just a pig — he's stupid." And the following night, when Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes appeared on MSNBC's "The 11th Hour," he slammed Carlson's anti-Milley diatribe without hesitation.
Sykes told "11th Hour" host Brian Williams and fellow guest Bill Kristol (another Never Trump conservative), "Think about this: You have this pampered man-child trust fund baby calling a decorated veteran a pig and stupid. And you would think that people would step back and say, 'OK, I'm sorry. You can disagree with the man, but we are a party and a movement that has always prided ourselves on respect for the military, respect for what he's accomplished.' Those stripes on his sleeve are not, you know, Venmo accounts. Those stripes on the sleeve are, you know, places that he has served his country.'"
Carlson definitely comes from a background of privilege. His full name is Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, and his stepmother is an heiress to Swanson Foods. Carlson's father is a former U.S. ambassador.
Sykes not only lambasted Carlson for his attack on Milley — he also pointed the finger at Republicans who are afraid to call him out. Carlson gets some of Fox News' highest ratings, and he is incredibly popular in Trumpworld. Former President Donald Trump watches Carlson's show religiously.
Sykes told Williams and Kristol, "The ongoing silence from other Republicans, the ongoing silence from other folks at Fox News — I guess part of it is… it's the stupidity of it. It's the crudity of it. It's the lack of patriotism."
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woke military? called gen pig
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/tucker-carlson-2653543558/
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) is the latest Republican lawmaker to promote a dangerous conspiracy theory about the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) being involved in the Capitol insurrection.
Biggs echoed the conspiracy that Fox News' Tucker Carlson began pushing last week. At the time, Carlson described members of the FBI as "unindicted co-conspirators," and suggested that some of the rioters could have been working with the federal agency.
Biggs expressed concern over FBI Director Christopher Wray's failure to acknowledge speculation around the FBI's alleged involvement in the Capitol riots. The Republican lawmaker also demanded more insight on the FBI's possible role in the deadly series of events that transpired, according to AZ Central.
On Tuesday, Biggs conducted a radio interview with conservative radio commentator Charlie Kirk where he further discussed the FBI conspiracy theory.
"It truly demands answers," Biggs told Kirk. "It is actually very troublesome to hear what's out there and we need to get to the bottom of that."
He added, "I want to know if there were 20 FBI agents, and they were not there for security for the president, why were they in that crowd?"
At one point, Biggs also attempted to blame the FBI for its so-called failure to stop what transpired.
"There's always been allegations of the media being in there, right?" Biggs continued. "We've seen some evidence of that. But if you have law enforcement that's there that could have stopped, thwarted, whatever, and they didn't? That's a problem. But moreover, Charlie, I mean, think about this: The FBI director said that the vast majority of people there were peaceful — peaceful protesters. They were rowdy, but they were peaceful. Were they infiltrating a peaceful protest? To what end would that be?"
Although Biggs is now calling for further investigation into the Capitol riots, he, like the vast majority of House Republicans, voted against the formation of the Jan. 6 commission to thoroughly investigate the attack.
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salon
The American people live in the same country. That does not mean they share a common reality. This inability to agree upon basic empirical facts and the nature of the truth is undermining the country's democracy.
Moreover, a type of collective malignant narcissism, in which entire communities of people believe that their opinions supersede empirical reality and scientific fact, is undermining America's present and future prosperity, stability and freedom, not to mention the basic health of our society.
To wit: A majority of Republicans apparently believe the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that it was somehow "stolen" from him and his followers by Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Roughly 30 percent of Republicans claim to believe that Trump will be reinstated as president this year, something that is not possible under current U.S. law. In addition, 50 percent of Republican voters have convinced themselves that Donald Trump is still the "real" president.
Approximately one in four Republican voters believes in significant portions of the interlocking antisemitic conspiracy theories of the QAnon fictional universe, with its claims about a "deep state" that controls American society and the world through Satanic rituals and human sacrifice. Of course, in the QAnon universe Donald Trump is imagined as a great hero and leader who will defeat this evil plot and restore American "greatness," not-so-subtly understood as a privileged state for white people.
In a season of death during which the coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 600,000 Americans, a new CBS/YouGov poll shows that 29 percent of Republicans will refuse the lifesaving vaccines. They have made this decision largely because of Trump and the right-wing media's disinformation and outright lies about the coronavirus pandemic.
This crisis is far greater than what historian and political scientist Richard Hofstadter warned about in his seminal 1964 Harper's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In a moment when a proto-fascist white supremacist Republican Party is waging a war on democracy and the truth, the white right's conspiracist thinking represents an existential threat to the safety and security of the United States.
In a recent conversation with Salon about Trump and his followers,psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes offered this warning:
It certainly is a public mental health emergency, and one that has occurred many times in human history. Followers adopt the belief system of a populist tyrant which becomes the new permitted reality, spreading to others who are swept up by their need to be included. That belief system, however fantastical or delusional, remains accepted truth until it is finally shown to be false. Those who have been conned into believing the tyrant's lies find comfort in their conviction that they know the truth, enabling them to feel superior to doubters.
On Jan. 6, right-wing conspiracy theories and other delusional ideas came together in a type of synergistic disaster in the form of the Trump regime's attempted coup and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, as a mass of white supremacists, Christian fascists, right-wing paramilitaries and QAnon believers attempted to nullify the results of the 2020 Election. These groups and ideas are not altogether distinct; there is considerable overlap of ideas and believers between them.
Those outside of the right-wing conspiracy community are likely unaware of the other fantastical beliefs and delusions that played a role in the events of Jan. 6.
Jason Colavito is a professional skeptic, researcher and author whose essays have been featured at The New Republic and Slate. He has also appeared on the History Channel and the American Heroes Channel. Colavito is the author of several books, including "The Mound Builder Myth," "Jason and the Argonauts Through the Ages" and the forthcoming "The Legends of the Pyramids:Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt."
In this conversation, Colavito places these "new" conspiracy theories about QAnon and the Big Lie about the 2020 election — as well as the decades-long popular obsession with UFOs — in a larger context of fear and anxiety about social change in America, arguing that a particular version of insecure white masculinity (and white supremacy more generally) is central to many of today's most widely believed conspiracy theories.
Colavito also details how right-wing extremists are using UFOs, "ancient aliens" and other supposedly "fun" conspiracy theories to radicalize and recruit new members, and discusses how figures like Rudy Giuliani and Tucker Carlson as well as the "Stop the Steal" plotters figure in that dynamic.
At the end of this conversation, Jason Colavito shares his thoughts about the soon-to-be-released Pentagon report on UFOs — which will almost certainly not report that the Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials.
QAnon, the "Deep State," Donald Trump's Big Lie and and now a report by the U.S. government on UFOs. How do you explain this confluence of events?
First, it's important to understand that all these conspiracy theories are interrelated. It's not like QAnon is completely separate from UFOs and that is completely separate from a conspiracy about Jewish bankers taking over the world — as Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, by using "Jewish space lasers."These conspiracies are all connected by this idea of rejected knowledge — that there is a secret body of knowledge that can tell a person how the world really works, and is being hidden away from the public by elites.
People who believe in conspiracy theories are searching for a means to understand a complex and changing world in a simple way, one that flatters their own particular prejudices, particular beliefs and feelings that they should be the ones at the center of the historical narrative.
One of the foundational issues involved in all of these conspiracy theories is white supremacy. It doesn't always seem obvious. In many cases, some of the people who believe in one particular variety of conspiracy or another are not themselves motivated primarily by white supremacy, and may not even be aware of the connections to white supremacy. But at their core, many of these conspiracy theories revolve around ideas about the way things were in a semi-idealized past, whether that semi-idealized past was Donald Trump's presidency, the 1950s, the 19th century or some other period. These were times when white people were at the center of the historical narrative in America and the West. In this worldview, everything was great and good and wonderful.
What we see in the United States are demographic trends which are causing a deep disconnect and deep concern among many white people who believe that they are losing economic power, losing status and losing their privileged social position. Of course this is not necessarily true in reality, because white people still control the overwhelming amount of political and economic power in the United States. However, they do see themselves as losing that power because in large measure the actual elites — the people who are running the economy, running politics and so on — have created a situation where the middle-class lifestyle of my generation's parents and grandparents simply does not exist anymore unless you have multiple incomes and the kind of education that requires enormous amounts of debt.
There are all these different societal changes going on and conspiracy theories are a way to try to explain it that lets a person feel as though they are still in control of the narrative. When you look at conspiracy theories in the aggregate, that is the underlying motive behind all of the different expressions of weird and extreme ideas.
How do we explain these waves of conspiracy theories in a larger context?
This is something that we see in United States history over and over again. In the wake of social change people turn toward extreme ideas such as the supernatural and the paranormal and toward conspiracy theories.
Much of what we see today is very similar to what was going on in the 1950s and the 1960s. There was a confluence of paranormal and political conspiracies at the same time. The UFO panic emerged in the late 1940s through the 1960s and did not occur in isolation. It was happening at the same time that McCarthyism and the second Red Scare was burning through the country. People were seeing communists behind every bush and trying to use the power of government to destroy what they perceived to be communist infiltration of the country.
Joe McCarthy had stoked nativism, nationalism and many forms of bigotry in order to gin up a vast conspiracy theory that there was massive communist infiltration. McCarthy, incidentally, didn't limit his hatred just to communists. He assumed that communists, being deviants, were close allies of the homosexuals and therefore he and his allies created a massive purge of gay people from government, leading to decades of oppression and some of the strictest anti-gay laws that the country has ever had. But while he's doing this, the UFO panic is happening outside of Washington and eventually in D.C. itself.
That isn't entirely a coincidence, because in both cases, what you're seeing is that beneath the placid surface of what should have been the most prosperous, peaceful time in American history there is also a deep anxiety because World War II had shaken the foundations of the American Dream. While it was patched together with suburbia and sitcoms and all of those things that conservatives love to hold up as the idealized post-war world, in reality it was a Band-Aid over massive amounts of social change, particularly in terms of the role of women. Women had experienced great liberation during the war years because the men were off fighting abroad.
After the war, men tried to force women back into those pre-war gender roles. The postwar years also saw a growth in the African American civil rights movement.
This comes together with how these social tensions and changes manifest in almost a spiritual way when people look up into the sky and see saviors or demons flying in the heavens. UFOs, right from the beginning, were identified not just as space aliens. Some people thought they were angels harboring the end times of revelation.Others thought that UFOs were secret communist technology infiltrating our skies. This is an example of tensions and ideas that are percolating through politics and society being remixed in symbolic form and ascribed to a supernatural cause. What we're seeing today, I believe, is closely related to that same process, that social tensions are driving a symbolic expression of tension as various conspiracies and supernatural occurrences.
How do we apply those questions of identity and agency to these current conspiracy theories?
It is important to recognize that many of the conspiracy theories are driven by people who are looking for ways to express control over the historical narrative. Most of what later became QAnon was already in circulation on the internet and on cable television years before it came together as a pro-Trump conspiracy theory. QAnon reaches all the way from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" straight through to UFO conspiracy theories, and draws in the Satanic panic and related ideas
These are narratives that we already found circulating on programs like "Ancient Aliens" or "America Unearthed" and other History Channel shows and cable TV series years before. This happened because the cable TV networks understood that their audience is primarily older and white, and in the case of the History Channel largely male, and they program towards that demographic.
To qualify my point: I do not think that cable TV networks were purposely planning to have white nationalist programming or anything like that. We are talking about TV networks staffed by hundreds of people using production companies around the world to produce content. But you have media all over the world driving toward the same ends because they're chasing the same audience. And once you start trying to flatter your audience into thinking that they are empowered and that they are the dynamic drivers of history, you end up in the same place every time.
What did you see in the events of Jan 6. when Trump's followers attacked the U.S. Capitol? In particular, what did you make of the "QAnon shaman," who is a known figure in the right-wing conspiracy world.
The QAnon shaman— who goes by a couple of different names, by the way — represented not just the neo-pagan theme in the QAnon movement and the white nationalist-adjacent conspiracies, but he was appropriating, to himself, other themes and ideas as well. The QAnon shaman has a series of videos that he put up on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms prior to the Jan. 6 attack in which he talked about a vast number of bizarre conspiracy theories.
There he cites people who had appeared on the History Channel by name, discussing a conspiracy theory that was popular among the ancient aliens crowd about "the secret space program." This is the idea that there is a secret space program in which the United States is engaged in warfare with one group of space aliens with the help of another group of space aliens. There is a spiritual component as well, which involves psychic powers.
The secret space program conspiracy theory has been circulating for years. But the QAnon shaman, in his videos, claimed to believe that he had been recruited, apparently against his will, into the secret space program because of his great psychic powers. He also claims that he was using those powers to combat space aliens on behalf of the U.S. government by traveling to another dimension.
Yes, it is easy to make fun of such claims, but such conspiracies played a role among the people at the Capitol rioting on Jan. 6. Incidentally, at least one of the Capitol rioters was wearing an "Ancient Aliens" sweatshirt with Giorgio Tsoukalos' face on it. [Tsoukalos is a ufologist who has frequently appeared on "Ancient Aliens."] I do not believe that was entirely a coincidence, because it is the same set of conspiracy theories about the "deep state," space aliens, secret cults and how elites are hiding things from the public that animate both the ancient conspiracy theories and the QAnon conspiracy theories. There is significant overlap, where some QAnon beliefs are derived directly from beliefs that also appear on "Ancient Aliens."
One of the huge failures of the mainstream news media is that they are not paying attention to what people are actually consuming. Among the most extreme fringes of American political and social life there is see a very deep and abiding interest in these conspiracy theories, and we don't see the U.S. mainstream media engaging with that enough — especially not before the 2016 election, and not even fully until after the Jan. 6 riot.
It is easy to say we're not going to take this seriously, but something can be both ridiculous and dangerous at the same time.
For example, QAnon is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It is also a white male power fantasy. More generally, how are these right-wing fantasies a space for a particular type of white masculinity?
The History Channel adventure mystery shows tend to have the same aesthetic. They feature very big blocky fonts, lots of dramatic music. These shows also feature middle-aged white men in either Indiana Jones cosplay or in tactical military gear marching around, having adventures and bonding in brotherhood over historical mysteries that flatter their own prejudices, mysteries that just happened to find that white men were here before Columbus and built this country from scratch even before Native Americans had come to the Americas.
The aesthetic is laughable, but it is also one that's desirable for a certain demographic in the United States. There is also an important overlap between these shows and their political consequences. A man named J. Hutton Pulitzer, who also goes by Jovan Pulitzer and a couple of other names, appeared on "The Curse of Oak Island" and some other ancient mystery-style shows, described as a treasure hunter, a historian and many other titles. On "Curse of Oak Island" they went looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Pulitzer's persona at the time was "the treasure force commander," who was supposedly leading a "crack team of historical investigators as they hunted history's greatest artifacts."
Where did he go next? Rudy Giuliani and the Donald Trump campaign used his ideas about ballot fraud to help create the recounts that we see in Arizona and the ongoing efforts to do the same in Georgia. In both instances, Pulitzer is being paid as a consultant to find evidence of ballot fraud through his amazing technology of looking for bamboo in the ballotsto prove they came from China. This also involves looking for creases in what Pulitzer calls the "origami ballots" to "prove" that they were folded up by Asian people.
This guy went right from the History Channel straight to a Trump conspiracy world. While he might be the most direct line between History Channel conspiracies and the extreme right-wing pro-Trump community, he's not the only one. Just the other day, Nick Pope, one of the ancient-astronauts theorists from the "Ancient Aliens" show, appeared on Rudy Giuliani's podcast. There you have the former lawyer for Donald Trump talking UFOs with a guy from "Ancient Aliens." Tucker Carlson was also on "Ancient Aliens" talking to Nick Pope. Carlson has UFO theorists from the History Channel on his show.
What is Tucker Carlson's relationship to the UFO and ancient aliens conspiracy world?
In a speech that Tucker Carlson gave a while ago, he said that after the 2016 election, he was so completely dumbfounded by the unlikely probability of Donald Trump winning that he started to think that other improbable things might be true. As a result he developed an interest in UFOs and flying saucers. But in a more practical sense, Carlson has been all in on pushing flying-saucer conspiracy theories, in large measure because flying-saucer conspiracy theories have long been associated with right-wing extremism.
Now, that is not to say that everyone who is interested in UFOs and flying saucers is a right-wing conspiracy theorist — but right-wing extremist groups have made a concerted effort to infiltrate flying saucer and UFO communities in order to use that belief in conspiracy theory as a wedge issue to draw more people into that type of conspiratorial thinking.
What happens is that UFO and flying saucer beliefs become a wedge issue that draws people into more extreme beliefs, because once you feel that one conspiracy theory may be true, it becomes easier to believe that the next conspiracy theory may be true. When you see Tucker Carlson going all in on UFOs and flying saucers, he is creating a situation where people can embrace one conspiracy theory and be led to another.
How have you been processing this new hysteria about UFOs (which are now described by the U.S. government as "UAPs") and the soon-to-be-released Pentagon report?
What we can do is emphasize what we know, what we don't know and what needs to be investigated. Many of these videos of UFOs can be explained in conventional terms. Now, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily conventional, but if you can explain it that way, that is a very strong indication that we shouldn't be looking at space aliens.
In the case of claims that we have wreckage of flying saucers and other alien artifacts, you need to listen to what the experts, the involved parties, are actually saying. [Former Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid has repeatedly said that he keeps getting misquoted. He does not in fact believe that there is any wreckage. Moreover, all of the supposed alien metal that has ever been seen in public and tested turned out not to have extraterrestrial composition. The only tests that were made publicly available indicated that the alleged alien metals were in fact industrial waste. This has happened several times over the decades, going all the way back to 1947.
What we need to do as science educators, journalists and historians is to educate the public — not necessarily on the specifics of each and every case but on the rules of evidence, the burden of proof and how experts come to an understanding of what something is or what it could be. That's a difficult task. It's a lot easier to say, "Could be aliens," or "Maybe not aliens," than to say, "There are a range of possibilities. Some are more likely than others. We base our conclusions on a preponderance of evidence and so on." That is complicated and hard, and it does not fit in a 30-second soundbite.
The Pentagon report on UFOs is probably going to be sufficiently vague. People are going to see what they want to see in it. What do you do with that moment when you read the same report and conclude that there is no proof of alien visitations, and true believers conclude the opposite? In essence, true believers will default to the script that lack of sufficient evidence is in fact proof of the conspiracy.
I wish there were a good answer for that. But unfortunately, what you suggest is likely going to be the outcome. People will see in the report what they want to see, and it will just move on to the next stage of the conspiracy. This is what happened with all previous government reports that found no evidence of space aliens and no UFO threat. The UFO community will take that as more fuel for their belief system. They'll look for ways to spin it into a focus for a new round of conspiracy theories, a new round of demands for disclosure and research, and a new round of accusations that the government is hiding the truth.
Perhaps the most devastating answer of all is that the government doesn't actually have the truth, because government is made up of people, and people have many different belief systems and ideas. You will find people in government who believe that flying saucers and UFOs are alien spacecraft. You will find people in government who think that they're Satan's minions and could provoke the forces of hell. You will find people who believe that flying saucers are nothing but optical illusions and misidentified drones and weather phenomena. Just because the government says something does not give it the weight of holy writ. The government and its reports are the work of people, and as such are fallible.
The New York Times preview of the report's content seems to suggest that the government will say that they don't know in some cases — but that's been the case for the last 70-some years. Each and every report has said that there are a number of UFO cases that cannot be explained. Being unexplained doesn't mean they're unexplainable, it means that we don't have the knowledge or the information to make a determination right now, and maybe not ever.
Sometimes you have to live in the ambiguity and to understand that the preponderance of evidence is sometimes the best that we can do. Science, after all, isn't a complete description of the entirety of existence. It is the best description we have at any one time, and sometimes you just have to live with the fact that there are going to be some things that don't quite fit in, some things that it may take years or lifetimes to fully investigate and understand.
So far, we haven't had any evidence that indicates space aliens. Until one of those space aliens decides to let us see a flying saucer and the aliens waving inside, we're going to have to go with the best evidence that we have and the preponderance of evidence and what it indicates.
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// juneteenth
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/fox-nation-tucker-carlson-and-charles-murray-discuss-race-science-and-speculate-race-war
621 chris hayes ID's False Flag as inevitable final stage of conspir BS, floated by tucker? one man escalator? under trump --> action?
OP Congressman: FBI 'participated' in insurrection to 'entrap' harmless protestors and 'frame the MAGA movement'
June 18, 2021
U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is demanding the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Dept. of Justice tell Congress what they know about their own alleged "participation" in Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection, which led to at least seven deaths. Gohmert falsely claims the attack on the U.S. Capitol – which in reality was an attempted coup designed to overturn a free and fair election – was instead a "monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors" and used to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists."
News organization The Recount calls Gohmert's assertions "a bullshit baseless conspiracy theory."
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) spews a bullshit baseless conspiracy theory blaming the FBI for organizing the January 6th insurrection to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists." pic.twitter.com/LZI5bQfx65
— The Recount (@therecount) June 17, 2021
The Texas Republican congressman, explained on Thursday on the floor of the House that his "friend," Fox News white supremacist host Tucker Carlson "covered this last night," called the conspiracy theory "really disturbing... because we don't like to see government agents stirring up trouble or find that there are criminal acts that would not likely have occurred had not the federal government been participating."
Having no evidence that January 6 was an "inside job," which is what Gohmert is asserting, he goes on to make up possible scenarios, again, without any basis in fact.
"Whether they were actual agents, or an undercover agents, or informants that were working for the federal government. But this is scary stuff this is, This is kind of third world stuff, this is not only third world stuff but this is like Putin-like kind of activity. So, if there were federal agents that were involved on January 6, we really need to know what the FBI knew and when they knew it, and not only that, we need to know how much participation did any of our federal friends either at DOJ, FBI, or any of the Intel Community, what kind of role were they playing?"
Gohmert, on the House floor, suggests federal agents were involved in Jan. 6: "We don't like to see govt agents stirring up trouble... This is not only third-world stuff, this is like Putin kind of activity." pic.twitter.com/Tku3tDIjbI
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) June 17, 2021
It's almost like he is demanding Speaker Pelosi form a Special Committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection.
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Louie Gohmert ›
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U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is demanding the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Dept. of Justice tell Congress what they know about their own alleged "participation" in Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection, which led to at least seven deaths. Gohmert falsely claims the attack on the U.S. Capitol – which in reality was an attempted coup designed to overturn a free and fair election – was instead a "monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors" and used to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists."
News organization The Recount calls Gohmert's assertions "a bullshit baseless conspiracy theory."
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) spews a bullshit baseless conspiracy theory blaming the FBI for organizing the January 6th insurrection to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists." pic.twitter.com/LZI5bQfx65
— The Recount (@therecount) June 17, 2021
The Texas Republican congressman, explained on Thursday on the floor of the House that his "friend," Fox News white supremacist host Tucker Carlson "covered this last night," called the conspiracy theory "really disturbing... because we don't like to see government agents stirring up trouble or find that there are criminal acts that would not likely have occurred had not the federal government been participating."
Having no evidence that January 6 was an "inside job," which is what Gohmert is asserting, he goes on to make up possible scenarios, again, without any basis in fact.
"Whether they were actual agents, or an undercover agents, or informants that were working for the federal government. But this is scary stuff this is, This is kind of third world stuff, this is not only third world stuff but this is like Putin-like kind of activity. So, if there were federal agents that were involved on January 6, we really need to know what the FBI knew and when they knew it, and not only that, we need to know how much participation did any of our federal friends either at DOJ, FBI, or any of the Intel Community, what kind of role were they playing?"
Gohmert, on the House floor, suggests federal agents were involved in Jan. 6: "We don't like to see govt agents stirring up trouble... This is not only third-world stuff, this is like Putin kind of activity." pic.twitter.com/Tku3tDIjbI
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) June 17, 2021
It's almost like he is demanding Speaker Pelosi form a Special Committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news/
david n kos
Fox News surprised everyone—including their own Donald Trump-loving viewers—on Election Night last November by calling the race in Arizona for Joe Biden before the other networks, who waited several days to do the same. It seemed the longtime wellspring of right-wing disinformation might actually be displaying some journalistic integrity, at last.
It didn't last long. The Trump White House erupted in fury, as did millions of Trump fans, who popularized a #BoycottFoxNews hashtag on social media. Its ratings briefly plummeted. In the months since, the executives behind the decision were given the boot.
Moreover, as Brian Stelter reveals in an excerpt from his new book on the Trump-Fox connection, Fox has subsequently completed its utter radicalization as a Trumpian right-wing disinformation outlet, embracing and broadcasting a nonstop parade of outright lies, as well as the authoritarian and racist politics that have now similarly subsumed the Republican Party: "We turned so far right we went crazy," one anonymous source told him.
The slide from being a partisan news source into an outright font of extremist disinformation came about, as Stelter suggests, as a result of pressure from the same authoritarian, fake-news-loving audience that Fox had created during Trump's tenure. The beast that they had created turned out to have an insatiable appetite for extremism.
"Fox is a really different place than it was pre-election," one of Stelter's Fox insiders told him after Biden was inaugurated.
"Fox News has always walked a fine line between trying to look like an independent news organization and supporting conservative politics," observed TV critic Eric Deggans to *The Guardian*."There have to be moments where they act like an actual news organization in order to maintain their veneer of being an independent news organization."
The wrath of Trump's followers descended on Fox immediately after its election-night call. Trump himself went on Fox and Friends and complained about the network: "What's the biggest difference between this and four years ago," he asked rhetorically. "I say Fox. It's much different now."
Outside Arizona's main election-counting center in Phoenix the day after the election, pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" protesters chanted, "Fox News sucks!"
Fox's main problem, as Stelter recounts, was that it now had competition to its right in the form of the far-right Newsmax and One America News networks, which unabashedly feature right-wing conspiracy theories and false information about the election and other political topics.
Newsmax refused to initially call Biden the president-elect. One of its hosts, Greg Kelly, repeatedly claimed that Trump could remain in office another four years. "IT ISN'T OVER YET," Newsmax's website banners read.
"We're bleeding eyeballs," one Fox producer told him in December. "And we're scared."
On Facebook, the dismay among longtime Fox fans was furious. "Time to switch to Newsmax or One America News," one post read. "Fox News has officially joined the corrupt media."
Another declared simply: "F FOX News," adding: "They have sold their souls and lost the respect of millions of loyal viewers , [thinking emoji] [crying emoji].Boycott and show them the power of the almighty [money bag emoji] dollar."
Fox executives decided to fix the problem, as Stelter says, by running "even further to the right." News Media CEO Suzanne Scott decided to lure viewers back by giving them, as he notes, what they wanted: "False hope."
On Fox, Trump was treated as a political genius, not a lame duck who failed to win reelection. Some of the network's key shows waded deeper into the voter fraud depths, eventually spurring massive defamation lawsuits by voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic.
"It's really emotionally taxing," a dissident Fox contributor told me as the Covid-19 case count exploded and Trump's legal challenges imploded. "We denied the pandemic and now we're denying the election outcome."
Media Matters' Matt Gertz assembled a laundry list of Fox News' post-election embrace of Trumpian disinformation:
:{Fox and its associates did everything they could to support Trump's autocratic maneuvers. In the two weeks after media outlets called the race for Biden, Fox personalities questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it nearly 800 times. They put the credibility of the network behind deranged lies about fraud plucked from the internet fever swamps, beaming batshit fantasies out to a huge national audience. It worked—polls following the election showed a majority of Republicans believed that the election was stolen from Trump.
But hosts, contributors, and guests went further than simply lying to their viewers—they pushed for action. They attacked Republican state officials for being insufficiently committed to Trump's scheme; called for the arrests of election workers; suggested that Republican state legislators in states Trump lost should "appoint a clean slate of electors" who support him; promoted fake Trump electoral slates for supposedly keeping Trump's "legal options open"; suggested a "do-over" election as "the only remedy"; called for congressional investigations; endorsed a lawsuit by Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to throw out results in four states Biden won; urged Republican governors not to certify unfavorable results; and denounced Republican members of Congress for "destroying the Constitution" by voting to count the electoral votes.}:
Recently, Fox has gone so far as to embrace right-wing extremist ideology, particularly the strange flavor of white nationalism that has been getting airtime on Tucker Carlson's evening program, which is Fox's top-rated program. Carlson has promoted eco-fascist themes related to immigration; endorsed the idea that Republicans are being forced to abandon democracy and eventually embrace fascism because of liberal hegemony; defended the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists as being ordinary conservatives and decried their prosecutions; and spouted white-nationalist "replacement theory" in claiming that immigration is an attack on democracy itself.
Carlson's most disturbing recent episode, however, came last week when he attacked Biden's speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. Biden had decried the continuing existence of violent racist hatred, saying:
I didn't realize hate is never defeated; it only hides. It hides. And given a little bit of oxygen—just a little bit oxygen—by its leaders, it comes out of there from under the rock like it was happening again, as if it never went away.
And so, folks, we can't—we must not give hate a safe harbor.
As I said in my address to the joint session of Congress: According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al Qaeda — white supremacists. (Applause.) That's not me; that's the intelligence community under both Trump and under my administration.
This set off Carlson, who insisted on his program that evening that this meant Biden intended to target ordinary Republicans:
Yeah, you're not surprised. It's always the same people, isn't it? Those white Republican men—the very ones that just today Joe Biden warned us are more dangerous than ISIS.These are the people who have been beating up elderly Asian women in our cities, you've seen that plague unfold. These are the ones who don't believe in science, who have no decency, they're the problem.
The next night, he insisted—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—that white nationalist violence is not the most lethal threat to the American public: "There is no credible way to argue that white supremacy is the most lethal threat that we face. That's not an argument. It's its own form of racial attack."
Carlson has been diving headfirst into this abyss, as Gertz has reported, with the blessing of Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch, who even tried to claim that a review of Carlson's remarks show "that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory."
However, Carlson also let the curtain slip a bit this week in an interview with right-wing pundit Mollie Hemingway about election misinformation. While introducing Hemingway—whose new book, titled Fixed,offers a wholly Trumpian take—the Fox host asserted that "so many people are lying at such high volume about the 2020 election, it's hard to know exactly what happened."
That, in fact, is the point of how the right now deals with reality: Just throw so much misinformation out there that the public becomes unable to discern fact from fiction—at which point right-wing authoritarians will naturally embrace their lying propaganda.
As Deggans told the Guardian,GUK Fox encouraged this kind of extremism for many years while working to maintain a veneer of journalistic credibility—and has now been finally dragged into the abyss, forced to abandon any such pretenses, by the monster it created.
"What's happening now is the Republican party is getting more strained, and there's more and more of a sense among Fox News viewership that anything that contradicts a worldview that is supportive of conservatives is wrong," Deggans said. "I think it's getting harder and harder for Fox News to ride that balance."
At this point, it's clear they no longer are even trying.
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U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez issued an inflammatory and high-profile ruling on Fridaystriking down a decades-old assault weapons ban in California as unconstitutional. In a widely cited opening passage, Benitez — who was appointed by President George W. Bush — compared the AR-15 to a "Swiss Army knife," an analogy many critics found absurd and thought undermined his argument.
But that wasn't the only unnecessarily incendiary portion of the ruling. As several legal commentators pointed out on Twitter, Benitez included a dangerous, superfluous, and outright false claim about COVID-19 vaccinations:
The evidence described so far proves that the "harm" of an assault rifle being used in a mass shooting is an infinitesimally rare event. More people have died from the Covid-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California. Even if a mass shooting by assault rifle is a real harm, the evidence also shows that AWCA's prohibited features ban has not alleviated the harm in any material way. (emphasis added)
It's notable that, given how heavily cited and documented legal rulings often are, the judge offered no citation or source for his claim — not for the number of deaths from the vaccine nor from mass shootings. It was simply a lazy yet explosive aside.
And to be completely clear, the statement is entirely baseless. According to the CDC, no deaths have been conclusively linked to the COVID vaccines — certainly not in California specifically:
A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.
It is possible that there have been a few deaths linked to blood clots from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the CDC said, but such a causal connection has not been established. Even if such a link were established to the small number of these cases, the judge's claim would still be spurious, because the vaccines save far, far more lives on the whole. And there have been multiple deadly mass shootings in California this year alone.
Some noted that the judge's offhand comment may be based on Fox News host Tucker Carlson's fear-mongering about the vaccines. Carlson used unverified data from a federal reporting system to suggest thousands of Americans might have died from the COVID vaccines, even though no such links have been established. Instead, it's simply the case that when more than 100 million people in the country get a vaccine, thousands will die afterward — just as they would've if they hadn't been vaccinated.
It's hardly reassuring if a federal judge is getting his information and misinformation from Fox News — and passing it along to the public in his rulings.
Many were critical of the ruling on traditional legal grounds. Legal analyst Luppe Luppen, for instance, pointed out that while Benitez relies on the landmark Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Hellerto justify his ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in that very decision that its reasoning wouldn't apply to guns like the M16 and AR-15.
But putting aside the merits of the decision, a judge making such a radical and significant ruling that can affect life and death in the United States should have the decency and restraint to make their arguments in ways that can be justified to all citizens and residents of the country. Including flippant remarks about AR-15s being like Swiss Army knives and wedging in erroneous and reckless claims about vaccine deaths shows contempt for the public.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fox-news-was-forced-to-make-a-damning-admission-in-a-tucker-carlson-lawsuit/
cody f
fox News got to claim victory on Thursday after a new ruling in a lawsuit brought against the company came out in its favor, but the win arrived at a steep cost. To deflect an allegation of defamation, thenetwork was forced to claim that one of its highest-profile personalities can't reasonably be expected to consistently provide accurate information to viewers.
Here's the background. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, was paid for her silence about an affair she said she had with Donald Trump during the 2016 election by America Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, on the Republican campaign's behalf these details were exposed and confirmed in the case against former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to participating in the illegal campaign finance scheme. The story became national news, so leading Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed the case.
But he didn't present it accurately. Discussing the McDougal case alongside the similar story of Stormy Daniels, Carlson said:
Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed. Two women approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money. Now, that sounds like a classic case of extortion.
McDougal decided to sue Fox News because these facts are not correct. She did not approach Trump, threaten him, or extort him for money. She sold her story to AMI, which promptly buried it. Carlson grossly misrepresented the facts, a point that Fox News did not dispute in the case. McDougal said since Carlson willfully distorted the factual record, he defamed her.
To defend Carlson, however, Fox News had to make a damning claim. The host with the highest-rated show on cable news cannot be trusted, his own network said.
In fact, it's even worse than that. Federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found:
This “general tenor” of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.” ... . Fox persuasively argues ... that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer “arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism” about the statements he makes.
So the top-rated program on a news station cannot be reasonably expected to be taken seriously and "reasonable" viewers will be skeptical that his claims are not "actual facts." Perhaps this is a good legal argument to make, but it's a dreadful position to be in as a news organization.
The judge argued that Carlson's defense is bolstered because he started out saying: "We’re going to start by stipulating that everything Michael Cohen has told the feds is absolutely true. Now, assuming honesty isn’t usually a wise idea with Michael Cohen, but for the sake of argument, let’s do it in this case, everything he says is true[.]”
But this actually should cut against Carlson's defense. His point is that the account he's giving is based off the claims in the Cohen case. That's a perfectly reasonable stance to take in an argument. But then he goes on to misrepresent those claims — claims which are a matter of the factual record. So this isn't a part of his show where he's clearly being non-literal — it's a part when he's explicitly said he's trying to convey the facts as the Cohen case presents them. And he patently failed to do that. This failure arguably, from McDougal's point of view, arose out of actual malice. Given that Carlson's show doubtless has the resources to do basic fact-checking and that his commentary displayed open contempt for McDougal, her legal claim seems eminently plausible.
And in the portion of the monologue that McDougal alleged is defamatory, Carlson explicitly said: "Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed." Again, the remarks were clearly couched to make it clear they were not opinion, but facts.
Carlson even repeated his remarks about the extortion later in the show, but the judge found these considerations unpersuasive:
It is true that Mr. Carlson repeatedly asserted that the conduct was extortion during a debate with a guest commentator in which Mr. Carlson also described the payment from Cohen to McDougal as “paying off someone who is extorting you, threatening to make public details of your personal life, if she doesn’t get paid.” See Episode Transcript. But there can be no doubt that Mr. Carlson did so as hyperbole to promote debate on a matter of public concern.
Putting aside the merits of the lawsuit, however, it's worth dwelling on the fact that Fox News' official position is that its lead commentator cannot be counted on to be accurate when discussing the news of the day, even when he says he's simply stating the facts of a case.
The fact is, Carlson is a liar, and from all appearances, he often intentionally lies to his audience to get them to buy into his warped ideological view of the world. For example, he recently misrepresented a government report suggesting it helped cast doubt on climate change, when in fact it reached precisely the opposite conclusion. But of course, people like me are always accusing Carlson of being a liar, and his viewers surely don't care what I think. How would his viewers feel, though, if they knew Carlson's own network thought he couldn't reasonably be trusted?
Perhaps the worst thing for the outlet is that not only did it have to make this damning admission in a legal case, but a judge agreed.
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big lie
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/republican-leader-claims-no-one-questioning-election-tucker-carlson-and-mollie-hemingway
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-white-nationalist-tucker-carlson-hosts-white-nationalist-stephen-miller-discuss
systematic rev racism?
t
Carlson's lie Biden called white Republican men 'more dangerous than ISIS’ backfires
David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement
June 02, 2021
Fox News host **Tucker Carlson** Tuesday night falsely claimed that President Joe Biden called white Republican men "more dangerous than ISIS."
During his speech commemorating and bringing...
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2021-fox-news-still-spreading-dangerous-climate-denial
no vids
on a near-daily basis, Fox News hosts, anchors, and guests spew misinformation and false narratives aimed at tanking efforts to address the climate crisis. These tactics to delay climate action or downplay the seriousness of our warming planet have often been referred to as the new climate denial -- since the actual denial of the scientific consensus that climate change is happening has mostly been pushed to the fringes of both politics and the traditional media landscape.
Fox deploys the new denial so often, it’s easy to forget that the network is one of the few highly influential media outlets that still promote one of the most dangerous lies of our time: Human activity is not overheating our climate.
This lie has existed for over five decades and for five decades has been repeatedly debunked. Its origins and merchants have been exposed; those who have continued to perpetuate it have been discredited; and our own experience during each unprecedented storm, historical heat wave, and apocalyptic wildfire has proven again and again what science has told us to expect from a warming world.
But in 2021, you can turn on Fox News and watch prime-time host Tucker Carlson quip that “not even climate experts understand the climate” or watchFox contributor Dagen MacDowell suggest that climate change is a hoax because it is cold in April.
And in 2021, there is still no federal response to the climate crisis on the books, despite decades of warnings from scientists and with mounting support for climate action even among the largest companies and businesses in the U.S.
Fox is still fueling the lie that our planet is not warming
From insisting the science on climate change is not settled to deliberately misconstruing weather with climate, Fox News is still pushing the idea that human-made climate change is not real, despite overwhelming evidence and consensus in the scientific community.
In a segment on the April 28 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson and Fox News contributor Sean Duffy discussed how the “critical environmental movement has infiltrated” schools and colleges, is scaring children about the climate crisis, and is convincing them to not have children. At the end of the segment, Duffy claimed that climate change is a “political movement, not a scientific movement” and that it is wrong to assume “the science is settled in climate”.
the segment aired just a week after Carlson and ultra-conservative political commentator and Fox contributor Mark Steyn mocked comments made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linking climate change and racism. (For the record, experts say the two are “inexorably” linked.) Steyn, not satisfied with mocking the relationship between climate and racism, went on to attack the scientific consensus that warming is human-made, by invoking a defamation suit filed against him by climate scientist Michael Mann:
MARK STEYN (GUEST): This is supposed to be science. I've been in a 10-year lawsuit in Washington, D.C., up against the guy who invented the climate change hockey stick, and he is a scientist and his position is that in the last millennium -- nothing happened for nine centuries and then you, Tucker, got into your SUV and fried the planet. And that is a completely idiotic theory. But at least he's not trying to sell the world on the idea that somehow climate change correlates to racism.
[vid]
not to be outdone, the following night, prime-time hostLaura Ingraham focused her April 22 monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “climate con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. For good measure, Ingraham closed her monologue by mocking and attacking young climate activists.
in back-to-back shows on April 29 and April 30, Ingraham suggested that the climate crisis along with other pressing issues have been manufactured to “justify the left’s brazen efforts to take more of our money and more of our liberty” and they “only exist in the minds of leftists ideologues who hate America anyway.”
Denial paired with fear-mongering about the “left’s radical agenda” exemplifies the brand of climate denial Fox has peddled for years, and some network figures disingenuously equate weather with climate to push that narrative.
On the April 21 edition ofThe Five, Fox News contributor Dagen McDowell ended a rant against the Paris Climate Agreement by suggesting that abnormally cold April weather from Texas to the Great Lakes somehow disproves that global warming is occurring.
DAGEN MCDOWELL (CO-HOST): Here is your forecast today and why they stopped calling it global warming. April 21, 2021: Freeze warnings from Texas to the Great Lakes. Record low temperatures engulfing the heartland. Oh, and Indians/White Sox game in Cleveland had to be postponed for snow and cold.
This bit by MacDowell is both painfully stupid and reminiscent of a body of tweets by then-President Donald Trump, who conflated weather with global warming while suggesting that the term “climate change” was adopted by scientists and advocates to hide the incongruity between major winter storms and the idea of warming.
Interestingly, the term “climate change” was promoted by the Republican strategist Frank Luntz as part of the infamous 2002 memo advising the GOP on how to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that human activity was warming the planet.
Fox Nation host Lara Logan made the same inane claim on the February 19 edition of :{Outnumbered:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, in a segment about the winter storm that caused the deadly power failure in Texas:
“It's time for us to have an honest conversation about renewable energy and about global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it,” said Logan. “This is the first time in Texas’ history that it has had a winter storm warning. So this is — this means that it is not getting warmer and warmer and warmer, simply.”
Fox has long been a platform for climate deniers
Fox News hosts and contributors not only push climate denial but regularly feature discredited deniers on their programs. Notorious climate denier Marc Morano -- who has no scientific background -- and Bjorn Lomborg -- whose spiel is dangerously claiming that climate change is happening, but not a big deal -- have both appeared on Fox for more than a decade. Just this year, both have appeared across Fox programming at least six times from January through April. Notably, Fox hosted both the day after President Joe Biden took office to attack his agenda on climate change.
Larry Kudlow, a long-time climate denier who formerly served as economic adviser to Trump and now hosts a show on Fox Business, has also been one of Fox’s go-to commentators on policies related to climate change across both the network’s so-called “news” and “opinion” programs.
But Morano, Lomborg, and Kudlow are far from the only climate deniers and contrarians on Fox’s roster. Over the past several yearsRush Limbaugh, Joe Bastardi, Steve Milloy, and Patrick Moore all appeared regularly on Fox to push climate denial and misinformation. (In 2019, Moore said on Fox & Friends that “the climate crisis ... is not only fake news, it’s fake science”, and the line was picked up by Trump and tweeted to his millions of followers.)
Importantly, like Morano and Lomborg, none of these commentators are climate scientists, many have strong financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, and all have made a living out of obstructing efforts to address the climate crisis. With the exception of the late Rush Limbaugh, none would have had a megaphone to spread their lies absent Fox News.
Supported by advertisers, Fox runs cover for climate inaction
Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that if immediate and bold actions are not taken, then we will face dire climate disruption -- ever-increasing extreme and abnormal weather that threatens our homes, our food, our livelihoods, our economy, and our lives.
The stakes could not be higher.
The purpose of Fox hosts’ and contributors’ climate denial is to maintain an air of doubt about the existence and reality of our dangerously changing climate to provide cover for Republicans, who actively work to do nothing to stop the climate crisis, and the Big Polluters that bankroll their campaigns. This climate denial is also the foundation of the network’s persistent attacks -- across “opinion” and “straight news” programming -- on any proposed actions to reduce our carbon emissions and transition to a clean-energy economy. By extension, companies that advertise on Fox are party to climate inaction.
Publicly, many of these companies that run ads on Fox, including big insurers Allstate and Liberty Mutual have acknowledged the severe threat of the climate crisis. While others like General Motors, which is also among the network’s biggest advertisers, are actively calling for significant reduction in climate pollution. On the same day Dagen McDowell mocked global warming because it was cold in Texas, General Motors, along with 407 other corporations and businesses, issued a press release for an open letter to Biden supporting his goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. By continuing to sponsor Fox, these brands expose the cavern between their words and actions and associate themselves with a dangerous hostility to facts and science.
To be sure, Fox News is an accomplice to the impending climate emergency we face as a country and as part of the global community -- and so are those that support its programming with ads.
mma
How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice over the past four years
05/06/21 11:10 AM EDT
Buoyed by Biden’s climate summit, broadcast and cable TV networks provided strong Earth Day coverage
04/28/21 12:24 PM EDT
How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2020
https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-are-having-field-day-physicist-steve-koonins-new-book-climate
on May 6, theoretical physicist and former Obama administration energy official Steve Koonin appeared on two Fox programs to discuss his recently released book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.
In a nearly 13-minute appearance on Fox Business’ Kudlow, Koonin pushed a number of claims from his book that contradict the established scientific consensus on climate change. Among other things, he stated that “we've seen hardly any change in most severe weather events”; that “in the U.S., the highest temperatures haven't gone up in 60 years and are the same as they were in 1900”; and that there’s been “no detectable human influences on hurricanes over the last many decades.” He also questioned why “somehow people don’t want to use” fracking and said the current situation around climate change is “misleading panic.”
Later that evening on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight,Koonin repeated the same statement on humans and hurricanes, and on hotter temperatures, he stated that “the incidence of heat waves across the 48 states is no greater now than it was in 1900, and the highest temperatures haven’t gone up in 60 years.” He also called climate models uncertain and claimed that climate science has become “immoral,” as “it's being used as a tool to scare young people, create depression.”
Koonin, who is not a climate scientist, has a controversial history within the scientific and political climate change community. He formerly served as chief scientist for BP (a company that has played an outsized role in both worsening climate change and delaying climate action). In 2017, he advocated for a “red team-blue team” approach to climate science, which would “put the ‘consensus’ to a test” and illuminate “differing perceptions of climate science.” This idea apparently caught the attention of then-EPA Administrator (and notorious climate change denier) Scott Pruitt. And in 2019, he reportedly tried to help former President Donald Trump create a “climate contrarians” panel with longtime climate denier Will Happer.
Given the content of his new book, it’s no surprise that Koonin appeared on Fox to discuss its key points. While those points are wrong and easily debunkable, they have been spreading across the vast right-wing media ecosystem.
Real climate scientists and experts have lambasted Koonin’s book
Some of the major claims Koonin made in his May 6 Fox appearances came directly from his book, which was reviewed in an April 25 Wall Street Journal piece that repeated a number of its claims. Climate Feedback, a website featuring climate scientists who review dubious climate pieces in the media, reviewed the article and estimated “its overall scientific credibility to be very low.”
Regarding Koonin’s misleading statement on human impacts on hurricanes, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel said the “most up-to-date research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates an increase in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes (Category 3-5) globally, supporting theoretical predictions that date back to 1987.” University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain echoed this point, noting that “the most intense tropical cyclones are indeed becoming stronger in terms of maximum wind speeds and minimum central pressure and are producing more extreme rainfall.”
In his Kudlow interview, Koonin also downplayed the threat of melting ice and rising sea levels, stating that “people worry about the melting of the ice sheets, but that’s gonna take hundreds of years, if it happens.” This statement is remarkably wrong. Twila Moon of the University of Colorado stated that “over the last 20 years, ice loss has been rapid and large, creating measurable sea level rise.” Postdoctoral researcher Thomas Frederikse agreed, saying that “tide-gauge observations show that sea levels are persistently accelerating since the 1960s, and overall, the observed sea-level rise during the 20th century is higher than during any other century over the last 3000 years.”
Koonin’s claims downplaying the effectiveness of climate models are also wrong. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather states that Koonin’s criticism “ignores the fact that climate models published since the 1970s were quite accurate in projecting the warming that actually occurred in the years after they were published, as we discuss in our recent paper.” (In fact, climate models have been so correct that even fossil-fuel giant Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the rate of global warming in the 1980s.)
The Climate Feedback piece also addressed other misleading claims from Koonin’s book that he did not repeat in his Fox interviews, including misleading statements on global wildfires, the severity of droughts, global crop yields, and the economic impact of climate change. Overall, says Twila Moon, “many conclusions highlighted in this article are examples of cherry-picking information and failing to provide the context of change. In other instances, statements are fully wrong and unsupported by scientific research.”
Marianna Lavelle of Inside Climate News also addressed some of the claims Koonin made in his new book, including rebutting the statement he made on his Fox appearances about hot temperatures and heat waves in the U.S.:
The average annual temperature in the contiguous U.S. has increased from 0.7 degrees to 1.0 degrees Celsius (1.2 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the 20th century. The year 2020 was the fifth-warmest year in the 126-year record for the contiguous U.S. And the five warmest years on record have occurred since 2012, NOAA reports. There is a more marked increase in nighttime lows than in daytime highs (the “warmest” temperatures) because of factors like the cooling effect of daytime aerosol pollution and soil moisture evaporation.
She also countered his claim about a future minimal economic impact of climate change by noting 2019 research that found that “global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century.”Multiple scientific studies have showed that the cost of climate inaction far outweighs the cost of climate action. Indeed, one analysis finds that climate change could cost nearly $70 trillion by 2100.
In the past several weeks, Koonin has been featured in numerous right-wing media outlets
In addition to his May 6 appearances on Kudlow and Tucker Carlson Tonight, Koonin has made a number of other television appearances, written op-eds, and given interviews promoting his book. The vast majority of these have been with right-wing media outlets, including sources that are climate deniers.
He appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s The First on May 6, Andrew Bolt’s show on Australia’s Sky News on May 5, CNBC’s *Squawk Box* on May 4, and Kudlow on March 19. O’Reilly, Bolt, Kudlow, and Squawk Box’s Joe Kernan are all climate deniers. He also appeared on the 
* program on Sky News Australia on May 8. Here, he claimed that “modest” global warming will be beneficial for the planet, without noting that the negative impacts of climate change will far outweigh any positive ones. Sky News Australia, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, has a history of climate denial.
He has written pieces promoting his book for The National Review and the New York Post, given a print interview to The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins (who has a history of being wrong about climate issues), given interviews to conservative radio personalities John Gormley and Ross Kaminsky, and spoken to fossil fuel industry shill Alex Epstein, climate misinformer Rich Lowry of The National Review, and conservative Daily Beast writer Matt Lewis. His book and its climate misinformation have also been the basis of articles in Townhall and The Federalist. And along the way, he’s been promoted by notorious climate deniers Marc Morano and Steve Milloy.
Right-wing media propping up books that are skeptical of climate change is an all-too-familiar occurrence
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is -- this sort of thing happened just last summer, when climate contrarians Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger both released books downplaying the seriousness of climate change within a month of each other. Like Koonin, they both appeared across the right-wing media ecosystem to promote their books. There are other similarities between these individuals as well -- all are highly controversial within the climate science community, while their major works have been fact-checked and discredited by actual climate scientists and experts. Additionally, none of them are climate scientists.
As the realities of worsening climate change become more and more apparent, it’s become more difficult for right-wing media outlets to continue unequivocally denying that climate change is even happening. This new type of climate denial espoused by people like Koonin -- who say climate change is happening but it’s not that big of a problem -- provides perfect cover for right-wing media outlets to act like they care about the issue while they continue helping polluting companies kick climate action down the road.
Koonin’s misinformation-filled book won’t be the last one to downplay the threat of climate change, but it’s becoming easier to spot books like these when right-wing media take an exclusive interest in promoting their false claims.
an ME 521 set off by?
ox News' Tucker Carlson leveled an attack on Republican pollster Frank Luntz during his broadcast on Friday evening and apparently, his viewers continued the attacks with a barrage of messages sent directly to Luntz inbox.
During the primetime show, Carlson insisted that Luntz "should no longer have any role with the GOP because his views don't align with average Republican voters," according to Newsweek. "Luntz — Dr. Frank I. Luntz, as he's often called, at his request — is the Republican Party's longest-serving message man," Carlson said at the beginning of his commentary.
Luntz took to Twitter with his reaction to the attack. In a now-deleted tweet, Luntz included a screenshot from Carlson's segment when his photo appeared on the screen. He'd tweeted, "That explains all the angry, misspelled messages in my inbox tonight."
Carlson's relentless attack included criticisms about Luntz's work as he lambasted the pollster for being what he describes as "a smooth salesman."
"Frank Luntz is a smooth salesman," Carlson went on. "That why he's been around for a while. The problem with Frank Luntz is that his views, his personal views, are very different from those of your average Republican voter."
To get a clear scope of voters' perspectives on key issues, Luntz typically uses focus groups to compile research. However, Carlson has repeatedly mocked the long-serving Republican pundit's work describing it as "just random people yammering." According to the publication, Carlson went on to slam Luntz for his views on "immigration, guns in schools and the phrase 'law and order.'"
Despite Luntz;s political affiliation, Carlson insists Luntz is a "conventional liberal" who caters to "left-wing corporations."
He added, "Frank Luntz is a conventional liberal. His main clients are left-wing corporations like Google. When Frank Luntz gives advice to congressional Republicans, he's got Google's perspective in mind. That's a huge problem."
Carlson concluded by saying, "This is the guy Republican leaders went to just this week for, quote, 'messaging guidance on hot topics.' And you wonder why you no longer recognize the party that you vote for."
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note how right is victim and must defend ~ aggressors (who actually aren't doing anything to them?!)
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-fantasy/
in the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.
If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes.Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."
Using as cover the recent reports that much of outdoor masking is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, Carlson told his audience that people wearing masks outside are "the aggressors" and that "the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate" to get in their face and demand they remove the mask. Carlson claimed this can be done "politely but firmly," but of course, it's categorically impossible to "politely" boss other people around about choices that simply do not affect you. And no, his story about how masks "prevent intimacy and human contact" is not enough. Strangers on the street do not owe you "intimacy," despite what creeps who follow women around and demand smiles might wish to believe.
Carlson then escalated by asking his viewers to call the police when they see children wearing masks because it "should be illegal." ["child abuse" call cops and cps till they show] Of course, Carlson also knows full well how dangerous such nuisance calls (which are *actually* illegal) can be if the target is a person of color — and likely, he's counting on it, Derek Chauvin defender that he is.
Skipping a mask outside does, indeed, seem to be mostly harmless, which means that the common-sense response is to simply leave other people alone while you also do what you want.But conservatives want revenge because they've been made to wear masks where it is necessary. Carlson is only too happy to feed them a narrative that allows them to pretend to be heroes while continuing to be jerks for no good reason whatsoever.
Over the weekend, we saw another comically over-the-top example of right-wing fake victimhood narratives when a totally fake — and obviously fake — conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden imposing severe beef rations tore through the right-wing media and exploded on social media.
Jon Skolnik explained here at Salon how right-wing media distorted a study about reducing meat consumption to impact climate change, pretended it somehow was part of Biden's infrastructure plan and ran wild with it. But what was truly remarkable wasn't just that the folks at Fox News and other outlets deliberately misled the public with false claims that Biden planned to "limit" beef consumption to four pounds a year. It was how this lie managed to spread rapidly, infecting every corner of the country, in record time.
"It's tempting to dismiss this attack as too absurd to be believed," Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Message Box newsletter, but warned that, "But too often, Democrats focus on the absurdity of the specifics and ignore the believability of the general impression."
Indeed, watching the "Biden's banning beef" lie spread out over social media, boosted by supposedly "apolitical" Instagram influencers and other such conduits, it was easy to see how this worked. Many people — possibly most — had wholly emotional reactions when they heard or read the lie, and were too focused on lashing out angrily to think critically about the story. So many reactions online were variations of "how dare you criticize me" and "fake meat tastes bad," instead of the more helpful "is this even true?"
The best right-wing B.S. works in this way, by activating people's pre-existing guilt and making them feel defensive. A lot of Americans, even on the right, already feel bad about how much beef they eat. It's not just because it's bad for the environment, but because they know it's bad for their health, and American discourse around food and health tends to be highly moralistic. The Biden beef lie works first by activating that sense of shame and then giving people a story that makes them feel better about themselves, about how they're actually the good guys here. They get so focused on trying to make their defensive feelings go away that they don't stop to search Snopesor Politifact and find out if it's even true.
Carlson is playing the same game with his mask nonsense.
Conservatives obviously have a lot of sublimated guilt over refusing to take the pandemic seriously and are therefore on a hair-trigger for defensive reactions. So they're ready to hear how someone else wearing a mask is a judgment on them, about how they're the "real" victims, and mask-wearers are the "real" bad guys. Truth and common sense are crowded out by these over-the-top emotional reactions, driven by their own — in many cases, completely earned — sense of shame.
As Pfeiffer notes, the only way to push back on nonsense like this is for ordinary people to confront those who are spreading it on social media. The problem is that these right-wing freakouts are fueled by conservatives feeling angry, ashamed, and judged — frankly often because they deserve to feel bad about their behavior. Unfortunately, that means that the smarter reactions are ones that turn the temperature down, not up. It can help a lot for interlocutors to focus on facts, instead of moral judgments about things like mask-wearing or beef-eating, and save the moral discussion for another time, when folks are in a less defensive mindset.
Either way, the amount of culture war debris that the right-wing media will be churning out is going to be immense over the next few years. Conservatives have a lot of guilt for their terrible behavior and beliefs, and therefore will be easy marks for any and every story that lets them believe they're the victims and not the victimizers. Right-wing media, as these examples show, is incredibly good at kicking up fake controversies that feed off those defensive feelings. Conservatives are addicted to these lies, and like most addicts, they need increasingly stronger stuff to get their fix. Be prepared.
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ah
Fox News' Tucker Carlson has drawn a great deal of criticism recently for promoting a racist conspiracy theory that is common among white supremacists and white nationalists: "the Great Replacement," which claims that liberals and progressives — especially those who are Jewish — are importing non-whites from developing countries in order to "replace" them. Liberal opinion writer Greg Sargent addresses Carlson's latest controversy in his Washington Post column this week, laying out some reasons why the far-right pundit's views on immigration are so wrong-headed.
The Great Replacement Theory isn't limited to the United States. In France, it is a widely held belief among members of the National Front — the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen, who lost to President Emmanuel Macron in France's 2017 presidential election. But whether it's being championed by Le Pen in France or Carlson in the U.S., the theory's basic premise — that whites are being "replaced" by non-whites by design — is the same.
Sargent notes that on Monday night, Carlson "doubled down" on Great Replacement ideology, "insisting that his comments were entirely race-neutral and that they were only about defending the 'voting rights' of U.S. citizens."
"But if anything," Sargent writes, "Carlson's defense reveals his worldview as the one that's truly hostile to democracy. And that in turn unmasks the ideological underbelly of the broader right-wing populist nationalist movement that he and his defenders champion."
Sargent goes on to lay out the flaws in Carlson's views on immigration.
"There are two big deceptions here," Sargent explains. "The first is that Democrats want to increase immigration only for cynical electoral purposes. In fact, those who favor more legal immigration have defended it on normative and pragmatic grounds…. Carlson's basic premise — that there's something untoward about wanting to bring more immigrants into one's political coalition — is unwittingly revealing."
Another major flaw in Carlson's thinking, according to Sargent, is that immigrants will automatically become card-carrying Democrats.
"It's strange that Carlson presumes the GOP has no chance at winning these particular immigrants," Sargent writes. "Doesn't that cut against the interpretation of the 2020 election — in which Latinos shifted Republican — holding that right-wing populism can effect a multiracial, conservative realignment of the working class?But the deepest deception of all concerns the notion that bringing in immigrants — or legalizing undocumented ones already here — is by definition a threat to the power of the existing citizenry's voting rights."
It should be noted that some of the Karl Rove-era Republicans of the 1990s and 2000s didn't view immigrants as hostile to the interests of the GOP. If anything, GOP strategist Rove and his allies — including former President George W. Bush and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who speaks fluent Spanish and is married to a Mexican woman — were of the view that Latino immigrants can be quite receptive to conservative ideas when exposed to them.
Trumpism, however, pushed the GOP in a more nationalist and isolationist direction. And Carlson has been a major proponent of Trumpist ideology.
"In his monologue," Sargent writes, "Carlson declares that on immigration's impact on democracy, 'America badly deserves a national conversation.' Too bad he and his pals are so cagey about what they really believe."
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/tucker-carlson-2652572485/
// amanda
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/gop-fascism/
// amanda same day
no lix twt vid
Red-pilled conservatives ready to give up on democracy and embrace fascism
David Neiwertand Daily Kos March 31, 2021
After the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, American conservatives were faced with a stark choice: Recognize that their movement had inspired a seditious attack on democracy itself and work to restore the damage, swallowing the cold blue pill of the reality that they lost the 2020 election; or instead embracing the authoritarianism that had inspired a significant chunk of their base to attempt to lynch members of Congress and overthrow the legitimate counting of ballots, gulping down the red pill of conspiracism that fueled those warped beliefs.
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It is now abundantly clear that they have chosen the latter. They have lied brazenly about who committed the attack, tried to claim that efforts to counter extremists' presence in the military and law enforcement are an attack on conservatives, and muttered darkly about secession while punishing members of Congress for voting to impeach Donald Trump. The final step—an open embrace of fascism—is now being discussed as a rational option among their leading pundits, including Fox News' Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson and Jesse Kelly agree that Republicans are headed into fascism
www.youtube.com]
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On his nightly Fox News show last Thursday, Carlson invited radio talk-show Jesse Kelly on to discuss how Hunter Biden's gun permit somehow proves Democrats have rigged the system to their own exclusive benefit (no mention of Ivanka's multitudinous business deals was made). Kelly complained that "it's just item Number 1,000 in proving to people that there's two sets of rules in this country, there are rules for powerful Democrats, and there are rules for people like you and I. This is what they do and people are sick of it. It's making people feel helpless, it makes people feel like there is no justice out there, it feels as useless as going to a feminist rally and trying to find a woman who can cook."
Carlson then veered into a discussion of how all this undermines society:
CARLSON: I think you make a really solid point about the sadness and the powerlessness that people feel in the face of this. And at some point people are going to say, "Why should I follow the rules? Why should I be a good citizen if they don't have to follow the rules?" I mean, things kind of break down at some point, don't they?
KELLY: They will break down, they are breaking down, Tucker. I have said this before, and I'm telling you I'm worried that I'm right, the right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20 years. Because they're not going to be the only ones on the outs. There's 60, 70 million of us. We're not a tiny minority, and if we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right's going to take drastic measures.
And it's not about Hunter Biden and his drug use. Nobody cares that he was bumpin' Booger Sugar and European hookers on the weekend, it's about justice, that he's never held accountable for it and none of the Bidens are, but you would be, Tucker, and so would I.
CARLSON: That's so well put, and you're absolutely right. We're moving toward actual extremism because they're undermining the system that kept extremism at bay. I don't think we can say that enough. I'm so glad that you just said it. Jesse Kelly, thank you.
This is an argument straight out of a Matt Bors cartoon—you know the one, where a young MAGA fanatic embraces neo-Nazism because of mild criticism from a liberal , saying: "I feel bullied, really"—that is recycled with great regularity on the right, particularly by young men who've embraced a proto-fascist ethos: "The left is making people become Nazis!" Portland Proud Boys figure Tusitala "Tiny" Toese is fond of regaling audiences with a similar origin story.
I have heard versions of this legend for many years in covering the radical right, and each time, given further probing with questions, it uniformly became clear that people who say they were pushed into extremism were already there in most regards, and whatever "pushed" them simply removed the pretense. Each of them had a pre-existing antipathy toward liberalism and "the left"—the same animus that historically fueled fascist movements—as well as a predilection toward conspiracism and violence.
But take special note of how Kelly frames the discussion: The Jan. 6 insurrection is never mentioned, but it forms the subtext of his complaint that "we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free"—because in their minds, those are the factions responsible for terrorist violence in America, not a mob of right-thinking MAGA folks.
This narrative runs throughout much of mainstream conservative discourse in the aftermath of the Capitol siege. Seizing on modern variations of the timeworn "bloody shirt" trope, they have tried to depict the insurrectionists as "decent Americans in good standing" being victimized by a vengeful left. When the military sought to offer fresh training intended to weed out far-right extremists from their ranks, right-wing pundits complained that it was an "attack on conservatives."
The left is not driving conservatives towards fascism: Rather, their own embrace of far-right radicalization is the engine in all this. The simple existence of "the left" is enough to drive them into an eliminationist rage, and provides a handy rationalization for their own radicalized worldview.
This reality was crystallized in an article published this week in the house organ of the right-wing Claremont Institute, The American Mind, headlined "Conservatism is no Longer Enough: All hands on deck as we enter the counter-revolutionary moment," from an Institute fellow named Glenn Ellmers. Unlike Carlson and Kelly, the piece does not embrace fascism explicitly, but rather explicates in detail a political ethos that is almost classically fascist in the scholarly sense.
Besides being authoritarian, populist, and palingenetic, the piece—an attempt at laying out a fighting plan for the American right after the epistemic break of Jan. 6 (which again goes unmentioned specifically, but is an essential subtext of the piece)—is aremarkable example of undiluted eliminationism, rhetoric that dehumanizes, demonizes, and disenfranchises other members of a society and argue for their elimination.
Ellmers divides the nation into two warring halves: the "real Americans" (who, seemingly, engage in violent seditionist insurrection out of patriotic impulses) and the "not Americans"—i.e., the rest of us. And only the former half deserves to hold the political franchise:
"Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."
I don't just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I'm really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else."
Like so many other red-pilled right-wing authoritarians, Ellmer's cognitive worldview is so skewed that he engages in outright projection here, especially in describing the enemy in greater detail as "a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism," and that the Real Americans voted against a "senile figurehead." This cognitive difference made voting for Trump "an easy choice," and in his view, voting for Biden branded one instantly a Not Real American: "Both Right and Left know where they stand today… and it is not together. Not anymore."
Ellmer somehow concludes that "the progressive, or woke, or 'antiracist' agenda" attacks and "repudiates" the notion that "any temporary majority in power must represent the rights and interests of all"—a concept that seems not to apply to vote-suppressing, anti-immigrant Republicans, not to mention precluding a liberal majority from applying policies that represent the rights and interests of people outside the majority—and so it "now corrupts our republic, assaults our morality, and suffocates our liberty."
Ellmer explains that his goal "is to show why we must all unite around the one, authentic America, the only one which transcends all the factional navel-gazing and pointless conservababble." A photo illustrating the piece, showing a muscular man in a tank top wrapping his hands in preparation for a fistfight, suggested what he has in mind: the thuggish street-brawler strategy of the Proud Boys.
As historian John Ganz explored in a responding piece at Substack, given there really is only one word to accurately describe this kind of authoritarian political ethos: fascism. His opening salvo—arguing for the disenfranchisement of the majority of the nation's voters on the basis of being insufficiently American is really only the beginning.
"These themes of pervading national corruption and decadence, and theneed for a counter-revolution and a national rebirthput this text firmly in the radical reactionary or fascist ballpark," Ganz observes.
He also notes the obvious eliminationism: "Like many fascist theoreticians, the author of the Claremont essay puts the condition of America in terms of a 'toxin,' a 'disease,' a 'sickness,' and awaits the appearance of a providential man with the cure: 'What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.'
"There are also hints of the kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that fascist propagandists employ: 'If you are a zombie or a human rodent (who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.' "
Ganz also discusses Kelly's appearance on Carlson's show, noting that both of them clearly stated that fascism is a justifiable response to the left, one forced on the right. "Carlson, of course, has long been a mouthpiece of mainstream conservatism, and has now taken a more radical turn," he adds.
It's probably also worth noting that Kelly has a history of spinning reality through his own authoritarian prism, as Vanity Fair details:
In a 2018 Federalist piece titled "It's Time for the United States to Divorce Before Things Get Dangerous," Kelly pointed to intracountry division on the issues of firearms, immigration, and religion to predict that "sooner or later, the left-wing rage mob will start coming for the careers (and lives) of any normal American who sees things differently." He further warned that right-wing Americans could be massacred in a liberal-led purge, writing in his Federalist post "America Is Over, but I Won't See It Go Without an Epic Fight" that conservatives should fight to the death against "an eventual socialist abyss" that Kelly believes will take over the country. "Close your eyes and imagine holding someone's scalp in your hands," the article's first line reads. "I mean a real scalp, Indian-style, of some enemy you just killed on the battlefield; somebody you hated and who hated you back."
After projecting that conservatives will "almost certainly" be massacred in an America's "inevitable communist purges," Kelly jumped "back to the scalping thing" and insinuated that conservatives should prepare to wage a bloody insurgency against fellow Americans: "When you make that long trek to the reservation the leftists have set up for you—and make that trek you will—what memories do you want to take with you? When living in the liberal utopian nightmare of 57 genders and government control over everything in your life…You'll want to know, to remember, even just cherish the knowledge that, one day, you rode out onto the plains and made them feel pain."
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In the epistemologically demented world that people like Kelly and Carlson occupy, the left is the source of all the world's ills, its political violence, its social dysfunctions, while "real Americans" like themselves are standing up for goodness and righteousness. In the end, this is why fascism becomes an acceptable option, especially after Jan. 6, when the web of denial that normalized the American right's descent into radicalization was wiped away and its inherent authoritarianism and anti-democratic intent became unmistakable.
As I wrote after the insurrection:
The Republican Party's hostility to democracy—embodied by conservatives' running refrain that "America is not a democracy, it's a republic"—has become its official policy over the past decade, manifested most apparently in its egregious voter suppression policies and court rulings that reached a fever pitch in recent years. It's now a commonplace for Republican politicians (notably Trump himself) to fret that a high voter turnout is nearly certain to translate into Democratic wins as a reason to even further suppress the vote.
As David Frum (a never-Trump conservative) noted in his book Trumpocracy: "If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." On Wednesday, that rejection became undeniably, irrevocably manifest.
Rather than taking a hard look at what they have become after the mob their president ginned up stormed the Capitol, today's lame attempts by conservatives to gaslight the public about what happened Wednesday (with figures like Matt Gaetz and Mo Brooks trying to gaslight the public by claiming the invaders were actually "antifa") make all too clear that the Republican Party, now consumed by right-wing authoritarianism, has ceased to be a viable partner in a working democracy. The problem the rest of us now face is how to proceed from here.
The red pill of authoritarianism is a helluva drug. And as its addicts descend into an embrace of fascism, it's clear they have the capability of not only warping their own reality, but everyone else's too.
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JESSE KELLY BIO Jesse Kelly is the host of ‘The Jesse Kelly Show’ on 950 KPRC in Houston, TX and ‘I’m Right’ on The First TV, a bold, new news and talk channel on Pluto TV. Unafraid to speak his mind, Jesse has a unique ability to connect with and engage his audience across all platforms. Jesse was born in the Ohio Rust Belt to a construction family. Seeking work, his family moved to Montana when Jesse was ten years old. He grew up hunting, fishing, and being part of his family’s construction business, which is where he learned his work ethic from his father: work hard, make no excuses, no complaining and make something of yourself. Having always respected the armed services, Jesse joined the Marine Corps in 2000 and on 9/11, watched the towers fall from inside his barracks. He later deployed to Iraq as an infantry Marine during the Second Persian Gulf War and received an honorable discharge after four years. Upon his return from Iraq, Jesse rejoined the family business, now in Arizona, which required him to drive to various construction sites around the state. It was at this stage of his life when Jesse really got his taste of news talk radio and politics. While Jesse has been a history buff and avid reader his entire life, he enjoyed that talk radio was the intersection where history, storytelling and entertainment crossed. In 2010, with no political experience to speak of but many opinions to share, Jesse decided to test the political waters and ran for Congress in a Democratic-controlled district of Arizona. Jesse was a virtual unknown in the race but was only narrowly defeated by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The race initially ended in a vote recount. As a Congressional candidate, Jesse recognized the power of radio and used it as a cornerstone of his political campaign. After his Congressional run, Jesse continued to be a major voice among conservatives, using his large social media following as a platform to continue many of the conversations started on the campaign trail. One particular thread on Twitter caught the eye of a powerful Houston radio host, Michael Berry. Berry asked Jesse to come on his radio show and quickly identified Jesse as “having a special talent he hadn’t seen before.” Michael Berry encouraged Jesse to try for a career in media and pushed to get him his own show. In 2018, Jesse Kelly was offered an hour-long talk radio show on 950 KPRC in Houston and in less than a year was given a two-hour show, which he hosts today. Jesse approaches all topics with his unique insight, knowledge and cutting humor. Jesse lives with his wife and two children in Texas
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/fox-news-white-nationalist/
no lnx twt
How Fox News became the beating heart of the white nationalist movement
Heather Digby Parton and Salon March 29, 2021
Political analysts are still trying to figure out just what has caused the Republican Party in this country to move so far to the right in recent years, and there are many theories. Much has been made of the Trump-loving white working class's perceived loss of economic success due to outsourcing and international trade and we've endlessly discussed their various grievances about losing the status and privileges they believe they are entitled to. We try to understand their confusion about changing cultural norms and the cascading disinformation that permeates social media. In the end, all we really know is that they are very upset and Donald Trump gave voice to their overwhelming anger and disdain for their fellow Americans.
:{
}:
Last week there was yet another congressional hearing with the top social media executives, this one focusing on the role of their companies in promoting extremism, misinformation, and cyberbullying. Republicans were most concerned about the companies censoring right-wing voices (although interestingly, they didn't complain much about Donald Trump's expulsion from all the platforms) and Democrats complained about disinformation and extremism being allowed to flourish on the platforms.
:{
}:
We don't really know at this point how much of that affected the 2020 election. As Kevin Drum pointed out, we are still awaiting data to tell us just how much people relied on social media for their political information during the election but judging by past analysis of election campaigns, it really isn't as influential as we might assume. There's no doubt that Facebook and Youtube and to some extent Twitter can lead people down the conspiracy rabbit hole, and there's little doubt that right-wing extremism has had a very comfortable home on all those sites. But according to the analysis that Drum cites, TV and talk radio are still where the action is. Fox and OAN and Newsmax may pick up ideas that percolate up through the fever swamps to social media. But really, it mostly goes the other direction.
Journalist Peter Slevin spent some months in Iowa before and after the election to get a sense of what the mostly rural, Republican voters were thinking. He reports in this piece in the New Yorker that basically, they are awash in disinformation and as a result have come to believe that Democratic voters are hardly even Americans anymore. Their own form of "identity politics" has been distilled down to "I am a Republican" in opposition to their enemies.
They believed that Donald Trump was the only person who could control the violent, socialist mob that was threatening their way of life. And they believed everything he said:
I met Kimberly Pont, the vice-chair of the Fayette County G.O.P., at a Mexican restaurant in the small city of Oelwein, and asked her what drove local residents to vote Republican. She said,"People could see the news. They could watch for themselves what was going on, when you have a party that's not going to denounce rioting." Pont believes covid-19 death figures are inflated, mail-in voting is dangerous, Biden is a "figurehead," and Harris is unqualified. "I'm terrified," she told me. "She is the most left-leaning of all the senators." When I caught up with Pont this month, she told me that the failure by the courts to identify widespread election fraud left her "disappointed and disillusioned."
Slevin noticed that in every house and business, right-wing talk radio was on in the background and thelikes of the late Rush Limbaugh were saying things like this:
Obama's been running the Democrats' show since 2016. He ran the operation against Trump. He ran the Russia sting. He ran the Russian coup. He ran everything, and he's running this."
None of that is QAnon weirdness or Alex Jones and Infowars. It is standard issue mainstream conservative media, which millions of Republicans listen to every day and watch on Fox News and the lesser cable channels at night.
Throughout the Trump administration, there was an ongoing question about whether Fox News was the president's brain or vice versa. I came to believe that it was a feedback loop with disinformation coming from both sides. There were numerous examples of Trump tweeting out some outlandish insult or idea just seconds after it had aired on the network. And the Fox News universe was dedicated to ensuring their audience saw Trump as their savior, often cleaning up his misstatements and amplifying his most effective messages to the faithful. They were a team.
Trump has begun to call into the shows again, clearly unable to keep out of the spotlight any longer. He checked in with Laura Ingraham a few days ago and made this stunning comment about January 6th:
Let's go to the video tape.https://t.co/oaT0nMllf1
— Ernest wilson (@Ernest wilson)1616794972.0
You will note that at the end he said of "the left": "they truly hate our country." That is the message those people in Iowa hear from him and all the talkers on the radio and right-wing cable news.
The question is where they go from here. It's unknown if Trump will maintain his influence. He intends to, of course, and unless he fades, these blatant lies will continue to be believed by tens of millions of people. He can draw an audience. But he can't last forever and there's little reason to believe that his offspring have whatever it is he has that appeals so much to these folks. But one Fox News celebrity is laying out a roadmap:
the right has become very honest about this https://t.co/XGFmce8Btq
— Devin (@Devin)1616982685.0
You'll note that this is all predicated on the notion that the liberals are making them do it. Carlson is the most flagrant white nationalist of the big-name Fox News celebrities and he gets the biggest ratings, which I suspect is not a coincidence. Before this guest joined Carlson, the host was nearly hysterical about the migrants at the border. He said:
You'd think that if you'd caused a crisis of this magnitude that was going to change your country forever, possibly for the worse, you'd feel a moral obligation to learn a lot about it because it's your crisis. You own it, you did it. But Biden hasn't."
A moral obligation to learn about a crisis? This is the same person who backed Trump's COVID response to the hilt and has been recently pushing anti-vax propaganda.
If you want to know what's fuelling right-wing extremism, you don't have to dig deeply into obscure corners of the dark web. Look no further than Fox News. It isn't just a ratings game for them and it isn't all about money. Fox News is the beating heart of the white nationalist movement in the United States and they are indoctrinating millions of people day in and day out. In fact, Donald Trump himself is one of those people, he just doesn't know it.
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djt kept his vax secret, after reveal he press to promote, 3/16 he did, while indirectly praise self as orig?
==
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/tucker-carlson-2651097830/ ~ vax
generator of alt reality ctr-narratives? trying to rehab gop thru amnesia?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/adam-kinzinger-2650737734/
ME
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) is tired of Fox News host Tucker Carlson's attempts to confuse his views while failing to "accept reality" and make effective changes.
According to Newsweek, Kinzinger took to Twiter to fire back at Carlson for his baseless claims during the recent segment of his show which aired on Tuesday, Feb. 23. "Next step in the whitewash: 'who is this 'Q' of which you speak?' There is no website!' Deny, plead ignorance, misdirect ... is there any question why people are confused? Quit lying, accept reality and use your energy to make us a better country."
Kinzinger also included the hashtags #Country1st and #restoreourgop appearing to acknowledge the intraparty divisions the Republican Party is left battling in the aftermath of Trump's presidency. twt vid]
kinzinger's remarks came as Carlson attempted to downplay the dangers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. "We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which, in the end, we learned is not even a website. If it's out there, we could not find it," Carlson said during the segment.
He added, "Then, we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter feed because we have heard she traffics in disinformation,CNN told us, but nothing there. Next, we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones?"
Carlson also appeared to suggest that the circulation of QAnon theories was the result of someone perpetuating lies with the intent of causing divisions in the United States.
"Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other and certain to destroy our core institutions?" Carlson asked. "Well, none of the above, actually. It wasn't Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV, they're the ones spreading disinformation to Americans. Maybe they are from QAnon."
Carlson also targeted CNN claiming the widely watched news platform is a "disinformation network more powerful than QAnon and far more destructive."
The Fox News host was one of Trump's devout supporters while Kinzinger voted to impeach the former disgraced president for inciting the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
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==
interview abbott?
who said small price to pay to keep gubmint out of our business?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/green-new-deal/
Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.
"Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action," Klein wrote. "Fortunately, there's a way out—and that's precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear."
Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of "an energy-market free-for-all" stemming from "a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-'90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas' electricity sector."
"As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies," Klein wrote. "Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike)."
In the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ordinary Texans are beginning to see the direct impact of the deregulatory push on their material wellbeing as electric companies hit them with bills topping $17,000—"a consequence," Klein argued, "of leaving pricing to the whims of the market."
Alluding to her previous work on "the shock doctrine"—a term she coined to describe how the right has exploited past disasters to force through unpopular privatization and austerity agendas—Klein noted that "large-scale shocks... become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense."
"I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman," Klein wrote. "In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: 'Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."[gop sez BO cos chic guy]
The difference between past shocks such as the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis and the current emergency in Texas, Klein argued, is that "Republican ideas are no longer lying around—they are lying in ruin."
Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott attacked the Green New Deal—a proposal that has not even been implemented—in an appearance on Fox News last week because he knows its promise to "create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit, and affordable housing" is "extremely appealing" to Texans as they "suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services, and extreme weather," Klein wrote.
"All that Texas' Republicans have to offer, in contrast," Klein added, "is continued oil and gas dependence—driving more climate disruption—alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state's mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead." [death spiral]
As The Houston Chroniclereported last week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature are already signaling that "one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state's electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables."
But Klein contended that "unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel."
"The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis," Klein wrote. "So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas." twt
in recent days, as Common Dreams has reported, progressive advocacy groups such as the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace USA have made the case that—contrary to the GOP's bad-faith attacks—a Green New Deal is precisely what's needed to help Texas equitably recover from the present emergency and build the resilience necessary to withstand future climate-driven disasters.
"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, they are unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said last Thursday.
On Monday, activists with the Sunrise Movement of Texas are expected to rally at the state capitol in Austin to demand immediate relief for struggling Texans, the resignations of Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), and passage of a Green New Deal that would "make our state and country more resilient to future disasters, and create millions of good union jobs in the process of transforming these necessary structures."
"Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this," said Chante Davis, a 17-year-old Sunrise Movement leader and Houston resident.
"I've survived three once in a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life," added Davis, whose family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face."
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221 mma
Friday, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell released a two-hour disinformation film chock full of lies about the 2020 presidential election. Pro-Trump disinformation network OAN aired it in full multiple times, led by an absurd disclaimer noting that Lindell paid the network for the airtime. Pro-Trump outlet Right-Side Broadcasting and pro-Trump platform Rumble streamed it as well; it was swiftly removed from Vimeo and YouTube for promoting disinformation and obvious lies about the election. Nevertheless, Lindell the next day bragged to Steve Bannon about how many views it had received.
Lindell's zealotry has led right-wing media networks to compete for his affection -- and his cash. This is complicated by the fact that Lindell's zealotry has led him to advocate completely deranged positions, including conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems; he's also pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory about Italy . This has been only heightened since Lindell was permanently suspended from Twitter.
Tucker Carlson gave Lindell a friendly interview, and allowed Lindell to push more Dominion conspiracy theories (you may recall Carlson lashing out at Sidney Powell over the exact same conspiracy theories). Lindell's My Pillow is the major sponsor of Carlson's show.
When Lindell appeared on Newsmax on Tuesday, he again pushed Dominion conspiracy theories. But in lieu of a prior legal threat from Dominion to Newsmax, the host muted Lindell to read a disclaimer and eventually walked off set as Lindell kept talking about election fraud. A different Newsmax host welcomed Lindell later in the evening, but they did not discuss election conspiracy theories.
OAN used that incident to attack Newsmax for being insufficiently pro-Trump; The network also used the incident to promote that it was airing Lindell's "documentary" about the election -- while trying to protect itself by running a massive disclaimer.
Also: Lindell pushed this conspiracy theory in appearances at two rallies the day before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He also visited the White House nine days after the insurrection to reportedly encourage then-President Donald Trump to consider enacting martial law. Now, as Olivia Little reports, several of Lindell’s public social media posts appear to reveal additional information about his activities in the lead-up to the events that day -- and could implicate other prominent figures like former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
Finally: Lindell told Bannon on Saturday that the COVID-19 vaccines are "the mark of the beast stuff."
Legal details: You can find our research on right-wing media promoting Smartmatic conspiracy theories here; our research on Fox figures promoting Dominion conspiracy theories is here. Rush Limbaugh also was a heavy promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories.
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-warns-viewers-they-could-be-targets-war-white-supremacists
~ aoc danger insurrection
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/tucker-carlson/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-media-2649880889
...Media Matters has a good round-up of the various strategies being employed by right wing media to spin Wednesday's events as something less serious than an attempted coup spurred on by Trump himself.
:{
}:
Fox News' Tucker Carlson is reframing the insurrectionistsas the real victims, subject to imaginary liberal incursions on vaguely defined "freedom." Laura Ingraham is working the "both sides do it" angle, falsely equating random and disorganized acts of vandalism during Black Lives Matter protests with the Trump crowd's direct attempt to overthrow the U.S. government and likely murder congressional leaders.
**Sean Hannity is still working the "antifa did it!" lie**,even after the FBI announced no evidence linking anti-fascist activists to the Trump-motivated mob. And Rush Limbaugh is denying that the insurrection was violent, saying it was simply people taking "selfies," ignoring the fact that five people died, including a Capitol police officer who was beat to death by someone wielding a fire extinguisher. These tactics of deflection also ignore that the mob clearly intended more mayhem— rioters weren't carrying weapons and wearing armor for their health — and it was only a matter of luck that things didn't get worse.
Unfortunately, such right-wing media pressure campaigns have worked, going back at least to the 1990s, when a campaign by figures like Rush Limbaugh to downplay Timothy McVeigh's 1995 terrorist attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City effectively shut down needed discourse about the role that extremist rhetoric on the right played in the attack.
Similarly, feigned outrage on the right over an FBI reportin 2009 over the threat of domestic terrorism from returning veterans caused the Obama administration to buckle, withdrawing the report. Since then, there's been an air of heightened skepticism in mainstream media towards efforts by progressive activists to highlight the growing threat of domestic terrorism. Mainstream journalists have tended, all too often, to treat those warnings as hysterical, even in the face of terrorist attacks in El Paso and Pittsburgh.
Right-wing efforts to minimize right-wing violence can work, so Democrats need to act swiftly to take control of the narrative. Republicans must not be allowed to rewrite history to minimize the seriousness of this situation. And the best possible tool that Democrats have right now to evade right-wing gaslighting is impeachment.
The good news is that Democrats seem to understand this. After giving Vice President Mike Pence the whole weekend to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office, House Democrats announced that they would be introducing an article of impeachment on Monday, accusing Trump of "incitement of insurrection." Still, there still seems to be some desire on the part of House Democrats to give Pence another 24 hours, leading to a confusing timeline where the impeachment is likely not to be brought to the floor until Tuesday....
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/tucker-carlson-2649561031/
no lnk twt
on Friday's installment of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News commentator accused the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of suggesting that COVID-19 vaccinations should be distributed based on race rather than need. Carlson's claims was a deliberate misrepresentation of a CDC presentation on the groups most needing vaccination.
In the presentation, the CDC said that healthcare personnel, adults ages 65 and older, people with high-risk medical conditions, and essential workers would be the first to receive vaccinations.
In explaining why these groups were chosen for vaccinations first, the CDC mentioned that essential workers tend to be poor people and people of color who can't work from home. People of color also tend to be underrepresented among people ages 65 and older (ie. They don't typically live as long). As such, inoculating essential workers who are largely poor and people of color will help reduce healthcare inequalities among these communities.
https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1340114067780984833
Always eager to whip up racial resentment and outrage, Carlson explained the presentation this way:
00:00
"It is true that more lives would be saved if the elderly receive priority access to the vaccine. But here's the problem, quote, racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among adults aged 65 and older. Therefore, the elderly should not be a top priority."
He continued, "In other words, it's entirely racial. They're making the decision based on race. Kathleen Dooling's presentation concluded that doling out life-saving medicine on the basis of skin color would quote mitigate health inequities. Of course, it would kill people, and she effectively concedes that. But the people who would kill come from a disfavored race, so it's not a big deal. It's been a very long time since anyone close to what we would consider the mainstream has endorsed eugenics that's exactly what that is — it's eugenics."
https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1340103950763253762
Media Matters writer Parker Molloy pointed out that Carlson has effectively made Dooling a target for harassment and death threats following his misrepresentation.
Democratic California Representative Eric Swalwell commented on Carlson's falsehoods by asking, "How many people did Tucker Carlson try and kill tonight?"
https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1340113381450264578
Atlantic science writer Ed Yong pointed out that people of color younger than age 65 are disproportionately dying from COVID-19 at higher rates, which explains why the CDC would want to inoculate them.
https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1340077357839822848
MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes pointed out that Fox News is owned by Rupert Murdoch who himself received a COVID vaccine this week.
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1340143861377748996
As Carlson peddles these dangerous distortions, anti-vaxxers are flooding Facebook and YouTube with videos training people how to refuse inoculations.
President-elect Joe Biden has said he won't make vaccines mandatory nationwide, although employers and states may require people to get vaccinated before allowing them back into workplaces, schools and colleges, USA Today reports.
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==
1220
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/tucker-carlsons-history-pushing-vaccine-conspiracy-theories
:{
}:
fox contributor Kimberley Strassel: “Economic lockdowns, we know, they are causing as much if not more damage than the virus itself.
Tucker Carlson dismissed loss of life from COVID: “Death is inevitable.”
denies rumor he's defecting from fox, in fact capitaLIZing on loss of AUd
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-becoming-foxs-news-side-assignment-editor
Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ most influential prime-time star, announced on Monday that he would be taking on a bigger role at the network. Carlson claimed that he was discussing with Fox executives what he described as plans to “expand the amount of reporting and analysis we do in this hour across other parts of the company.” He told his viewers that “the people who run Fox News want more of it, not less.”
They are already getting it -- at the expense of the network’s putative “straight news” programs. In the two days following Carlson’s announcement, those shows aired clips from his nightly “opinion” show at least 14 times. Fox “news” anchors and correspondents have incorporated clips from Carlson or his guests into packaged reports; used them as the jumping off point for panel discussions; and featured them in news briefs.
This drastic change in Fox’s typical programming habits suggests that the wall between the “news” and “opinion” side -- often touted by the network’s executives and defenders -- has become increasingly permeable. Carlson effectively served as Fox’s assignment editor over the last two days, with the network’s purportedly independent “news” side adopting his story selection and framing.
Fox executives know that Carlson is not a credible source for “news” content. The network lawyers won a court case by convincing a judge that no “reasonable viewer” should take him seriously.He’s also a notorious demagogue, particularly on issues related to diversity and the coronavirus pandemic, and his “anti-Black rhetoric” has reportedly led to confrontations between the network brass and its Black employees.
But Carlson’s heightened profile during Fox’s “news” hours comes as the network tries to stave off far-right competitors by promoting its right-wing prime-time hosts. Over the last week, Fox “news” shows have featured on-screen promos, advertisements, and the equivalent of live ad reads for Carlson and his prime-time colleagues, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Fox’s “news” programs aired clips from those three “opinion” shows at least 17 times. Wednesday’s edition of the morning show America’s Newsroom was effectively a show about the previous night’s prime-time lineup, accounting for a whopping 10 of the segments over its three hours. Of those, seven came from Tucker Carlson Tonight, two from The Ingraham Angle, and one from Hannity.
Tucker Carlson Tonight clips were also featured twice on the Tuesday edition of America’s Newsroom, once each that night on the flagship evening broadcast Special Report with Bret Baier and late-night show Fox News @ Night, and three times on Wednesday’s Outnumbered Overtime.
Fox is deploying its “opinion” shows during its “news” hours in two ways, airing both comments from the monologues of their prime-time “opinion” hosts and remarks from their guests.
Clips from the monologues of the prime-time “opinion” hosts accounted for five of the “news” side segments, four of which came on Wednesday’s America’s Newsroom, which separately highlighted all three of the hosts. These segments show Fox treating its employees as de facto newsmakers whose opinions are inherently worth providing the network’s audience during its “news” hours. It’s also a way of giving those viewers more access to their favorite pro-Trump personalities -- lest they change the channel to one of Fox’s competitors.
Chief breaking news correspondent Trace Gallagher, for example, anchored a news brief on Wednesday’s America’s Newsroom that seemed to have little purpose other than to tell viewers what Carlson thinks about coronavirus restrictions.
Gallagher highlighted new limitations on private indoor gatherings that some Democratic governors have rolled out to slow the spread of the coronavirus during the Thanksgiving holiday and commented, “Tucker Carlson blasting the new measures.” He then aired a clip of Carlson saying on Tuesday night’s show, “Politicians have now decided they have total power over you. They can literally decide who comes to Thanksgiving dinner at your house and where they can stand. Well that's lunatic; it’s never happened in American history before." After pointing to some sheriffs who say they won’t enforce the measures, Gallagher concluded the segment.
likewise, the anchors twiceused a clip from Ingraham’s Tuesday monologue attacking “the Thanksgiving police” to frame Wednesday America’s Newsroom segments about the new coronavirus restrictions.
Twelve of the “news” segments, by contrast, featured clips of guests on Carlson’s show.Conservative guests could already expect softball treatment from Carlson when talking about the prime-time host’s particular grievances, like trans youth or the perfidy of social media companies. Now, their talking points are also driving and framing additional coverage on the network's “news” programs.
On Wednesday’s America’s Newsroom, for example, anchor Sandra Smith repeatedly aired comments that Tootie Smith, the incoming Republican chair of the board of commissioners of Clackamas County, Oregon, made on Carlson’s show the previous night attacking Gov. Kate Brown for tightening restrictions due to the coronavirus’s nationwide surge, including by limiting private gatherings.
“You look at what’s happening in Oregon, with this incoming Republican chair slamming these new COVID rules,” the Fox anchor said during one of the segments. She then aired a video of the Republican telling Carlson that Brown’s actions were “a travesty” and “hypocrisy” because the governor was going to “send the police into people's homes and arrest them and fine them for having a Thanksgiving meal with their family.”
that’s an overtly partisan and deeply questionable claim -- while violators of Brown’s order could technically face jail time, the same set of penalties applied to violators of her stay-at-home order in March, and “authorities said at the time that they intended to inform people about the laws rather [than] issue punishments, and it’s not clear those penalties were ever applied.”
Carlson didn’t push back of course, because he’s deeply invested in poisoning the well for any efforts to prevent mass death from coronavirus -- which is the same reason he decided to give airtime to a county official who had a viral social media post in the first place. And Fox’s “news” side decided to prioritize her comments from Carlson’s “opinion” show and air them unchallenged, rather than highlighting an expert voice who could have provided insight into how to stay safe during the holiday.
Despite Fox's best efforts, the United States will soon be transitioning to a Democratic administration -- and the network is sending every signal that it intends to respond by allowing its craziest elements to run the show, influencing the network’s programming well beyond their own timeslots.
sidney powell blamed hugo chavez for steal election
She got angry': Tucker Carlson just exposed a Trump lawyer's sketchy charade in the most bizarre way
November 20, 2020
On Thursday night, Fox News' Tucker Carlson got an impressive scoop. Unfortunately for him, it didn't fit with his ideological agenda. So instead of presenting it in the most straightforward and direct way possible, he skewed the news in such a warped fashion that an...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/voter-fraud/
accuse specif woman?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/furious-trump-fans-are-now-boycotting-fox-news-after-tucker-carlsons-post-election-remarks/
Carlson warns about Biden: “They want to make you drink Starbucks from now until forever!”
muthertucker
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/nbc-news-fires-back-at-tucker-carlson-for-dangerously-and-dishonestly-attacking-a-journalist/
on Wednesday night, Fox News' Tucker Carlson brought on a guest, Darren Beattie — a former speechwriter for the president — to slam NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny for her story on harassment campaigns that Donald Trump supporters have conducted online. And NBC News, in an official statement issued on Thursday, struck out to "vigorously" defend Zadrozny.
NBC News said, "Over the past several years, journalists from news organizations around the world have put themselves at risk in order to shine a light in the dark corners of society and the internet — specifically, in the realm of conspiracy theories and online extremism. Last night on Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson dangerously and dishonestly targeted one of those journalists: Brandy Zadrozny. Brandy represents the best of investigative journalism and of NBC News. She is relentlessly well-researched and sophisticated in her understanding of disinformation and conspiracy theories on the internet and within some social media communities."
NBC News went on to say, "Fox News has chosen to smear Brandy. In doing so, they have shamefully encouraged harassment and worse. Fortunately, any effort to intimidate Brandy is doomed to failure. NBC News couldn't be prouder of Brandy, and we will continue to vigorously support her work."
Beattie left the White House in 2018 after CNN reported that in 2016, he had attended an event that included white nationalists. The former Trump speechwriter has accused Zadrozny of using "data search engines to dox the personal information of anonymous Trump supporters online." But Ben Collins, one of Zadrozny's colleagues at NBC News, tweeted that Beattie seriously distorted Zadrozny's reporting.
On Wednesday night, Collins tweeted, "Tucker Carlson is devoting an entire segment to attacking my colleague, Brandy Zadrozny, for doing actual reporting, like using public records to confirm identities of people who create harassment campaigns. It's disgraceful. She's the best reporter I know. I'm with her 1000%."
Collins, in a Twitter thread, went on to say, "That was a hideously unethical segment by Tucker Carlson, framing using basic reporting tools like public records searches as some sort of evil act. To do it to a mom, and one of the best people I know, is disgusting. I won't forget it."
trifecta on baby jail tucker 2x down:
biden debate cites new report 525 lost, dhs lied about trying to beep track alpha #
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-claims-parents-are-refusing-reunite-their-children-after-being
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/tucker-carlson-hosted-qanon-conspiracy-theorist-noor-bin-ladin-talk-about trump
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/is-fox-news-obsessed-with-hate-study-finds-network-uses-this-word-5-times-more-than-its-rivals/
no grafs
Tucker Carlson is a big fan of the phrase 'they hate.' Usually, he's talking about Democrats.
Curd Knüpfer, Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman, George Washington University
Fox News is up to five times more likely to use the word “hate" in its programming than its main competitors, according to our new study of how cable news channels use language.
Fox particularly uses the term when explaining opposition to Donald Trump. His opponents are said to “hate" Trump, his values and his followers.
Our research, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 8, 2020, initially explored news of Trump's impeachment. Then came the coronavirus. As we sifted through hundreds of cable news transcripts over five months, we noticed consistent differences between thevocabulary used on Fox News and that of MSNBC.
While their news agendas were largely similar, the words they used to describe these newsworthy events diverged greatly.
Fox and hate
For our study, we analyzed 1,088 program transcripts from the two ideologically branded channels – right-wing Fox and left-wing MSNBC – between 6 p.m. and 10:59 p.m.
Because polarized media diets contribute to partisan conflict, our quantitative analysis identified terms indicating antipathy or resentment, such as “dislike," “despise," “can't stand" and “hate."
We expected to find that both of the strongly ideological networks made use of such words, perhaps in different ways. Instead, we found that Fox used antipathy words five times more often than MSNBC. “Hate" really stood out: It appeared 647 times on Fox, compared to 118 on MSNBC.
Fox usually pairs certain words alongside “hate." The most notable was “they" – as in, “they hate." Fox used this phrase 101 times between January and May. MSNBC used it just five times.
To put these findings in historic context, we then used the GDELT Television database to search for occurrences of the phrase “they hate" on both networks going back to 2009. We included CNN for an additional comparison.
We found Fox's usage of “they hate" has increased over time, with a clear spike around the polarizing 2016 Trump-Clinton election.But Fox's use of “hate" really took off when Trump's presidency began. Beginning in January 2017, the mean usage of “they hate" on the network doubled.
'Us' versus 'them'
So who is doing all this hating – and why – according to Fox News?
Mainly, it's Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media. Though these groups do not actually have the same interests, ideology or job description, our analysis finds Fox lumps them together as the “they" in “they hate."
As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience – “you," “Christians" and “us" – as the target of animosity.Only 13 instances of “they hate" also cited a reason. Examples included “they can't accept the fact that he won" or “because we voted for [Trump]."
Citing liberal hate as a fact that needs no explanation serves to dismiss criticism of specific policies or events. It paints criticism or moral outrage directed at Trump as inherently irrational.
For loyal Fox viewers, these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.
Our data show intensely partisan hosts like Hannity and Carlson are more likely than other Fox anchors to use “they hate" in this way.Nevertheless, the phrase permeates Fox's evening programming, uttered by hosts, interviewees and Republican sources, all painting Trump critics not as legitimate opponents but hateful enemies working in bad faith.
By repeatedly telling its viewers they are bound together as objects of the contempt of a powerful and hateful left-leaning “elite," Fox has constructed two imagined communities. On the one side: Trump along with good folks under siege. On the other: nefarious Democrats, liberals, the left and mainstream media.
Research confirms that repeated exposure to polarized media messages can lead news consumers to form firm opinions and can foster what's called an “in-group" identity. The us-versus-them mentality, in turn, deepens feelings of antipathy toward the perceived “out-group."
The Pew Research Center reports an increasing tendency, especially among Republicans, to view members of the other party as immoral and unpatriotic. Pew also finds Republicans trust Fox News more than any other media outlet.
Americans' divergent media sources – and specifically Fox's “hate"-filled rhetoric – aren't solely to blame here. Cable news is part of a larger picture of heightened polarization, intense partisanship and paralysis in Congress. [vid "hate & hysteria]
Hannity portrays criticism of Donald Trump as hate-based.
Good business
Leaning into intense partisanship has been good for Fox News, though. In summer 2020 it was the country's most watched network. But using hate to explain the news is a dangerous business plan when shared crises demand Americans' empathy, negotiation and compromise.
Fox's talk of hate undermines democratic values like tolerance and reduces Americans' trust of their fellow citizens.
This fraying of social ties helps explain America's failures in managing the pandemic – and bodes badly for its handling of what seems likely to be a chaotic, divisive presidential election. In pitting its viewers against the rest of the country, Fox News works against potential solutions to the the very crises it covers.
Curd Knüpfer, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman, J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor Emeritus of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University
This article is republished from The Conversation
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.
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 Morano to 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.
On the September 13 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Jedediah Bila briefly discussed a story accusing a supposed left-wing activist of deliberately setting fires:
JEDEDIAH BILA (CO-HOST): Another man is accused of setting a fire near a Washington highway. A report says he is a regular attendee of defund police rallies in Seattle. That last detail unfolding [is] pretty amazing. It is really incredible to see.
…
WILL CAIN (CO-HOST): These arsonists, as of yet we do not know exactly their ties to any extremist organizations or what their motivations might be, but I think one thing is clear: We now know many of these fires in the West were set intentionally. What does that reveal, Pete? What it reveals is the brazen political monopolization of a tragedy by people like Gov. Gavin Newsom who quickly jumped out and blamed these fires on climate change. There’s no tragedy, there’s no moment too soon to jump and advance your political agenda and pin awful events on your political opponents.
While discussing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s recent climate speech on the September 14 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham brought up arson unprompted, asking, “Did Biden anywhere in that speech lay out his solution to prevent any wildfires in the future or the people who are actually intentionally setting them in California, including antifa?”
Her guest, Victor David Hanson, glossed over this comment and directed his ire at Biden for even considering to blame climate change for the fires.
The mentions by Fox hosts are particularly irresponsible and egregious given that several days earlier both The Intercept and The New York Times reported that these claims were unfounded and that local law enforcement were “pleading with the public to stop calling 911 to pass on unfounded rumors that antifascist political activists have intentionally set the blazes.” On social media, the arson rumors have been pushed by a number of far-right accounts and groups including QAnon, which the FBI identifies as a domestic terrorism threat. It is alarming that Fox is undermining law enforcement and continuing to align itself with dangerous factions in spreading such conspiracy theories.
Fox has, and continues to be, the main purveyor of climate denial in the United States. It’s no surprise that their minimization of climate change’s role in this year’s western wildfires is lazy, cheap, and similar to Murdoch-owned Australian media’s role in downplaying climate change from earlier this year; we can expect to see more of it in the future.
https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-antifa-and-black-lives-matter-thugs-are-going-be-clubbing-people-suburbs
Roger Stone: Antifa and Black Lives Matter “thugs” are going to be “clubbing” people in the suburbs to suppress voting
09/18/20 4:25 PM EDT
roger Stone continues to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare martial law
09/18/20 1:26 PM EDT
https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-continues-lay-groundwork-trump-declare-martial-law
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/warning-left-wing-coup-trumpist-media-prep-their-audience-election-unrest
no lnx many
Warning of a left-wing coup, Trumpist media prep their audience for election unrest
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 09/18/20 10:25 AM EDT
Trump
Molly Butler / Media Matters
Nearly 5 million people were watching on Tuesday night as a Fox News host who claims that white supremacy is a hoax and a former speechwriter for President Donald Trump who was fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference spun out a wild-eyed conspiracy theory portraying mail-in voting as a sinister Democratic cabal’s coup attempt.
Tucker Carlson opened the segment by telling his viewers that Democrats were promoting mail-in voting not as a way to boost safe turnout during a pandemic, but because “they want the uncertainty over the outcome of the election, so they can manipulate the results.” His guest, Revolver News’ Darren Beattie, then explained that “a very specific type of coup called the color revolution” is “unfolding before our eyes.”
A color revolution, Beattie explained, is “a regime change model favored by many in our national security apparatus, particularly against Eastern European countries to overthrow target regimes that they don't like.” (They were actually peaceful protests that toppled despots in places previously dominated by the Soviet Union.) And now, he claimed, that model is being applied to the United States, with “color revolution professionals” deliberately generating election fraud in order “to use lawfare in order to overturn the 2020 election.”
Right-wing media figures generally push a baseline level of apocalyptic rhetoric about the purported predations of progressives. But Trumpist media have reached a dangerous fever pitch over the last week or so, even by that standard. With polls showing Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden following the party conventions and the election only weeks away, commentators like Carlson are preparing their audiences to treat a Trump defeat as a left-wing coup -- and encouraging the president toward an authoritarian response.
Their deranged statements are fed by -- and fuel -- the president’s own unhinged remarks. Trump has portrayed himself as “saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.” He describes his political opposition as supporters of “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “left-wing cultural revolution” so dangerous that he has even endorsed extrajudicial executions.And all the while, he’s been openly claiming that he could not possibly lose a fairly held election, and that any defeat would be the result of a Democratic election fraud conspiracy.
Carlson’s show is the most prominent vehicle fearmongering about a Democratic coup, but it is not the only one. A new special from The Blaze TV’s Glenn Beck is titled “CIVIL WAR: The Way America Could End in 2020,” and it details how “the Left is grooming us for an Eastern European-style color revolution this election.” His complex plot sprawls over three chalkboards and features mail-in voting as a vector for “something dangerous happening in November if we don’t act now.” (Beck praised Carlson during the program for the way he has been “putting the puzzle pieces together.”) The Trumpist publication The Federalist has offered up a similar “coup” theory.
The right-wing “coup” talk is the natural result of their demagoguery and dehumanization of the political opposition. Months ago, Trumpist media figures began warning that civilization itself was on the ballot in the fall, with Trump standing as the only thing preventing the left from making America “unrecognizable.” That type of rhetoric has only escalated, producing ever-more-inflammatory claims about what Trump’s defeat might mean to the safety and security of his supporters.
Over the last week or so alone:
Carlson described Black Lives Matter as “poison” that “we have to fight” because “if we’re going to survive as a country, we must defeat this.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn explained that he bought a gun in case “100 or 200 people bent on violence” show up in his suburb.
Fox’s Laura Ingraham and the pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan baselessly attributed the massive western wildfires to left-wing arsonists, blasting false rumors circulating on social media to millions of viewers and listeners.
Fox contributor Dan Bongino claimed that “we're watching the greatest nation in the history of sentient beings collapse in front of our face.”
Fox host Sean Hannity said that U.S. cities have become “war zones” and that there is a “war on police now.”
And Charlie Kirk, a frequent Fox guest and head of the Trumpist youth group Turning Point USA, warned on his podcast that if Trump loses, leftists seeking “bloodthirsty revenge” will “come for us all. They will come for your children.”
Some are taking their hatred of the left to lawless, authoritarian conclusions.
Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, said during an appearance earlier this month on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network that if Trump were to lose (illegitimately as a result of voter fraud, of course), he should try to retain power by having federal agents seize purportedly tainted ballots, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.
Fox’s Mark Levin,meanwhile, has also urged Trump to consider invoking the Insurrection Act -- but he argued that it would be needed if he wins. “He will have to use it to put down the enemy,” Levin explained on his radio show last week.
“The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter, and the enemy is anybody that is going to use rioting, arson, looting, violence against our country to try to overthrow our country,” he added. “Those are traitors. That's treasonous.”
Extremist violent rhetoric is nothing new for right-wing media. Glenn Beck made it a staple of Fox News during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before the midterm elections, Fox warned its audience members that they needed to vote for Republicans to protect themselves from being killed by Democratic mobs.
But this sort of demagoguery can come with a heavy price. Beck’s rhetoric inspired an attempted domestic terror attack against one of his regular targets that ended with a firefight with law enforcement. And in the days before the 2018 midterm elections, a Trump superfan sent bombs to leftist leaders whom Fox commentators had attacked.
There’s still six weeks to go before the election. How will this spate of violent rhetoric end?
IN THIS ARTICLE
Voter Fraud and Suppression
Voter Suppression
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07/08/20
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/tucker-carlson-rages-after-social-media-platforms-finally-check-his-racist-conspiracies
on Tuesday, Tucker Carlson broke away from his usual format of being racistagainst mostly Black people andLatino folks, to get racist against the country of China. In a segment that Fox News emblazoned with the chyron “Coronavirus Whistleblower talks to Tucker,” Tucker brought on Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan to promote a debunked conspiracy theory that the Chinese government created the SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. Her theory is based on what she and three other colleagues say are telltale signs that the virus did not evolve naturally.
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}:
Yan’s theory and the report she was promoting on Carlson’s show have not been peer reviewed, and since it lacks any evidence to back it up, “evidence” she claimed during the interview but never seemed to get around to presenting, has been considered debunked for months by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. Both Facebook and Instagram (owned by Facebook) flagged Tucker Carlson virus posts as “false information.” Twitter has followed suit, suspending Yan’s account. Tucker is freaking-out mad that the social media sites, usually complicit in the right wing’s spread of misinformation and lies, is cracking down even a little on the almost always egregious lies people like Carlson promotes.
One of the ways that Tucker attempted to sell Yan to the public was that because she is Chinese herself, she cannot be racist against Chinese people and therefore isn’t wrong about accusing the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese scientists of creating the virus because she is racist. You see how that tail gets eaten by itself? The idea that Yan and this research team found special evidence in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is interesting since the genome has been publicly available to any scientist with access to a computer and the internet for months.
Carlson’s “interview,” forgot to mention that Dr. Yan’s not-peer-reviewed “report” was published “by two nonprofit organizations, the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation,” both connected to former Trump adviser and generally terrible person Steve Bannon. *Forbes* reports that “the four authors of the paper, Li-Meng Yan, Shu Kang, and Jie Guan, and Shanchang Hu, all have the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation as their affiliation.” The University of Hong Kong has distanced themselves from Yan, and have contradicted her personal narrative, saying “Dr. Yan never conducted any research on human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus at HKU during December 2019 and January 2020, her central assertion of the said interview."
now, any good conspiracy theorist will tell you that you cannot trust China or the University of Hong Kong, and they would have the power and the motive to smear a scientist who was accusing them of unleashing a global pandemic. But strangely, for all of the purported “evidence,” the researchers forgot to submit their explosive findings to a legitimate scientific journal. I mean, if they had that evidence, they would win Nobels and Yan would be exonerated pretty quickly.
But this is a trumped-up conspiracy theory to distract the public from the Trump administration’s homicidal neglect of our country’s national and public health security. The hope is that in promoting China as the evil concoctors of this virus as some kind of biological weapon, Americans will make the leap to believe that there was little Trump could have done to be prepared for it. Don’t try to explain it to me.
Online, people chronicled how the Bannon right-wing machine promoted this calorie-free theory instantly, pushing it into the general consciousness, or more specifically, into the right wing’s general consciousness. Everything from the New York Post pushing the conspiracy theory based on the Carlson evidence-free interview, to Yan’s heavily edited Wikipedia page, reengineered to seem more serious and rigorous than it was previously.
Tucker has since decided to go full-on in on Wuhan-created virus conspiracy theory, adding a new low to the Tucker Carlson experience. Tucker is now promoting his show by saying that Facebook, and any and every scientist that disagrees with the conspiracy theory is a part of the conspiracy theory. So while he and his surrogates will not and cannot provide actual evidence for their many outrageous claims, if you point that out … you are a part of the conspiracy.
It’s not a new angle. In fact, this has been the right wing’s entire propaganda gimmick for the last four decades. Say you are strong on National Security and supportive of the troops, while cutting back on social services and military health services that directly impact them and us. Promote that conservatives are fiscally responsible, while blowing out the deficit every time they are in a position of power. It has been effective as the majority of Americans believe that social media companies are censoring people, and most of the people screaming about being censored are right-wing websites with enormous amounts of traffic, or conspiracy-theorist hucksters. Sadly, our country’s inability to think critically is an enormous problem.
The work that needs to be done is hard work. The answers are not implemented easily. You don’t get to just post blame on something and then fold your arms and say it shouldn’t be this way. It is this way and solving the issues take work.
If you want you can watch the fact-free interview with Yan below.
not sure this is the takedown that left hopes? he might be said to referring to cooler weather? tho that not matter of sci knowing
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-faceplants-with-a-scientifically-illiterate-claim-about-climate-change/
no lnx twt
trump faceplants with a scientifically illiterate claim about climate change
Written by Cody Fenwick September 14, 2020
[California Natural Resources Secretary @WadeCrowfoot: "We've had temperatures explode this summer..."
President Trump: "It'll start getting cooler, you just watch."
Crowfoot: "I wish science agreed with you."
Trump: "I don't think science knows, actually."]
President Donald Trump refused to accept the scientific consensus on the existence of climate change at a meeting about the California wildfires, preferring to blame the crisis on poor forest management.
California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot spoke about the issue, addressing the president directly and calling out the need for federal leadership.
“As the governor said, we’ve had temperatures explode this summer. You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley, 130 degrees,” he said.
At this point, Trump smirked and look away from Crowfoot.
:{
}:
“But even in greater LA, 120-plus degrees. And we’re seeing the warming trend make our summers warmer, but also our winters warmer as well,” Crow foot continued. “So I think one area of mutual agreement and priority is vegetation management. But I think we want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests. And actually work together with that science, that science is going to be key. Because if we ignore that science and put our heads in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting California.”
“OK,” Trump said. “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”
“I wish science agreed with you,” said Crowfoot.
:{
}:
“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump said, laughing.
It’s was an embarrassing display of ignorance. The science of climate change is extremely well-established, and while uncertainty remains, the trend we’ve been headed in is clear. As the chart from NASA below shows, the increase in temperatures is a decades-long trend scientists have observed since the ’60s.
“The decade that just ended is clearly the warmest decade on record,” NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt said in January in a statement naming 2019 as the second-warmest year ever recorded. “Every decade since the 1960s clearly has been warmer than the one before.”
Trump’s comments were particularly galling because he claimed to know the temperatures will actually get cooler. This is bolder than even many climate denialists, who often say that future temperatures are wildly uncertain. No, Trump’s claim is not only that climate scientists have no idea what they’re talking about, but that he somehow has enough information that contradicts the profession’s broad consensus. It requires a stunning level of arrogance to make this claim.
But it is consistent with what Trump has probably been hearing on Fox News. HostTucker Carlson has repeatedly cast doubt on climate change, including in connection with the California wildfires.In a recent broadcast, he said: “So are we climate change deniers if we point out that the state of California has failed to implement meaningful deforestation measures that might’ve dramatically slowed the spread of these wildfires? Does that make us deniers? Because in 2018, a state oversight agency in California found that years of poor or non-existent forest management policies in the Sierra Nevada Forests, had contributed to the fires.”
Carlson didn’t mention, however, that the very report he was referring to explicitly listed poor management policies alongside climate change as the key causes of the crisis.
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mma 920
:{ Carlson: Black Lives Matter is “poison,” and “if we're going to survive as a country, we must defeat this”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal"):}:
09/10/20 8:37 PM EDT
burning down hse author mentions as newt mini-me's that could run for prez
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-theres-no-evidence-climate-change-contributed-wildfires-ravaging-west
CARLSON (HOST): So, if you live in the western part of the country, you know, if you have a television, you've seen that there are horrible wildfires ravaging the western states, a couple of them. It's been going on for a little while, but it took no time at all for the usual vultures and parasites to swoop in and try to make political advantage out of this.
Barack Obama and the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, are now telling you that these fires are a direct result of climate change and according to Barack Obama, Donald Trump is directly responsible for them. He tweeted, "Vote like your life depends on it, because it does." You could die if you don't vote for Joe Biden. In fact, if you don't vote for Joe Biden we're going to see a lot more fires and not just from BLM rioters. The media, of course, went dutifully along with this as they always do.
...
Of course, there's no evidence for that, but lying on television is now the norm, so everyone did it. In fact, we know that a pyrotechnic device of some kind at a gender reveal party appears to have sparked the biggest of the fires, that's now grown to more than 10,000 acres. We also know state regulations preventing deforestation played a role, likely in spreading the blazes. We also know that the state of Oregon apparently sent a number of its firefighting helicopters to Afghanistan, a neocon request, to fight a war that has no purpose that has gone on for nineteen years and that Donald Trump has attacked for trying to end, but whatever. What the Democrats in California want you to know is "No, we've mismanaged the energy grid so badly, we can't leave the lights on, we literally can't be a first world state anymore, but it's not our fault. It's Donald Trump's fault." How long can this lying go on exactly? This blame shifting?
As Jeff Berardelli put it for CBS News: It's not coincidence, it's climate change.
Right on the heels of arguably the West Coast's most intense heat wave in modern history comes the most ferocious flare-up of catastrophic wildfires in recent memory. Meanwhile, just a few hundred miles east, a 60-degree temperature drop over just 18 hours in Wyoming and Colorado was accompanied by an extremely rare late-summer dumping of up to 2 feet of snow.
It's not coincidence, it's climate change.
These kinds of dystopian weather events, happening often at the same time, are exactly what scientists have been warning about for decades. While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes, scientists say, is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts, some of which were underestimated by climate computer models.
==
mma
CARLSON (HOST): In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can't see it, but rest assured it's everywhere and it's deadly. And, like systemic racism, it is your fault.
The American middle class did it, they cause climate change. They ate too many hamburgers, they drove too many SUVs, they had too many children. A lot of them wear t-shirts to work and didn't finish college, and that causes climate change too. And worst of all, some of them may vote for Donald Trump in November.
And if there's anything that absolutely, definitively causes climate change, and literally over 100 percent of scientists agree with this established fact, it is voting for Donald Trump. You might as well start a tire fire in your yard.
==
Carlson tries to throw Lindsey Graham under the bus for Trump’s disastrous interviews with Bob Woodward
Roger Sollenberger / Salon September 10, 2020
Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Wednesday for urging President Donald Trump to participate in taped interviews with Bob Woodward for the veteran journalist’s new book “Rage.” Earlier that day, recordings of Trump privately acknowledging the severe “deadly” threat posed by the…
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/amid-wave-right-wing-vigilantism-tucker-carlson-hosts-guest-ties-domestic-terrorist
amid wave of right-wing vigilantism, Tucker Carlson hosts guest with ties to domestic terrorist group
WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ
PUBLISHED 09/04/20 3:39 PM EDT
Amid a national wave of right-wing vigilantism that has cost anti-police brutality demonstrators their lives, Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson hosted Dov Hikind, a former New York State Assembly member with ties to a right-wing domestic terror group. Hikind and Carlson smeared Joe Biden as supporting anti-Semitism for meeting with the father of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23. Right-wing figures have been circulating social media posts that were supposedly made by Blake’s father.
During the September 3 segment, Carlson characterized Biden’s visit to the grieving father as “giving moral authority to someone like Jacob Blake Sr.” Hikind responded by calling it “pathetic” and said “people in my community asked me is there a future in America” for Jews because Democrats “are endangering this country.” He also attacked Muslim and Jewish members of Congress Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).[vid]
hikind is not new to Fox News -- he’s appeared on the network at least three times since 2017. The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), a nonprofit group whose goal is to inform journalists about issues affecting Palestinians and Palestinian Americans, has an explainer on Hikind’s ties to racism, right-wing violence, and extremism, some of which has been summarized and expanded below:
- Hikind was a member of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a violent anti-Arab extremist group with ties to decades of right-wing terrorism, including an international incident in 1994 when a JDL member “massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims kneeling in prayer at a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron.” The FBI describes the JDL as a “violent extremist Jewish organization” and a “right-wing terrorist group.”
- According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the JDL was founded as “part of the white backlash surrounding the New York City teachers' union strikes of 1968”, and its activities included sending squads of JDL members to “patrol” parts of the city that were “predominantly Jewish areas, which ultimately led to an ethnic polarization of neighborhoods.”
- An article from The New York Times described Hikind as an “important leader” of the JDL during the 1970s, a time when the group was responsible for “bombing Russian targets in New York to publicize the plight of Soviet Jews. Although Mr. Hikind and his former league associates say he was never directly involved in the violence, by his own count arrested five times in demonstrations, including once for chaining himself to the gate of the Soviet Union's United Nations Mission.” The SPLC points out that many Jews in Moscow were opposed to the violence being wrought on their behalf by the JDL.
- Hikind was an ally to Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the JDL who also founded the Israeli Kach party, which according to the IMEU “advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories.”
- The New York TImes described Hikind as an “intimate” friend of Kahane who spoke at his funeral, saying it “gave legitimacy to many of the ideas for which Rabbi Kahane stood.”
- While serving in the New York State Assembly, Hikind wore blackface to a Purim party in 2013. When his offensive costume was reported in the press, Hikind responded by writing a blog that characterized criticism as “political correctness to the absurd.”
- In 2017, Hikind spoke at an event hosted by anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller alongside white supremacist Milo Yiannopolos and attended by Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent far-right street gang the Proud Boys.
In 2017, HuffPost reported on Hikind's involvement with the JDL and published his response to questions from reporter Christopher Mathias in full. Mathias summarized Hikind's response:
Because there has been little public accounting of Hikind’s role in the organization, HuffPost sent the assemblyman a detailed list of questions this week about his relationship to the JDL. In response, Hikind gave HuffPost an exclusive statement ― a full copy of which can be read at the bottom of this article ― in which he states that he “couldn’t recall with greater fondness” his time with the group.
“Over 43 years ago, I was very proud to be part of the Jewish Defense League,” Hikind wrote.
Although Hikind claims his role in the JDL was “non-violent,” his statement did not address specific HuffPost questions regarding whether he once called for the assassination of pro-Palestinian Arab-Americans; whether he was a close friend of a man convicted of carrying out 20 bombings in New York and Washington, D.C.; or regarding why the FBI suspected him in plotting six bombings of Arab targets across the U.S.
He did not answer a question regarding whether he had knowledge of, or involvement in, other JDL plots that involved violence or were otherwise illegal. He also did not deny that in 1976 he tossed a smoke bomb into the Ugandan mission at the United Nations in New York, saying in his statement that he did a “few pranks” at the Ugandan mission, “for which I was never charged.”
Fox News has been awash with support for violent right-wing vigilantism. In recent days, Carlson has defended the right-wing vigilante who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, and even hosted his lawyer for a sympathetic interview. As my colleague Matt Gertz describes it, this trend in the network’s coverage is as “horrifying as it was inevitable.”
Hosting Hikind, who has historic ties to right-wing terrorism, is yet another way Carlson and Fox News work to legitimize right-wing vigilantism.
:{Carlson claims Democrats are using “race riots” as a “get out the vote operation”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal"):}:
09/03/20 8:29 PM EDT
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/27/tucker-carlson-defends-kenosha-shooter
no twt pix
TUCKER CARLSON set off a firestorm of criticism on Wednesday — by describing a 17-year-old Trump supporter who opened fire on protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday, killing two, as a well-meaning kid who decided he “had to maintain order” in the Democrat-run state because “no one else would” — the Fox News host was surfacing an idea that had already spread widely on the far-right.
“The chaos that began with the first George Floyd protests on Memorial Day has reached its inevitable and bloody conclusion,” Carlson told viewers tuning in for his buildup to the Republican National Convention, which had featured, on its first night, two speakers lionized for threatening to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters outside their mansion in St. Louis.
[twt pix]
Last night, three people were shot on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Two of them have died. Police say they’ve charged a 17-year-old with murder,” Carlson reported, without revealing that the suspect, Kyle Rittenhouse, was not the anti-fascist radical his viewers might have been led to expect, but a conservative vigilante who had posted video from the front row of a Trump rally in January, and written “BLUE LIVES MATTER” and “Trump 2020″ on his TikTok bio, as Buzzfeed first reported.[twt tucker]
rittenhouse was reportedly charged with six crimes on Thursday, including first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, attempted first-degree intentional homicide and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.
The incident came after a third night of protests in Kenosha over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father who was critically wounded by a police officer who fired seven shots into his back, but throughout his report on the fatal shootings Carlson pretended, as he has for months, that there were no non-violent protests over police violence against communities of color, just “riots.”
In Carlson’s telling, the moral of the story was not that Rittenhouse — who was photographed and caught on video from multiple angles shooting three men — had provoked trouble by responding to a militia group’s Facebook call for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend” the city from “evil thugs,” but that he was something closer to a victim, prodded to fill a vacuum by the misrule of the city’s Democratic mayor, John Antaramian, and the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers.
[
pix Kyle Rittenhouse was photographed hours before the shootings on Tuesday, among a group of volunteers who cleaned anti-police graffiti from a high school in Kenosha.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images]
“Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it,” Carlson told Fox viewers unaware that the city had not, in fact, collapsed into chaos just because they were being shown isolated scenes of violence on a loop.
“People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn,” Carlson claimed, oblivious to the fact that video recorded by witnesses to Tuesday’s events showed Rittenhouse and other heavily armed young vigilantes had spent most of the night standing close to armored police vehicles outside a business they appointed themselves to guard.
[twt vid]
at one point in a livestream broadcast that night, a police officer could be heard offering water to the militiamen, including Rittenhouse, and telling them: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”
Later that night, after Rittenhouse wandered a short distance away and got into a confrontation with a man he shot in the head, video recorded by a pro-Trump YouTuber, Drew Hernandez, seemed to show Rittenhouse running back down the street in the direction of the police vehicles. As he retreated from the scene, the video appeared to catch Rittenhouse telling someone on his phone: “I just killed somebody."
[twt vid]
according to the police complaint against Rittenhouse, released on Thursday evening, his friend Dominic Black told a detective that he received a call from his friend Kyle at 11:46 pm on Tuesday, in which the gunman stated that he shot someone.
A subsequent analysis of the video by the New York Times visual investigations unit suggested that, moments before Rittenhouse opened fire, a single gunshot was fired into the air for unknown reasons by someone standing near the parking lot where the confrontation took place.
Shelby Talcott, a video journalist for the Daily Caller, a conservative site founded by Carlson, captured footage of Rittenhouse fleeing the scene of the first shooting, as protesters shouted that he had shot someone.
[twt vid]
video shot by another pro-Trump YouTuber, Brendan Gutenschwager, appeared to
Rittenhouse pursued by several protesters who suspected him of carrying out the first shooting. After he tripped and fell, just a block away from the police, two of those men attempted to disarm him, one by kicking him and another by hitting him with a skateboard.
[vid]
rittenhouse fired at both of them, apparently killing the skateboarder, Anthony Huber, with a shot to the chest as they struggled for the rifle, and then shooting a third protester, Gaige Grosskreutz, causing a gaping wound in his arm. Grosskreutz, a member of a social justice group who was wearing a hat with the word “paramedic” emblazoned on it, also appeared to be armed with a handgun.
In a remarkable scene at the end of Gutenschwager’s video, Rittenhouse can be seen walking with his hands up, apparently trying to surrender to the police officers he had been chatting with earlier in the evening, as a bystander shouts that he shot the protesters, but the officers drive right past him in the direction of the men he shot.
while all of this footage was available to Carlson before he went on air, later in his monologue he professed to have no idea what exactly had happened or whether — because the men who had attempted to disarm the vigilante after he had shot someone in the head could be seen kicking and hitting Rittenhouse — a jury might ultimately decide that he had acted in self-defense.
In this, Carlson was closely following a consensus explanation that had formed during the 24 hours after the shooting by pro-Trump YouTubers, bloggers, and commentators, who decided, after studying slow-motion imagery and still photographs, that the young man who had traveled to Kenosha from his home in neighboring Illinois to defend the city from residents enraged by the shooting of Jacob Blake, was merely acting in self-defense.
rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, suggested on Twitter that the slow-motion video convinced him that the killings were “100% justified self defense.” Hours before Carlson went to air, Gosar also blamed the violence on Kenosha’s local government. “Armed citizens defending themselves will fill the vacuum,” he wrote[twt dr paul gosar az cernovich?]
one of Rittenhouse’s defenders was Elijah Schaffer, a freelance producer for Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV and a pro-Trump political activist who releaseda misleading accountof a fight involving Black Lives Matter protesters in Dallas in May. Writing on Twitter on Wednesday, Schaffer described the Turkish journalist Tayfun Coskun’s photograph of the protesters attempting to disarm the gunman as Rittenhouse “being attacked by #BLM rioters.”
“One of the attackers,” in Schaffer’s words, was “about to assault him with a skateboard."
[twt pix]
that “assault” by the skateboarder Anthony Huber ended with his failed effort to wrest the gun away from Rittenhouse and being fatally shot in the chest.
Schaffer also thought a 20-second interview he did with Rittenhouse before the shootings provided important “context” as to what took place later, since the vigilante did not say anything racist or political in that third of a minute.
[twt vid]
as Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times opinion columnist, noted on Twitter, an obvious flaw in the conservative argument that Rittenhouse was just defending himself from the second and third men he shot is that they were only “attacking” him because he had just shot someone else in the head[twt]
carlson’s defense of Rittenhouse also hinged on the false idea that he had taken to the streets to oppose a phantom movement of violent radicals using the protests as cover. “The Justice Department could have stopped all of this months ago,” Carlson ranted over footage of Kenosha recorded by another of the conservative gonzo video bloggers who descended on the city this week, searching for images of chaos to discredit the protest movement. “If federal prosecutors had treated the organizers of BLM and antifa the way they treated Roger Stone, our cities wouldn’t look like Kosovo tonight.”
Another conservative journalist who interviewed Rittenhouse earlier in the evening was Richie McGinniss, who directs video for the Daily Caller, the website that was once used to smear Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer.
[twt vid]
mcGinniss appeared on Carlson’s show on Wednesday to discuss what happened in Kenosha and his own effort to save the life of the first man shot and killed by Rittenhouse, who was later identified as Joseph Rosenbaum.
What made Carlson’s interview with McGinniss odd, however, was that the Daily Caller videographer repeatedly referred to Rittenhouse as “the alleged shooter,” even though he was standing just six or seven feet away from Rosenbaum when he was shot and seemed to have been filming the confrontation at the time.
[twt vid]
it is unclear if McGinniss has video of Rittenhouse shooting Rosenbaum, but he told Carlson that he witnessed the crime at close range. Even so, Carlson failed to ask him directly if he could say for certain that Rittenhouse did shoot Rosenbaum in the head and cause his death. Instead, McGinniss offered what sounded like testimony to the gunman’s good character. “The 17-year-old who I interviewed earlier in the night, he actually mentioned that he was there to maintain peace, in the absence of police,” McGinniss said.
“It’s just hard to believe this is America,” Carlson said. “We can’t put up with this.”
When the complaint against Rittenhouse was released late Thursday, it said that McGinniss told a police detective that he did clearly see the teen shoot Rosenbaum at close range as the victim reached for the rifle. Footage recorded earlier in the evening showed that Rosenbaum was incensed by the presence of the armed militia members in the neighborhood.
The complaint cited a coroner’s report which “indicated that Rosenbaum had a gunshot wound to the right groin which fractured his pelvis, a gunshot wound to the back which perforated his right lung and liver, a gunshot wound to the left hand, a superficial gunshot wound to his lateral left thigh, and a graze gunshot wound to the right side of his forehead.”
As the momentum to excuse Rittenhouse’s crimes as justified spread online Thursday, amplified by far-right figures around the globe, Jamelle Bouie called it “the single most ominous development of the year."
[twt]
the journalist Matt Prigge noted that the increasingly obscene lionization of Rittenhouse echoed the wave of praise in 1970 for the National Guardsmen who killed four anti-war protesters at Kent State, documented by the historian Rick Perlstein in his book, “Nixonland."
at a news conference on Friday, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth said that he did not want armed volunteers like Kyle Rittenhouse on the streets during protests.
“This group of people that are carrying weapons here, if they’re in their house — and again, I support the Second Amendment — if they’re in there protecting their property, I have no issue with that,” the sheriff said. “The people that have been here carrying guns, they haven’t been arrested because it’s a right that they have. Have we asked for them to come? Are we asking for them to come in and support things? I’m not.”
“You could clearly see the situation escalated Tuesday night because a 17-year-old boy carrying what appears to be an assault rifle, who has no idea how to handle a situation like this,” Beth added. “I don’t care if he had the right intentions or not, two people are currently dead, and one almost had his arm blown off.”
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tucker-carlson-claims-white-militia-guy-accused-of-ing-protesters-was-trying-to-maintain-order/
no lnx twt vid
twt
Carlson has been circling the toilet bowl that is right wing culture for years now. The millimeter thin scum that is the entirety of the conservative intellectual movement in our country, has been able to float on top of the drain for an interminably long time now. No one has benefited from this failure more than Tucker Carlson, whose only intellectual claim to fame was his anachronistic use of a bowtie in his 20s.
On Tucker’s Fox News show tonight, Carlson decided to take on the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. You know that there is zero chance that Tucker is going to speak to the injustice against Jacob Blake, shot 7 times int he back by law enforcement, while his young children watched in horror. You might think that Tucker would try to speak to “virtue signaling” or one of his other wafer-thin buzzwords, by going after NBA players striking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. But you might also think that Tucker would stay as far away from talking about right wing vigilante militia racist and Trump-supporting accused murderer Kyle Howard Rittenhouse. But you would be wrong.
Speaking about Rittenhouse, Tucker decided to conflate fear-mongering and civil disobedience with rioting and then posture that young Rittenhouse was just trying to bring law and order back to a county and state he doesn’t even live in. “So are you really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-yea-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Just. Man oh man.
Tucker has long been a hate-mongering spoiled bag of farts, but this crosses the line from simply being a mean and vapid prick, to being someone condoning vigilante violence against American citizens.
The fact that mass-shooter is someone that was brought in from out of town doesn’t even get mentioned by these ghouls on right wing media.
While Andy Ngo and Ben Shapiro tip toe around the subject, Tucker Carlson just says it outright. The right is pushing a line that it’s ok to shoot protesters.
Brendan Karet
@bad_takes
Tucker Carlson: "How shocked are we that 17 year olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?"
nikki mccann ramírez
@NikkiMcR
Tucker Carlson says that they don't have "more details" about the killings in Kenosha other than that the shooter was 17, killed two people, and possibly acted in self-defense, he then goes on to blame Kenosha leaders and protesters.
Once again a Fox host, this time Martha MacCallum, frames the Kenosha shooters a someone "protecting their business" throughout the segment neither Martha nor The Daily Caller reporter has mentioned that the shooter was from out of state and involved with a militia.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ny-times-investigation-tracks-the-activities-of-17-year-old-suspect-in-lead-up-to-kenosha-shootings-that-left-2-people/
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-says-postal-workers-cant-be-trusted-deliver-ballots
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-claims-concern-over-us-postal-service-part-preparations-military-overthrow
mirroring for portland and Laf Sq?
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/richard-grenells-flynn-unmasking-noninformation-campaign
Right-wing media froth over “Obamagate” and bully press to play along
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 05/15/20
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump,provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance.
Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.
Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way -- or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.
We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy.Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign.He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own.But pro-Trump partisans -- particularly at Fox -- have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions [// Qanon]. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public.
This is an intentional plan that corresponds with what the president wants from his director of national intelligence. “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking,” The New York Times reported Thursday.As the president struggles in reelection polling, Trump and his Fox propagandists are using the Flynn story to try to damage the credibility of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 opponent.
Grenell’s noninformation campaign is the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by Trump and his Fox propagandists to turn the Russia investigation inside out, presenting the Trump associates who pleaded or were found guilty under its auspices as victims and those involved in carrying out the probe as criminals.
With vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy in the hands of partisans selected for their loyalty to the president, including the DNI and Justice Department, we should expect more of these releases -- and perhaps more dangerous actions -- in the coming months, as Trump’s supporters try to push the political debate away from the ongoing pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 Americans so far in order to secure his reelection.
The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn is a retired general who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, the transition, and the early days of his White House tenure. At various points during that timeline, Flynn was also assigned by Trump to find the Hillary Clinton emails he had publicly asked Russia to procure; was under investigation by the FBI, which was concerned with whether he was serving as a witting or unwitting agent of the Russian government; was illegally acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, for which he was reportedly involved in discussions of a kidnapping plot; and was seeking Trump’s approval for a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after working as a paid adviser for the group behind the proposal.
On December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the presidential election, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and urged him that Russia not retaliate for those sanctions. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security adviser after reports surfaced that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations, which opened Flynn up to blackmail from the Russian government. He would later repeatedly plead guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI about those calls before renouncing that plea last year.
The position on Flynn among Trumpists like Fox host Sean Hannity is that he is an American hero, [started w/ ollie?]that there was no good-faith reason to probe any of his actions during that period, and that anyone involved in such an effort was a participant in the broad-ranging Obama administration conspiracy to take down Trump, which the president terms “OBAMAGATE.” [RECALL EACH TIME HE WRIGGLES OUT OF A LEGIT CHARGE, HE DECLARES HIS RIGHEOUSNESS/VICTIMHOOD, ASCRIBING EACH TO INCREASING DESPERATION BY DEMS, THEY TRIED TO IMPEACH ME ON DAY 1...]
Their argument features Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in two ways: They argue that the FBI’s interview with Flynn was a nefarious “setup” and suggest that the leak about the conversation from a “senior government official” to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for his 2017 column, which brought the call into public light, was anillegal attempt to take down Flynn and Trump by someone who had improperly “unmasked” his identity from intelligence intercepts.
William Barr’s Justice Department showed last week that the Trump administration is putting the force of the federal government behind Fox’s conspiracy theories when it filed a dubious and virtually unprecedented motion seeking to drop the government’s case against Flynn,[THIS SORT OF SUCCEEDED 7/20, STILL BEING FOUGHT IN CT?] citing the FBI’s interview tactics. And on Wednesday, Grenell tried to use his own power as the director of national intelligence to provide grist in support of the other fork of the Flynn defense.
“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Grenell had declassified [VS POMPEO IG REPORT IS CLASSIFIED?!]and provided to the Justice Department what the paper described as “an Obama-era document related to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn” and “a list of Obama administration officials who sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials.” Later that day, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Grenell and Barr asking for the document. Grenell provided it to the senators on Wednesday, and it was immediately leaked to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, a former Fox reporter whose work often promotes Republican talking points. Herridge then published the letter on Twitter. (The document did not turn out to be precisely what the Times had reported. It had been generated on May 4, not during the “Obama era,” and dealt solely with cases involving Flynn, not “Trump associates” more generally.)
In NSA reports derived from the legal surveillance [FISA FBI SCREWUP LATER FOUND?] of foreign targets, analysts anonymize (“mask”) the names of U.S. persons to protect their privacy. It is routine for senior officials to ask the NSA to reveal (“unmask”) those identities in cases where they believe that information is necessary to understand the intelligence. The NSA has a standard procedure for doing this, including a review of the justification of the person seeking the unmasking. For context, Trump administration officials sought and received the unmasking of U.S. persons from the NSA more than 10,000 times in 2019 and nearly 17,000 times in 2018.
The document is a list created at Grenell’s request of several dozen “officials who submitted requests” to the NSA between Trump’s election and the end of January 2017 to unmask an identity which turned out to be Flynn, as detailed in an attached memorandum to Grenell from NSA Director Paul Nakasone. It provides the names of the officials, which include then-Vice President Biden, Cabinet secretaries, and intelligence agency leaders, and the date on which their requests were processed. It is the second version of the document -- as Nakasone detailed, the list was originally provided in alphabetical order but revised to be chronological.
That’s it.
Contrary to the insinuations from the right-wing figures, the document provides no evidence that any single unmasking was related to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. In fact, the record suggests none of them were the original unmasking that first discovered Flynn had made the call, as that one was done by the FBI from its own intercept, not the NSA’s. Nor does it show that Flynn was in some way targeted -- by definition, unmasking occurs when senior administration officials don’t know the name of an American referenced in an intelligence report.
Indeed, there is no indication in the document that anyone listed behaved inappropriately -- in fact, it makes clear that the Obama-era unmaskings happened by the book. “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” it states. It also points out that the NSA cannot confirm that any of the persons who requested the unmaskings eventually saw the information.
Grenell’s noninformation plot
Grenell is totally unqualified for his post. While previous occupants of his position ran intelligence agencies, he at most was a consumer of their products during a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. What he brings to the table instead, along with unswerving loyalty to the president, is broad experience in public relations and shaping news cycles, which he honed as a spokesperson for Republican politicians and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, a strategic communications consultant for domestic and foreign clients, a Fox contributor, and a notably unhinged Twitter troll.
Grenell personally requested, sought revisions to, declassified, and provided the document to Congress in precisely this form, showing precisely what he wanted to become public.
If he wanted the document to include more information -- by for example, including the actual documents for which Flynn’s name was unmasked, or summaries thereof -- it would. Without that, despite the right-wing chorus linking Grenell’s document to Flynn’s Kislyak calls, it doesn’t provide evidence that any single unmasking had anything to do with them.In fact the majority of the unmaskings predate the calls and thus could not be related. Indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that Flynn was a participant in the intercepts used in the intelligence reports in which his name was unmasked, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage points out:
If Grenell had wanted the document to include less information -- by, for example, limiting the date range to after Flynn’s December 29 calls with Kislyak, which would reduce the list from 39 names to only eight -- it would.
What he produced is a very long list of names that maximized its impact, with no information whatsoever that any of them were involved in something the least bit inappropriate. That is, presumably, exactly what he wanted to do.
Perhaps Grenell has no evidence of wrongdoing, and few or none of the unmaskings reference the Kislyak calls (which is not implausible, as the FBI derived and distributed its own intercepts of the call with no masking as part of their already in-progress counterintelligence probe of Flynn). In that case, he’s declassified and released this information for a political purpose.
Perhaps he does have that evidence, but isn’t releasing it for now so he can continue to dribble documents out and generate more news stories as the presidential election approaches. In that case, he’s withholding that informationfor a political purpose.
Fox’s propagandists understand that their role in this noninformation campaign is to fill in the gaps left by the document with feverish, often fact-free speculation. Fox’s Tucker Carlson described Flynn’s unmasking as a “domestic spying operation” that was “hidden under the pretext of national security,” and that the Obama administration officials involved are “amoral creeps” who committed “felonies” and should be “punished.”
His prime-time colleague Hannity
by asking, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it?Tonight, we willunravel the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history.” He also attacked Biden for “lying” about the story and claimed on Wednesday that if the officials involved in Flynn’s unmasking don’t face “justice,” “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes.” Despite how little information the Grenell document provides, they are convinced that it vindicates their conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, Fox personalities are attacking the mainstream press for not obsessing over the story,with Hannity arguing that this proves they are “Democratic shills.” On Friday, Trump himself picked up that angle, praising the Fox morning show for “covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE,” while pillorying CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as “Fake News” for failing to do so.
It’s no coincidence that Trump and Fox are trying to bully the mainstream press into giving the story more attention. They are counting on journalists to repeat the failures of the 2016 electionand flood the zone with context-free scandal coverage that dirties up the president’s opponent. That’s the play Trump is calling, and the leaders of the Justice Department and intelligence community are eagerly supporting the effort, and will likely continue dropping noninformation and disinformation until Election Day.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-fauci-just-another-oily-politician-ego-trip
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attempted break-in at reporter home
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-911-call-transcript-shows-the-results-of-tucker-carlsons-threats-to-reporters
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/russian-propaganda-and-far-right-media-wildly-exaggerated-story-about-bible-burnings
no lnx vid many
russian propaganda and far-right media wildly exaggerated a story about Bible-burnings in Portland — and Fox News ran with it
There was no “stack of Bibles” being burned
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 08/12/20 10:39 AM EDT
screen grab]
Fox News and other right-wing media were aghast last week about a story from the ongoing protests and civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, in which a crowd supposedly burned a stack of Bibles as a widely seen political statement — which now turns out to have been a vastly exaggerated event, further enlarged and distributed by Russian propaganda.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that what actually occurred was that just a few individuals out of thousands present seemed to have used a single Bible, or possibly two Bibles, among other pieces of kindling to start a fire: “None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.”
The story about a supposed mass fire of Bibles originated, however, from the Kremlin-financed news channel RT, and was spread by its online video service Ruptly with adeceptively edited video.
Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests. The story, by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly video, which was edited to string together a number of clips from the night. (A New York Times reporter had observed a truck offering free Bibles at the protests earlier that night, though it was not clear whether it provided the book that was burned.)
The Ruptly video was further tweeted by Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Twitter personality based in Malaysia, who wrote: “Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland.” As the Times notes, Cheong was “wildly exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed.” There was no actual stack of Bibles being burned, let along a crowd of people bringing them to a bonfire for a public burning.
Nevertheless, his tweet was in turn picked up by American conservatives including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump Jr.
“The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its most successful,” the Times wrote. “Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident, blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the United States or Canada or Europe spread it.”
For example, The Federalist ran an article on August 1, headlined “As They Turn To Burning Bibles, Portland Rioters Show Their True Colors.” The New York Post ran a piece headlined “Protesters burn Bible, American flag as tensions rise in Portland.”
And the story got plenty of pickup on Fox News.
On the August 2 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth discussed the Bible-burning story with a Republican congressional candidate in Oregon, and even tried to grill House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) after he compared police brutality against demonstrators to what was done to the civil rights marchers he remembered from the 1960s....
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an 820
fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed Tuesday that it was still unclear “how exactly George Floyd died.”
A pair of autopsies both ruled the cause of death a homicide. A “homicide” is any death caused intentionally by another person. Former Minneapolis Police Office Derek Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder, while three former others were charged with aiding and abetting murder. No one has yet to enter a formal plea.
Video released in the aftermath of Floyd’s death showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe.” All four former officers on the scene were later fired.
As Carlson played partial body cam video leaked earlier this month on his show, he claimed that the footage was inconclusive.
AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER
“It’s striking how little we really know months later about how exactly George Floyd died,” Carlson said Tuesday. “The official storyline is clear — it couldn’t be clearer. Established news organizations state as a matter of factual certainty that Floyd was, in the words of NBC News and so many others, quote, murdered by a Minneapolis police officer."
[twt pix]
Floyd’s death was not ruled a homicide by police by the media but rather by multiple autopsies.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled that Floyd’s death was a homicide due to “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restrain and neck compression.”
An independent autopsy found that the death was “homicide caused by asphyxia due to neck and back compression that led to a lack of blood flow to the brain.”
“What we found is consistent with what people saw,” former New York City chief medical examiner Dr. Michael Baden, who performed the independent autopsy, said. “There is no other health issue that could cause or contribute to the death.”
Carlson made the comments while questioning how Floyd had died. The death of the unarmed Black man sparked nationwide protests against police brutality. Carlson, who has described white supremacy as a “hoax” and an “attack on white people,” called the protests “a form of tyranny” in May.
Carlson, who frequently pushes white grievance politics and occasional white supremacist talking points, later responded to the protests by warning his viewers that “violent young men with guns” will soon “make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhoods.”
The Fox News host on Tuesday described the protests as a “nation-wide convulsion of violence, destruction, looting, and in some cases, killing.” However, data shows the overwhelming majority of protests have been peaceful.
Carlson pointed to the fact that Floyd had fentanyl in his system when he died, citing a narrative sparked by a misleading preliminary autopsy report delivered by prosecutors in Chauvin’s initial charging documents.
“We’re still not precisely sure how George Floyd died,” Carlson claimed. “On what grounds are we dismantling police departments, rewriting curriculums, firing people from their jobs? What exactly is the basis of this cultural revolution that we’re all living through?”
CNN’s Oliver Darcy responded, “Tucker should watch . . . the video . . . he’s showing on the screen.”
Carlson, who was accused by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign of “hate speech masquerading as journalism” after repeated baseless and racist attacks on his potential running mates, made the comments following an abrupt vacation after his head writer was fired for making racist and sexist comments online.
“Tucker took a ‘vacation’ in August 2019 after he said white supremacy was a ‘hoax’ in the wake of El Paso shootings. He took a ‘vacation’ this summer after his racist writer was outed. And, still, he does this,” CNN commentator Amanda Carpenter tweeted. “Fox is fine with this.”
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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-deceitful-coverage-breitbarts-covid-19-frontline-doctors-video
recall DC is foundation?!
https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-caller/daily-caller-receiving-money-trump-and-gop-groups-while-its-subsidiary-participates
Daily Caller has been receiving money from President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican candidates and organizations for email list rentals while its Check Your Fact division participates in Facebook’s fact-checking program.
The Daily Caller is a right-wing publication with a history of promoting false information and hiring or publishing white nationalists and other bigots. In 2019, Facebook began partnering with Check Your Fact for the social media giant’s fact-checking program. Popular Information's Jugg Legum documented in March how the Daily Caller used “its role as a Facebook fact-checker to boost Trump and discredit a mainstream media outlet, Politico.”
Check Your Fact states on its “about us” page that it is “a for-profit subsidiary wholly owned by The Daily Caller, Inc. Majority owners of The Daily Caller, Inc. are co-founder and publisher Neil Patel and co-founder Tucker Carlson. The Daily Caller’s fact-checking team is funded by The Daily Caller’s general news budget, as well as revenue generated through advertising.” (Carlson sold his stake in the Daily Caller last month.)
Will Ragland, the research director for Center for American Progress Action, tweeted today:
After that tweet, Media Matters found that The Daily Caller has sent dozens of sponsored emailssince 2016 that were “paid for by Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized by and composed of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee.”
The Daily Caller has also received $40,213.75 so far this year from the National Republican Senatorial Committee for list rentals, according to Federal Election Commission records. It has also received $18,171.40 so far this year from the National Republican Congressional Committee for list rentals, according to FEC records.
The Daily Caller has sent numerous other sponsored emails for various Republicans this year. Those emails include Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) reelection campaign; Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) reelection campaign; Bikers for the President political action committee; and the Senate Conservatives Fund.
The Washington Post and the Center for Media and Democracy wrote in 2017 about how The Daily Caller has received money from the Trump campaign for list rentals.
Here are four recent examples of The Daily Caller’s sponsored emails for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee: [screenshots]
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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-launches-bizarre-attack-dr-fauci-claims-hed-push-reopen-economy-if-he
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dr stella immanuel socmed bias bs
Fox News knew of harassment allegations against Tucker Carlson before his pre-planned vacation
Roger Sollenberger / SalonJuly 21, 2020
Fox News learned the details of sexual harassment allegations against top network host Tucker Carlson on July 9, four days before Carlson announced on the air that he would be taking…
https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/trump-commutes-roger-stones-sentence-following-concerted-campaign-fox-news-and-infowars
no vid lnx
Trump has commuted the prison sentence of his longtime confidant and friend Roger Stoneafter Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and other crimes in what prosecutors said was a bid to protect Trump. Stone had been sentenced to 40 months in prison in February by a federal judge. Following legal wrangling over when Stone would have to report to prison, he was ordered to begin home confinement on June 26 and report to prison by July 14. He will now avoid serving any of his sentence in prison.
During a substantial portion of Stone’s legal proceedings, he was prohibited from publicly discussing his case because of several actions he took to undermine his prosecution, including posting a threatening image of the judge who oversees his case, Amy Berman Jackson, on social media. But in April, after Stone lost his bid for a new trial, the gag order was lifted.
In the months leading up to Trump's announcement, Stone made a number of appearances at conservative media outlets where he disputed the verdict against him and pleaded for a pardon or a commutation. In recent days, Stone offered Trump an incentive to grant him clemency during several media appearances, saying that if Trump did so, he would be a more effective advocate for the president in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s commutation follows a two-pronged effort in conservative media to absolve Stone of responsibility for his crimes. Stone previously worked as a host at Infowars, which has sought to undermine the case against its former employee every step of the way. And the propagandists on Fox News who often have Trump's ear have been loudly calling for clemency for Stone for months, a gambit that clearly got the president’s attention as he repeatedly amplified their commentary on Twitter.
Stone was arrested in January 2019 and charged with seven federal crimes: five counts of lying to Congress, one count of obstructing an official proceeding, and one count of witness tampering. The charges arose from then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in 2016 elections and focused on claims Stone made to Congress about his knowledge of plans by WikiLeaks to release hacked emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. As prosecutors alleged at trial, Stone’s lies to Congress were meant to shield Trump because the truth “would look really bad.”
In addition to being a confidant to Trump and a political “dirty trickster,” Stone has been a mainstay in conservative media, including working as a host in recent years for Alex Jones’ far-right conspiracy theory outlet Infowars.That platform attempted to interfere with the trial proceedings against Stone. Before Stone was even arrested, Infowars was already conducting a publicity campaign to pin any WikiLeaks-related wrongdoing on conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, who was also under investigation by the special counsel’s office and had also worked for Infowars but had fallen out of favor.
After Stone was arrested, he used his Infowars platform -- which he described as “vital” to his defense strategy -- to publicly litigate his case (he has since left the outlet). When Stone was hit with an expanded gag order after he posted an image to social media that seemed to threaten Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was overseeing Stone’s trial, Infowars figures picked up the slack. Most notably was Infowars’ head Alex Jones, who repeatedly attempted to interfere with the administration of justice in Stone’s trial.
While jury selection was underway in Stone’s November trial, Jones, aided by Stone’s assistant Jacob Engels, attempted to out the identities of jurors during broadcasts of The Alex Jones Show while making wild allegations that the jurors were “minions” in a conspiracy against Stone. According to trial transcript, Jackson found that Jones’ actions put “the safety of all the people associated with this case, on both sides, and including, possibly, the jurors, at risk.” Also, before the jury even reached a verdict, Jones broadcast a message from Stone asking Trump to pardon him. Jackson asked prosecutors to brief the court on whether that action violated Stone’s gag order and prosecutors did include the incident in their sentencing memo that called for prison time for Stone. Jones has also claimed to have inside information about deliberations at the White House over whether Stone should be pardoned, claiming during his February 11 broadcast that it had already been decided that Stone would eventually receive one. Post-conviction, Jones continued his attacks on Jackson, in one instance telling her to “fill your hand, politically” -- a reference to picking up a firearm to use in a gun battle.
In addition to efforts by Infowars and other parts of conservative media, Fox News also waged a campaign to seek clemency for Stone. Hours after he was convicted of all the charges against him on November 15, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested that Stone should be pardoned, calling the outcome of the trial a “travesty.” According to reporting from The Daily Beast, the position of Carlson’s show “as a platform for pro-Stone messaging is potent enough that Trump allies who seek leniency for Stone have specifically sought to appear on the Fox News show in order to get the message to the president.” Sources close to the president told The Daily Beast that Trump watches segments about Stone on the show and discusses them with others. While Stone was under a gag order prohibiting him from discussing his case, he made an October appearance on Infowars in which he praised Carlson and other hosts at Fox News in general terms.
After Stone was sentenced on February 20, that night Carlson called for Trump to “pardon Stone immediately,” while bemoaning the fact that “apparently there are people around the president telling him not to pardon Roger Stone or to wait until after the election.” After Stone’s gag order was lifted in April, one of his first stops was on Carlson’s show, where he claimed that going to prison would be “essentially a death sentence.” Other figures at Fox who have taken up Stone’s cause include Sean Hannity, Jesse Waters, Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee, Lou Dobbs, and Fox correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera.
The drumbeat on Fox News appeared to have worked, as the network’s coverage of Stone became fodder for the president’s Twitter account:
Additionally, on June 27, Trump promoted an article calling for Stone’s pardon written by Tom Pappert at his conspiracy theory website National File. Pappert is a frequent Infowars guest host and his show is available for streaming at Infowars’ platform banned.video.
Judge Amy Jackson noticed the efforts by Infowars and Carlson on behalf of Stone and it influenced the course of the criminal proceedings. During a February 25 hearing for a motion from Stone for a retrial, “Jackson read the President's tweet attacking the Stone jury forewoman, as well as commentary from InfoWars' Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson from Fox News, to a federal courtroom, in deciding to hear testimony from jurors while protecting their identities after Stone asked for a retrial,” CNN reported.
Stone is the latest beneficiary of the Fox News pardon pipeline, which has been linked to more than a dozen clemency grants. Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has written extensively on the phenomenon in which “people accused of or convicted of federal crimes and their family members and lawyers have descended on the network over the past few years, using the president’s favorite programs to plead their case to him directly.”
Trump’s commutation of Stone's sentence indicates a new chapter in the phenomenon: Not only will Fox News egg on Trump in capriciously wielding his clemency power -- often in support of his political allies -- but also in instances where the crime at hand was an effort to cover up the president’s own wrongdoing.
roger Stone accepts Trump’s commutation during Infowars appearance with Alex Jones
07/16/20 2:25 PM EDT---
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mma
inside the right-wing media campaign to rig the justice system in favor of Roger Stone and Donald Trump
02/12/20 5:07 PM EST
Tucker Carlson: Roger Stone’s arrest means anyone can be arrested just for supporting Donald Trump
02/20/20 9:37 PM EST
Alex Jones: Source involved in Roger Stone White House discussions says Trump will pardon him after sentencing
02/11/20 3:23 PM EST
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Lomborg regularly publishes op-eds in the conservative Wall Street Journal and New York Post. As noted above, he generally downplays the seriousness of climate change, avoids calling for a reduction in carbon emissions, and argues in favor of focusing on milquetoast approaches like increasing clean energy research and development spending.
He’s also appeared on Fox News three times in 2019 -- twice on Tucker Carlson Tonight and once on The Ingraham Angle. In all of these appearances, he’s downplayed the risks of climate change. For example, in an April appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, he stated, “They’re telling us global warming is a problem. But it’s also a moderate one.”
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.
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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 hostTucker Carlsonwill 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.
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In 1979, Carlson's father married divorcée Patricia Caroline Swanson, an heiress to Swanson Enterprises. Swanson is the daughter of Gilbert Carl Swanson and the niece of Senator J. William Fulbright.[4][14] This was the third marriage for Swanson, who legally adopted Carlson and his brother.[12][14]
When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved him and his brother to La Jolla, California and raised them there.[15][16] In La Jolla, Carlson attended La Jolla Country Day School and grew up in a home overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club.[17] His father owned property in Nevada, Vermont, and islands in Maine and Nova Scotia.[17][3]
Carlson attained his secondary education at St. George's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Rhode Island. He then went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he graduated in 1991 with a BA in history.[4] After college, Carlson tried to join the Central Intelligence Agency, but his application was denied, after which he decided to pursue a career in journalism with the encouragement of his father.[18][4]
chickenhawk: 1989?- 1995
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
panama, gulf war 1, somalia (blk hawk down), bosnia
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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/how-tucker-carlson-became-fox-host-trump-listens-most
matt g
President Donald Trump frequently tweets video clips of Fox News segments that capture his fancy. But the one he sent Tuesday morning stood out nonetheless.
Trump tweeted a clip of Fox host Tucker Carlson praising the president for a speech in which Trump had echoed the divisive culture war narratives the host himself has repeatedly promoted on his program.The tweet displayed in dizzying fashion the unprecedented synergy that has developed between the president of the United States and the right-wing TV star.
Carlson is now the most powerful member of the Fox Cabinet, the set of network personalities who play second roles as unofficial presidential advisers. By speaking to Trump directly and shaping his worldview through the programs that he watches obsessively, figures like Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham, and Pete Hegseth have each influenced the administration’s actions over the years. But even as major advertisers fled from Carlson’s show due to his bigoted, unhinged rants in recent months against America’s diversity, both the host’s audience and his sway over the president and his party have swelled to eclipse those of his colleagues.
Carlson has held the president’s attention for much of his administration. Notably, last year he displaced and then pushed out the hawkish White House national security adviser, John Bolton. But in 2020, Carlson emerged as a preeminent influence on Trump -- and thus on the nation’s policy.
The year began with Trump reportedly declining to escalate a military conflict with Iran, in part because Carlson’s program had warned against it. In the spring, Carlson used his show and a personal meeting with Trump to briefly convince the president to take the novel coronavirus more seriously. His program subsequently helped persuade Trump that unproven antimalarial drugs could serve as a miracle cure for the virus; that the virus was actually less dangerous than originally anticipated and so it was crucial to swiftly reopen the economy; and that the United States should terminate funding for the World Health Organization during the pandemic.
That power crystalized over the past six weeks, as Carlson lashed out at nationwide protests against police brutality and racism -- at times marred by violence and looting -- following the police killing of George Floyd in late May.His nightly monologues became dark and twisted rants peppered with conspiracy theories, racist fearmongering, attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement, demands for mass arrests, defenses of statues, and denunciations of Republicans who strayed from his vision. He lost nine of his remaining advertisers after claiming that this moment is “definitely not about Black lives” and telling his audience, “Remember that when they come for you.” But Trump responded, turning away from police reform efforts begun in response to protests against police killings in favor of a Carlson-style fixation on culture war divisiveness.
The shift was not subtle. Carlson devoted his June 19 monologue to the purported failure of the Republican Party to “protect this country from the crazed ideologues who seek to destroy it,” an implicit criticism of the president. Trump responded within hours in a plaintive series of tweets in which he tagged the Fox host, claiming that he had helped “end rioting & looting” in Minnesota and opposed “statue demolition.”
Then on July 4, Trump delivered a quasi-fascist speech at Mount Rushmore in which he decried “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” “cancel culture,” “left-wing cultural revolution,” and a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” Carlson’s monologues were the “rhetorical roots” of Trump’s diatribe, as Axios’ Jonathan Swan noted.
Carlson, unsurprisingly, loved the speech. On Monday, he described it as “the single best speech Donald Trump has ever given.”
“It was a roadmap for his reelection message, but more than that, it was a roadmap for the country itself,” he continued. “Equality, decency, pride in our nation, those were the themes."
[twt]
he praised the speech again on Tuesday, calling it “succinct and clear” and “true.”
Carlson’s diatribes will likely remain at the heart of the national debate in the months to come. “Trump's Independence Day speech lays a marker for how he's going to campaign through to November, according to campaign advisers,” Swan reported, describing this as evidence of the Fox host’s unprecedented position “in defining a president's re-election message.”
That means that Carlson -- who is beloved by white nationalists because he
their talking points, frequently promotes “great replacement” conspiracy theories about a migrant “invasion,” and argued just last night that masks and social distancing “have no basis of any kind in science” -- has an unrivaled role in U.S. politics.
While Trump is desperate to shake up a race he is losing, Carlson may be leading his campaign into a ditch.Voters prefer the views of his opponent on most issues -- including race relations and criminal justice -- making it unlikely that the culture war onslaught will succeed. But with Republicans unwilling to challenge Calson’s bigotry, a Trump loss may just set him up for his own presidential run in 2024.
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