hate destroy Am bak

prolly shd do analysis 2 26

hate tag?

SEE APOCALYPSE 3 SECULAR VARIANT

see story 1 vs 2, polarization, anti-commie, patriot [vs traitor?]

merri ok

SEE NO KINGS MARCH 10 25 MIKE JOHNSON

see demonization polarization hype fear

hate also = crazy /irrational, can't be reasoned with thus force

satan hates am? dems love satan and hate god

hmmn mystery solved iowa caucus: anyone who criticizes am am values etc including acknowleding slavery HATES america and roots for contributes to its decline

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a staple of RW has been X hates Am; b2 used to explain 911, they hate our freedom (nothing to do with CIA coup Iran or US mil in saudi)

see gt replacement immigrants pollute xian white blood see demonization enemy polarization

--> self defense violence civil war 2nd amendment 1776

1019 djt ~ the Squad, they hate am; often says pelosi and dems are rooting for Am to fail (WHY?!) just warmed over anti-commie BS?

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===

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RWW

04/30/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Mario Murillo says that Democrats "want to end America as you know it": "It is, in my opinion, a crime family and as a crime family, it needs to be ended."

Mark Meckler claims that "every form of liberalism ultimately leads to fascism."

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MMA

February 9, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Five}:

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): The game was so bad, everyone's talking about halftime. And halftime was so bad. Now, they say, the halftime was not bad. Okay. Last halftime was Kendrick Lamar, okay? That was also the most highly rated halftime. So is this. We didn't understand what Kendrick Lamar was saying last time, and that was English. Now how do you think we feel?

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): Jesse, they had a signer for the deaf but no translator for the Spanish. Why do you think that is?

WATTERS: I don't know. I like the Super Bowl not to be an international event. I like it when we kind of all come together as Americans, especially when it feels like the NFL's just using it as a marketing ploy to recruit Latin American audience -- on the heels of Latin America invading this country. 20 million pouring in and that's what you see. You see all these foreigners speaking a foreign language, with foreign flags marching into the camera like a caravan. Too soon!

Listen, this was an open borders moment. Everybody knows it. That's what's going on here. And all the reporters, who are liberal, who don't even watch football, this is the first playoff game they've ever watched, they are saying they loved it? They didn't hear a word. They couldn't understand what the guy said. Of course, they loved it. It was foreign.

Now, a lot of us feel -- Americans, red-blooded Americans -- that it feels like the left is teaming up with large corporations and foreign populations to take our culture away from us. Now, I love Bad Bunny. I thought some of the tunes I could move to, and I love Puerto Rico. That's the thing. Not for Super Bowl halftime. Can you give me at least that? Give me that.

On Fox News, Kid Rock calls Jay-Z “a DEI hire” by the NFL

02/10/26 3:15 PM EST

Laura Ingraham says Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny's halftime show “didn't represent America at all”

02/09/26 7:51 PM EST

Greg Gutfeld launches incoherent rant about a Jewish halftime show with “dancing accountants” and “men slinging pastrami”

02/09/26

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MMA

February 9, 2026, edition of Newsmax's Greg Kelly Reports

GREG KELLY (HOST): The silly bowl. Did you watch? I only watched a little bit. Sorry. It stands for so much — they're trying to destroy America. I do believe the NFL, they have no interest in this country or its culture. They're interested in money.

A couple of weird things just off the top. The Black national anthem. I know they do this in smaller games, but what the hell? I mean, it's crazy. The black, white and — no. Where's the red, white, and blue. It's green, black, and red, which is the pan-African color, apparently. Let's see.

Bad Bunny, bad guy. Why is he jumping up and down on a car? That's like a riot. That's code for rioting or something.

It's bad enough when these guys speak in English. I couldn't understand anything in Spanish. It's hard to tell what singers are singing about sometimes.

I think the whole thing had an LGBT, queer-ish kind of vibe, right? With the colors.

And not for nothing. But, you know, a lot of football players are killing themselves by playing football, right? I know those aren't the right guys, the right team, but CTE, that's a real bad thing. And that Goodell, he doesn't care about any of this. He cares about money mountain.

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rww

Mark Meckler tells Christian parents to remove their children from public schools: "You are sacrificing your children to Moloch if you leave them in those schools. You are leaving them to the mercy of demons and people who hate the Creator." 2 26

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OMFG ANTI-COMMIE WATERS INGRA HANTY BEFORE SEE BAD TRINITY

MMA

MAGA media demand Trump put down the Minnesota “revolution”

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 01/30/26

A week after Border Patrol officers gunned down nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, MAGA media’s biggest stars are portraying locals who oppose immigration enforcement officers’ brutal tactics as China-backed “revolutionaries” seeking “the complete overthrow of Western civilization” which they are urging President Donald Trump to put down at all costs.

Horrific videos of Pretti’s killing by masked agents of the state whose activities he had been filming spurred a backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration policy, with polls showing eroding support and some Republican officeholders and right-leaning streamers expressing dismay.

Even some commentators on Fox News, which initially plowed ahead in depraved service of the administration’s absurd argument that Pretti was a terrorist threatening the officers’ lives, backed down a bit. After Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade urged the president to send former Fox contributor and White House “border czar” Tom Homan to take control of the situation on Monday, Trump took Kilmeade’s advice, spurring premature media claims of a “pivot.”

But in this tug-of-war over the president’s brainbox, MAGA stars quickly regrouped and urged Trump not to back down, reverting to the language of war that has characterized right-wing media discussions of Minneapolis for weeks. And the tenor of their coverage has only become more disturbing over the course of the week.

Fox host Laura Ingraham, in her opening monologue Thursday night, claimed that the “mobs you've witnessed in Minnesota and in other far-left-wing pockets of America” are composed of “revolutionaries” who “smear and dehumanize as a prelude to the executions.”

Ingraham went on to argue that “behind all this” is “a national network of socialists, communists, and Marxist-Leninists” whose “goal is to destabilize the West and undermine trust in our institutions and eventually dismantle capitalism and replace it with a Marxist communist framework that eliminates private property in favor of state-owned enterprises.”

“So how do you defeat these well-funded, well-organized revolutionaries?” Ingraham asked. She replied to her own question, claiming, “We defeat the revolution by staying the course, by prosecuting criminal conspiracies to impede ICE and also their funding networks, and by reminding Americans that their safety and U.S. sovereignty will not be negotiated away, not now, not ever.”

Video

Citation

From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Ingraham further argued that the anti-ICE movement has “Chinese fingerprints all over it.”

The following hour, Fox’s Jesse Watters described Minneapolis as “antifa’s new favorite city” and local protesters as an “ICE watch mafia” with its “own socialist supply lines, logistics, and financial benefactors.”

“They're calling Minnesota a testing ground for a domestic revolution,” he added. “This is more than just about immigration. It's about the complete overthrow of Western civilization.”

Democrats want “more Renee Goods and Alex Prettis,” he added. “They think if they can stack enough bodies, Trump's going to back off.”

Video

Citation

From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

Watters later hosted MAGA streamer Tim Pool, who argued that “the terrifying thing about Minnesota” is not that federal officers keep killing civilians, but that “we're looking at a leftist base in this country that are being radicalized.”

“My concern is that there's, there's a bloodlust” among the protesters “that's not going to be satisfied,” he added.

Watters went on to say that “there's a certain faction of the left that wants the violence” and suggested that the media “has a little bit more responsibility in situations like this to calm things down.”

Then on Sean Hannity’s program, the host likewise denounced what he termed “the well-coordinated, well-funded, quote, resistance to ICE investigations in Minnesota,” which he claimed is engaged in “an attack on our very system.”

He went on to describe Democrats’ “current anti-ICE outrage” as “pure political theater,” adding that “ultimately, they want to dissolve our borders and fundamentally transform a country and the people that they despise.”

Video

Citation

From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Hannity

The vitriol on Fox’s evening shows is somehow less ominous than that coming from right-wing figures off its airways, though.

Tucker Carlson, who hosts one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, argued on Wednesday’s installment that in, “we are watching the destruction of the social fabric of the government and potentially of the nation.” He explained that the video of Pretti’s killing “represents chaos” and added: “Chaos is worse than illegal immigration. Chaos is worse than police brutality. Chaos is worse than anything. Chaos equals death. The death of people, the death of the weak, the death of countries.”

Carlson that Minnesota activists “want the chaos,” adding: “This is proof that what you're watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you're watching are the beginnings of a color revolution, of a kind of insurrection against federal authority.” He further claimed that if that revolution is not stopped, the result will be “civil war” and “killing at scale.”

“We have to hold the line,” Steve Bannon likewise argued on Wednesday. “There can be no de-escalation at all. You don't need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature. Put them under pressure. They're the ones that are cracking.”

“This is an inflection point,” he added. “You blink now and you're going to blink forever. You bend the knee now, you'll bend the knee forever. If we stand in the breach and say, screw you, we're fighting for the country, right?”

And Nick Fuentes, the increasingly prominent white nationalist streamer, argued that if the “radical intervention” Trump is overseeing does not succeed, “all of white civilization just collapses.”

“You have to put yourself in the position of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the year 2100 and look around at your majority-minority country that looks like South Africa, where it's just trash and graffiti and filth and homeless people and vagabonds and criminals,” Fuentes explained. “And then you have to go back in time to now when we can prevent it. And then think about what you're willing to do to stop this. And then killing a stupid fat lesbian and a male nurse doesn't seem so bad, does it?”

“Do you know what 'Sieg Heil’ even means?” he concluded. “It means ‘hail victory.’ And not to go like full Nazi or something, but there is no substitute for victory. We have to win; they have to lose.”

### After 36 hours justifying the killing of Alex Pretti, Fox News suddenly changes its narrative

:{:{01/26/26}:

### The Fox News response to the federal government execution of Alex Pretti sets a new level of depravity

:{:{01/25/26}:

### Fox’s absurd attempt to cast Tom Homan as Trump’s good cop on immigration

01/27/26

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MMA

January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Peter, you wrote a whole book about how China is infiltrating the United States, the silent coup. And this has Chinese fingerprints all over it in my view, and it's not like you're going to have a direct line to the CCP. But given what you've witnessed and the revolutionary goals on the websites of some of these organizations, what's your sense?

PETER SCHWEIZER (GUEST): Yeah, there's no question there's an international component to it and China's involved. There is an organization linked to the CCP in China called the Center for the Study of Marxist Parties in Foreign Countries. And what they do is they track these political activities. And they've been running articles, analyses on their website in China, which is restricted, talking about color revolutions in the United States and how it might happen. They cover groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation. They cover groups like the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, both who are neck deep in this action in Minneapolis and have been involved in many other protests.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization has pledged its allegiance to the CCP. They have fraternal party ties, which means they're very close. And the political director of that party, Mick Kelly, lives in Minneapolis. He's been investigated in the past by the FBI for possible involvement for direct terrorism. He was never charged. But these are radical groups, same thing with PSL, sympathetic, tied to China. Its members have flown to China. So, this is part of something that China directly encourages, wants to see happening. And they are monitoring the situation in the United States as it relates to all kinds of social unrest like this.

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RWW

01/20/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Eric Metaxas says the anti-ICE protestors who disrupted a church service were "following in the footsteps of the KGB" and the Gestapo.
Will Chamberlain claims that the protest was "the closest thing we've had for left-wing protesters doing something akin to Jan. 6."
Joshua Haymes used his Martin Luther King Jr. Day program to explain that King was "worse than Stalin."
North Dakota state Rep. Nico Rios declares that King "was a communist pos."
Rep. Eric Burlison thinks that "if we had had four more years of Joe Biden, we really were at the precipice of no longer recognizing this country."
Rick Green gushes that the last year under President Donald Trump was "remarkable" and that, if he had to nitpick, he could find fault with "maybe five percent of the things that he did."
Finally, Nick Fuentes proclaims that Jeffrey Epstein "was cool as fuck."

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rww vid

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith Blasts Republicans Who Refuse To Redistrict As 'Neville Chamberlain Type' Appeasers

12/08/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Facing the prospect of seeing their current congressional majorities wiped out in the 2026 elections, President Donald Trump is pressuring Republican legislators all over the country to gerrymander congressional districts in their states in a desperate bid to hold on to power.

Currently, the focus is on Indiana, where an effort to do Trump's bidding is in danger of being thwarted by Republican hold-outs in the state Senate.

On Friday, Indiana's Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith appeared on the "FlashPoint" program, where he said that those Republicans who are refusing to bow the knee to Trump are "Neville Chamberlain type" figures, thinking that "they can make peace with Hitler."

"We're living in an era of Neville Chamberlains versus the Winston Churchills," Beckwith said. "Those 18 senators are Neville Chamberlain types. They think they can make peace with Hitler, make peace with evil, pet a demon, and that the demon will leave him alone."

"What I'm trying to tell them is, 'Guys, the Democrat Party is not your grandparents' Democrat Party. This is not the party of JFK; JFK fought against the communists, now his party wants to be the communists," Beckwith continued. "We're trying to get them to wake up and see, guys, it is time to fight."

"For crying out loud, they tried to assassinate Donald Trump twice," he added. "They did assassinate Charlie Kirk. They are doing everything to destroy this great nation that God has given us and it is now time for us to pull out the rod—be the shepherds that God has called us to be—and go fight."

"They think we can just be peaceful, we can be non-conflict and it will go away," Beckwith griped. "It's not going to blow over. We lose this fight, we lose our future and so that's what they just don't understand. I think they're slowly starting to wake up to it, but it's been a lot harder than it should have been in Indiana."

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note victim lurk, // trump i will get in trouble for saying truth lost pals

Mario Murillo Says 'You Are Full Of The Devil If You Vote For Any Democrat'

12/04/2025 rww

Kyle Mantyla

On Wednesday night's episode of the "Fire Power" program, co-host Mario Murillo, a far-right evangelist, faith healer, and full-blown MAGA cultist, declared that anyone who votes for any Democratic candidate in the 2026 midterm elections is "full of the devil."

"What I really am excited about," Murillo declared, "is there's an intersection of when the political and the spiritual unite; when men of God, women of God are willing to, in their pulpit, to call out sin and political corruption and take a stand on all the issues, take a stand against the Democratic Party."

"You cannot help Donald Trump until you recognize that the Democratic Party has sold its soul to Satan and is now categorically working to destroy the United States of America," he continued. "We don't have a two-party system; we've got good and we've got evil."

"Folks, the midterm elections are coming up," Murillo added. "It's unfathomable to me that we would ever allow the Democrat majority. ... I literally campaigned for Donald Trump in the last election. I lost a lot of friends. A lot of doors were closed to me. But this midterm, I'm going to be shouting it from the rooftop that you are full of the devil if you vote for any Democrat. You are literally spitting on the grave of the apostles, if you, in any way, shape, or form, have anything to do with voting for [Democrats] or not voting. If you decide to stay out, you're as guilty as voting for a Democrat."

"I'm going to get in trouble for saying that," Murillo proclaimed, "but I know with all my heart, this midterm, more than any other election, is life and death."

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MMA

October 28, 2025, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): Sometimes when you get hit in the head so hard that you go into a coma, you wake up and people have to reteach you the English language. They have to reintroduce you to your family. That's how I feel like dealing with Democrats.

There are concepts that have kept civilizations thriving for thousands of years: border walls, different bathrooms, asylums. And it's like, we're trying to teach basic things to Democrats and they're not going along with it. It makes me feel like they want civilization to collapse. And civilizations have collapsed. There's no guarantee that the American civilization is going to continue to thrive and survive. If you have people, a faction of this country, dead set on tearing it down by releasing criminals, by destroying gender, by destroying the English language, you will have Rome.

And that's what you're facing with these people. And that's why Charlie Kirk talked about trying to save Western civilization. We're fighting each other. We're not really fighting China, we're kind of fighting Russia. We're really fighting Americans who want to destroy the country.

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RWW

10/29/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Eric Metaxas declares that Zohran Mamdani is "about as wicked a figure as we have ever seen": "I don't think I have ever seen anyone as nefarious, as wicked as Mamdani. He's frightening."

Joshua Haymes asserts that "a woman’s job is home-making": "When they neglect or reject this calling, not only does it make them miserable in the long run, it literally destroys society."

Shane Vaughn proclaims that there are "two types of Americans": "In America, we have devout Americans that believe in the ideals, and then we have liberals who do not believe in those founding ideals. That's why we say of those liberals, they are not American."

Lauren Witzke says that "TPUSA is where it is currently thanks to Nick Fuentes and the groypers steering Charlie in the right direction": "Others can try and deny it, but TPUSA and Charlie's views have evolved over time thanks to Nick."

Finally, speaking of Fuentes, he brags that following his interview with Tucker Carlson, "I am no longer the radical on the outside; I'm actually the leader on the inside."

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RWW

10/20/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Peter Michaels claims that participants in the "No Kings" protests "are not interested in protesting kings and defending democracy. In truth, they are more interested in tearing down the United States, Christianity especially": "They rebel like the devil did against order, against hierarchy, and against the immutable fact that Christ is King not only over each of them but also over society by natural right."

Kandiss Taylor says that "liberal white women are destroying our country."

AN 10 25

Facing growing backlash from Democrats and even lawmakers from his own party — as well as GOP voters — for sending the House into recess during the shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson is turning his anger toward Democrats and the broader left.

As Politico reported on Friday, Johnson is “dead set on keeping the House out of session as long as it takes to pressure Senate Democrats” on the shutdown, to pass the House’s continuing resolution to fund the government.

The Speaker suggested tensions are so high in the halls of Congress right now that he thinks Democrats need to be “physically separated” from Republicans.

“Emotions are high. People are upset — I’m upset,” Johnson said on Thursday. “Is it better for them, probably, to be physically separated right now? Yeah, it probably is, frankly.”

Johnson, who was set to host a now-postponed private Palm Beach, Florida “retreat” and fundraiser this weekend, went even further on Friday morning.

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“We’re so angry about it,” he told Fox News. “I mean, I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people,” the Speaker said, emphatically, of Democrats. “They’re playing games with real people’s lives.”

“The theory we have right now — they have a hate-America rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. ”

“And it’s being told to us that they won’t be able to re-open the government until after that rally, ’cause they can’t face their rabid base,” Johnson said, adding that he is “beyond words.”

Johnson appeared to be referring to the “No Kings” rally, a protest against authoritarianism, which is not only being held in Washington, D.C. on October 18, but nationwide.

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AN 10 25

During Wednesday’s White House roundtable on “Antifa,” Trump Cabinet secretaries compared it to international drug cartels and vowed to dismantle it “brick by brick,” while the President described Antifa as “treasonous, probably.”

Antifa, which the President has labeled a “domestic terrorist organization,” is widely seen as a movement of people opposed to fascism and racism. It is not believed to be a formal organization. BBC News describes it as “a loosely organized, leftist movement that opposes far-right, racist and fascist groups,” and which “lacks a distinct leader, membership list or structure. In 2020, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa was better defined as an ideology than as a formal organization.”

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told roundtable attendees, “One of the individuals we arrested recently in Portland was the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa.”

Secretary Noem said they are “hoping that as we go after her, interview her and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out, and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”

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She also said that “this network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TdA, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.”

“They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years. And today is the day that we have a president that won’t tolerate it, and will stand up and fight for the American people.”

Similarly, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It’s breaking down the organization, brick by brick. Just like we did with cartels. We are going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart.”

“Their hatred for President Trump, and for law and order agendas, fuels their violence,” Bondi said. “We saw what’s happening in Portland and Chicago, and you saw what happened in Dallas. No longer. It is not activism, it’s anarchy. We can’t, and we will not, let masked terrorists burn our buildings, attack our law enforcement, and intimidate our communities.”

She declared that the Trump administration is “deploying the full might of the federal law enforcement to crack down on Antifa and other domestic terrorist organizations.”

President Trump said, “we’re going after Antifa criminals and all who fund and support their campaigns are in serious trouble, and we have a lot of records already, a lot of surprises, a lot of bad surprises — people that you would never think.”

He also asked the group to identify the “funders” of Antifa: “These are people that do not have good intention for the country, and that’s treasonous, probably.”

Critics blasted the event.

“After the US bombed multiple boats in the middle of the ocean, murdering people on grounds that they were allegedly ‘carrying drugs,’ the US Attorney General says ‘Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take the same approach…with Antifa,'” wrote Zeteo News’ Prem Thakker.

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council observed, “Cartels have actual leadership structures, central funding, command and control, and more. ‘Antifa’ is mostly a philosophy. That the Attorney General doesn’t know the difference is quite the thing to admit!”

Bill Kristol, the director of Defending Democracy Together, wrote: “Which is more alarming? That the Homeland Security secretary might actually believe that ‘Antifa’ is as dangerous as Hezbollah or Hamas? Or that she’s willing to engage in this level of lying and demagoguery? Neither is good!”

Olga Lautman, a Russian intelligence expert and senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, pointed to Bondi’s remark about cartels and asked: “Are they planning on sending missiles to American cities to carry out extrajudicial killings.”

SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah issued this warning: “Please understand that This is Trump regime explaining how they will use the government to prosecute Democrats. Page 1 of the fascist playbook is imprison political opponents so that the fascist has one party rule.”

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rww

// eliminATIONALIST

Joel Webbon Tells Christians To Join ICE And 'Make Jesus Smile' By Enacting ‘God’s Vengeance’ on Immigrants

10/07/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Christian nationalists have vocally supported the militantly harsh deportation campaign that President Donald Trump has enacted since returning to the White House, so it was no surprise to see racist, antisemitic, and deeply misogynistic pastor Joel Webbon urge Christians to join the Immigration and Customs Enforcement effort on Monday's episode of his "Right Response Ministries" podcast.

"You can't be vigilante, but you literally can join ICE and be God's appointed avenger who seeks to carry out God's vengeance on the evildoer," Webbon told his audience. "Immigration is evil, at least at the level that we have it today."

"Those who are flooding our country—it's not theirs—they are flooding our country like a swarm of locusts and eating up the inheritance that your fathers, by their blood, sweat, and tears, laid up for you," Webbon continued. "It is a breach, a rebellion, against the Fifth Commandment to honor your father and mother."

Webbon declared that this nation, which belongs to "heritage Americans," is "being devoured by those who it does not belong to."

"And so to join the proper mechanism through ICE and to become, in that sense, God's appointed deacon to carry out vengeance on the evildoer who is devouring the inheritance of the children, that is a righteous thing," Webbon proclaimed. "You can join ICE today and make Jesus smile as you, with a gun, pack foreigners into the back of a van to be kicked out of the country. That is a godly, glorious endeavor."

Webbon's co-host Wesley Todd then noted that, as an added bonus, ICE agents "also get to throw libs to the ground too."

"That is also a God-glorifying endeavor," Todd said.

"These are people who hate you," Webbon agreed. "They hate the country. They're trying to destroy it. These are criminals. It's treason. These are traitors. They're traitors to America, and it's time to clean up our country."

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MMA

From the October 7, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

MARK LEVIN (FOX HOST): You know, Donald Trump uses this phrase, the enemy within. You know who else used that phrase? Great men of the past, Abraham Lincoln talked about the enemy within. When you have an enemy within, and you say we have an enemy within, our press starts attacking you as some kind of a fascist.

There is an enemy within. The Democrat party has changed. It's not just policy disputes, they seek to overthrow the republic, they seek to destroy our economic system. They want to change the citizenry and population. They want to bankrupt the country. These are not policy disputes anymore with the Democrat party. These are fundamental battles over the survivability of the United States. Trump gets it, 100%, and he's trying to do the best he can in our country, in the Middle East, and with Europe.

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Well said.

### Newsmax's Greg Kelly supports Trump's “enemy within” comment: “He has every right to say that, to believe it and to fight against it”

10/17/24 9:17 AM EDT

### Fox anchor Bret Baier tried to explain away Trump's “enemy within” remark. Trump just proved him wrong — on Fox News.

10/16/24 1:01 PM EDT

### Why the right-wing media apparatus is suddenly yelling about Jack Smith supposedly spying on GOP senators

10/07/25

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11 PPL ON BD SO LIKELY HUMAN SMUGGLING?

MMA

September 5, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus

HARRIS FAULKNER (ANCHOR): We begin with this Fox News alert. The Trump administration ramping up its mission to stop narco-terrorists who are bringing in deadly drugs to the United States. Now he has slowed things down to a crawl at the border. So that has helped. But we have a tremendous amount of things coming into the country in other ways. I mean, you know, they are being pushed from China, we know that. That's where the original sourcing is. The Pentagon is reportedly deploying ten advanced fighter jets to Puerto Rico now to join the fight against the drug cartels. Those jets will join a growing military build-up into the Caribbean. So I want to get into how this is still getting into the country. We will. I'm Harris Faulkner. You are in the Faulkner focus.

This week the U.S. Military took out a vessel the administration says was carrying Venezuelan gang members and drugs. It's hard to believe that that wouldn't be a good thing for everybody — because it is. Somebody's not really telling the truth on this. Under a Trump administration, the people on the left and the legacy media say this is a bad thing. Why?

...

FAULKNER: I love that part about: It feels to me. That's not exactly how any of this works. So are they just fooling around on the left or do they realize what they actually sound like? Are they working against America and for the drug cartels with their support? These are questions they need to answer.

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AN 6 25

Just one day after a widely criticized, multimillion-dollar military parade marking both the U.S. Army’s birthday and his own—and amid millions attending thousands of nationwide “No Kings” protests—President Donald Trump announced on Sunday night a new crackdown targeting undocumented immigrants exclusively in Democratic-led strongholds, declaring that blue cities “are the core of the Democrat Power Center.”

Some critics also note that the move comes after a suspect, reportedly a Trump supporter, allegedly assassinated a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her spouse and gravely shot and wounded another Democratic lawmaker and his spouse on the same day as the anti-Trump rallies in all 50 states.

In a 400-word Sunday night “order” on social media, President Trump claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) every day face “threats from Radical Democrat Politicians,” as he announced “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” before baselessly claiming voter fraud.

“Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” the President wrote.

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“In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,” Trump continued. “These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports.”

Critics blasted the President and issued warnings.

“This is illegal on so many levels,” charged John Jackson, a former trial lawyer. “He’s declaring war on specific areas based entirely on their voter registration, which is a form of speech and protected political choice. It’s ‘vote Republican or I will punish you.’ Incredible. Out in the open. Lawless.”

“2 implications of Trump specifically targeting immigrants in Democratic cities: He’s NOT going after immigrants in places where they are least welcome,” observed former Washington Post editor Robert McCartney. “He IS doing what’s most likely to provoke backlash. We conclude that his goal is not to ‘solve’ the problem but to stir chaos.”

“This is the politicization of law enforcement. It’s not about ‘immigration,’ it’s about demonizing cities, harming political enemies and winning elections,” declared The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum. “Also, those are the cities that had the biggest No Kings protests.”

Pointing to Trump’s full screed, political strategist Rachel Bitecofer noted, “Please go study how the Nazis talked about the Jews to whip the public up into accepting restricting them from society, deporting them, and ultimately murdering them. It will sound a lot like this.”

“Trump is going after Blue cities based on nothing more than the crazy, conspiratorial voices in his head,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. “He’s already violating our 1st, 4th, 5th & 14th Amendments, and deploying the U.S. military against citizens in L.A. This is what authoritarianism looks like.”

“He’s openly admitting that he’s politicizing law enforcement,” observed Chuck Todd, the former NBC News Chief Political Analyst and “Meet the Press” moderator. “This will not help ICE’s image because he’s asking them to perform a political task. Throw in the decision to shield the red states from law enforcement and he’s clearly hoping to provoke an angry response. At a moment when we need a president to de-escalate, he does the opposite.”

“Trump’s ugly plan is clear: Incite violence in blue cities & blue states only, and then put the military on the streets in those blue cities & blue states only,” warned former Tea Party GOP Congressman Joe Walsh, now a Democrat and political commentator. “Everything he does is meant to divide us. He is the absolute worst of us.”

“This sort of dehumanizing language about political opponents is exactly what leads to the horrific shootings we saw yesterday, wrote MeidasTouch News. “Disgraceful and dangerous.”

“One of his crazed supporters just assassinated a Democrat and he continues to instigate division and hatred, noted Arizona Democratic state Senator Analise Ortiz. “We need an adult in the White House, not a dictator hell bent on escalating tensions and political violence.”

Progressive media outlet The Tennessee Holler wrote that “the president posting that Dems are ‘sick of mind’ and ‘hate our country’ immediately after 2 Dem lawmakers and their spouses were shot in their homes is the opposite of leadership. Gas on the fire.”

“A US president is supposed to be the president of all the people,” wrote retired Professor of Law Anne Arbor. “This man instead foments hatred of his own political party against his political opponents. This statement verges on a declaration of civil war against half the country.”

---

AN 6 25

Salon Senior writer Chauncey Devega warns the authoritarian tide is “rising very quickly in America,” with President Donald Trump threatening to use his "big beautiful bill" as a weapon or revenge against his enemies, namely the Democratic Party.

During a recent trip to Capitol Hill to whip up support for his “big beautiful” budget bill, the president admitted to reporters that “We're going to make a couple of tweaks….I mean, we don't want to benefit Democrat governors.”

“… We want to help all the states, but we have governors that are from the Democrat [sic] party, let's say New York, Illinois, big ones, and let's say Gavin 'Newscum,' who's done a horrible job in California. We want to benefit Republicans. They are the ones that are going to make America great again….The Democrats are destroying our country," Trump said.

Devega points out presidents didn’t do this before Trump because a two-party system is essential to democracy. But last week Trump escalated threats to terminate federal funding from the state of California, forgetting that “Democrat-led blue states contribute more money to the federal government in terms of tax dollars and other resources than Republican-led red parts of the country,” as Devega explains.

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When Governor Gavin Newsom responded by suggesting California could retaliate by cutting off tax payments from the state to the federal government, Trump’s administration went ballistic. United States Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent warned Newsom that he would be guilty of “criminal tax evasion” over such a move.

But this escalation is just the beginning for our “first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator,” Devega says. In addition to series of “Truth Social propaganda platform” posts where Devega says :{Trump shared conspiracy theories and menacing images of retaliation against judges who stymied his immigration policies, the administration is also harassing Democratic members of Congress with arrest.}:

Department of Homeland Security police recently handcuffed an aide to U.S. Rep. Representative Jerry Nadler, (D-N.Y.), which makes the second time in less than a month the Trump administration has used law enforcement to directly target Congress. And for the second time in less than a month, Congress doesn’t have the desire or ability to defend itself.

Atlantic columnist David Graham writes: “The Constitution’s checks and balances are premised on each branch wantingto protect its powers. What happens if that’s not the case?”

Republicans are largely unwilling to stand up to Trump, Graham argues, while Democrats are incapable of exerting formal or informal political power.

With Trump announcing he was federalizing the California National Guard—against the wishes of Gov. Newsom—after ICE raids over the weekend, the authoritarian tide is rising, Devega warns. But the American people and their leaders “had numerous opportunities to ‘drown-proof’ their democracy at the ballot box.”

They also had ample time to deal with the problem through the rule of law and by addressing the deep societal problems that birthed Trumpism, MAGA, authoritarian populism and the larger antidemocracy movement. Instead, he says they put “a man who announced he would be a ‘dictator on day one’ back” in the White House.

READ MORE:How this horrid show ends

Read the full Salon report at this link.

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---}:

MMA

CHYRON ANTI ISRAEL COL STUD ORDERED RELEASED

Mahmoud Khalil — a 30-year-old Columbia University student

May 1, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): I don't care about international law. I care about the laws that govern this country. And I think we are setting a dangerous precedent that we have the courts involved with the visa process. So now every time someone doesn't like that their visa got denied or rejected, we have essentially said now that's up to the courts to decide?

Show me any statute that talks about the visa process. Sure there's laws that govern our immigration process. But, when it comes to the visa process, the secretary of state has wide discretion.

And now we have a guy that is beating his chest. He has anti-American views. He is trying to destroy a lot of the things that we hold true to our country. He stands with Hamas and a lot of the pro-Palestinian causes that are there that we don't support. And now we're letting him celebrate it outside of the courtroom. Not a good look.

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beast 4 25

A top Trump administration official said those demanding due process for a wrongly deported Maryland dad might themselves be accused of “aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.”

Appearing onRob Schmitt Tonight on Newsmax, Donald Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, suggested critics of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s incarceration in a Salvadoran megaprison might even be committing a federal crime.

He said: “It’s not left and right, It’s not even Republican or Democrat. There’s one line that divides us: Do you love America or do you hate America? It’s really quite that simple.”

Bondi Says Deported Dad’s Family Better Off Without HimPLEADING FOR HIS RETURN

Janna Brancolini

Gorka, born in the U.K. to Hungarian parents, suggested in the Tuesday interview that Democrats who argue that Abrego Garcia should be returned to the U.S.—per the Supreme Court’s orders—don’t “love America.”

The former Newsmax host added that those who dissent against the Trump administration’s actions are “on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens on the side of the terrorists.”

He went even further, saying: “And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”

Bolton Slams Trump’s Latest Cabinet Pick as a ‘Con Man’NO CONFIDENCE

Will Neal

Gorka failed to mention that Abrego Garcia’s alleged links to the MS-13 gang—used to justify his deportation—have been disputed and are based upon an allegation made in a field interview report from 2019, and a confidential informant supposedly telling police he was a member of the organization.

Gorka said critics of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation and apparent incarceration in an infamous supermax prison are “aiding and abetting” terrorism.Newsmax.

The cop who penned the field report was suspended in wild circumstances soon after he interviewed Abrego Garcia, yet his allegation is among the scant evidence the government has produced to support its MS-13 claim.

The informant reportedly claimed the father was part of the “Westerns” clique of MS-13. This is despite the fact that group operated out of Long Island and Abrego Garcia had never lived anywhere other than Maryland while in the U.S.

Additionally, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers were unable to interview the cop who supposedly spoke to the informant because of his suspension.

The government has also tried to justify the deportation of Salvadorian migrants based on their tattoos, using a point-scoring system to determine whether their ink relates to gang affiliation.

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When he was arrested in 2019, ICE officers also reportedly pointed towards his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie as potential gang involvement indicators.[dollar over ears?]

The El Salvador native had fled his home country in 2011 at age 16 after gang members threatened to kill him. He was arrested while undocumented, found hanging around outside a hardware store looking for day labor work.

He was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without being charged with any crimes.

At his deportation hearing in 2019, ICE stated that he was a danger to the community because he had been detained “in connection with a murder investigation,” and local police had “verified” he was a gang member.

The Trump administration has ignored judges’ orders to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant who was deported to El Salvador on March 15, to the United States.Abrego Garcia Family/Handout via Reuters

Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and was granted a “withholding of removal” order, a legal form of protection that says the government won’t deport someone to their home country if the person is “more likely than not” to face persecution there.

Since he was picked up by ICE again in March this year, the Department of Justice has not presented any evidence in court showing gang affiliations.

Government lawyers have even “abandon[ed]” their earlier position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community,” a federal appeals court found.

But despite, this, top government officials continue to brand him as a danger and a “terrorist.”

His attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told NBC News that these claims “endanger his life.”

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A60 Minutes investigation discovered that at least three-quarters of the 250 men shipped to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) had no criminal records at all. The facility is notorious for human rights abuses.

The Trump administration has admitted it deported Abrego Garcia after an “administrative error,” but still refuses to bring him home.

In fact, it has doubled down. In a Wednesday X post, the Department of Homeland Security again branded him an “MS-13 gang member,” and revealed a protective order his wife took out against him in 2021.

Sharing the documents, DHS officials echoed comments from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who said on Tuesday that he was “not the father of the year.”

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“Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a history of violence and was not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as,” the post said.

“According to court filings, Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence restraining order against him, claiming he punched, scratched, and ripped off her shirt, among other harm. This MS-13 gang member is not a sympathetic figure.”

Abrego Garcia’s wife—Jennifer Vasquez Sura—addressed the restraining order in a statement to Newsweek.

“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” she said. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.”

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NOTE TRUMP VOUGHT OMB COUP BS MARXIST EQUITY...

2 25

Tech billionaire, Elon Musk, who leads President Donald Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, has moved to seize control of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID.

Musk took a dig at USAID on his social media platform X, writing, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

He also wrote several other posts about the agency, saying things like, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America” and “USAID is evil.”

Fox News reports that more than 50 senior USAID staff members were placed on administrative leave and subjected to a gag order.

The gag order implies that they were not allowed to communicate with anyone outside the agency without approval.

According to the report, citing congressional sources, signs were also removed from USAID’s headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., and the DOGE team took over the computer systems.

USAID, an independent agency, is responsible for distributing civilian foreign aid and development assistance to countries around the globe.

The agency was said to have managed approximately $40 billion in appropriations in 2024.

Trump administration had on Sunday placed two top security chiefs at USAID on leave after refusing to turn over classified material in restricted areas to DOGE.

The development came after initially being refused access to USAID’s classified information.

However, DOGE eventually gained that access on Saturday, allowing them to see things like intelligence reports.

USAID is evil, criminal organization – Elon Musk

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aha if X hates america [which God loves?] , wants to destroy it, thus they want to destroy me and my loved ones so they must be defeated/killed, ends justify means?

Fox News’ Will Cain says “I truly believe that DEI could have killed America”

01/22/25

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01/08/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Rick Green claims the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection was little more than "an opportunity for the left to create their own version of the Reichstag Fire."
South Dakota state Sen. John Carley, who is a member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, has introduced legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted and taught in all public schools.
Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver recently appeared on a Twitter Space with far-right activists Myron Gaines, Preston Parra, Tristan Tate, and others.
Not only did Mike Lindell spend millions failing to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, but he also owes millions to the guy who debunked his claims.
Finally, Rep. Tim Burchett says that Democrats "want [the] total destruction of this country." tenn

day after MsqG hate nazi rally:

mma

October 29, 2024, edition of WZFG The Flag's What's On Your Mind?

CLETA MITCHELL (ELECTION INTEGRITY NETWORK): And so there have been a lot of different changes that have been made in legislation and in statutes around the country. And that's a good thing but it's not enough. We have to do more.

But the biggest thing I think is that the RNC, to their credit, have filed a lot of lawsuits. They haven't won as many as I would have liked but at least they've been aggressive before the election and the other thing is we have citizens, we have so many volunteers who are trained who now know the election code better than most lawyers in their state and they are involved and they're engaged and they're working as poll observers and many of them have become election board members and election officials and so we have a presence and we have eyes on the process that we really didn't have in 2020And of course it makes the left's collective head explode. They hate it. T. hey hate me, they hate the Election Integrity Network, and they hate everything that we're doing which tells me we're on the right track.

RANDOM

RANDOM GRAM NEW FORMAT RWW

Steve Shultz Likens Trump To Moses And Jesus

10/04/2024

Steve Shultz Likens Trump To Moses And Jesus Extremist video 10/04/2024 by Kyle Mantyla Herman Martir says that "God has raised President Trump as a prophet" while Steve Shultz likens Trump to Moses and Jesus: "If you don't recognize President Trump as a …

Lance Wallnau on FlashPoint

Lance Wallnau Says The Devil Is Using Kalama Harris To Destroy The Country

10/04/2024

Lance Wallnau Says The Devil Is Using Kalama Harris To Destroy The Country Extremist video 10/04/2024 by Kyle Mantyla MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau claims he had a spiritual vision showing that Kamala Harris was "the one that the devil was going to use to …

Micah Beckwith appearing on a "50 Day Fight" prayer call

GOP Lt. Gov Nominee Micah Beckwith Says Indiana Must Choose Between "Godly Boldness" and Jezebel

10/02/2024

GOP Lt. Gov Nominee Micah Beckwith Says Indiana Must Choose Between "Godly Boldness" and Jezebel Extremist video 10/02/2024 by Kyle Mantyla Micah Beckwith, a Christian nationalist pastor who is the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor in Indiana, says …

Hank Kunneman Praying on FlashPoint

Hank Kunneman Delivers A MAGA Prayer For The Victims Of Hurricane Helen

10/02/2024

Hank Kunneman Delivers A MAGA Prayer For The Victims Of Hurricane Helen Extremist video 10/02/2024 by Kyle Mantyla Asked to pray for those impacted by Hurricane Helene, MAGA pastor Hank Kunneman prayed that Americans will see that only Trump can provide …

Mario Murillo during an episode of "Fire Power"

Mario Murillo Says Not Voting For Trump Is "Mocking God"

10/02/2024

Mario Murillo Says Not Voting For Trump Is "Mocking God" Extremist video 10/02/2024 by Kyle Mantyla Trump-loving evangelist Mario Murillo declares that Kamala Harris is "the puppet embodiment of a system that is here to destroy us" and warns that if you …

Josh Bernstein: Rep. Ilhan Omar Is a 'Jihadist Terrorist' Who Should Be Charged With Treason

07/17/2019

Josh Bernstein: Rep. Ilhan Omar Is a 'Jihadist Terrorist' Who Should Be Charged With Treason Extremist video 07/17/2019 by Kyle Mantyla Radical right-wing commentator Josh Bernstein posted a video today in which he declared that Rep. Ilhan Omar is a …

Michigan Pastor Appears to Take Up Church Offering to Fund Anti-Choice Petition Drive

07/15/2019

Michigan Pastor Appears to Take Up Church Offering to Fund Anti-Choice Petition Drive Extremist video 07/15/2019 by Kyle Mantyla Last week, radical Religious Right activist Janet Porter spoke at Floodgate Church in Brighton, Michigan, as part of her …

Perry Stone: God Will Strike America With Tsunamis as Punishment for Abortion

07/11/2019

Perry Stone: God Will Strike America With Tsunamis as Punishment for Abortion Extremist video 07/11/2019 by Kyle Mantyla End Times pastor Perry Stone hosted a " Prophetic Summit " at his church in Cleveland, Tennessee, earlier this year, where he …

David Barton Says Liberal States Will Secede If Roe v. Wade Is Struck Down

07/11/2019

David Barton Says Liberal States Will Secede If Roe v. Wade Is Struck Down Extremist video 07/11/2019 by Kyle Mantyla Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton appeared on "The Jim Bakker Show" yesterday , where he declared that if the Supreme Court …

Religious Right Commentators Suggest Climate Change Is A 'Trojan Horse' And A 'Religion'

07/08/2019

Religious Right Commentators Suggest Climate Change Is A 'Trojan Horse' And A 'Religion' Extremist video 07/08/2019 by Talia D Following the Democratic debates last month, Kenneth Copeland's "Believers Voice of Victory" network held special programs …

mma

fox shrugs at Maria Bartiromo’s peddling of “kind of racist” election fraud lies

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/21/24

Fox’s response to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo peddling thirdhand election fraud falsehoods she didn’t bother to check demonstrates how the network has abandoned anything resembling journalistic standards in its quest to return Donald Trump to the White House.

Bartiromo repeatedly told her Fox Business viewers this week about a “Democrat operation” to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote at Texas government offices, a story she originally attributed to the wife of a friend of a friend and made no apparent effort to verify. Her thirdhand gossip was swiftly debunked by the local Republican Party and the Texas Department of Public Safety, with a spokesperson for the latter noting that her conspiracy theory was “kind of racist.”

It should go without saying that at any credible news outlet, an anchor promoting wild claims they hadn’t verified that promptly dissolved like this would be facing disciplinary action for breaching standards. But Fox apparently doesn’t have standards barring its purported journalists from citing gossip they haven’t bothered to try to confirm on the air.

Zeteo News media columnist Justin Baragona reached out to a Fox spokesperson on Tuesday about whether Bartiromo planned to address or correct her false claims about undocumented immigrants registering to vote en masse in Texas.

“According to a Fox News spokesperson, Maria Bartiromo was clearly citing a source of hers and never said she confirmed the story,” Baragona subsequently posted to X. “The spox also said it is worth noting that Republicans have been speaking a lot about this issue of noncitizens voting in recent months.”

Meanwhile, Bartiromo did not mention her debunked claims on her Wednesday show, though she did ask the Republican member of Congress she hosted questions like, “Do you have any evidence that you can share with us that tells us that illegals are registered to vote?” and “Do you think you’ll be able to stop it? I mean you’ve got 76 days before the election. How many people will be voting illegally?”

Fox’s response simply emphasizes the problems with Bartiromo’s coverage:

Yes, it is true that Bartiromo was citing a “source,” if that’s what you want to call her friend who said they heard it from a friend who heard it from their wife.
Yes, it is true that Bartiromo never said she confirmed the story.
Yes, it is true that Republicans have sought to undermine the election with baseless claims of noncitizens voting.

But all of that is bad!

If you work at a national cable news network, you’re not supposed to feed your viewers thirdhand, unverified gossip simply because it supports the claims of a political party, and if you do that and the story is subsequently debunked by everyone who bothers to actually try and look into it, that’s a black mark on your credibility.

I don’t want to suggest there was some halcyon day when Fox acted responsibly — the network prioritized Republican political success from its founding — but there was a time when the network’s executives at least tried to curtail its most obvious and indefensible journalistic failings.

When the hosts of Fox & Friends in 2007 cited a right-wing outlet’s quickly debunked report that then-Sen. Barack Obama had attended an extremist Islamic madrassa as a child, the network made clear both publicly and privately that its standards had been violated.

Host Steve Doocy issued a clarification on the show’s next edition. John Moody, at the time Fox’s vice president for news, also acknowledged to The New York Times that the network had erred. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” he said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Moody also sent a daily editorial note to staff stating what should have been the obvious: “For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC.”

Seventeen years later, seeing a text from a friend detailing a story the friend’s friend heard from their spouse apparently means it is ready for air on Fox. The spokesperson’s comments about Bartiromo effectively confirm as much. And meanwhile Jesse Watters, the network’s biggest star, is now apparently preparing to send a staffer to Hawaii to “dig deep” and “get the truth” about Obama’s birth certificate.

It all makes perfect sense when you recognize that Watters, Bartiromo, and the spokesperson work not at a news outlet, but a propaganda network that is in the tank for Trump’s presidential campaign. The peril for Fox, however, is the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit shows how letting people like Bartiromo spin up poorly sourced conspiracy theories to benefit Trump can get very, very expensive.

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### Maria Bartiromo's wild and “kind of racist” election conspiracy theory collapses immediately

:{08/20/24

### Fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

:{05/14/24

### Maria Bartiromo's source for election conspiracy theories: “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it."

02/16/23

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mma

Bartiromo's wild and “kind of racist” election conspiracy theory collapses immediately

Bartiromo, who was deeply involved in promoting the Dominion election conspiracy theories that Fox News paid for, is at it again

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Lis Power

Published 08/20/24

Maria Bartiromo repeatedly used her Fox Business show to peddle an election fraud conspiracy theory that she claimed originated with the wife of a friend of a friend in Texas and that she made no apparent effort to confirm. But when the Texas Department of Public Safety and the local Republican Party investigated her reckless allegation, they discovered that none of it was true.

On Sunday morning, Bartiromo posted an item to X alleging that “a massive line of immigrants” had been obtaining driver’s licenses and registering to vote at three Department of Motor Vehicles offices in Texas:

From a friend ...

Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.

Bartiromo brought the wildly flimsy allegation to Fox’s airwaves the following day, having apparently done no independent reporting to confirm claims that she said originated with the wife of a friend of her friend.

She brought up the story in at least three segments on the Monday and Tuesday editions of her Fox program — including in interviews with two Republican U.S. senators.

Indeed, the story became even more sinister for the Fox audience, with Bartiromo alleging that the people registering to vote were not just “immigrants,” as stated in her X post, but “illegals.” A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety noted that assuming that nonwhite Texans are undocumented is “kind of racist” and called her story “simply false.”

### Bartiromo used Fox show to trumpet thirdhand claim of “illegals” getting registered to vote

Bartiromo first flagged the story during a Monday morning interview with Sheriff Thad Cleveland of Terrell County, Texas, and Republican strategist Michael Balboni.

“I'm serious about this issue of illegals voting, and I want to get your take on this,” Bartiromo told Balboni. “Apparently, the DMV offices right now are packed with illegals right now trying to get driver's licenses, and they're getting Social Security cards, driver's licenses, apparently, in very short order after coming into the country. They want to get them naturalized as soon as possible before the election.”

She returned to the subject later in the segment, saying that a “person … spoke to me about this this weekend” detailing how DMV offices had been “jam-packed with illegals” and claiming that “he” had told her there had been a voter registration “tent and a table” in Weatherford, Texas, that had been “an obvious Democrat operation.”

Bartiromo further discussed the DMV conspiracy theory during an interview with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). This time, she said the allegation came not from the wife of a friend of a friend, as she originally wrote on X, but from “a friend” who had personally seen the “massive lines of illegals getting licenses” and registering to vote, and texted her directly.

“I reported, earlier, and over the weekend, that a friend had sent me a text this weekend telling me that they went to DMV for a new license, and there were lines and lines of illegals all over the DMV office, the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Bartiromo said. “There was one in Weatherford, Texas, massive line of immigrants getting licenses. They had a tent outside and a table to register them to vote.”

“So, what is going on in terms of illegals voting in this election? And do you think that is the reason that the border has been wide open for three and a half years?” she asked.

Video

CitationFrom the August 19, 2024, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

“Yeah, I’ve been saying that for about three and a half years,” Johnson replied, quickly pivoting from Bartiromo’s anecdote to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “I saw no other explanation of why Joe Biden-Kamala Harris would open up the border, presenting a clear and present danger to America, other than to change the electorate to bring in more people — it would be, you know, very beneficial to them from a standpoint of getting elected.”

“Democrats want to make it easy to cheat,” he added. “They want to change the electorate, that is what this has all been about, and it’s destroying this country.”

Bartiromo discussed the story with a second senator on Tuesday.

“I got a tip over the weekend that these DMV offices are jam-packed with illegals and they’re getting them Social Security cards and drivers' licenses,” she told Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS). “Do you have any evidence that illegals are registered to vote?”

### Bartiromo’s thirdhand claim was “simply false,” “kind of racist”

Others who saw Bartiromo’s initial X post did what she apparently failed to do and tried to confirm her story.

Sgt. William Lockridge, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the account Bartiromo promoted was “simply false” and “kind of racist.”

From the Monday report:

Contrary to Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s account, there is no office for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in Weatherford. Folks there get their licenses at a DPS Driver License office.

Still, no such tent and table were set up outside the office last week.

“None of it is true,” Lockridge said, adding that the assumption that non-white Texans lined up to get their driver licenses are immigrants or illegal is “kind of racist.”

“Just because these people aren’t white, that doesn’t mean they’re illegal,” he said.

There was a table set outside the DPS Driver License office in Lake Worth on Friday, Lockridge said, but not at the other two sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post.

Similarly, Brady Gray, the chairman of the Parker County GOP, said on X that his group had spent “24 hours investigating the claims” Bartiromo made about Weatherford and found them to be “erroneous.” From the post:

While we are everyday registering more voters in Parker county, there has been no large submission of registrants consistent with the claim.

All voter registration applications in the county are processed by the county EA office (County Voter Registrar) and are uploaded to SOS to verify the applicants eligibility to vote (i.e. citizenship, etc.). Not only have there been no recent instances of ineligible individuals attempting to register in Parker county, there have only been two in the last 15 years.

The DPS office has confirmed that there have been no tents or tables and no one registering voters on their premises, and that if it were the case they would be told to leave, as it is not allowed.

### Bartiromo’s history of promoting absurd election conspiracy theories

Bartiromo’s ludicrously thin claims of Democrats trying to register undocumented immigrants to vote in the 2024 presidential election fit neatly within her recent career.

Bartiromo promoted a series of wild claims about election fraud following the 2020 election. Her deeds included hosting Trumpist lawyer Sidney Powell to baselessly allege that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the vote against Donald Trump. She brought Powell on after Powell forwarded her an email from a woman who claimed that Dominion’s software flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden — and also that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”

Her Dominion segments were featured in the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, which resulted in her network paying a record settlement. But they had no apparent impact on her standing at Fox: She retains a weekly Fox News show and a three-hour weekday show on Fox Business, giving her platforms where she can ask U.S. senators about unverified thirdhand claims.

That leaves her well-positioned to help Trump if he once again tries to subvert a presidential election.

---

Charlie Kirk: “Kamala Harris wants to see the elimination of the United States of America”](https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-kamala-harris-wants-see-elimination-united-states-america)

08/05/24

August 5, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on YouTube

CHARLIE KIRK: This economic crisis is a national security issue. Over one trillion dollars a year in interest payments alone. And the current kleptocrats of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker — they could not care less about the damage that's being done to the country because it is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Kamala Harris wants to see the elimination of the United States of America. The Cloward-Piven strategy is we are communists, number one, who hate America, and number two, we are going to do things to destroy the country. And we do that by mass inflation and mass migration. Mass inflation and mass migration. Ruin the dollar, open the borders. Ruin the dollar, open the borders. And that's what you're seeing on a daily basis.

rww 6 24 team trump $ ltr logo]

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

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

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

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

===

rww 6 24 team trump $ ltr logo]

===

an 5 24

at Texas GOP convention, Republicans call for spiritual warfare]

(https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/28/texas-gop-convention-elections-religion-delegates-platform/)" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

SAN ANTONIO — From his booth in the exhibit hall of the Texas GOP’s 2024 convention, Steve Hotze saw an army of God assembled before him.

For four decades, Hotze, an indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist, has helmed hardline anti-abortion movements and virulently homophobic campaigns against LGTBQ+ rights, comparing gay people to Nazis and helping popularize the “groomer” slur that paints them as pedophiles. Once on the fringes, Hotze said Saturday that he was pleased by the party's growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare with “demonic, Satanic forces” on the left.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/JFkqsROPRlcFcL99azhBNmhW0bY=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/ee33b4da54577749111fe238d8b0bd90/0905%20Impeach%20Trial%20Day%201%20BD%20TT%2013.jpg)

From left: Conservative activists Steven Hotze and Jared Woodfill enter the Senate gallery during the afternoon session of Day 1 of the Ken Paxton impeachment trial in the Texas Senate on Sept. 5, 2023. Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune

“People that aren’t in Christ have wicked, evil hearts,” he said. “We are in a battle, and you have to take a side.”

Those beliefs were common at the party’s three-day biennial convention last week, at which delegates adopted a series of new policies that would give the party unprecedented control over the electoral process and further infuse Christianity into public life.

Delegates approved rules that ban Republican candidates — as well as judges — who are censured by the party from appearing on primary ballots for two years, a move that would give a small group of Republicans the ability to block people from running for office, should it survive expected legal challenges. The party’s proposed platform also included planks that would effectively lock Democrats out of statewide office by requiring candidates to win a majority of Texas’ 254 counties, many of which are dark-red but sparsely populated, and called for laws requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools.

Those moves, delegates and leaders agreed, were necessary amid what they say is an existential fight with a host of perceived enemies, be it liberals trying to indoctrinate their children through “gender ideology” and Critical Race Theory, or globalists waging a war on Christianity through migration.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/fzcMrsQQEKXRO3FPEF7YT6aOTHo=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/da9c4842dbc8e8cb35ddbcee11590f3b/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2031.jpg)

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks during the Texas GOP Convention on Thursday, May 23, 2024 in San Antonio. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

Those fears were stoked by elected officials in almost every speech given over the week. “They want to take God out of the country, and they want the government to be God,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Thursday morning.

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood,” Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, said Friday. “It is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

”Look at what the Democrats have done,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Saturday. “If you were actively trying to destroy America, what would you do differently?”

*[“The house is on fire”: Texas GOP plots its next chapter amid civil war, depleted staff, funding drops]

Controlling elections

The Texas GOP’s conventions have traditionally amplified the party’s most hardline activists and views. In 2022, for instance, delegates approved a platform that included calls for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.

The 2024 convention went a step further.

It was the first Texas GOP convention set against the backdrop of a civil war that was sparked by the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton and inflamed by scandals over white supremacists and antisemites working for the party’s top funders, West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. This year’s convention was also sparsely attended compared to past years, which some longtime party members said helped the Dunn and Wilks faction further consolidate their power and elect their candidate, Abraham George, for party chair.

“What we're seeing right now is a shift toward more populism,” said Summer Wise, a former member of the party’s executive committee who has attended most conventions since 2008, including last week’s. “And the [party’s] infrastructure, leadership, decision-making process, power and influence are being controlled by a small group of people.”

(https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/_X93OkVqWjKf0MF0YqIovXarXM4=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/37d777dfbb61f282f112bd04a575cbbc/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2055.jpg)

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, wave to attendees during the Republican Party of Texas convention in San Antonio on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

That shift was most evident, she said, in a series of changes to the party’s rules that further empower its leaders to punish dissent. The party approved changes that would dramatically increase the consequences of censures — which were used most recently to punish House Speaker Dade Phelan for his role in impeaching Paxton, and against U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for voting for gun safety legislation.

Under the changes, any person who is censured by the party would be banned for two years from appearing on GOP primary ballots — including judges, who are elected in partisan races but expected to be politically neutral once on the bench. The party also voted to unilaterally close its primaries, bypassing the Legislature, in a move intended to keep Democrats from voting in Republican primaries.

“It’s pretty hypocritical,” Wise said of the changes, which legal experts and some party members expect will face legal challenges. “Republicans have always opposed activist judges, and this seems to be obligating judges to observe and prioritize party over law — which is straight-up judicial activism.”

The convention came amid a broader embrace of Christian nationalism on the right, which falsely claims that the United States’ founding was God-ordained and that its institutions and laws should reflect their conservative, Christian views. Experts have found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to migration, religious pluralism and the democratic process.

*[Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office]

Wise said she has seen parts of the party similarly shift toward dogmatic political and religious views that have been used “to justify or rationalize corrupting the institution and stripping away its integrity, traditions, fundamental and established principles" — as if “‘God wants it, so we can rewrite the rules.’”

“Being Republican and being Christian have become the same thing,” she said. “If you're accused of being a (Republican in Name Only), you're essentially not as Christian as someone else. … God help you if you're Jewish.”

The “rabbit hole”

Bob Harvey is a proud member of the “Grumpy Old Men’s Club,” a group in Montgomery County that he said pushes back against Fox News and other outlets that he claims have been infiltrated by RINOs.

“People trust Fox News, and they need to get outside of that and find alternative news and like-minded people,” Harvey, 71, said on Friday, as he waited in a long line to meet Kyle Rittenhouse, who has ramped up his engagement in Texas politics since he was acquitted of homicide after fatally shooting two Black Lives Matter protesters.

Rather, Harvey’s group recommends places such as the Gateway Pundit, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News or the Epoch Times, a far-right website that also had a booth at this year’s convention and is directly linked to the Falun Gong, a hardline anti-communist group.

Such outlets, Harvey said, are crucial to getting people “further down the rabbit hole,” after which they can begin to connect the dots between the deep-state that has spent years attacking former President Donald Trump, and the agenda of the left to indoctrinate kids through the Boy Scouts of America, public schools and the Democratic Party.

Harvey’s views were widely-held by his fellow delegates, many of whom were certain that broader transgender acceptance, Critical Race Theory or “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives were parts of a sinister plot to destroy the country and take over its churches.

The culprits behind the ploy differed — Democrats, socialists or “globalists,” to name a few. But their nefarious end goals loomed over the convention. Fearing a transgender takeover of the Republican Party of Texas, delegates pushed to explicitly stipulate that the party’s chair and vice chair must be “biological” men or women.

At events to recruit pastors and congregations to ramp up their political activism, elected leaders argued that churches were the only thing standing between evil and children. And the party’s proposed platform included planks that claim gender-transition care is child abuse, or urge new legislation in Texas that's "even more comprehensive" than Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits the teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/ciJpskJjFVkA32MexM-6q3bGI6M=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/8fc7586ac950819feeeabb4760560fb8/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2072.jpg)

Kyle Rittenhouse shakes hands with conventioneers at a meet and greet during the Texas GOP convention on Thursday in San Antonio. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

“Our next generation is being co-opted and indoctrinated where they should have been educated,” Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, said at a Friday luncheon for pastors and churches. “We are in a spiritual battle. This isn't a political one.”

For at least a half-century, conservative Christian movements have been fueled by notions of a shadowy and coordinated conspiracy to destroy America, said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put the Bible in public schools.

“It's like the boogeyman that won't go away, that gets summoned whenever a justification is needed for these types of agendas,” he said. “They say that somebody is threatening quintessential American freedoms, and that these threats are posed by some sort of global conspiracy — rather than just recognizing that we're a pluralistic democracy.”

In the 1950s, such claims were the driving force behind the emergence of groups such as the John Birch Society, a hardline anti-communist group whose early members included the fathers of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump. After decades of dwindling influence, the society has seen a revival since Trump's 2016 election. And in the exhibit hall last week, so-called Birchers passed out literature and pamphlets that detailed the New World Order's secret plans for "world domination."

Steve Oglesby, field director for the Birch Society's North Texas chapter, said interest and membership in the group has been on the rise in recent years — particularly, as COVID-19 lockdowns and international climate change initiatives have spurred right-wing fears of an international cabal working against the United States.

"COVID really helped," he said, adding that the pandemic proved the existence of a global elite that has merely shifted its tactics since the 1950s. “It’s not just communism — it’s the people pulling the strings.”

Throughout the week, prominent Republicans invoked similar claims of a coordinated conspiracy against the United States. On Friday, Patrick argued that a decadeslong decline in American religion was part of a broader, “Marxist socialist left” agenda to “create chaos,” including through migration — despite studies showing that migrants are overwhelmingly Christian. Attorney General Ken Paxton echoed those claims in his own speech minutes later, saying migration was part of a plan to "steal another election."

“The Biden Administration wants the illegals here to vote,” he said.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/XrT-lkapyY0opApzI2UV_yF-8JE=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/f65ff0a8564b0acdb321e69bd3b233c7/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2011.jpg)

Ella Maulding and Konner Earnest watch as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks during the Republican Party of Texas convention in San Antonio on Thursday, the first day of the gathering. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

As Paxton continued, Ella Maulding and Konner Earnest held hands and nodded their approval from the convention hall’s front row. Last year, the two were spotted outside of a Tarrant County office building where Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist and Adolf Hitler fan, was hosted for nearly seven hours by Jonathan Stickland, then the leader of Dunn and Wilks' most powerful political action committee. They eventually lost their jobs after The Texas Tribune reported on their ties to Fuentes or white nationalist groups.

Maulding has been particularly vocal about her support for Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy theory that claims there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to replace white people through migration, LGBTQ+ acceptance or interracial marriage. Once a fringe, white nationalist worldview, experts say that Great Replacement Theory has been increasingly mainstreamed as Republican leaders, including some who spoke last week, continue to claim that migration is part of a coordinated effort to aid Democrats. The theory has also been cited by numerous mass shooters, including the gunman who murdered 22 Hispanic people at an El Paso WalMart in 2019.

Five hours after Paxton and Patrick spoke, Maulding took to social media, posting a cartoon of a rabbi with the following text: “I make porn using your children and then make money distributing it under the banner of women’s rights while flooding your nation with demented lunatics who then rape your children.”

David Barton

Kason Huddleston has spent the last few years helping elect Christians and push back against what he believes is indoctrination of children in Rowlett, near Dallas. Far too often, he said, churches and pastors have become complacent, or have been scared away from political engagement by federal rules that prohibit churches from overt political activity.

Through trainings from groups like Christians Engaged, which advocates for church political activity and had a booth at this year’s convention, he said he has been able show more local Christians that they can be “a part of the solution” to intractable societal ills such as fatherlessness, crime or teen drug use. And while he thinks that some of his peers’ existential rhetoric can be overwrought, he agreed that there is an ongoing effort to “tear down the family unit” and shroud America’s true, Christian roots.

“If you look at our government and our laws, all of it goes back to a Judeo-Christian basis,” he said. “Most people don’t know our true history because it’s slowly just been removed.”

He then asked: “Have you ever read David Barton?”

Since the late 1980s, Barton has barnstormed the state and country claiming that church-state separation is a “myth” meant to shroud America’s true founding as a Christian nation. Barton, a self-styled “amateur historian” who served as Texas GOP vice chair from 1997 to 2006, has been thoroughly debunked by an array of historians and scholars — many of them also conservative Christians.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/Pr4f05aMyQrJ6_1ubGg9az8vwjQ=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/7acf1f2412dd7df9c6f492e50a5f07ee/BD%20INC%20Barton%20David%20748%202012)

David Barton, left, of WallBuilders, at a Texas Eagle Forum reception at the Republican Party of Texas convention in Fort Worth on June 7, 2012. Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune

Despite that, Barton’s views have become widespread among Republicans, including Patrick, Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson. And his influence over the party was clear at last week’s convention, where his group, WallBuilders, maintained a booth and delegates frequently cited him.

This year’s platform, the votes for which are expected to be released later this week, included planks that urged lawmakers and the State Board of Education to “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance,” and supports the use of religious chaplains in schools — which was made legal under a law passed by the state Legislature last year.

Warren Throckmorton, a former Grove City College professor and prominent conservative, Christian critic of Barton, told the Tribune that the platform emblematized Barton’s growing influence, and his movement’s conflicting calls to preserve “religious liberty” while attempting to elevate their faith over others. The platform, he noted, simultaneously demands that students’ religious rights be protected, and for schools to be forced to teach the Bible.

“What about the other students who aren’t Christians and who don't believe in the Bible?” he said. “This is not religious liberty — it’s Christian dominance.”

As Zach Maxwell watched his fellow Republicans debate and vote last week, he said he was struck by the frequency and intensity with which Christianity was invoked. Maxwell previously served as chief of staff for former Rep. Mike Lang, then the leader of the ultraconservative Texas House Freedom Caucus, and he later worked for Empower Texans, a political group that was funded primarily by Dunn and Wilks.

He eventually became disillusioned with the party’s right wing, which he said has increasingly been driven by purity tests and opposition to religious or political diversity. This year’s convention, he said, was the culmination of those trends.

“God was not only used as a tool at this convention, but if you didn’t mention God in some way, fake or genuine, I did feel it was seen as distasteful,” he said. “There is a growing group of people who want to turn this nation into a straight-up theocracy. I believe they are doing it on the backs of people who are easily manipulated.”

Nancy Leclerc poses for a photo in front of a GOP elephant statue during the Texas GOP convention in San Antonio on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/28/texas-gop-convention-elections-religion-delegates-platf

11 23 rww

...Hawking gold has been a financial mainstay of right-wing media outlets and online personalities for years. For religious-right pundits like Wallnau, promoting gold as a hedge against financial and societal collapse can dovetail with broader apocalyptic messaging.

A few months ago, The Washington Post wrote about the extensive marketing on right-wing media of gold coins as a retirement investment, often with outrageous markups. Reporter Hanna Kozlowska, one of the authors of the Post report, followed up with an August story for MSNBC, noting that their research found that older people who watch conservative media are “bombarded” with ads for gold:

We’ve spoken to customers who are disabled, homebound or living only on Social Security, their lives upended by losing their only nest eggs. And although complaints and allegations of fraud against these companies have been public for years, right-wing media outlets have continued to benefit by accepting their advertising.

The kind of fearmongering pitch Wallnau’s email included is a common sales tactic, according to Kozlowska. “To lure customers, the companies often use fear-based and politically tinged messaging in their advertising and on sales calls,” she wrote for MSNBC, citing an example of an ad sent to a Newsmax list claiming, “Nancy Pelosi has been on a secret mission to KILL the US Dollar.”

...

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an 323 maya

no lnx

'Populist and belligerent': Republican Party 'sad' state of division on full display at CPAC

Maya Boddie March 06, 2023

The 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference revealed the Republican party's undeniable current state of division, Axios reports.

Per Axios, the GOP was formerly "defined by its general ideological unity on three core conservative principles: free markets, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values," but now the party's vocal MAGA members have "moved the GOP's center of gravity toward a more protectionist, populist and belligerent outlook."

The Daily Beast columnist, Matt Lewis, recently wrote:

It's easy to highlight how unstable the GOP has become in the last decade. But the most obvious changes involve tone, attitude, temperament, and sanity. Policy preferences have largely taken a back seat to nihilism, showmanship, and culture war battles that don't easily track with our recent past experience.

READ MORE: 'A professional grassroots huckster wing': GOP strategist torches CPAC 'scam'

According to Axios, former President Donald Trump invoked an extreme sense of division in the room during his speech, declaring, "We will expel the warmongers, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, we will throw off thepolitical class that hates our country."

He continued, "The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots and fools. We're never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush" — before he lambasted Senator Rick Scott's (R-FL) attempt to cut Social Security.

The potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate also surpassed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — who missed the conference for his book tour – by more than 40 percent in a straw poll.

In addition to disagreements over the existence of federal programs, Republicans' starkly different opinions on the war on Ukraine also emerged on stage.

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an 1 23

12:29 a.m.:

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

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an 12 22

Basketball star Brittney Griner is back in the United States after her December 8 release from a Russian prison. Griner, who spent almost 10 months imprisoned in Russia, was serving a nine-year sentence on a drug smuggling charge but was released as part of a prisoner exchange; the United States agreed to release Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange for Griner’s release.

Civil libertarians all over the world described Griner’s arrest and imprisonment as politically motivated, as it came during a time of considerable tensions between the United States and Russia. On February 17, Griner was detained after Russian customs officials found less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil in her luggage. And in August, Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Griner’s release was applauded by countless civil libertarians and critics of the War on Drugs. But a long list of MAGA Republicans, on the other hand, are furious that the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) player was released. And libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young vehemently calls them out in a biting article published by The Bulwark on December 16.

READ MORE: James Carville: Right-wing ire over Brittney Griner is because she 'is not white and is not straight'

“Since just about everything is potential fodder for culture wars these days,” Young argues, “it’s no surprise that the return to the United States of basketball player Brittney Griner, detained in Russia on a drug charge earlier this year, turned into another such skirmish. What is notable, though, is the extent to which American far-right punditry has been almost literally reciting Kremlin propaganda talking points — and putting identity politics over basic solidarity with a fellow American.”

Young describes Griner as a former “hostage” of the Kremlin.

“Bringing American hostages home — and there is little doubt that Griner, arrested days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was being held hostage — is surely a cause for patriotic celebration,” Young writes. “But many commentators on the right touted the trade as evidence that the Biden Administration was Woke Central: Griner is Black and gay — gay-married, even! — and spoke out against the American anthem being played at WNBA games during the summer 2020 racial justice protests. That two other Americans, ex-Marine Paul Whelan and history teacher Mark Fogel, still remain in Russian prisons — the former on spying charges, the latter in a marijuana-possession case very similar to Griner’s — became further evidence of wokeness run amok, or a decision based on ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies.”

Young cites specific examples of anti-Griner comments from the far right. On December 8, Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted, “The Biden Admin was apparently worried that their DEI score would go down if they freed an American Marine.” And Matt Walsh, that same day, tweeted, “Unfortunately Marc Fogel and Paul Whelan made the mistake of being white men. The rules of intersectionality dictate that the black woman gets freed first. That's one of the primary factors driving this, whether we want to admit it out loud or not.”

Newsmax’s Benny Johnson said of Griner and the Biden Administration, “They knew they had to appeal (to) the left-wing, woke wing of their party. They wouldn’t allow a Black woman, lesbian woman, drug addict, America-hating woke, to be kept in prison in Russia. One of ours. Not the Marine. Not the person who served this country. No, no. One of ours. Somebody on the identity-politics spectrum who’s notched every single victory that you could ever hope for inside of the vector of woke politics.”

Young points out that similar rhetoric has been coming from the Russian media. For example, RT’s Margarita Simonyan, during an appearance on Russia’s TV-1 program “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” commented, “I found it very amusing, though not surprising, that Bout was finally traded for Griner, not Whelan…. (Whelan) is a hero, a decorated Marine covered in medals. He only has one — no, two — no, three, problems. First problem: He’s white. Second problem: He’s a man. Third problem: It seems he’s hetero. This is something that just can’t be forgiven these days…. American voters were given a choice: A hero who suffered in the service of his country…. or a black lesbian hooked on drugs who suffered for a vape with hash.”

Young also notes that in the prisoner exchange, the Biden Administration didn’t choose Griner over the other American prisoners being held in Russia; the Kremlin’s offer was “Griner or no one” — a fact that “right-wing propagandists in the United States” overlooked when they “recycled Kremlin talking points.”

“Also not mentioned: Trevor Reed, another former U.S. Marine and one-time Russian prisoner who happens to be white, male, and heterosexual,” Young writes. “Despite these three strikes, Reed — detained in Moscow in 2019 on probably bogus charges of assault on two police officers — was freed in late April in a swap for Russian pilot and convicted drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko, a highly inconvenient fact for the ‘woke points’ narrative…. For the overwhelming majority, Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan are both Americans. You’d think the ‘All Lives Matter’ gang could grasp that.”

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mma 12 22

MATT WALSH (HOST): It is quite -- quite, quite sad that the guy, the international arms smuggler who we traded back to Russia appears, based on what he said, to love America more than the woman we traded for. OK, those are sentiments that you're never going to hear from Brittney Griner. She wouldn't even be able to express it. Both because she lacks the articulation required but also because she just doesn't see America -- she hates America. She really does.

When you refuse to -- when you say, I'm not going to go onto the court when the national anthem is played, that is -- I mean that can only be driven by pure scorn and resentment for your home country. You would never hear that from Brittney Griner. Instead we hear it from the Russian guy, the guy that we're trading back to Russia. So, we're sending away the person who loves America more and bringing in the person who hates America.

Now, now, look, what you're hearing there -- there's a reason why they did the interview in English, right? Is this, perhaps, a ploy on the part of Russia? Is that, you know, a part of this? That's probably the case. But even so, it's still quite sad that the woman we're bringing in would never say anything like that. And everything he said is true. Whether he really believes any of that, I have no idea. But what he said is true.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steven-crowder/blazes-steven-crowder-launches-vile-personal-attacks-brittany-griner-shes-not-best

https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-benny-johnson-attacks-brittney-griner-drug-addict-:{america-hating-c:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}:riminal-who

“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander claims he was “offered a job at Twitter in 2018”

12/09/22 9:03 AM EST

Tucker Carlson claims Joe Biden wants Paul Whelan to remain imprisoned in Russia because he's white

12/08/22 9:03 PM EST

Fox News host says hostage exchange for Brittney Griner “should never have been made, ever”

12/08/22 8:01 PM EST

Washington Post columnist criticizes hostage exchange that freed Brittney Griner, claims it will “create more hostage-taking”

12/08/22 7:37 PM EST

Elon Musk reinstates Twitter accounts of proud Islamophobe Laura Loomer and bigoted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone

12/08/22 5:57 PM EST

Matt Walsh: Brittney Griner will “return to us more committed to her own self-victimization and personal resentments than ever before”

12/08/22 4:49 PM EST

Timcast contributor gives full-throttle endorsement of Ye for president

12/08/22 3:29 PM EST

Dana Loesch: If other American prisoners in Russia “were as anti-American as Brittney Griner” then “maybe they'd be released a hell of a lot quicker”

12/08/22 3:24 PM EST

Charlie Kirk: “If you're a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States Marine?”

12/08/22 2:40 PM EST

Right-wing media praised Herschel Walker’s decision to double down on anti-trans attacks before he lost the Georgia Senate election

12/08/22 2:25 PM EST

Climate deniers gain traction on Elon Musk's Twitter

12/08/22 2:15 PM EST

The Blaze's Steven Crowder launches vile personal attacks on Brittany Griner: “She's not the best among us”

12/08/22

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fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

:{:{}:

VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

:{:{}:

“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

---

doh of course inverse of loving freedom and am:

6 22

united States Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) appeared on a recent edition of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia)'s podcast and suggested that Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) is unable to do his job because his son committed suicide.

Raskin served as the House of Representatives' manager of former President Donald Trump's second impeachment for inciting the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Raskin also sits on the Select Committee investigating the attack, which was triggered (at least in part) by Republican lawmakers refusing at Trump's behest to acknowledge President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election.

Now, with just 24 hours remaining before public hearings revealing what the bipartisan congressional commission has found begin, Gaetz and Greene have launched a new and unusually cruel offensive against Raskin.

"When people encounter trauma, they often associate a lot of the other things around that trauma with it, even if they don't naturally or even rationally associate. And what I worry about for the Congress and for Jamie Raskin, you know, no one would ever want to lose a child, particularly to suicide," said Gaetz.

"As human beings, our hearts go out to him. But I think that he takes that trauma and he associates it now with his work in the Congress to such an interwoven way that he's unable to do the congressional experience outside of just the dungeon of that personal trauma," Gaetz continued, "and I think it makes him look at everything in these very like, dark and severe ways."

Greene agreed.

"You know, we try to come to the job to uplift people," Gaetz resumed.

"We're here to serve the people," Greene interjected.

"Well and we love this country," Gaetz added.

"Absolutely," said Greene.

"We're not here out of a sense of grievance or hatred. We love America," Gaetz said.

"No we love it," Greene chimed in again.

"And we want to vindicate the rights of our citizens and we want to champion their causes andbattle their dislikes," Gaetz remarked.

"Yes that's right," Greene said.

"But I think for Jamie Raskin, it's really like, his service in the Congress has almost become like inextricably attached to this sad personal trauma he's had," Gaetz proclaimed. "And I do think it clouds his judgment and you could see that, that very darkness and that pain manifest on Thursday in a way that's not particularly relevant to the challenges that we've talked about, but it might be deeply relevant to what he's going through. And the country shouldn't have to go through all that with him."

Greene then stated the quiet part out loud.

"Well my goodness, it's a horrible thing, what he went through, but it doesn't change the fact of, uh, his political beliefs," she said, "and I believe he's a communist and I believe what he's doing on the January 6th Committee is completely wrong."

Watch below via PatriotTakes:

---

4/22

libtard twat musk says left hate Am and selves?! become extreme vs rt

inequality productions: many vids

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

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

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

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/aoc-elon-musk/

no lnx many twts

Elon Musk's attack on AOC draws far right Twitter trolls – and charges of 'staggering' misogyny

AOC catches a Republican launching a 'cynical' smear against her — and has the receipts to prove it

Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at South By Southwest 2019 in Austin, Texas, nrkbeta

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 30, 2022

Whether you believe him or not (don't), Elon Musk claims he is buying Twitter to protect "free speech" but he's already turning the top social media platform into a home for the far-right – exactly as liberals warned.

On Thursday the billionaire was accused of sounding "just like Trump" when he posted a demonstrably false meme alleging conservatives haven't changed since 2008, while the "center" and liberals have moved to the left – with liberals running to the extreme far left. Again, demonstrably false.

Apparently not thrilled by the massive negative response from the left, on Friday Musk tweeted, "The far left hates everyone, themselves included!"

About 20 minutes later, again apparently gauging reaction, he added: "But I’m no fan of the far right either.Let’s have less hate and more love," acting as if he already owned the place – which he does not.

Friday night, Musk responded to a tweet from a powerful sitting member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). While she did not tag him, it was clearly about him.

"Tired of having to collectively stress about what explosion of hate crimes is happening bc some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner [fem] and made him feel special," she wrote.

News reported Friday suggested Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey asked Musk to buy the social media site – and "libertarians" like Thiel urged him on.

The Wall Street Journal reported hours earlier thatDorsey "was whispering in Mr. Musk’s ear that Twitter should be a private company, people familiar with the matter say." The Journal also reported billionaire Peter Thiel, a strong Trump backer, had been urging Musk to get involved. Thiel is also a strong backer of Trump-aligned MAGA candidates.

So it's no wonder that Musk responded to AOC in a most vile manner, sexualizing her remarks, which was a dog whistle – if not a clarion call – to the misogynistic far right, who came barking with glee.

This was Musk's ugly response:...

Emma Vigeland, the co-host and producer of The Majority Report with Sam Seder weighed in: "Congratulations on reaching yet another right-wing milestone, Elon: projecting your own creepy sexual fixations onto Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a rite of passage!"

RELATED: Experts Sound Alarm Against Elon Musk Buying Twitter – and Warn All Your DMs Might Not Be Safe

Geraldine DeRuiter, "the voice behind the award-winning Everywhereist blog," observed: "This is how the owner of this platform is choosing to engage with elected female officials. The misogyny is staggering."

Here's how the far-right responded to Musk's tweet: scott adams...

---

hmmn dunno fit here

axios has published a report that is making some Republicans furious.

“Young Dems more likely to despise the other party,” the headline reads. It doesn’t get much better for those on the right.

The study of 850 college students finds 71% of Democrats would not go on a date with someone who voted for Donald Trump. Just 31% of Republicans surveyed said they would not go on a date with a Biden voter.

It also found four out of 10 Democrats would not shop at or support a business of Trump voters. Just seven percent of Republicans felt the same way about Biden voters.

Three in 10 Biden voters would not work for someone who voted for Trump. Just seven percent of Trump voters felt that way about a Biden-voting boss.

Some of those on the right are bristling at the results of the poll, with one pointing to the line that talks about dating as “terrifying.”

When asked if they would be friends with someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate, more than one in three Democrats/Biden voters (37%) said no. Just 5% of Trump voters said they could not be friends with a Biden voter.

“Democrats argue that modern GOP positions, spearheaded by former President Trump — are far outside of the mainstream and polite conversation,” Axios explains.

But for those on the left it goes even deeper.

“Some have expressed unyielding positions on matters of identity — including abortion, LGBTQ rights and immigration — where they argue human rights, and not just policy differences, are at stake.”

Some conservatives reacted angrily, and others used it as a tool to bash Democrats. None appeared interested in examining the actions of the right that led to the poll results, such as working to weaponize religion, and attacking abortion, same-sex marriage, voting rights, the Affordable Care Act, mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing, Black Lives Matter and the equality of people of color, the integrity of America’s electoral systems, and Democrats themselves.

Attorney and former Trump DOJ spokesperson Sarah Isgur commented on the poll by saying it “doesn’t bode well.”

Andrew Follett, a senior research analyst at the right wing Club for Growth called the lines on dating “terrifying.”

---

anyone who does not accept story 1 hates am, is not a patriot:

https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/genocide-denial-racist-myths-and-fight-against-canceling-columbus-look-0

no lnx ,ammy

Genocide denial, racist myths, and the fight against canceling Columbus: A look at One America News’ anti-Indigenous coverage

Over the past nine months, OAN has disseminated racist, revisionist content about Indigenous people in Canada and the United States. AT&T is responsible.

WRITTEN BY BEATRICE MOUNT

PUBLISHED 11/24/21

Note: The subjects discussed in this article may be triggering for some readers. If you need immediate care or long-term support, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has compiled a culturally sensitive resource kit.

Since February, right-wing cable outlet One America News Network has revived some of its favorite white nationalist conspiracy theories, bigoted lies, and racial epithets in a series of incendiary segments targeting Indigenous people of North America. Hosts, reporters, and guests have thrown fit after fit about small recognitions made in 2020 and 2021 to acknowledge the whitewashed history of colonization, power imbalances, and racist depictions of Indigenous people in North America.

In June, the network turned to full-fledged genocide denialism after ground-penetrating radar uncovered over 1,300 unmarked graves of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children killed under Canada’s residential school policy. Canada's 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the residential school system a "cultural genocide" of Indigenous people, and the federal government formally apologized for it in 2008.OAN downplayed this history and dismissed the discovery of the graves as an “excuse” for “an anti-Christian crusade.”

In October, OAN used Indigenous Peoples Day to praise Christopher Columbus and Europeans for “civilizing” the “savages.” And throughout the nine-month period, OAN figures regurgitated right-wing talking points about “social justice warriors” forcing sports teams to change their names from racist slurs and “erasing” Columbus from our calendars.

Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation revealed that telecom giant AT&T had played a key role in creating and funding the far-right network, with 90% of OAN's revenue reportedly coming from its AT&T contract.

Less than a month later, in November, AT&T Vice President Tom Brooks (a member of the Kanien'kehà:ka nation) renewed his company's commitment to “support Indigenous peoples” for Native American Heritage Month. That marked AT&T’s latest commitment to support Indigenous people via nonprofit fundraising, policy research and advocacy, and its Inter-Tribal Council of AT&T employees.

But the company can't have it both ways: AT&T cannot support Indigenous rights in one breath while funding OAN in the next.

As we recognize National Native American Heritage Month, here’s a look at how OAN has attacked Indigenous people so far this year -- all enabled by AT&T’s continued support for the network

Key narratives

OAN denied the history of genocidal policies used to assimilate Indigenous children

In the 1800s, governments in the U.S. and Canada partnered with churches to force Indigenous children into boarding schools under a genocidal assimilation policy with the explicit goal to “kill the Indian, save the man.” An estimated minimum of 6,000 Indigenous children died from injuries, illness, abuse, and neglect sustained in Canada’s system alone. Countless more children disappeared alongside their languages, cultures, and traditional teachings. By the time Canada shuttered the last of these schools in 1996, the residential school system left behind an ongoing, traumatic legacy extending far beyond the immediate survivors of the cultural genocide.

This traumatic legacy made headlines earlier this year after the discovery of over 1,300 bodies on the sites of former residential schools in Canada. In the U.S., the story prompted Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (a member of the Pueblo of Laguna) to order the first comprehensive federal review of American residential schools with an explicit “emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites.” While imperfect, this order is a significant first step in America’s own slow reckoning with its genocidal assimilation policies -- one that OAN seems intent to undermine by spreading disinformation to its viewers.

Led by Tipping Point host Kara McKinney, OAN treated the discovery of more than a thousand Indigenous children’s graves as a lie meant to target churches, drawing a tenuous connection between the discoveries and a string of church vandalism and arson across Canada.

On July 12, McKinney called the reporting on mass graves of Indigenous people at former residential schools an “odious lie” used to “excuse” the “desecration of holy grounds.”

On July 23, McKinney asserted that the media had “exaggerated” its coverage of residential schools, stating, “Just like the history of slavery in America gets overexaggerated in some cases in order to be weaponized to reorder society to this day -- they make everything about race -- the same thing is happening with these schools in Canada.”

Days later, OAN irresponsibly blamed Canadian church fires on “activists seeking revenge for Indigenous students,” comparing them to “American churches [that] were burned down or vandalized” by “George Floyd protesters” in 2020. (Though some suspects have since been arrested and charged for the Canadian fires, authorities there have yet to discuss their possible motivations.)

In a Tipping Point segment promoting her deceptive YouTube video “The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax,” alt-right troll Lauren Southern downplayed the discoveries at former residential schools, saying, “If you scratch past the surface, none of it is true.” She later claimed that “it is a far stretch to say a pit of murdered children with thousands of bodies across Canada and a gravesite that the markers have been lost -- a massive stretch, and one that ... led to mass hatred and hate crimes and terrorism, quite frankly, across Canada.”

OAN mocked Indigenous Peoples Day

OAN was outraged after President Joe Biden issued a proclamation officially recognizing October 8 as Indigenous Peoples Day. The move neither removed nor replaced Columbus Day, which is still a federally recognized holiday. Instead, it simply shifted focus onto the Indigenous community by creating what the Indigenous Peoples’ Initiative calls a “more powerful, more accurate, and more inspiring narrative about the contemporary Native experience” than the whitewashed history of colonization long perpetuated by Columbus Day.

That didn’t stop OAN from calling the move a leftist attempt to divide America. OAN hosts and guests accused Biden of “trying to erase Italian Americans,” whitewashed and defended genocide, and used derogatory terms to refer to Native Americans.

Host Stephanie Hamill discussed the “divisive” decision with Andre DiMino, executive board member of the Italian American One Voice Coalition, who portrayed the recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day as Democrats “trying to revise history and attack western culture by starting at the foundation, which was the uniting of the continents by Columbus.” DiMino whined that Indigenous people were taking Italian Americans’ holiday even though they already have “August 9, the day after Thanksgiving, and the whole month of November.”

Host Natalie Harp cited Indigenous Peoples Day as proof that “the people running our country, they do hate America at this point.” Her guest, conservative columnist Lee Smith, claimed the new holiday was part of “a campaign of demoralization” by Democrats to tell other Americans “that we will replace you with whoever we can drop into the country at any particular time” -- a direct reference to the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

After accusing Indigenous groups of cannibalism during her October 11 program, McKinney contradicted Columbus’ own accounts of enslaving and brutalizing Indigenous people, asserting that he “actually treated native peoples with great respect for his time" and “actively punished his own crew members when they abused and hurt the native peoples.”

After repeatedly referring to Native Americans as “savages,” host Dan Ball asked, “What if Christopher Columbus had not found and tried to colonize this land? What if European settlers ... did not come to America and civilize the Native Americans? … If this land was left to tribes that were warring for the last 500 years, what would this land look like?” These types of rhetorical questions are predicated on racist myths about Indigenous people that continue to perpetuate systemic health, economic, political, and social inequalities.

OAN attacked Indigenous activism and spread racist misconceptions about Native Americans

OAN regularly derided historic figures and activism and ensuing media coverage, paying particular attention to the Washington Football Team’s decision in July 2020 to stop using its previous racist moniker after decades of Indigenous activism against harmful and racist naming practices in sports. Hosts and guests referred to the team by the defunct name well into 2021.

OAN segments consistently criticized and undermined the historic nomination of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, claiming the media focused too much on “the fact she’s the first Native American named to a Cabinet position” instead of her supposedly “radical environmentalist agenda” to fight "so-called climate change.”

In an August 5 segment that repeatedly referred to the Washington Football Team by its racist former name, two OAN news hosts mocked Indigenous concerns and suggested that the Pittsburgh Pirates would be the next sports team to cede to “the left” and change its moniker “because a group of pirates are very upset about that.”

On the July 23 edition of The Real Story, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told Indigenous people to “stop taking everything so personally” as “it’s a total honor to name your team after the Indians, or [the Washington Football Team’s former name], or the Cherokees, or the Chiefs or whatever” because they were “very tough adversaries” who “we had to fight … in America for 400 years.”

Over a graphic stating “No Whites Allowed,” Ball suggested applying to a reparations fund meant for Black and Indigenous Californians “because I have Native American on my dad’s side, with probably more than Pocahontas,” referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), “but if I describe myself as an Indigenous person then I could apply to this.” His guest, former Trump adviser Harmeet Dhillon, said that this reparations policy is an example of “the ultimate racial privilege, really.” (Under current Federal enrollment guidelines, tribes do not consider a vague Indigenous ancestor or DNA test as valid proof of Native ancestry. Furthermore, using tenuous claims of Indigenous identity to avoid accountability for racist policies and beliefs is racist.)

On September 29, Tipping Point guest Christopher Check, president of Catholic Answers, downplayed Franciscan monk Junipero Serra’s brutal treatment toward Native American people, calling the colonizer a “saintly man that wanted nothing more than the best thing for natives of California, that eternal salvation." As Bad Indians author Deborah Miranda (Ohlone Costanoan Esselen nation) told KQED, “Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture.”

Sumantra Maitra, a senior contributor to The Federalist, used the October 11 edition of McKinney’s show to call the landback movement “a prelude to violence” and said that “the logical endpoint to that rhetoric is taking that land back, and taking that land back would've mean a reconquest,” explicitly comparing it to the Balkan genocides of the 1990s. Maitra’s comments grossly mischaracterize the landback movement, which is the latest social media-focused iteration of a broad political movement calling for settler governments to return land stewardship to Indigenous peoples.

---

hates am, hates freedom, -->hates xians, who love am and freedumb

rww 921

several Republican members of Congress, North Carolina state legislators, various candidates for office, and radical religious-right activists gathered at Temple Baptist Church in Mount Airy, North Carolina, last weekend for the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Salt & Light Conference.”

Among the politicians in attendance was Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who used his time in front of his home state crowd to declare that he is waging a “spiritual battle” in the supposedly “evil and vile” Washington, D.C., against people like Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her “cold, evil eyes.”

“I believe that the power of prayer will save this country in the coming decades,” Cawthorn. “When I’m in Washington, D.C., I know a lot of you consider the place to be evil and vile, and I am here to tell you with first-hand knowledge, it is evil and vile. But I will tell you when I’m there, I don’t feel an overwhelming sense ofdarkness as if the devilhas complete dominion of that area because I feel a spiritual battle going on on Capitol Hill. And patriots like all of you in this room, on your knees, praying that we have the cover within the spiritual fight is what it will take to save this country.”

“I have to look Nancy Pelosi in her cold, evil eyes every single day,” he continued. “She just passed a bill yesterday trying to say that we can abort babies on demand all the way up until right before the day of birth. When we hear this, when we hear the fact that if a baby comes through a botched abortion alive, sitting there on the table, they then still have the right to murder that child, we realize that when I quip and say, ‘I look her in her cold, evil eyes,’ it’s not a joke. These people hate us.”

“I will tell you, the only way that we take our country back is when strong, God-fearing patriots decide it is time for us to stand up and say, ‘No’ to your tyranny,”Cawthorn declared. “It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows, to say no longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in. We are going to stand valiantly for God’s incredible, inerrant truths that predate any version of government. Because my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, and our children will never know what freedom is. It’s our duty to stand up. I encourage you—let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It may have been the case that in the early days of Trump his supporters could rationalize backing a man with an absent moral compass, a profound disrespect for our public institutions, and a deeply and openly narcissistic personality. But the moment when a Trump supporter could hold him up as a welcome alternative to the traditional political establishment has long gone. Any hope that Trump signaled anything positive for this country has now been eclipsed by the avalanche of proof that he holds all of the core values we associate with our nation — whether from the left or the right — in profound disdain.

Take, for example, the information that has poured in just over the last month.

We learned that Trump was aware of reports of financial incentives given to Taliban fighters by officials linked to the Russian government to target and kill American troops in Afghanistan, and he did nothing about it.

We have had multiple confirmations of Trump’s inability to appreciate the value of military service, to respect veterans, and to understand the sacrifices those in the military make for their country. And that wasn’t all. Trump went after military leadership, claiming that they wage wars in order to boost the profits of defense manufacturing companies, somehow forgetting that, as President, he is Commander-in-Chief of the military.

Trump didn’t just attack the military; he attacked our electoral system as well. We have read reports of his concerted efforts to derail the electoral process and suppress voter turnout by criticizing mail-in voting and encouraging voters to vote twice. He has also repeated an expectation that election results could be delayed by months, stoking fears over a peaceful transition.

Then we also learned via Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage” that Trump only cares about himself and that he is willing to lie and deceive the American public when it suits him. Woodward reports that Trump knew well that COVID-19 posed a serious health threat, yet he deliberately downplayed it, saying he did so to avoid stoking public “panic.”

Yet, he is more than happy to foster public panic if it can help him win re-election. He has specifically suggested that if he isn’t elected in November, citizens will be in grave danger.

These more recent developments simply build on years of examples of his profoundly selfish desire to put himself before his office and above the national interest. Only last week we had further confirmation of his self-aggrandizing, unpatriotic behavior when we learned that he manipulated the Department of Homeland Security to downplay the threat of Russian election interference and minimize the threat of white supremacists.

This is a man who hasn’t protected our citizens, our health care workers, our military, our national security, or our elections. This is a man who has openly sown social division and purposefully put the future of the nation at risk.Without question, Donald Trump is the least patriotic man to have ever held the office of President. And, what’s more, he is entirely transparent about it.

How, then, to explain the fact that he still enjoys such an astonishing level of support by Republicans? Sure, there are dissenters, but the**latest Gallup poll numbersstill show Trump earning support of 90 percent of Republicans.

So, supporting Trump when he is obviously doesn’t care a wit about the United States means you can no longer claim to “love” your country.

By every metric that matters, Republicans’ ongoing support for Donald Trump officially ends any claim they have to anything resembling patriotism. Supporting Trump in the wake of these revelations suggests that your patriotism has turned into nothing more than blind fanaticism for a demagogue. There isn’t any other way to explain it.

For many, the idea that Trump and his supporters have ruined U.S. patriotism may not matter much given the fact that for many of us patriotism is too closely aligned with an uncritical American exceptionalism. The notion, though, that the rise of Trump signals the demise of Republican patriotism is a big deal for the simple fact that the Republican party has equated itself with U.S. patriotism for decades. In fact, the mere suggestion that they might not be the patriots they claim to be is likely to seem shocking even to those who are not in the party.

But that’s the thing. The left has generally allowed the Republicans to be the party of those who “love” their country because, for the left, the idea of loving your country uncritically rather than trying to make it better is ignorant and narrow-minded. If being patriotic means you can’t ask questions about the flaws in the system, interrogate injustices past and present, account for the facts of history, and point out deep hypocrisies in the national narrative, then who wants to be patriotic? So, if patriotism means loving your country, then it’s no wonder that the left gave free rein to Republicans to have at it.

And that’s exactly what they did. The story of how Republicans came to dominate the notion of U.S. patriotism is long and complex, but, as Geoffrey Nunberg points out in “Talking Right,” the key to understanding conservative control of U.S. patriotism lies in the deliberate ways that their party worked to merge conservative values with national ones.

According to Nunberg, conservatives exercised a methodical plan to co-opt terms like values, freedom, and patriotismso that these words were uniquely associated with the right — a plan that allowed them to increasingly paint the left as being unpatriotic, against freedom, and morally bankrupt.

This story is key to understanding the twisted patriotism of Trump supporters today, because it wasn’t just that the left let the right merge conservative values with patriotism; it was also that the left let the right suggest that anyone sharing a progressive platform hated their country. This was how it came to be that protesting the Iraq War or demanding accountability for systemic racism or claiming that health care in Canada was better than it is here meant you hated your country.

The love-hate patriotic drama that the right was allowed to develop meant that all thoughtful conversations about what it means to support the United States were absent, replaced, instead, by the right’s increasingly hysterical claims that they were the only ones who even knew what our nation’s values were. For decades the left avoided claims about their country being great, offering, instead, visions for hope and change and a better future.

The distinction makes sense: the right loves their country in a narrow minded and fanatical way while the left strives to take the best of America’s ideals and make them reality.The problem, though, as Nunberg explains in his book, was that the left forgot that they also needed to fight for their critical approach to nationalism to be understood as offering a set of patriotic values too. Absent that, the right was free to own the idea and mold it to their desires.

It is thanks to these developments that Trump was able to claim Ronald Reagan’s slogan and suggest that he was going to make America great again. Everyone was already used to seeing these sorts of claims from the right.

The problem, though, is that Trump has not ever wanted to make America great in any way at all. He has wanted to make it his to do with as he wishes. He has openly idolized despots and dictators. He has bemoaned that he is limited by our democratic process and commented glibly that he should be able to stay in office beyond eight years. And none of that unpatriotic, un-American behavior has caused his supporters to waver.

Because Trump’s base has spent decades forgetting what it actually means to uphold national values, they’ve been easily swayed into associating a selfish, self-aggrandizing, unethical and morally repugnant human with a patriot.Content to equate flag waving, eating hot dogs, going to football games and buying guns while wearing a red hat with being patriotic, Trump’s base has lost sight of what it means to uphold national values. For them, to love their country means loving Trump.

It’s time to push back on this love affair and call out Trump supporters for their anti-American values. No one should be able to claim that they love their country and still support him. We might disagree on whether schools should focus on teaching students the symbolism of 1619 and we might disagree on whether or not we should idolize the association of 1776 with freedom, but it’s time to agree that our nation deserves better than Trump.

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820 nugent variant freedom-hater?

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gohmert dispenses with cultural bit:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/louie-gohmert-is-a-dangerous-fool-just-like-the-president-he-so-admires/

no lnx

Michael Winship / Common Dreams August 2, 2020

A few years ago, while I was president of the Writers Guild of America, East, several union members and I went down to Washington to hold a midday briefing on Capitol Hill about net neutrality.

We were in the House Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Rayburn office building. To lure an audience, on a table at the back, we provided a pile of free paper bag lunches for the small crowd. As usual with this sort of event, most of the people who showed up were hungry young congressional staffers but at one point, a colleague poked me in the ribs, pointed and said, “Look—an actual congressman is grabbing a couple of our lunches!”

“Doesn’t count,” I replied. “It’s Louie Gohmert.”

Yes, Louie Gohmert, the man the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt described just this week as “America’s dumbest and craziest congressman.” The man who claimed the Obama White House had been infiltrated by “many Muslim Brotherhood members” and once tried to nominate as Speaker of the House a man who had just been beaten for reelection. The man who once declared that same-sex marriage caused Noah’s flood and that Charlottesville was a “false flag” operation, with people posing as KKK and Black Lives Matter protesters bused in to make trouble. The man who outed the alleged whistleblower during the impeachment proceedings and voted against a Federal anti-lynching law. And on and on…

In the latest chapter of the ongoing saga of East Texas US Rep. Gohmert holding onto his title as the biggest blockhead in Congress (admittedly, there are a lot of contenders), it was revealed that Gohmert tested positive for COVID-19 after weeks of walking around the capitol and congressional offices without a mask. His condition was caught when he was prescreened by the White House as he was getting ready to fly to West Texas with Donald Trump on Air Force One. Who knows how long he’d been walking the halls and corridors spreading contagion along with his own innate cheer and charm?

Previously, he had claimed that he didn’t needed to wear a mask because he was being tested on a regular basis. The day before his diagnosis was announced, he was sitting maskless at the House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General William Barr and at one point was seen leaving a nearby men’s room with Barr. There was minimal social distancing and Barr wasn’t wearing a mask, either.

Upon receiving word of Gohmert’s positive test, the following occurred:

Rather than call and immediately self-quarantine, he went to his office to personally inform the staff of his status. It’s uncertain as to whether he was wearing a mask.

A Gohmert aide tweeted Jake Sherman at Politico, “When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that ‘we could be an example to America on how to open up safely.’ When probing the office, you might want to ask how often people were berated for wearing masks.” Gohmert denied the beratement accusation.

Subsequently, Sherman tweeted, “Ive gotten a flood of emails from republican staffers who say they too are being forced to come to the hill without a mask now.” (sic)

In a video, Gohmert idiotically argued that wearing a mask – assuming he ever was wearing one — might have made him sick. “I can’t help but wonder if by keeping a mask on,” he said, “keeping it in place — if I might’ve got some germ, some of the virus, on the mask and breathed it in.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy accidentally referred to Gohmert as “Congressman COVID.”

As per The Washington Post, on Wednesday night, Gohmert “told Fox News host Sean Hannity he and his doctor already had agreed on a treatment: hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug pushed by President Trump and his allies despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and medical experts that it isn’t effective as a coronavirus treatment and could carry significant health risks. ‘My doctor and I are all in.'”

This all would be funny in a sardonic, blackly humorous sort of way if not for the fact that Gohmert consistently has spread misinformation about the virus, and hails from a state where the governor and other elected Republican officials were in denial about COVID, reopened too early and as of this writing have 436,402 confirmed coronavirus cases and 7,107 deaths.

And then there’s this: last Sunday, competing demonstrations were held at a public square in downtown Tyler, Texas, part of Gohmert’s district. One was a pro-police protest—with MAGA hats, Trump 2020 signs and tee shirts and at least one Confederate flag—the other a smaller counterprotest in support ofGohmert’s Democratic opponent for the House and against the presence of anonymous Federal law enforcement in Portland, Oregon.

Earlier in the week, Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce gave a heads up as to what happened next. Here’s part of an account, as reported by a local news site, The Gilmer Mirror:

Armed supporters of Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Tyler) brutally beat and assaulted Ryan Miller, the campaign manager for Gohmert’s opponent, Hank Gilbert (D-Tyler) around 2:30 PM CST Sunday during a peaceful rally organized to protest the unconstitutional occupation of Portland, Oregon on the courthouse square in downtown Tyler.

Miller was attacked by at least four protesters, some of whom were armed, and sustained blows to the head and other parts of his body, as well as a large gash under his eye. The incident occurred as officers from the Tyler Police Department drove around the square idly, waving at the Blue Lives Matter counter-protesters who had come to support Gilbert’s opponent.

Gohmert’s supporters disrupted the rally by shouting, ‘Louie! Louie! Louie!’ repeatedly, including while Miller was being brutally attacked.

A police report has been filed with Tyler police, who showed up on the square after the violence was well-underway.

Tyler police say their investigation is ongoing. But when Louie Gohmert was asked about the incident, he refused to condemn the attack and characteristically, turned the situation on its head. He responded (in part), “[W]hat came to my mind is the violence Democrat leaders paid to create at Trump campaign events in 2016, followed by Democrats then claiming Donald Trump incited violence. They created the mess, then blamed candidate Trump. There are Democrats and Marxists doing the same thing this year, as well.

… It is unfortunate thatextremistswanted to bring the violentprotests and riots we’ve seen around the country to our peaceable area here in East Texas. …The goal of the Marxist groups is to destroy this great nation through violence and intimidation, which calls into question why anyone of sound mind would want to support and replicate these violent activities in Tyler. That comes from either terrible judgment or an intent to use Bolshevik or Mao tactics.

Contrast that inflammatory lying nonsense and all his other bloviating rhetoric with the final words left us on Thursday by another congressman, the late John Lewis, laid to rest in Atlanta with bouquets of righteous eloquence from friends and colleagues, among them House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama.

“Democracy is not a state,” Rep. Lewis wrote in his farewell. “It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself… In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”

We can make fun of Louie Gohmert; he’s an easy target. But for all the buffoonery, he’s a very dangerous fellow, an enabler of Donald Trump and the forces that seek to undermine and destroy everything that John Lewis and the speakers at his funeral represent, especially true freedom and patriotism, unity and equal justice under the law.

You can go ahead and laugh at Louie Gohmert but remember, he represents the views of far too many of our fellow Americans—and he’s probably heading for re-election to his eighth term in the House.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-administration-insisted-this-democratic-congressman-hold-hearings-in-person-now-he-has-19

no lnx

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-identity-politics-has-left-us-vulnerable-coronavirus

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https://www.mediamatters.org/**tucker-**carlson/tucker-carlson-its-obvious-:{sanders-hates-country-he-seeks-lead}:

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-unleashes-his-twisted-2020-strategy-of-grievance-and-racism/

no lnx

Trump unleashes his twisted 2020 strategy of grievance and racism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019

Having only lost Minnesota by 1.5 percentage points in 2016, the Trump campaign has made it clear that they think they can win the state in 2020. That’s what Thursday night’s rally in Minneapolis was all about. Peter Nichols wrote about the strategy.

One Republican operative close to the White House, speaking anonymously to discuss campaign strategy, told me that Trump is convinced of the old political adage “The race will hinge on turnout.” If he can mobilize and excite his base voters, they’ll show up in force, much as they did in 2016, impeachment be damned…

“His message is so edgy, and his core support is so intense and enthusiastic, and the rallies are so unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era,” the strategist told me. “Arithmetically speaking, this election is about jacking up turnout of your own supporters on the theory that no one on their side of the ball excites them the way Trump excites us,” he said, referring to the Democrats.

If that’s the plan, then we can look at Thursday night’s speech to see how Trump plans to excite his supporters in order to get them to show up in force.

As Nichols pointed out, the first half of Trump’s speech was all about his personal grievances. He mocked FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, said that Joe Biden was “only considered a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass,” called Ilhan Omar an “American-hating socialist,” and referred to congressional Democrats as “sick” for pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Then Trump engaged in his second strategy for exciting his voters: racism. Because Minnesota is home to the largest concentration of Somalis in the country, they became his target.

Same old playbook: racism https://t.co/4OuUA1Hvya

— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) October 11, 2019

He then went on to say that “we will alwaysprotect American families first” and that hadn’t happened in Minnesota. He said that he would not “allow a violent ideology to take root in our country on our shores” like had happened in Europe.Equating the Somali community in Minnesota with a “violent ideology” is not only a racist lie, it is the same kind of rhetoric that inspired the gunman in El Paso.

This is, however, merely a repeat of what Trump did in 2016 when he visited Minnesota two days before the election and told the crowd that they had “suffered enough” as a result of “filthy refugee vetting” that had allowed an influx of Somalis into the state.

When it comes to this part of Trump’s strategy, Elad Nehorai, who describes himself as a “proud progressive Orthodox Jew,” put it best. He wrote that “This is the kind of hate rally seen in authoritarian and fascist countries. We Jews have seen this before, as have countless other minorities. This is the powerful hurting the vulnerable to empower themselves.” Senator Amy Klobuchar echoed that statement.

The President just attacked Somali Americans in his rally in Minnesota. Immigrants and refugees have helped make our state a wonderful place to live and work — which is far more than this President has done. Stop using immigrants and refugees as political pawns!

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) October 11, 2019

I have often been proud to point out that, when it comes to the economy, my home state of Minnesota consistently performs better than the national average. One of the reasons why is because of the very immigrant community the president attacked. Here is the data from the Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis.

With high levels of labor force participation and employment, African immigrants brought in $2.5 billion in earnings during 2015. These households paid $419 million in federal taxes and $222 million in state and local taxes, leaving African immigrants an estimated $1.8 billion in spending power. Despite its relatively small size, the African immigrant population makes significant contributions to the Minnesota economy.

At the end of his speech on Thursday night, Trump threw out a couple of lines about health care and a promise to end childhood cancer. But as Nichols wrote, “he read those parts without any particular vocal affect, perhaps because he doesn’t truly believe they’re the way to win.” It could also be because he doesn’t really give a shit about things like health care. In the end, the plan is to excite his base of supporters with a combination of grievance and racism, because that is exactly what excites him. But the truth is, that’s all he’s got.

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