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Willie Soon on Unleashed with Marc Morano - 18 May 2024 tnt talk radio, rumble iheart

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Marc Morano

Weekly update ⋅ December 12, 2025

It Could Be The End Of The Climate Cult | KTRH Local Houston and Texas News

News Radio 1200 WOAI - iHeart

"We are at a historical low point of the climate cult" said Marc Morano, publisher of the Climate Depot, "In my lifetime, I've never seen a ...

COP30 Round-Up: Failure of a UN Climate Summit Is Great News for Humanity! - HotAir

HotAir

COP30 Round-Up: Failure of a UN Climate Summit Is Great News for Humanity! Marc Morano from Real Clear Energy 11:00 AM | December 06, 2025. Thank ...

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BACK TO PLASTIC!': Trump vows executive order ending 'ridiculous' push for paper straws

WDBD Fox 40 Jackson MS

close Video Trump is turning out to be the 'greatest environmental hero' of the 21st century: Marc Morano ClimateDepot.com executive editor Marc ...

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Right-wing radio hosts in Wisconsin and other swing states are priming their audiences for election denial

With baseless suggestions of noncitizens voting, illegal ballot harvesting, and manufactured votes, Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna and others are telling listeners to reject a Trump loss before all the votes have even been cast

Written by Emma Mae Weber

Published 10/31/24 9:04 AM EDT

Updated 10/31/24 12:44 PM EDT

Right-wing radio hosts in Wisconsin and other swing states – including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — are falsely suggesting election fraud is already taking place in the 2024 election.

Hosts including Wisconsin’s Vicki McKenna have been warning about mass voting by noncitizens being part of “the cheat.” Other Wisconsin radio hosts such as Dan O’Donnell and Mark Belling, as well as right-wing hosts from other swing states, are further contributing to a flood of misinformation this election cycle, including false claims of voter fraud and a “stolen” election....more

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alternet-no lnx

When it comes to 'rage' of white rural voters, liberals may not be asking the right questions

Former President Donald J. Trump arrives to deliver remarks Thursday, August 6, 2020, at the Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Reverend Daniel Schultz May 16, 2024

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book out titled White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. It has proved controversial. There are two major objections, as I understand them. First, Schaller and Waldman may have misrepresented or misunderstood scholarship on the rural context. Second, their thesis — white rural voters pose a unique threat to American democracy — may be overstated and under-supported.

I've known of Schaller and Waldman's work for a long time, and know Tom himself at least a little. So I was a bit surprised to see the vehemence and breadth of the pushback on the new book. I was equally surprised to see other folks I know strongly defend their thesis. The authors got their own word in at The New Republic.

Is it rural or is it race?

It may surprise you to hear this, but I am neither a rural sociologist or political scientist. I decided I was in no place to give an authoritative assessment of these arguments. Then, while I was groping around for what I did want to say, Noah Berlatsky ... just went ahead and nailed it?

Democrats struggle not with rural voters in general, but with white rural voters in particular. And white rural voters do not vote for the GOP because they are rural. They vote for the GOP because they are white.

That's pretty much it. As one scholar argues, if you control for other factors, the difference between rural and urban voting patterns essentially disappears. Race is a much stronger predictor than things like income, religion or place of residence.

Let's put that more anecdotally. I've known some straight-up, stone-cold racists in rural areas. But then I've also known some in urban areas.

It's not quite as simple as saying that rural whites are a bunch of racists. But for at least some people, it's a straightforward enough syllogism:

Cities are the source of all our problems.

Black people live in cities.

Democrats run cities.

Ergo, Democrats and everything they stand for are bad and wrong.

There are variations on this theme. Illegal immigrants are overrunning our society! Democrats let them all in! Therefore, etc. Or: covid is a city problem, Democrats run cities and liberals run health departments. Therefore, we're not interested in getting vaccinated or practicing social distancing.

As with any white people, rural or urban, the supremacist elements of these formulas are more or less explicit, depending on the individual and their community. It could be that rural whites are more prone to bias due to lower levels of education. But other than that, racists are racists, no matter where you find them.

Social incentives

There is one factor particular to rural areas that deserves consideration before we look at potential answers to the "rural problem." Rural folks traditionally don't move around as much as city folks.

Deep roots feed social capital through rich networks of relations, neighbors and friends. Rural communities are able to offer impressive support to those in need or to accomplish shared goals. Think food pantries, volunteer fire companies, churches that persist with a handful of members.

But those same roots provide lots of incentives not to rock the social boat. This boils down to "Don't tick off the neighbors because you're stuck with those assholes for a long time and you never know when you might need their help." That makes it difficult to confront your loudmouth bigoted uncle. It makes it even harder to disagree with those weird dudes down the road with all the AR-15s. It also can create a "culture of bullying" that reflexively smashes down anyone who doesn't conform to gender, political or racial norms.

Asking better questions

I don't say these things to valorize or demonize rural areas. It's just that knowing them helps us to ask the right questions.

For example, Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, tells Tyler Austin Harper:

The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what is wrong with our systems — our government, our economy, our modes of communication — that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard, and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do, constructively, about that?

On the surface, this seems like a decent enough question. But it falls apart when you consider its easiest answer. Some people feel unseen, unheard and disrespected because they're bigots who have been spoon-fed a diet of resentment and entitlement courtesy of rightwing media. That leads to the practical but not very satisfying conclusion that they're best ignored in any kind of political project to the left of Attila the Hun.

You might also ask, as Thomas Frank did, What's The Matter With Kansas? Or as Frank's thesis is often formulated: Why do white rural residents vote against their economic interests?

The usual hot take is that they've been hoodwinked by Republicans into voting on culture rather than cold hard cash. But that doesn't give them much credit. They're not fools. What if they know what they're doing? What if there's something they value more than economics?

To put it more exactly: What is it that white rural voters are willing to sacrifice so much for? It could be maintaining various forms of privilege, especially racial hierarchies. Or it could be saving a rural way of life that they perceive to be under threat of vanishing. (These options are not mutually exclusive.)

Getting better answers

Whatever the case, I suspect the most productive response to the situation will involve two things. They might seem like pie-in-the-sky projects at first. But I at least think there's some cause for a bit of optimism for each of them.

Democrats and progressives will need to do a lot less writing off rural districts as hopeless and a lot more intentional work on developing solidarity with them. A revived union movement such as we're currently seeing could go a long way toward meeting this goal. So could a new "green economy." It would help if there were a leftwing media ecosystem to push the good news coming out of those developments. Rural voters may not be fools, but there is evidence that messages of economic success aren't getting through to voters. There is also a desperate need for more positive racial narratives than the ones provided by Fox News and AM radio. But that might be too much to ask, given the kind of investment it would take.

And in the end the answer to overcoming divisions between rural and urban areas will have to come from within the communities themselves. They'll never accept a solution imposed from outside, and it is their community, after all.

It may very well be that cultural differences and the tensions between extractive and information economies are too big to bridge. On the other hand, maga extremism might prove finally too much even for country mice. Trump's unpopularity might create an opening for home-grown — and less extreme — leadership to emerge. And as Schaller and Waldman point out in their New Republic piece, there is a sizable rural minority population to build upon.

On the third hand, I despair.

Why bother?

But on the fourth hand, I'm pleased to see homegrown rural Democratic candidates emerging to challenge Republican hegemony. I'm also encouraged to hear of communities adopting more inclusive policies out of self-interest, if nothing else. With time and investment, I'm fairly confident liberal messages can get through to rural voters and a progressive vision can take root.

Rural white voters aren't more extreme than anyone else in my experience. Nor are they more racist. Your mileage may vary. They are, however, primed to support Republicans in a lot of ways. It would take a lot of time and investment to overcome those factors. There are legitimate arguments to be had about how worthwhile the effort would be. I've made some of the same arguments about religious outreach.

But it can be done, and I think it should at least be attempted. It won't win Democrats the next election, probably not the next few either. But if the nation is ever to emerge from the shadow of racialized politics, it will have to confront white beliefs and practices. White racism may not be all that different in the cities than it is in the country. Still, it's as good a place to start as any. Which, come to think of it, is the tacit motto of a lot of rural places.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Why do white rural voters vote for Republicans? ›

America’s second civil war? It’s already begun ›

Economist Paul Krugman: Here’s what’s driving 'white rural rage' and 'the MAGA narrative' ›

Major Summer Protests

ByB.D. Hobbs

Apr 29, 2024

If the anti-Israel protests that are happening across the U.S. aren't bad enough, the radical climate cult is getting ready to wreck havoc this summer.

A group called 'Climate Defiance' is calling for a "historic blockade" of the Congressional Baseball Game, an annual competition where Republican and Democratic members of Congress compete in America’s favorite pastime.

"And what they're instead turning this into is, how can anyone play a game when the country is boiling, and the world is dying" said Marc Morano at the Climate Depot, "To save the climate, we need to legislate a better climate."

That is the left's agenda, and the ultimate goal is pretty simple.

"For Joe Biden to declare a national climate emergency" Morano told KTRH, "Which would give him Covid-like, and 9-11 executive powers, for which he could bypass democracy, and implement the 'Green New Deal' without a vote of Congress. That is really what this pressure is, it's just another way to put America down the road to a climate lockdown."

And if you think that sounds crazy or extreme? It is already happening in Europe, where 'going green' has been catostrophic.

"Just last week the German Transport Minister floated the idea of weekend car bans, in order to meet their net zero climate goals in Germany" noted Morano, "That is the kind of stuff, it's up to your imagination what Joe Biden could do."

The radical climate activists, who Morano says are actually doing the bidding of the elites, want Biden to do something before the November election.

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evang {talk?] radio?

Another Climate Summit - VCY.org

VCY.org

Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot says, “COP 28 is shaping up to be a doubling down on the green agenda despite the massive failure on a ...

penna Dexter

It’s December: time for another UN climate confab. Global socialists who see a climate emergencyin every heat wave are meeting in Dubai for the 28^th annual Conference of the Parties. Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depotsays, “COP 28 is shaping up to be a doubling down on the green agenda despite the massive failure on a grand global scale.”

These conferences have no effect on climate. They have sparked little significant change in energy consumption. People who have to live with these agendas are starting to push back. Three thousand U.S. auto dealers are asking President Biden to let up on his aggressive electric vehicle push. EV’s are piling up on dealers’ lots. They’re losing money on every EV sold.

Wall Street Journalcolumnist Gerard Baker observes God’s “wicked sense of humor” in that, on their way to the summit, “members of the planetary emergency rescue elite” ran into the early arrival of winter — a facet of the climate they could not control. They were stranded in Munich, where a snowstorm dumped 17 inches on the ground and forced cancellation of most outbound flights.

The private jets and snowbound adventures of attendees is just the beginning of their hypocrisy.

That so much time and money is spent on these conferences would be laughable if the climate mandates were not so damaging.

The Hillpoints out that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry has said, “There shouldn’t be any more coal power plants permitted anywhere in the world.” And yet he’s pushing what Gerard Baker describes as “some grand new partnership with China, which ”is becoming one giant coal-fired power station.”

A Bloombergreport predicts that “developed nations will be told to curb their excessive appetite for meat.” A UN report for mayors recommended a limit of three new clothing items per person per year by 2030 to fight climate change.

Apparently, climate bureaucrats are not content with the destruction of the American auto industry.

- Hamas launched its attack against Israel on October 7, with militants from the Gaza Strip targeting both civilians and Israeli military personnel. Since then, Israel has promised to eradicate Hamas, leading the Israeli military to target Gaza in an ongoing conflict that has left more than 1,400 Israelis and nearly 3,800 Palestinians dead. Al Jazeera, [10/20/23]
- Right-wing media figures fearmongered about a supposed “global day of jihad” transpiring on October 13.The notion of a “day of jihad,” in which Islamic extremists would launch Hamas-inspired attacks around the world, seemed to come in part from the mistranslation of a statement from former Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal. Without a “specific and credible threat” to the U.S., this day failed to materialize. The rhetoric nonetheless sparked increased fears of violence during a time when anti-Muslim violence is already expected to rise. Media Matters, [10/16/23; The Guardian, 10/17/23]
- An Illinois man who “‘listens to conservative talk radio on a regular basis’ and became obsessed with the war between Hamas and Israel” allegedly stabbed his 6-year-old Palestinian tenant to death in what is being investigated as a hate crime. NBC News, [10/16/23]

## Radio hosts and guests fearmongered about Islamic extremists attacking the U.S.
- Charlie Kirk told people to carry a gun to defend themselves in case sleeper cells are “activated” in the U.S. The Turning Point USA founder told his audience, “This needs to be a wake up call. They are here, they mean harm to the American homeland and I pray that they are not activated. Make sure you have a gun on you.” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/11/23]
- According to Kirk, “We have imported the dynamite right into our country.” Kirk claimed that “we have invited some of the most disgusting people on the planet into the West,” including “Third World Muslims,” and now “we shouldn’t be surprised” to see a “global day of jihad.” Media Matters, [10/16/23; Salem Media Group, The Charlie Kirk Show, 10/12/23]
- Kirk claimed that “millions of young, fighting-age Muslim men in America” have the potential to be “activated” as terrorists. Kirk said, “You have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of young, fighting-age Muslim men in America. All it takes is for a couple of them to be activated in this country.” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/12/23]
- Kirk fearmongered about the potential of Islamic terrorists crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and “shooting up a public place in the name of Allah.” Kirk said, “What's to prevent one of these Muslims that came across the border … from getting their hands on a firearm and going and shooting up a public place in the name of Allah?” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/10/23]
- Sean Hannity told his audience to take the “global day of jihad” seriously despite a lack of evidence. He proclaimed, “Hamas has now called for their supporters to make tomorrow, Friday the 13, a global day of jihad. Now I care about everyone in my audience. I'm gonna urge all of you: Take this seriously.” He added, “You know, it’s a holy war, and they want it worldwide.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [10/12/23]
- Hannity claimed there are terrorist cells in the U.S. that have already entered the country illegally and are planning attacks.He said, “I guarantee you that among the 8 million, by the end of this year, of illegal immigrants, I guarantee you people that have connections to terrorism have entered this country and that there are terror cells plotting, planning, and scheming another attack.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show,* [10/17/23]
- On right-wing pundit Eric Metaxas’ show, a guest spread the conspiracy theory that the Biden administration is allowing men from “Muslim countries” into America to be later used to cause chaos. Appearing on The Eric Metaxas Show, The Stream senior editor John Zmirak claimed, “They were letting in thousands of military-age men from Muslim countries and spreading them all over the country. Why? My theory, my conclusion is this is the next army of political police, of political thugs whom the Democrats will send out onto the streets to riot, to burn, to threaten, to intimidate, to pillage the next time it suits their political advantage.” Salem Media Group, *The Eric Metaxas Show*, [10/11/23]

## Right-wing radio hosts spread blatant Islamophobia
- Steve Deace claimed that Islam has “no compunction or reservation at all about using women and children as human shields.” “Hey, I lose a wife. I've got seven more,” Deace said, mocking Muslims. “I lose a kid, I'll make another kid with the other seven wives. And that kid, you know, was just welcomed by Allah into heaven as a hero.“ Blaze Radio, *Steve Deace Show*, [10/16/23]
- Charlie Kirk maintained that the “vast majority of Muslims” live “in the 1300s” and hold a “medieval worldview.” Kirk framed the Israel-Hamas conflict as “civilization, aka Western values, versus barbarism.” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/11/23]
- Kirk claimed Muslims are going to kidnap people “across the world.”According to Kirk, “People are going to start getting kidnapped all across the world if we mishandle this. You’re going to see a string of kidnappings,” Kirk said. “Americans don’t travel internationally nearly as much as Europeans, but we travel internationally a lot, and there's a lot of Muslims out there.” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/11/23]
- Kirk falsely claimed that Islamic law justifies killing children. “It's perfectly acceptable in Islamic law to go kill kids — perfectly fine,” Kirk said. Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/12/23]
- Shapiro claimed that the United Nations is “despicable and vile” and “filled with Islamist countries that support the death of Jews.” Westwood One, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [10/10/23]
## Right-wing radio hosts dehumanized Palestinians
- Charlie Kirk claimed Palestinians in Gaza are “savage animals.” The TPUSA founder and Salem Media Group radio host stated, “To be clear, they will — they'll take you out of the car and cut your head off and parade you through the streets. They're really nice people we got dealing with here. And I'll never forget — as soon as they see an Israeli license plate, they're savage animals, they’ll come after you.” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/11/23]
- Mark Levin declared, “The Israelis are up against these animals — they’re not even animals,” before calling Palestinians “subhumans.” On his Westwood One radio show, Levin also questioned why the safety of Palestinian civilians should be considered, “particularly when the enemy wants its own civilians killed.” Westwood One, *The Mark Levin Show*, [10/13/23]
- Levin: “And I'm supposed to, what, shed crocodile tears, for what's going to happen to these people?”Levin also called people in Gaza “barbarians” and said that their deaths are not Israel’s responsibility. Levin continued, “I'm not. Maybe I'm the only one who will voice it, but I'm not. Israel has every right to throw every damn thing it has at barbarians. And if there are innocent people, quote-unquote ‘civilians’ who are killed, then maybe they ought to organize to take out the government they elected, but it's not Israel's responsibility." Westwood One, *The Mark Levin Show*, [10/10/23]
- Levin implied that all Palestinians are evil and said that if “there's collateral damage” when Israel attacks Gaza, “so be it.” According to Levin, “One side is immoral and evil. The other side is moral and good. It's that simple.” Westwood One, *The Mark Levin Show*, [10/17/23]
- Steve Deace claimed that Palestinians are “basically Arab squatters, people who were kicked out of countries like Jordan, who didn't want them.” The Blaze Radio host said, “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian. It’s a people group that does not exist. They’re basically Arab squatters, people who were kicked out of countries like Jordan, who didn’t want them.” Blaze Radio, *The Steve Deace Show*, [10/13/23]
- Blaze Radio producer Aaron McIntire claimed that Palestinian civilians “don’t exist” and also called them “squatters.”McIntire said, “What you do with the Palestinian civilians — that don’t exist — what you do with the people, the squatters, who live in the area known as Gaza Strip: Make Egypt take them, make the Arab nations, Arab neighbors take them.” Blaze Radio, *The Steve Deace Show*, [10/13/23]
- Deace also said, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people as a people group.”He stated, “The people identifying as Palestinians — and they're not all Muslims, they're not all, you know, Hamas crazies, and every one of them's made in the image of God. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a Palestinian people as a people group. These are folks from other Arab countries, a lot of them, a legacy like in Jordan that were kicked out of those countries, and there's a reason why these Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt are closing their borders to them now. They don't want them back.” Blaze Radio, *Steve Deace Show*,[10/16/23]
- Charlie Kirk claimed Palestinians are all antisemitic to justify attacking them: “The reality is Hamas and the Arab world, they just hate Jews. They just want Jews dead.” Salem Media Group, T*he Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/12/23]

## Right-wing radio figures tried to justify withholding aid to Palestinians
- Sean Hannity said any humanitarian aid to Palestine will help Hamas. Hannity stated, “Any humanitarian aid you want to give the innocent people in Gaza — I don't know what the percentage is because I don't know how deep their indoctrination is — will not go to the civilians. Innocents won't see this aid. It will go to Hamas, and they will build out their terror network.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [10/18/23]
- Ben Shapiro said “turning off water and electricity in military areas is normal” and emphasized that Israel is trying to avoid targeting civilians. Westwood One, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [10/16/23]
- Shapiro claimed that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a humanitarian organization, allows for “Jew hatred” and should not be supported. According to Shapiro, “The UNRWA, the U.N. refugees administration, which is an agency that is specifically dedicated only to the Palestinians, it’s amazing. It’s a garbage administration run internationally that allows for full indoctrination in Jew hatred at UNRWA schools and the hiding of weaponry beneath UNRWA schools. They admitted yesterday on Twitter, briefly, that Hamas was literally stealing aid and then they deleted it because they’re afraid that Hamas might get mad at them.” Westwood One, T*he Ben Shapiro Show*, [10/17/23]
- On The Mark Levin Show, the president of the Zionist Organization of America declared: “The civilians are not innocent.”ZOA National President Mort Klein said that the U.S. should withhold aid because Palestinian civilians were also guilty for Hamas’ October 7 attack, saying, “In any war, do you do something against the civilians there? Do we do anything for the Vietnam civilians? For the Iraqi civilians? For the German civilians? No. It is a war. And yet strangely enough when it's Israel fighting Hamas Nazis, we want to aid the civilians. And I must add, the civilians are not innocent.” Westwood One, *The Mark Levin Show*, [10/18/23]

## Right-wing radio figures defended or downplayed civilian casualties in Gaza
- Mark Levin complained that asking Israel not to bomb schools or cut off food and medication to Gazan civilians constitutes too many “conditions.”Levin said: “Urban battle: It’s going to be very hard. Of course it is, but the Israelis are being told by our government, ‘Make sure your feed the population, make sure you medicate the population, make sure you don’t hit a mosque, a hospital, a school, don’t hit any of those. Now go for it.’ Look at all these conditions. All these conditions.” Westwood One, *The Mark Levin Show*, [10/16/23]
- Brian Kilmeade suggested civilians should not be let out of Gaza because terrorists might escape. According to the Fox News and radio host, “Word is — there’s some word that we are pressuring — the U.S. is pressuring Israel to hold off on the invasion so that more civilians get out. But you know who else gets out? The terrorists! Who are going to plot and plan another day and be treated like heroes when the red carpet comes out with a lot of these evil regimes or the Muslim Brotherhood affiliates around the world around the globe. “ Fox News Radio, *The Brian Kilmeade Show*, [10/16/23]
- Shapiro excused civilian casualties as necessary to achieve Israeli military objectives, saying, “This notion, that it is incumbent on Israel not to achieve its military objectives in order to prevent civilian casualties caused by Hamas, is absurd on its face.” Westwood One, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [10/17/23]
- Shapiro also said that Palestinian civilians should not be prioritized over “the first rule of war: winning.” According to Shapiro, “Yes, of course, those of moral bent ought to work to minimize civilian casualties. Yes, of course, those of moral bent ought to work to find a place for civilians to escape from the line of fire. But neither of those rules can be prioritized over the first rule of war: winning. War is ugly by nature. Nearly the ugliest thing. As it turns out, there’s only one thing uglier: losing to those who don’t care about morality or decency at all.” Westwood One, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [10/16/23]
- Sean Hannity claimed Hamas and Iran, not Israel, are to blame for civilian deaths in Gaza. According to the Fox News and radio host, “The people of Palestine — those that have been killed and will be killed — you can only blame one group, and that would be the terrorist group Hamas. Well, you can blame another group too — the No. 1 state sponsor of terror that helped, apparently, organize, foment these attacks against Israel. That would be Iran.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [10/16/23]
- Kilmeade said it’s “not Israel’s problem” that civilians are collateral damage in eradicating Hamas.According to Kilmeade, “They say go by the rules of war, and — the best you can — but if Hamas is going to use these people as human shields, prevent them from leaving, or going south, or leaving their building — even though it’s gonna be targeted — that’s not Israel’s problem, it’s their problem.” Fox News Radio, *The Brian Kilmeade Show*, [10/16/23]
- Beck claimed there are “no Israeli war crimes” and said that “every innocent harmed in Gaza is on Hamas.” Beck dismissed the number of casualties caused by Israel, arguing, “Every piece of human suffering in Gaza is on Hamas. Want more peace? Have less Hamas.” Blaze Radio, *The Glenn Beck Program*, [10/17/23]

## Right-wing radio figures tried to justify the complete elimination of Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip
- Blaze Radio founder Glenn Beck said Israel should make Gaza into a “parking lot,” claiming the over 2 million Palestinians who live there are simply the tools of “people who just want to kill Jews.”Beck stated, “I think Israel should park their car there. You know what I mean? Park a lot of cars there. It could be, you know, some sort of a parking lot that they make it. … The Palestinian people have been used over and over again by people who just want to kill Jews. That's it. That's — that's been the thing from the very beginning." Blaze Radio, *The Glenn Beck Program*, [10/16/23]
- Salem radio guest: “I’m OK” with an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.During an appearance on Salem Media’s The Charlie Kirk Show, Breitbart writer Joel Pollak stated, “I don’t think it’s going to be something people consider, but it's there. It's a possibility, and frankly I'm OK with it. I say that at the risk of being accused of all kinds of stuff, but, you know, if it comes down to ethnic cleansing, if you want to cleanse my people, I'll cleanse yours first. I mean, that’s where we are.” Salem Media Group, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [10/9/23]

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AHA ? : did talk radio supplant local news? radio and podcast blend, and often has video now; snn radio amplifies fake paper website [trump picks up boost/escalate, feedback back into eyeballs/ratings [then RNC/GOP $]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-election-claims/

Since the 2020 presidential election, conservative news outlets have been popping up in droves to continue circulating former President Donald Trump's big lie about the election.

So how are outlets continuing to do this? According to NPR, it is more of a trick of the eye. The publication https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011916687/how-pro-trump-local-news-sites-keep-pushing-2020-election-misinformation.

While the publication appears to be just a local news outlet, NPR reports that it is actually flagship of a news syndicate, known as The Star News Network, which consists of several pro-Trump sites. Like The Georgia Star News, the network has created similar sites for states like Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.

Per NPR:

"Its part of the Star News Network - an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida."

By focusing on states where Trump is still heavily favored among voters, the network can continue to circulate misinformation since the audience is still focused on what transpired during and after the election.

During a rally in Ohio Las weekend, Trump also added more fuel to the fire with more dangerous claims of voter fraud.

"The biggest tragedy of all is millions of Americans have lost confidence in their vote," Trump said." We can't let that happen. And that's why I say you have to know what took place in 2020 before you can vote in 2022 or 2024."

To name mafter worse, conservative publisher John Fredericks defended defended sites and the information they share.

"We work very hard to fund our operation through legitimate advertising of all kinds, people that want to reach our expanding audience," he said. "And if somebody needs to reach informed, motivated readers that want the truth, advertising is a great opportunity for them, is a great [return on investment] potential."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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aha hmmn: talk radio is losing meaning as podcasts can have video? but these build on radio foundation?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/radical-right-wing-broadcaster-pete-santilli-calls-for-obama-and-clinton-to-be-executed-in-response-to-trumps-indictment/

rww 4 23

when news reports first broke that former President Donald Trump was likely to be indicted over the hush money payments he made to a pornographic actress with whom he had an alleged extramarital affair, radical right-wing broadcaster Pete Santilli reacted by calling on the military and law enforcement to round up former President Barack Obama and other members of a supposed “criminal cabal,” line them up against a wall, and execute them.

[twt]

santilli is a right-wing conspiracy theorist who was deeply involved in the 2014 Bundy standoff and who once declaredthat he wanted to shoot Hillary Clinton “right in the vagina.” Give that Santilli has used his radio program to encourage violence against his perceived political opponents in the past, it was no surprise when he reacted on Saturday to the news that Trump had in fact been indicted by doubling down on his call for the military to rise up and execute Obama and others.

Santilli used the Saturday program of his “The Pete Santilli Show” to lay out a plan that he said will result in Trump being restored to the White House by the end of the month. Santilli’s plan revolves around having 150 million United States citizens send $1 to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign as a pledge of their intention to vote for him. Once Trump raises $150 million in individual $1 donations, Santilli asserted that this would conclusively demonstrate that there is no need for a presidential election in 2024 at which point the military would immediately restore Trump to office and execute his political enemies.

Santilli said this would be a “constitutional restoration” that he likened to the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989.

“Every single one of you that’s wearing a badge and a gun, be forewarned: We the people are rising. Serve us,” Santilli declared. “It’s not sooner or later; it’s now.”

“I’m escalating things because they’re escalating taking away my freedom,” he continued. “I wanted to wait till 2024, but no, they want to meddle in my election in 2023. Not sooner or later, now! I’m liighting the candle. Will you join me?”

“You in the military, you need to work for us and protect us,” Santilli said. “Ceaușescu was taken to the concrete wall and executed as a symbol of what I’m talking about. I want to set up a scenario where themilitary and the police have no choice but to execute Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton—through proper process. I’m not in charge of that.… I think I share a lot in common with150 million other people that don’t want communism, and if we come together and we say that the military and police are to set up a law that requires when you get overthrown by we the people and a constitutional restoration happens, that you should be swiftly brought to a concrete wall andhold a little hearing and fire away."[vid]

it is worth remembering that Santilli has hosted numerous Republican candidates for office on his show including Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel, Arizona congressional candidate Jerone Davison, and Kari Lake. Lake, the broadcaster-turned-MAGA-cultist who lost her bid for governor of Arizona last year, appeared on Santilli’s show in February, where she praised Santilli and agreed with his assertion that thenation has been overthrown by “a CIA coup.”

---

an 3 23

right-wing broadcaster Pete Santilli recently argued that the U.S. military should execute former President Barack Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice if former President Donald Trump is arrested.

In a video clip obtained by Right Wing Watch, Santilli pleaded with members of the military to take action.

"Get the military, whatever few are left that are gonna side with the people," he said. "That you military personnel and you people with guns and badges and law enforcement will succumb to the will of the people."

"And ultimately, we demand, we absolutely demand that the criminals, the criminals in this country, if you want them held accountable, the criminals are Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Susan Rice," he continued, "this entire criminal cabal that came about as a result of the murder of John F. Kennedy, the people that perpetrated the murder of John F. Kennedy, rise up to that."

"Military, join us and put all of them up against a concrete wall... and do what we must do to save not just our country, the entire world," he implored.

Watch the video below or at this link

---

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/13/capitol-officer-sicknick-time-traveled-then-died-from-the-covid-vax-suggests-far-right-radio-host.html

---

aha murdoch tabloid NY post and rw talk radio part of RW conservative media

[[ 8 22 update BTW in last month 2 sci artls prove that it was wet mkt?

a case study in RW bad faith? jrnl fail

aha hmmn 8 22 connect to target fauci // bogeyman conspir req single cause/bad guy a la soros

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-turned-dr-fauci

matt g

no lnx many vid]

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official and a public health adviser to seven presidents, announced on Monday that he plans to retire in December after more than 50 years of public service. President Joe Biden toasted Fauci as “a steady hand with wisdom and insight honed over decades” and praised his “unparalleled spirit, energy, and scientific integrity,” while top scientists touted his record of “sav[ing] countless lives.”

While Fauci once earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President George W. Bush, his impending retirement was not greeted with plaudits from the right. On Fox News that night, Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue described him as “a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” The New York Post headlined its editorial the next day “Good riddance to dangerous Dr. Fauci,” while The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board concluded that “his legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.”

Fauci, like everyone else involved in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans, does not have a perfect record. But he spent his career trying to remain impartial, avoid partisanship, and offer the best advice he could, and for decades, he was respected on both sides of the political aisle. That reputation ultimately could not survive the relentless propaganda of the right-wing press, which needed a coronavirus scapegoat and found one in the octogenarian scientist.

Right-wing propagandists began turning Fauci into their latest hate object in March 2020.At the time, states had imposed stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures that were recommended by the Trump administration to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. Fox and other pro-Trump outlets consistently downplayed the threat posed by the virus and promoted a minimalistic response that dismissed such efforts in favor of snake oil miracle cures.

Trump’s media supporters could not or would not try to directly challenge the president, and settled instead on targeting Fauci, who was a face of the administration’s response. He initially drew their ire as a critic of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, the malaria drugs thatFox hostsand then the president had recommended as a coronavirus treatment (numerous studies have found the drugs ineffective) and as part of the supposed “ruling class” that could weather a long-term economic shutdown.

At the time, even right-wing pugilists likeFox’s Tucker Carlson were still pulling their punches. “Imagine another year of this,” he said on his April 3, 2020, show. “That would be national suicide, and yet, that is what Anthony Fauci is suggesting, at least.” But Carlson went on to acknowledge that Fauci wasn’t trying to “hurt America,” saying that he “seems like a very decent man” who was simply misguided.

That gentility would not last. The pro-Trump media — and Carlson in particular — became increasingly unhinged and vituperative toward Fauci as the pandemic wore on. Ultimately, the right-wing attacks on Fauci had dramatic impacts for the country.

By mid-May of 2020, Fox’s prime-time stars had decided that the crisis was over. When Fauci said in congressional testimony that it was not, and that the virus was likely to recur in the fall and winter, they began pushing for Trump to fire him.On programs that the Fox-obsessed president watched religiously, they portrayed Fauci as power-mad and using his influence to “favor what the Democrats want.” Those attacks continued over the following weeks and months.

In July, Trump began publicly echoing the right-wing media’s concerns about Fauci. The following month, the president appointed Scott Atlas, a radiologist and right-wing think tanker who caught his attention through frequent Fox appearances, to the White House coronavirus task force.

Atlas effectively displaced Fauci as Trump’s top coronavirus adviser, and used that position to promote a “herd immunity” strategy for coping with the virus. His actions ultimately helped bring about the very wave of hospitalizations and deaths Fauci had earned the opprobrium of the right for warning about months earlier.

But the right’s attacks on Fauci continued over the months and years to come.

Carlson was the scientist’s most implacable media foe. He described Fauci as an “elderly power-drunk epidemiologist”; “capricious and transparently political”; a “hypocritical buffoon”; an “oily politician on an ego trip”; and an “even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.” He denounced the scientist’s recommendations as “authoritarian,” falsely claimed that Fauci “helped to create” the coronavirus, and called for him to “never work in public policy again.”

Other right-wing pundits demonized Fauci as “one of the great criminals of our civilization” and a member of the “medical deep state” who was “on a jihad” against Trump and behaves “more like a monarch.” They called for an investigation into his purported crimes and fantasized about him being put in “leg irons” or even beheaded. They even accused him — falsely — of killing puppies, with one describing him as “the dog-murdering and orphan-killing doctor, Anthony Benito Fauci.”

Fox’s attacks on Fauci have become so habitual that they often seemed to serve as background noise on the right-wing channel. But at times, the network’s talking heads have issued comments so abhorrent that they trigger widespread public outrage and even a response from the network brass. Fox sidelined Lara Logan, a host on the network’s streaming service, after she compared Fauci to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele during a November 2021 appearance.The following month, the network publicly defended host Jesse Watters after he drew controversy for exhorting an audience of young right-wing activists to “ambush” Fauci with a rhetorical “deadly” “kill shot.”

Amid the flurry of often violent public criticism, Fauci divulged that he regularly received threats. Earlier this month, a man was sentenced to more than three years in prison for sending Fauci emails with comments like “You and your entire family will be dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.”

Fauci’s retirement announcement has opened a debate about who might succeed him. But senior members of the U.S. medical establishment are warning that the right’s attacks on Fauci may limit the pool of applicants willing to try to fill his shoes.

“What keeps the former surgeon general [Jerome Adams] up at night is his fear that talented candidates won’t want these jobs after what Fauci and other public health officials have faced over the last few years,” Politico reported on Monday. “Fauci has received death threats, and his daughters have been harassed — and Adams worries that this vitriol is a big part of why Fauci is stepping down.”

When the next pandemic hits, the U.S. response might thus be hobbled, thanks to the right-wing media’s impulse to destroy a vital public servant for political gain.

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-promise-harass-anthony-fauci-retirement-if-republicans-win-back-control

no lnx vid

Right-wing media promise to harass Anthony Fauci in retirement if Republicans win back control of Congress

Fauci’s retirement announcement was met with a new flurry of vitriol from right-wing media

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD, BUSHRA SULTANA & SHELBY JAMERSON

PUBLISHED 08/24/22

When presidential medical adviser Anthony Fauci announced his plans to retire in December after five decades of public service, right-wing media personalities predictably attacked him, calling him a “sociopathic liar and political hack” who “needs to be held accountable for all of the lies and misdirections.”

On Monday, Fauci announced he intends to step down as President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser and as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In response, right-wing media mounted a public onslaught, claiming that Fauci is stepping down to avoid investigations if Republicans take control of Congress in November, directing the GOP to investigate Fauci if the party should take control, proclaiming Fauci should face criminal charges and be sent to prison, and generally attacking his character.

Even Fox anchor Neil Cavuto, who had previously served as a seeming voice of reason and who has previously interviewed Fauci at the network, pressed the retiring public servant about whether his retirement was really just “a way to avoid Republican investigators.”

Video

Citation From the August 23, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto

Right-wing media, especially Fox News, have been maligning Fauci since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted, then-President Donald Trump’s “media supporters could not or would not try to directly challenge the president,” whose administration’s response included recommendations of stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures, “and settled instead on targeting Fauci, who was a face of the administration’s response.” The smear campaign against Fauci didn’t stop;over a roughly 10-month period in 2021, Fox News personalities attacked him over 400 times.

Fauci may plan to retire at the end of the year, but the right-wing echo chamber is prepared to hound him for years to come if given the opportunity.

Claims that Fauci is stepping down to avoid oversight

Fox prime-time star Tucker Carlsonspeculated that Fauci may have resigned because he thinks the Republicans are going to take over Congress in the midterm elections and does not want to be investigated by them. “So it's possible that Tony Fauci might want to resign before he has to explain all of that to a new Congress,” Carlson said. “He might want to get out of town now and move to, say, Cambridge, find a safe place to hide before the reckoning. Just a thought. Because honestly, there's a lot to answer for.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/22/22]

Fox prime-time host Laura Ingrahamspeculated that “Fauci thinks this retirement would save him from a congressional investigation or a subpoena.” She then interviewed Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who said congressional Republicans would want to investigate Fauci based on the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 virus was human-made. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/22/22]

Right-wing radio host Buck Sexton claimed, “Sociopathic liar and political hack Fauci is making a run for it before Republicans can take over the House.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch claimed Fauci “doesn't want that GOP-controlled House oversight.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Fox prime-time host Jesse Wattersclaimed that Fauci “seems to think stepping down before Republicans take the House will get him off scot-free.” Watters made this pronouncement just hours after Fauci appeared on Fox and told Neil Cavuto that he would not avoid appearing before Congress. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/23/22]

The National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam: “BREAKING: Fauci to step down right before Republicans are expected to take control of Congress and commence investigations into his funding of the Wuhan Lab and pandemic response.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Conservative pundit Mercedes Schlapp claimed “it's no coincidence” that Fauci announced he will step down in December, noting that it “is right after Republicans will take back the House and immediately plan oversight into our pandemic response and hisfunding of gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab.”[Twitter, 8/22/22]

Calls for congressional Republicans to investigate Fauci

Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity declared that “Fauci still needs to be held accountable for all of the lies and misdirections.” He then interviewedSen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who predicted that if there is a Republican-controlled Congress, it would subpoena Fauci to testify next year. [Fox News, Hannity, 8/22/22]

Fox’s “news side” presented a more respectable face for the right’s determination to investigate Fauci. Fox contributor Marc Thiessen discussed the need for an “after-action study” of the nation’s COVID-19 response, while blaming Fauci for various aspects of both the pandemic response and its economic consequences. Concluding the segment, co-anchor Bill Hemmer said that in “2023, I think we’ll see him again.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 8/23/22]

Fox anchor Sandra Smith asked Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS): “What do you want to see happen as far as holding Dr. Anthony Fauci accountable for his actions during this pandemic?” Marshall then repeatedly and falsely accused Fauci of covering up the supposed creation of COVID-19 in a lab, statements which Smith did not challenge. [Fox News, America Reports, 8/23/22; FactCheck.org, 5/19/22]

Former White House adviser Peter Navarro said on Newsmax that the government should to “take that SOB’s passport” so Fauci cannot flee a Republican-led congressional investigation.Navarro himself was recently indicted for a charge of contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. [Newsmax, Eric Bolling: The Balance, 8/22/22; NPR, 6/4/22]

Calls for Fauci’s to face criminal charges and/or prison

“Stop the Steal” organizer Alex Bruesewitz wrote that Fauci “should be investigated, and quite frankly arrested, for what he put our country through.” [Twitter, 8/22/22; Media Matters, 7/27/22]

:{:{}:

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk declared that Fauci “belongs in prison.” He continued, “Seize the passports. Freeze his pension, distribute it to his victims. Lawyer up. Time to hold him accountable for the last 3 years.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Right-wing radio host Clay Travis wrote that Fauci “belongs in prison,” claiming he is the “most destructive bureaucrat in United States history.” Travis also said Fauci’s “‘leadership’ on covid will — in the decades ahead — come to be seen as one of the greatest and most destructive failures in our nation’s history.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Right-wing podcasters Diamond & Silk: “Fauci doesn't need to just step down, he should be arrested for Crimes Against Humanity!” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Attacks on Fauci’s character

In his opening monologue, Fox's Carlson said, “On some level, even Tony Fauci knows that Tony Fauci is in fact a dangerous fraud.” Carlson further elaborated that Fauci “has done things that in most countries at most times in history would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/22/22]

Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy called Fauci an “authoritarian monster.” She claimed Fauci “led our country on aChinese-style approach instead of an American-style where we look at science.” [Fox News, The Five, 8/23/22]

Washington Examiner’s Haisten Willis described Fauci as someone some people “feel is … self-promoting, unaccountable, and even liable for helping start the pandemic.” [Washington Examiner, 8/22/22]

Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen: “Never has anybody been so wrong about so much for so long and been so lionized as Anthony Fauci.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 8/23/22]

Sean Duffy, Fox News contributor and former member of Congress, repeatedly accused Fauci of having “Chinese” principles instead of American ones in his supposed use of the power of government. [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 8/23/22]

Fox News’ Katie Pavlich said it is “sickening” the way Fauci supposedly let “power and fame” go to his head.Pavlich tweeted, “In March 2020 Fauci actually told the truth about who Wuhan coronavirus was deadly for, the elderly and those with comorbidities. He said it was ‘very clear.’ He also said drug store masks don’t work. Then, he got a taste of power and fame he just couldn’t let go. Sickening.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

New York Post columnist Karol Markowiczon Fauci: “His half-century of ‘public service’ was a disaster for us. His handling of covid should be studied in the future as a blueprint of what not to do.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]

Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro called Fauci “a true douchebag.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 08/23/22]

Right-wing media gadflyBenny Johnson called Fauci “the most evil and malevolent character in my lifetime.” [The Benny Show, via YouTube, 8/23/22] ]]

---

AHA: correction is a journalistic norm, not a law thus no real penalty for lying or just sloppiness (recall jrnl biz values the scoop 1st, thus speed vs accuracy, and clickbait values hype/eyeballs/ fear hate algo boost]

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011916687/how-pro-trump-local-news-sites-keep-pushing-2020-election-misinformation.

no lnx

How Pro-Trump Local News Sites Keep Pushing 2020 Election Misinformation

July 2, 20215:00 AM ET

STEPHEN FOWLER

FROM

Georgia Public Broadcasting

Georgia election workers begin their recount of ballots after the November election. Despite three recounts of the tally, former President Donald Trump and his allies falsely claim electoral fraud cost him the state.

If you don't follow politics in Georgia closely — or even if you do — you might be forgiven for not knowing much about The Georgia Star News.

Founded just after the November election when President Biden narrowly flipped the state by about 12,000 votes, it looks like a regular news website with a lifestyle section, a widget for the weather and stories about local and national goings-on.

But the site is more than just a local news outlet. It's part of the Star News Network — an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida.

Steve Bannon, a former strategist for former President Donald Trump, described The Georgia Star News in a radio interview as content "you can't get anywhere else."

"We're not Conservative Inc.," he said. "It's very populist, it's very nationalist, it's very MAGA, it's very American First."

Pro-Trump media ecosystem

The Star News sites are part of a larger pro-Trump media ecosystem that emerged over the course of his four years in office. Since last year's election, some of those sites have spent months churning out false content suggesting Trump won the election and claiming that massive electoral fraud will be uncovered.

Many of the Star News sites have been around for a while, but the 2020 election — and an intense focus on swing states like Georgia — has helped the sites' stories reach a much a larger audience.

Georgia's fledgling website gets a boost from publisher John Fredericks' talk radio show that has featured numerous figures from Trump's orbit, including Bannon and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. His show also regularly features Georgia Republican politicians who have pushed false claims of election fraud or are challenging those who did not work to overturn the election.

Fredericks, who most recently hosted his talk show from Virginia, came to Georgia ahead of last January's dual Senate runoffs as part of an effort by conservatives (and conservative media) to support then-Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue's reelection campaign. He alsohosts aTV show on the Real America's Voice networkthat also features Bannon's "War Room: Pandemic" podcast popular with many election skeptics.

So there was a ready-made audience when the Georgia Star published a misleading story mid-June questioning the legitimacy of nearly 20,000 absentee ballots placed in Georgia drop boxes — slightly more than the margin of Biden's victory there.

The story said that Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, could not produce crucial chain of custody documentation for ballots returned in drop boxes, suggesting that the ballots may not have been legitimate.

Days later, county officials were able to find all but eight of those forms, said all the ballots were accounted for — and noted that Georgia's votes were counted three different times in November.

"The most explosive thing" ESCA ECHO

But in the conservative alternate media sphere, the story began to pick up steam. On Fredericks' radio show, Bannon called it "the most explosive thing that I think has happened in the entire process."

From there it ricocheted across the pro-Trump mediasphere to TV networks like One America News and conspiracy sites such as The Gateway Pundit.

But the story was not limited to the fringe of Republican politics: several pro-Trump lawmakers and primary challengers in Georgia demanded an investigation. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — himself a frequent target of misinformation, attacks and death threats because of these sites — did too. That led mainstream outlets to run with Raffensperger's response, pushing the story further into the spotlight.

Just a few days after the original Georgia Star story, Trump issued several statements linking to a One America News segment about the misleading story and praising the Georgia Star writer by name for "the incredible reporting you have done."

The Georgia Star hasn't updated its original story, or several follow-up pieces, with Fulton County's release of the data.

In an interview, the story's author, Laura Baigert, blamed the county for providing incomplete documents and information.

"Not our problem to solve" ~ CORRECTION

"If they can't tell us how many forms they have and how many ballots they have, that's an issue for people who are administering an election," she said. "That's not our problem to solve that for them."

At the time, a Fulton County spokeswoman said that the county followed proper procedures in collecting the drop box ballots and the county was continuing to research the few remaining missing chain of custody forms. The county elections director said that staff spent more than 200 hours that week locating the "missing" forms before they were provided to Georgia Public Broadcasting.

But the story breathed new life into Trump's false claims, which he repeated at length during a rally last Saturday in Ohio.

"The biggest tragedy of all is millions of Americans have lost confidence in their vote," he said. "We can't let that happen. And that's why I say you have to know what took place in 2020 before you can vote in 2022 or 2024."

After the rally, Baigert snagged an exclusive half-hour interview with the former president as he rode back to the airport. The next day, an all-caps headline appeared on The Ohio Star, Georgia Star and sister sites in battlegrounds like Michigan and Arizona, touting the conversation and its key takeaway.

"There's no more important issue than the 2020 election," Trump said.

Fredericks defended the outlet's coverage in an interview and said that the Georgia Star is a credible news service for Georgians that acts as an alternative to "fake news" mainstream media."Our goal is to speak truth to power in the world of fake news, and that's really what we're dealing with, that's why we're here," he said. "That's why we have an audience."

Less than seven months into existence, Fredericks said that the website was profitable, thanks to a crush of advertising from local Republican candidates and conservative groups.

---

// fox policy?

10 21

https://www.mediamatters.org/dan-bongino/cumulus-media-gives-platform-some-radios-biggest-anti-vaccine-peddlers-despite-its-own

---

Google

Marc Morano

Weekly update · October 1, 2021

NEWS

Greta's blah blah blah will be Countered by Marc Morano's "Green New Deal -WFMZ

WFMZ Allentown

Marc Morano, author, and climate realist activist will counter many of Greta's claims to phase out fossil fuels 'immediately' in his presentation "Green New ...

Politicians Can't Stop Climate Change – Free Online Events with Dr. Guus Berkhout and ...

PR Web

Marc Morano, American author, and long-time climate realist will present “Green New Deal: The Great Regret” on Oct. 6, 2021, at 7pm MDT, with live Q&A to ...

New Yorker Magazine Has a Moral Obligation to Open the Climate Debate Before COP26 ...

WFMZ Allentown

... part two ofFriends of Science Society's 18th Annual Event online will feature American author Marc Morano with "Green New Deal: The Great Regret".

Greta's blah blah blah will be Countered by Marc Morano's “Green New Deal - The Chestnut Post

The Chestnut Post

In the two-part free online event, Dr. Guus Berkhout of CLINTEL presents Oct. 2, 2021, and Marc Morano presents “Green New Deal – The Great Regret” on Oct.

Twin Attacks on Science and Freedom | FreedomFest 2021 - The New American

The New American

Marc Morano is the founder of ClimateDepot.com, one of the most popular and informative sources of information debunking climate alarmism.

---

no lnx twt

Welcome back to HEATED, a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis—written by me, Emily Atkin.

A new anti-climate leader

Dan Bongino, a climate denier who spread the Texas wind energy lie, is gearing up to take Rush Limbaugh's place today.

Emily Atkin May 24

Dan Bongino at Fox News Channel Studios on June 18, 2019 in New York City. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images.

Rush Limbaugh’s death in February left a deep hole where some of America’s most influential climate disinformation used to be. That hole will start being filled today, as far-right Fox News pundit Dan Bongino steps in to take Limbaugh’s place.

Twitter avatar for @TPPatriots

Tea Party Patriots

@TPPatriots]

Donald Trump to Be First Guest on Bongino's Show, Expect a Powerful Debut Episode in Limbaugh's Old Time Slot

Dan Bongino will begin a new chapter of conservative talk radio Monday with former President Donald Trump as his first guest.

patriotproject.com May 23rd 2021 204 Retweets1,127 Likes

Bongino, who in 2018 declared his life mission as “owning the libs,” is already an popular purveyor of general disinformation.His Facebook page, The Bongino Report, regularly boosts false claims of election fraud, among other things.

Though the page only has about 135,000 followers, these posts “consistently land among the site’s top posts and outperform mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and Fox News,” reports Forbes. That’s in part because Facebook’s algorithim rewards misleading content from conservative creators, as Wired reported in March:

According to researchers at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, far-right purveyors of misinformation have by far the highest levels of engagement per follower compared to any other category of news source. Indeed, the researchers found that while left-leaning and centrist publications get much less engagement if they publish misinformation, the relationship is reversed on the far right, where news organizations that regularly publish false material get up to 65 percent more engagement than ones that don’t.

Bongino is about to be rewarded even further with his new radio show. Though it’s yet unclear exactly how many of the 600 stations that once ran Limbaugh’s show will pick up Bongino’s, the opportunity to pick up some of Limbaugh’s 15 million regular listeners is large. In addition, earlier this month, Fox News also announced that it would start airing a new show on Saturday nights lead by Bongino, called “The Big Saturday Show.”

Bongino is thus well-positioned to soon become one of the most influential sources of right-wing disinformation in America. Here’s what we can expect on climate front.

Less flagrant denial, more insulting liberals

Bongino is a straight-up climate denier, and for the most part, is not particularly shy about it. “These climate change alarmists have been wrong about just about everything. All their charts have been debunked,” he said on Fox in 2019. “The climate’s been relatively stable. There’s not any evidence that storms are out of control. All this stuff is made up.”

But just like the fossil fuel industry, Bongino’s anti-climate policy talking points lately have moved further away from flagrant denial. Instead, they promote more insidious falsehoods— like that wind energy was a significant contributor to deadly blackouts in Texas following February’s deep freeze, and that liberals were trying to cover it up.

Bongino delved into that subject specifically for a February episode of his podcast, which he began by strongly defending the quality of his own information regarding “What really happened with Texas and the energy system failures there.” “I never want to be first if I don’t have the facts,” he said. “I’m tired of the lies.”

Bongino went on to disparage “These filthy people on the left who can never ever tell the truth,” like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who he called a “sick little turd” for debunking Texas Republican officials’ prolific claims that wind energy was the culprit of Texas’s woes. Bongino did admit that natural gas and nuclear energy failed as well. But he said wind turbines had failed, too, and the only reason liberals were mad that Republicans were pointing it out was because they had to “protect their golden calf.”

He said liberals were taking “advantage of an ongoing tragedy to score cheap political points,” and added: “The hacks at Facebook and soviet fact-checkers will ding this segment because the facts trouble them.”

In reality, the blackouts in Texas were caused not by any particular power source, but by Texas’s failure to prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather. In order to protect their “golden calf”—fossil fuels—Republican officials publicly sought to place the majority of the blame for Texas’s blackouts on wind reliability. Practically every major news outlet in the country debunked that lie, an attempt to use a tragedy to score political points.

Still, Bongino adopted wholesale the argument made by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which was that the only reason nuclear and gas failed during the deep freeze was because it was trying to make up for the gaps in wind power. Ironically, that editorial was debunked by the journal’s own news section.

[Twitter avatar for @EricKleefeld Eric Kleefeld @EricKleefeld

Texas’ utter failure to winterize — despite a freeze and rolling blackouts 10 years ago — makes the choice of particular energy sources irrelevant. Their whole system is going down across the board!

This happens when you only pursue short-term cost cuts, don’t invest in safety.

February 18th 2021 44 Retweets213 Likes]

Green New Deal-bashing, arguments for human dominion

Here are some other trademark Bongino climate claims that we can expect to proliferate on conservative talk radio and Fox News as his profile continues to rise:

People who compare the challenge of climate change to World War II are participating in the “Moron Olympics.”

The Green New Deal is “outrageous,” “ridiculous,” and “expensive.” It looks “like it was conceived by a high schooler” and “proofread by a bartender.” It’s also not actually about climate change at all. It’s a “bad joke.”

“The climate changes all the time. Temperatures have been flat for 18 years.”

“We should care about the environment. It’s the right thing to do, if you’re really a God-loving person. But God gave us the world, not the other way around.”

“The Left is the one destroying their own credibility. Because ironically there are a lot of Republicans, me included, who are absolutely open to a conversation about a cleaner, better future, just not with a bunch of lunatics telling me the world is going to blow up.”

Moving forward, it’ll be interesting to see which advertisers are willing to sponsor claims like these. Bongino’s interview with Trump airs at noon EST. So, you know. Right now.

Bonus: Gina McCarthy on HBO]

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https://theintercept.com/2021/02/19/rip-rush-limbaugh/

AFTER RUSH LIMBAUGH died on Wednesday, there was an outpouring of analysis of his impact on U.S. politics. He popularized a hard-right perspective on economics, celebrating the worthy wealthy and pouring scorn on the undeserving poor. Along the way, he amassed a personal fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

What’s gotten no attention, however, is the hilarious irony at the core of Limbaugh’s life: His career and wealth were a handout from the U.S. government.

This is because Limbaugh was a radio broadcaster. The section of the electromagnetic spectrum used for radio is an extremely valuable resource, and different stations in the same area can’t broadcast at the same frequency. This means the federal government has to regulate radio, and grant monopolies in the form of licenses to broadcast at every point on the band. And until fairly recently, the government handed out these licenses — and thereby the opportunity to exploit the radio spectrum — at essentially no cost.

this situation is equivalent to huge gold mines on public land. Imagine if the government simply gave the rights to extract the gold to corporations, and then the corporations hired a contractor to mine the gold, splitting the proceeds with them. The contractor would easily grow stupendously wealthy. But it would be a little hard to take if he constantly lectured everyone else about the nobility of the rich and the dangers of dependence on the government.

Yet this is exactly what Limbaugh did. No. 1 on a Limbaugh list of “undeniable truths”: “There is a distinct singular American culture — rugged individualism and self-reliance — which made America great.” No. 2 on the list: “The vast majority of the rich in this country did not inherit their wealth; they earned it. They are the country’s achievers, producers, and job creators.” Down at No. 27 is “Our cities have not been neglected, but poisoned with welfare dependency funds.”

Limbaugh returned obsessively to these themes for decades, turning them into common sense in the minds of his listeners. “There will always be poor people,” he said, and “this is not the fault of the rich.” He proclaimed constantly that the super-wealthy are not under-taxed, but woefully over-taxed. (The misleading statistics he used are one of the right’sfavorite lies.)

For Limbaugh, all of this was a deeply felt issue of morality. “The rich, as you know, are under assault,” he explained. “They are maligned, criticized, ridiculed, impugned, and instead they ought to be held out and up as the role models.” Meanwhile, “There’s no question we have a dependent class in this country, and it’s growing. … These are people who have had their futures taken away from them.”

Limbaugh’s own dependency on the federal government had its roots in the Communications Act of 1934. At the time, radio was a thrilling new invention, much like the internet in the 1990s. Idealists saw it as opening vast new possibilities for public education and edification, and tried to amend the act so it would reserve 25 percent of the spectrum for nonprofit organizations. Corporations had a different view, which was that they should be given the radio spectrum so they could commercialize it and make as much money as possible.

The idealists lost when the Senate rejected their amendment. A previous 1927 bill had stated that each radio station “must be operated as if owned by the public. … It is as if people of a community should own a station and turn it over to the best man in sight with this injunction: ‘Manage this station in our interest.’” The 1934 Act downgraded this language to require that stations should operate for the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” What this meant was largely unspecified, and in any case would almost never be enforced.

Instead, most of the radio spectrum was simply handed over to corporations, for fees so low that it might as well have been free. The broadcast industry then predictably consolidated, especially since it was largely impossible for companies to lose their licenses. Sixty years after the 1934 Act, the Federal Communications Commission did start auctioning off available radio spectrum, but there has always been exceedingly little to auction. All of Limbaugh’s main stations appear to have acquired their licenses decades before the auctions were established.

This government dole made Limbaugh incredibly rich. In 2008, he signed a contract with Clear Channel Communications paying him $400 million over eight years. In 2018, he made $84.5 million. He lived in a Florida mansion worth $50 million and had a net worth at the end of his life estimated at $600 million.

In fairness to Limbaugh, he did work his radio gold mines with skill and verve. In a fairer world, he could have accumulated perhaps 1 percent of his wealth. It is also the case that he is by no means unique. Other radio hosts, the stars and creators of hit broadcast TV shows, professional athletes, corporate media executives — all have grown extraordinarily rich, thanks to the government’s giveaway of the electromagnetic spectrum.

But few have had the gall to gobble down so much public wealth while simultaneously berating the public about their failures and laziness. Hopefully in the future Limbaugh will be remembered not just for the stones he threw, but the fact that he threw them while living in the world’s biggest glass house.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/trump-impeachment-inquiry/right-wing-radio-hosts-side-trump-calling-republicans-who-support

right-wing talk radio hosts are rallying around President Donald Trump after the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time, and they’re targeting elected Republicans who support the effort.

On Wednesday, Trump was impeached for his role in inciting a mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6. For many in pro-Trump media, any GOP support for the impeachment, no matter how small, signals an attempt by the Republican “establishment” to take the party back from Trump voters.

Even before the vote took place, right-wing media figures were already lashing out at elected Republicans who seemed likely to support the impeachment. In particular, talk radio hosts singled out Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the chair of the House Republican Conference who announced her support on Tuesday, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has reportedly indicated that he might be in favor of convicting Trump in a Senate trial.

After Trump was impeached, some local hosts criticized the 10 Republican representatives who voted in favor of impeachment. These hosts are also beginning to turn their attention to the upcoming Senate trial, with one host predicting that “there is not a conservative in this country that will vote” for Republicans again if they “dare to convict” Trump.

Talk radio hosts are attacking Republicans who support impeachment

On Wednesday, Virginia-based host John Fredericks declared that he welcomed an impeachment vote because he wants “a record of the quislings” in the Republican Party. Fredericks also attacked Cheney as the “queen of the warmongers” and encouraged Republicans to primary those disloyal to Trump. [aud]
fox personality Mark Levin attacked McConnell as a “leaker” and a “player” and claimed that Cheney’s statement in support of the impeachment was “utterly false.”

Before the vote on Wednesday, Mark Steyn, guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh, claimed that Republicans in favor of impeachment are “trying to calibrate the precise moment at which it’s best to slip the shiv to President Trump.”
Florida host Joyce Kaufman complained about “watching these rats jump off the ship, which really is only sinking because they’re so stupid.” Kaufman singled out Cheney, saying, “Liz Cheney can kiss my Darth Vader. … You don’t grow up in the Cheney household with your priorities being principles and morality.”
After reading part of Cheney’s statement in support of the impeachment, Ohio host Bob Frantz said, “Liz Cheney is now dead to me as a politician. Not that I was ever a big fan anyway, but that was ridiculous and wholly unsupported and unsubstantiated by the facts.”
Lars Larson, a host popular in Oregon and Washington, called for a primary challenge against Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) on Twitter after she announced her support for the impeachment.
After the House vote on Wednesday, host Joe Pagliarulo began warning GOP senators against voting to convict. Pagliarulo predicted, “If the Republicans vote to convict this guy, that’s it for the Republican Party. There is not a conservative in this country that will vote for them again if they dare to convict him on impeachment which of course is specious and dumb and a Nancy Pelosi game.[aud]
ohio host Mike Trivisonno encouraged his audience to vote out Republican representatives who voted in favor of the impeachment, including Rep. Anthony Gonzales (R-OH): “Remember those names when you head to the polls on voting day, whenever that may be.”

Steve Gruber, a local host in Michigan, complained on Thursday that the 10 Republicans who voted in favor of the impeachment were “drawn to it just like the mob followed into the Capitol. They are no better in my estimation.” Gruber specifically targeted Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), hosting a potential Republican challenger to Meijer in 2022 and arguing that Meijer’s “political career may have ended after a week in Washington.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-fact-checking-may-be-futile-against-trumps-black-hole-of-lies/

Donald Trump has publicly lied at least 20,000 times since taking office, according to the Washington Post. He does this in part because he has shown himself to be mentally unwell, if not a sociopath. But he also lies because he is a fascist authoritarian. For such leaders, lies are a way of assaulting reality and truth as a means of achieving unlimited power. These explanations are not discrete. They overlap with one another.

In a season of massive death, Donald Trump and his regime's lies about the coronavirus are a public health emergency – one which has killed at least 216,000 people in the United States.

Donald Trump and his regime's lies have also severely damaged America's prestige, alliances and global power. The country's enemies have also been emboldened by the Trump regime's lies and overall lack of consistency in foreign policy and principles.

Most important, Trump and his regime's policy of lying (in conjunction with wanton cruelty and other evil) has undermined American democracy. A common understanding of reality is the foundation of a health democracy. The Trump regime's lies and those of its agents are rotting that foundation.

In "The Death of Truth," Michiko Kakutani explains that the damage Trump has done to the country's institutions and foreign policy will take "years to repair."

"And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away," Kakutani writes.

Why is Donald Trump such a powerful and effective liar? Why has the mainstream American news media largely surrendered to his lies, and by doing so normalized them? Would more aggressive fact-checking have blunted Donald Trump and his regime's strategy of lying? What explains why the mainstream American news media as a whole refused — and for the most part, continues to refuse — to describe Donald Trump and his regime accurately as being fascist and authoritarian?

In an effort answer these questions, I recently spoke with Eric Alterman, a columnist at The Nation and the author of more than 10 books, including the bestseller "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News." His latest book is "Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie and Why Trump is Worse."

Why are there now so many more voices in the mainstream American news media who, several weeks from Election Day, are finally using language such as "fascism" and "authoritarianism" to describe Trump and his regime? This was obvious several years ago. Why the delay? What were they waiting for?

There are many disincentives to tell the truth about Donald Trump. The most obvious one is that he's the President of the United States and people consider it disrespectful to use certain words about the president, like "liar" and "racist" and "conman" and "conspiracy nut," even when they're true. It is worse in Washington D.C. to call someone a liar than for them to actually be a liar.

In Washington, that rule is part of how a person makes a living. Therefore, people in the news media have to show respect for the office of the presidency. The second reason is that the ideology of "journalistic objectivity" does not have a framework for determining what the truth is. It has no bias for truth. "Journalistic objectivity" says on the one hand, so-and-so said this; on the other hand, his opposition said that, and you, the reader, you, the viewer, you, the listener, it is up to you to decide what's true.

Donald Trump is an idiot in many ways, but he is a genius when it comes to media manipulation.

The Washington Post has now documented at least 25,000 or so lies by Donald Trump — and nothing has changed in his behavior. If anything, he has become more brazen.

I do not find fact-checking as done in that way to be very helpful, because Donald Trump is not being fact-checked as he says the lies. If a person reads the fact-checking article, they will learn what Trump said is not true. Trump's lie still has power because it is repeated by the president and circulated. Again, Donald Trump has been winning this battle against the mainstream news media every day and they still have not really caught up to his strategy. The New York Times still does not really know what to do about Donald Trump in this regard and others.

Is the reluctance, if not fear, of calling Donald Trump a liar a function of the corporate culture of American's mainstream news media? Are reporters and journalists afraid of being punished in terms of their careers if they tell the unpolished truth about Donald Trump?

I have a different idea of lying than most of the country's journalistic institutions do because they will almost never use the words "lie" or "liar" when it comes to the president or most politicians. Instead most in the mainstream news media will say, "We can't know his intent. We can't know what's in his heart." They assume that a lying politician may believe the nonsense that they are saying. My position is if a politician should know what is true and he does not, then he is lying.

I do not care what the excuse is. I don't care if Trump or some other politician thinks God is talking to him. I don't care if Trump is too disengaged from reality. I don't care if Trump is so much of a narcissist that he makes up stuff and he believes it. If it's the president's job to know something and he misinforms the country, then he's lying. Worry about his motivation some other time.

There has never been a historical moment in this country where a president, in this case Donald Trump, could be ignored because everyone knows he's so full of lies and nonsense.

Donald Trump might get reelected and destroy our democracy because so many in the mainstream news media are treating Donald Trump's lies and delusions as though it is all somehow normal.

Why has the White House press corps been so accommodating and enabling of Trump's lies? He also uses them as props for his fascist performances. Why do the members of the White House press corps not just walk about of the briefings or stand up and turn their backs to him?

They do not know how to do their job any other way. Their job is defined as getting whatever information is available at the White House. So even if it's lies, even if it's daily humiliation, the press corps has to go back the next day. Those reporters need to be on good terms with the people who are giving out the information — even if they're not giving out real or otherwise substantive information. It would be nice if the job of the White House press corps was to actually go out and find news, but that's not what they're there for. They're there as conduits for the White House.

There are few public voices who have been consistently warning the American people and the world about the realities of Trumpism and the threat Trump represents to the country. Why have the American people, largely, been in so much denial about the horrible reality that is the Age of Trump and what it means for the present and future of the country?

There's about a third of the country that lives inside this bubble where the truth never reaches them. They watch Fox News, they listen to conservative talk radio, they read Breitbart and Daily Caller and so forth, and they are lied to, and the lies that they are told make them feel good about themselves. They blame other people, mostly Black and brown people and Muslims and immigrants and so forth, sometimes Jews, for the problems in their lives, and it works for them. Such people are unreachable. You cannot get through to them.

There is a battle over the rest of the American people. Trump and his spokespeople and others who are doing all the lying on the right have a gravitational effect on the entire public discourse.

It began initially with Ronald Reagan and then went into warp drive with Newt Gingrich. But before Ronald Reagan, and especially before Gingrich, both parties pretty much had an idea where the goalposts were on what you could get away with in terms of not telling the truth. There were a lot of problems. Nixon was a big problem, Lyndon Johnson was a big problem, but still people understood what was all right and what wasn't all right, and then Reagan and Gingrich just started making stuff up all the time. They did this with no consideration for the truth — and they discovered that the media wouldn't call them on it.

The American right-wing learned that the American people did not care enough. As long as the news media was attacked as having a "liberal bias" it did away with the problem of them being called on their lies. This dynamic expanded and grew until Donald Trump could run for president with his claims that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Kenya. There were 30 or 40% of Trump voters believing that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring inside a pizza parlor in Washington. They actually believed that.

Now the country is facing QAnon nuttiness with millions of people believing such nonsense because as a country we have just completely lost track of the truth in our political discourse. As Hannah Arendt warned, "This is how you create a dictatorship. You destroy the idea of truth."

Why this obsessive narrative and all these expeditions out to Trumplandia to talk with "white working class" and other Trump followers by the mainstream American news media? What is there left to learn? The research shows that Trump's voters are driven by racism, white supremacy, misogyny and authoritarianism, if not outright fascism and in some cases Nazism.

They just have to be defeated. Enough is enough. We have to beat them into the ground as hard as we can and let them start over. For example, the Lincoln Project is seeking to destroy every single Republican senator because they believe that the Republican Party cannot be saved. It's been taken over by crazy people, by corrupt people, by the equivalent of a mafia gang, and they just have to be beaten. There is no sense in trying to talk sense into them anymore.

Fox News really is sports talk radio for conservatives. What are the implications of how American politics is now treated like some type of sport by the right wing?

I recall an observation that Noam Chomsky made when I was writing my first book. He said, "What we need in this country is a politics where people care as much about sports as they do about politics, because if you listen to people on sports radio, they're very knowledgeable in a way that people did not have the same passion about the Democratic and Republican candidates."And then there was the rise of talk radio and the internet and it brought in all this passion — but it seems to only exist on one side. The conservative side is driven like mad to care about every little thing. By comparison liberals do not feel that way. Liberals would let the people who are in charge do the right thing.

Liberals trust scientists and want to let them be the experts. Almost every single-issue group is a conservative group. They win. 90% of the country wants stronger gun control, but we're not getting it because the 5-10% that doesn't want it has a stronger voice than the 90% because they're so dedicated. They vote only on this issue, and you can't say that about really any issue for liberals. We see this on Fox News and on right-wing talk radio.

When Trumpists say that "all politicians lie" and "Trump is no worse than Obama," and the news media is being "mean" and "unfair" to Donald Trump, how do you respond?

The New York Times tried to answer that question about Obama. Trump followers say that, "Why all the fuss about Donald Trump lying? Why don't you explain that Obama lied too?" The New York Times looked at the entire eight-year record of Obama's presidency and they found 12 false claims over eight years, none of which he repeated, all of which he then corrected when he found out that what he had said was not true. Trump can tell 12 falsehoods in 10 minutes. He does it all the time. There is no comparison between Trump and Obama. Some presidents lied a lot. Trump is in his own category. Trump lies about absolutely everything, and he gives his cabinet and his advisors permission in doing so to lie about everything as well.

Are our expectations of the American public too high or too low in terms of their understanding of politics, generally, and capacity to intervene against and reject Trump's lies, specifically?

Too many Americans have had a full meal of bullshit and now they have no way to judge good and bad, right and wrong. I'm very angry at the people who support Donald Trump because they are destroying my country. They are responsible for putting people in cages and separating families. A lot of Trump's supporters do not know any better. Some of them are just terrible people. I do not really care why people think what they think anymore, I just want to beat them. Trump's supporters are on the wrong side.

Does Donald Trump believe his lies? Or is this all some type of performance?

All that Donald Trump cares about is winning the next five minutes — and he only really cares about the next minute or so. Trump is always doing the wrong thing. Trump is a toddler and he just wants to have his belly stroked every minute or so and then he forgets that it happened.

What is your greatest hope in this moment? What is your greatest fear?

My hope is that we turn this ocean liner around in the 2020 election. I hope that the Republicans are defeated, that Trump is defeated, that the Supreme Court is made rational, and we start moving the country back in the direction of sanity and decency. My fear is that the upcoming election is the last time we actually have a chance to save the United States from an American form of fascism. I'm only 60, but I'm an American historian, and I don't think things have ever been this bad since the Civil War. I wish there was more of a sense of alarm among the institutions that really matter to this country's democracy.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/thriller-where-horror-is-combined-with-farce-tv-critic-breaks-down-the-spectacle-of-the-trump-show/

the Age of Trump is a horrible never-ending story. One page is turned, and another appears. "The End" is nowhere in sight. Although Election Day 2020 is less than a month away, the days and weeks ahead feel interminable.

As a story the Age of Trump is simultaneously drama, comedy and tragedy. In terms of genres, it is a spy thriller (Russia's control and influence over Trump), a crime story (Trump and his taxes, a political mafia family, vast corruption), dystopian speculative fiction (how could so many horrible things all happen at once?), and a political drama and documentary (how fascism came to America). Donald Trump's story, unfortunately, is also a distasteful softcore farce (considering the sordid details of his known or alleged affairs).

In the season of death caused by the coronavirus and Trump's negligent and criminal response, life in the Age of Trump is also a horror movie.

At some point last week Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. On Friday he was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center. The Trump regime, of course, distorts, lies, dissembles, circulates disinformation and refuses to tell the whole truth about Trump's health and related matters — including just how many people in the White House and Trump's inner circle have contracted COVID, and how and when the infection began.

As a story, Trump's personal experience with the coronavirus, and the regime's reporting on it, resembles a North Korean and/or Russian propaganda film. After what Trump has presented as a miraculous recovery — quite likely a temporary steroid high — he was released from the hospital on Monday. For his cult members and other followers, Trump's saga of infection and "recovery" makes him even more into a type of Christ figure, or an Übermensch blessed with "good" genes.

In a Monday interview on Fox News, Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp had this to say about Trump: "He obviously has stayed in contact not only with the campaign but also talking directly to the American people in saying, 'We're going to get through this. We're going to defeat this virus. We're not going to surrender to it like Joe Biden would surrender to this virus.'" She suggested that Donald Trump is "the ultimate fighter."

Such a narrative is another example of Trump's fascist allure and power and the threat it poses to American democracy. At the Independent,**philosopher Jason Stanley, author of "How Fascism Works," warns: "In this kind of politics the leader is the nation. The leader is supposed to be strong. They're just trying to represent that he's strong and it doesn't affect him and it won't affect the nation. [President Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil did the same thing."

On Monday via Twitter, Stanley elaborated further:

In fascist ideology, the enemy is diseased and weak. The fascist leader is masculine and strong. As Bolsonaro said in March, if he gets Covid, because of his history as an athlete, it won't be an issue. The enemy — minority groups and political opponents — are weak and diseased.

Don't be afraid of Covid, says our leader, who has soundly defeated it. It only harms the weak. If you are harmed by it, you were already weak.

Donald Trump, a reality TV star and con man — and now a fascist, white supremacist cult leader — is an amazing story that defies almost all explanation, except in a kakistocracy and pathocracy that has amused itself to death.

Ultimately, TrumpWorld is very real. Unfortunately, the American people are trapped in it, with no obvious way to escape. Perhaps even more worrisome, many of them do not want to.

In this story, what type of character is Donald Trump? How does he imagine his role? How did Donald Trump master the new rules of television and the media in the 21st century to gain so much power? As Election Day finally approaches — with an unknown outcome and the real possibility that Trump will use legal and illegal means to steal the election — what would be the perfect ending for Donald Trump the character, and his bizarre epic story?

In an effort to answer these questions I spoke with James Poniewozik. Once a writer for Salon, he is now chief television critic at the New York Times and author of the new book "Audience of One:Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America."

Does Donald Trump really exist?

Part of my premise is that Donald Trump is not a person. Donald Trump as we know him and as he matters to us is really more a mediated character and performance. The performance has evolved over time in response to the rewards he has received being a celebrity. If the real Donald Trump does exist, I am not sure that he even knows who he is anymore.

What happens when the person playing the character is lost in their performance?

There is a danger for someone with power and responsibility over others — in this case a whole country — that once you reach that point a person can lose their core self. A person is just a persona and they know what to do in response to certain expectations and stimulation. Your behavior is dictated by how you have been received by others and the reactions that your behavior engenders in others. Certainly, that performance can be brilliant in show business. In a way, it can be very effective in politics. But governing a country involves making decisions that have to do with much more serious matters than how you are perceived and the impressions you are making on other people.

For better or for worse, Donald Trump was the most entertaining thing on television during the 2016 campaign. In many ways, that remains true even at the end of his first term. Trump is a product of an American culture of spectacle and distraction. That is the foundation of his power.

The metaphor that I like to use for Trump running for president in this media era was like Julius Caesar taking power in Rome. Trump spent his entire career mastering the weapons which are used for combat in the television era. Trump did this as a tabloid figure. He's done it as a reality TV figure. He has done it across various arenas, and so much of it was directly translatable to politics. Trump's skill in the arena of this media age goes beyond his message to any particular segment of the electorate.

How do you assess Trump as a performer?

He's not a good actor in the sense that a film actor is. There's an essential difference between what a film actor does and what a reality TV performer does. When you play yourself as a character in reality TV what you are doing is being yourself but louder, presenting an exaggerated version of yourself. As far as acting — a skill that requires empathy and basically imagining that other people are real — you can see Trump's shortcomings whenever he has to visit the site of a tragedy or read off a teleprompter.

What Donald Trump does works pretty well for his particular style of political performance. For him, much of his message is about life as a zero-sum competition, conflict, winning and the idea that for you to get something, somebody else has to lose something. Trump's brand is based on those values.

Trump also has a great off-the-cuff, pugilistic sense of verbal combat. He is very good at throwing up a lot of dust and keeping people off balance. That has worked very well with the kind of persona that Trump was presenting as candidate and then as president. It is not necessarily a kind of performance that might have worked well for another person or a politician with a different message.

What is beguiling or compelling about Trump as a character for his supporters? I find him to be a repugnant human being, but he is infinitely watchable. I also believe he is a more sophisticated performer than people give him credit for.

For those who love him as president, he is someone who fights.That goes beyond policy. Trump seeks to inflame conflict rather than smooth it over. In a political debate there are always at least two messages going on: One is the text of what you're saying and one is this meta-narrative of, "In the way that I debate, here's how I'm going to champion you as president."

Among people who hate Donald Trump — and obviously there are myriad political reasons that people hate him — I think part of the heart of it is that he is a culture warrior instinctually. Beyond the strategic embrace of certain public policy issues, he has a sense for locating exposed nerves and jabbing at them, inciting conflict in a way in which it will leave the most bad feelings after it's finished.

What happens to truth and people's understanding of reality when they have to confront a person such as Trump, who is so skilled in terms of being a performer and a professional liar?

All the places where Trump has thrived have been fields where there is a thin boundary between fact and fiction. This is true of the New York tabloids, professional wrestling, reality TV and now being president of the United States. Trump has created a type of permission structure which dispenses with the idea of verifiable, objective reality and just takes cues from the people that you have loyalty to. Authoritarian leaders like Trump cultivate a following by nurturing the idea that everyone is lying and the truth is always fuzzy.

What fantasies does Trump represent for the viewer, his public?

The fantasy of Trump has evolved from the 1980s to Trump as a presidential candidate.

The proto-Trump of the Reagan era was the fantasy of the lottery winner. He was somebody who intuited very early on that it was more important to look like a very successful businessman than to actually be the most successful businessman. Trump understood how to leverage appearance, which in turn allowed him to build a brand. The easiest way to accomplish that is withcartoon symbolism, a tower with your name on it in three-foot tall golden letters or a helicopter with your name on the side.

It's a combination of that cartoonish fantasy of prosperity combined with the notion that — this is where thelottery-winner aspect enters in — that you don't need to change to be this way. This is part of what allows him to cultivate the blue-collar [eats McD? garish taste?] billionaire notion, and for Sean Hannity to push it later. Because this lottery-winner performance also allows people to imagine themselves as a rich person, not beholden to the proprieties of gatekeepers, not having to change yourself or your tastes or your likes.

Every iteration of Trump as a pop-culture character involves a notion of fighting and conflict and grievance. Those two elements were the form of Trump that ran for president and won.

How would you explain or track Donald Trump's career, relative to broader changes in the terrain of the American news media?

My book is basically a parallel story about the character of Donald Trump over the decades and the media that he evolved in sync with. The journey of the American media from when Trump was beginning his public career, basically around 1980, until he ran for president is also the journey from the mass media of the mid-20th century to the fragmented media of the 21st century.

When Trump started, if you put something on television it had to appeal to tens of millions of people. There was a big-tent strategyof programming. You had to tailor things to a broader audience. As cable developed, as the internet developed, the outcome was more outlets and more targeted programming. There were increasing rewards for more polarizing programming, whether it's entertainment or news, fiction or nonfiction. And that produces all sorts of things, be it provocative sensationalistic reality TV or be it Fox News and political talk radio.

This is a story of the media becoming a space where somebody as belligerent and pugnacious and outrageous as Donald Trump can successfully build a career and then become a political leader and run for president and win.

Would Donald Trump even be president if there had been a Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow who successfully confronted him during his first campaign? A public figure in the news media who was viewed with respect and trusted by the American public?

I do not believe so. It's not just that we no longer have a Murrow, it is that we no longer have Murrow's audience. There is no collective audience in America that is willing to accept that there are agreed-on facts and arbiters of truth. I do not believe that one could have someone go directly from hosting a TV program, like Trump did, to then becoming president of the United States until you had a media environment where politics was basically a form of entertainment combat that was carried out through the media.

Somebody like Trump, with his sense of showmanship and flimflam and exaggeration, could have had a successful business career in another era. P.T. Barnum existed long before television. But something significant had to change in media, and therefore in American political culture, before somebody like Donald Trump has got a serious shot at the presidency.

The Age of Trump is a perpetual cliffhanger. There is never any closure to the story, just one scandal and crisis after another. There is no emotional release and closure. The story never ends. What does that do to the American people?

It is exhausting. People are frazzled. It is not just all the horrible things that are happening, but that everything keeps accelerating without any release. There is nothing but a buildup of tension. This moment with Trump as president is like the difference between watching a blockbuster movie and watching a trailer for a movie. Trailers are not necessarily narrative — they just need to communicate that if you go to this movie you will be excited all the time.

Living in a movie trailer constantly, for the length of a movie, is really exhausting for most people. That may not be true for Donald Trump, however, which may be one reason that he is so well-suited for this era. I honestly believe that there is something about Donald Trump where he feels that conflict and agitation are the best and most productive state of mankind.

What genre is the Age of Trump? Is it comedy, tragedy, drama or something else?

A kind of thriller where horror is combined with farce.

How would you write the end of the Age of Trump? If you were crafting the story, what would the resolution to the story and the main character be?

I feel like the truest story for the character Donald Trump is for him never to be defeated in his mind. That is Trump's narrative. As a character in the story, he will never acknowledge getting his comeuppance, disgrace, failure or punishment. He is not capable of acknowledging it. The end of the story that is the Age of Trump, whether it is Donald Trump actually victorious or Donald Trump utterly disgraced and a disparaged figure in history, is him with his arms raised in victory — because that is the way he sees himself.

I keep thinking about "The Sopranos," and Tony Soprano tripping on peyote during the final season. Tony has killed his nephew, Christopher, and he is saying, "I get it! I get it!" In Tony's mind he is at one with the universe and doing the right thing. Tony Soprano, like Donald Trump, is not capable of seeing himself otherwise.

Will the end of the Age of Trump be as subjective as the end of "The Sopranos"?

I do not think the screen will cut to black. There is not going to be a question of what ultimately happens with Donald Trump. But no matter what, there is not going to be consensus on whether Trump was victorious or defeated, whether he got his just deserts or whether he was robbed, whether he was a hero or a villain.No amount of evidence is going to create consensus on anything about Donald Trump. With "The Sopranos," people are still arguing about what happened to Tony at the end of the series. It doesn't matter what the definitive explanation is. For Donald Trump and Tony Soprano, there is going to be an argument no matter what happens at the end.

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aha 9/20 talk radio big in gold grift hype fear ~ sr citizens, but also big pusher of racism (also about fear/threat)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scholar-explains-how-the-conservative-movement-transmits-sanitized-versions-of-white-supremacist-ideology/

paul r salon

As the longest sustained period of racial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante killing of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and widespread conservative defenses of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous charges against protesters, including "terrorism," to the Trump administration's crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it "anti-American," and Attorney General Bill Barr's call for protesters to be charged with sedition.

So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about why such views were myopic: "Trump advances core paleoconservative positions," researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including "rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism."

Trump's record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment:With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump's ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond.

Dr. James Scaminaci III has just published a report about the long historical genesis of this recent push for Political Research Associates, "Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War." Scaminaci has a PhD in sociology from Stanford and has worked as a civilian intelligence analyst with expertise on the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and organized crime. So the spread of social chaos, internecine violence and associated enabling ideologies is a subject he's familiar with.

Scaminaci traces the roots of culture-war and race-war narratives as far back as the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. He observes that Steve Bannon nurtured those carefully at Breitbart News and they have played a key role in radicalizing Trump's base over the past five years, to the point where some of his supporters are visibly preparing themselves for violence. Some parts of this story have been relatively well covered, but Scaminaci provides a much more integrated and historically extensive account of how we reached our present state. I reached out to him recently for an interview by email to discuss some of his key insights and how they provide us with a much clearer picture of the forces pushing America toward civil war. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your article, you write: "Over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right." You observe that this comes in different versions and has deep historical roots, dating back to the colonial era. Before getting into the details, why is it important to recognize this history and learn about it?

I wanted to convey that what we are seeing now on the right wing has a long history, a history that is either overlooked or ignored. Jill Lepore and other scholars looking at the right have noted that modern day "patriots" cast themselves as lineal descendants of the founding fathers and the American Revolution — that they are revolutionaries against the existing "tyrannical" federal government. But that history is drenched in violence and blood against Black and indigenous peoples. That context cannot be omitted. And the idea that whites are under existential threat from Black folks also needs to be put into historical context.

Second, the right-wing idea that the federal government is "tyrannical" is largely the product of white supremacist politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. This was the idea that post-World War II federal support for civil rights was federal overreach, was unconstitutional, and that it upset allegedly harmonious race relations in the South and eventually in the North.

According to white supremacists, the existential threat to white people in the Jim Crow South came from Black folks, whether children or adults, even touching anything that could be shared with whites. A schoolbook touched by a Black child became a Black textbook. Blacks and whites could not share drinking fountains or sit in the same seats on a bus.

What I wanted to portray in "Battle With Bullets" is that whites have long viewed any expression of nonviolent Black agency as an existential threat to themselves that required whites to resort to a brutal, genocidal racial civil war. One can understand the palpable fear of a slave revolt before 1861. But white supremacists have claimed that registering to vote, voting, moving into a white neighborhood after a history of redlining, moving into managerial or foreman positions in the workplace, or being cast as heroes or superheroes are existential threats.

You write that "The most dangerous versions of that [civil war] narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis." Can you give an example of each and then help us understand how the two are related?

Roger Stone is a political operative who has graduated from ratfucking political operations into calling for a civil war or violence or martial law. He is an ideological chaos agent. He can help set the narrative mood for the right wing. As Chip Berlet has written, elites know how to write the score for scripted violence. Somehow, the gunmen always know who to kill. In a similar category are the numerous Christian right leaders who broadcast the same civil war message to their Christian nationalist supporters and followers. I also quoted [Dallas megachurch pastor] Robert Jeffress in the article.

David Neiwert owns the beat on tracking the transmission of fringe ideas to the conservative mainstream. Even a decade before Trump, the ideological lines were blurring.

In 2008,Michael Savage, a right-wing radio host, said, "[T]he white person is being erased from America's future. ... There is a racial element to the immigration invasion." Then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly claimed, "So now, it's becoming a race war."The Center for American Progress went on to note that O'Reilly claimed that immigration reformers "hate America ... because it's run primarily by white, Christian men" and were seeking "to change the complexion...of America."

That is no different from Jean Raspail's theme in "The Camp of the Saints" or the narrative at The Social Contract, a white nationalist journal which published Raspail's novel. Or Glenn Beck on Fox News in February 2009, airing his racial civil war scenario within one month of the first Black president taking office. Or a variety of Christian Right leaders during the Obama years calling for or suggesting a racial civil war is coming, includingTony Perkins, Larry Klayman and Rick Joyner.

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the "symbiotic dance" between white supremacist groups and John Tanton's hardline anti-immigration movement, as well as the sharing of conspiracy narratives between white supremacists and the "patriot" militia movement.

The conservative movement, both the political and religious wings, transmit sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology. The latter is premised on preparing for, if not instigating, a racial civil war in America.

John Jackson, a scholar who covers "scientific" racism, in a recent article titled, "Going Full Nazi,"asked the question: "[W]hat is the point of drawing a line between the 'mainstream' and the 'alt' right? Perhaps there is no useful distinction to be made." The angry white guys with guns are dangerous because they have weapons of war. But the dividing line between them and the "Fourth Generation Warfare" chaos agents creating a crisis of legitimacy is increasingly blurred.

You write that this rhetoric is rooted in a narrative adapted from the1973 French novel you just mentioned, "The Camp of the Saints." Can you explain its basic narrative?

The novel has seven key ideas that its critics and proponents have noted. One, mass migration is an invasion. Two, immigrants and refugees are invaders. Three, the invaders will eventually destroy Western culture and replace Western populations. Four, the West's political elites do not have the moral strength to defend the West. Five, the invaders must be physically removed and/or violently repelled. Six, there is a difference between the "real country" and "real citizens" and the "legal country" and "legal citizens." Seven, multiracial, multiethnic or multi-confessional societies are not only unstable but undesirable, and lead to the "balkanization" of societies — a view also imported from Serbian genocidal propaganda into the American and global right.

The main variations within this "Camp of the Saints" worldview are whether the political elites lack moral strength to resist the invasions ("Great Replacement"), enact immoral policies which weaken Western societies to invasion ("demographic winter") or actively collaborate with the governments of the invading migrants to facilitate the invasion (as in John Tanton's network). The other variation distinguishes the neo-Nazis from all the other segments: whether or not the Jews are responsible for the destruction of their societies ("white genocide").

You note that for both France and the United States, the historical roots of this narrative go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In the U.S. this has produced the "white genocide theory" and in France the "great replacement" theory. What distinguishes them and what draws them together?

The "white genocide" theory is premised on the fear of a Black slave revolt against the white slave-owning society. The "great replacement" theory is based on the fear of massive nonwhite immigration coupled with lower white birth rates leading to a "replacement" of the white population with a nonwhite population, and the transformation of the culture.

White supremacists use the more palatable, more sanitized "great replacement" theory interchangeably and conflate them. But they have different causal mechanisms.

On the other hand, the neo-Nazis and other proponents of the "white genocide" narrative consider any action by Black people to improve themselves, to gain access to privileged white spheres of social action or to more equitably redistribute power and status as an existential threat. "Great replacement" proponents do not share this outlook. Nor do "great replacement" proponents, in general, blame Jews for what they consider to be massive immigration.

You write, "It would be a mistake to see these various 'White Replacement' narratives as isolated from mainstream conservative thought in Europe or America." How has their influence spread through terrorist acts?

In the right-wing information sphere, ideas swirl around, mix, recombine and mutate over time to fit changing circumstances. Raspail's "Camp of the Saints" is foundational to this narrative or worldview. Raspail directly influenced the emergence and popularity of the "great replacement" theory, which is the catchall theory cited by white terrorists.

But Bat Ye'or's conception of the problem — that European elites conspire with Arab elites to produce both subservience to Islam and the "great replacement" — directly influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who was motivated to provoke a decades-long civil war to stop the formation of what Ye'or called "Eurabia." Breivik, as well as the "great replacement" narrative, have inspired numerous white terrorist acts around the globe.

Returning to the American context, How did Steve Bannon and Breitbart spread their influence?

Bannon's principal contribution was to use Breitbart News to mix white supremacist ideology into the Republican Party and the Christian Right, and to heavily promote Raspail's "Camp of the Saints." In 2015 and 2016, Breitbart was the largest driver of ideological influence on the right.

How has this spread through the Trump administration?

The "Camp of the Saints" worldview largely shapes Stephen Miller's approach to immigration issues. Raspail's bottom line was that "the barbarians had to be repelled" either by violence or cruelty or both. Trump's immigration policy has been cruel, and as Adam Serwer noted, "cruelty is the point."

You also call attention to the Christian right's specific variant called "demographic winter," and argue that this has played a central role in evangelical support for Trump and his wall. What should people know about that?

The term "demographic winter" appears to have come from Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families [a far-right, anti-LGBT Christian group]. He is the most prominent WCF official linked to the Tanton anti-immigration network and was apparently influenced by Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" ideas, which circulate widely in conservative and right-wing Jewish circles.

In November 2005, Feder's view of Muslims in France reflected the worldview of Raspail and other "Eurabia" writers. Feder blamed the French riots of that year on "demographic winter," "lax immigration policies" and "brain-dead multiculturalism." Where "demographic winter" differs from Raspail, the "great replacement" and the Eurabia narratives is that liberal elite support for women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage are the principal culprits, in addition to massive Muslim immigration.

What resonates with conservative Christians and Christian nationalists is the idea that Christian (Western) civilization is under threat from nonwhite immigration, Christians are being persecuted in the West and around the world, and only a strong, authoritarian leader building a wall can save them.

Survey data supports my contention that white evangelical Protestants have a "Camp of the Saints" worldview: Seventy-eight percent favor strict limits on "legal immigration," 76% favor "building a [border] wall," 69% support a "temporary" Muslim ban and, 54% favor "preventing refugees from coming into the United States," according to October 2019 PRRI data.

The last section of your article deals with the emergence of the "Boogaloo boys"during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. How can we better understand them in terms of the longer history you've laid out? What lessons need to be learned?

The first lesson to be learned is that Donald Trump and local elected Republican officials, especially the so-called "constitutional sheriffs," have a much closer relationship to the armed wing of the Christian right. Bruce Wilson and David Neiwert have been tracking that.

The second lesson is that Trump is openly orchestrating armed demonstrations of force against Democratic Party governors and mayors.

The third lesson is that it is very easy to take off your camouflage fatigues and put on a Hawaiian shirt and pretend you just got concerned — but not before you spent around $2,000 on a rifle, tactical gear and ammunition. Journalists should stop being so credulous.

The last lesson is that claims that the "patriot" militia support Black Lives Matter protests are preposterous. The BLM protests are not simply about wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement — something a majority of whites can see and empathize with.

BLM is calling for reckoning, a "Third Reconstruction" of America — politically, economically and culturally — in the context of a deliberate confrontation with that racist, violent history. Even at the intellectual level of the "Never Trumpers," those potentially most sympathetic to BLM, there is a blindness or an inability to confront that larger American history and the smaller Republican Party history regarding racism. To think that "angry white men with guns" have thought it through is absurd.

What's the most important question I haven't asked? And what's the answer?

I do not know the answer to the question: "Why do scholars and journalists not consider the religious basis of America's long-term crisis of legitimacy in terms of politics and science?" But I would suggest that scholars and journalists have glommed on to the least important of Richard Hofstadter's explanations, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and ignored his more trenchant analysis in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which focuses on the epistemological disruption caused by fundamentalist Protestantism. They also ignore Marty Lipset's and Earl Raab's use of the concept of monism in describing the right wing in "The Politics of Unreason." Those old guys were on to something.

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david n

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/

...trump] refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:

Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal, and has been from the start. His opening salvo in the campaign—the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race poll-wise and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border.Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans—labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease—was classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. This became more refined and pronounced over the course of his presidency, as when he attacked four women Democratic congressmembers of color: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave!”
Trump’s palingenetic ultranationalism is his central theme. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidency and its neverending campaign, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”) That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis—that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but in the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
Trump constantly proclaimed America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world during the 2016 campaign, and insists that this occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians.During his presidency, the crises varied according to Trump’s political needs—an immigrant caravan’s arrival on the border with Mexico was portrayed hysterically by Trump during the 2018 midterm elections as an existential threat, while this year, America is in grave danger (according to Trump and his fellow Republicans) from a largely imaginary “antifa threat.” The coronavirus pandemic that the world knows his incompetence allowed to kill 200,000 Americans—not so much.
He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
Trump’s contempt for weakness (another classic fascist trait) is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability, and more recently to his decision not to attend a ceremony at a World War II gravesite near Paris because the American soldiers there who had died in the war were “losers” and “suckers.”

Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference.

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims byFox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing punditthat the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normalthat they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them.

...

The primary impetus has been the change under which conservatism became a discrete movement intent on seizing the reins of power. In the process, the means—that is, the obtaining of power—became the end. And once the movement became centered around obtaining power, by any means necessary, then ideology became fungible according to the needs of its drive to acquire power, just as it was with fascism. This virtually guaranteed it would become a travesty of its original purpose. The nature of today’s “conservative movement” is no more apparent than in how distinctly un-conservative its actual conduct has been: busting budgets, falling asleep at the wheel of national security, engaging wars recklessly and without adequate planning.

Two things occurred to the conservative movement in this drive for power:

It increasingly viewed liberals not merely as competitors but as unacceptable partners in the liberal-conservative power-sharing agreement that has been in place since at least the New Deal and the rise of modern consumer society. Ultimately, this view metastacizes into seeing liberals as objects to be eliminated.

It became increasingly willing to countenance ideological and practical bridges with certain factions of the extremist right. This ranged from anti-abortion and religious-right extremists to the neo-Confederates who dominate Republican politics in the South to factions of the Patriot/militia movement.

The combination of these two forces exerted a powerful rightward pull on the movement, to the point where extremist ideas and agendas have increasingly been adopted by the mainstream right, flowing into an eliminationist hatred of liberalism. In the process, their own rhetoric has come to sound like that on the far right. A lot of the dabbling in far-right memes has been gratuitous, intended to “push the envelope” for talk-radioaudiences in constant need of fresh outrageousness. [AMPL]...

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mma 720

National talk radio hosts reject calls for masks, echoed by local hosts in at least one coronavirus hot spot

07/02/20 3:04 PM EDT

Conservative talk radio hosts across the country are mocking the use of masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, even in states like Arizona where cases are surging.

Masks are an essential tool in the effort to limit the spread of COVID-19. Infected people are less likely to transmit the virus to others when wearing a mask, and while no mask can completely prevent inhalation of virus particles, even cloth masks provide some protection for healthy individuals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to recommend that Americans wear cloth face masks when interacting with people outside of their households.

Despite clear evidence demonstrating significant public health benefits, some in right-wing media have sought to undermine public support for mask wearing. On Fox, host Laura Ingraham has questioned the science behind masks, and fellow prime-time host Tucker Carlson has attacked public health officials and elected representatives over their mask guidance. Meanwhile, anti-mask posts on Facebook — many posted by right-wing media figures like Tomi Lahren — are racking up millions of interactions from users.

Conservative talk radio is no different. While some hosts have spoken positively about the potential benefits of masks, others have questioned their value and decried the supposed message wearing masks conveys. For instance, host Rush Limbaugh has previously referred to masks as “a required symbol on the left to promote fear.”

Now as cases are surging in a number of states, some local officials in places like Arizona have implemented mandatory-mask orders to help slow the spread. Yet these orders are being met with resistance from local radio hosts who have declared they will not be complying and have provided a platform for disgruntled callers and medical misinformation. The local focus of these hosts, combined with messaging from some nationally syndicated programs, threatens to undermine public support for mask wearing when it’s needed most.

Nationally syndicated hosts have mocked masks as a sign of “submission” and questioned their effectiveness

On June 29, host Michael Savage claimed, “Masks are useless. They’re a mark of submission.” As evidence, he cited a piece by a doctor named Simone Gold in which she argues against mask mandates because cloth masks cannot completely block COVID-19, and because mandates infringe on individual liberties. Gold previously organized and sent a letter to President Donald Trump calling on him to end coronavirus lockdowns. Savage continued on to say parents are “abusing their children” when they require them to wear masks, calling the parents “stupid, compliant, societal goons."
[audio]
former Trump adviserSebastian Gorka, host of America First with Sebastian Gorka, also claimed mask wearing is an “act of submission” during his June 23 show. Gorka mockingly referred to masks as “COVID burqas” and bragged about not wearing one in public.

Texas-based host Michael Berry on June 29 declared that “the masks don’t work” and claimed mask guidelines are part of “irrational behaviors” resulting from fear of the virus. On June 22, Berry complained about a mask order instituted in Harris County, Texas, and argued, “If people actually believe that the mask keeps them safe, why do you think you have to issue an order to require it? Maybe people don’t believe that the mask is necessary.”

In Arizona, local hosts rejected mask orders designed to slow surging case numbers

Arizona has seen one of the worst surges in coronavirus case numbers in the country in the past month. On June 17, Gov. Doug Ducey finally allowed local officials to implement mandatory-mask orders after weeks of resistance. Cities like Phoenix passed these orders almost immediately, much to the dismay of some local radio hosts.

On June 22, James T. Harris, host of The Conservative Circus with James T. Harris on Phoenix's KFYI-AM, complained about Ducey allowing local officials to implement mask orders and Mayor Kate Gallego announcing it for Phoenix. Harris argued, “President Trump could come out and say ‘James T. Harris, I want you to wear a mask,’ and I will say, ‘I appreciate you President Trump but I’m not going to wear a mask.’ … Won’t do it. Can’t do it because I don’t believe in it, Kate Gallego.”
Harris has also promoted medical misinformation about masks on both his show and social media. On June 24, Harris interviewed Dr. Jane Hendricks who claimed masks lead to dangerous drops in oxygen. In reality, there’s no evidence that cloth and surgical masks can cause breathing problems for most people. Harris also tweeted on June 20 that masks will cause respiratory issues due to “breathing all the toxins our lungs filtered out and into our masks.” In fact, wearing masks does not increase inhalation of toxins.
On KKNT, another station serving the Phoenix area, host Seth Leibsohn responded to the Phoenix mask order on June 19 by declaring, “I am just telling you right now, audience. I’m not doing it. Not doing it. I am not sick. … Seven tenths of 1% of our population has the virus. It radically can affect 15% of the population if they get it. I’m not wearing a mask and covering my face for that.”
On June 24, Leibsohn spoke to a caller who attended what he described as an “unmask me rally” in Scottsdale. During the call, Leibsohn claimed that mask wearing is “pitting us against one another. It is creating its own form of civil war. … There’s a lot of problems that come from the orders that we’ve been forced to live under. A lot. And we are just beginning to scratch the surface of them. I believe they are a great deal more dangerous than the coronavirus.”
On June 16, Mike Russell and Rob Hunter, hosts of Russell & Hunter on KFYI-AM, discussed a push for mandatory mask orders ahead of Ducey’s announcement that he would allow local officials to implement these orders. Hunter said mandatory-mask orders are useless because “those that are not going to follow the requirement know that it’s unconstitutional, know that you can’t do it, know that the masks aren’t effective. So what’s the point?”
Two days later, Russell listed cities in Arizona that had implemented mandatory-mask orders and declared, “I am not wearing a mask. There. I’m a rebel.” Russell complained about cities quickly implementing mask orders following Ducey’s announcement, saying, “That’s lazy and that’s stupid. It’s reckless.” Hunter later claimed, “If you have a compromised immune system, … if you are breathing in your own air all the time, your carbon dioxide, it might actually make it worse. There’s actually studies that show that.” (In fact, wearing a cloth or surgical mask will not substantially increase carbon dioxide levels.)

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/across-country-right-wing-talk-radio-hosts-promote-local-protests-against-stay

320 aha lt gov dan patrick sportscaster career revived by talk radiom one of the 1st to sign up rush; do we need a tag? poster?

---

AHA: TALK RADIO + POL-OP + TWITTER = DJT

trump trolls soc med TV etc for odd story, repkg retweet amplify, seeking retweets, constant instant feedback via crude stats

TWITTER is reductionistic, it's "killer app" attraction is 140 character, why?

---

https://theintercept.com/**2015/12**/09/donald-trumps-anti-muslim-rhetoric-amplified-on-local-talk-radio/

lee f

Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigrants is being amplified by media programs millions of Americans listen to every day: talk radio.

“My only problem with Trump’s comments is that they don’t go far enough,” Dale Jackson of 1070WAPI said during his morning talk radio program in Birmingham and Huntsville on Tuesday. Jackson called for an end to all immigration. “We are not the world’s garbage can.”

Nick Reed, a talk radio host with Missouri’s KSGF, spent much of his morning program Tuesday praising Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigration. “What is there not to like about Donald Trump’s plan?” he asked.

As Buzzfeed reported Tuesday, the biggest names in talk radio — Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin — “showed different levels of sympathy for Trump’s idea.”

Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, the anti-Muslim advocacy group that sponsored the poll Trump cited in his announcement on Monday, has been taking a victory lap.

“Everything you’ve been saying has come true, and now with Trump, do you think it’s time to have a frank and full conversation about what this issue is?” Breitbart News’ Stephen Bannon asked Gaffney on SiriusXM. Gaffney replied that he hoped the country would focus on discussing “sharia,” which he described as “a toxic ideology that seeks the destruction of this country and everything it stands for.”

Gaffney warned that Muslims abroad and Muslims here at home share dangerous beliefs in Islamic law, and expressed pleasure that discourse has shifted toward a greater focus on this alleged threat. “I hope Donald Trump is going to be able to catalyze that,” he said.

On his own Secure Freedom Radio program, which airs in the Washington, D.C. area, Gaffney hosted former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andy McCarthy, who argued that a ban on Muslim immigration does not violate the Constitution. McCarthy said that Islam is an “ideological system,” not a religion “as the Framers were conceiving religion when they put religious freedom in the Constitution.”

Indiana News/Talk 95.3 host Casey Hendrickson discussed Trump’s idea with mostly supportive callers. He also tried to rationalize the plan. “Well, I think because we’re dealing with a unique situation. We’re dealing with radical Islamists who are coming over in the name of their religion,” Hendrickson said.

Inside Radio, a trade publication, notes that Trump has been “cozying up to conservative talk radio.” He sometimes calls in unexpectedly, and spent $300,000 advertising on talk radio in early primary states, his only advertising buy of the election so far.

an 1219

...The core of the book involves political and psychological issues, but you start off with somehistory that’s really crucial to set the stage. Our current political media environment began in the late 1990s, you explain, but the pattern was set more than a generation earlier. So how is that pattern expressed in the late ‘50s and ‘60s? How did it first emerge?

Once I started digging into this, I realized this really was the first chapter of the book, because there are things that we would consider to be the roots of, or the precursors to these dominant genres as we know them today. What was super helpful here on the right was the book by media historian Nicole Hammer, her book “Messengers on the Right” really traces this back through the 1950s.

She points to these radio show hosts that had these small followings, usually they were funded by sponsorships. They were almost like preachers — very fire-and-brimstone — talking about anti-desegregation movements, talking about how the United States needed to exit the United Nations.A lot of them were concerned about communists lurking inside the Supreme Court, or inside Washington and Congress. I’m talking about people like Clarence Manion and Dan Smoot. When you listen to these original broadcasts, they have a similar kind of clear, didactic, angry, imploring tone that is reminiscent of what we hear from our outrage hosts today.

These kinds of radio shows were really taking hold at the very same moment as our formative ironic satirists — those to whom we still refer today, and those to whom our top satirists today say, “They are the reason I got into this business” — when those individuals were engaging in their craft. We’re talking about the late 1950s into the 1960s, folks like Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who pioneered an entirely new spirit of social and cultural commentary that was quite radical, not even liberal but radical in its orientation.The fact that those two moments coincided was something that just seemed like — this can’t be just a coincidence, that this is how these two things are articulating themselves, and that they look so similar to what we witness today in our bifurcated cable landscape.

I was struck that the outrage on the right was specifically reacting to social changes they don’t like, they feel threatened by, while on the radical side these same changes are opening up and exposing contradictions in the status quo that they probe and engage with.

They engage with them and start asking more questions about them. And the way that they’re exploring these issues is not to try to put these constructs back into boxes, but to really unpack them, and say, “Wait! Why do we even …” There’s a wonderful example I got from Ed Greenberg who’d been in The Committee and talked about the show The Cockettes, who were these sort of gender-fluid, cross-dressing men, and when he described it, he just described like just being mind-blown, thinking about “What is gender? Is gender a social construct?” To be thinking about that in the 60s like that, that is forward thinking — unpacking some of these things that we used to think of as fixed identities and exploring their truth value. That’s what I think satire is particularly gifted to do...

---

mma

Sinclair personalities push anti-impeachment propaganda

10/04/19 11:20 AM EDT

Right-wing media label impeachment inquiry a “coup” driven by Democrats

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trumps-false-and-dangerous-coup-claim-comes-fox-news-and-conservative-talk-radio

Mainstream media uncritically quote Trump’s false “coup” label for impeachment inquiry

mma 1019

Over the past week, Fox News and conservative talk radio have relentlessly characterized the House of Representatives’ formal impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump as a “coup d’etat” by Democrats “to try and take our votes away from us.”

Right-wing talk radio hosts have claimed Trump “is not going down without a fight” and questioned “how much longer are we going to endure” the House investigations.

In an October 1 tweet, Trump repeated the dangerous and false rhetoric that the constitutionally protected inquiry “is a COUP” to “take away the Power of the … People.”

Click for more on how this rhetoric made its way to the White House. video compilation:

big booster islamophobe

zach b vox:

...All of this, combined with Trump’s much more overt anti-Islam rhetoric, has helped turn the Muslim religion into a partisan issue:

Right-wing media, recognizing the appeal of the counter-jihadist message among their audience, has embraced this extreme anti-Islam narrative the counter-jihadists are peddling. A study published by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center found that guests with extreme anti-Muslim views made up 11 percent of all guests on prominent conservative talk radio during a period they studied in 2010. Two prominent counter-jihadists appeared on Fox News 15 times between September 2015 and February 2016, according to a count by Media Matters. Prominent televangelists spread the anti-Islam gospel to yet another group of reliable conservatives. Pat Robertson, the host of the widely broadcast 700 Club, once said on air that “Islam is a political system that is bent on world domination.”

All of this is supplemented by a vast grassroots network, centering on a group called ACT for America. Billing itself as the “the NRA of National Security,” it claims to have a membership of 500,000 nationwide, clustered in 1,000 chapters around the country.

Its president, Brigitte Gabriel, is the author of one of those mid-2000s counter-jihadist bestsellers (Because They Hate). A Lebanese Christian immigrant who calls herself “one of the leading terrorism experts in the world,” Gabriel has no formal background in terrorism, either through working in government or academia. According to her book, the highest level of education she received was a one-year course in business administration at a YWCA. Her claim to authority stems, allegedly, from experiences of persecution at the hands of Muslims during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s — a historically dubious story that Lebanese-American journalist Michael Young once labeled a “con act.”

In a speech in at the Oasis Church in Middletown, Ohio, Gabriel delivered an accessible and entertaining speech on the counter-jihadist view of Islam. In her telling, the history of Islam is a history of bloodshed.Between Islam’s founding in the seventh century and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, she says, “Islam was responsible for 270 million people across the globe — killed by the sword.”

This violence was not accidental, Gabriel told the rapt crowd. It was the core of Islam itself.

Gabriel believes that for 12 years, Mohammed attempted to peacefully proselytize — and failed, miserably. Only when he turned to violence, to conversion at the point of the sword, did he begin to win success.

“Islam went from being strictly a spiritual movement, after 12 years, to becoming a political movement cloaked in religion,” she says. “Jihad is mentioned in the Quran 40 times — 36 times out of 40 as a holy war against the infidels, to either kill them or subjugate them.”

These are all historically inaccurate claims. Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that they “play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples,” in order to put together a narrative of a uniformly aggressive Islam. Yet Gabriel’s group has been profoundly influential.

[twt mar lago sec breifing look who i ran into djt]

Her activists have worked tirelessly to pass legislation, based on a template constructed by Gaffney and CSP in-house counsel David Yerushalmi, that would ban state courts from considering sharia a valid source of law.By 2016, they had succeeded in nine states: Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, South Dakota, Arizona, and Tennessee.

“No court, administrative agency, or other governmental agency may enforce any provisions of any religious code,” the South Dakota version reads, neutral language obscuring the clear intent.

More alarmingly, the ideas pushed by Gabriel and CSP have been embraced by the most important members of the Trump White House.

“Most people in the Middle East, or at least 50 percent, believe in being sharia-compliant,”Bannon said on theBreitbart Daily News radio show in 2015. “Sharia-compliant” is an innocuous phrase commonly used by Muslims to denote that something is in line with Islamic law: For instance, you can find sharia-compliant home mortgage companies in the US that cater primarily (but not exclusively) to Muslims, because Islamic law forbids Muslims from collecting or paying interest on loans.

The Team B II report’s authors sees things like sharia-compliant financial institutions as an insidious threat to the US Constitution (they never really explain how a home mortgage company that doesn’t charge interest threatens the Constitution).

It’s not just Bannon.But the Team B II report also frequently uses the term “sharia-compliant” to describe not institutions or practices, but people: specifically, Muslims with dangerous, anti-American beliefs, anti-constitutional beliefs. And this is exactly the way Bannon is using the term. “If you're sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you,” Bannon proclaimed.

In his 2016 bookThe Field of Fight, Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, wrote that Islamic scholars are attempting to trick the West to obscure the true nature of sharia.

“These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control,” Flynn writes. “Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions.”

Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said more or less the same thing — in an official Senate press release. “Once again we face a totalitarian threat to the free world. This time it’s from ideological and apocalyptic Islam,” Sessions said.

“Theologically-based sharia law,” Sessions argued, “fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order that separates church and state, and that considers free debate and dissent the way to a better world.”

That these individuals all espouse the same weirdly specific interpretation of sharia is not a coincidence. Each one of them is deeply connected to the counter-jihadist world.

Bannon hosted counter-jihadists on his Breitbart radio show 41 times,according to a count by Mother Jones’s Josh Harkinson. Flynn is an adviser to the board of Gabriel’s ACT for America, and local ACT chapters organized many of the stops on the speaking tour for Flynn’s book. In 2015, Sessions received CSP’sKeeper of the Flame award, in honor of “his leadership on issues of great importance to the national security.”

...

gorka demoted from fox tv to radio?

---

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432450-gorka-fox-part-ways

hmmn

gorka...parted ways with Fox News and has joined Sinclair Broadcasting.

Gorka, who joined Fox News as a national security strategist in November 2017 following a seven-month stint in President Trump's White House, will serve as a national contributor at Sinclair.

"I'm very excited to be one of Sinclair's national contributors," Gorka told the Hill by email. "Fox News and Fox Business Network have both been very good to be before I joined the Trump Administration and after I left the White House.

"I am especially grateful to Sean Hannity," he continues. "My new nationally syndicated radio show with Salem Radio and position with Sinclairwill allow me to go deeper on the key issues of the Trump era."

The 48-year-old British, Hungarian and U.S. citizen told The Hill that his Fox News contract had expired. A Fox News spokesperson confirmed the exit and said the the parting of ways was mutual.

Gorka launched his syndicated talk radio show, "America First," in November.

Scheuer

:{:{}:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/kill-them-all-right-wing-extremists-violent-rhetoric-features-trump-endorsed-radio

:{:{}:

Suppose there were a best-selling author, historian, essayist, public speaker, TV commentator, adviser to Ron Paul, secessionist advocate, Christian nationalist, Vladimir Putin apologist and expert on terrorism who was married to a senior intelligence official. Suppose he were a frequent commentator on an influential radio show with close ties to President Donald Trump, his family and his administration.

Suppose this Trump-connected radio show routinely directed its listeners to this person’s blog, on which he wrote that it was “quite near time” for “well-armed citizens who voted for Trump” to “kill those seeking to impose tyranny,” of whom there was a “long and very precise list” that included journalists, activists, pundits, abortion providers, Republican and Democratic elected officials, federal judges, law professors, FBI agents, intelligence officials and Justice Department officials, along with “all who support them.”

There is such a man, and such a show, on which he has declared that former President Barack Obama “deserves to be hung.” The broadcast promotes his blog (archived here), where for years, he has advocated the right of, and the approaching “necessity” for, “armed rebellion” by citizens seeking to “end the tyranny of their elected representatives,” and listed people cast as “tyrants” and “expendables” whom Trump voters should prepare to “eliminate” by stockpiling arms and ammunition. Michael Frank Scheuer, 66, of McLean, Virginia, a former CIA intelligence official and the author of four books, is the man. And John Fredericks Radio is the influential, nationally syndicated talk radio show that provides Scheuer a platform as a regular commentator and occasional host. In many ways, the show is a favored voice of Team Trump, as evidenced by its preferential access to Trump family members and White House officials, its payments from the Trump campaign, and “testimonials” from the president and people close to him. So it would appear significant that Scheuer has appeared on the show with increasing frequency for the last four years, including more than 25 times since January 2017. Each time, the show promotes his blog, where his violent rhetoric has been escalating.

“He’s earned our trust and support”

John Fredericks, 60, who Trump’s 2016 Virginia campaign, is a commentator on CNN, which describes him as a member of Trump’s 2020 presidential advisory board. Although Fredericks has interviewed elected officials and candidates from both parties, Team Trump demonstrates its conspicuous support for the show in various ways. For example, with a nod from Ivanka Trump, Team Trump approved the Fredericks show as the “exclusive” media outlet allowed to broadcast live from the war room in Trump Tower on election night in 2016.

Recently, the White House included Fredericks at a press briefing. He live-tweeted a lament: “At WH presser with @PressSec All Russia. Again.” Then Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called on him for the final question. Fredericks said he was using the opportunity to ” from the Russia investigation to Mexico. Sanders smiled and said, “Sure, I think that would be fine.” She has been a guest on his show.

Fredericks’ show has featured numerous exclusive interviews with Trump family members, White House officials and Trump campaign advisers. Donald Trump has been interviewed eight times, most recently in July 2016. Others have included Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as well as Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Marc Short, Corey Lewandowski, Sean Spicer, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Larry Kudlow, Nikki Haley, Ben Carson, Tom Price, Tom Ridge, Sebastian Gorka and Carl Higbie (a Trump appointee who went on the show in May to defend his racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ comments just after his resignation).

...

Stone had also worked with Trump on his earlier aborted presidential runs in 2000 and 2012. By 2014, he'd been working with Trump for some time, preparing for what both men saw as his big chance. By then Stone had brought in a helper named Sam Nunberg to school the candidate on the issues the GOP base cared about. According to journalist Gabriel Sherman, Nunberg taught Trump a lot:

“I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

Trump fired Nunberg that year for setting up an interview that didn't go well and then hired him back in 2015. He fired him again over some racist Facebook posts and later sued him for $10 million for violating a non-disclosure agreement. (That case was settled "amicably.") Nunberg is yet another example of the top-notch talent Trump always seems to attract.

On Monday, Nunberg had a meltdown on national TV

---

also politico

If you’re a regular listener of Glenn Beck’s radio show and you wanted to contribute to a political group that would advance the populist conservative ideals he touts on his show, you’d have plenty of reason to think that FreedomWorks was your best investment.

But if you’re a fan of Mark Levin’s radio show, you’d have just as much cause to believe that Americans for Prosperity, a FreedomWorks rival, was the most effective conservative advocacy group. And, if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity are who you listen to, you’d be hearing a steady stream of entreaties to support the important work of the Heritage Foundation.

“The point that people don’t realize,” said Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of the talk media trade publication TALKERS Magazine, “is that (big time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities – they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in – and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener.”That’s not coincidence. In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees buy them a variety of promotional tie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs – praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate – often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising.

The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s – and considers it money well spent.

“We approach it the way anyone approaches advertising: where is our audience that wants to buy what you sell?” Genevieve Wood, Heritage’s vice president for operations and marketing. “And their audiences obviously fit that model for us. They promote conservative ideas and that’s what we do.”

Last month, in the midst of a flurry of scrutiny of GOP presidential candidates’ stances on health insurance mandates similar to one included in the 2010 Democratic healthcare overhaul, Limbaugh took to the airwaves to defend Heritage’s past support for such a proposal.

“The Heritage Foundation to this day says they are being impugned and misrepresented in terms of their advocacy for such a thing,” Limbaugh said, explaining that the venerable think tank “abandoned the idea once they saw it implemented” and realized “it doesn’t work.”

Limbaugh, who has been a paid Heritage endorser since 2009, said the reversal did nothing to detract from the “profound … respect for Heritage. Heritage is the gold standard. Heritage was every bit as involved in Reaganism as Reagan was, and nothing’s changed.”

Levin, whose endorsement deal with the tea party organizing group Americans for Prosperity started last summer, was similarly protective of his sponsor last year after President Barack Obama singled out the group in making the case that anonymously funded attack ads were distorting the midterm elections.

“Americans for Prosperity is a magnificent organization that people join voluntarily. You. Me,” Levin said. Obama, Levin continued, “wants you to hate Americans for Prosperity. So if he wants you to hate it, then you should embrace it, and promote it, and support it and join it, because it’s effective.”

...Beck, lavishing praise on FreedomWorks’s new social network website this year, seemed to acknowledge the blurriness of the line between his show’s content and messages paid for by advertisers.

“This is a new thing from FreedomWorks and by the way, they are sponsor of this program and I have a commercial to do for them in, well, in just a few minutes. I don’t think they’re going to get one because this is pretty much it,” he said on his show, in a clip that’s posted on his personal website. “But it is something that I believe in, I’m not saying this because they’re paying me to do a commercial in a couple of minutes. This is something that I think is absolutely critical.”

To be sure, the hosts’ political perspectives dovetail with those of their endorsees and their paid sponsorships do not preclude them from discussing – or even praising – other groups.

And theintegration of sponsors and their causes into the content of conservative talkers’ shows is not unique to advocacy groups and think tanks, as Beck demonstrated in 2009 when he melded his frequent warnings of impending economic collapse with his promotion of gold, generally, and the precious metals retailer that sponsored his show, Goldline, specifically.

That prompted liberals – led by now-embattled Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner – to accuse Beck and, to a lesser extent, other conservative talk show hosts sponsored by gold retailers, of using misleading fear-mongering tactics “to cheat consumers.”

The increased willingness of non-profits to write big checks for such radio endorsements – which appears to have started in 2008, when Heritage paid $1.2 million to sponsor the talk shows hosted by Hannity and Laura Ingraham – seems to be a primarily, if not entirely, a conservative phenomenon.

That’s perhaps attributable to the enduring power of talk radio on the right, as well as a newer development, the explosion of grassroots engagement by tea partiers and other newly mobilized Republican activists, which has spurred a competition for grass roots support – and contributions - among conservative groups.

Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new memberships starting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.

Americans for Prosperity wouldn’t divulge any details about its sponsorship of Levin, but board member Art Pope said the endorsement “makes AfP’s position on issues and policies more widely known and it also does attract grassroots activists or potential donors to AfP.”

The groups pay the companies that distribute the hosts’ shows, and not the hosts directly, for the endorsements.

While the deals differ, most provide the sponsoring group a certain number of messages or so called “live-reads,” in which the host will use a script, outline or set of talking points to deliver an advertisement touting the group and encouraging listeners to visit its website or contribute to it.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck sell endorsements to ...

www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56997_Page2.html

And the integration of sponsors and their causes into the content of conservative talkers' shows is not unique to advocacy groups and think tanks, as Beck demonstrated in 2009 when he melded his frequent warnings of impending economic collapse with his promotion of gold, generally, and the precious metals retailer that ...

Missing: seed ‎sam ‎crime

Top radio talkers sell endorsements - POLITICO

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/top-radio-talkers-sell-endorsements-056997

Jun 15, 2011 - From left: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are shown in this composite.Glenn Beck ... In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees ... Heritage is the goldstandard. Heritage was ...

Missing: seed ‎sam

Conservative Groups Paying Up for Talk Show Endorsements – Adweek

www.adweek.com/.../conservative-groups-paying-talk-show-endorsements-132573/

Jun 15, 2011 - For the past few years, conservative radio hosts like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin have been preaching the messages of ... According to Politico, that's because these groups, whether listeners know it or not, are paying high sponsorship fees to these programs for on-air plugs ...

Some local talk radio shows and fake news websites are pushing a new conspiracy theory from Infowars that the CIA hacked into a Hawaii state government database to forge former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.**One of the radio hosts pushing the conspiracy theory has previously been cited as an analyst on a local ABC affiliate.

On December 12, Jerome Corsi [phd?!]of the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars claimed that investigators for former Maricopa County, AZ, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, headed by his chief investigator Michael Zullo, had found “evidence that the CIA and or other government entities illegally hacked into Hawaii Department of Health records searching for” Obama’s records. (President Donald Trump pardoned Arpaio in August after he was charged with criminal contempt because of his treatment of undocumented immigrants.) Corsi, who has been a chief figure of the birther movement, added that the “evidence” “strongly suggests the CIA played a role in the forgery” of Obama’s birth certificate.

Some local talk radio stations have hyped Infowars’ report. New Orleans talk radio host Jeff Crouere -- a Townhall writer who has been featured as a “political analyst” on ABC’s New Orleans affiliate WGNO -- calledCorsi’s report a “bombshell” on his radio program (which is carried by a station affiliated with Louisiana Public Broadcasting) and said, “I’ve said from the beginning that birth certificate [Obama] released was a fraud.”

[vid]

Some stations have invited Corsi and Zullo as guests on different radio shows and allowed them to push the extremely dubious allegation. Corsi hyped his report on Weekend Wake Up with Chuck and Julie on Denver, CO, radio station KNUS, where Corsi said that the “CIA played a major role in, I believe, creating” Obama’s long-form birth certificate that was released in 2011. Corsi also promoted the conspiracy theory on The Peter Boyles Show, which also airs on KNUS. In response to Corsi’s “report,” Boyles said that Obama’s “social security number is fraudulent” (Boyles has previously allowed guests to push birtherism on his program). Zullo spoke about the article on the showYour Turnon Northwest Florida radio station WEBY, where the host called the report a “bombshell” that’s “shaking the Earth” and lauded Infowars.

Additionally, multiple fake news websites have lauded the report, with some of them also calling it a “bombshell” and claiming that it showed the CIA, “possibly with the help of other government agencies, forged Obama’s documentation.” Some of these fake news websites also used their verified Facebook pages to push the conspiracy theory. The Infowars report was also hyped on the pro-Trump subreddit “/r/The_Donald,” a conduit for conspiracy theories.

This is not the first time this year that an Infowars conspiracy theory citing Arpaio has reverberated in the right-wing echo chamber with the help of fake news websites. In March, the outlet, trying to back Trump’s false claimthat Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower, asserted that Arpaio had documents showing that Trump and his family had been surveilled by the National Security Agency (NSA) for years. That report subsequently spreadto other far-right outlets and fake news websites, along with The Drudge Report.

Alex Kaplan is a Research Coordinator at Media Matters.

hannity

http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/11/28/sean-hannity-people-dont-need-fake-news-shifting-breitbart-drudge-talk-radio/

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-trump-campaigns-latest-tactic-is-straight-from-the-conservative-echo-chamber/

NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, in an effort to regain momentum following the candidate’s poor performance in Monday night’s debate, has begun distributing talking points to surrogates encouraging them to talk about ‘90s era sex scandals.

Putting aside Donald Trump’s own philandering history, these new attacks demonstrate the GOP’s inability to pull themselves out of the right-wing echo chamber and have a broader conversation with voters.

In 2012, Mitt Romney fell victim to conservative insistence that the polls were skewed and that he was therefore all but certain to win the presidency. This belief was ultimately contradicted by voters, who it turned out did not need to be unskewed. Now, Trump and his allies in the conservative media are doing something similar, pretending that unscientific online polls are the real authoritative sources on public opinion.

Trump’s campaign was born in the far-right media. His ascent to the top of the Republican Party was driven by birtherism and seeded in the deepest, dankest of fever swamps. Then in 2014, while he was preparing to run for president, it has been widely reported that Trump received daily memos outlining the issues and views raised by callers to conservative radio shows. Thus, harsh and often racist anti-immigrant rhetoric became a central tenet of his campaign.

From Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter to Michael Savage, many of the leading conservatives now supporting the Trump campaign built their careers on the impeachment of Bill Clinton and spent years attempting to use sex to toxify the president’s public image.

What seems to be forgotten by many in the media and the conservative movement is what a miserable failure their efforts were. Clinton was reelected in 1996 and Democrats gained seats in Congress that year and again in 1998. Republicans lost two House speakers, Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, and completely extinguished the flame of their 1994 “revolution” in pursuit of prurient details that would take down the president. And the cumulative effect of this entire period was the elevation of Bill Clinton’s approval ratings.

Despite this failure, two decades later conservatives are once against returning to this same old playbook, but with a new twist. Now they would like to blame Hillary Clinton for the alleged foibles of her husband and use them to convince the American people that she is not suited to hold public office.

Along with the obvious strategic shortcomings of this plan, there is an even more obvious dose of sexism behind these latest attacks—blaming a wife for the actions of her husband. Yet the Trump campaign presses forward, beginning the week with the too-cute-by-half notion that their candidate was courageous for not raising these issues during the debate.

The right-wing echo chamber has been demanding for months that these issues be discussed and Trump is happy to once again oblige, now through his surrogates in the media.

While the symbiotic relationship between Trump and the right-wing media is perhaps greater than with any other Republican candidate in history, it is not wholly unique. That’s why it’s no surprise that in the seven presidential elections since Rush Limbaugh’s radio program was syndicated nationally, the Republican candidate has only been able to win a plurality of the popular vote twice.

---

ref

Ari Rabin-Havt | April 26, 2016 5:03 pm

“Donald Trump is campaigning as a general election candidate at this point,” wrote Callum Borchers on the Washington Post’s Fix blog.

NBC News’ Lester Holt said, “Trump’s comments appear to signal a more moderate shift, and some are asking if it a sign of things to come,” after the Republican Presidential candidate appeared to oppose — albeit briefly — North Carolina’s new anti-LGBT law.

Expect to hear this meme repeated in the media following a foreign policy speech Trump is scheduled to deliver on Wednesday.

The concept of a general election pivot — that candidates can shed extreme and divisive statements and policies as they move from partisan primaries into the general election in order to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate — is at best an exaggerated phenomenon. In the case of Donald Trump, it is an impossibility.

Trump’s conservatism is not based on a set of policy positions that can be slightly modified or added to in order to make them more palatable. His campaign was born in the fringes of the conservative movement.

The American public’s memory might be short, but they will not forget that Trump’s presidential campaign is rooted in the birther movement and his doubts about the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate.

Trump launched his campaign with a racist attack on Mexican immigrants claiming they are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

He cannot moderate his proposal “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

And Trump cannot force the public to unremember the plethora of sexist statements he has made, from denigrating Carly Fiorina by stating, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” to his sexist attacks Megyn Kelly.

Trump’s controversial statements were not random or an accident. They were designed to curry favor with the far right. In early April Gabe Sherman reported in New York magazinethat the Trump campaign’s communications efforts began with a study of what appealed to the conservative radio audience.

Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence.“I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” [former Trump aide Sam] Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

A campaign born from the talking points of conservative talk radio hosts can only pivot to the mainstream if the American people develop a collective case of amnesia. That is unlikely to happen in 2016.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/inside-the-donald-trump-presidential-campaign.html

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As early as 1987, Trump talked publicly about his desire to run for president. He toyed with mounting a campaign in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket, and again in 2012 as a Republican (this was at the height of his Obama birtherism). Two years later, Trump briefly explored running for governor of New York as a springboard to the White House. “I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned,” he tweeted in March 2014.

Trump taped another season of The Apprenticethat year, but he kept a political organization intact. His team at the time consisted of three advisers: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg. Stone is a veteran operative, known for his gleeful use of dirty tricks and for ending Eliot Spitzer’s political career by leaking his patronage of prostitutes to the FBI. Cohen is Trump’s longtime in-house attorney. AndNunberg is a lawyer wired into right-wing politics who has long looked up to “Mr. Trump,” as he calls him. “I first met him at WrestleMania when I was like 5 years old,” Nunberg told me.

Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence.“I listened tothousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

Meanwhile, Trump used his wealth as a strategic tool to gather his own intelligence. When Citizens United president David Bossie or GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump for contributions, Trump used the conversations as opportunities to talk about 2016. “Reince called Trump thinking they were talking about donations, but Trump was asking him hard questions,” recalled Nunberg.From his conversations with Priebus, Trump learned that the 2016 field was likely to be crowded. “We knew it was going to be like a parliamentary election,” Nunberg said.

Which is how Trump’s scorched-earth strategy coalesced. To break out of the pack, he made what appears to be a deliberate decision to be provocative, even outrageous. “If I were totally presidential, I’d be one of the many people who are already out of the race,” Trump told me. And so, Trump openly stoked racial tensions and appealed to the latent misogyny of a base that thinks of Hillary as the world’s most horrible ballbuster.

It was also thanks to some information he had gathered that Trump was able to do something that no other Republican has done before: take on Fox News. An odd bit of coincidence had given him a card to play against Fox founder Roger Ailes. In 2014, I published a biography of Ailes, which upset the famously paranoid executive. Several months before it landed in stores, Ailes fired his longtime PR adviser Brian Lewis, accusing him of being a source. During Lewis’s severance negotiations, Lewis hired Judd Burstein, a powerhouse litigator, and claimed he had “bombs” that would destroy Ailes and Fox News. That’s when Trump got involved.

“When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me,” Trump said.Burstein, it turned out, had worked for Trump briefly in the ’90s, and Ailes asked Trump to mediate. Trump ran the negotiations out of his office at Trump Tower. “Roger had lawyers, very expensive lawyers, and they couldn’t do anything. I solved the problem.” Fox paid Lewis millions to go away quietly, and Trump, I’m told, learned everything Lewis had planned to leak. If Ailes ever truly went to war against Trump, Trump would have the arsenal to launch a retaliatory strike.

In January 2015, Trump hired Corey Lewandowski as campaign manager at the recommendation of Citizen United’s Bossie. On paper, Lewandowski’s credentials didn’t shine, but what he lacked in pedigree he made up for in raw ambition and ruthlessness.Lewandowski grew up poor in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. As an undergraduate at the local UMass branch, he ran unsuccessfully for state representative. After graduating in 1995, he moved to Washington, D.C., got a master’s in politics at American University, and worked as a House aide on Capitol Hill. In 2001,he got a job with the Republican National Committee. But Lewandowski’s time as a member of the GOP Establishment was short-lived.

In 2002, he managed the reelection campaign of New Hampshire Republican senator Bob Smith, who was loathed by George W. Bush’s White House for briefly leaving the party in 1999 to launch an independent run for president. Against Smith, the Bushes backed John Sununu Jr., the son of George H. W. Bush’s former chief of staff. “I told Corey that the Establishment is coming after me, even the president of the United States,” Smith said, recalling his interview with Lewandowski for the job. “I said, ‘If that bothers you in any way, if you don’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole because of your political career, I understand.’ He just said, ‘No problem.’ ”

Smith lost, and Lewandowski, as Smith had warned, found himself cast into the political wilderness. He settled in New Hampshire, got married, and raised four children while bouncing around a series of jobs, at one point selling real estate and serving as a police officer. In 2008, he landed a position with Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-brothers-backed free-market group. Lewandowski rose through the ranks at AFP to become national director of voter registration but stalled after a voter-recruitment project he spearheaded failed to yield results in 2014. Politico also reported that Lewandowski once threatened to “blow up” a colleague’s car and even called a female co-worker a “cunt.” One former Koch executive told me he was going to be fired. (Lewandowski denies this.)

Luckily, Trump came calling. He hired Lewandowski thinking that the 42-year-old operative had two crucial assets: his Koch connections and an intimate knowledge of New Hampshire’s quirky political terrain. The first assumption was wrong, but on the second, Lewandowski proved his worth. And he gained Trump’s trust by demonstrating he possessed the quality Trump values most: loyalty. “This campaign, above all other things, is about loyalty,” Lewandowski said. In what’s been said to be a unique arrangement for a campaign manager, Lewandowski travels everywhere with Trump, a role normally reserved for the campaign’s “body man.”

Trump turned to an equally unlikely candidate to handle communications. One day in January 2015,Hope Hicks got a call from Trump’s office asking her to come in. At the time, she was working on the 25th floor with Ivanka. “Mr. Trump looked at me and said, ‘I’m thinking about running for president, and you’re going to be my press secretary,’ ” Hicks said. “I think it’s ‘the year of the outsider.’ It helps to have people with outsider perspective.” Her mother told her she should write a book about this experience someday. “She said it would be like Primary Colors, and I told her, ‘You don’t even know.’ ”

Six months later, Lewandowski and Hicks worked into the early hours of the morning prepping for Trump’s campaign announcement in the lobby of Trump Tower. “It had to be perfect,” Lewandowski said. “We had to build the stage, make sure the flags hung perfectly; the eagles faced out; the carpet was red, and he would wear a red tie.” And hire plants. The campaign paid actors $50 each to wear Trump T-shirts and wave placards.

Later that morning, they watched from the wings as Ivanka introduced her father in front of reporters and photographers and the manufactured crowd. “It looked like the Academy Awards!” Trump recalled. “You saw the cameras, forget it. You couldn’t get another person in.”

Trump didn’t read a prepared speech, but he knew what he wanted to say, which hardly mattered anyway because hardly anyone took his candidacy seriously at the time. “Nobody said anything,” Trump said about the fact that he had accused Mexico of sending “rapists” over the border into the U.S. “Then two weeks later, they started saying, ‘Wait a minute! Did he really say that?’ ”

He hadn’t tested the line, but Nunberg’s deep dive into talk radio had shown him that this was the sort of thing that would resonate with a certain segment of the Republican base. He also knew that this kind of outrageous statement would earn him the free media attention ($1.9 billion worth and counting, according to the New York Times) that would propel his campaign.

This strategy did not go over well in all corners of the Trump empire. Ivanka, Trump’s 34-year-old daughter, had carefully tended her public image as the softer, more refined face of the Trump empire. Now her father’s hard-edged nativist rhetoric risked damaging not only her brand but her business. A few days after the announcement speech, Ivanka received a terse email from Kimberly Grant, the CEO of ThinkFood Group, the holding company behind celebrity chef José Andrés, whose restaurant was supposed to be the anchor tenant in one of Ivanka’s biggest projects: the $200 million redevelopment of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., into a luxury hotel.

“We need to talk. Getting crushed over DJT comments about Latinos and Mexicans,” Grant wrote her, according to legal filings.

Ivanka forwarded Grant’s email to her executives.

“Ugh,” one responded. “This is not surprising and would expect that this will not be the last that we hear of it. At least for formal, prepared speeches, can someone vet going forward? Hopefully the Latino community does not organize against us more broadly in DC / across Trump properties.”

Ivanka’s older brother, Donald Jr., also weighed in. “Yea I was waiting for that one. Let’s discuss in the am.”

Ivanka did her best to salvage the partnership. She asked her father to issue an apology, even submitting several drafts for him to release to the press. But he refused. “Rapists are coming into the country! You know I was right,” Trump later told me.

On July 8, Andrés backed out of the restaurant deal, citing Trump’s immigration comments. The two sides are now battling in court.

Despite any differences of opinion, Ivanka is by all accounts thrilled at the possibility of her dad becoming president. She managed to persuade him to support Planned Parenthood—at least the part of the organization that doesn’t provide abortions—an extreme position for a Republican to take. “She’s very much into the concept of women’s health issues,” Trump said. (He no doubt embarrassed her last week by saying that women should be punished for getting abortions if the procedure were outlawed, a position held by almost no one even in the pro-life community, and one Trump recanted several hours later.)

Ivanka also pushed him to act more “presidential,” but in one of our conversations, Trump said he disagrees: “You know, there’s a difference between being presidential when you’re now president of the United States than being presidential when you’re running against 17 other people.”

“No one can control him,” said Nunberg. Not even his family.

Ivanka’s husband, the real-estate scion and Observer owner Jared Kushner, has also gotten involved in the campaign, serving as an emissary to the Jewish community. He helped plan Trump’s trip to Israel last December, though it didn’t go exactly as planned. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized Trump’s proposal to halt Muslim immigration, Trump canceled the trip. “This was all your idea!” Trump scolded his son-in-law, according to a source. He fared better with Trump’s AIPAC speech, which Kushner wrote with input from Observereditor Ken Kurson. It was one of the most subdued of his public statements so far, perhaps because it was the only one he has read from a Teleprompter.

Kushner has tapped his network in an attempt to help his father-in-law. He reached out to hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singerto introduce him to Trump (Singer declined), and during Trump’s feud with Fox, he called Rupert Murdoch to try to make peace (Murdoch told him to deal directly with Roger Ailes). But this is where Kushner’s involvement makes for the strangest of bedfellows. One of Trump’s most prominent endorsers, Chris Christie, happens to be the man who, as U.S. attorney, sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to federal prison for tax fraud, among other felonies, in 2004.

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