strict father

oddly blank? 1219

no merri

see by George lakoff, he cracked it; cruelty is the pt?

see man/male fashy see macho tag

SEE TUCKER

see retaliation, see reductionism

SEE EXECUTE TREASON

// force violence, cruel execute

~ COMPASSION EMPATHY

see flipside nurture mo and crypto nanny state

see activist suppression (run them down in cars)

see tough on crime, 3 strikes, criminalization, "law & order"

BAK CAPT 11 25

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old test god yaweh punishes disobedience?

aha trump claims to be their instrument of punishment i am your retribution

white grievance  an extreme flavor of pseudo-populism? // qanon storm punishes

• Kelly McClure @ Salon: “I am your retribution,” says Trump in his CPAC speech.

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gen z aspect?

Trump says protesters would vote for him if their parents 'slap 'em around'

an 10 26

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rww 9 26

Anti-Choice Activist Seth Gruber Advocates The Death Penalty For Women Who Get Abortions

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09/28/2026

byKyle Mantyla

Radical right-wing anti-choice activist Seth Gruber recently spoke at Calvary Tucson Church, where he argued that women who have abortions should face the death penalty.

Gruber, founder of the White Rose Resistance, has consistently been a leading voice among anti-choice activists demanding prosecution for women who obtain abortions and made the case during his recent conversation with Calvary Tuscon pastor Robert Furrow that potential penalties for doing so should include the death penalty.

Furrow declared that the only way to completely end abortion is to outlaw the practice and to prosecute women who have them but dismissed as "hypothetical" claims that women would be imprisoned as a result.

Gruber, for his part, made no such effort to downplay the ramifications of this position.

"You want to know what the role of the state is according to Paul in Romans?" Gruber said. "They're to be a terror to those who do evil. Do you know that's in Romans 13? What's the role of the state? To be a terror to those who do evil. Basically to be a deterrent."

"Paul says the state does not bear the sword in vain," he continued. "So in other words, here's a firing squad—to apply it to the 21st century, or an electric chair; in Paul's era, it was a sword—and the state is going to kill you if you murder innocent people. So there's this deterrent that floats up in the ether, and a lot of people never have to endure the punishment of that deterrent being applied because just the fact that the deterrent floats there up in the ether stops most people from doing those things."

"As a pro-life leader, I say make the death penalty great again," Gruber declared. "The death penalty is a recognition of the sanctity of life, because it's saying what you did was so heinous and evil in murdering an innocent that you've actually rescinded your right to live. We don't do the ceremonial laws in the Old Testament anymore, but the moral law is still there. Live by the sword, die by the sword, tooth for tooth, eye for eye; that kind of stuff still stands."

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MMA

Right-wing media’s heinous rhetoric against people experiencing homelessness

From calling for homeless people to be sent to “internment camps” to fantasizing about making them “fight like gladiators,” right-wing media’s crusade against people without housing continues

Written by Sage Hodil

Published 04/03/26

Right-wing media have a long history of attacking homeless people, and so far 2026 has seen a continuation of that trend. Pundits have called for sending homeless people to different countries, “internment camps,” and institutions. Right-wing media figures have also pushed dehumanizing rhetoric by referring to homeless people as “bums,” “blighty,” “junkies,” “mentally deranged,” and even joking about their deaths.

• ## Right-wing media have consistently demonized and mischaracterized homelessness, sometimes advocating for aggressive solutions

• • Research shows that homelessness is driven primarily by economic factors, and the belief that it’s a personal choice is largely a myth.From October 2021 to November 2022, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, conducted the “largest representative study of homelessness since the mid-1990s” and found homelessness was mainly determined by “high housing costs and low income.” Margot Kushel, who led the study, has criticized the media for “misdiagnosing the problem” when they “blame homelessness on substance abuse,” arguing, it “simply isn’t true” that homeless people “refuse housing or that their problems make them impossible to house.” University of California San Francisco, The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, [6/2023; Truthout, 11/6/23]

• • Experts from the Legal Defense Fund say that punitive approaches, such as forced displacement and criminalization, “will not end homelessness or address its root causes.” As The Legal Defense Fund stated, “Study after study show that the best way to address homelessness is to provide people with safe, affordable housing and to offer additional supports and services if needed.” Legal Defense Fund, [8/1/25]

• • Yet right-wing figures like Fox host Jesse Watters have spent years calling homeless people “a virus,” a “contagion,” and an “invasive species” and proposing carceral solutions.Watters, for example, has fantasized about sending homeless people to a “mega prison,” advocated for “bulldoz[ing]” homeless encampments and “institutionaliz[ing] everybody,” argued “it was more civilized when we banished them to asylums and put them in strait jackets,” and proposed “federally funded opium dens where the homeless can kill each other.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [8/21/23, 9/22/22, 9/22/22; Fox News, The Five, 3/24/25, 6/3/19, 9/15/22]

• ## In 2026 alone, right-wing media figures have called for detaining homeless people in jails and even sending them to other countries

• • On Fox News, billionaire CEO John Catsimatidis suggested homeless people should “live in Uganda.”Catsimatidis claimed the homeless should “live in Uganda for $8.13 a day. We'll give them the check for $8.13 a day, let them live somewhere else.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [3/19/26]

• • Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said we could “annex Greenland,” “send the homeless there,” and “call it homeless island.”Gutfeld continued, “You send them to a cold place, they've got to build shelter. Pretty soon they start to evolve towards normal living.” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*,[1/15/26]

• • Newsmax host Michael Savage proposed “internment camps” for “homeless bums.”Savage said homeless people “shouldn't have the freedom to live in the streets” and we should “take the freedom away from them, put them in internment camps 100 miles away from cities, and give them the care that they need.” Newsmax, *Carl Higbie: Frontline*, [3/16/26]

• • Podcaster Tim Pool said if Democrats were serious about fixing homelessness they would “forcefully detain them and bring them to a facility” because “the only way to remove the homeless is by force.”Pool went on to say people are not homeless “because they fell on hard times” but “because of substance abuse issues and choice.” YouTube, *The Culture War with Tim Pool*, [2/16/26]

• • Daily Wire host Matt Walsh called for homeless people to be “forcefully and permanently” moved into jails or mental institutions.Walsh stated, “They should be jailed or they should be institutionalized. You remove them from the street forcefully and permanently.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [2/4/26]

• • On Newsmax, Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney complained about “mentally deranged” people on the streets and said, “I'm not trying to be harsh when I say this, but some people, you got to just lock them up and throw away the key.”Newsmax host Carl Higbie also endorsed bringing back mental institutions and insane asylums, saying, “Make asylums great again.” Newsmax, *Carl Higbie Frontline*, [1/21/26]

• • Fox host Todd Piro advocated for rounding up “every single homeless person” and putting them “in one location.”Piro stated, “I feel like you can take every single homeless person in a city, put them in one location, and pay security to keep everybody safe.” Fox Business, *Mornings with Maria*, [3/26/26]

• ## Right-wing media have dehumanized people experiencing homelessness as “bad people” who are “repulsive” and embody “third world criminal blight”

• • Jesse Watters said billionaires should “make the homeless people in skid row fight like gladiators.”Watters also proposed for billionaires to “buy maybe everybody in skid row a one-way ticket to Thailand.” Fox News, *The Five*, [2/19/26]

• • Fox News contributor Lisa Kennedy Montgomery joked about homeless people freezing to death in New York City, referring to them as “corpsicles.”Her comment came after actor Rob Schneider joked, “As soon as they freeze to death you don't have to call them homeless. You just call them frozen dead people.” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*, [2/6/26]

• • Fox News host Sean Hannity cited New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s free bus proposal and said if he really wants to “get rid of their homeless problem” he should “offer free booze, hookers, and drugs and nobody will ever leave the bus.”Prior to Hannity’s comment, guest Jeff Dye made a joke about “bums” urinating and defecating on buses and claimed they will “end up living” there if public transit is made free. Fox News, *Hannity*, [1/19/26]

• • Greg Gutfeld claimed, “Homeless people do not have the ability to make decisions for themselves. We all know that.”Gutfeld blamed Mamdani for the deaths of 16 people during New York’s freezing weather and argued, “If they had allowed to take down the encampments and required them in shelters, all of those people would be alive.” Fox News, *The Five*, [2/3/26]

• • Matt Walsh characterized homeless people as “junkies” and “for the most part bad people.”Walsh went on to say, “The only solution is to round them up by force and put them in jail. … Treat drug use as a crime. Treat homelessness as a crime.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [1/6/26]

• • In January, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson referred to homeless people as “vagrants” who are “sickening,” “blighty,” and “repulsive and dangerous.”Johnson also said homeless encampments in California represent “third world criminal blight.” YouTube, *The Benny Show*, [1/16/26, 1/13/26]

//

1. ### Jesse Watters’ decade-long hate campaign against homeless people

07/17/23

2. ### Fox News zeroes in on a new target: the homeless

06/04/19

3. ### NY Post's Latest Attack On Homeless Demonstrates Real-World Consequences Of Poor-Shaming

03/10/16

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AHA? // TO HEARTLAND RATIONALE? WE GOOD CONSERV XIAN CANNOT BE STARVING KIDS, THUS THE PROBLEM MUST NOT EXIST?

MMA

Myths and facts about SNAP

As the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program runs out of funds, right-wing figures have suggested food insecurity is an “illusion” and called program recipients “entitled”

Written by Noah Dowe

Research contributions from Helena Hind & Jane Lee

Published 10/31/25

With SNAP benefits set to expire on November 1 due to the ongoing government shutdown and the Trump administration’s refusal to shift emergency funds, many right-wing media figures have seized the opportunity to spread false claims about the program and its users.

These figures have claimed, contrary to government data, that food insecurity is overblown, and suggested the program leaves taxpayers being “ripped off by the poor.”

They have also wrongly suggested that “a lot” or even “most” of SNAP recipients are “not even Americans,” arguing the program is “redistributing the wealth away from productive Americans to foreigners.”

As SNAP funding runs dry, the Trump administration has decided not to use emergency reserves to maintain it

• • SNAP is set to “exhaust its remaining funds” by November 1, and the administration is refusing to save the program by using “billions of dollars left over across multiple federal accounts, including money in an emergency reserve specifically for SNAP.”In a hearing for a lawsuit filed against the administration by 25 states, a federal judge commented that it was “hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency, when there’s no money, and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits.” The judge later gave the administration until Monday to come up with a plan for expiring benefits, and said “the Agriculture Department must use emergency funds to keep SNAP going.” The New York Times, [10/30/25; NPR, 10/31/25]

• • Axios: The U.S. Department of Agriculture “told states it would not provide November's SNAP payments” in “an apparent departure from its Sept. 30 shutdown plan (which has since been taken down) that stated, ‘Congressional intent is evident that SNAP's operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds.’” The USDA’s initial shutdown plan also stated: “These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.” Axios, [10/27/25; U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Lapse of Funding Plan (as of September 30, 2025),” accessed 10/31/25]

• • The USDA website later posted a notice blaming Democrats for its refusal to pay out the benefits, declaring that “the well has run dry.” United States Department of Agriculture, accessed [10/31/25; Axios, 10/27/25]

• • The Project 2025 play book,Mandate for Leadership, which has heavily influenced the Trump administration, called for sweeping changes to SNAP and other food assistance programs that would cut many Americans off from aid. These include implementing work requirements, ending automatic eligibility for those receiving other forms of welfare, reducing the purchasing power of SNAP over time, and closing the “heat-and-eat loophole” which allows those in the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program to receive more benefits. Axios, [10/2/25; Media Matters, 10/29/24]

• ## MYTH: Food insecurity is overblown, and people will not go hungry without food stamps

• • Newsmax host Rob Schmitt: “This whole idea that there's food insecurity in this country, what an illusion that is.” Schmitt declared, “I don't think there's a food security problem at all -- or food insecurity problem.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [10/28/25]

• • MAGA influencer TheQuartering: “I refuse to believe there are 43 million Americans in need of me to pay for their Mountain Dew.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25, 3/26/25]

• • Conservative Political Action Conference Chair Matt Schlapp said it was “sad to watch Republicans saying that SNAP funding delays will lead to widespread starvation.” He explained, “There are truly needy poor people in America. But these programs are riddled with waste and people here illegally seem to be first in line.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]

• • Right-wing host Steven Crowder claimed SNAP recipients “spend TWICE what the average worker does on groceries,” arguing the program is “rewarding people who abuse the system.”Twitter/X, [10/28/25]

• • Right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson said, “This is not the Great Depression. There are not food shortages in this nation.” He then attacked SNAP recipients, calling them “able-bodied Americans and illegals who refuse to work” and “ want to just leech off the productive class.” YouTube, The Benny Show, [10/31/25]

• • Daily Wire host Matt Walsh questioned whether anyone has “ever starved to death” in modern America, adding, “There are so many other lines of defense that should mean that you're not going to starve” and listing family, friends, soup kitchens, charities, churches, food drives, and other welfare programs. He then attacked SNAP recipients, saying when you consider their pleas they come off as “entitled, lazy,” and “barely literate,” arguing that “some of them are just frankly bad people.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/28/25]

• ## FACT: SNAP is an essential program protecting against food insecurity and severe hunger, and food banks “will not be able to fill the gap”

• • USDA data shows that “47.4 million people lived in food-insecure households” in 2023. The agency noted that food insecurity was worst in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Food Security in the U.S. - Key Statistics & Graphics,” [1/8/25]

• • A 2019 study published in the Health Affairs journal found “groups whose SNAP benefits were reduced or cut off had significantly increased odds of household and child food insecurity.” Health Affairs, [5/19]

• • According to CNBC, 73% of SNAP recipients “live below the poverty line, which is currently $32,150 or less for a family of four.” The article notes that “Google search interest for ‘food banks’ and ‘food stamps’” have surged “as SNAP beneficiaries look for alternatives.” CNBC, [10/29/25]

• • The New York Times interviewed “several food bank directors” who warned that “they will not be able to fill the gap if funding for SNAP does not come through.” As reported by the Times, “For every nine meals that were supplied by federal food assistance, food pantries can provide only one on their own. No matter how thin they stretch their resources, they will not be able to fill the gap if funding for SNAP does not come through.” The New York Times, [10/26/25]

• ## MYTH: SNAP is rife with “fraud”

• • Rob Schmitt: “12% of Americans are on food stamps. I think just purely about how much fraud there must be in that, because we do not have 12% of Americans that aren't able to work.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [10/22/25]

• • :{:{Matt Walsh claimed the shutdown’s impact on SNAP “has finally drawn attention to the scale of this fraud” and “exposed a vast network of criminal activity that needs to be shut down.” Walsh continued, “And beyond that point, if the food stamp program is going to continue to exist at all, which I'm not convinced it should, it needs to have standards, strict standards. It needs to have a reason to exist.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/29/25]}:

• • Walsh later said taxpayers are “getting ripped off by the poor and the rich at the same time.” Twitter/X, [10/30/25]

• • Right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich: “SNAP is fraud, it's for people to buy sugar soda and junk food.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]

• • Right-wing influencer Phillip Buchanan, who posts on social media under the moniker “Catturd”: “The Government shutdown has exposed how many millions of people are scamming the SNAP program.” Daily Dot, [7/25/23; Twitter/X, 10/29/25]

• ## FACT: SNAP fraud is rare, and nearly 40% of recipients are children

• • Citing the Congressional Research Service, PBS reported in 2023 that “for every 10,000 households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about 14 contained a recipient who was investigated and determined to have committed fraud.” The article continued, “Within SNAP, for every $10,000 paid in benefits, about $11 is determined by state agencies to have been overpaid due to recipient fraud.” PBS, [5/15/23]

• • The Urban Institute found that “the maximum SNAP benefit did not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99 percent of US counties.” Urban Institute, [7/16/25]

• • MSNBC: Nearly “half of SNAP households contain elderly or disabled people. Of the others, about half are currently employed while most of the rest are relying on SNAP during relatively short periods of unemployment.” MSNBC, [10/30/25]

• • According to USDA data from 2023, about 39% of SNAP recipients were children, and about 11% of recipients were under 5 years old. USDA, [7/24/25]

• ## MYTH: SNAP is used primarily by “noncitizens or foreigners”

• • Newsmax host Rob Finnerty: “Most of the people getting food stamps from the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer are not even Americans.” Finnerty continued, “We can confirm tonight that millions of Joe Biden illegal aliens, people who crossed the border when Joe was president, are now collecting food stamps from a program funded by hard-working American taxpayers.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/27/25]

• • Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark: “While we are here-let’s look into the amount of illegals using SNAP benefits over Americans.” Twitter/X, [10/27/25]

• • Fox host Laura Ingraham claimed “a lot” of SNAP recipients “are noncitizens or foreigners.”Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [10/28/25]

• • Townhall senior columnist Kurt Schlichter said SNAP users are “bums” who should “go back to the garbage homelands.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]

• • Newsmax guest James Fishback: “We are essentially redistributing the wealth away from productive Americans to foreigners and subsidizing their way of life.” Newsmax, *Carl Higbie Frontline*, [10/29/25]

• • :{Matt Walsh: “We import the third world and force working class Americans to feed and house them at gunpoint. Civilizational suicide.” Twitter/X, [10/26/25]

• ## FACT: The overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients are citizens

• • Wired: “USDA data shows that almost 90 percent of SNAP recipients are American-born citizens. 1.1 percent of recipients are refugees, and 3.3 percent are other noncitizens.”Wired, [10/30/25]

• • ABC News: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act “cuts off [SNAP] access completely for refugees and other immigrant groups in the country lawfully,” although “states are still awaiting federal guidance on when to stop or phase it out.” As reported by ABC, “One of the first provisions to take effect under the law removes SNAP eligibility for most refugees, asylum seekers, trafficking and domestic violence victims, and other legal immigrants.” ABC News, [10/30/25]

• ## MYTH: SNAP recipients are using the program to live unhealthy lifestyles

• • Far-right commentator Stefan Molyneux: “You should not be fat on government food.” Twitter/X, [10/27/25]

• • Right-wing social media account End Wokeness: “Every single fat person on food stamps is an indictment of the entire program.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]

• • :{:{Matt Walsh: “75% of these people are obese.” Walsh used this to claim that “the massive number of people who receive these subsidies … clearly don’t need them, for the most part.” Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/29/25]}:

• • Podcaster Adam Carolla: “The average female who gets no free food from the government is 146 pounds. The average SNAP recipient is 211 pounds. … Nobody could benefit from a nice fast more than the SNAP recipients.”Twitter/X, [10/29/25]

• • Rob Schmitt: “Why are people who weigh 300 pounds on SNAP? Is there no weight limit for a free food program in this country? Are you kidding me?” Schmitt added, “A perfect diet plan would be no more EBT cards.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [10/29/25]

• ## FACT: SNAP recipients sometimes see improved health outcomes as compared to nonrecipients

• • Usage of SNAP is associated with “better self-reported health, lower risk of heart disease and obesity among adults who had access to SNAP as children, and greater medication adherence among older participants.” According to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Early access to SNAP among pregnant mothers and in early childhood improved birth outcomes and long-term health as adults. Elderly SNAP participants are less likely than similar non-participants to forgo their full prescribed dosage of medicine due to cost. … Infants and children in families participating in SNAP are more likely to see a doctor for periodic check-ups. Low-income adults participating in SNAP incur an average of about $1,400, or nearly 25 percent, less in medical care costs in a year than low-income non-participants. The difference is even greater for those with hypertension (nearly $2,700 less) and coronary heart disease (over $4,100 less).” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, [12/14/22]

• • PBS: “Anti-hunger advocates point to research that shows SNAP recipients are no more likely than other low-income Americans to buy sugary drinks or snack foods. And they say that limiting food choices undermines the autonomy and dignity of people who receive, on average, about $187 per month — or about $6.16 per day, according to latest figures.” PBS, [2/19/25]

//

1. ### The Trump administration previously indicated it would pay SNAP benefits during a shutdown. Fox is defending its new refusal to do so.

:{10/30/25

2. ### The split in the right over SNAP and food stamps: Some attack the program and its recipients, while others try to use cuts as a cudgel against Democrats

:{10/29/25

3. ### Newsmax's Rick Santorum says Kevin Roberts “just sort of missed it a little bit” in his response to Tucker Carlson's “softball” interview with Nick Fuentes

11/04/25

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RWW

Steve Deace Urges Trump To 'Stop Trying To Be Reasonable' Amid Anti-ICE Protests

01/29/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

Steve Deace is a far-right broadcaster who has repeatedly called for violence against his political opponents, including openly declaring that he wants to see "antifa members hanging from gallows in Trump ties." Predictably, Deace is livid about the anti-ICE protests that have been occurring in Minnesota and is calling on President Donald Trump to "stop trying to be reasonable" and embrace the authoritarian label by making an example out of those who have dared to resist him.

Appearing on "The Eric Metaxas Show" earlier this week, Deace was outraged that Trump seems to be "afraid of being branded authoritarian."

"We get called that no matter what we do anyway," Deace fumed. "So why don't we actually pass the legislation that we want, that we believe in? If they're going to call us that no matter what we do, stop trying to be reasonable."

"Why get all the blowback for what we say we're going to do and what we claim to believe and then not follow through?" he added. "We might [as well] get some of the benefit for it."

"Someone must be made an example out of," Deace proclaimed. "A community must be made an example out of so it's a cautionary tale, so that everybody still knows what Sodom and Gomorrah means. It's been 4,000 years; everybody knows. An example must be made. We've not made an example out of anybody yet."

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mayor stands w gov pritzker on military 8 25

September 3, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show

MATT WALSH (HOST): Now when you hear politicians like Brandon Johnson claim that they have solutions, remember videos like this one. They've gone out of their way to make violent crime much, much worse in Chicago. This is a deliberate effort that they've embarked on. Now it's true that in our federal system, states are not required to assist the federal government in carrying out certain policy objectives, but it's also true that states and local government cannot actively interfere with the federal government's decision to enforce the law. That is not states rights. That is treason.

Brandon Johnson is openly encouraging residents of Chicago to engage in treason against the United States. And for that reason, Brandon Johnson should be arrested, charged with treason, convicted, and then given the requisite punishment for a capital offense. Will that ever happen? Probably not. But then again, just a few days ago, Tren de Aragua, you know, they never thought that they'd be intercepted as they sped towards the United States on their drug boats. They certainly didn't imagine they'd get blown up without any warning.

All indications are that we are entering a new phase of federal governance, one where the U.S. military acts to defend the American people, where false narratives from NGOs are ignored, where criminals are actually punished when they violate the law in public. So who knows? Maybe Brandon Johnson shouldn't be so confident. Like Washington, D.C., which has experienced something like a 50% drop in violent crime since the National Guard moved in, Chicago is about to become a much safer place.

The more JB Pritzker lies about crime statistics, the more Brandon Johnson commits treason in public, the more obvious it becomes that this strategy needs to be applied to every major American city. Democrats have no response. They have no counterargument. The safer America becomes, the more they will complain. And in response, every American who's paying attention will recognize their party for what it is. They are the party of chaos, crime, and cartels, and they should be treated accordingly.

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RWW

01/22/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

The day before the inauguration, Trump cultists gathered in DC to pray that "our beloved Donald Trump" will assume a fathership position" and "be a role model for the children and the kids in our nation."

ANGEL ARMY GABRIELLE BRUNO

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rww Joel Webbon Says That If You're Poor In America "It's Because You're Lazy" | People For 11 24

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TUCKER 10 24 TPUSA BIZARRE DADDY SPANK BAD GIRL, BIG CHEERS

CALL COACH GAY

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alternet-lNO LNX

MAGA pastor who wants to end female voting rights compares women to 'pigs with gold nose rings'

Thom Hartmann October 26, 2024

The Hartmann Report, this little newsletter that Louise and I started in our living room and our old friend and business partner Nigel helps us administer, hits 100,000 daily readers this weekend. Over 90% of our growth has come about as the result of word-of-mouth; people sharing this newsletter with their friends, relatives, and coworkers. We are so honored to have your trust in our research and hard work, and really appreciate your sharing my articles with others. Thank you!

— The Massive Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans. Trump and Vance are promising to deport 15 million people from America, a massive undertaking that will require a major departure from our traditions and laws providing for due process. “You go to the red state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard.’ We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers,” notorious racist and Trump ally Stephen Miller said recently. Those soldiers — not police officers — would then “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.”

Melissa Gira Grant wrote a brilliant piece about this obscenity for The New Republic that’s well worth a read, and it’s vital to remember that Trump is setting up something that appears inspired by Hitler’s early pogroms of the Jews. What will you do and say when they knock on your door — particularly if you have a last name that sounds Hispanic — and demand to see your citizenship papers? This is the world these bizarre men want to plunge us into, and, tragically, half the country appears to be just fine with it. What the hell has happened to our nation? I lay most of the blame at the feet of the billionaires like Murdoch, etc., who’ve been funding rightwing hate media for decades.

— One of the reasons our media so rarely reports on the obscene things that Trump says at his rallies is that they are terrified of his followers. A woman reporter showed up at a Trump rally and was assaulted by the fascists in attendance, as reported by the International Women’s Media Foundation. The Trump-cult followers surrounding her screamed, “I hope you’re murdered,” “I hope you’re dismembered,” and “I hope someone rapes you before they murder you,” along with other hateful epithets. This is typical of fascist movements: violence is always just a thin-scratch layer under the surface.

Now it appears that billionaires including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong have been intimidated by Trump (or are desperately sucking up to him) and so are preventing their newspapers from making an endorsement in this year’s presidential race. (I just canceled my Washington Post subscription.)

It took Adolf Hitler less than three months to cow and then largely shut down the media in Germany after he acquired power in January, 1933, although most newspapers had surrendered to him before then and voluntarily stopped reporting negative stories.

Reporters were interred in Dachau as early as March of that same year, along with progressive politicians and editorial writers who’d dared criticize him in the past.

Trump and his people trying to revisit this history is not the sign of a healthy republic; this is a bright red flashing warning about a country sliding into autocracy, as I described in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Now that the MAGA movement has become a full-blown fascist movement, the question is: What will the GOP do with it after the election? Particularly if Trump loses? You can leave your comments here.

— Rightwing billionaire Elon Musk and his colleagues apparently believe they now have the Supreme Court votes necessary to overturn the 1935 Wagner Act that legalized labor unions. When Musk “interviewed” Trump on Xitter, the two joked about how impressed Trump was with Musk’s unwillingness to allow unions in any of his companies. “I love it,” Trump told his fellow oligarch. “You’re the greatest ... I mean, I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone ... Every one of you is gone.’” Musk chuckled at that one, so Trump followed up by discussing putting Musk in charge of a government “efficiency” body that could lead the charge to bust the last of America’s unions among government workers:

“You are the greatest! You would be very good [on the proposed commission]. Oh, you would love it.” Musk has filed a lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board (which enforces unions’ right to exist) claiming the entire agency is unconstitutional; a Trumpy federal judge has already agreed, temporarily blocking the agency’s ability to enforce the law, as the case now heads toward the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Republicans and the billionaires who own them have been on a jeremiad against the ability of unions to exist ever since American workers first earned the right to organize in 1935. Will Musk and his Republican buddies succeed in finally gutting the last income protection the middle class has against greedy billionaires? Stay tuned.

— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail.

They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’”

They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”

— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…

— Crazy Alert! Can anything get weirder than this? Tucker Carlson’s creepy “daddy speech” is stunning. Goddess only knows what happened to frozen-fish-stick heir Tucker Swanson Carlson in his childhood, but whatever it was, it’s showing. Earlier this week he introduced Trump at a rally with a sweet little speech about the former president’s future role overseeing our country and “spanking” all those uppity girls and women who’ve dared defy the Republican Party’s demand for more pregnancies and less talkback:

“There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right, dad comes home and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed! He’s not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you, not it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.’” Honest, that’s what he said. And the crowd’s response wasn’t the shocked silence a rational person would expect; instead, when Trump appeared after this introduction, they started chanting, “Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!” Where do they find these people? And how can anybody vote to put them in charge of our country?

— Even Crazier Alert! Famous MAGA pastor says American women are “pigs with gold nose rings,” wants to overturn the 19th Amendment right of women to vote, and says women who accuse men of rape but can’t absolutely prove it should be put to death. Say what?! Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon is a rising star in the GOP, and recently had some interesting things to say about American women. First, he claimed they’re far too pampered: “Pigs with gold nose rings.” Then he claimed it’s time to overturn the 19th Amendment and revoke women’s right to vote because that’s “the Christian thing to do.” Finally, to top it all off, the GOP’s top Christian guru argued women who claim rape but can’t prove it should be publicly executed to put an end to the Me Too movement.

“If you perjure yourself by bearing false witness accusing somebody else,” the minister told his followers, “whatever the penalty would have been for that person had they been found guilty, then that penalty should fall on your head for falsely accusing them. … If that were to occur and the just penalties were to be enforced, you, the false accuser, is now put to death. And that’s a public death. It’s a public sentence, publicly carried out, then the citizens of these United States of America, you know what they would do? #MeToo would end real fast. False accusing, playing the victim when you’re actually not; you know how to end that real fast? All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied.” This guy isn’t an outlier; this is the direction the entire GOP has been going for years, and now, with Trump and Vance within a hair’s breadth of seizing the federal government, they feel empowered to be open and public about their positions. What would Jesus say? Nothing like Joel Webbon’s spouting off, I can guarantee you that…

---

===

// trump 2016 abort? execute fema traitors? 10 24

rww webbon 10 24

...

"In Israel, and this should be the law of the land in our country and every country still to this day, this is a timeless principle, a timeless, universal truth," Webbon preached. "If you perjure yourself by bearing false witness accusing somebody else, whatever the penalty would have been for that person had they been found guilty, then that penalty should fall on your head for falsely accusing them."

"So if you accuse in a court of law, falsely accuse someone of murder and it turns out in the final analysis that that person is not guilty of murder," Webbon continued, "and the penalty for murder should be capital punishment—life for life—then you, even though you have not committed murder, because you falsely accused someone else for murder and the penalty for that crime would have been death, you should be put to death."

:{:{"If that were to occur and the just penalties were to be enforced, you, the false accuser, is now put to death," Webbon declared. "And that's a public death. It's a public sentence, publicly carried out, then the citizens of these United States of America, you know what they would do? :{#MeToo would end real fast. False accusing, playing the victim when you're actually not; you know how to end that real fast? All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied."...}:

===

an 4 24

just normal gop macho strict fr bs?

tensions in the Middle East escalated during the April 13-14 weekend when Iran attacked Israel with drones and missiles, many of which were shot down by U.S. forces.

President Joe Biden has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Gaza policy as the death toll in Gaza continues to soar. However, Biden has also made it clear that the U.S. remains a major ally of Israel.

Protests against Netanyahu's policies have been plentiful in the United States. And Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is drawing vehement criticism after promoting violence against protesters.

In an April 15 post on X, formerly Twitter, the GOP senator wrote, "I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."

Politico's Niall Stanage noted that Cotton edited his tweet, replacing "take matters into your own hands" with the longer "take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way."

New York Daily News columnist Brandon Friedman tweeted, "Cotton should be expelled from the Senate over this."

On X, journalist Brian Beutler commented, "Remember when people insisted that Cotton simply meant for troops to discern with perfect accuracy between protesters and rioters and intended no harm to the former?"

READ MORE:[The Big Picture: Donald J. Trump's attempted coup

In response to Cotton, Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude Jr. — a frequent guest on MSNBC — tweeted, "What is wrong with you?"

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said of Cotton, "What? He wants to kill Americans. That makes him a Republican."

Activist Charlotte Clymer, a former press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, told Cotton, "Why is violence your answer to every problem? Why are you so weak?"

Wade Lentz, co-host of "The Patriot Pastor's Podcast," tweeted, "It's sad that an Arkansas Senator asks that American citizens put their lives in danger when he has done not one thing to address this in DC. Do something besides posting about it, and then show us how you have addressed it in Washington."

aha

women allowed to express some emotions in some ways /time & place; man can express anger, often via violence

strict fr righteous anger retribution for bad weak immoral out of control behavior disobedience

How Barbie sped up the collapse of Trump’s macho-based hate movement

Thom Hartmann

August 28, 2023

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers.

Have you noticed Americans are beginning to reject hate?

Trump’s popularity — even among Republicans — is dropping like a stone, and parents are beginning to show up in large numbers at school board meetings to talk back to bigots and haters.

MSNBC and CNN are filled with Republicans who have rejected Trump and hate. Increasingly, pastors are speaking out against Trump and hate.

Trump called for huge protests at his arraignments, but only a handful of people showed up, and the Wall Street Journal is calling for Republican presidential candidates to organize themselves in a way that will prevent Trump from becoming the GOP’s nominee again.

As investigative reporter Jordan Green notes over at Raw Story:

“On Telegram accounts linked to the Proud Boys, posts about the Maui wildfires — typically suggesting sinister causes or accusing the Biden administration of neglect — appear to outnumber references to the Trump indictment roughly four to one.”

The New York Times reports that even in the weeks before Fani Willis’ Fulton County indictment:

“A majority of Americans, in four recent polls, said Mr. Trump’s criminal cases were warranted.”

And democracy expert David Pepper points out on his excellent Substack blog Pepperspectives:

“Recent polls on Trump are brutal, with more than 60% saying they won’t vote for him in a general election.

“Recent elections in Ohio and Wisconsin confirm that the far right’s toxic brew of extremist policies and attacks on democracy are also deeply unpopular. Absolute losers at the polls.”

Political candidates who base their campaigns on hate are failing, and ordinary cordial discourse among Americans with different political views is beginning to return.

The media has noticed the trend, but they think it’s caused entirely by Trump’s legal troubles. While that’s no doubt a very large factor, I believe there’s also another force at work here: the movie Barbie.

Seriously.

Last week Louise got together with some “girlfriends” — including a few Trump supporters — for a Barbie Party. A group of boomer women all hanging out wearing pink and talking smack about “the patriarchy.”

Before you scoff, consider this:

— The reason “shock therapy” (electro-convulsive therapy or ECT) fell out of favor in America wasn’t just because of the development of anti-depressive medications during that era: it was also because of the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

— Deer hunting collapsed as a sport in large part because of the Disney movie Bambi, and sociologists credit the film and it’s “Bambi Effect” with a rise in vegetarianism among boomers who were children when it came out (I sure still remember it, and my parents took me to see it during the film’s revival 66 years ago!).

— Teaching evolution and contrasting it with creationism in American classrooms became acceptable as the result of the movie Inherit The Wind about the Scopes Monkey Trial.

— The nationwide revival of the then-moribund Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (leading to the Klan taking full political control of the State of Oregon that decade) was entirely attributable to D.W. Griffith’s movieBirth of a Nation.

— The movie Jaws caused a drop (that lasted for years) in people willing to swim in the ocean, as well as an increase in shark hunting that has caused some species to become endangered.

— The film Gone With The Wind, whitewashing the crimes of the Confederacy and the brutality of slavery, led to a revival in “Confederate Culture” that echoes across the South to this day.

Given this history, and the brilliant screenplay, acting, and production values of the movie Barbie, it would be naïve not to think it’s had an impact on American consciousness. The question is, how big is that impact?

A recent survey reported by The Hill found that fully 85 percent of conservatives who’d seen the movie Barbie said it increased their “awareness of the patriarchy at work.”

Fifty-seven percent of all viewers surveyed said the movie “improved their opinion of women in leadership.” The percentage of people surveyed who said that women were more effective leaders than men went from 19 percent before seeing the film to 29 percent after.

A movie ostensibly about a Mattel doll, it opens with a Barbie character proclaiming:

:{

}:

“In Barbieland, corporations are not people, and money is not considered protected free speech!”

From there the plot becomes even more progressive. Ken goes from the matriarchal Barbieland to the “real world” and brings back the idea of patriarchy, a cultural contagion that destroys Barbieland nearly as completely as Trump tried to destroy democracy in America. (I promise not to give away any more of the movie.)

The analogies between the transformations of Barbieland and the collapse of Trump’s macho-based movement are startling; it’s hard to imagine the screenwriters weren’t either influenced directly by it or at least by the same social forces that brought it about.

And it’s hard to overestimate how widespread the impact of the movie has been. It’s grossed over a billion dollars, and fully 22 percent of people who saw it hadn’t been to a movie in years.

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}:

Hopefully, this is the start of a trend like the one we saw during the latter Obama years.

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}:

Between 2013 and 2014, hate in America experienced a significant decline: in an “Intelligence Report” released in March, 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center said, as CNN reported, “the number of hate groups operating in the U.S. declined 17% between 2013 and 2014.” They were, SPLC reported, at their lowest levels since 2005.

But then Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Towerand, like Satan opening his mouth and unleashing the hounds of hell, poured out a plume of hatred, bigotry, and a call for violence that has saturated our nation for nearly eight long years.

There was an immediate jump in hate crimes, a trend that continued and increased steadily right up until this year. The Washington Post summarized the phenomenon succinctly in a 2019 headline:

“Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes”

It’s premature to proclaim the era of Trump-fueled racism and hate over, but the sense I’m getting from doing a national radio and TV call-in talk show for the past 20 years is that America has begun its much-needed healing.

Perhaps most surprising, people who had previously called in to promote Trump and “conservative values” are increasingly telling me and my listeners that they’ve seen the light and want to work together to make America a better place for all.

Beth Felker Jones writes for Christianity Today that she’s seeing it in her family and her church community, as the twin sensations of Barbie and Taylor Swift’s tour (and Swift’s open disavowal of hate) sweep the nation:

“Movie theaters are full of families and groups of friends, dressed in pink and laughing together; the country’s biggest stadiums are packed out with a tiny slice of those who would have come to see Swift perform, had more tickets been available.”

She notes how the pandemic and America’s political differences pulled us apart for years; now, she writes, things are changing for her kids and others:

“Now they’re hungry for togetherness. They’re hungry for large-scale shared cultural events and wearing dress-up clothes in public.”

Whether it’s Barbie or the Trump prosecutions that have brought about what feels like the early stages of a sea-change in the American zeitgeist — or the perfect storm of the combination of the two around the same time — I’ll take it.

America is better for both!

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-homelessness-they-should-be-mental-institutions-put-them-mental-asylums

see strict fr ~ coddle

an 6 23

fx News host Jesse Watters on Tuesday encouraged his network's predominantly right-wing audience to "stigmatize" unhoused Americans. During his rant, Watters asserted that demonizing human beings is a necessary tactic to end what he suggested was a choice.

[Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom] "is now maybe midfield, but he has to understand homelessness isn't about lack of affordable housing. It's about drug addicts that wanna wander around and live in tents on the sidewalk. And so you can't coddle antisocial behavior. You can't subsidize antisocial behavior. You have to stigmatize it," Watters declared.

"You can't celebrate people with purple hair, with nose rings, four kids with four different men who are dressed like trash, and make them out to be some sort of cutting-edge heroes," Watters continued. "You have to call them what they are. These are people that have failed in life and they're on their deathbed, and if we're not honest about it, we're never gonna fix this problem."

READ MORE: 'Whatever you want to call them': Jesse Watters ridicules the NAACP’s Florida travel advisory

According to the nonprofit Breaktime, "Homelessness often manifests in a cycle. Without consistent access to well-paid jobs, our associates struggle to save money and build financial stability. Left unable to put money toward savings after first satiating immediate needs, like food or transportation, they in turn struggle to find stable housing. Our associates cannot access the job or financial security necessary to sustain housing, nor can they ensure the housing security necessary to access employment or financial security. This is the cycle of young adult homelessness."

Similarly, The National Alliance to End Homelessness notes that "the solution to homelessness is straightforward: housing. By connecting people experiencing homelessness to housing and services, they have a platform from which they can address other areas that may have contributed to their homelessness — such as employment, health, and substance abuse."

Watch below via Media Matters for America researcher Kat Abughazaleh

explains trump xian sticking w/ putin thru ukraine invasion?

https://www.mediamatters.org/education/cpac-panelist-cites-bible-call-bring-paddle-back-schools

hannity is hard right? (macho border militia, strict fr?)  normalizing

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-pushes-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-tie-her-national-divorce-america-debt

an 2 23 edit bd

The Iowa Republican party is proposingdraconian new restrictions on what food can be purchased with the state’s food stamps, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

This attack on the poor at the state level is coming at the same time as the national GOP has successfullyblocked the continuation of the Child Tax Credit, a program which substantially, demonstrably reduced child poverty.

The GOP’s priorities are clear. They don’t want to reduce poverty. They want to police, control and torment the poor. The party that constantly touts liberty doesn’t want liberty for all. They want liberty for the powerful to impose their will on the most vulnerable.

READ MORE: 'Everyone in the territory is disenfranchised': Washington DC should replace Iowa as first presidential nominating contest

Republican ire

SNAP is a crucial safety net and the country’s most effective anti-hunger program. In 2021, itensured that 41 million Americans — 12 percent of the population — could afford an adequate diet every month.

SNAP also provides valuable emergency economic stability. SNAP enrollment increases in downturns, putting money into the economy to combat recession and boost recovery.

Despite its importance, or because of it, SNAP has long been a target of Republican ire.

READ MORE: Mike Pence teases a presidential run in Iowa stump speech for Republican midterm candidates

Matthew Gritter’s 2017 monographUndeserving: SNAP Reform and Conceptions of the Deserving Poor chronicles how politicians have moved to regulate food stamps in recent decades. They’ve tried to put limits on what foods could be purchased and to prevent people without disabilities or dependents from getting aid.

They’ve also pushed drug testing — an ideaintroduced by former KKK leader and Louisiana Senator David Duke, and instituted in states like Florida and Utah.

Gritter concludes in an earlier paper that the goal of these interventions appears to be to replace “a safety net of last resort” with “a costly method to impose punitive measures on the poor.”

“Evidence suggests that reforms will reduce enrollment without changing the circumstances that led people to seek assistance,” he says.

Iowa is the latest attempt to target SNAP.

Canned tuna and salmon

The new bill,House File 3, would putharsh limits on what low-income families could purchase in Iowa when receiving federal SNAP food stamp funds for healthy food options.

It wouldrestrict purchases to those covered by the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which uses federal funds for food assistance to pregnant people and new parents.

According to theIowa Hunger Coalition, “this bill would restrict SNAP participants’ ability to make their own food choices, take food away from Iowans, and increase hunger and food insecurity in our state.”

Families under House File 3 could no longer buy white bread, American cheese, coffee, snack foods, canned fruit and vegetables, bottled water, crackers and more.

They also couldn’t buy any meat except canned tuna and salmon. This despite the fact that meat, poultry and seafood is thetop expenditure category for SNAP recipients, accounting for 19 percent of money spent on food.

The Iowa GOP also wants a limit of $2,750 on household assets for receiving SNAP benefits; the cap is raised to $4,250 in assets if one family member is over 59 or is disabled. Houses and one vehicle would be excluded. Children’s savings accounts would not.

These low caps mean that people could not save for emergencies, because doing so would mean they would lose SNAP benefits. Nor could they own a second vehicle — a necessity for getting to work in many rural areas.

Historic low

The assault on SNAP is ugly because we have just conducted a sweeping experiment demonstrating that no-strings assistance to the poor is wildly successful at lifting children out of poverty with virtually no downsides.

The expanded Child Tax Creditinstituted in 2021 provided monthly cash payments to low-income families with children. It closed a loophole that prevented the poorest families from receiving assistance, and increased payments for everyone.

The result? Child poverty dropped to a historic low of 5.2 percent.

Lawmakers allowed the expanded CTC to expire.

Inevitably, child poverty rateswent back up.

Lawmakers refused to renew the expanded CTC in part because, mirroring attitudes towards SNAP, they believed that the people receiving the money were not deserving.

West Virginia’s conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin saidhe was worried parents would use benefits to buy drugs. He also wanted to institute work requirements for recipients.

But increasing restrictions prevents the neediest people from receiving benefits. It also mayprevent people from working.

A study of those in line to receive CTC funds found that recipientsbelieved the additional money would allow them to pay for childcare and increase their work hours.

Sure enough, in studies of the program conducted after it expired, there wasno evidence that CTC payments reduced workforce participation.

Undeserving

We know that SNAP is effective at reducing hunger. We know that simply giving people money, without conditions, is an incredibly effective means of pulling children out of poverty.

But conservatives don’t care. That’s because they’re not actually concerned with helping the poor.

They are concerned with policing them.

Conservatives want a poverty policy that is focused onpreventing people from accessing benefits. The goal is to punish the undeserving. And all poor people are assumed to be undeserving.

The success of the CTC shows that poverty and hunger are not intractable problems. They are deliberate policy choices.

The wealthy and powerful impose misery on the poor because they believe desperate people are more tractable and less able to organize.

Or perhaps they attack the poor simply because they don’t like the poor and believe they should suffer.

In any case, the expiration of the CTC, and the Iowa GOP’s assault on the SNAP program, shows that neither the pandemic nor the 2022 midterms have changed Republican commitments. GOP politicians like to cosplay as champions of the working class.

But the truth is they hold people of modest means in contempt and relish the chance to take food out of their mouths.

READ MORE: 'This is on you': NRA-backed Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst blasted following mass shooting at Iowa church

see treason execution

mma 1 23

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been featuring anti-vaxxer Dr. Jon Ward at COVID-19 events as he positions himself for a 2024 presidential run. Ward said in a podcast appearance last year that Dr. Anthony “Fauci should face a firing squad” because of his work.

Ward is a Florida dermatologist who, as Politico recently reported, has become “a central figure in DeSantis’ Covid-19 events.” He at a COVID-19 press conference with DeSantis on January 17. In August 2022, DeSantis appointed Ward to the Northwest Florida State College District Board of Trustees. 

Ward has linked the death of Lisa Marie Presley to “Pfizer and Moderna” and told parents to lie to schools about their children’s COVID-19 history. 

In a statement to Politico, a DeSantis spokesperson defended the governor and praised Ward, stating: “We thank Dr. Ward for lending his time and expertise to our press conference to ensure medical freedom is preserved in Florida.”

Ward has regularly appeared on podcasts and radio programs to discuss medical issues. During the September 8, 2022, edition of The Driveway Liberty Podcast, Ward piggybacked off of DeSantis’ statement that he wanted to chuck Fauci across the Potomac River by stating: “I think Fauci should face a firing squad myself.”

Jon Ward on The Driveway Liberty Podcast

September 8, 2022

JON WARD: It’s just one of those things where I say Fauci by pushing only drugs that were Big Pharma drugs, by not being willing to tout very cheap, inexpensive, widely available medicines, Fauci killed hundreds of thousands of people. When Ron DeSantis said he would like to take that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac, I said, “Let me be the next one to chuck him across the Potomac.” 

CO-HOST: Right. Yeah. So I think the next question — you’ve been through all the medical ethics classes that I sure as hell haven’t — what should happen to these people? 

WARD: For Fauci, given what we know about the gain of function research in Wuhan and for him knowingly collaborating with international scientists to publish a paper claiming that there was no way that COVID was manmade and that it for sure was natural, I think Fauci should face a firing squad myself.

cut soc safe net:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/rick-scott-ron-johnson/

when up for re-election?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ron-johnson-targets-medicare-and-social-security-for-annual-budget-discussions/

obstruction/ stick it to libs/Biden? strict fr //free mkt makers/takers BS?

an 5 22

Republicans just voted against two bills to ease the **baby formula shortage** they have spent weeks falsely trying to pin on President Joe Biden.

In tweets and in floor speeches, Republicans have been attacking President Biden for the nationwide baby formula shortage caused by one manufacturer’s recall and closure of its plant for bacterial infection after two infants died.The shortage has been exacerbated by a trade agreement signed by then-President Donald Trump that makes it extremely difficult and expensive to import formula from other countries, and the fact that 90 percent of baby formula in the U.S. is manufactured by just four companies. Also, hoarding, and price-gouging.

Last week President Biden sat down with manufacturers and retailers to map out a plan to get more formula onto store shelves immediately and directed the Food and Drug Administration to help get the plant reopened. This week he went two steps further: he invoked the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula and produce it ahead of other products and created a program to use federal planes to import baby formula from other countries.

House Democrats last week also opened an investigation into the baby formula shortage.

On Wednesday the House voted on two emergency bills to further ease the shortage.

One example of Republicans falsely attacking President Biden and the left is House GOP Caucus chair **Elise Stefanik**‘s now-infamous tweet accusing Democrats of having “no plan” as she labeled them “pedo grifters.”...

one bill would give FDA $28 million to add staff, work to help get more formula to consumers, and create a long-term strategy, including increased safety inspections so this cannot happen again. The second would dramatically increase supply from foreign sources to consumers using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program.

192 House Republicans voted against giving FDA $28 million to help fix the crisis and ensure it does not happen again.

Nine House Republicans voted against making it easier for WIC customers to get access to baby formula.

Many Americans are becoming outraged as the news from last night’s votes is spreading online.

[Here’s the list of 9 members of Congress (all Republicans)who voted NO:

Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Gaetz Louie Gohmert Lauren Boebert Paul Gosar Thomas Massie Andy Biggs Clay Higgins Chip Roy.]

thieves now mock the rule of law in 'progressive' cities ...

:{https://nypost.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{ › 2021 › 06 › 17 › thieves-now-mock-the-rule-of-law-in-progressive-cities-like-san-francisco:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:

Jun 17, 2021In January 2020, San Francisco's new "progressive" district attorney, Chesa Boudin (a son of convicted cop killers), made decreasing penalties for nonviolent offenses a cornerstone of his ...

an 3 22

With barely a whimper, free community college for all Americans bit the dust, at least for now.

Already stripped from the pared-down Build Back Better bill proposed by the Biden administration in October, free community college will not re-emerge as a free-standing bill in 2022.

An initiative that has been implemented successfully in 19 states as different as Arkansas and California, you might think that two years of free college might have been a model for elevating successful local initiatives as federal policy.

But apparently it was one thing for states to shoulder the burden of creating an educated workforce and another for the Biden administration to make that investment.

First Lady and community college professor Dr. Jill Biden was tasked with presenting the disappointing news to the 2022 Community College National Legislative Summit last week. She spoke of the human cost of this failure.

"These aren't just bills or budgets to me, to you, right?” Biden told colleagues who had hoped for a $45.5 billion infusion of federal money. “And it was a real lesson in human nature that some people just don't get that."

It’s no surprise that Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and their Republican allies don’t “get that.”

They believe that a $45.5 billion investment in technicians, health care workers and other skilled laborers we desperately need is an unaffordable “handout” that weakens Americans’ moral fiber.

New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu also rejected the plan. Students who didn’t pay, he argued, would not commit seriously to education.

The bill had other enemies. One was inside the house all along.

Private colleges and universities, and at least one major, public four-year institution, saw the plan as a direct threat to their bottom lines.

As early as last October, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universitieswithheld its support because the idea was “untested” and government could better help students by increasing Pell Grants.

But federally funded free community college is neither new nor untested: many were free for almost a century.

Part of an education reform plan, two-year colleges would, University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper argued in the 1890s, make Morrill Act public education funds available to more Americans.

These “junior colleges” would be situated in public high schools and would relieve four-year colleges and universities from teaching basic college-level skills and general education courses.

As an example of what this could look like, Harper divided his own tuition-driven university into a “junior college” and a “senior college” in 1892. But it was a high school principal, in Joliet, Illinois, who, in 1901, took up Harper’s challenge to first offer college-level courses for free and then establish an independent, public junior college.

The junior college movement expanded heterogeneously before World War II. Some, as in California, were public and free, and usually an extension of high school. Others, like the private, tuition-driven Harcum Junior College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, established in 1915 to educate middle-class women, were intended as a launching pad for a university education.

But by the mid-century 20th century, that status of community colleges declined in many states. As college enrollment expanded dramatically under the 1944 GI Bill, Harvard president James Bryant Conant argued that junior colleges — now known as “community colleges” because of their democratic to local education — were primarily for students with modest, vocational goals.

Similarly, all community colleges were never free, but they were free in places where the desire for economic growth and democratic social mobility merged.

Native Floridians paid no tuition until 1969. Similarly, post-secondary schools in California, the largest educational system in the country, offered post-secondary education to in-state students for free until 1978.

Its 73 community colleges also served as feeder schools to four-year institutions. By providing skilled labor, free community and four-year colleges fueled both states’ growth as national hubs for the aerospace and military industries.

Although the United States is currently faced with worker shortages across its skilled labor force, there is hard evidence that reviving tuition-free community college could be the remedy.

In 2008, Knoxville, Tennessee, made this move, a program that became statewide in 2014, funded by a combination of taxpayer dollars and private donations. Mentorship and apprenticeship programs that complement course work have boosted poor students into well-paying jobs.

So, what are the barriers to supporting two-year schools?

First, as their opposition to the Biden plan reveals, public and private four-year colleges and universities remain fatally dependent on tuition dollars that would be diminished if students who wanted a four-year degree could complete two of them for free.

Despite the economic vulnerability that became evident during the first months of the covid crisis, these institutions and the politicians that support them have no immediate plan to replace tuition with more sustainable income streams, like taxes.

As importantly, Joe Manchin’s anxiety that Americans will become moochers, and Chris Sununu’s belief that students will only be disciplined learners if they have skin in the game, reflect a national divide on whether public goods should be shared or earned, and whether the nation benefits from educated workers.

But voters, not surprisingly, break along ideological, class, age and racial lines.

A recent Pew study reveals that 85 percent of Democrats, and only 36 percent of Republicans, believe public colleges should be tuition-free.

But over half of non-college educated Republicans under 50 do support taxpayer-funded community colleges. So do Americans under 30 by an overwhelming 73 percent.

And while only 51 percent of white Americans are in favor of canceling tuition, Black (86 percent), Hispanic (82 percent) and Asian American (69 percent) citizens support democratic access to post-secondary education.

And best of all, tuition-free community college does have a track record. It creates satisfying and sustainable lives for American families, and a robust economy that can respond to the needs of tomorrow.

strict fr again? see also crack pipe BS

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/to-us-oligarchs-majority-views-on-taxing-the-rich-count-for-little/

noah b

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent.

At some point, corruption stops being a bug in democracy and starts becoming a feature of oligarchy.

Has the US passed that threshold?

Based on the sweeping and effective resistance to commonsense solutions to reign in wealthy tax scofflaws, the answer is not encouraging.

Since the 1970s, the United States has become steadily and inexorably more economically unequal. According to Pew, upper income families have brought in a larger and larger share of total income.

US income inequality is the highest of all G7 nations. Its Gini coefficient is .434, well above second highest UK at .392.

In 1968, the top 20 percent of households earned 43 percent of national income. By 2018, the top 20 percent of households earned 52 percent.

In 1989, the richest 5 percent of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second poorest income tier. In 2016, they had 248times as much wealth.

In 2020, the 50 richest Americans had almost as much wealth as the poorest half of the US population.

This massive concentration of wealth is also a massive concentration of power. The wealthiest people have access to the best lawyers, the best tax attorneys and the most powerful politicians.

That means that it is very difficult for the government to restrain them, or to create a more equitable economy and society against their wishes.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth. [amp fdbk]

An example of oligarchical power is billionaire tax evasion. A recent IRS study found that wealthy Americans conceal more than 20 percent of their earnings. They are able to do this because of complex accounting scams involving offshore tax shelters.

The lost tax costs the government at least $175 billion a year in revenue. The top 1 percent of earners are responsible for a third of unpaid federal taxes.

In addition to these straightforwardly illegal accounting tricks, the very wealthy also benefit from at least nominally legal loopholes.

For instance, wealthy people have many assets that increase in value over time, but they do not pay taxes on those assets until they sell them.

They can borrow against those assets without paying taxes, since again the assets aren’t considered income. Then, if they die before selling the assets, they can pass them on to their heirs using trusts and other accounting shenanigans to avoid the estate tax.

ProPublica called this strategy Buy, Borrow, Die. It’s a key method for hoarding generational wealth, and entrenching oligarchy.

The Biden administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, have proposed strong measures to rein in billionaire corruption. In part, they want to restrain inequality. In part, they hope to fund other priorities like climate mitigation and anti-poverty measures in the administration’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan.

To address billionaire tax evasion, BBB included $80 billion to boost capacity and staff at the IRS. That would help make up for the steady budget-cuts under Republican administrations. Those have led to a 60 percent decrease in audits of taxpayers who earn more than $1 million. Biden said the investment would allow the IRS to collect $400 billion in taxes.

Biden, Yellen and Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden have also been pushing for a billionaire tax to force the very wealthy to pay taxes on the increased value of their assets.

This would strike at the heart of the oligarchic “Buy, Borrow, Die” lifestyle. It would force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share, like everyone else, every year, year after year.

Policies that prevent the rich from escaping a tax burden everyone has to pay should be easy to pass in a democracy. You’d think preventing billionaires from cheating on their taxes would be a popular policy.

And you’d be correct.

A 2019 poll, for example, showed that 76 percent of Americans agreed that the wealthiest should pay more in taxes. Proposals to tax income over $10 million at 70 percent — a huge increase over current rates — obtained more than 50 percent support.

In an oligarchy, though, public support doesn’t necessarily count for all that much.

A notorious 2015 study found that politicians were much more likely to listen to and follow the political preferences of economic elites than those of the less affluent.

You can see that playing out in the politics of billionaire taxation.

Build Back Better, which included the beefed-up IRS funding, was scuttled by millionaire West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, in large part, reportedly, because he was worried that poor parents would spend money on drugs.

A wealthy politician refused to enforce the law against billionaires because he was worried that poor people are natural criminals.

That is what you call class consciousness.

Wyden’s proposal to end “Buy, Borrow, Die” also failed after opposition from Manchin.It was of course opposed by Senate Republicans, whose main goal is to shovel as much money as possible to the rich in as short a time as possible.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent. This would make it harder for businesses to escape tax burdens by moving their corporate offices. Congress still has to pass the treaty, but Yellen said she was confident they would do so.

The corporate minimum tax is a substantial achievement. But it’s also a small dam erected against the tsunami of inequality in the US.

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

The wealthy have been expanding their power and influence for decades in the US. The result is that the US regularly chooses to make the rich richer rather than helping the poorest feed their children.

The outlook for change is likely to be even bleaker if Republicans recapture one or both legislative chambers in November.

Yellen and Biden are to be commended for fighting an ongoing rearguard action against corruption. But if government inability to restrain corruption is a feature of oligarchy, then the US is already well down a path that it is very difficult to retrace.

race to the trump bottom?! very strict fr = auth dictator

aha: (thom traces slavery roots to RR to now]

if gov't is tryrant we need guns terrorism to defend oureselves and our freedumb; if gov't merely inept handcuffed by PC we need guns to defend ourselves from antifa thugs commie dems;car kill protester is not that far from PI duetertes death squads to kill dealers and junkies?! note this turns over gov't monopoly on force and hands over to lone wack jobs radicalized by fox and soc med

thom h kyle

...A right-wing militia group in New York celebrated in the streets and then put a punctuation mark on their disdain for the law and simple rules of a civil society by entering the NY subway system through the emergency exit, bypassing the toll booths. "Rules don't apply to us!" they seemed to be shouting, along with, "You can't stop us!"

Trump wannabees in public office who are still trying to capture the white supremacist and white nationhood vote have doubled down on his strategy of fear, hate, and vigilantism.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, recently signed into law legislation that gives legal protections to people who drive their cars into protesters in the street and defines everybody in any protest as a criminal felon if anybody in that protest breaks a window or engages in other illegal activity.

With DeSantis and other Republican governors pre-exonerating people like the driver who viciously killed Heather Heyer and vigilante protest shooters like Rittenhouse, many are worried that we're entering a new era where vigilante shooters and drivers-into-crowds will become as normalized and accepted as Amy Vanderpool documents how normalized daily mass shootings have become in America.

Laws similar to Florida's have been passed or are pending in numerous Republican-controlled states, presumably in anticipation of citizen protests when those states use their newly passed laws to overturn the will of voters in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Object to your politicians handing an election they lost to themselves? You go straight from the streets to the jail, just like in tinhorn dictatorships.

There's always been a fringe movement of violent white supremacist vigilantes in America, particularly since the end of the Civil War, but they've never before been embraced by or succeeded in capturing a political party. Today, astonishingly, that's the case in our country.

So, what's motivating today's vigilantes and the police who often aid and support them, as in the Rittenhouse case?...

wow literally strict fr

an 11 21

after Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's gubernatorial race Tuesday, the GOP appears eager to take his bigotry-infused "education" strategy nationwide. "The Republican swings in Virginia and New Jersey show the efficacy of a new model of conservative politics: appealing to suburban voters by promising greater parental control of schools," the Washington Post reports Thursday morning. It's a clever strategy.

If the public knew what the GOP demands actually were — banning classic books like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" or "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood — most parents would not be on board. Few people want to be a Nazi book burner! But the GOP is repackaging this deeply fascist love of censorship in a friendlier frame of "parental rights." They got lucky that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, blundered in the campaign's closing weeks when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," instead of mounting a robust defense of free speech and teaching the truth about slavery and segregation in history classes.

So what, exactly, are kids learning?

Republicans use scare terms like "critical race theory," and liberals try to draw attention to the lists of books Republicans are trying to ban, mainly for suggesting racism is bad or that LGBTQ people exist. It's extremely important for the left to focus on how this supposed fight over "education" is really a proxy fight over the right's rejection of equality for LGBTQ people and people of color.

But there's another aspect to this fight that has been less discussed: How the GOP war on schools is instigated, organized, and funded by right-wing religious groups whose true agenda is opposing the rights of children.

Conservatives, especially the Christian right, have long taken a dim view of raising kids who can think for themselves. Their view is children should be "trained" to be obedient and submissive. Under the guise of "parents' rights," the Christian right is mainstreaming their hostility to the very idea that children have a right to an education. In this case, the right of a child to have a proper education that teaches critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.

As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her recent deep dive into the history of corporal punishment in evangelical circles, the movement of "biblical parenting" started in 1970, when Christian right activist James Dobson published his book "Dare to Discipline," which advanced a belief in "the enforced submission of children to absolute authority." Soon there was a cottage industry of similar books, all of which promoted "the complete subjection of the child's will," usually through relentlessly beating kids (which is minimized through the cutesy word "spanking"). Children, in the Christian right view, are not to be educated — they are to be "trained." This philosophy of child-rearing was accompanied by a movement to impose their anti-child ideology on society and government. Unfortunately, this particular political goal of the Christian right gets far less coverage than their war on reproductive rights, their anti-LGBTQ activism, or their white supremacy. This lack of attention may, in fact, be a reason they've been wildly successful. As Lavin notes, hitting children "is outlawed completely in63 countries," but "legal in all fifty states." Laws allowing parents to take kids out of school to be "home schooled" are notoriously lax, and there's been a great deal of headway in redirecting kids out of schools and into religious "charter schools" that embrace the training-not-education approach. Donald Trump's Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, a far-right fundamentalist who has spent decades trying to destroy the public education system. It's why the U.S. is the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It should be unsurprising, then, that the religious right groups who have long opposed children's rights are behind this newly sprung nationwide attack on public schools.

Religious right stalwarts like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation have been central to planning and unhatching this scheme to use the scare term "critical race theory" to stir up outrage at schools for teaching the truth about racism in history and literature classes. Also central to the effort, as reported by NBC News, is the International Organization for the Family, which has, like the Family Research Council, been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Under its original name, the World Congress of Families, the International Organization for the Family promoted not just a deeply authoritarian and patriarchal view of the family, but also white nationalism. As explained at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Through its ideology of the so-called "natural family," WCF promotes a strict view of family, one based exclusively on the marriage of one heterosexual man to one heterosexual woman and their biological children, to the exclusion of many different types of families. Closely tied to this ideology is an adherence to strict binary gender roles, in which men serve as the heads of households and women as their helpmates and the bearer of children. Only this type of family, they contend, can quell the "demographic winter," the idea that European populations, especially, are in decline because of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, women in the workplace, and a variety of other things that deviate from the "natural family."

There's no way to really untangle all these different far-right views from each other. Forcing children into submission and preventing them from developing critical thinking skills is seen as crucial for raising them to be compliant adults who will unquestioningly adopt this patriarchal and racist view of family formation and purpose. One can see why schools teaching the book "Beloved" was flagged by far-right activists as a threat. Not only does the book humanize the victims of white supremacy, it also raises important questions about the rights of children and the meaning of self-determination. Indeed, even the concept of "raising questions" alarms the Christian right. In their view, children are not to think for themselves but to passively accept the instructions of elders.

Unfortunately, one reason the Christian right has a lot of success smuggling their radical views into mainstream politics is they, as happened in Virginia, often reframe it as a matter of "parental rights."

Most parents reject the religious right's extremist views on extinguishing a child's autonomy, to be clear. But most parents believe that they should have some control over their child's life, including over their education, health care, and disciplinary matters. They aren't even really wrong about this. Children's rights are always in contention with the need to keep children safe and to socialize them properly. Knowing the exact right mix of autonomy and discipline is a nuanced and tough question. The problem, however, is the reframing this as a matter of "parents' rights" distracts from the real issue, which is the war being waged on children'srights.

Children have a right to learn the truth about American history and to learn critical thinking skills. Children have a right to be exposed to great works of literature and art, and to expand their horizons. Children have a right to a robust health education, which includes information about sexuality and sexual orientation so that they can grow into healthy adults, instead of being hobbled with shame for having normal human impulses. All this chitter-chatter about "parents' rights" — by design — is hiding the fact that many of these rights of children are under very real threat right now

Failure to understand the deeply radical nature of the Christian right ideology fueling this school board movement leaves Democrats unequipped to fight back. We saw this with the McAuliffe campaign, which fumbled early on with the "parents' rights" framing, and only too late in the campaign realized they could reframe the matter — correctly, mind you — as a deeply racist attempt to censor books. Democrats need to highlight how profoundly anti-child the GOP attack on school boards is and defend both the right of children to learn and the right of educators to teach.

Most people don't want kids to grow up without learning to think for themselves. Democrats can win this fight — but first, they must understand what they're truly up against.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/

no lnx vid twt?

Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report

[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022

This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.

It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.

"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."

The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”

The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”

The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.

In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”

The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.

Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:

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Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.

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Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"

The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.

pathological strain?

1021 an

So much depends on respectable white people. Those are white people who care about appearing respectable to other white people, who themselves care about appearing respectable to other white people. They are the great globular middle of American politics that determines electoral outcomes in this country.

For the longest time, they sided with the Republican Party on account of tax cuts and other goodies. My hope is that, for the foreseeable future, they will side with the Democrats on account of tax cuts and other goodies being a banner for hiding the fact that sadism is the GOP's point.

Sadism isn't only about sex, though it can be, obviously. When I say "sadism," I mean the pleasure derived from seeing other people suffer. The Republicans have no policy goals. Their only goal is creating legal and political conditions in which the in-group is protected while the out-group is punished. But it doesn't end with punishment. It can't.

When the out-group gains power, the in-group feels powerless. When the in-group feels powerless, the in-group feels oppressed. When the in-group feels oppressed, it cries out for freedom. But in order to feel free, the in-group must do more than merely punish the out-group. It must derive pleasure from seeing pain and suffering. This is what I want respectable white people to understand. When they vote for tax cuts and other goodies, they are doing far more. They are helping the GOP's authoritarian base feel a freedom that depends on suffering.

When white police officers pulled a Black paraplegic man out of his vehicle by his hair last month in Dayton, Ohio, on illegal drug suspicion, that might appear to be another case of police brutality. (Body cam footage of the incident was released Friday. An investigation by the police department is underway.) But to the authoritarian base of the Republican Party, what the Dayton cops did was the goal itself. Seeing the man's pain produced pleasure. It made them feel free.

It is sadism. It is not cruelty. Cruelty is not the point. Sadism is. You can be cruel without meaning to. You can be cruel without taking pleasure in pain. You can be cruel because you can't help it (on account of repeating past traumas, for instance). But sadism takes intention. It takes the desire to set aside priorities, like tax cuts and other goodies. It is its own cause. It is its own effect. This is another thing I want respectable white people to understand. Sadism isn't an unintended consequence. It's the point. When you vote for the Republican Party, when you give money to Republican candidates, you are joining a concerted effort to bring more suffering to more people, and you are complicit in the derivation of pleasure from suffering. You have become a sadist.

This sounds extreme. That's because sadism cancels equality. If the Republicans had some degree of commitment to equality, they might seek conditions in which the in-group feels free regardless of whether the out-group feels pain. But there is no equality. Therefore, there is no equal protection under law. Therefore, there is a one-to-one relationship between in-group freedom and out-group pain. Put another way, it's quite impossible for the in-group to feel free when the out-group does not feel pain. Sadism is the GOP's vital link.

Given the reality of this one-to-one relationship, you can see they don't mean freedom when they say freedom. They don't mean the presence of choice. They don't mean the absence of coercion. They don't mean freedom in any conventional sense. What they mean is the pleasure of seeing other people's pain, because their freedom can't exist without their suffering. Respectable white people need to understand this. Cries for freedom are in fact cries for sadism.

Just as they don't mean freedom when they say freedom, they don't mean borders when they say borders. Ten Republican governors went to the southern border to pressure the president to do more about immigrants coming in. Most of them were from non-border states. And that's the tell.The border they are defending isn't the border. It is the border between us and them, between the GOP's authoritarian base that can't feel free unless someone suffers, like immigrants, and everyone else who can feel free as they share power with others.

This is the last thing I want respectable white people to understand. There is no middle way. There is no neutral position. "Every state is now a border state," said Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany last week while visiting the border. Every state is a border state. Every issue is a border issue. Every person is a border person who must choose a side. Are you with us or against us. Sadism is the point.

aha strict fr; conspir is simple story to explain away complexity with a simple single cause; cast self as hero/victims see de-industrualize/ globalize outsource --> trump pseudo-populist

angry white man w/ rush; al franken sez expert on rightwing megalomaniacs; trump, bill and rush?

421

brett kavanaugh scotus says juvenile can get life ~ sotomayor;

aha: strict  father: must protect my home castle woman from them dark ppl criminals ANTIFA LOOTERS THUS NO GUN CONTROL

tax and spend libs gingrich memo ? --> mantra?

rand paul trms 621 coke quail sex habits basic science

ended 3 yrs ago, legislator he got it from died, added digits with cut and paste typo w/ footnote 140#

aha: great pix, aha ~ sci, sex  // clinton boomer draft dodge potheads

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strict fr vs nurture monther

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-governors

kos

note criminalization

The flood of Republican-controlled states cutting off the federal unemployment benefits supplement will lead to nearly 2 million people losing payments before the September cutoff passed by Congress. The nearly 1.4 million people in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Assistance programs will lose everything they're currently getting, while people on traditional unemployment insurance will lose the $300 a week above their state's regular benefits.

"These changes have the potential to drastically scale back assistance to jobless workers far too early in the recovery," Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, told CNN. "Nationally, there are still 16.8 million workers on one of the unemployment programs, and the nation is still short 8 million-plus jobs from the start of the pandemic."

According to Stettner's calculations, the early cutoffs will strip billions of dollars from jobless workers. If every state that has announced it's refusing the federal supplement did so starting on June 12, it would be $10.8 billion, but several states have announced later cutoff dates.

The Republican message is that this is what's needed because too many people are sitting home living large on unemployment aid and are too lazy to work. In reality, writes Adam Chandler at The Washington Post, "In the past year alone, study after study has debunked the myth that the emergency benefits and occasional payments provided by the government are disincentivizing people from returning to the labor force en masse."

Back when the federal government was adding $600 a week to unemployment benefits—a measure passed by a Republican Senate and signed by Donald Trump—a study by Yale economists found "no evidence that high UI [unemployment insurance] replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring." Also last summer, University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube looked at unemployed workers without a college degree. "Overall," he concluded, "these findings do not provide evidence supporting the claim that the [Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation] has held back the labor market recovery."

And, Chandler notes, even these supposedly lavish unemployment benefits are not eradicating hunger: "According to a Census Bureau survey last month, nearly 1 in 3 Americans on unemployment said they were still failing to cover routine expenses such as food, housing and medical treatments."

So studies show that the emergency benefits aren't keeping lazy people from looking for work. Surveys show that people are not living large, or even necessarily making ends meet. But history gives us a context for the persistent claims that that's what's going on, as AFL-CIO economist William Spriggs pointed out: [twt]

republicans can't reproduce those conditions, but they can use low or no unemployment benefits to force people back into minimum-wage and unsafe jobs—and the present-day effort also echoes the past in the disproportionately Black and Latino workers it targets, after 14 months in which Black and Latino people have disproportionately suffered and died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

So far, Montana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Idaho, Tennessee, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio have announced cutoff dates ranging from June 12 to July 10. More states could follow, raising the number of people in economic pain as a direct result of Republican lies about the unemployment situation.

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aha both trumpism and evang invitation to grift, both rely on obed to strict ft; holier than thou, trumpier than thou; he will punish THOSE POC who are getting uppity demanding standing/dignity, access =PC; loyalty, belief, magical thinking. orgasmic apoc purge in which your passive and bigotry will lift you up/be rewarded

edit bd

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/leaving-qanon/

I don't believe Ashley Vanderbilt escaped QAnon. Yes, I know that's what she told CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, and that's what Donie O'Sullivan told the rest of us on Wednesday. But trust me when I say there's no way someone indoctrinated into believing up is down, left is right, and wrong is right snaps out of it in a matter of weeks. People like Vanderbilt are primed to believe anything, and will keep being primed to believe anything. O'Sullivan's reporting suggests the danger is fading. The danger is not, and O'Sullivan's reporting goes a way toward obscuring that reality.

Who is Ashley Vanderbilt? She's a married white 27-year-old mother of a young child living in South Carolina. She lost her job last April as a result of the covid pandemic. Though neither she nor O'Sullivan say what kind of Christian she is, the fact she does not say suggests she's with a nondenominational evangelical congregation, I'd guess a megachurch, which would put her squarely among Donald Trump's loyalest of loyal supporters, the people most likely to believe the former president was sent by God. As such, she's probably gotten very adept at envisioning her life not as one she has control over, but one she must suffer through as the price for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

When she said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar religious backgrounds in which morality is obedience.

O'Sullivan said that after Joe Biden won the election, Vanderbilt "spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon." (That's the conspiracy theory holding that the Democrats are in league with a global—read: Jewish—cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them.) "By inauguration day," O'Sullivan said, Vanderbilt "was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter."

Vanderbilt said she was spending a lot of time by herself after losing her job. She was depressed. She was cranky. She too often snapped at her daughter. As a result, she said, she probably lost touch with reality. "I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she said. Folks, I'm here to tell you someone who believed that the "deep state" was having sex with children before eating them, that the former president would declare martial law, and that the military would round up his enemies before publicly executing them in cold blood is not someone who needs to lose her job, go into a depression or snap at her child to be not quite "one hundred percent there."

She was already there. How do I know? From experience. I've mentioned before I grew up on the margins of a closed protestant sect called the Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. (They are better known as the Plymouth Brethren.) Strict obedience to authority, which is to say, strict obedience to the father of the family, which is to say strict obedience to God, was morality.When Vanderbilt said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar backgrounds. We were taught Hell is really real, and God really will send you there if you do not do what He tells you to. We were taught a God who threatens eternal pain and suffering is a lovingGod. We were taught to believe up is down, left is right, wrong is right, but especially don't think just do as you're told.

So I know she was already there. She didn't need TikTok to fall down "the QAnon rabbit hole." If it wasn't TikTok, Facebook or whatever, it would have been something else, most likely ordinary word of mouth. QAnon does not demand of believers any more than Vanderbilt's white evangelical church does. She seems to have sensed the connection between them. O'Sullivan said, "while she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, 'Am I putting even Trump above God?'" She doesn't read, she said, and she doesn't pay attention to the legitimate press. All she needs to do is what she's told to do, which is follow the leader don't ask questions.

Which is why her explanation of how she "escaped" doesn't hold up. "Some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration," O'Sullivan said. "Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen. That was a step too far for Vanderbilt."Wut!

She was convinced Joe Biden's inauguration would transform the country into a Communist state. She believed she'd have to go into hiding with her daughter. She believed the Democrats and the Jews and "the Globalists" are cannibals. And she was disappointedwhen the military did not publicly execute Der Führer's enemies in cold blood. But wait whoa—a conspiracy theory adapting to reality? That's a step too far!?

Look, I don't understand why Vanderbilt thinks she escaped QAnon. I do know, using my intuition, that she does not understand why either. In not understanding why, she's vulnerable to the influence of a CNN journalist reporting a national story about a QAnon believer who escaped. Vanderbilt, in being someone who always did what was asked of her, continued being someone who did what was asked of her, in this case, giving O'Sullivan a story he was asking for, however tacitly. And in the process of telling that story, he obscured a terrible conclusion about Vanderbilt. That she felt fooled into believing there would be blood does not change the fact she wanted blood.

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aha: trump the disruptor generates chaos, polarization, hype fear/anger (and inequality that drives it) and declares only he is the strong man/strict father alone who can establish law and order

rhet

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/is-trump-a-fascist/

Hours before a mob of far-right insurrectionists — including members of the Proud Boys, QAnon supporters, White nationalists and members of various militia groups — violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, then-President Donald Trump held a "Save America" rally in Washington, D.C.'s Ellipse Park. Trump and his allies showed a propaganda video at that event, and according to Yale University professor Jason Stanley — author of the book "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them" — that video was full of fascist themes.

Stanley has made no secret of the fact that he considers Trumpism a fascist movement. In an article published by Just Security on February 4, the Yale professor identifies some of the overtly fascist themes in the video presented at the Save America Rally.

"On January 6," Stanley explains, "Trump supporters gathered at a rally at Washington D.C.'s Ellipse Park, regaled by various figures from Trumpworld, including Donald Trump, Jr. and Rudy Giuliani. Directly following Giuliani's speech, the organizers played a video. To a scholar of fascist propaganda, well-versed in the history of the National Socialists' pioneering use of videos in political propaganda, it was clear, watching it, what dangers it portended. In it, we see themes and tactics that history warns pose a violent threat to liberal democracy. Given the aims of fascist propaganda — to incite and mobilize — the events that followed were predictable."

NEW A movie was shown at the Ellipse on 1/6. It's escaped attention. Until now. We asked a top expert on propagan… https://t.co/UzIExOEwPK

— Ryan Goodman (@Ryan Goodman)1612445788.0

Fascism, according to Stanley, "is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the 'true nation,' and fold them into a global world government."

Such themes, Stanley stresses, were "laid bare in the video" that Trump and his allies showed at the Save America Rally.

"In it, Trump is repeatedly represented as the nation's father figure," Stanley notes. "It is laced through with images of masculinity, and mournful loss at the hands of traitors, clearly justifying a violent restoration of recent glory."

In the video, Stanley adds, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is now Senate majority leader, "is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine White rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish congressmen, Representatives (Jerry) Nadler and (Adam) Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews…. Fascist propaganda creates an awesome sense of loss, and a desire for revenge against those who are responsible."

Although Stanley draws parallels between Trump's video and Nazi Germany propaganda of the 1930s, he stresses that Trumpism is a distinctly American brand of fascism.

Stanley explains, "Fascism is not an ideology consigned to Europe. Black American intellectuals from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison have spoken of American fascism. America has a long history of anti-Semitism similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, central to the ideology not just of the Ku Klux Klan, but to Henry Ford's 'The International Jew.' In its American version, communist Jews supposedly use Black liberation movements, control of Hollywood, and labor unions to destroy the nation in the service of a global elite. We should not be surprised at all by the rise of a fascist movement in the United States."

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omfg

declares vote void in advance, camp look at electors, will not pledge peaceful trans

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/get-rid-of-the-ballots-trump-badly-bungles-a-question-on-whether-hell-accept-a-peaceful-transfer-of-power/

==

==-

trump Praises “Good Genes” of White Audience, Cites Eugenics Theory

==

trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

AlterNet Staff  September 23, 2020

John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…

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/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/barr-to-be-honored-for-christlike-behavior-with-award-from-right-wing-catholic-group-with-strong-ties-to-trump/

no lnx twt

attorney General Bill Barr will be honored for his “Christlike behavior” at Wednesday’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, according to Roman Catholic Sister, author, and anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean.

"sister Helen Prejean

@helenprejean

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast will present an award to Attorney General Barr for “Christlike behavior” tomorrow morning. A.G. Barr has ordered the executions of six men with at least one more on the calendar. What is “Christlike” about using discretionary power to kill?"

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast says Barr will be presented with its Christifideles Laici Award during today’s 16th annual prayer event.

“In Honor and Gratitude for Fidelity to the Church, Exemplary Selfless and Steadfast Service in the Lord’s Vineyard,” are the words inscribed on the award.

The event is being sponsored by several groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

President Donald Trump is expected to address the group today during its virtual ceremony.

Among the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast’s founders arePat Cipollone, President Trump’s White House Counsel; former RepublicanSenator Rick Santorum; and Joseph Cella, President Trump’s Ambassador to Fiji, and a former Trump transition team member who co-founded the right wing activist group Catholic Vote.

Another founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is Austin Ruse, the president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM).

Perhaps the most notable founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is the group’s president, conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo.

Leo also serves as co-chairman of the Federalist Society, the far right group responsible for promoting the illegitimate belief that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted by judges according to how the nation’s founders thought.

President Trump, for the first time in history, has effectively farmed out the approval process for federal court judges and even Supreme Court justices he nominates, to the Federalist Society.

The award to Barr is being condemned by notable Catholics, including Sister Prejean, and Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America magazine.

hmm dunno if story of metaphor/schema, both?

the duty of the strict father is to instill/enforce strict discipline/control/ sacrifice vs short term childish sinful  hedonism; law and order, hierachy vs those uppity AA and women hippie antifa

capitalism built on myth/story /schema of spot transaction/barter, not found in real world?

aha: trump is just apotheosis: invis hand me vs we short vs long term: $ = winner, vs losers who deserve poverty, corruption/crony capitalism is natural inevitable outcome

// metaphor; immune sys digestive sys goes on overdrive?

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction [extraction  is just a more extreme form where other has no power] INEQUALITY

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

long term means more entities,  more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern (even where none exists, eg qanon) thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info ); but fills vacuum need, that previously would have been filled by experts/textbooks/teachers/leaders/pastors?

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

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

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

no lnx audio

c de v

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

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

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

order is enforcement of hierarchy

jobs widow out of line b/c steve not here to control atl mo suckers losers

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-is-using-the-tricks-of-reality-tv-against-a-and-its-not-going-well/

it’s hardly new or revelatory to say this, but it’s critical to remember the role that “The Apprentice” played in turning Donald Trump, a notoriously bad businessman with a string of bankruptcies, into an American icon of capitalist success. Everything from careful editing to set designers giving the dreary Trump Organization offices a glow-up came together to create the illusion of success where only failure and mediocrity had been before.

It was an experience so profound for Trump that he did something highly unusual: He learned something. He absorbed the idea that a well-constructed illusion of competence gets you all the benefits of being accomplished, without having to do the hard work of actually achieving anything.

Unfortunately, it was a lesson we are all paying the price for now.

On Thursday evening, the New York Times published an exposé about how the Trump White House forced the CDC to publish dangerously misleading coronavirus testing recommendationson its website.  the new “guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus,” Apoorva Mandavilli writes, noting that actual public health experts at the agency strenuously objected because the virus is often spread by asymptomatic people and vigorous testing is crucial to preventing that.

It’s not hard to see that Trump’s reality TV instincts fueled this effort to discourage coronavirus testing. Trump has made clear from the beginning of this pandemic that he would prefer to leave as many coronavirus cases on the editing-room floor as possible, and he thinks the best way to do that is to keep people from getting tested. Trump truly believes that the best way to get coronavirus numbers down is not by preventing people from getting infected in the first place, but by hiding the true number of cases and juking the stats.

Even during this week’s town hall hosted by ABC News, Trump asserted this belief, claiming that the only reason the U.S. has more 20% of the world’s coronavirus cases (despite having only 4.5% of the world’s population) is that “we do much more testing.”

Of course, the U.S. also has more than 20% of the world’s deaths, a fact that exposes that Trump’s instincts aren’t just immoral, but wrong. Those dead Americans tell the real story of what’s happening, and no amount of trying to monkey with the numbers is going to change that.

Trump is also playing the reality TV game with the vaccine. He has been dropping hints for weeks, reality TV-style, that there will be a shocking and heartwarming twist right before the election, which he clearly views as the penultimate episode of this “season,” in which he will dramatically unveil the vaccine that will save us all and also ensure his re-election. He’s even used CDC resources to prop up this insinuation that the big vaccine reveal is coming, right in the nick of time.

“You could have a very big surprise coming up,” Trump said in a press conference last week.

“We’re going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special date. You know what date I’m talking about,” he added. Gee, I have no idea. What date could he possibly mean?

It’s doubtful that Trump cares, one way or another, that he’s making empty promises. In reality TV, it’s normal to hype some big revelation to lure in viewers for the next episode, only to produce some anticlimactic nothing-burger. All that matters is sucking people in, not delivering them what was promised.

Trump’s playing the same game here. He doesn’t care that there won’t be anything close to a readily available vaccine this year. He just wants to hype that idea long enough to somehow scrape out an election victory, legitimate or otherwise, at which point he’ll not only abandon the idea entirely, but most likely interfere with the process of getting one safely on the market.

But of course, trying to deceive people about their own health and lives isn’t just reality TV sleaze. It’s a deeply immoral gambit that appears to have given the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, a minor crisis of conscience. At least Redfield he wasn’t willing to lie to Congress flat out, and told the obvious truth that even if a vaccine is approved this year, it probably won’t be widely available until the middle of 2021. He also encouraged mask-wearing, even though Trump seems to think every mask applied to a face is an eff-you personally directed at him.

Trump, as usual, reacted poorly to someone trying to pierce his poorly constructed illusion of competent leadership. He responded by claiming that Redfield had “made a mistake” and offered “incorrect information.”

This is just another example of Trump treating the leaders of important government institutions not as if they were public servants, but as if they were TV producers whose main job is to clean up Trump’s image, cover for his ignorant mistakes and odious statements, and present him to the public as the brilliant statesman he absolutely is not.

Much has been written about the hard work that it took for the team on “The Apprentice” to conceal Trump’s repugnant personality and mediocrity as a businessman.

“What we did, that was a scam,” Bill Pruitt, a former producer on “The Apprentice,” said in the Netflix documentary “The Confidence Man,” which explored how the people behind that show used TV magic to make Trump seem smart and accomplished.

“If you walked around Trump’s actual office in Trump Tower you’d see the wood’s chipped, and what’s that smell?” Pruitt added, noting, “It wasn’t the empire we were going to have to sell to people. We needed to gussy it up a bit. And we did.”

“Most of us knew he was a fake,” Jonathan Braun, another producer, told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

In a 2017 essay about “The Apprentice,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum wrote that “the Trump of ‘The Apprentice’ receives endless praise, even behind his back. All scandal and debt are erased; Trump’s combative streak is alchemized into Daddy’s tough love.”

For Trump, being a fake success is better than being a real success. For one thing, it’s less work. For another, it feels like cheating the system, and Trump loves to believe he’s doing that. So even with the death toll from the pandemic closing in on 200,000 Americans, Trump still clings to this notion that he doesn’t need to actually do anything about it. He just wants someone to come in and edit reality to make it look like he’s doing something.

While it was undeniably hard work for the team at “The Apprentice” to present this false image of Trump-the-competent-businessman, they at least had the benefit of being able to contain the illusion within the rectangular frame of the TV screen.

The real world, it turns out, is too big to be captured and controlled in an editing bay. Trump’s increasingly futile efforts to make the pandemic disappear through reality-TV antics keep running up into the biological realities of people who get sicker and sicker, wind up in hospital ICUs and then on respirators, and then die. Trump can’t hide that his management of this crisis has been a total failure, and on some lizard brain level, he seems to understand that he’s unpopular. That’s why his next big gambit is to try to replace the real election, which he would almost certainly lose, with a fake one where he’s declared the winner.

920

no lnx twt

thehill

Trump on Sunday threatened to withhold funding from California schools incorporating The New York Times’ 1619 Project in their classrooms.

"Department of Education is looking at this," Trump tweeted in response to an anonymous post claiming the Times’ series had been “implemented… into the public schools” in California.

"If so, they will not be funded!" he added.

The president’s allies have frequently targeted the Pulitzer-winning Times series, which emphasizes the legacy of slavery in American history.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in July introduced legislation that would make any schools using 1619 Project materials ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Cotton called the series “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union.”

Pelosi: Trump 'engaged in fright and fear' in efforts to 'discredit'...

DeWine: Trump 'extremely respectful' of military, says report has...

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week ordered federal agencies to end workplace sensitivity training that teaches the U.S. “is an inherently racist or evil country” or "that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."

It is unclear to what extent, if at all, such programs are in place at the agencies, with the OMB citing “press reports.”

==

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

no lnx twt

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

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 25, 2020 Commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:{

}:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:{

}:

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

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

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

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

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

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

:{

}:

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

:{

}:

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

620

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

RANGE:

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

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

extremist sorta tied with militant, but latter ominous suggestion of force?  well doth do, but hard to picture Pelosi busting out AR 15?

easy slide over to terrorism (eco economic)

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

takes immediate swift unilateral Executive order action

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

@realDonaldTrump

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

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

ok he was there, but a week before?

no lnx pix twt

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

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

Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon June 16, 2020

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

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

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

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

He was digitally placed in front of the entrance sign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Police Chief Carmen Best later corrected that statement.

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

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

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

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

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

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

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

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520

aha: see zinn on sacrifice, //austerity (= tough, discipline, rational, male)

free mkt FUNDAMENTALISM: = METAPHOR // STORY  WORLDVIEW

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-time-to-reject-the-gods-of-commerce-america-is-a-society-not-an-economy/

david m

The “economy” does not exist. Human beings do. What nearly everyone understands, except Republican officials and economists on television, is that there is no singular, shared experience within one large-scale economic system. Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old woman with a developmental disability, who worked as a grocery clerk at a satellite store of Giant Food — a chain throughout three states — died from the coronavirus infection she contracted when earning her final paycheck. That check was for $20.64. She worked without a facial mask, and lived in an entirely different universe than Nick Bertram, Giant’s CEO, who collects a salary in the high six figures.

The majority of Americans have less than $500 in savings. They simply do not experience the same “economy” as Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, a Republican who described Americans dying as a result of “opening the economy” as the “lesser of two evils.” Hollingsworth is the 12th-richest member of Congress, with a net worth of $50.1 million, most of it coming from his father — the “silent partner” in Hollingsworth’s investment firm.

Americans as disparate as Trey Hollingsworth and Leilani Jordan, whose death the congressman would presumably regard as collateral damage, might not share an economy in any substantive sense, but they do share a society.

The ideological disease that cripples the United States is the belief that society does not exist beyond its commercial activity. President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that “the business of America is business,” while Joel Millman, a formerreporter for the Wall Street Journal, once wrote, “America is not a nation … America is a market.”

Millman was making a neutral, analytical observation, but a similar thesis has guided America’s long succession of disastrous policy decisions that treat the “economy” — meaning profits for corporations and their owners or shareholders — as sacred. An entire set of religious assumptions follow, most significantly that people like Jordan are martyrs for the God of profit. Their deaths are acceptable losses in the name of God and country, which mutate together into the bloodless idol of commerce.

Human sacrifices at the altar of the idol have become almost commonplace. Millions of children of color in the inner cities develop asthma and suffer from other respiratory problems because they breathe heavily polluted air; 26,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance; public health experts have concluded that poverty — and the lack of robust social services — causes tens of thousands of deaths a year.

The fatalities caused by environmental injustice, denial of health care and outright deprivation never provoke widespread scrutiny because, unlike the daily stock market report or reports of marginal GDP growth rates, they are largely out of sight and out of mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the United States to confront its market-based theology. Americans now must consider whether their country is anything more than an engine of commerce, and whether human life has value separate from a financial calculus. For the first time in most of our lifetimes, the question of priorities is direct and implicates almost everyone....

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420 mma

prosperity/GNP = life; bankruptcy is social darwin fail with invis hand culling out the unfit (like wolves of caribou?]

the strict fr allows co's to go out of biz vs coddle profligate or even sinful:

220 i'm trying to remember the name for some sort of scary risk that befalls us without the discipline of mkt: moral hazard

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-some-alabama-county-sheriffs-force-their-inmates-into-medical-debt

no lnx

How some Alabama county sheriffs force their inmates into medical debt

Written by ProPublica December 26, 2019

This article was produced in partnership with AL.com, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

In Alabama, the county in which you’re arrested could be the deciding factor in who will be financially responsible for your medical bills behind bars.

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In Baldwin County, known for its white-sand Gulf Coast beaches and waterfront communities, the sheriff’s office ensures that inmates in the county jail do not have to pay anything more than a $15 copayment for medical care.

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“Inmates are not billed for the full cost of any medical care either inside or outside” the jail, Sheriff Hoss Mack said in an email. “Alabama Code Title 14 assigns financial responsibility of inmates’ medical treatment to the department where they are being held.”

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Just across the bay in Mobile County, home to one of the busiest ports in the U.S. and the eponymous city of nearly 200,000 people built around it, Sheriff Sam Cochran takes a different tack: Some of his inmates are personally on the hook for the full cost of medically necessary care they receive from outside doctors while incarcerated, even if they are awaiting trial.

The difference between the two sheriffs’ approaches demonstrates the unique power Alabama sheriffs have to set their own rules and answer only to voters.Legal experts and civil rights advocates say sheriffs like Cochran are likely violating both state law and the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and excessive fines.

...