what about ism / both sides

619 see larger concepts mirror and false balance (which refers in part to balancing norms in journalism that led to dueling sound bites, empowering hacks)

see balance/false equiv, mirroring

merri ok

see jrnl fail

a bit of disambiguation here

this is triggered by djt saying he would take oppo from foreign country (non-state actors) b/c info is good and listening is good (polite/kind/sensitive?)

2nd iran war threat good to get both sides; bolton would take on the whole world at once [he's one of the the tough guys on my side, with bikers and cops [don't worry about hitting head in car]; he did not specify who the dove in admin is.

321 mebbe boost to primary as so common ef antifa tried to block trump trucks in salem Or called insurrection/cap takeover BS mirror

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virtuoso by lomborg and denier on rogan carlson

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// deflection? we are true victim here; PC woke silence gag soc media bias BS

2024 election debate : Vance dodge question with rant on Harris censorship:

“You have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal,” moderator Norah O’Donnell asked Vance. “Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?”

Vance said that instead of the threats to democracy decried by Democrats, what’s really worrying is the threat of “big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.” Vance says Harris would like to “censor people who engage in misinformation,” and that’s “a much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen” in the last four or 40 years.

“Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale,” Vance said, adding that’s a much larger threat than former President Donald Trump telling people to protest “peacefully” on January 6th at the US Capitol insurrection. Vance compared Trump’s refusal to believe the results of the 2020 election to Democrats’ concerns about Russian foreign interference in the 2016 election, where they pointed to foreign agents’ purchasing of Facebook ads as contributing to Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. (A Republican-led Senate committee concluded in 2020 that Russia did seek to interfere in the 2016 election to benefit Trump’s candidacy.

“January 6th was not Facebook ads,” Walz retorted, calling Vance’s version of events “revisionist history.”

Vance was apparently alluding to the events behind Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case decided earlier this year. The case covered accusations that the Biden administration coerced tech platforms to engage in censorship. Justices ruled in the Biden administration’s favor based on standing, but they also cast doubt on whether there was a meaningful connection between government outreach to platforms like Facebook and those platforms’ later moderation decisions.

Walz attempted to redirect the debate back to the original question. “Did he lose the 2020 election?” he asked Vance.

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?”

“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.

“It’s a damning non-answer for you not to talk about censorship,” Vance retorted.

At another point, Vance accused Harris of wanting to “use the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds.” Trump himself recently suggested that some people “should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices,” referring to criticism of the Supreme Court.

Walz responded to Vance with the widely used but misleading claim that “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” is a Supreme Court test for unprotected speech. Vance didn’t dispute the premise, but he claimed “you guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn’t wear masks. That’s not fire in a crowded theatre. That is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.”

“I don’t run Facebook,” Walz said. “This is not a debate, it’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jd-vance-avoids-january-6th-questions-by-pivoting-to-facebook-censorship/ar-AA1ryGeZ**

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an 6 25

Bulwark Policy Editor Mona Charen says Americans do more damage than they know when they dismiss gross corruption as “everybody does it” —because everybody doesn’t.

“It’s perfectly clear why Trump and his many enablers rely on whataboutism. It’s the easiest deflection,” Charen writes. “What is the proper response to Trump’s iniquitous treatment of women? What about Bill Clinton? How can one evaluate his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists? What about all those who rioted in protest of George Floyd’s murder and were never prosecuted? (They were.) Was Trump’s refusal to return highly classified documents a serious breach? What about Joe Biden keeping files in his garage?(Biden returned them when asked.) Is Trump corrupting the rule of law with his pardons of friends, donors, and political allies? *What about Joe Biden’s pardons of Hunter and his entire family?”

Many people, when caught in a lie or transgression admit their guilt and seek to repair the damage, said Charen. “That’s how mature people and societies stay civilized. … But “truly depraved people don’t take that route. Trump uses whataboutism not just to change the subject or disarm the accuser … but also to breed cynicism.”

Cynicism is corrosive because it invites the very thing it scorns, said Charen. “Once you elect a sociopath and agree with his jaundiced view that everyone is corrupt, you’ve lost any chance of upholding basic values.

IFrame Content

“Yes, Biden’s pardons of his family were grubby, but they were a few pebbles compared with Trump’s avalanche of corruption,” Charen concedes, however, “… Trump’s corruption is so off the charts (a Qatari luxury jet, hundreds of millions in memecoins and tokens, bidding wars to dine with him as his club) that it defies comparison.”

Charen ticks down a list of the president’s worst: “Through the memecoin, anyone anywhere for any reason can put hundreds, or thousands, or millions of dollars directly into Trump’s pocket. Not into a campaign fund, not into a political party, but into the hands of the president. And as we witnessed on his Middle East trip, eager foreign leaders and businessmen are lining up to do so. Vietnam, hoping for relief from tariffs, is in talks to help Trump build a luxury golf course. Due almost entirely to his crypto holdings, Trump has, by one estimate, doubled his net worth in just four months.”

The Bulwark podaster says the Constitution could not be clearer that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign state.” But that doesn’t appear to be preventing the administration from disbanding the Justice Department unit devoted to ferreting out crypto crime just in time for the Securities and Exchange Commission to drop an investigation into one of Trump’s largest donors “—the one who donated top dollar (or memecoin) to have dinner with Trump at his country club outside D.C.,” she said.

If Americans do treasure honesty, integrity, the rule of law and decency, Charen said they must be prepared to reject whataboutism and risk mockery by insisting that no, not everybody does it, and we don’t want to accept the kind of society in which that is assumed.

“We must disenthrall ourselves from the whataboutism mindset,” she said. “There are honorable politicians. There are honest businessmen. There are police and soldiers and teachers and programmers and athletes and judges of integrity. Millions of Americans are appalled and deeply embarrassed by the kakistocracy we’ve elevated. Hold on to that outrage. It’s the road back from this disaster.”

Read the full Bulwark report here.

===

Mainstream media don’t have to take the right's phony outrage over Biden’s “garbage” comments seriously

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 10/30/24 mma

Some mainstream media outlets aided the inevitable right-wing outrage cycle regarding President Joe Biden's comments about a racist joke made at a Trump rally by adopting right-wing media's framing.

Speaking to nonprofit Voto Latino, Biden reacted to a comedian at Trump’s weekend rally calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

NBC senior White House correspondent Gabe Gutierrez initially reportedthe comments as Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage”; Biden later clarified what he said, writing on social media, “Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That's all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don't reflect who we are as a nation.”

basket of deplorables problem? trying to get last few undecided?]

The next day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris told reporters that Biden “clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” She mentioned that she had called for unity in a speech the previous night, saying, “You heard my speech last night. I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not. I will be a President for all Americans.”

Even though Biden clarified his comments, many in the mainstream media posted headlines suggesting Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” and that his comments could give the right “a way to pivot away” from the overwhelming racism at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.

The Associated Press incorrectly wrote that Biden “suggests Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ after comic’s insult of Puerto Rico.” ABC News wrote up right-wing media’s bad-faith outrage, saying in a headline that Biden “angers GOP associating ‘garbage’ with Trump supporters.” NPR framed Biden’s comment as “a divisive remark” in a piece titled “Harris urged unity in her closing argument. Biden's ‘garbage’ line undercut that.”

Biden’s comment predictably led to a deluge of apoplectic reactions from right-wing media figures, who falsely claimed that the president called all Trump supporters “garbage” and made comparisons to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during the 2016 election cycle. (That comment was also misleadingly covered at the time, with some saying she was referring to all Trump supporters, when Clinton was specifically talking about voters who supported Trump for “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” reasons.)

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fearmongered that Biden “is using dehumanizing language towards 80 million Americans,” adding, “They think you are garbage, therefore worthy of elimination.” Fox News called the comments the “2024 campaign’s October Surprise.” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said that the comments are “the kind of seething, anti-American contempt that you only find among Democrat elites.”

While right-wing media engage in bad-faith outrage over Biden’s comments, Trump has repeatedly disparaged the United States and Democrats during his campaign. He recently said America is “like a garbage can for the world” and has ramped up demonizing rhetoric toward immigrants and political foes. Trump has called Democrats “evil,” “dangerous,” and “enemies from within,” going as far as suggesting he will use the military against “radical left lunatics.”

By adopting the right-wing framing about Biden’s remarks, the mainstream media are enabling a false narrative that both sides are ramping up hostile rhetoric. They don’t need to engage in the right’s latest efforts to deflect from Trump’s racism and extremism.

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odd in law? except trump liars?

see RAM rundo

caller BS

HAILEY GOMEZGENERAL ASSIGNMENT REPORTER

February 22, 2024

The Ninth Circuit of Appeals stepped in Thursday to block a ruling from U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney after he dropped all charges against two alleged white supremacists, according to court filings.

Carney, a federal judge within Orange County, California, dismissed the charges Wednesday against alleged white supremacists Robert Rundo and Robert Boman who were charged in 2018 with conspiracy to violate the Anti-Riot Act, as well as rioting at political rallies in 2017, according to the Los Angeles Times. Within his opinion, the federal judge stated that both men displayed they’d been selectively prosecuted in comparison to “members of Antifa” and other “far-left groups” who had reportedly physically assaulted Trump supporters at rallies, however, were not charged in the same manner. (RELATED: 31 Suspected White Nationalists Booked For Conspiracy To Riot Near Pride Event)

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“By many accounts, members of Antifa and related far-left groups engaged in worse conduct and in fact instigated much of the violence that broke out at these otherwise constitutionally protected rallies to silence the protected speech of the supporters of President Trump,” Judge Carney stated in his opinion. “That is constitutionally impermissible…prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech.”

While Boman was released on bond following the dismissal, disputes in reporting on if Rundo had also been released were up in the air as prosecutors filed an emergency request with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after the judge had turned down their pleas Wednesday on not releasing Rundo, according to ABC News. Prosecutors argued that Rundo was a flight risk, noting that the alleged white supremacist had fled the U.S. previously in 2019 after Carney had dismissed another case of his based on First Amendment grounds, the outlet reported.

“I don’t believe it’s warranted that Mr. Rundo spend one minute more in custody, so I’m going to release him forthwith,” Carney stated. “I feel very comfortable in the decision I’ve made.”

Both Rundo and Boman are alleged members of a white supremacist group called Rise Above Movement (RAM), which claims to be a “combat-ready, militant group of a new nationalist white supremacy and identity movement,” with Rundo notably an alleged founding member, according to the LA Times. Carney additionally noted within his original opinion that the government couldn’t prosecute RAM members “while ignoring the violence of members of Antifa” and other far-left groups.

“The government cannot prosecute R.A.M. members such as Defendants while ignoring the violence of members of Antifa and related far-left groups because RAM engaged in what the government and many believe is more offensive speech,” Carney wrote.

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It is unclear if Rundo is back in custody, however, a U.S. Attorney spokesperson in Los Angeles who had prosecuted the case stated that developments would be advised “as appropriate,” according to the LA Times. [comment yikes]

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{{{RAM rundo BS:

===

Right-wing media claim that Biden’s handling of classified documents was similar or worse than Trump’s | Media Matters for America

The political press runs with Hur’s scurrilous partisan attack | Media Matters for America

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an 2 24

whataboutism rubber glue

an 2 24

Greene (R-GA) came under attack after making remarks in support of Donald Trump, insisting that both she and the ex-president did not engage in insurrection. The far-right Georgia Republican’s comments came during a press conference (https://www.c-span.org/video/?533397-1/rep-matt-gaetz-introduces-resolution-fmr-pres-trump-engage-insurrection) promoting a House resolution from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) that claims the ex-president did not engage in insurrection.

A Colorado judge in November ruled that Donald Trump did engage in insurrection (https://www.reuters.com/legal/colorado-judges-allows-trump-primary-ballot-delays-decision-general-election-2023-11-18/), despite what the Congresswoman and her fellow Republican said on Tuesday.

“Democrats and liars in the media accuse President Trump of being an insurrectionist when in fact he is not,” Greene declared Tuesday.

“Not one single person has been charged with insurrection. Not one single person has been convicted with insurrection, not one in every single court of our land. No one’s been charged and convicted with insurrection,” Greene, speaking angrily and sharply, told reporters. She ignored that the U.S. Dept. of Justice has obtained at least four guilty pleas of seditious conspiracy (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/36-months-jan-6-attack-capitol-0#::text=Pleas%3A,have%20pleaded%20guilty%20to%20misdemeanors.) for felonious actions surrounding the January 6, 2021 insurrection, which can carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/what-is-seditious-conspiracy-insurrection-treason.html) – more harsh than the rarely-used charge of insurrection.

“Yet Democrats and dishonest people in the media every single day accuse President Trump of waging an insurrection and accused many of us of waging an insurrection and you’re doing nothing but lying and selling the lies of the Democrats all for campaigns and elections. Shame on every single person that has done that. Shame on you. You need to tell the truth. You have the freedom of press, one of the greatest rights in this entire world. And anyone that puts the word ‘insurrectionists,’ calls President Trump an insurrectionist, and calls any of us an insurrectionists is a liar and you do not deserve the power that you possess. Shame on you. Shame on you,” Greene, nearly shouting, declared falsely.[= twt?]

READ MORE: Tuberville: Democrats Want Women to Be ‘Extinct’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2024/02/tuberville-democrats-want-women-to-be-extinct/)

She then appeared to demonstrate a misunderstanding of the definition of the word “insurrection,” which has been defined as (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/insurrection), “an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence,” or (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insurrection), “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”

“Let me give you guys a little history lesson,” Greene continued. “Okay. When President Trump was inaugurated Antifa and leftist rioters nearly burned down Washington, D.C. Did you call it an insurrection? No. BLM raised millions of dollars on the ACT Blue Democrat fundraising website and then proceeded to cause $2 billion in damages across American cities and communities all in 2020, every day, not one day for three hours but every damn day. Did you call it an insurrection? They attacked police officers, federal courthouses, tore down statues, burned 93 police vehicles. Did you in the media call it an insurrection? No, you did not. You called it mostly peaceful, and you lied to the American people and the American people don’t trust you anymore because of that.”

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drilled panel 10 22 verbatim press release 4x more then norm; NO MORE BOTH SIDES ON DENIAL BUT SHIFT TO CCS

santer? cd not figure out why he was being attacked for cherry-picking etc then realized THEY were doing it. it's a tell.

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https://www.alternet.org/media-trump-officials/

an 1 23 cdv

There is no such thing as "the liberal media."

That is language concocted by the Republican Party and right-wing consultants with the goal of bullying the American news media into being compliant and subservient to the "conservative" agenda.

And they were remarkably successful in achieving that goal.

Decades later it is now an accepted "fact" among America's political class, the general public, and the mainstream news media itself that there is such a thing as "liberal bias" in the news industry. The enduring myth of the "liberal media" is one of many examples of how the American right has successfully weaponized language with a propaganda campaign to shape the country's political terrain in their interests.

Republicans have marketed themselves as defenders of "freedom." In reality, they are authoritarians who support a range of policies that limit human and civil rights.

The Republican Party has created a brand that is based upon "family values." This is fiction. The policies and ideology of the modern GOP are centered upon gutting the social safety net and ending the county's already very weak and still developing social democracy. If they are successful in that agenda, the overall well-being of American families will be greatly diminished.

The "conservative" movement staunchly claims to be "pro-life." This is not true. Their policies and ideology have actually shortened the lives of the American people as seen with health care, gun violence, the global climate crisis and environment, the COVID pandemic, and social inequality more generally.

Former Rep. Newt Gingrich is one of the main architects of the strategy that allowed the Republican Party to win the language wars and the central role of the myth of "the liberal media" in that outcome. In 1995, the media watchdog group FAIR explained how:

Since winning control of Congress, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) has constantly complained about "destructive" and "negative" coverage from the "liberal elite media."… In fact, the new speaker of the House—who once described his goal as "reshaping the entire nation through the news media" (New York Times, 12/14/94)—has given a great deal of thought to the media and how to manipulate them.One Newtonian axiom is "fights make news" (Boston Globe, 11/20/94). Another skill he has taught to Republican candidates through his political organization, GOPAC, is how to create a "shield issue" to deflect criticism…

But the clearest expression of Gingrich's philosophy of media came in a GOPAC memo entitled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Distributed to GOP candidates across the country, the memo's list of words for Democrats and words for Republicans was endorsed by Gingrich in a cover letter: "The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language." Next time you hear Gingrich complain about media focusing on the negative, refer back to these lists.

In a widely cited 2003 essay at The Nation, media critic and author Eric Alterman said the following about the myth of "the liberal media":

Move over to the mainstream publications and broadcasts often labeled "liberal," and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal dominance becomes. ….

I could go on, but the point is clear: Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match–either in size, ferocity or commitment–for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."

:{The right is working the refs. And it's working. Much of the public believes a useful but unsupportable myth about the so-called liberal media, and the media themselves have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop. :{As the economist/pundit Paul Krugman observes of Republican efforts to bully the media into accepting the party's Orwellian arguments about Social Security privatization: "The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla,much of the media–fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of 'balance'–won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown."}:

}:

In the real world of the right-wing media, the pundits are the conservatives' shock troops. Even the ones who constantly complain about alleged liberal control of the media cannot ignore the vast advantage their side enjoys when it comes to airing their views on television, in the opinion pages, on the radio and the Internet.

In total, the mainstream news media is inherently "small c" conservative. As a social institution it prioritizes making money and is averse to change. As such, the American mainstream news media also serves an agenda-setting and boundary-enforcing function that sets limits on the "approved public discourse." In that role, liberal and progressives are routinely silenced out of deference to "conservative" and right-wing voices – however extreme the latter may be.

Because the mainstream news media are aligned with the powerful as a class, they prioritize having access to them in what is a parasitic and symbiotic relationship. In practice, this meant that access to the powerful — especially for DC beltway journalists — is more important than bold truth-telling and consistently speaking truth to power.The conservative nature of the American news media and its institutional bias towards "normalcy" helps to explain why it has been so unable to properly pivot and adapt to the realities of the Age of Trump, rising neofascism, and the country's ongoing democracy crisis. Thus, the continued habit of using obsolete norms such as "bothsideism," an overempahsis on "horserace coverage," an obsession with political personalities instead of systems and power, and an amplification of the controversy of the day instead of on fundamental issues.

One of the most dangerous examples of how the media has been conditioned by the right through the myth of "liberal bias" is how it is now helping to launder the reputations of several Trump regime members and other Republican fascists. In a very high-profile example of reputation laundering, The New York Times— which is routinely attacked by right-wing media for committing the "crime" of "liberal bias" (a baseless and absurd claim) — recently featured a guest opinion essay by former Trump regime advisor and propagandist**Kellyanne Conway.Her Times op-ed contained Trump political pornography such as this:

Donald J. Trump shocked the world in 2016 by winning the White House and becoming the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience. He upended the fiction of electability pushed by pundits, the news media and many political consultants, which arrogantly projects who will or will not win long before votes are cast. He focused instead on capturing a majority in the Electoral College, which is how a candidate does or does not win. Not unlike Barack Obama eight years earlier, Mr. Trump exposed the limits of Hillary Clinton's political inevitability and personal likability,connected directly with people, ran an outsider's campaign taking on the establishment, and tapped into the frustrations and aspirations of millions of Americans.

Some people have never gotten over it. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. There is no vaccine and no booster for it. Cosseted in their social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness, the afflicted disguise their hatred for Mr. Trump as a righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country. So desperate is the incessant cry to "get Trump!" that millions of otherwise pleasant and productive citizens have become naggingly less so. They ignore the shortcomings, failings and unpopularity of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and abide the casual misstatements of an administration that says the "border is secure," inflation is "transitory," "sanctions are intended to deter" Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraineand they will "shut down the virus." They've also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 and not in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In her New York Times audition for a job on Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, Conway also wrote:

:{A popular sentiment these days is, "I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality." It is true that limiting the name-calling frees up time and space for persuasion and solutions. Still, it may not be possible to have one without the other. :{Mr. Trump would remind people that it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border;structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran's most powerful military commander;forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Mr. Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine.}:

}:

When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. Much like with the audio debate a few years ago "Do you hear 'Laurel' or 'Yanny'?," what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America's interests.

There were thousands of comments on the New York Times website in response to Conway's column and the publication's decision to allow her such a privileged platform. Based on a cursory review, a good many, if not most of these comments were negative. The Times even featured one such complaint in a letter to the editor:

A diversity of opinions and perspectives is a fantastic goal, and one reason I've been a longtime subscriber. Generally speaking, your opinion guest essays are well written and thoughtful and provide a point of view that makes one examine a topic with fresh eyes.

The opinion from Ms. Conway is not that.

Time and again she employs sloganeering to sling arrows at Democrats and non-Trumpists in an attempt to burnish the reputation of her former boss.

She continues to attempt to turn neighbor against neighbor by perpetuating the othering of Trump detractors and the denial of Mr. Trump's and her attacks on voting, democracy and simple decency.

Hers is not another "opinion"; it is carefully crafted and intentional spin to appeal to people's sense of grievance and to reaffirm the lies and misinformation they are so ready to believe.

Her inclusion in your paper diminishes the quality of debate, and galvanizes a person America would be better off forgetting.

Conway is representative of a larger pattern where such leading news media outlets as the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NBC and others are deciding to amplify and provide a platform for Trumpists, Republican-fascists, and other right-wing anti-democracy voices. They are doing this behind the cover of "fairness" and "balancing" when in reality such a decision is based on fear, profit-maximizing, and strategically positioning themselves to be in good favor with the Republican Party, "conservatives" and other anti-democratic forces as a type of insurance policy and security blanket for what promises to be a very perilous and unsettled future.

In an essay at Medium, journalist and author Wajahat Ali warns that "Even in the face of increased threats and a failed coup, too many journalists in mainstream media outlets will continue to pave the road toward fascism with their 'both sides' coverage." He continues, "Access journalism is a parasitic relationship.Some of these journalists are like small remoras, or shark suckers, who attach to sharks to get to their destination. If they were riding the shark in JAWS, they'd write an article blaming the townspeople for forcing the shark to eat them":

There's a class of journalists belonging to legacy outlets and corporate media who are incapable of shedding their antiquated, toxic skin and adapting to the changing political and cultural landscape where disinformation, white supremacist conspiracy theories, and right-wing stochastic terrorism is the norm. Instead, they chase the North Star, which isn't the truth, but rather access to power, ratings, and a path toward personal success….

Instead of bending the knee to right-wing intimidation, platforming their lies, mainstreaming their hate, and engaging in "both sides" nonsense to create the fiction of symmetry in an utterly asymmetrical reality, these political journalists need to be biased in favor of the truth and democracy.

Ultimately, the American mainstream news media needs to engage in a type of personal inventory and critical self-reflection about its role in democracy and failings (and successes) in the Age of Trump and beyond.In short, it must do better as it strives to live up to the ideals of the Fourth Estate in a democracy. A big step in that direction would be refusing to participate in the reputation laundering and rehabilitation of Trump's regime members and other neo-fascists and enemies of democracy in today's Republican Party and larger right-wing and "conservative" movement.

If the American mainstream news media does not do this necessary and hard work it is just contributing to its own legitimacy crisis and lack of trust among the American people, which in turn means aiding the Republican fascists and other enemies of a free press and democracy.

---

7 22

United States Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R-Georgia) recently gave a speech at the Hall County Republican Party Independence Day Picnic in which he fired off a series of oversimplified claims about climate change.

"Get rid of the pipeline, get rid of the energy, starts your downfall, because we need energy for everything, do y'all know that?" Walker said. "And they would talk about the Green New Deal, you know climate change. I’m gonna help ya’ll with that real quickly, and I'm gonna do it in the Wrightsville way so you can understand what I'm saying."

Walker then suggested that foreign powers, rather than corporate polluters, are primarily responsible for poisoning American skies and waterways. While that does have some validity, it nonetheless dismisses the damage being done by domestic sources. To Walker's credit, however, it was a tiny break away from the GOP's broader stance that climate change is either grossly overblown or nonexistent.

“We in America have some of the cleanest air, the cleanest water of anybody in the world,” Walker said to cheers from the crowd. "So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put from the Green New Deal millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden, China and India ain't put nothing in their – cleaning that situation up."

Walker added that "since we don’t control the air our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got we to clean that back up."

Watch below via Mediaite:

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an 6 22

some establishment Republicans, when asked about the far-right extremism of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia or Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, will engage in “whataboutism” — saying, “What about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar?” It’s a weak, totally disingenuous attempt to downplay the radicalization of the GOP; AOC and Omar can be combative debaters, but they haven’t threatened anyone — and they obviously want to have a conversationwith those they disagree with, not intimidate them into silence.

Nonetheless, bogus “whataboutist” comparisons of the AOC/Omar/Rashida Tlaib wing of the Democratic Party and the Greene/Gosar/Lauren Boebert wing of the GOP are common among establishment Republicans. But in an op-ed written by the New York Times’ Thomas B. Edsall and published on June 8, a GOP staffer offered a very different — and more honest and accurate — take on the Democratic Party’s left versus the “MAGA Caucus.”

The Republican staffer, described by Edsall as “high-ranking” and interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the journalist, “They are different in that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The ‘Squad’ seem to me to be more ‘idealist.’ They actually do want to legislate/accomplish the very far-left social ideas they propose. They are willing to cause Pelosi headaches, but they have shown they are not going to go so far as to jeopardize the government (operations) and safety net that so many families depend on from a working government.”

The staffer went on to tell Edsall, “The ‘MAGA Caucus’ members operate more like bullies — legislative bullies. If they have the opportunity, they will gladly hold bills/government funding hostage for the sake of populism and social media. They would take pride in ‘shooting the hostage’ as that would be very popular with their tribal base and their social media.”

The Squad refers to a left/populist alliance of four Bernie Sanders allies, all Democrats, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives: AOC, Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The name “MAGA Caucus” is typically used to describe Greene, Boebert, Gosar, Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina (who recently lost a GOP primary) and other MAGA extremists in the House.

Referring to The Squad as “far left” is misleading; their idea of “socialism” is the social democracy of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, not communism as it is practiced in Cuba or North Korea. Nonetheless, the GOP staffer generally made a good-faith argument — the type that is usually absent when Republicans appear on Fox News or Fox Business.

“The Squad and the MAGA Caucus are best known for their most visible members, Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia,” Edsall explains. “Both factions have caused major headaches for their respective party leaders.”

Edsall continues, “Centrist Democrats contend — citing poll data from USA Today Ipsos, Pew Research, a FiveThirtyEight polling summary and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Survey — that support from members of The Squad and their allies for defunding the police has undermined the reelection chances of moderate House Democrats running in purple districts. The participation of members of the MAGA Caucus in events linked to White supremacists have increased the vulnerability of the Republican Party to charges of racism, alienating moderate suburban voters.”

Edsall, adds, however, that there are “major dissimilarities” between The Squad’s methods and the Maga Caucus’ methods.

John Lawrence, former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told Edsall, “The MAGA people seem far more focused on personal celebrity and staking out extremist stances, whereas The Squad — while pushing the policy envelope to some extent — remain reliable party members.”

Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, authors of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” also offered Edsall a Squad/MAGA Caucus comparison — and saw enormous differences between the two.

Mann told Edsall, “The MAGA Caucus is anti-democratic, authoritarian and completely divorced from reality and truth. The Squad embraces left views well within the democratic spectrum. What’s striking about the MAGA Caucus is that they are closer to the Republican mainstream these days, given the reticence of Republican officeholders to challenge Trump. We worry about the future of American democracy because the entire Republican Party has gone AWOL. The crazy extremists have taken over one of our two major parties.”

Ornstein told Edsall, “The true believers…. think Trump won, that there is rampant voter fraud, the country needs a caudillo, we have to crack down on trans people, critical race theory is an evil sweeping the country and more. The Squad is certainly on the left end of the party, but they do not have authoritarian tendencies and views.”

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david badash

3 22 an

The New York Times Editorial Board is under fire for what its own readers are calling an “appalling” editorial that claims “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” It is a massive treatise, well over 2500 words, that essentially blames liberals for “cancel culture” and conservatives for banning books – and manages to equate the two as equal, something the Times is criticized for doing on multiple topics frequently.

Rather than quote the Times piece – it can be read here – we’re going to quote some of what the Times’ own readers voted as the best comments responding to the editorial.

“This editorial is appalling,” writes a reader from Baltimore. “Clearly, the Editorial Board is feeling touchy about the widespread ridicule of its recent decision to characterize as a political crisis an undergrad’s discomfort at expressing her opinions in class. I guess you need to be reminded that the 1st Amendment does not guarantee the right not to be ‘shamed or shunned.’ You are creating a false equivalency between private citizens’ opposition to willful disinformation and points of view they find objectionable, and the recent Republican craze for using the levers of government to stifle discussion of particular topics.”

The Baltimore reader is referring to a widely-criticized op-ed the Times published earlier this month written by a college senior complaining about “cancel culture” and claiming she feels she has to “self-censor.” That student identified herself as a liberal yet writes for a right-wing outlet, cited right-wing media, and interned at a Koch-funded foundation. She even praised a right-wing professor at her school who is an anti-LGBTQ activist. As several said, she cited no actual examples of harm that came from her speaking her opinion.

A reader from New York City commenting on the Editorial Board’s piece says they “have never liked the phrase ‘Cancel Culture’ as it creates an easy scapegoat by attacking the terminology and not the underlying sentiment. When I replace the phrase ‘Cancel Culture’ with ‘Accountability Culture’ I am much more inclined to to accept it. I do not think people should be ‘Cancelled’ for their view points or what they say but I do feel people should be held ‘Accountable’ for their words just as they are for their actions.”

Theresa from Vermont says she is “stunned to read this. Free speech is protected in the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from restricting speech, protects the right not to speak, and protects against government censorship. It does not protect a speaker from accountability and responsibility for their speech. I’m a senior citizen, and never remember a time when everyone was expected to listen to every bad idea, all the bad science, every hateful expression, or every lie or misrepresentation of fact, in the name of free speech. Facts and truth, and validity of argument, matter if you want someone to listen. This opinion is totally off the mark, both in analysis of free speech and historical tradition.”

Another reader from New York says, “it seems to me this editorial went really far out of its way to attempt [to] blame the left and the right evenly for cancel culture. But it is not the left that is burning books, it’s not the left that are attacking people in school board meetings, in our Capital, on social media day in and day out. It is not left wing “news” shows that are spreading misinformation daily and it is not the left that have members of Congress shouting out in chambers as if they are calling to a rival at a NASCAR event. Once again the false equivalencybetween the left and the right helps normalize the behavior from the right that we abhor.”

Dan from Naples says: “I have never felt restrained or curtailed from stating my opinion or voicing my feelings with one exception. The violence that the Right in this country embrace and the gun culturethat has become a religion with the Right makes me consider where I am and in what kind of surrounding I’m in before stating what I believe.”

And from Washington, D.C., a reader adds: “If people are more uncomfortable talking about politics because they think they will be judged, it is because of the political moment that we are in. One of our two political parties is getting dangerously close to overthrowing our system of government. It should make you uncomfortable to support that. It should make you uncomfortable to go along with it because you refuse to acknowledge what is happening or because you want a tax cut or whatever.”

Lastly, a reader from SOMA says definitively, “NO. I think it is appropriate to shame and remove from public discourse those that repeat lies that hurt people–such as the lies about scientific information about Covid that kills. Because as we have seen–misinformation does kill. No I do not want to hear alternative truths in the name of free speech. It is destroying society. Especially when the undereducated are lauded by so many, and propaganda abounds that people cannot discern the difference between fact and fiction. We must set some boundaries for when public figures lie to the detriment of the public. They must be held accountable. I’m not sure how we do it, but I know we must.”

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hard to tell bad analogy from bad faith? (tho i note i labelled him hypocrite]:

an 2 22

no lnx vid twt

'Depths of hackery': Fox News legal analyst mocked for suggesting Martin Luther King Jr. was never arrested

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 16, 2022

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley is being mocked after he attacked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for cracking down on a convoy of largely American-funded “truckers” who shut down a major bridge between the two nations and with it crippled trade for days.

:{:{}:

Not only is Fox News’ promotion of the so-called “Freedom Truckers” extreme, Turley’s suggestion that those who fought for actual civil rights – not the “right” to not wear a mask or not be vaccinated – during the Jim Crow era were never physically attacked or arrested by police is just plain false.

“I thought it was quite excessive,” Turley declared of Trudeau’s decision to invoke emergency – but not military or martial law – powers, on Fox News. “This was an act of civil disobedience,” he said of the truck protestors.

Turley called the protest “a standard tactic of groups, going back to the Civil Rights era.” He even quoted the late Democratic U.S. Congressman John Lewis’s “good trouble” remarks.

“By this rationale, they could have cracked down on the Civil Rights Movement. They could have arrested Martin Luther King,” Turley declared.

Fox News has clearly been on the side of the protestors.

Pushback against Turley was swift.

“Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested 29 times,” noted HuffPost senior front page editor Philip Lewis.

“This is what happens when you ban teaching history in our schools,” wrote popular economist David Rothschild.

Historian Peter Manseau warned, “This is beyond dumb — but don’t fall for the trap of participating in any comparison between people fighting for civil rights & people fighting against public health. Answering this with ‘But they did arrest MLK!’ only invites the response ‘So the truckers are just like him…'”

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but hillary, combines whattaboutism with whiny victimhood?

no lnx vid twt

Distraught Eric Trump calls for prosecutors to investigate Hillary Clinton: 'They’ll go after my father for nothing'

Eric Trump screengrab

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 15, 2022

Appearing on Fox News Monday night a distraught Eric Trump told Sean Hannity that Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted.

“Isn’t that a, you know, isn’t that fraud? Isn’t that all sorts of offenses?” Trump asked Hannity, a longtime unofficial advisor to Donald Trump.

“Where are the prosecutors right now?” Eric Trump asked. “You know, the same prosecutors, they’ll go after my father every single day for nothing, right? Just because they want to disqualify him because he’s clearly the front runner for 2024,” cried Eric Trump, a top executive of the Trump Organization, which is facing investigations of potential fraud. There is massive evidence of potential, possibly criminal, wrongdoing by Donald Trump as well, going as far back as the Mueller investigation if not earlier.

“Where are those prosecutors? Hillary Rodham Clinton is a New York resident. Let me just kind of break that down for you. She lives in Chappaqua, New York and guess where Trump Tower is located is located? It’s located on Fifth Avenue in New York. Where are these prosecutors? Where is the DA? Isn’t that a federal – Isn’t that a, you know, isn’t that fraud? Isn’t that all sorts of offenses?”

Eric Trump appeared to be discussing the news, incorrectly reported by Fox News, about the Durham investigation.

“Where’s Letitia James in this whole thing?” Trump, upset, asked of the New York Attorney General. “Is she just gonna ignore this because Hillary happens to be in her political party?”

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https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/cnn-smears-sen-ron-johnson-as-climate-denier-for-not-bowing-to-climate-alarmism/

cNN Smears Sen. Ron Johnson As ‘Climate Denier’ For Not Bowing To Climate Alarmism

JULY 7, 2021 By Gabe Kaminsky

CNN’s Chris Cuomo opened his Tuesday monologue smearing Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson for refusing to bow down to climate alarmism after a new “KFILE” report found a video of Johnson calling climate change, “bullsh-t.”

KFILE reported Johnson told attendees at a June Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin luncheon, “I don’t know about you guys, but I think climate change is — as Lord Monckton said — bullsh-t.”

Cuomo blasted Johnson for his comments. “We need to call out garbage in the form of the game,” he said. “The target tonight, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson … Sounds like a denier, no?” He continued:

Now many see Johnson as just selling stupidity. I see something worse. I know this guy. I remember him when he came to the Senate. Businessman, and he said, ‘I don’t know anything about this politics, I’m just here to make things happen.’ …He wanted to come on my show and show economic theories and principles and do charts to justify policy. Now he’s this. This is how he responds to a heatwave gripping North America.

Johnson failed to walk the politically correct line, so CNN thought they scored a win. But in reality, the senator provided a full comment to the outlet that it did not include in its story. Reporters Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski included the first four sentences of Johnson’s response.

“My statements are consistent. I am not a climate change denier, but I also am not a climate change alarmist. Climate is not static. It has always changed and always will change,” Johnson said.

The rest? Deemed irrelevant to the narrative, as spokeswoman Alexa Henning indicated to The Federalist. Here’s what they left out:

I do not share Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s view that the “world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Or President Biden saying the “greatest threat” to U.S. security is climate change. I consider those to be extreme positions — to say the least. At some point, all the Malthusian predictions that have not come true should begin reducing the credibility of the scaremongers. But that would take honest reporting by mainstream media, so I’m not holding my breath.

Marc Morano and other seasoned energy experts have consistently exposed climate alarmism as another way for the left to expand government regulation on false premises.

Cuomo connected the heatwave across the country to climate change. But Morano, the author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think” and a former George W. Bush administration staffer in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Federalist this is false.

“Any heatwave, hurricane, tornado outbreak, etc., are always used by the media and other climate activists as some kind of ‘proof’ of a climate emergency,” Morano said. “At least these claims are more plausible than claims that building collapses or illegal immigration is caused by ‘climate change.'”

Morano said the current global satellite temperature for June 2021 is below the 30-year average, and that in addition to the U.S. heatwave, there are ongoing record cold temperatures elsewhere.

“The media gaslight anyone who mocks ‘global warming’ on a record cold or snowy day but has no problem doing the exact same thing whenever it’s hot. As University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy’s research has found: ‘About 75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940,'” he said.

Johnson said climate change is “bullsh-it,” and he is not wrong. He even told CNN “climate is not static” and that he is “not a climate change denier,” but the outlet wants to mold a narrative.

Gabe Kaminsky is an intern at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, The American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, and other outlets. He has also appeared on Fox News, Hill.TV, and various radio programs. Follow him on Twitter @Gabe__Kaminskyor email gkaminskycontact@gmail.com.

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an 521

top Dem lawyer blasts CBS News: 'Do you really need to both-sides democracy?'

Bob Brigham Raw Story

May 09, 2021

Attorney Marc Elias, who coordinates Democratic Party lawsuits to protect voting rights, blasted CBS News on Saturday.

"Senate committee to hold markup on controver...

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321 just wondering watn pension plan (rich husb)

no lnx twt

Ex-Trump attorney furious DOJ investigating Matt Gaetz but not Hunter Biden

Screengrab.

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 31, 2021

Former Trump campaign and personal attorney Jenna Ellis is furious about the Dept. of Justice's investigation into Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for possible sex trafficking of an underaged girl, demanding to know why Hunter Biden has not been charged with wrongdoing – while just hours later lamenting the death of the "presumption of innocence."

"Okay so wait," Ellis, who professes to be a "Constitutional Law Attorney," said on Twitter, "the DOJ has time to investigate Matt Gaetz, but the whole Hunter Biden situation is just fine now?? And where's Durham??? This is why the American people are so over all of it."

"Durham" is now-former U.S. Attorney John Durham, who former Attorney General Bill Barr set up as a special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI's Russia probe. So far, after two years, he reportedly has found no problems with the FBI's decision to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign for possible Russia ties.

It's unclear who Ellis is referring to when lamenting that "the American people are so over all of it," given that it appears Hunter Biden's actions do not warrant prosecution, but she also went on to lament, ironically, the death of the "presumption of innocence," just seven hours later:

[some crack about twitter annd PC]

Ellis, a devout Christian who has suggested the left is trying to "cancel Christianity," has compared same-sex marriage to pedophilia and bestiality and supports criminalizing homosexuality.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Trump attorney spirals out in unhinged CNN rant claiming Trump is ... ›

MAGA attorney: Trump-appointed judge who ruled against ... ›

A review of Jenna Ellis' professional history shows she is not the ... ›

Who is Marjorie Taylor Greene and what is her connection to QAnon?

Greene ran as a Republican and won her runoff GOP primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, functionally securing her a seat in Congress. Greene is an outspoken QAnon supporter and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who, according to The Washington Post, “has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments.”

While some Republicans initially distanced themselves from Greene after reports of her QAnon support and other comments surfaced, many embraced her in the wake of the primary election. President Donald Trump enthusiastically praised Greene’s win on Twitter, calling her a “future Republican Star.”

An internal FBI memo published by Yahoo News in 2019 classified QAnon as a domestic terrorism threat because of its ties to violence. The memo explained that the conspiracy theory revolves around a supposedly high-level government official known as “Q” who “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring." These violent ties include a man who murdered his brother with a sword and another who threatened to kill YouTube employees.

Why the false equivalence?

In 2019, Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) publicly criticized Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called their comments worse than those of infamous white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who had recently been stripped of his committee assignments. Omar then tweeted, “It's all about the Benjamins baby,” in response to an article reporting that McCarthy was working to punish members of Congress critical of Israel. Omar later apologized for some of her phrasing and accidental use of anti-Semitic tropes while also doubling down on her criticism of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying group.

A month later, Omar again drew controversy for her remarks about lobbying by AIPAC:

Some Jewish leaders said she then revived an old trope about divided loyalties among Jewish-Americans when she said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

She added, “I want to ask, ‘Why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the (National Rifle Association), or fossil fuel industries or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?’”

Omar’s critical stance gave rise to disingenuous attacks against her by right-wing media figures who claimed that her criticism of Israeli policies makes her horribly anti-Semitic.

Right-wing media outlets have now begun to compare Omar to Greene, falsely claiming that Greene is simply the Republican version of her.

What makes the comparison between the two women particularly outrageous is the fact that Politico unearthed hours of racist and anti-Muslim video rants from Greene’s Facebook, some of which specifically targeted Omar.

Greene described the election of Omar and Tlaib as “an Islamic invasion into our government offices” and called Omar “that woman out of Minnesota" who “has got to wear a head covering." She said, “If you want Islam and Sharia law, you stay over there in the Middle East. … You stay there, and you go to Mecca and do all your thing. And, you know what, you can have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.You stay over there. But in America, see, we’ve made it this great, great country. We don’t want it messed up."

In fact, following the AIPAC controversy, Greene traveled to Capitol Hill in 2019 and filmed herself attempting to confront Omar and Tlaib, who she falsely claimed are “illegitimate members of Congress because they took their congressional oaths of office on the Quran” (Greene said she wanted to make them retake their oath on the Bible). “She also said she wanted to tell them they ‘really should go back to the Middle East if they support Sharia.’”

Greene’s racist rants reportedly include a statement that Black people are being “held slaves to the Democratic Party.” She has also posted “an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that [liberal philanthropist George] Soros, a Holocaust survivor, collaborated with the Nazis” and secretly controls “every single Democrat politician.”

Despite ample evidence of Greene’s bigotry and racism, right-wing media are still comparing her politics to those of Omar.

Examples of right-wing media drawing false equivalencies

Right-wing media outlets are unapologetically comparing Omar and Greene, implying that they are both equally radical but on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro had a meltdown on the August 14 edition of his show over election coverage of Omar and Greene, claiming that Omar “is a radical anti-Semite who really, really, really hates Israel and says horrible things about the United States as well,” but the media cover her favorably compared to the way they report on Greene. “It’s worth covering Greene,” Shapiro continued, “but it’s also worth covering” how the media have treated Omar even though she has “said awful things beginning to end from the very moment that she entered Congress and actually well before.” Shapiro also concluded that Greene’s treatment is part of the “media double standard.”

Prior to discussing this on his show, Shapiro had also tweeted a similar sentiment.

ZeroHedge, a far-right conspiracy theory blog, posted an article both-sidesing Omar and Greene titled “‘Anti-Semite’ Ilhan Omar & ‘QAnon Believer’ Marjorie Taylor Greene Win Tuesday-Night Primaries.”

On the August 12 edition of The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino, Fox News anchor Dana Perino made a further false equivalency between Omar and Greene as she displayed their photos while introducing a report on primary elections, saying, “Two of the most polarizing congressional candidates out there had a very good night.”

On the August 12 edition of Fox News @ Night, conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey compared Omar to Greene, saying, “You know, it's hard not to see that characterization of both sides kind of being taken by their extremes, especially on the left when you've got a Democratic Party who for example won't denounce some of the things Ilhan Omar has said.” She concluded that “we have to resist though the fear that maybe both parties are gripped by the most extreme and, in some cases, the most bigoted parts of their party.”

Fox contributor Doug Schoen published an op-ed on Fox News’ website claiming that while both elections “provide clear evidence of the ascendancy of fringe movements and candidates within both major parties,” Omar’s reelection is more dangerous than Greene’s primary win: “It is clear to me that Omar’s victory and the threat of the progressive movement overtaking the mainstream Democratic party poses a greater challenge to Joe Biden and the Democrats than Greene’s victory does to Donald Trump and the GOP.”

Even mainstream media are drawing comparisons

While often more subtle than right-wing media, some mainstream media reporters are just as guilty in comparing Omar and Greene. NBC News contributor Dave Wasserman irresponsibly compared Omar and Greene:

After Wasserman posted his tweet, National Republican Congressional Committee Communications Director Chris Pack quote-tweeted it, asking, “What's the (D)iffe(R)ence between the two?”

A number of mainstream media outlets categorized Omar and Greene together when reporting election results, describing them both as controversial without sufficient nuance.

USA Today ran a piece headlined “Tuesday's primaries: Ilhan Omar fights for political survival and QAnon believer hopes to join the House,” calling them “the two biggest races to watch” for “some primary drama.”
Politico grouped Omar and Greene together when reporting election night results, comparing the House resolution opposing anti-Semitism directed at Omar to future measures to be potentially taken against Greene.

Yet in a sign of how tight Trump’s grip is on the GOP, few Republicans — including those who campaigned against Greene — spoke out in the wake of her primary win. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), GOP Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Emmer of Minnesota had no comment on Wednesday.

A spokesperson to Emmer responded by invoking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came under fire for repeating Jewish tropes that many feel are anti-Semitic. Omar won her primary Tuesday night.

“Are Cheri Bustos and the DCCC going to support Ilhan Omar, given the concern House Democrats have expressed repeatedly with her racism and anti-Semitism?” NRCC spokesman Chris Pack said.

House Democrats responded to the Omar controversy last year by passing two resolutions decrying anti-Semitism, though the Minnesota Democrat wasn’t named in either measure.

McCarthy and GOP congressional leaders are hampered in how they can stop Greene by House rules and legal precedents. If Greene were to win in November, as expected, there’s no way the House can refuse to seat her, despite her incendiary comments.

Comparing Greene and Omar is not only incorrect, but normalizes QAnon

Falsely suggesting the politics and beliefs of Greene and Omar are equally “radical” is both dangerous and incorrect. Equating Omar’s critical stance on the Israeli occupation of Palestine with Greene’s well-documented support for QAnon, which is rooted in beliefs about Satan-worshipping pedophiles running the world, creates a dangerous normalization of the conspiracy theory at a time when she will be one of at least 20 QAnon supporters on the ballot in November.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/foxs-whitewash-trumps-qanon-endorsement-helps-explain-how-it-happened-first

Trump’s Wednesday endorsement of the deranged and dangerous QAnon movement as people who “love this country” thrilled its supporters while horrifying observers, who pointed out that his validation of an extremist ideology linked to violent acts would swell its ranks. But during his first interview following those remarks on Thursday night, the president faced no questions about his praise for unhinged pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who claim that he is on the verge of unraveling a global pedophile ring of Satan-worshipping Democrats and celebrities. As Fox News host Sean Hannity provided the president with his typical mix of sycophancy and softballs over the course of the half-hour phoner, Trump’s embrace of QAnon never came up.

Hannity’s decision to ignore the story put a capstone on Fox’s lackadaisical response to the president’s praise for advocates of a bizarre conspiracy theory that the FBI has termed a domestic terror threat. Fox News political analyst Karl Rove garnered press attention on Wednesday for calling QAnon supporters “nuts and kooks” and saying the president “ought to disavow them” on Special Report, and that program ran a segment on the “conspiracy theory” the following day. But none of the network’s highly rated prime-time hosts have mentioned Trump’s remarks at all, and by Thursday morning, Fox & Friends was decontextualizing part of the president’s comment as an anodyne reference to his administration “saving the world.”

Trump backing the QAnon movement seems like a natural fit -- the president is a notorious conspiracy theorist who finds it nearly impossible to disavow even his most reprehensible supporters. But his praise for the group can’t be separated from Fox’s unwillingness to try to establish guard rails for the Republican Party by denouncing it. Trump relies on Fox for news and information, and its coverage constantly shapes his worldview. If Fox’s hosts had condemned the QAnon movement in the years since it first emerged, it’s hard to imagine that the president would be praising it today -- or that it would have metastasized through the GOP to the extent that it has.

But Fox has largely kept discussions of the QAnon movement and its violent and unhinged ideology off its airwaves, even as its spread within the Republican Party has ensured that the network has repeatedly ended up promoting its supporters. I noted last week, after one of its adherents received the GOP congressional nod for a blood-red district, that QAnon has been referenced on only eight broadcasts on the network’s weekday evening programming over the previous two years -- almost all passing references that failed to describe the conspiracy theory’s dangers. The network’s on-air talent have alternately denied knowing anything about the movement and played footsie with it, engaging with its followers on social media, downplaying its extremism, and even praising aspects of it on Fox shows. Meanwhile, the network’s executives hired a prominent QAnon-supporting influencer to host a cooking show on Fox’s streaming service.

We know what it looks like when Fox tries to destroy the credibility of a movement with its audience, and that isn’t it. Fox hosts and personalities highlighted the Black Lives Matter movement during 288 weekday evening broadcasts over the same two-year span, building on racist and unhinged smears the network has deployed against its supporters since its founding.

In recent months, as the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor drove new attention to Black Lives Matter’s campaign against racial injustice and police brutality, Fox hosts redoubled their efforts to delegitimize it. Network star Tucker Carlson, perhaps the Fox host with the most influence on Trump right now, turned his program into a nightly assault on the group. He called it a “totalitarian political movement” and denounced Republican leaders who expressed support for it.

Trump got the message. He repeatedly lashed out at Black Lives Matter this summer, at times in direct response to segments he was watching about it on Fox. The president was particularly aggrieved by an anti-police chant that members of a Minnesota-based Black Lives Matter group used during a march in 2015 -- one that Fox has highlighted dozens of times in the years since.

If Fox had devoted even a fraction of the venomous demonization it launched at Black Lives Matter activists to QAnon conspiracy theorists, the network could have warned off its millions of viewers -- including the president -- from the movement. But Fox has not chosen that path, which would require trying to curb the excesses of the radicalized Republicans whose anti-Democratic fervor powers the network’s ratings.

Instead, Fox sold out its viewers to a cult. The longer the network held its fire, the more vulnerable its audience was to the movement’s entreaties, and the harder it became to pry Trump supporters away from its conspiracy theories. Now QAnon’s ranks have swelled, its supporters have effectively become a key GOP constituency, dozens are running for Congress, and at least one will likely be elected to the House in the fall. With the president himself signing on as a validator, it may be too late to keep QAnon away from the levers of power.

QAnon may garner criticism here and there from some at Fox who, like Rove, find the spectacle of the president cozying up to “kooks” too much to bear. But I doubt very much that the network as a whole will engage in the full-spectrum denunciation needed to curtail QAnon’s growth. Instead, the days to come will likely bring a range of responses from Fox personalities, from ignoring the movement, to downplaying its importance and extremism, to condemning its critics for attacking Trump supporters. The press will be hammered for covering the story. Some network figures will claim that the QAnon movement makes some good points, perhaps even outing themselves as full-fledged supporters. Others will rely on whataboutism, with the president’s defenders pushing back against reporting on QAnon by demanding to know why the media isn’t asking Democrats to condemn antifa or Black Lives Matter.

Fox is a Republican propaganda outlet that is deeply devoted to Trump. As long as that party and its leader are standing by the QAnon cult, the network won’t dare to stand up to it.

---

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-struggles-explain-culture-lawlessness-around-him-n1237483

aug. 20, 2020, trms

By Steve Benen

Not long after Stephen Bannon was indicted as part of an allegedly fraudulent wall-building scheme, Donald Trump was asked for his reaction. True to form, the president pretended to barely know his former chief strategist -- a go-to move Trump has relied on throughout his presidency.

The president also feigned ignorance about the We Build The Wall venture, which is a claim that's very difficult to take seriously for a variety of reasons.

At the same White House event today, NBC News' Geoff Bennett followed up with the right question.

"Respectfully, sir, it's not just Steve Bannon. It's Roger Stone, it's Michael Flynn, it's Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. What's that say about your judgment that these are the kind of people who you affiliated with, and the culture of lawlessness around people who were involved in the leadership of your 2016 campaign?"

Trump began by saying, he "had no idea" -- about what, he did not specify -- before adding, "There was great lawlessness in the Obama administration. They spied on our campaign illegally."

At this point, we could note that the Obama administration was a modern marvel for scandal-free governance. We could also reemphasize that no one spied on the Trump campaign. While we're at it, we could note how pitiful it is to see the president peddle whataboutism when he can't think of anything credible to say.

But in this instance, the forest is vastly more interesting than the trees.

In recent years, Donald Trump's personal attorney (Michael Cohen) was charged and convicted. His White House national security advisor (Michael Flynn) was charged and convicted. His campaign chairman (Paul Manafort) was charged and convicted. His deputy campaign chairman (Rick Gates) was charged and convicted. Two of his former campaign advisers (Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos) were both charged and convicted.

And these are just the top-line indictments, and don't include others in Trump's orbit, including folks like Corey Lewandowski, who've faced charges.

Ten months ago, the Washington Post highlighted "the remarkable universe of criminality surrounding President Trump," and that was before the list grew longer.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, the number of criminals is important, but so too is the degree to which this dynamic conflicts with the message Trump has been eager to trumpet. As regular readers know, the president presents himself as being aggressively "tough on crime." which he frequently tries to incorporate into his agenda. Last year, for example, while making the case for a border wall, the Republican declared, "The Democrats, which I've been saying all along, they don't give a damn about crime. They don't care about crime.... But I care about crime."

Of course, given recent events, it's hardly unreasonable to wonder whether he cares about crime or about surrounding himself with people who've committed crimes?

The president's newest campaign manager, Bill Stepien, recently argued, "I think you need to judge Joe Biden by the people he's surrounding himself with." I'm curious whether he'd encourage voters to also judge Donald Trump by the criminals he's surrounded himself wit

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/fox-news-has-been-afraid-to-criticize-the-dangerous-extremist-ideology-of-qanon-media-matters/

congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up - a real WINNER!

:{:{}:

ak: Qanon is a fabrication. This “insider” has predicted so much incorrectly (but people don’t remember PAST predictions) so now has switched to vague generalities. Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.

:{:{}:

:{:{:{no lnx some twt}:Fox News has been afraid to criticize the ‘dangerous extremist ideology’ of QAnon: Media Matters:{Written by Alex Henderson August 14, 2020}::{On Tuesday, the QAnon conspiracy cult achieved a disturbing victory when Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon supporter, won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia — and President Donald Trump, on Twitter, congratulated her on her victory. Some Republicans have been willing to criticize Greene, including Rep. Liz Cheney. But Matter Gertz of Media Matters, in an article published this week, takes a close look at Fox News’ reluctance to call out the QAnon cult}::{. In his article, headlined “Fox News’ dangerous dance with QAnon,” Gertz argues, “The network’s unwillingness to challenge QAnon, an all-encompassing extremist ideology which postulates that President Donald Trump is on the verge of uncovering a worldwide satanic pedophilia ring composed of Democratic leaders and celebrities. Fox and its cadre of right-wing stars could have tried to prevent QAnon’s rise. And as an overwhelmingly powerful force in conservative politics, they may have been able to do it and have a responsibility to try. But instead, they have alternately ignored and flirted with QAnon, even as its supporters have multiplied and infested the Republican Party.” Gertz writes that “Greene’s primary win seems to have spurred a gut check for some on the right” and inspired vehement criticism from “the generally pro-Trump National Review.”}::{This week, the public relations department at Koch Industries — which donated $5000 to Greene’s campaign — contacted AlterNet to stress that is has distanced itself from her. The spokesperson was quite emphatic, saying that “Koch does not support her campaign” and noting that “in June, upon learning of Ms. Greene’s past comments, KOCHPAC immediately requested a refund of its contribution.”}::{But Fox, according to Media Matters, has “has been almost entirely silent” about QAnon.}::{“The QAnon cult is now large enough that it overlaps with a solid swath of staunch Trumpists, which is also the network’s devoted viewership,” Gertz argues. “At this point, Fox hosts would risk alienating their audience if they were to criticize QAnon}::{.}::{ The movement is particularly enamored of Hannity’s program…. Second, Fox is a cog in the Republican Party’s propaganda apparatus, and while it has at times challenged the GOP establishment from the right, it has shown zero inclination to act as a guardrail against the party’s extremists.”}::{Gertz adds, “And indeed, third, Trump himself is hanging over the entire debate. While he dodged a direct question about Greene’s QAnon support on Friday, he has endorsed her as a ‘future Republican star,’ and one of his top campaign aides lashed out at Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) when the congressman criticized QAnon.”}:

}:}:

MattWolking

When will @RepKinzinger condemn the Steele Dossier fabrications and conspiracy theories pushed by Democrats? That actually WAS Russian propaganda.

And on Friday, when asked by a reporter about whether he supports the theory — which centers on him — Trump refused to address it:[she comes from a gt state]

---

gohmert dispenses with cultural bit:

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

no lnx

Michael Winship / Common Dreams August 2, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

no lnx

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/axios-reporter-reveals-most-shocking-revelations-trump-made-in-interview-about-russian-bounties/

aha doh trump does what about both siderism all the time on issues he wants to duck? eg russian activ meas, we do it too (see gohmert)

Travis Gettys / Raw Story July 29, 2020

President Donald Trump admitted he never confronted Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about bounties on U.S. troops, but the reporter who interviewed him said that wasn’t even the “most shocking” revelation he made.

Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interviewed the president about the bounties allegedly placed on U.S troops in Afghanistan and his recent call with Putin, but he told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” what shocked him the most about their conversation.

“In some ways, the most shocking part of that clip is actually not the first part where he admits for the first time on the record that he hasn’t raised the issue of the bounties with Vladimir Putin,” Swan said. “That’s the least shocking part of that call, because actually, frankly, you know, you could have a debate within policy circles about whether it’s the appropriate thing.”

“I mean, that there are dissenting opinions within the intelligence community about this intelligence,” he added. “It certainly is serious intelligence, being taken seriously by the allies, and there is a very good argument for why the president should raise it with Putin.”

But that wasn’t the most surprising revelation Trump made, Swan said.

“The second question is actually more important, which is, fine, you don’t believe this intelligence, or you’re skeptical of it,” Swan said. “Let’s try and take the most good-faith interpretation of it. But you know that Russia has been supplying weapons and money to the Taliban because the man who ran your forces in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, under your administration, said this on the record when he worked for you, and for him to say then, well, I didn’t — I don’t know if I’ve heard about this, never reached my desk, and by the way, we gave them weapons, too.”

“I mean, like in a different era,” he added. “I just — honestly, it was one of the most shocking — I’ve covered president Trump for five years. I think it’s one of the most shocking exchanges I’ve ever had with him.”

aha: see disnfo GRU if goal is to divide, make cynical thus apathetic (elections are not legit) then whattabout/mirror/crypto is useful because THEY ALL DO IT

aha: is Q an interdisc hub? // anti-mask? [vax, militia?] alt rt boogaloo?

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

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

note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs

=---

6/20

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

no lnx many pix

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

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

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

@OneVoiceUS

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

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

The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1

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

4chan ActBlue claim

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

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

Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim

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

Candace Owens ActBlue claim

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

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

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

Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim

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

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/

...How the Media Amplifies Disinformation

:{:{}:

To thrive, disinformation needs amplification and lots of it. Disinformers generally have a plan not just to create disinformation but to disseminate it using both willing amplifiers and dupes. Journalists and media outlets often become unwitting carriers of disinformation, helping viral online conspiracies, propaganda, and disinformation go mainstream.

Pro-Trump disinformers have optimized their strategies to include media amplification as part of their disinformation campaigns. They count on right-wing media to amplify content to their base and traditional media to cover their base in a way that amplifies their disinformation, conspiracies, and extremist views to a mainstream audience.

In her landmark report, The Oxygen of Amplification, researcher Whitney Phillips explains the crux of this problem:

The choices reporters and editors make about what to cover and how to cover it play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem—and, simultaneously, threaten to undermine democratic discourse more broadly. This context demands that journalists and the newsrooms that support them examine with greater scrutiny how these actors and movements endeavor to subvert journalism norms, practices, and objectives. More importantly, journalists, editors, and publishers must determine how the journalistic rule set must be strengthened and fortified against this newest form of journalistic manipulation—in some cases through the rigorous upholding of long-standing journalistic principles, and in others, by recognizing which practices and structural limitations make reporters particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

There are three areas of media manipulation often exploited by disinformers that are easy for news consumers to spot when they know what to look for:

Social Media as Segment Producer: Traditional media often mine social media and trending topics for story ideas. Given that trending topics and viral content are so easily gamed by trolls and activists, overamplifying content in an attempt to force traditional media to cover it is a common tactic of pro-Trump disinformers. The #ReleasetheMemo conspiracy theory and the resulting media coverage is a prime example of this; the recent “Against Excessive Quarantine” protests is another. Trump is also masterful at using his tweets to drive coverage, knowing that media outlets consider every tweet of his to be newsworthy.

Repeating Disinformation in the Headlines: Often when media outlets cover disinformation, even with the intention of debunking it, they will repeat the disinformation in the headline without correcting it, furthering the amplification even when the intention is the opposite. These headlines often spread further on social media via the media account and shares or retweets of the story. In a study of headlines,Media Matters “documented some egregious cases of news outlets repeating lies and other misstatements in headlines or tweets”and found that “all together, these accounts shared demonstrably false information from the president an average of 19 times a day; 65% of the tweets did not include any context indicating the statement was false.”

Amplifying Disinformation Because Both Sides: Media outlets that attempt to cover both political parties or both sides fairly often amplify disinformation and give it added credibility by presenting it as equally valid to truthful information from another political viewpoint. Columbia Journalism Review’s John Allsop, writing on bothsiderism as it pertained to the recent impeachment coverage, explained, “When it comes to much impeachment coverage, bothsidesism isn’t the beginning and end of the problem, but part of our broader reflex to frame contentious political stories around the concept of partisanship.” Pro-Trump disinformers, including Trump himself,rely on this amplification of false content and continually game the refs, claiming the media is biased against them to put media outlets on the defensive....

Why is this happening? There are a few journalists out there who are in the tank for Trump and ready to sell whatever nutty conspiracy theory he throws out. But mostly it’s because so much of the mainstream media,terrified of being accused of having a “liberal bias,” will go out of its way to minimize real Republican scandals while blowing up often-imaginary Democratic scandals, all in a bid to appear “balanced.” a m

you probably saw Donald Trump’s ridiculous, false and deadly claim last week: that ingesting chemical cleaners could cure humans of the coronavirus. At a White House press briefing on Thursday (4/23/20), the president said:

I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it [coronavirus] gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.

He also suggested that exposing patients to bright lights could help cure them, once again confusing what works on surfaces like tables with the inside of a human body.

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It’s worth taking a step back for a second and pausing on the fact that the person in charge of the United States thinks injecting bleach might be a good idea. Trump has consistently spread false information about the pandemic, claiming in February that it would be gone by April due to the warmer weather, and insisting that “we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”

His pronouncements have already been fatal: After promoting the drug chloroquine, an Arizona man died and his wife was hospitalized after they ingested fish tank cleaner that contained the substance. Surely more deadly but harder to quantify are his outbursts proclaiming that states should “LIBERATE” themselves from oppressive lockdown measures (some of the lightest in the developed world), encouraging people to go out and demonstrate, thereby spreading the virus.

Unfortunately, for journalists stuck in a corporate media system that promotes deference to authority and finds equivalency even when there is none, the president’s dangerous ramblings need to be treated as legitimate and worthy of discussion, even in apparently adversarial media. Vox (4/23/20), for example, said that it was only “highly unlikely that injecting humans with disinfectants will turn out to be a safe or effective treatment.” The Washington Post (4/24/20) described Trump’s statement as an “unsubstantiated and potentially dangerous” idea. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is not “highly unlikely” but impossible, and Trump’s idea is not merely “potentially” dangerous: No amount of bleach is safe to inject into your body. It will kill human beings, as chemical cleaning product manufacturers immediately warned. (The Post did include a disclaimer: “Do not ingest any bleach or disinfectant.”)

Despite this, USA Today (4/24/20) presented the story as a he-said she-said between two opposing views, describing (4/24/20) Trump’s ludicrous outburst merely as “the latest in a pattern of questionable claims.” “We should inject bleach for our health” is not a “questionable” claim, and would not be treated as such if someone without power or influence made it.

NYT: Trump Muses About Light as Remedy, but Also Disinfectant, Which Is Dangerous

The New York Times (4/24/20) referred to the idea that injecting bleach into your body may cure the coronavirus as an “unproven treatment.”

Perhaps the worst offender of phony both-sidesism, however, was the New York Times (4/24/20), which described the president as “eagerly theorizing—dangerously, in the view of some experts—about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.”

In other words: “Can injecting bleach kill you? On the one hand, definitely yes. On the other, here is a dummy who thinks it will save you from Covid–19, so let’s teach the controversy.” Refusing to state categorically that ingesting known deadly substances is a bad idea, the wording of the Times article suggests that only “some experts” disagree with the idea, while there are other, pro-bleach drinking authorities out there.

After widespread pushback on social media, the Times amended the offending paragraph, but, if anything, made it worse, changing it to Trump “eagerly theorizing about treatments involving the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household disinfectant that could be harmful if they were used to try to kill the coronavirus.” Injecting bleach “could” be harmful under certain circumstances, but who knows? Certainly not us at the New York Times.

This sort of reporting would be absurd beyond belief in other circumstances involving people without serious power. For example, there were no Times reports stating that, “at the Jonestown camp in Guyana, Rev. Jones eagerly theorized about the benefits of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid that could be harmful in certain circumstances.”

Even CNN’s Anderson Cooper (4/23/20), who has emerged as one of Trump’s most visible and aggressive critics, was anxious not to give an opinion, so strong is the culture of supposed “neutrality” in journalism. He asked his guest, “Is there any evidence about taking a disinfectant that’s used on the table where I’m sitting, and using it internally? That doesn’t seem like a good idea. Am I wrong?”

Cooper, like any adult, knows full well that it is a bad idea, but the spectacle of a CNN anchor asking a doctor about drinking bleach is a bizarre example of what can happen when you combine practices of deference to authority, both-sidesism, and a pretense of neutrality.

The failure of corporate media to call a spade a spade for fear of losing their status as objective arbiters of news has, of late, led to clearly racist actions and statements being laundered as “racially charged” or “racially tinged” or even just “race-related” (FAIR.org, 4/5/19, 11/1/19; CounterSpin, 7/23/19). Likewise, ICE concentration camps are described as “detention centers” (CounterSpin, 1/5/20), which has the effect of making them sound like places unruly school kids who fail to do their homework are sent.

To corporate media: It is OK. Facts are facts, even when the president of the United States disagrees. You don’t have to both-sides this one. Injecting bleach is bad.

an 420

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/nyt-slammed-for-terminal-both-sides-ism-after-reporting-on-trumps-household-disinfectant-suggestion/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/here-are-the-desperate-ways-trump-and-his-allies-are-trying-to-defend-his-dangerous-claim-about-injecting-disinfectants/

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expertise

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/this-researcher-wrote-the-book-on-presidential-failure-shes-never-see-anything-like-trumps

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-right-wing-coronavirus-deniers-want-to-kill-expertise-and-they-could-entice-trump-to-court-disaster/

no lnx

The right-wing coronavirus deniers want to kill expertise — and they could entice Trump to court disaster

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly March 31, 2020

Back in 2012, Donald Trump tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

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Paul Krugman is right to suggest that we might experience a bit of déjà vu when we watch how the president and his enablers are responding to the coronavirus.

Let me summarize the Trump administration/right-wing media view on the coronavirus: It’s a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it’s China’s fault, which is why we should call it the “Chinese virus.”

Just as there are climate science deniers, there are a whole range of coronavirus deniers out there as well. They come in many different shapes and sizes, but the most common are those who simply deny the scope of the problem. While they accept that the virus exists, they tend to believe that Democrats, the media, or the “deep state” (pick your villain) are simply exaggerating the problem in order to make Trump look bad.

The more perverse of these folks started the Twitter hashtag, #FilmYourHospital. They take videos of the outside of hospitals and claim that the lack of activity indicates that the hype is all a hoax.

DeAnna Lorraine????

@DeAnna4Congress

Just went to 2 hospitals in LA to check out these “War Zones” the MSM keeps telling us about.??

They are very quiet & EMPTY.

We are not being told the truth. Why?? Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending. We ARE the news now. We can’t trust the news. Post pics of ur hospital here!

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One of the most prominent coronavirus deniers is radio talk show host Bill Mitchell. His most recent schtick has been to rail against the “stay at home” orders being issued by governors.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

I promise you, when we granted Governors these emergency powers, no one envisioned them shutting down their state for months at a time and imposing martial law.

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But it was Mitchell who initiated the right wing attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci. It all started back on March 3rd.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

So this Dr. Anthony Fauci is pushing the panic button today. Always helpful. Talking about closing schools and businesses?

Hell, why don't we just shut down the whole country over 104 sick, 6 dead?

Sorry President Trump, but replace this crackpot.

Almost immediately Fauci was accused of being a Democratic plant. The idea that he was a member of the so-called “deep state” took hold and eventually an email from Fauci surfaced among those that had been released by WikiLeaks. In it, the doctor had praised Hillary Clinton for her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee. Now the deniers were off to the races. They were soon doing the same thing to Dr. Deborah Birx.

Bill Mitchell

@mitchellvii

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate Conflicted Loyaltieshttps://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/exclusive-dr-birxs-connections-with-the-clinton-foundation-and-obama-unfortunately-indicate-conflicted-loyalties/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons …

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate...

Is Dr. Deborah Birx, the doctor with the scarf, a voice of reason or another Deep State doctor pushing economic disaster and suffering? Her past unfortunately provides the answer. Dr. Deborah Birx...

thegatewaypundit.com

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Isaac Stanley-Becker makes the important point about all of this (emphasis mine).

[T]he disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further — aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the “deep state” that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.

This is something we’ve seen over and over again from right-wingers. Whenever someone says something they don’t like—especially if it challenges “dear leader”—all they have to do is find a remote connection to a Democrat (preferably Hillary Clinton), and the opposing opinion can be discarded as nothing more than partisanship. That is how the right is attempting to kill the whole notion of expertise—be it on anything from climate change to coronavirus. The mainstream media provides an assist to those efforts when they assume a “both sides” approach to every issue instead of prioritizing the truth.

Over the course of the last three months, Donald Trump has dallied in many of the opinions espoused by these coronavirus deniers. His decision to extend the guidelines calling for social distancing and other measures to mitigate the virus indicate that at this point, he’s still listening to the experts—even if it is merely for his own self-interest. But we’re not out of the woods yet. The deniers are waiting in the wings with their conspiracy theory guns loaded for the moment he grows impatient with the experts.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/gop-tries-to-turn-impeachment-against-as-a-way-to-justify-their-shameless-trump-cover-up/

no lnx

GOP tries to turn impeachment against as a way to justify their shameless Trump cover-up

Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon February 3, 2020

There’s a decent chance that former Vice President Joe Biden will win the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, cementing his status as Democratic frontrunner. The Republican-controlled Senate will then vote to acquit Donald Trump, probably two days later, after blocking witnesses and direct evidence at his impeachment trial. Instead of paying attention to the case outlining Trump’s public corruption, however, several Republican senators have spent the last two weeks slagging Biden in an effort to tarnish the potential Democratic nominee — using almost exactly the same playbook used to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Demonstrating exactly why it’s bad to have foreign governments smear a political opponent on your behalf,Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who faces a tough re-election battle this fall, appeared before reporters after a day of impeachment hearings last week and casually suggested that the airing of Trump’s misdeeds might actually result in Biden’s defeat.

“Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening. And I’m really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus goers. Will they be supporting VP Biden at this point?” the first-term Republican asked.

The question came just before the GOP Senate voted to cover up Trump’s crimes by refusing to hear witnesses. For months, Republicans argued that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine and pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into the activities of Joe and Hunter Biden because he was earnestly trying to root out corruption. In a classic case of projection, Republicans still vaguely deny that Trump’s actions were politically motivated but now insist that Biden, not Trump, is the one who deserves impeachment.

“I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened,” said Ernst, whose approval rating is underwater with Iowa voters, in an interview with Bloomberg News on Sunday. “Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately people, the day after he would be elected, would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.'”

On CNN that same day, Ernst argued that not just Biden but even Barack Obama is more deserving of impeachment than Trump, who has already sought foreign interference in the 2020 election after welcoming it four years ago.

“Whether you like what the president has done or not — we can argue this up one side and down the other all day — does it come to the point of removing a president from office?” Ernst asked rhetorically. “I don’t believe this does. I’ll tie it back to Obama and his hot-mic moment with the former president of Russia, where he literally said, ‘Give me some space in my election.’ Oops, OK, talking about elections.”

Host Jake Tapper reminded Ernst of the context for the former president’s 2012 remarks: “He was talking about a missile defense.”

“Yes, but a missile defense that the Congress wanted him to build up, make much more robust [to] protect American citizens,” Ernst responded, “and President Obama choose not to do that as long as the Russians gave him space in the elections. That nobody brought up for impeachment. So the very fact that because aid was held for about two months because there was not an official White House meeting, people are wanting to impeach this president. What President Trump did, it didn’t rise to the level of what President Obama did.”

This nonsensical comparison only makes sense as an attempt to justify the vote to acquit Trump by treating impeachment as an ordinary partisan tactic.

“There is a mountain of evidence to suggest the Bidens’ behavior was harmful to the United States,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeted last Wednesday, coming close to threatening a Biden impeachment if he becomes president next year.

Such presumptive threats were doled out by Republican senators prior to the 2016 election as well, which makes their “let the voters decide” rhetoric in defense of Trump so much more dishonest. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, now a staunch Trump defender, declared that Clinton could be impeached before a single general election vote was cast in 2016.

This certainly looks like the GOP’s 2016 playbook all over again. Trump’s campaign has sent and more than 80 surrogates to Iowa ahead of Monday’s caucuses, including Vice President Pence. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has claimed “there was more than enough information [and] allegations about corruption” surrounding the Bidens to make Trump “entirely justified in asking for an investigation, and that resolves the matter.” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., a multimillionaire, has taken out his own TV ads in Iowa to claim that “The real story here is the corruption Joe Biden got away with.”

Trump, Rudy Giuliani and all their goons have been searching for dirt on Biden for well over a year and so far have produced zero material evidence. Senate Republicans, for their part, displayed little interest in Biden’s supposed impropriety back when they controlled both chambers of Congress. They could still launch a Senate investigation into the Bidens, since they currently hold a majority in the upper chamber. But that’s not the point, and they’re well aware that even if they found dirt on either Biden, it would change nothing about Trump’s impeachable actions.

Republicans view the law as a weapon to be wielded against their opponents, so it should come as little surprise if Attorney General Bill Barr announces an official investigation into Bide before the general election, should he be the Democratic nominee.Perhaps only Joe Biden himself, who has repeatedly touted his ability to work effectively with the very Republicans out to destroy his family, would be surprised by such indecency.

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-cnns-jake-tapper-is-failing-to-tell-the-truth-about-republican-disinformation-campaigns/

no lnx

How CNN’s Jake Tapper is failing to tell the truth about Republican disinformation campaigns

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly January 14, 2020

Jake Tapper has shown himself to be one of the more responsible journalists when it comes to prioritizing the truth over balance in his reporting. For example, here is his response to Republicans who have suggested that Democrats were mourning the death of Soleimani.

Recently Tapper made an important point about how disinformation campaigns don’t always originate with foreign adversaries.

“While we are all bracing for what the Iranians might to do to us as this conflict escalates, let’s not lose sight of what Americans are already doing to each other,” says @JakeTapper about misleading and false information being spread on social media. #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/EwWfEKNLQ0

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) January 5, 2020

As I have already noted, it wasn’t just Russia that launched a disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton in order to influence the 2016 election. Peter Schweizer, with an assist from mainstream media, spread a smear against the former secretary of state that was demonstrably false.

But I have to take issue with how Tapper framed his concern. Notice the examples he gave of people who spread knowingly false information. They included:

Bob Salera, Deputy Communications Director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, who tweeted a doctored video of a Biden speech, referring to the former vice president as a “white nationalist.”

Tony Shaffer, a member of Trump’s 2020 advisory board, who tweeted a doctored video that makes Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear to be intoxicated.

Donald Trump, who tweeted a video of Rep. Ilhan Omar dancing, along with the lie that it was filmed on 9/11.

The White House press secretary, who tweeted a doctored video of a Trump press conference, suggesting that a reporter had rough-housed a staff member.

It strikes me that all four of those examples have one important thing in common: they came from Republicans. Yet, during his commentary, Tapper blames this kind of disinformation on “folks in the political world” and ends by cautioning us not to lose sight of “what Americans are doing to each other.” In an apparent nod to balance, he failed to tell the truth, which is that we shouldn’t lose sight of what Republicans are doing to our political discourse.

I believe that this is an example of how ingrained the whole idea of bothsiderism has become for almost everyone in the mainstream media. It runs so deep that even Jake Tapper feels the need to hedge his bets when it comes to naming the source of domestic disinformation campaigns. Republicans will continue to exploit that opening as long as journalists fail to hold them accountable.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-the-new-york-times-is-botching-its-impeachment-coverage-and-empowering-republicans

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How the New York Times is botching its impeachment coverage and empowering Republicans

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 16, 2019

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the editorial boards of over a dozen newspapers have called for the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Washington Post: The case for impeachment

USA Today: USA TODAY’s Editorial Board: Impeach President Trump

New York Times: Impeach

New York Daily News: The truth hurts: The House Intelligence Committee presents a coherent and compelling case for impeachment

Philadelphia Inquirer: Impeach President Donald Trump | Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board

Boston Globe: Impeach the president???????

Los Angeles Times: Editorial: We’ve Seen Enough: Trump should be impeached

San Francisco Chronicle: Editorial: What is the alternative to impeachment????????

Tampa Bay Times: The case for impeachment | Editorial???????

Orlando Sentinel: The House should vote to impeach Trump, and the Senate should remove him from office | Editorial???????

Chicago Sun-Times: The case for impeachment over censure for President Donald Trump???????

Salt Lake Tribune: Tribune Editorial: Impeachment proceeds as it should

Honolulu Star-Advertiser: Editorial: It’s now time to impeach Trump???????

Following a brief summary of where things stand, the New York Times editorial board wrote this about congressional Republicans.

So far, Republican legislators have shown little sign of treating this constitutional process with the seriousness it demands.

Instead, they have been working overtime to abet the president’s wrongdoing. They have spread toxic misinformation and conspiracy theories to try to justify his actions and raged about the unfairness of the inquiry, complaining that Democrats have been trying to impeach Mr. Trump since he took office…

The Republicans’ most common defenses of Mr. Trump’s behavior fall flat in the face of the evidence.

They go on to summarize the evidence of the president’s impeachable offenses.

That is in stark contrast to how the news division of the same publication handled their coverage of the impeachment vote in the House Judiciary Committee. Jay Rosen noted the language that was employed.

Jay Rosen

@jayrosen_nyu

This is it, people. This is all they got. All phrasing from a single story in the New York Times today. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/politics/impeachment-partisan-trump.html … Asymmetrical polarization is just too much for the institution as currently led. So they changed it to 50/50 polarization and put it on page one.

In the article Rosen linked to, reporter Michael Shear highlighted several exchanges like this.

Even for members of a profession who are used to talking past each other, it was striking how unwilling both Republicans and Democrats on the committee were to concede even an inch to the other side.

“Ukraine was not aware of the aid,” Mr. Johnson insisted Thursday, referring to the $391 million in security assistance that Mr. Trump had ordered withheld. If they didn’t know the money had been frozen, he explained, Ukraine couldn’t have been on the receiving end of a pressure campaign by the president.

When it was his turn, Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, asserted exactly the opposite, alluding to email evidence and testimony that disproved Mr. Johnson’s argument. “They knew it on July the 25,” Mr. Cohen said of the Ukranians. “There were communications from the embassy that have been released that they knew the aid was being held up. They knew it was being held up.”

Shear could have referred to other reporting in the New York Times to demonstrate that it was Representative Cohen who was being factual.

As deputy foreign minister, it was Olena Zerkal’s job to read incoming diplomatic cables from embassies around the world. One from Washington caught her eye back in July, she recalled: It said the Trump administration had frozen military aid for Ukraine.

“We had this information,” Ms. Zerkal said in an interview. “It was definitely mentioned there were some issues.”

Instead, Shear went on to relay several other instances where Democrats said one thing and Republicans the opposite. He assumes that there is some value in reporting that there were “disputes over basic facts” without informing his readers what the evidence tells us about those facts. That is how he reaches the conclusion that “both sides engaged in a kind of mutually assured destruction.” Nowhere in his reporting does Shear acknowledge what the New York Times editorial board stated so clearly: that Republicans “have spread toxic misinformation and conspiracy theories to try to justify [Trump’s] actions.”

What is most revealing about these two pieces from the New York Times is that the editorial board of the publication is providing facts in support of their opinion, while the news division is trafficking in bothsiderism and ignoring the facts.

At a time in our history when one of the greatest dangers we face is an assault on the truth, the kind of bothsiderism promulgated by reporters like Shear plays right into the hands of the attempt by congressional Republicans to be the “merchants of doubt.” Their goal is to muddy the evidence and promote the idea that there is an “unresolved controversy with two sides.” It is an insidious form of propaganda that undermines facts and evidence.

As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote back in 2012 when political polarization had become obviously asymmetrical, “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” In 2014, Ornstein went on the make a remarkably prescient prediction.

Saying both sides are equally responsible, insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism, leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem. The public is left with a deeper disdain for all politics and all politicians, and voters become more receptive to demagogues and those whose main qualification for office is that they have never served, won’t compromise, and see everything in stark black-and-white terms.

Ornstein wrote that five years ago when a lot of media outlets were taking a “both sides do it” approach to the Republican strategy of total obstruction. He was right to suggest that it left the average voter unable to “identify and vote against those perpetuating the problem.” As a result, we wound up with a demagogue in the White House and one of his chief enablers in charge of the Senate trial for his removal from office.

If ever there was a time for journalists to prioritize truth over balance, this is it. Pretending to stay above the fray by avoiding the facts is not a neutral position. The news room at the New York Times could learn a thing or two about that from their editorial board.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/a-national-nightmare-is-upon-us-heres-what-happens-what-a-journalist-chooses-truth-over-balance

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‘A national nightmare is upon us’: Here’s what happens when a journalist chooses truth over ‘balance’

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 9, 2019

Chuck Todd has often been criticized as a journalist for his adherence to bothsiderism.The most egregious example was when he blamed Democrats for the unpopularity of Obamacare and proclaimed that it wasn’t the media’s job to call out Republican lies. But here’s a more recent example.

Chuck Todd

@chucktodd

Let’s be blunt, our political parties are waging a “cold” civil war... And as ?@amyewalter? argues so well, each side rationalizes their bad behavior by pointing to the bad behavior of their “opponent”. The incentive structure punishes moderation https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/war-never-ends …

The War That Never Ends | The Cook Political Report

The vote on Brett Kavanaugh is likely to be taken this weekend. But, the impact of the battle over his confirmation is likely to have short and long-term consequences.

cookpolitical.com

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That struck me as a form of gaslighting. But as Jay Rosen notes, something recently changed.

Jay Rosen

@jayrosen_nyu

Something has happened to Chuck Todd. I view @MeetThePress almost every week. Today his tone — I mean his voice itself — was different, as if the gravity of events had sunk in and his patience with denial had run out. Now go to 0:32 in this clip and watch.

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619 funny wihnow the other day

(poster of mercer at LA? movie gig px

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/inoculation-as-a-form-of-propaganda

np lnx

Inoculation as a form of propaganda

written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly June 12, 2019

Meeting charges with countercharges brings a disease into the body politic that's a prophylactic against accountability.

With so much focus on Fox News providing a propaganda platform for Donald Trump, national news outlets haven’t been paying as much attention to theSinclair Broadcasting Group — which has been trying to take over local broadcast news.

It is worth remembering that a 2018 report from Emory University found that “when Sinclair buys a local station, its news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.” In other words, Sinclair has become the local right-wing propaganda network.

True to form, Eric Bolling’s show on Sinclair recently featured an interview with Peter Schweizer. You might remember him as Steve Bannon’s partnerwho authored the book Clinton Cash, which was weaponized by the Trump campaign in 2016. More recently, Schweizer wrote Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. His discussion with Bolling represents a form of propaganda we’re seeing quite often these days.

“The problem is the corruption is being globalized,” Schweizer said. “What that means is thatforeign governments and foreign oligarchs are looking to recruit the family members of politiciansbecause they believe by striking commercial bargains with them—helping politician families become rich—that they’re going to get favorable treatment.”[CHAO MCCONNELL?!]

“And Joe Biden has been a major recipient of that kind of largesse from them,” Schweizer added.

As he did with Clinton Cash, Schweizer backs up his allegations of corruption with inferences and innuendo, but zero actual evidence. What struck me most was the fact that stories about “globalized corruption” in the form of allegations about countries like Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia have been rampant when it comes to Donald Trump and his family. As a matter of fact, this story broke at about the same time as Schweizer’s interview.

A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump.

Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.

Kushner, who is married to Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka, kept a stake in Cadre after joining the administration, while selling other assets. His holding is now valued at up to $50m, according to his financial disclosure documents.

When right-winger’s like Schweizer level these kind of charges about the Bidens, they are obviously forms of hypocrisy and projection.But it’s also a type of propaganda that we could call “inoculation,” because they introduce the disease into the body politic as a prophylactic against accountability. To mitigate charges of corruption against Trump and his family, similar charges are leveled against their opponents. As we’re seeing now with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the investigators, that ultimately leads to charges being met with countercharges in an attempt to confuse the public and ward off accountability.

The reason that kind of propaganda works for Republicans is because low-information voters — spurred by a media obsessed with bothsiderism— tend to respond by saying “they all do it,” which promotes cynicism and a disengagement from the political process. As Barack Obama once wrote:

A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

As with all forms of propaganda, this one is not easy to combat. But the first step is to recognize what’s going on. From there, taking personal responsibility for staying grounded in facts and evidence, no matter where they lead, is the only possible antidote.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/sean-hannitys-bizarre-fixation-on-hillary-clinton-exposed-in-new-review-of-his-primetime-show/

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Sean Hannity’s bizarre fixation on Hillary Clinton exposed in new review of his primetime show

Written by Shira Tarlo / Salon September 11, 2019

It has been nearly three years since President Donald Trump clinched the White House, however Fox News host Sean Hannity has remained fixated on the Democrat nominated in the 2016 elections: Hillary Clinton.

During the last presidential election cycle, Hannity labeled his primetime show the “Stop-Hillary Express” because of its sustained focus on defeating the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. In the more than two years since Trump defeated Clinton and seized control of the White House, it appears the one-time conductor has continued taking his viewers for a ride on the anti-Clinton train.

From Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 through August 2019, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 505 of the 587 episodes of his program — a figure that represents 86 percent of his shows — according to a review conducted by Media Matters for America, a progressive news watchdog. And if you include mentions from guests, Clinton’s name was dropped in a staggering 91 percent of the episodes Hannity hosted over that time period.

Hannity’s apparent obsession with Clinton is “largely a reflection of his show’s focus on the dizzying conspiracy theory he constructed to defend Trump” from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters.

Gertz further explained: “Hannity places Clinton at the center of several key strands of that web. In his telling, 1) federal investigators should have beencharging Clinton for crimes related to her email server rather than looking into Trump’s associates; 2) some of the attorneys involved in the probe had conflicts of interest because they supported her election; and 3) the investigators ignored the ‘real’ collusion with Russia that she supposedly engaged in through the Uranium One pseudoscandal and via an anti-Trump dossier that became part of the investigation.”

Since Clinton largely receded from the national political spotlight in the wake of her defeat, Hannity’s references to the former presidential hopeful decreased in each of the first four months of Trump’s administration, according to Media Matters.

In 2017, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 88 percent of the episodes he hosted in January after Trump’s inauguration, 76 percent in February, 70 percent in March and just 39 percent in April, the lowest total over the course of the study. That figure spiked to 79 percent in May. Since then, Hannity’s mentions haven’t fallen below 60 percent in any month since October of 2017.

Gertz noted that the longest consecutive streak in which Hannity mentioned Clinton on the shows he has hosted was 60 — from April 8, 2019 to July 12, 2019. Hannity did not mention Clinton on five shows he hosted between April 26, 2017, through May 2, 2017, the longest consecutive streak in which the Fox News host did not name-drop Clinton.

“When Hannity takes a night off, the ‘stop-Hillary express’ rolls on, as the show typically features the same guests and themes, including the Clinton-focused anti-Mueller conspiracy theory,” Gertz concluded. “His guest hosts mentioned Clinton in 63% of their episodes, and she was mentioned in 85% of the episodes they hosted during the period of the study.”

Watch the astonishing supercut of Hannity’s Clinton name-drops here:

nb how desperate they are to deflect mirror mass shooter (2nd time, eco-fascism?)

beto now official target?

suspended campaign to go home to take care of shooter [ post- elpaso] Odessa? ppl:

no lnx

How bots and far-right figures spread a lie about Beto O'Rourke and the Odessa shooting

A likely bot network, QAnon accounts, a TPUSA advisory council member, the Proud Boys, Sebastian Gorka, and a member of Trump's 2020 advisory board helped push the false claim

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 09/04/19 1:52 PM EDT

UPDATED 09/05/19 9:08 AM EDT

Multiple far-right figures helped a likely network of bot accounts spread a false claim on social media connecting former Texas congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke with an alleged mass shooter in Texas.

On August 31, a gunman in Odessa and Midland, TX, killed seven people. While the alleged shooter’s motive is still unknown,a false claim appeared afterward on social media that the alleged shooter had an O’Rourke sticker on his car (authorities said there is no evidence for this) and reportedly spread with the help of likely bot accounts. Other crucial players that spread the falsity included multiple accounts supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, a member of Turning Point USA’s advisory council, far-right gang the Proud Boys, former Trump White House adviser and current Sinclair contributor Sebastian Gorka, and current Trump campaign adviser Tony Shaffer.

How the lie spread

On the afternoon of September 1, Twitter account @suemo54 tweeted that the shooter was “a Democrat Socialist who has a Beto sticker on his truck.” As a data analyst noted on Twitter, even though the @suemo54 account had few followers, the tweet containing the false claim received hundreds and eventually thousands of retweets. A misinformation-tracking firm told The Washington Post that “the post appears to have been amplified mainly by bot accounts.” The account was later suspended but has since been reinstated.

@suemo54 image

The @suemo54 account’s Facebook page has previously shared material from JoeM, a major QAnon account.

Also that afternoon, a Facebook user called Lupe Fuentes posted almost identical language to @suemo54’s tweet in a meme, along with “BINGO!” The account had also previously postedQAnon material from JoeM. The meme was subsequently shared tens of thousands of times, and Fuentes bragged about the post’s virality.

Fuentes Facebook Beto false claim

Following these posts, other Twitter accounts began tweeting similar language, with some, according to the data analyst, getting “traction on their shooter/Beto tweet above and beyond what one might expect from their follower count.” Some of the accounts spreading the false claim that received thousands of retweets included @paphotog, an account that used to support QAnon; @nightingalern, a QAnon account that has the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” or “WWG1WGA” in its profile; and @bbusa617, which also supports QAnon.

@paphotog

@nightingalern

@bbusa617

Joel Fischer, an advisory council member for Turning Point USA, also tweeted the false claim by the evening, receiving thousands of retweets. Fischer has a history of pushing social media falsities, including those from the QAnon community.

Joel Fischer Beto false claim

Fischer’s tweet was spread by other right-wing figures and outlets, including the Telegram channel for the far-right group the Proud Boys, a Daily Wire writer whose tweet has since been deleted, and former White House official and current Sinclair contributor Sebastian Gorka, who has previously amplified false content spread by QAnon supporters.

Gorka Beto false claim

Telegram Proud Boys Beto false claim

Meanwhile, the false claim also continued to spread on Facebook, where some directly cited Fischer and Gorka and, as noted by The Associated Press, some “posted a picture of a white truck with a ‘Beto 2020’ sticker on the back window, saying it belonged to Ator”; on Twitter, including from Dustin Nemos, a co-author of a bestselling QAnon book who pushed @suemo54’s tweet; and on white nationalist hotspot 4chan,where a user shared Fuentes’ meme.

Dustin Nemos

Facebook Beto false claim Gorka Fischer

4chan Beto false claim

4chan Beto false claim2

Tony Shaffer, a former intelligence officer and member of President Donald Trump’s 2020 advisory board,shared @suemo54’s tweet on the morning of September 2, adding that it showed the alleged shooter “was a @BetoORourke supporter.”

Tony Shaffer Beto false claim

When The Washington Post told Shaffer in a brief interview that the claim in his tweet is false, Shaffer doubled down, saying, “That’s not what I’ve seen from people.”

The baseless claim tying the shooter to a Democratic presidential candidate -- and to the left more broadly -- appears to have jumped from social media to right-wing talk radio; on September 4, host Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed the alleged shooter “was an out-of-control Democrat.”

A Facebook spokesperson, in response to criticism from O'Rourke's campaign about the falsity's spread on social media, told the Post that it was looking into whether “inauthentic behavior amplified content promoting the false story on its platform.” Neither Google nor Twitter responded to the paper's inquiries about the false claim.

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aha: mirror slippage

horo-show sez left is source of violence (noteslippage of black bloc wackos burning some trash or breaking windows are violent) whereas actual acts of violence eg by trump whipping up hate to press that gets them shoved/hit? see dobbs on never again truck below

more aha:rt conflates verbal violence and actual,eg sec of def nom said ok for son to use baseball bat on mom b/c she yelled/nagged him for 3 hrs, thus self-defense

// slippage of eco- --> econ terror; rt calls left "extremists" and angry thus irrational, they seem to be the ones to consistently and constantly "lose it" plus violence is the trad perogative of mean and power. plus if left tyranny is real threat to freedom and liberty, violence is justified/necessary

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no lnx

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs: Man who plowed truck into ICE protesters was ‘well within his rights’

Lou Dobbs speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) ]

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 16, 2019

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs praised a corrections officer who intentionally plowed his truck into a crowd of protesters outside a Rhode Island ICE facility, saying the attack was justified.

A correctional officer at the Donald W. Wyatt PVT Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, intentionally drove his pickup truck into protesters demonstrating against the detention of migrants by ICE on Wednesday, the Providence Journal reported. Capt. Thomas Woodworth was placed on administrative leave after protest organizers said a 64-year-old protester suffered internal bleeding and a broken leg in the attack and another protester was injured as well. Fellow corrections officers sprayed protesters with pepper spray, sending three other people to the hospital.

The protesters were part of the “Never Again” movement, a Jewish protest group that likens ICE detention facilities to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. The protesters had been organizing outside the Rhode Island facility since early July.

Video of the protests shows the black pickup truck accelerate toward protesters and stop suddenly just before hitting anyone. After demonstrators began to bang on the hood of his truck, the vehicle pushed forward again.

Several injured after driver plows truck into immigration protesters outside ICE facility in Rhode Island. https://t.co/KlhQXBlEaW pic.twitter.com/tizuWqlLmH

— ABC News (@ABC) August 15, 2019

Dobbs played an edited clip that cut out the part where Woodworth drove at the protesters and praised his actions.

LOL. Lou Dobbs recasts incident at RI immigrant detention facility as attack on truck driver by selectively slo-moing the footage and editing out the part when the ICE guard (now suspended) intentionally ran into/over demonstrators. cc: @NeverAgainActn @mollycrabapple pic.twitter.com/K0XfqLC3oY

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 16, 2019

“Protesters in Rhode Island harassing a federal detention worker last night,” said Dobbs, an ally and adviser of President Trump. “These demonstrators blocking an entrance to a facility holding illegal immigrants when the driver tried to pull into the parking lot, the protesters surrounded him, yelling, banging on the hood of the truck, blocking his entrance.”

Dobbs claimed the protesters “committed assault” by banging on the truck after Woodworth drove toward them.

Speaking to former acting ICE director Tom Homan, Dobbs said, “I know that it must just gladden your heart to see a bunch of demonstrators at an Immigration Customs Enforcement facility blocking the path of a guard and then complaining about the fact that he sought to do what is within his rights, which is to proceed to park his vehicle and go to work.”

Homan also attacked the protesters, wondering whether any of them “even got a job.”

Homan previously worked in the Trump administration and Dobbs has frequently consulted with the president. The Daily Beast reported last year thatDobbs has been “involved with some of the administration’s more sensitive discussions.” Trump has even put Dobbs on speakerphone during multiple Oval Office meetings so the Fox host could weigh in, according to the report, which added that Trump will occasionally “cut off an official so the Fox Business host can jump in.”

Dobbs is in some ways the godfather of what is now called Trumpism.

“He was Trump before Trump,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Washington Post. “He has always sort of epitomized the intellectual foundation of the Trump movement on trade and immigration, even if he doesn’t get enough attention. He was more Breitbart than Breitbart, going back years.”

A spokesperson for Never Again accused Dobbs of creating “propaganda” to help “distort reality” to help justify the Trump administration’s “inhumanity.”

“Lou Dobbs just justified and promoted the car ramming that that caused one of our peaceful protesters to have serious injuries,” the group said. “This was an attack that could have (and has, as in Charlottesville) killed someone. Fox News is inciting violence.”

vehicles charlottesville, cda and now ICE jewish

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs: Man who plowed truck into ICE protesters was ‘well within his rights’

Igor Derysh / Salon

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/revealed-leaked-memo-shows-the-republican-partys-vile-strategy-to-respond-to-mass-shootings-with-lies/

no lnx

Revealed: Leaked memo shows the Republican Party’s vile strategy to respond to mass shootings with lies

Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos August 16, 2019

In the wake of the most recent mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, congressional Republicans have been circulating a “memo,” on how to discuss gun violence. The Tampa Bay Times obtained this memo and report that while not shocking to most people here, the depth of cynicism and craven hypocrisy on the part of Republicans knows no bottom. According to the Times, the memo discusses the general rhetorical tricks of handling questions about closing existing gun law loopholes instead of creating more robust gun laws. But it also discusses how to very specifically move the conversations away from white supremacy and the role that right-wing propaganda seems to be playing in most domestic terrorist scenarios like the recent El Paso shootings, where the gunman told authorities that he wanted to kill Mexicans.

If asked, the memo suggests that the first thing to do is to “steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.” Subsequently, Republicans are directed to point out, falsely, that many of the mass shootings in recent years were carried out by “left-leaning” individuals. They specifically point to “El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.” The El Paso mention is a classic right-wing typo, they meant the Dayton shooting—the right wing in our country does have a level of incompetence that one might call its brand.

Did you know that all of those shooters were “left leaning?” I bet you didn’t. Cause they weren’t. The man that shot Arizona’s Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen other people January of 2011, while registered as a Democrat, showed motives all over the map, referencing everyone from Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler, and according to people around him, a general obsession with Giffords herself. The Colorado shooters seem to have been motivated, more than anything, by anger over bullying and a perverse sense of revenge.

The most recent Dayton, Ohio, shooting has been the big news story for the right wing of this country because Donald Trump tweeted and told reporters that the shooter was a “fan” of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

CBS News

@CBSNews

President Trump on Dayton shooter: "He was a fan of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, nothing to do with Trump. Nobody ever mentions that." https://cbsn.ws/2Ky1ZZO

Embedded video

However, while the Dayton shooter may have had left “leanings,” politically, he also had a very specific history of violent fantasy not at all connected to one political ideology or another. Either way, the fact remains that domestic white nationalist terrorism is still the biggest problem when it comes to mass shooting gun violence in our country. As FBI Director Christopher McKay told a Senate Judiciary Committee last month, the majority of 2019’s domestic terrorist arrests were “motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” The need for the Republican Party to sit on their hands to protect their gun money, dovetails nicely with their need to appeal almost exclusively to white nationalists and the people who hate being called white nationalists, but espouse most of the same positions and beliefs of white nationalists.

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mirror/whataboutism BS on astroturf (actuLLY it's not even astro, ) NO NAME

just same op-ed in bunch of local papers, which is old RW ploy]

http://leftexposed.org/2018/01/lefts-latest-copy-paste-fake-grassroots-campaign/

pyle trade group?

The Left is notorious for runaway gangbuster campaigns with massive grassroots groundswell support – that are actually not runaway gangbuster campaigns with massive grassroots groundswell support.

The Left’s ideas are awful. Because of this awfulness, their ideas aren’t very popular with We the People. Thus the Left isn’t any good at generating support. But they are absolutely GREAT at making it look like they are generating support.

In these fraudulent endeavors – they have many massive built-in advantages over we who fight for Reality-based public policy solutions that garner actual public support.

The Left gets sympathetic uber-amplification from the hominoid absurdities who infest Hollywood. The late, inordinately great Andrew Breitbart rightly observed: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Our politics is positively polluted by the Leftist claptrap Tinsel Town has for decades been spewing.

The Left gets sympathetic uber-amplification – and social media game-rigging – from the hominoid absurdities who infest the Silicon Valley. Time and again mega-companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook have been caught slanting searches and warping “news” feeds Leftward – and banning and blocking Rightists.

The Left gets TONS of cash from Communist mega-donors. George Soros and Tom Steyer alone have been good for billions of dollars. You can run all sorts of fake campaigns and purchase a whole lot of fake protesters with that kind of coin.[AKA PAID PROTESTERS]

And the Left has received hundreds of billions of dollars in in-kind contributions from their Fellow Travelers in the pseudo-“news” media. No Leftist message is too absurd, no Leftist campaign too fake, no Leftist policy demand too insane. The “news” media qualm-lessly, instantaneously parrots and amplifies. Whatever the Left needs – the media delivers.[MYTH OF LIBERAL MEDIA]

Which brings us to Nicholas Pyle, his lobby shop – and the Independent Bakers Association (IBA). Nicholas Pyle’s lobby shop isn’t actually, originally, his lobby shop. It was his father’s, and he inherited it:

“Nicholas Pyle, President, joined his father at Pyle & Associates to expand and diversify the client portfolio. He is a specialist in the areas of trade association management, government relations, issue advocacy and representation in many functional areas of the food industry and strategic defense materials. Over nearly three decades, Nick leads Pyle & Associates’ representation of some of the world’s largest food and metal companiesas well as a national wholesale bakers trade association in government relations.”

For our purposes today, the key phrases therein are “issue advocacy” and “a national wholesale bakers trade association.” The latter is the IBA. In what types of “issue advocacy” is Pyle engaged on behalf of the IBA?

Well, just one kind and type, actually. Pyle – or someone for Pyle – penned a single, solitary editorial. Which was then copied and pasted with appropriate, pertinent Congressman or Senator name changes, over and over and over again. Into email after email after email. And then submitted to newspaper after newspaper after newspaper.

A brief, important aside: I buy groceries by writing for publications. What is almost a universal truth of the publication industry is the fact that just about every outlet wants exclusivity on what you submit. Meaning what you publish with them publishes only with them.

So how did Pyle get away with running the exact same editorial in forty-six different newspapers? Yes, they are mostly local papers, but come on. This is the Age of the Internet. All forty-six are available online. After, I don’t know, two dozen publishes, wouldn’t the subsequent “news”papers have executed a cursory Web search and rejected their versions of the exact same editorial?

You’d have to ask the newspapers if they searched. And if they didn’t, why they didn’t. And if they did, why they run the exact same thing over and over and over again. I can’t tell you what they were thinking (well, I can guess). I can’t think like a Leftist. When I try – my head hurts.

I can tell you that this overt rote repetition – duplicated time and again in the direction of elected official after elected official – creates a faux cacophony for Pyle’s fake messaging campaign. Our elected officials will talk with one another, and one may mention getting yelled at in their local paper about this fake campaign. Another responds “Gee, me too.” A third chimes in with “Wow, me too.”

The chances are pretty slim that these officials will check each other’s editorials – and thereby realize they are all being targeted by the exact same editorial from the exact same person. The chances are pretty good that it will leave all these officials with the false impression that this nonsense non-campaign is an actual campaign, with broad nationwide support.

So you all see how this phoniness works. Here’s hoping our elected officials do too.

Originally Published at [RedState]

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note mirroring contortions (good news is a ways since it show that critige of right is getting thru to ppl; a variant of whataboutism?

https://cei.org/AGclimatescheme

Law Enforcement for Rent (note series, gov't etc)

How Special Interests Fund Climate Policy through State Attorneys General

Christopher C. Horner • August 28, 2018

Author’s Note

This paper is based on documents obtained over two and a half years fromopen records requests and, in some cases, subsequent litigation. Due to the volume of records, not all cited records are included in the body of this paper. Key documents are provided in the paper’s appendix, which can be accessed at CEI.org. The complete collection of documents cited in this paper is available at ClimateLitigationWatch.org, a project of the nonprofit public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight.

Executive Summary

This paper details an extensive and elaborate campaign using electivelaw enforcement offices, in coordination with major donors and activist pressure groups, to attain a policy agenda that failed through the democratic process. The plan is revealed in emails and other public records obtained during two and a half years of requests under state open records laws. Most are being released now for the first time. Many were obtained only by court order in the face of a determined and coordinated resistance that one deputy attorney general foresaw, expressing early concerns over “an affirmative obligation to always litigate” requests looking into the effort.The paper details how donor-financed governance has expanded into dangerous and likely unconstitutional territory: state attorney general (AG) offices.

The plan traces back to 2012 when activists agreed to seek “a single sympathetic attorney general” to assist their cause. AGs began subpoenaing private parties’ records in service of a campaign of litigation against opponents of their climate policy agenda. The public records date to a July 2015 email in which Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists confided the group’s involvement with AGs.

Those public records reveal the following:(a) donors introduced plaintiffs’ lawyers to AG offices (OAGs),

(b) a slideshow tour by plaintiffs’ lawyers recruiting OAGs to the effort, and

(c) senior attorneys from OAGs flying in—some at taxpayer expense and others on the donors’ tab, which had been run through a pressure group— for a briefing with “prospective funders” about “potential state causes of action against major carbon producers.” One presenter described this briefing as a“secret meeting.”It was secret enough that one AG litigated to withhold the agenda— under implausible claims of privilege—for a year and a half before being compelled by a court to release the lineup for what turned out to have been an AG-assisted fundraiser.

Those public records reveal the anatomy of what began as an “informal coalition” of AGs to use the legal system in pursuit of anovertly political agenda in coordination with activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers. That coalition disbanded under open records and media scrutiny, but it has now reconstituted through a program by which donors fund, privately hire, and place investigators and prosecutors in AG offices. It uses a nonprofit organization to pass the funding through and to provide the OAGs with a network of “pro bono” attorneys and public relations services. In return, OAGs provide office space to the privately hired prosecutors; agree they are there to “advanc[e] progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions”; and provide regular reports about their work.

Led and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this scheme hires “Research Fellows,” which it then places as activist “Special Assistant Attorneys General.” All of the participating OAGs had to promise that this work would not get done but for this private funding. All OAGs also certified they are not violating the law by accepting privately funded prosecutors. At best, as several OAGs tacitly admit, this unprecedented arrangement operates in a gray area with neither prohibition nor authority. One state where the scheme is arguably illegal is New York, where disgraced former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had a leading and organizing role at every stage of the campaign this paper describes.

The New York OAG openly boasted to a donor that its “need” for privately funded prosecutors was driven in part by the “significant strain on staff resources” that had been caused by its “non- litigation advocacy”—that described as its having “led” the resistance to the Trump administration. Importantly, the NYOAG also cited its campaign “building models for two different types of common law cases to seek compensation” from industries for supposedly having caused global warming; moreover, it “needs additional attorney resources to assist with this project.”On these bases and with a claim to having statutory authority to enter the unprecedented arrangement—a claim which on its face appears to be an invention—the NYOAG was awarded not one but two privately underwritten prosecutors.

This is the most dangerous example of a modus operandi we have found: it uses nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors can support elected officials to, in turn, use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors. It also uses resources that legislatures will not provide and that donors cannot legally provide directly. The budget for climate policy work alone is in the tens of millions of dollars per year.

Across various levels of government—including mayors and governors—the bulk of this money is budgeted for pass-through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and off-the-books consultants, report writers, and public relations (PR) firms that are hired through an NGO. The NGO takes a percentage as its fee (up to 24 percent in some cases). Another component involves privately hiring and then placing in-house, non- official personnel as advisors when they are actually employed by a donor’s group.

The extension of this billion-dollar per year climate industry to privately fund AG investigations sets a dangerous precedent. It represents private interests commandeering the state’s police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda and to hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process’s rejection of a political agenda.

As a subsequent report will affirm, this model of using nonprofit groups as cutouts for donors to finance elected officials’ activism is, in fact, widely adopted generally by the axisof donors, elected officials, and NGOs and by the climate litigation industryspecifically. The de facto law enforcement for hire by private interests raises concerns beyond mere political opportunism, obvious appearances of impropriety, or even compliant 501(c)3s that seeminglyrent out their tax-exempt status on behalf ofactivist donors.

The use of this approach by AGs carries legal, ethical, and constitutionalimplications, as well as for the integrity of law enforcement and the constitutional policy process. The public–private partnership of law enforcement for hire revealed in this report, in which the partnership uses public office to expend resources not appropriated or approved by their legislatures, raises significant constitutional and other legal issues—as well as ethics concerns—and should be the subject of prompt and serious legislative oversight.

Introduction

BEFORE YOU GASP, PLEASE NOTE that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”1 So wrote Dan Carol, a senior aide to California Governor Jerry Brown(D), on October 3, 2017, to his colleagues and staff members for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) and Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) regarding charitable foundation spending that promotes their climate policy agenda (see Figure 1). This figure dwarfs spending in opposition to that agenda—efforts to portray matters otherwise notwithstanding.2

Carol offered this sum to make his case that $50 million per year is reasonable to ask so donors can privately underwrite an off-the-books network of “support functions” for a handful of governors’ climate policy advocacy.

In further support of his position, Carol attached a “draft agenda, presentation slides, and budget worksheet.”Those items are among a large cache of public records that were obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), along with other public policy groups, and that detail and propose the exploitation of a “plethora of funder interest” in secretly bankrolling the public office holders’ use of their positions to take a more aggressive role concerning climate politics and policy.

This years-long campaign by substantial, left-leaning donors revealed in Carol’s email correspondence and in other emails produced under state open records laws has now expanded into dangerous and likely unconstitutional territory. Led and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this scheme centers

..[long]

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pivot from eco to econ to nat'l security "critical infrastructure" // BS on tariffs?

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note drop eco econ and go straight up terror (// iran republican guard):

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/dangerous-republican-resolution-suggests-that-all-forms-of-political-dissent-could-soon-be-considered-terrorism/

no lnx

Dangerous Republican resolution suggests that all forms of political dissent could soon be considered terrorism

Written by Urie Dvorozniak / Salon July 23, 2019

Last week, Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a resolution to designate “antifa,” which the Anti-Defamation League defines as “a loose collection of groups, networks, and individuals who believe in active, aggressive opposition to far right-wing movements,” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

In fact, antifa is a constellation of many different activist groupings, with no official leader or clear hierarchy. As the New York Times has noted, its membership count is “impossible to know.” That didn’t stop the two Republican senators from claiming that “Antifa are terrorists, violent masked bullies who ‘fight fascism’ with actual fascism, protected by Liberal privilege.”

Senator Ted Cruz

@SenTedCruz

Antifa is a terrorist organization composed of hateful, intolerant radicals who pursue their extreme agenda through aggressive violence. Time and time again their actions have demonstrated that their central purpose is to inflict harm on those who oppose their views.

26.2K

1:02 PM - Jul 18, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

23.5K people are talking about this

Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” traces its ideological roots to 1920s and 1930s Germany and supposes that if people had opposed the Nazi Party more aggressively, Adolf Hitler might never have come to power. The ADL reports that many people who act within antifa are anarchist or very left-wing, but that “since Trump’s election, some people with more mainstream political backgrounds have also joined their ranks.”

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In their resolution, Cruz and Cassidy reference the “violent demonstrations” on June 29 in Portland, Oregon, where writer right-wing Alex Ngo was assaulted while covering an antifa protest against the “far-right nationalist” group known as the Proud Boys.

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After the incident, Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat who is also the police commissioner of the city.

Ted Cruz

@tedcruz

To federal law enforcement: investigate & bring legal action against a Mayor who has, for political reasons, ordered his police officers to let citizens be attacked by domestic terrorists. https://tinyurl.com/y2udrv5d https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212511966441473 …

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Under Fire for Not Stopping Antifa Protests

Wheeler's hands-off policy when it comes to Antifa came under scrutiny on Saturday after journalist Ngo was assaulted by masked assailants.

breitbart.com

Ted Cruz

@tedcruz

To law enforcement: find & prosecute these violent felons. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212299914952704 …

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11:10 PM - Jun 29, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

19K people are talking about this

Cruz and Cassidy also point to antifa activists occupying the areas outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, as well as posting the personal information of ICE officials online.

But the Republican senators’ resolution is little more than a political stunt.

Cruz and Cassidy’s resolution, which is entirely non-binding, won’t actually change U.S. law — because there is no existing law to change. The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism as criminal activity that appears intended to “intimidate or coerce” civilians or influence government policy using violent methods. But, domestic terrorism is not a specific crime under U.S. law. Labeling a group as domestic terrorists give federal law enforcement broader powers to conduct investigations of other crimes, but does not itself define any criminal activities. criminal make. Furthermore, since antifa isn’t a singular group, as mentioned above, its definition under this resolution is unclear.

The designation of what “groups” are called terrorist, domestic terrorist or hate groups is extremely loose. For instance, the Pulse Nightclub shooter was charged with terrorism, while the Ku Klux Klan is legally considered a “hate group,” not a domestic terror organization. And while the federal government keeps a list of foreign terrorist groups, there is no public list of domestic terrorist groups.

Some outlets have thought it worthy to equate the confrontational tactics of antifa to political violence on the far-right. But as the ADL has pointed out, “To date, there have been no Antifa related murders,” yet “right-wing extremists” have “ murdered hundreds of people in this country over the last ten years alone.”

Just last week, James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi, was sentenced to life in prison plus 419 years for the violent assault he committed during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyerand injuring several others.

Free speech activists have expressed concerns that the Cruz-Cassidy resolution could set a precedent for more groups to be labeled domestic terrorist organizations. As National Observer reporter Caroline Orr noted, Cruz’s resolution uses the terms “antifa” and “left-wing activists” interchangeably. Most dangerously, it suggests that all manner of dissent could be considered terrorism.

Cruz’s move looks to be a transparent attempt to saddle congressional Democrats with a divisive political debate, declaring themselves either against antifa or in support of it, invariably alienating some of the party’s supporters ahead of a critical presidential election.

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another sub-genre, fake outrage?

This was the week that a “controversy” continued over what to call the facilities where the United States government is housing migrant children who have been separated from their parents in filthy, disgusting, unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the detention facilities run by the Trump administration “concentration camps” and was immediately attacked by Republicans like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming for making light of the Holocaust.

And this was the week that we learned the government is spending $775 per child per day to house migrant children in the temporary tent camps it is running along the border and in southern Florida.

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