MAGA coalition TAKE BACK
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12 21 i make this generic for concept // take back our country
see trumpista
see qanon
gop troll
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an 5 25 n wallace deadline wh
..."MAGA went from being, you know, perhaps a surprisingly effective political slogan on a hat to being like the biggest sort of subversive punchline of irony that I've ever seen in politics: Making China look good and like the better, more responsible actor. Making Europe the magnet for science and research," she said. "These are the real consequences of Trump's second term."
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house Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-Louisiana) financial disclosure forms — in which he didn't even disclose a personal checking or savings account — have prompted an anti-corruption watchdog group to file an ethics complaint against the new speaker.
The Daily Beast reported that End Citizens United's new ethics complaint includes allegations of Johnson failing to disclose certain gifts, overlooking blind spots in his spouse's income, making "contradictory" financial statements relating to his work as an attorney for far-right groups, and various other "inconsistencies." End Citizens United president Tiffany Muller said the American public deserves to know whether the new speaker of the House has financial conflicts of interest.
"It’s laughable to believe that the person leading government funding negotiations doesn’t have a reportable savings or retirement account," Muller told the Beast. "But beyond his own potential financial mismanagement, failing to disclose travel and his spouse’s sources of income is against the law and the Office of Congressional Ethics must investigate and hold him accountable."
In the six-page complaint, End Citizens United found evidence of Johnson failing to report an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel in February of 2020 paid for by the 12 Tribes Film Foundation that cost a total of $17,950. Congressional ethics reporting laws dictate that all travel costing more than $415 needs to be reported. Johnson also accepted another paid trip by young Earth creationist group Answers in Genesis to Williamstown, Kentucky in 2022 that exceeded the $415 threshold.
"These blatant omissions are clear violations of federal law and show a disregard for the Act’s important transparency goals that allow the public to know what groups have privately funded the Speaker’s travel," End Citizens United wrote.
The group also pointed to Johnson's lack of disclosure of his spouse's income from her LLC, Onward Christian Counseling Services, which was founded in 2017 and remains active as of 2023. According to the complaint, the company's website was recently taken down, though the archived version shows that Johnson's wife advertised "confidential, biblically based individual, marriage and family counseling to the people of Northwestern Louisiana."
Federal law concerning statements submitted to government agencies states that anyone who "falsifies, conceals, or covers up material facts, "makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation" could be fined and/or jailed for up to five years.
an 11 23
no lnx
Selling hate, vulgarity and violence: How Trump and MAGA overran a quaint Midwest festival
Some of the pro-Donald Trump and anti-Joe Biden T-shirts for sale at the Mansfield, Ind., site of the recent Covered Bridge Festival. Curse words — many of the shirts featured them — have been redacted. Mark Alesia/Raw Story
Mark Alesia
andRaw Story
October 31, 2023
MANSFIELD, Ind. — The name Covered Bridge Festival evokes images of artisans selling their wares under the country sun and live music delighting passersby, all while celebrating quaint structures built more than a century ago to protect the wooden crossing from the weather.
The unsuspecting, however, encounter something much different at this west-central Indiana town, one of several sites for the decades-old event in Parke County.
MAGA.
MAGA merchandise and MAGA culture all but shouting at you in Donald Trump’s voice amid a bazaar of cheap flea market items and carnival food.
“One for Biden, One for Harris,” says a T-shirt with a drawing of Donald Trump raising two middle fingers for the president and vice president.
Another T-shirt says “LGBT,” with a drawing of the Statue of Liberty over “L”; a gun (actually a rifle) over “G”; a beer over “B”; and You Know Who over “T.”
“Don’t Tread on Trump,” says a different take on the Gadsden Flag with a coiled rattlesnake. “Keep America Great.” The Trump flags above that tent included, “Only GOD and Trump Can Save Our Country.”
This isn’t a Trump rally.
But here in Parke County, which voted 77 percent for Trump in 2020, Trumpism now permeates what, not long ago, was a mostly apolitical event designed to herald autumn and Americana.
It’s a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in many swaths of red-state rural America, where Trump hero worship and evangelization, and the prospect of the former president’s return to power, override other, more genteel community-centric considerations.
There’s also money to be made off Trump’s followers with T-shirts such as “F– Biden and F– Everyone Who Voted For Him!”
Several tents at the Covered Bridge Festival's Mansfield, Ind., site sold only Trump merchandise.
David Dixon, one of the vendors selling nothing but Trump merchandise, said he travels the country to Trump rallies and usually avoids flea markets, but the person who supplies tents for the Covered Bridge Festival urged him to come and set up shop.
While most other vendors declined comment to Raw Story, Dixon welcomed discussion about his politics and his business.
“I am a business person, but I’m extremely political,” he said. “I’m real conservative. I probably lean more Libertarian than Republican. I love seeing smaller government.”
Dixon’s Trump-y wares did not include obscene items found elsewhere at the event. He said he started selling Sarah Palin merchandise in 2008 when she was a vice presidential candidate. That proved lucrative. Business cooled off in 2012 when Dixon sold items at events for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, then the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees who lost badly to then-President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
ALSO READ: 'How many cheerleaders did he grope?’ Fans share outrage at Trump’s Iowa State game visit
“We actually did better with Mitt’s wife than we did with Mitt,” Dixon said. “Mitt didn’t inspire the people. Sales come when the candidate really inspires the people.”
Dixon was going to follow Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker in 2015 but switched to Trump when Walker bowed out early.
Dixon said he shows up about five days ahead of Trump’s rallies and starts with roadside sales. He sold merchandise at Trump’s speech before the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., but said he didn’t go with the crowds to the Capitol.
At the Covered Bridge Festival, Dixon faced a lot of competition in the Trump category. He said he bought the inventory of one disappointed Trump vendor.
“People come out here and think they’re going to get rich, especially older people,” Dixon said.
David Dixon, a vendor at the Covered Bridge Festival in Parke County, Ind., travels the country selling Trump merchandise at Trump rallies. Mark Alesia/Raw Story
The Trump fervor at the Covered Bridge Festival didn’t dissipate after his loss in 2020. A seller at the 2021 event, for example, prominently displayed large flags saying, “TRUMP 2024 - F— THE NEWS” and “BIDEN IS NOT MY PRESIDENT.” (The actual flag used the full curse word.)
The same year, a vendor tent peddled T-shirts saying “Trump 2024 - The Revenge Tour” and “Trump 2024 - Because Black Rifles Matter.”
Vendors at this year’s festival that boasts, questionably, “fantastic food” and, unquestionably, “beautiful fall foliage,” also sold fear.
ALSO READ: Trump ‘stiffs law enforcement officers’: Nikki Haley
“PROTECT YOURSELF - STUN GUNS,” says a sign on one tent, which also offers free pepper spray with a sale.
Another tent flew large flags for “Concealed Weapon Purses,” with drawings of a gun and purse. One of the styles for sale has a sequined American flag.
Yet another seller offered “Native American Medicines” touted for any number of maladies including tooth aches, lupus and psoriasis.
T-shirts for sale at the October 2021 Covered Bridge Festival. Mark Alesia/Raw Story
Steffannee Werner, who runs a screen printing and embroidery business, had a tent filled with a variety of shirts for sale. Anti-Biden wares hung prominently outside, prompting people to stop for a look. Those shirts included “Dumb and Dumber” with a photo of Biden and Harris; “We the People Are Pissed Off”; and “BIDEN” as an acronym for “Brain dead, Idiot, Destroying, Entire, Nation.”
It turns out that Werner is not, as one of her T-shirts said, “Ultra Maga.” She’s about business.
“We’re apolitical,” Werner said. “We equally hate both sides. We try not to talk too much politics with customers.”
But what about the anti-Biden stuff? Among them was a parody of the Chef Boyardee pasta logo: “Chef Boyarewe Screwed” with a photo of Biden wearing a cook’s hat.
Said Werner, who offered no pro-Biden items: “We go for what people ask for.”
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'Repugnant MAGA garbage': Dems slam Eric Adams - Alternet.org
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an 10 23 common dr
as GOP Congressman Jim Jordan tried (and failed for the third time) to claw his way up to Speaker of the House this week, he deployed the MAGA base to pressure those representatives who were reluctant to vote for him. Some extremist MAGA supporters even made death threats to fellow Republicans who didn’t support Jordan.
Who actually forms the backbone of this MAGA base that Jordan desperately turned to?
Media and social media enterprises have reinforced the idea that the MAGA base is composed of uneducated white working-class voters. Supposedly, these are the very voters who Hillary Clinton, as Democratic nominee for president in 2016, infamously described as a “basket of deplorables,” (racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist.) With the vivid images of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol burned into our national consciousness, if we’re honest, many of us now add ‘violent’ to Clinton’s picture of these working-class deplorables.
"These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves."
While researching Wall Street’s War on Workers, however, our Labor Institute team found compelling data that turns this image of the right-wing Republican base on its head. It is a destructive stereotype that doesn’t square with reality.
Let’s start with the Tea Party, which sprung to life in 2009. It is usually assumed that it was driven by disgruntled white working-class reactionaries who fundamentally resented intellectuals and the media. But a comprehensive study by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism(2012), provides an entirely different view of the socioeconomic status of Tea Party members:
“Tea Party supporters and activists are better-off economically and better educated than most Americans. . . . Most are not truly wealthy, however. Comfortable middle-class might be the best way to describe grassroots Tea Partiers.”
White? Yes, almost entirely so. Working class? Decidedly not, as defined by income, education, or occupation.
What about Republican primary voters? The 2018 Primaries Project at the Brookings Institution provides detailed profiles of Republican primary voters during the Trump presidency:
- They were disproportionately white compared to the rest of the country: 86.4 percent.
- They were better educated: Nearly 75% had a college degree, postgraduate study, or some college. Only 15% had finished high school or dropped out.
- They were richer: Republican primary voters were considerably richer than the rest of the population in their primary districts. For example, 26.9% of Republican primary voters (and 21.5% of the Democratic primary voters) had household incomes above $150,000 per year, compared to only 15.4% of the general population in the average district.
- They were also older than the general population.
How about the January 6th insurrectionists?
The Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago published demographic information on 656 of the 861 insurrectionists who, as of July 22,2022, had been charged with illegally entering the Capitol or Capitol grounds. The study found the following:
- 92% of the insurrectionists were white.
- 50% were white-collar employees or business owners.
- Only one-quarter were blue-collar (no college degree).
- And 25% had a college degree, slightly more than the 23.5% for the country as a whole.
The study does not say how many of the insurrectionists had graduate degrees, but we do know that the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes (sentenced to 18 years in prison for sedition and other charges for his January 6 activities), is a graduate of the ultra-elite Yale Law School, the same law school from which Bill and Hillary Clinton graduated.
*January 6, 2021, was not a working-class riot.
To be sure, members of the working-class form a significant portion of the MAGA base, but not disproportionately so. Instead, we see that the true MAGA base is disproportionately higher-income, white-collar white people who are enthralled by MAGA politics. And when we step back a bit and look at the many conspiracists who organized, staffed, and drove the election lies, this makes sense. Nearly all are lawyers and businesspeople, many with advanced degrees, backed by a vast ultra-right media and social media ecosystem of highly educated influencers. You don’t find labor union activists leading the MAGA charge.
The real drivers of the MAGA base—the ones the Ohio Republican was calling on to support his ultimately failed bid to become Speaker of the House—are financially successful people who are hungry for more power and wealth. MAGA is their ticket to move up the political ladder, to amass greater influence, and to garner more resources for themselves.
These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves. And precisely because they are not burdened by ideological consistency or deeply held principles, they rely on one overriding trait—a formidable will to power.
So, as many of us do, let’s not lay blame on white working people for the decline of our democracy or today’s rise of Jim Jordan. The authoritarian, oligarchical—yes, even violent—impulses of political life today are really the responsibility of a basket full of highly-educated elites. And because they are so unencumbered by principle, they are really dangerous.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/marjorie-taylor-greene-russian-propaganda
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, continuing to move closer and closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin, says “real Americans” only care about “open borders,” gas prices, and inflation but not Ukraine. She also declared that “COVID doesn’t exist.”
“What real Americans care about is gas prices they can’t afford, inflation that goes up enough to where grocery bills are unaffordable, and they’re very concerned about our out of control open border,” Greene said on the floor of the House Thursday. “Crime is out of control,” she added, ignoring that major crimes like murder are “out of control” mostly in just red states.
“But yet Washington has completely disconnected and seems to care more about sending our sons and daughters to a potential war where they do not belong,” she claimed, saying “we need to focus on our country first.”
“America first” is a Trump-era “policy” that essentially says America first and only, period.
The extremist Republican Congresswoman from Georgia just yesterday,in what she claimed was an “address to the nation”that was carried only on Facebook Live, inaccurately announced “both sides” – Russia and Ukraine – have violated their treaties.
The Washington Post called her Facebook Live speech a “10-minute riff,” noting she repeatedly called Ukraine defending itself from the harmful and dangerous Russian attacks and slaughter “a war they cannot win.”
“False claims, debunked nonsense, echoes of Russian propaganda,” is how the Post describes her remarks from Wednesday, in its piece titled “A layer cake of misinformation, dishonesty and pro-Russia apologism.”
Watch Greene on the House floor today:
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an 222
no lnx
The Trumpified GOP has a whole new generation of power brokers and 'kingmakers': report
Alex Henderson February 04, 2022
The fact that so many well-known right-wing Republicans endorsed Joe Biden during the United States’ 2020 presidential race —from former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina to Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain — speaks volumes about how dramatically former President Donald Trump remade the GOP in his image, and how alienated they fell from the party. The GOP landscape is radically different from what it was during the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, and journalists Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay describe that landscape in an article published by Axios on February 4.
“Paths to power and winning elections inside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years,” Swan and Markay explain. “Why it matters: 14 of the Republican Party's top consultants and operatives across the country spoke in detail with Axios about how profoundly primary races have changed since 2014 — the last pre-Donald Trump midterm election and the last midterms in which a Democrat occupied the White House.”
The reporters continue, “What we found: Those sources — whose clients range from as Trumpy as they come to establishment Republicans — described a clear shift in the party's power brokers. They spoke of changes to the ecosystem across four categories: institutional upheaval, endorsements, conservative media and donors.”
Swan and Markay go on to list Republicans who “had the power” in the past — a group that includes the National Review, the National Rifle Association, the Drudge Report, Heritage Action and the “Koch network,” among others.
But their “who has the power now” list is much more MAGA. That list includes Trump and his “family and former aides” as well as Breitbart News, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro’s the Daily Wire, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and the Susan B. Anthony List.
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Swan and Markay also mention “online influencers, including Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.”
“Most of these changes weren't gradual,” the Axios journalists note. “They were triggered by the shockwave of 2016. Much of the institutional GOP worked against Trump in 2016. Much of the heft they believed their endorsements carried evaporated as voters saw in real-time how Trump had little need for them and ultimately obliterated them.”
A Republican consultant, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Axios, “You wouldn't know that these groups were paper tigers — unless you ever ran against one of them."
In 2020, Never Trump conservatives hoped that if Trump were voted out of office, the Republican Party would return to a pre-MAGA brand of conservatism. But a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, that obviously isn’t going to happen.
“Many movement conservative brands are shadows of what they used to be,” Swan and Markay emphasize. “Many of the major conservative think tanks supported policy positions — such as reforming Social Security or free trade — that Trump obliterated and proved elderly GOP voters didn’t actually support.”
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aha:
FOUNDING MYTH: innocent colonists oppressed by tyrant so no choice but to minuteman pick up rifle to response to attempt to deprive them of guns; they would not submit/surrender, be the bitch of geo III. nanny state cannot force me vaxxer to wear a diaper b/c goes beyond emmaculation to infantilization: helpless, no control, freedumb; after WIN WASP XIAN founding fathers wrote CONSTITUTION
aha a military victory surest proof of god's favor, superiority
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fter torch-bearing white nationalists marched in Charlottesville last month and a peaceful counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was murdered by a neo-Nazi, the leaders of the black, Hispanic, Asian and progressive caucuses in Congress sent a letter to President Trump. They asked that he fire White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.
They wrote:
Americans deserve to know that white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis are not in a position to influence U.S. policy.
It's hard to believe it somehow became necessary to write such a thing to the president of the United States about his high-level White House advisers, but it did. All three of those men have affiliations with or connections to white supremacists, "alt-right" groups and neofascist organizations. In the wake of those horrifying events in Charlottesville, and the president's insistence that the neo-Nazi marchers included "very fine people" and that anti-fascist protesters had created many of the problems, it seemed important to go on the record with this request.
As it happens, Bannon was exiled from the White House shortly afterward and Gorka followed a couple of weeks later. The press reported that they were both let go as part of a staff reorganization by John Kelly, the retired general who had come in to replace the hapless Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and put an end to the chaos that had characterized the Trump administration from the beginning. For their part, Bannon and Gorka insisted that they had made the decision to leave because they believed they could better serve Trump from the outside. Let's just say that didn't sound convincing.
Most political observers, even many conservatives, were relieved. Gorka was an embarrassment, a man who literally wore medals associated with Nazi collaborators to the inauguration. The Daily Beast reported this week that he had landed a new job working for a pro-Trump super PAC called the MAGA Coalition, which is best known for its promotion of conspiracy theories, notably "Pizzagate," the imaginary child-rape ring allegedly run by Hillary Clinton out of a Washington pizza parlor. Gorka told Laura Ingraham on her radio show on Tuesday that the group plans to run primaries against "fake conservatives."
We know where Steve Bannon went. He's back at Breitbart making Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell miserable and plotting the apocalypse. Most observers saw Bannon as the most sinister presence in the White House, a white nationalist Rasputin with special access to Donald Trump's id. It was assumed that getting rid of Bannon meant that Kelly had removed the main influence that stoked Trump's darker impulses.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/seb-gorka-joins-pro-trump-group-founded-by-pizzagate-truthers-and-a-seth-rich-conspiracy-theorist
Seb Gorka may have left the Trump White House. But he’s still working for a conspiracy theorist.
The controversial former White House adviser has officially signed on with a new pro-Trump super PAC founded and run by people who have promoted conspiracy theories about the 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and outlandish falsehoods regarding a Democratic Party child-rape ring known in the right-wing fever swamps as “Pizzagate.”
In joining the group, dubbed the MAGA Coalition, Gorka has dramatically elevated its profile. But that hasn’t led its members to stop dabbling in urban myths and legends. Reached for comment on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the MAGA Coalition defended its leaders’ efforts to “raise questions” about both human trafficking rings run out of D.C. pizza shops and a murder they deemed mysterious even as police insist it was the result of a botched robbery.
The MAGA Coalition was created to promote Trump’s agenda and “compete against globalist corporatist interests,” according to the group. It is headed by Adam Gingrich—no relation to Newt—who worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in Pennsylvania. Gorka joined the group as a “senior adviser,” Axios reported on Tuesday, not long after his unceremonious ouster from the Trump White House last month.
Gingrich and others associated with the MAGA Coalition have small followings in corners of the right-wing media universe, and have used their online platforms to promote conspiracy theories about Rich. Rich’s murder last year has become a rallying cry for some pro-Trump media voices convinced that he was responsible for the release of hacked emails from the Democratic Party and that, as a result, Hillary Clinton presidential campaign played a role in his death. The Washington, DC, police has consistently dismissed such claims as Rich’s grieving family has begged to be left alone.
“If Seth Rich was African-American, would the DC police get away with hiding body cam and other video footage?” Gingrich wrote on Twitter in July. In another tweet last year, Gingrich amplified WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s suggestion that Rich was his group’s source of hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman. “Who murdered Seth Rich?” Gingrich asked, adding the hashtag “#paranoidhillary.”
After The Daily Beast contacted him for comment, Gingrich made his Twitter account private. A screen grab of his tweets can be seen below.
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