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prolly neglected
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SEE ALT FACT POST TRUTH
see EARTH2
SEE DOGE COUP WH AMBUSH SWITCH SIDES IN COLD WAR 3 25
abrego garcia cecot RULE OF LAW
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(DIGITAL) AUTHORITARIAN 71% OF WORLD DN 1 25 ZUCK MUSK
ALT RT EUR REBOOT RADICALIZATION FACEBOOK CHARLOTTE AND ROHINGA GENOCIDE
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Michele Bachmann Says The Biggest Problem In Gaza Today Is Obesity From Too Much Food
9 26
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OMFG
AN 7 26
Over the course of his war with Iran, President Donald Trump has made inflammatory remarks that many have suggested implied his intention to use nuclear weapons. Now a whistleblower from his first term warns that he “watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys,” and that “he may be closer to playing with them than you think.”
This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of National Security during Trump’s first administration, at the time famously penning an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance movement working within the White House. On Monday, he published a new piece explaining why Trump has a “fixation” with using nuclear weapons.
“Last week,” writes Taylor, “the president told Axios he was ‘close’ to ordering a ‘massive attack’ on Iran … The threat had the same ominous feel of his April comments that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight.’ It was an insinuation that he possessed super powers — and might break the world’s nuclear taboo to end the stalemate.” The pause didn’t mean the war was off, however, and Trump told Axios why he thought the war had to continue: “They haven’t received enough pain yet.”
“Not enough pain,” notes Taylor. “I’ve heard rhetoric like that from him before. And it wasn’t about Iran.”
“Back in 2017,” Taylor explains, “Trump judged that the only way to bring North Korea to heel was to make it suffer. He tweeted furiously at ‘Rocketman’ Kim Jong-un and promised ‘fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before’ if the hermit kingdom didn’t meet his demands. That was Trump’s first wink-nod to the fact that he possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs and was ready to use them. Kim answered by threatening to fire missiles at Guam and testing a nuclear-capable missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.”
Taylor says the situation escalated so rapidly that Defense Secretary James Mattis began preparing DHS officials for an all-out nuclear war. “For the first time in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, we ran exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil, because frankly, we couldn’t rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation.”
According to Taylor, the president’s motivation was simple: “Trump wanted to see something blow up, and the rest of us built contingency plans around that desire. Thankfully, he didn’t launch nukes at North Korea. But General Mattis also isn’t at the Pentagon anymore. ‘Pistol Pete’ Hegseth is.”
Taylor asserts that “Trump’s nuclear fantasies go way back. When he was a candidate in 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said a foreign policy adviser had come away from a briefing with Trump rattled, because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’ Candidate Trump also told The New York Times he wasn’t sure it ‘would be a bad thing for us’ if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea, and he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nukes, too, ‘absolutely.’” And “since then, Trump has toyed with nuclear weapons more openly and more recklessly than any American president ever entrusted with the stewardship of the bomb.”
Now, amid an “unresolved war with Iran,” warns Taylor, “you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.”
Taylor says that Trump’s motivation is not difficult to grasp, writing, “Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list. To say that he’s ‘toying’ with extreme powers is probably the wrong phraseology. He’s addicted to power. Very much like it’s an intoxicant. When his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic that her boss had an ‘alcoholic’s personality,’ it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue. That’s how everyone who’s served the man has come to see him … He has an uncontrollable, pathological, junkie-like urge to power.”
“If deploying troops to seize foreign leaders and raining missiles on other nations isn’t cutting it anymore,” Taylor concludes. “I worry about where the quest leads next. I’ve written before about how close Trump got to using the bomb the first time. Let’s not forget what Trump reportedly absconded with after he left the presidency: U.S. nuclear secrets. Back in office, the fixation has returned.”
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AI TERMINATOR = MAX DEREG
GGL 7 26 AI Overview
Palmer Luckey is a key defense-tech billionaire driving the shift toward autonomous weapons. As the founder of Anduril Industries, he works closely with the Trump administration to modernize the U.S. military using AI-powered tech. He shares overlapping military modernization and deregulation goals with Elon Musk. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Key Intersections & Initiatives
- Anduril’s Weapon Arsenal: Anduril develops advanced autonomous systems—including the Roadrunner drone interceptor, Dive XL autonomous submarines, and AI platforms like Lattis—designed to engage targets faster than a human.
] - Manufacturing Surge: To support mass-production for the U.S. and its allies, Anduril is constructing a massive 5-million-square-foot "Arsenal-1" facility in Ohio. [1, 2]
- Trump Administration Ties: Long viewed as an outlier in Silicon Valley for his early, vocal support of Donald Trump, Luckey has become a major supplier of military hardware and wields significant influence. [1, 2]
- Deregulation Alignment: Trump’s defense regulations aim to limit exorbitant executive pay and enforce military industrial growth. Luckey has stated he "broadly" supports these new policies, citing that Anduril (where he pays himself a $100,000 salary) was designed to fix similar issues within legacy contractors. [1, 2, 3]
- The Abundance AI Movement: Musk, Luckey, and other tech leaders are heavily focused on rapid, scaled deployment of artificial intelligence and advanced weapons as a strategic, "secret weapon" advantage to maintain deterrence against adversaries like China. [1, 2, 3]
Palmer Luckey on the future of AI and warfare
“We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter.”
MoneyWeek---
omfg guk 6 26 Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’ | US news | The Guardian
Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’
Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions
Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by
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Fri 5 Jun 2026
The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.
Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.
As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), run by the US National Science Foundation, is a vast network of seafloor systems, underwater gliders and moored surface platforms that feeds data to researchers, policymakers, educators and mariners worldwide. The initiative, which covers both US coastlines and extends into the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, has been used to study marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms, subduction zone earthquakes, ocean acidification and fisheries variability.
Dismantling it would remove a major component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a network of robotic floats, moored buoys and research vessels experts describe as the “eyes and ears” of the ocean. The warning systems based on the data, “save lives”, experts say.
Prescient research published in Nature Climate Change last month showed how data losses in GOOS, a UN-coordinated framework for ocean data for weather and climate collected by several countries, could degrade the ocean heat estimates that underpin weather prediction, El Niño forecasting and fisheries management. Losing US observations would be worse than randomly losing 80% of all ocean data worldwide, it found. US-funded platforms span every ocean basin, plugging critical gaps that no other nation currently fills.
Speich, a co-author of the research, said: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system”. Vertical temperature profiles that provide ocean heat content, are “amongst the simplest measurements we can make”, she said.
“Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.
“Forecasts would continue – but they would degrade, sometimes dangerously so. Atmospheric observations alone are not sufficient” said Speich. “Ocean data [is] fundamental to early warning systems for tropical storms, cyclones and El Niño. And the consequences would not stop at science: the economic costs would be felt within the United States itself, from agriculture to insurance to disaster response.”
The loss of US observations, in a year predicted to be an El Niño year, with “supercharged” weather extremes, could also “lose the ability to see it coming clearly to act in time”, she said.
“The stakes are concrete: farmers in the US and across South America use El Niño forecasts to decide what to plant and when – whether to expect drought or flooding shapes every agricultural decision months in advance.”
The most recent El Niño, which hit in 2023-2024, was one of the five strongest on record and contributed to 2024’s record-breaking increase in global temperature.
Removing US observations alone would produce a 163% increase in error for annual ocean heating rates, the research by Speich and her co-authors found.
On Thursday, the European Union said it would boost its own monitoring of the world’s oceans by investing in a €92m ($107m) initiative called OceanEye, more than half of which will go to GOOS. The announcement, by the European Commission, was long-planned, not a direct response to the US move.
John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, and co-author of the research paper, described the US administration’s move to dismantle the $368m OOI system as “penny-wise, pound foolish”.
“The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean” said Abraham. “We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US. ”
The US suffered more than 400 climate and weather disasters where damages exceeded or reached $1bn,between 1980 and 2024. In 2024 alone, the costs of such disasters amounted to $177bn. This “billion dollar climate and weather product”, managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer be updated due to “evolving priorities”, according to a note on its website.
The system, is, Abraham said is “quite an inexpensive way to reduce climate-related costs”.
“This is not about saving money, this is about killing climate science research,” Abraham said.
Samantha Burgess, the strategic climate lead at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union’s Earth observation system which integrates European space data with in-situ measurements to monitor changes and provide forecasts, said ocean observations are “irreplaceable” because “we can’t see the deep ocean from space.” They “save lives” by warning us of severe storms, she said.
Burgess said: “We need international cooperation to get the best available observations to mitigate risks in our changing world. Without ocean observations we are flying blind.”
A statement earlier this week by the National Science Foundation, which funds and oversees the OOI, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope”, or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.
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5 26 lever Trump’s Private Repo Men Are Hunting Immigrants
theTrump administration has quietly hired a team of scandal-plagued private debt collectors to hound immigrants slapped with new multimillion-dollar civil penalties for not leaving the country, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. All of the companies previously worked on a federal student loan debt-collection program shut down for widespread abuses.
One private collection notice obtained by The Lever assessed a $1.8 million fine on its recipient, the maximum penalty allowed under immigration law, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges, bringing the total to $2.3 million.
IFrame ContentA collection notice sent by a private debt-collection agency regarding a $1.8 million Homeland Security fine, plus another half a million in fees and interest charges.
That notice is not a one-off. According to immigration lawyers, there’s been a recent uptick in collection letters from private firms demanding immigrants pay multimillion-dollar fines, which the Department of Homeland Security began imposing last year.
As directed by a White House executive order from January, the Trump administration is using these massive new financial penalties to pressure immigrants to self-deport as part of its immigration crackdown. And to ensure immigrants ship out or pay up, the White House is enriching private contractors with a history of dubious practices, just like it has outsourced oversight of its detention centers to embattled for-profit companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic.
“This is part and parcel with the administration’s desire to partner with the private sector to make immigration enforcement as punitive and painful as possible,” said Charles Moore, an attorney at Public Justice, a legal advocacy and defense group. “It’s very telling that they view the private market as the best way to accomplish that.”
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Global Press Freedom Hits Record Low, U.S. Drops to 64th in the World: Reporters Without Borders
May 6, 2026 Latest Shows
Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de...Reporters Without Borders warns press freedom has fallen to its lowest level since the group began publishing its annual World Press Freedom Index in 2002. The index has charted how press freedoms have deteriorated in the United States and elsewhere over the past 25 years.
The U.S. was ranked 17th in the world in 2002. In the latest index, the U.S. is down to 64th, falling seven places since last year. "It's tempting to lay all of this at the feet of President Donald Trump, and to be clear, he is the single biggest threat to American press freedom today," says Clayton Weimers, the North America director for Reporters Without Borders. "But the mere fact that we fell from 57th last year tells us that this isn't just a Trump problem. We have structural deficiencies that are imperiling the future of press freedom in this country.
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DOH LOSS
2023 was the busiest year in the anti-ESG (environmental, social, and governance investing) trend in the states, with 26 of the 48 total anti-ESG laws passed that year in 31 states. AFP, along with other heavily Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, led a state and federal crusade against “ESG” risk assessments in investing as a means of shielding the fossil fuel industry from accountability for the investment risks posed by climate change and pollution.
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primary YIKES 3 26 DENIAL BC OF AI RACE
GUK 3 10 26
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'Extraordinary Presidential Power': Trump Is Urged to Declare Emergency Over Voting
Trump, who has insisted on federalizing voting and who issued an executive order last March to pressure states to require proof of citizenship to register voters, is reportedly now being urged to declare an emergency over voting.
“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting,” The Washington Post reported in an exclusive.
“President Donald Trump has repeatedly previewed a plan to mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November’s midterm elections, and the activists expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue.”
According to Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, who is advocating for a presidential order on voting, “we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes.”
“That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it,” Ticktin told the Post.
Claiming there is an emergency would allow the president to ban voting by mail and voting machines “as the vectors of foreign interference, Ticktin argued.”
Trump has repeatedly urged Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which critics say could disenfranchise millions of American citizens who do not currently have a passport or access to their birth certificates. It could also disenfranchise people who have married and changed their names but did not do so on all their legal documents.
“Trump has said that if the bill fails, he will act unilaterally to impose the changes for the midterms,” the Post reported.
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OMFG LOSS 2 26 12TH DN
UCS AND --- SUED TO SHUT DN BS COMM BUT STILL LOST ON EPA REGS
9:31
President Trump accepted the Washington
9:33
Coal Club's inaugural award on
9:36
Wednesday, declaring him the quote
9:38
undisputed champion of beautiful, clean
9:42
coal, unquote.
9:44
Trump accepted the award, a statue of a
9:47
coal miner from Peabody Energy President
9:49
and CEO Jim Gretch during a White House
9:52
event where Trump announced he directed
9:54
the Pentagon to purchase electricity
9:56
from coal fired plants and said he'd
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asked the energy department to provide
10:01
$175 million in federal funds for
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upgrades at several US coal plants.
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I've saved 74 coal power plants from
10:13
crushing restrictions and closures that
10:16
would have been forced to shut down in
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the very immediate future. And today,
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I'm proud to announce that the Tennessee
10:22
Valley Authority is taking action to
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save two major coal plants in Tennessee.
10:27
Tennessee Valley Authority. In response,
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the Natural Resources Defense Council
10:33
wrote, quote, "While Americans are
10:35
demanding clean, affordable energy, the
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Trump administration's using our tax
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dollars to prop up the nation's
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dirtiest, least efficient power plants.
10:45
It's no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are
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handing Trump an award today." unquote.
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OMFG
AN 2 26
Donald Trump's aggressive "America First" agenda has caused a "profound shift" around the world, with a new analysis reported on by The Guardian showing the extent to which more countries are siding with China as strong U.S. alliances have "crashed."
On Friday, The Guardian published a report sharing the findings of a survey by the firm, FocalData. Using the results of United Nations votes over the first year of Trump's second term as a measure of how much the nations of the world are siding with either the interests of the U.S. or China. The results, as depicted in a chart showing a map of the world, are significant, with many more countries, including once-key allies, shifting towards China, as Trump's machinations have "started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China."
Based on the map created with FocalData's findings, every UN country in Europe has shifted more towards China in the last year, as have the likes of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Most of South and Central America has made the same shift, except for Peru. Africa and Asia are closer to an even split, but countries that shifted towards China are still in the majority, including major players like Japan, South Korea, India and even Russia.
Among the countries that have shifted more towards the U.S. are North Korea, South Africa, Madagascar, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Nigeria.
Though the shifts show some notable trends, many countries have not yet changed their overall voting allegiance. Most of Europe, for example, remains largely aligned with the U.S. despite the shift towards China. Still, the trends show a world power balance in the midst of a historic shift.
"In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory," The Guardian explained. "With significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term."
The report further detailed: "The total number of countries strongly aligned with the US has crashed under Trump, in contrast to China, which has maintained its allies. When comparing all of Trump’s years in the White House, including his first term, with those of his immediate predecessors – Barack Obama and Joe Biden – the number of countries strongly aligned with the US has collapsed, from 46 to just seven. The number of countries closely in China’s orbit has remained broadly constant."
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an 1 26
Doomsday preppers are often depicted as right-wingers. Some are libertarians, while others are Christian fundamentalists. And their reasons for predicting doom vary, ranging from fears of an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression to predictions of nuclear war.
But Dmitri Mehlhorn, according to The Atlantic's Michael Scherer, is a "doomsday philosopher" and a former Democratic strategist who fears a "political apocalypse" under President Donald Trump.
"Betting money puts the odds of constitutional collapse in the United States at about one in 25," Scherer explains in an article published on January 22. "Anyone can wager three or four cents on Polymarket, Kalshi, or PredictIt that will pay out $1 if Donald Trump wins a third term in the 2028 election — an impossibility, according to the plain text of the 22nd Amendment: 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.' Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic strategist, thinks that the chance of political apocalypse is about 20 times higher — and that Americans need to start preparing now."
Scherer adds, "He recently secured dual citizenship for his family on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and is obsessively thinking through how people should respond if Trump tries to maintain power with the threat of force. He styles himself a doomsday philosopher of this worst-case scenario."
In December 2025, according to Scherer, Mehlhorn visited Manhattan's Soho area to "play a war game of sorts" with "about 15 finance professionals, nonprofit leaders, technology executives, and former Democratic-campaign advisers."
In the game, Scherer reports, the people gathered in Soho faced a fictional scenario in which "President Buzz Windrip" and "his team must increase their own wealth and maintain power or secure legal amnesty through 2030."
Mehlhorn told Scherer that in the scenario, "You have a man who breaks the law, and that man is the strongman. Which bends, the man or the law? That's the question…. If the president has proven in his first term that he will ignore subpoenas and ignore congressional budget authorizations and pardon anybody who also does, then suddenly, there's no power. What are the remaining checks? Every check is gone."
Interviewed by Scherer, Mehlhorn voiced his fears about what could happen in the 2028 presidential election.
"Trump would announce his candidacy for president late, leading the Republican Party to easily nominate him," Scherer explains. "The Supreme Court then would either split on the question of whether this is legal or rule against Trump with no effect. (Vice President) JD Vance has repeatedly endorsed the idea of the president defying Supreme Court rulings. As the votes are being counted, Mehlhorn imagines, Trump and federal law enforcement would declare rampant fraud in urban centers and move to disqualify residents of those districts' votes. In January 2029, Vance would do what (former Vice President) Mike Pence did not do in 2021: use his power to throw the election to Trump."
Scherer continues, "If there is resistance, another pro-Trump mob — including many who have already been pardoned for the January 6, 2021, attack — could provide backup."
Mehlhorn told Scherer, "As president, who stops him? Who prevents that from happening? What person? What combination of people?"
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an 12 25
Ross Vought is often credited as the architect of Project 2025, and as Donald Trump's director for the Office of Management and Budget, he has helped oversee historically destructive government cuts throughout 2025. In addition to his standing as an "amoral political actor," per a new analysis from The New Republic, what sets him apart from the worst of the White House "hatchet men" is his claim to carry out his actions in the name of his "devout" Christianity.
Writing an extensive breakdown of Vought's tenure as OMB director on Monday, journalist Timothy Noah observed that "conservatives used to think you could be a political hatchet artist or you could serve the Lord." Now, he argued, "they say: Why choose?" This idea is typified by Vought, who has stressed his devout adherence to Christianity throughout his time in politics, suggested that the US is an exclusively Christian nation and written in defense of "Christian nationalism."
"Vought wishes trauma on civil servants and has inflicted same; boasts about turning his think tank into a 'Death Star'; panders to the right’s paranoid streak by claiming Marxists rule America; helps Trump withhold aid to Ukraine illegally after its leader declines to investigate the son of Trump’s 2020 opponent; and impounds congressional appropriations in gleeful defiance of court precedent," Noah wrote. "Pretty sinful, no? Not to Vought. While doing all this Vought proudly declares his deep devotion to the Christian faith."
Vought, he continued, does not practice any form of Christianity devoted to helping the poor or downtrodden, or any sort of "sentimental nonsense about the least among us." Noah highlighted a part of Project 2025 in which Vought decried the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as “a permanent and immiserating feature of the global landscape.”
"That’s a novel way to describe a program to alleviate global poverty," Noah wrote.
According to an October profile of Vought from ProPublica, when it was suggested that the agency's budget be cut in half, he countered that it should be brought as close to zero as possible. An estimate from Boston University estimated that these cuts have been responsible for "640,000 people, 430,000 of them children," with the total deaths estimated later being increased by 38,000.
"... How on earth does the prevailing Christian ethos in Donald Trump’s Washington, as practiced by Russell Vought, align with the Christianity that the goyim have been telling me about my whole life?" Noah wrote in conclusion, suggesting that "Vought would run over his own grandmother to serve his president," and "also do it to please his Creator."
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I was pushing my 4-year-old on the swing at our neighborhood playground in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday, less than a mile from my alma mater, Brown University, when my wife texted me about a mass shooting. I would eventually learn that two people had been killed and many were injured. Three days later, we still don’t know the shooter’s identity, and thus don’t know anything about his motives—but that has not stopped influential right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, from amplifying disinformation that portrays the shooting as a political attack on Republicans. Meanwhile, voices of reason in the center and on the left have appeared helpless to counter this dangerous false narrative, which is further evidence of how badly we are losing the information war.
What we know is that a man dressed in black walked into a classroom in Brown’s Barus & Holley building, just as a study session for Brown’s introductory economics course—the most widely taken course at the university—was wrapping up. The gunman shouted something (students who were present that they don’t know what he said), and then fired more than 40 rounds at the assembled group, injuring nine students and killing two people: Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan who grew up in Virginia, and Ella Cook, a 19-year-old Alabaman who was vice president of the Brown College Republicans. This is more or less all we know.
Right-wingers have filled this void with a baseless narrative that Cook was, as the chairman of the College Republicans put it in a post on X with nearly two million views, “targeted for her conservative beliefs, hunted, and killed in cold blood.” To be clear, there is zero evidence, as of this writing, that Cook was targeted for her conservative beliefs. It’s not impossible, but it’s just as likely—or significantly more likely, considering that most extremist-related murders are committed by white supremacists—that the shooter targeted Umurzokov for being an immigrant. By farthe most logical possibility, given that the shooter fired 40 rounds into a crowded classroom and hit 11 students in total, is that this shooting was not targeted at any one individual—that he wanted to kill as many people as possible at Brown, regardless of what they believed.
And yet, the right’s declarations of victimization, honed after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, have been immediate and relentless. One right-wing influencer wrote, “The left is going to target and kill every effective Republican they can find.” A fellow at the Heritage Foundation with almost a million followers on X wrote, “If you don’t absolutely destroy left wing extremists, they WILL be emboldened.” Republican elected officials joined in, with New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino writing that the attack “was perpetrated by the leftist activist and targeted Republicans.” Another post read, “This happened because Antifa (and all the like groups) wasn’t liquidated after Charlie Kirk was assassinated.… The time to respond harshly was months ago, but now is better than never.” Musk shared that last post, which has more than 30 million views.
At one point, my timeline on X was full—literally full—of nothing but these false claims, all from accounts I have never followed. Others have reported similar experiences. It’s hard to imagine such informational dominance not being the result, among other dynamics, of a clear algorithmic push (Musk runs X, after all). And the goal is to exploit this tragedy toward political ends, namely the repression of MAGA’s political opponents. This repression is the explicit aim of President Donald Trump’s NSPM-7 directive and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent memo ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” which is targeted toward those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity,” as well as “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”
Of course, this isn’t an isolated example of the MAGA conspiracy machine whirring into action. Increasingly, it seems like every high-profile event with potential political ramifications—certainly shootings but also climate disasters, elections, and more—gets poisoned by the right’s toxically mendacious content amplification system. This week it’s been occurring on multiple fronts simultaneously, with Grok spreading the lie that the hero in the antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach was Christian, despite media confirmation that the man, Ahmed Al Ahmed, was a Muslim immigrant originally from Syria.
American politics today are defined by a profound informational asymmetry. The right now controls most of the traditional media institutions, the social media platforms, and the algorithms that shape our attentional ecosystem. They have also built up a far larger network of creators than anything the left has at its disposal. How do you beat opponents who have the informational and attentional firepower to impose deceptive conspiracies on the public and, in many cases, make their lies an accepted common truth? How can we win back the narrative on climate change when they can ascribe every climate-induced hurricane or wildfire to DEI initiatives or weather control technology? How can we address far-right political violence when they can turn an evangelical Trump supporter’s assassination of a Democratic lawmaker into a plot by radical Marxists? How can we protect free and fair elections when they can just deny the results?
I don’t have the solutions to these problems. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few days—watching the buzz saw of MAGA disinformation tear through the factual reality of this mass shooting not far from my home—it’s that we need to figure them out, and quickly. It’s not about finding that oft-discussed “liberal Joe Rogan.” What’s required is the buildout of a media ecosystem that can challenge the right’s extensive informational infrastructure with the full panoply of content creators, revenue structures, cross-platform coordination, amplification systems, and attention-getting strategies necessary to win this narrative war.
Our reality is just what we see in front of us. It can be defined by truth or by lies, by information or disinformation. Ensuring that people start receiving more of the former, and less of the latter, is an incredibly difficult and expensive challenge. But there may not be a way around it. And we’ve got to start building fast, before MAGA’s attentional stranglehold becomes our permanent reality.
Aaron Regunberg is a contributing editor at The New Republic, a climate lawyer, and a progressive organizer.
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OMG AN 12 25
President Donald Trump went on a bizarre Truth Social posting binge Monday night, as pointed out by many media experts, including Vaughn Sterling, executive producer of "The Source With Kaitlan Collins" on CNN, who wondered "what was going on last night?"
CNN political reporter Aaron Blake posted one of the president's unhinged posts, noting, "Trump last night promoted a post that guaranteed Barack Obama will face a military tribunal."
Meidas Touch co-founder Ben Meiselas posted screenshots of Trump's Truth Social, saying, "Trump has made approximately 400 posts in the past hour which include posts like this."
One of those posts included an interview Meiselas did with former Attorney General Eric Holder and Holder’s call for reforming the Supreme Court.
"Trump demanded that Republicans abolish the filibuster based on what Holder was telling me," Meiselas writes in a Tuesday morning article titled, "Trump Attacks MeidasTouch in Midnight Mental Breakdown."
"Shortly after Trump made the post about MeidasTouch, there was a brief pause, and then he began making new posts every 10 seconds for a full hour, totaling about 400 posts," Meiselas explains.
"His posts included deranged claims that Michelle Obama 'controlled Biden’s autopen' and that Biden’s executive orders were really done by Michelle Obama. Trump posted an AI video claiming Nicolás Maduro surrendered to him and that Trump was now controlling Venezuela, and that Maduro admitted Tren de Aragua confessed [former President Joe] Biden was the leader of their cartel. Trump made posts saying Canada was involved in election rigging. He made bizarre posts about Obama’s weekly 'kill list.' I can go on and on, but you get the point," he adds.
"Trump has posted hundreds of times in the past few hours. It’s a smorgasbord of propaganda e.g. 2020 election lies, blaming Pelosi for J6, calling Democrats seditionists, raging about illegals and Somalis, Biden and the autopen, the Obamas, Ilhan Omar [and] Tim Walz. Total insanity," wrote Andrew—#IAmTheResistance on X.
Liberal influencer Harry Sisson posted a few of Trump's rants on his X account, saying, "These are just some of the over 150 posts Trump put out on Truth Social last night in the span of an hour. Completely insane conspiracy theories. He was clearly having a mental decline episode and was posting whatever came to mind. It’s going to get worse."
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OMFG
FAV PHRASE I AM ALLOWED TO DO IT
an 11 25 day after pardon 77 trump coup liars
One participant in the January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol is now calling on President Donald Trump to establish an armed vigilante squad that exclusively reports to the president.
During a recent appearance on the far-right Gateway Pundit podcast, Stewart Rhodes — who founded the "Oath Keepers" paramilitary group — told host Jim Hoft that not only was he relaunching the Oath Keepers, but issuing a direct call to Trump to deputize his loyal followers to enforce federal laws. Progressive group Media Matters for America noted that Rhodes explicitly urged Trump to use a power that the Constitution assigns to Congress.
"President Trump, as commander in chief, always has absolute authority to call all of us up as the militia ... if he sees it necessary, especially for three purposes: to repel invasions, to suppress insurrections and to execute the laws of the union," Rhodes said. "... So from the bottom, from down the rank and file, we can let President Trump know that we're ready to serve, encourage him to do that, call us up as a militia, order us all to come together in our counties under his command, which gives you complete legal sanction to do what you're doing."
Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 of the U.S. Constitution specifically stipulates that Congress – not the president — has the power "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress." It's unlikely that the federal judiciary would allow Trump to do what Rhodes asked, particularly after a judge ruled earlier this year that Trump's deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (which prohibits the military from being used as a domestic police force).
Rhodes' insistence that his group be used as a private army to serve at the pleasure of the president is particularly ironic given the Oath Keepers' history. George Washington University noted that Rhodes formed the Oath Keepers in 2009 "in response to a perceived conspiracy by the U.S. government to facilitate total economic collapse, thereby providing the pretext to imposing martial law and a system of totalitarian control." But if Trump granted Rhodes' request, the Oath Keepers would in fact be used to impose the same martial law his group ostensibly opposes.
In 2023, Rhodes and another Oath Keepers leader were each sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 insurrection — the most serious charge given to all of the roughly 1,500 defendants. During Rhodes' trial, prosecutors played a recording of him on January 10, 2021 expressing regret that more January 6 participants didn't bring weapons.
"My only regret is that they should have brought rifles," Rhodes said, adding that his group could have "fixed it right then and there" if they were armed. Trump pardoned Rhodes and all other January 6 defendants on the first day of his second term.
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an `11 25
Far-right podcaster and former top presidential advisor Steve Bannon told a crowd of aspiring conservative staffers on Capitol Hill this week that the job of Republicans between now and the midterm election next year is to seize complete control of government institutions and turn as many of President Donald Trump’s executive orders as possible into law as a way to avoid politic defeat in the coming years and, ultimately, keep MAGA loyalists from being tried and sent to jail.
“I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison,” Bannon told the crowd Wednesday at an awards event hosted by the Conservative Partnership Academy. This group offers training and certifications to aspiring right-wing ideologues working in politics and government.
Bannon, who has already served time in prison for refusing to submit to a congressional subpoena related to his role as a top aide to Trump during his first term, included himself among those who might be targeted if Republicans lost power.
In his remarks, Bannon said Tuesday’s election results in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere—where Democrats swept the GOP—should be seen as a warning to Trump’s MAGA base, but called for an intensification of the agenda, not a retreat.
“They’re not gonna stop,” Bannon said of Democrats and progressives aligned against Trump’s authoritarian push and Republican economic policies that have focused on lavishing ever-larger tax cuts for corporations and the rich while gutting government programs, including cuts to Medicaid, food assistance for the poor, devastating environmental policies, and dismantling of healthcare subsidies leading to a surge in monthly premiums for millions of families.
Trump’s opponents, warned Bannon, are “getting more and more and more radical, and we have to counter that.”
His advice to Republicans in power and the right-wing movement that supports them is to counter “with more intense action” and more “urgency” before it’s too late. “We’re burning daylight,” Bannon said. “We have to codify what Trump has done by executive order.”
In what seemed like a reference to Trump’s recent talk of going “nuclear” on the filibuster in the US Senate and other efforts, Bannon said, “We have to get beyond these structural barriers” in Washington, DC, that he believes are hindering the president from consolidating his power even further.
Speaking about discussions behind the scenes, Bannon said he has been in touch with Republicans in the Senate who he says are asking him to go through for them what he means and that in the coming days people may be surprised by who “in the conservative movement” are coming around to his thinking, mentioning “institutionalists” like Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as those he’s been speaking with.
“These are what I would call heavy-hitters on the limited-government constitutionalists, in our movement,” Bannon said of other unnamed individuals, “and they’re about to come out in the next couple of days and make this argument because I said, ‘Look, we have to understand that if we don’t this to the maximum—the maximalist strategy—now, with a sense of urgency, and in doing this, seize the institutions... if we don’t do this now, we’re going to lose this chance forever, because you’re never going to have another Trump.”
In an interview with Politico following Tuesday’s elections, Bannon said the win by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to become New York City’s next mayor “should be a wakeup call” to Trump’s right-wing nationalist movement. “These are very serious people,” Bannon said of Mamdani and others who support his affordability agenda that focuses on the needs of working people, “and they need to be addressed seriously.”
As such, Bannon called for the Justice Department, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security to target Mamdani specifically by going after his US citizenship and calling for him to be deported. Mamdani is a naturalized US citizen who came to the United States with his parents when he was seven years old.
As the video clip of Bannon’s remarks about jail time if the Republicans lose in the upcoming elections made the rounds online Thursday, reactions were predictable along partisan lines.
“Steve Bannon motivating Democratic voters,” said Aviel Roshwald, a Georgetown University professor of history with a focus on nationalist movements.
Bannon’s call for “seizing the institutions” has been a mainstay on his popular War Room podcast for months, but critics warn that his open embrace of the demand should not make it any less shocking or worrisome.
“He’s preparing his audience to see violence and institutional takeover as ‘necessary.’ And he’s counting on Democrats and independents being too divided or too polite to call it what it is,” warned Christopher Webb, a left-leaning political writer on his Substack page last month.
Bannon and his allies, continued Webb, “do not give a damn about the law, the Constitution, or democracy. They only care about control. And if we keep treating their words as ‘just talk,’ it will be too late when it stops being talk.”
He concluded: “This isn’t going to end well.”
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SEE SABOTAGE PUTIN PUPPET
10 25 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: IF YOUR GOAL WAS TO DESTROY AMERICA, HW WOULD IT LOOK DIFFERENT? UNREGULATED AI ARMS RACE ONE TECH LORD TO CONTROL ALL?
// WRIGHT OIL CEO KILL GREEN R&d CEDE SECTOR TO CHINA (ALSO HUMAN AID)
SPARKED BY
an 10 25
After President Donald Trump returned to the White House almost nine months ago, his administration carried out an aggressive campaign to downsize a range of federal government agencies. And it did so with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was led by Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk at the time.
Agencies ranging from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) were targeted for mass layoffs. Another was the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
In a Canary Media article republished by Mother Jones on October 16, journalist Maria Gallucci details the Trump Administration's push to eviscerate the Energy Department's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) — a move that might have killed a lot of job creation.
"The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was supposed to be a launchpad for ambitious projects to help America lead the way on cleaner power and manufacturing. Now, it's been reduced to a shell of itself," Gallucci explains. "As the Trump Administration slashes spending and fires workers across the federal government, the U.S. Department of Energy has emerged as one of the hardest-hit agencies — and perhaps no other of its divisions has been singled out as deliberately as OCED…. The situation is best summarized by the budget the White House has requested for OCED for the next fiscal year: $0."
According to Gallucci, this is a "dramatic reversal" from former President Joe Biden's energy policies.
"During the Biden Administration," Gallucci explains, "Congress endowed it with nearly $27 billion to try to scale up cutting-edge technologies that could curb planet-warming pollution from industrial facilities and power plants. Trump officials have, in recent months, hollowed out the office, canceling billions in previously issued awards for everything from low-carbon chemical manufacturing to rural energy resiliency, while also dismissing over three-quarters of its employees…. Experts and insiders warn that the tumult within OCED and the DOE more broadly is eroding the private sector's trust in the federal government and its ability to drive energy innovation."
Advait Arun of the Center for Public Enterprise told Gallucci that the Trump Administration "has really created a chilling effect on the willingness of future early-stage technology developers to work with the Department of Energy."
A former OCED staffer, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Gallucci, "We are eliminating ourselves as a leader in the clean energy space, especially for the industrial complex. What I'm seeing is China is about to slip right into that position. Just logically and economically, I don't understand the steps that are being taken."
*Read Maria Gallucci's full article at this Mother Jones link.
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10 25 an
SARASOTA, Fla. — Florida plans to end nearly a half-century of required childhood immunizations against diseases that have killed and maimed millions of children. Many critics of the decision, including doctors, are afraid to speak up against it.
With the support of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Sept. 3 announced his plan to end all school-age vaccination mandates in the state.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” he told a cheering crowd of vaccination foes in Tallahassee. “Who am I, as a government or anyone else,” he said, “to tell you what you should put in your body?”
History shows that mandates increase the use of vaccines. Lower vaccination rates will mean increased rates of diseases like measles, hepatitis, meningitis, and pneumonia — and even the return of diphtheria and polio. Many of these diseases threaten not just the unvaccinated but also those they come in contact with, including babies and older people with weakened immunity.
But that scientific fact is being left unsaid in Florida. Health officials have largely been silent in the face of Ladapo’s campaign — and not because they agree with him. The University of Florida muzzled infectious disease experts, said emeritus professor Doug Barrett, formerly the university’s chief of pediatrics and senior vice president for health affairs.
“They’re told not to speak to anyone without permission from supervisors,” he said. University spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment.
County-level Department of Health officials across the state got the same message, said John Sinnott, a retired professor at the University of South Florida who is friends with one of the county health leaders.
Sarasota County’s health department referred a reporter to state officials in Tallahassee, who responded with a statement that vaccines will “remain available” to families who want them. The state did not respond to other requests for comment or for an interview with Ladapo.
Many pediatricians are silent, too, at least in public.
“A lot of them don’t take a strong stance on whether kids need to be vaccinated,” said Neil Manimala, a urologist and the president-elect of the Hillsborough County Medical Association. “They don’t want to lose business. And there are enough anti-vax people who can lambaste you on Google, spreading stories about clinicians who ‘want to instill the poison jabs.’”
History of Modern Vaccine Mandates
Several states ended vaccination mandates early last century when smallpox was the only widely given vaccine, said historian Robert Johnston of the University of Illinois-Chicago. None has done so since other vaccines were added to the schedule. (Routine smallpox vaccination ended in 1972).
In the 1970s, persistent measles outbreaks provoked officials to strengthen child protection with enforced school mandates in every state. Today the partisan split on vaccine policy in the wake of the covid outbreak has changed the equation. This is nowhere more the case than in Florida, although legislators in Texas and Louisiana are also considering ending mandatory vaccination, and Idaho enables parents to get an exemption just by asking for it.
“This is really going to be a watershed moment for families who already were not sure they want to do vaccines and now are being told they don’t need them,” said Jennifer Takagishi, vice president of the Florida branch of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
It’s hard to know how fast vaccine-preventable diseases might return if Florida ends its mandates — or how the public will respond. Asked
whether his office had modeled disease outcomes before his September announcement, Ladapo said “Absolutely not.” Parental freedom of choice isn’t a scientific matter, he said. “It’s an issue of right and wrong.”
Ladapo’s Department of Health did not respond a month later when asked whether it was making contingency plans for outbreaks. During a 2024 measles outbreak in Broward County, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school, defying the science-supported advice from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 1977, a measles epidemic that killed two children in Los Angeles County spurred a dramatic crackdown on vaccine-shunning across the country. But during an epidemic this year that killed two Texas children and 14 people in Mexico, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed a bill making it easier for parents to opt out of getting required shots.
“When are we going to have enough of a groundswell of people dying or becoming severely ill that leads people to push back and say, ‘No, no, we want the vaccines?’” Takagishi said. “I don’t know if we know the tipping point yet.”
“I don’t have the answer,” said Emory University emeritus professor Walter Orenstein, who worked on measles for many of his 26 years at the CDC and led the agency’s immunization program from 1988 to 2004. “Measles resurgences created the political will to support our overall immunization program. For some reason it hasn’t worked this time. It’s just sad.”
Youngsters in Florida are already among the least vaccinated in the nation, because of relatively lax enforcement, the post-covid backlash against shots, and the libertarian attitude of state officials. Statewide, only about 89% of kindergartners are fully vaccinated, with Sarasota County having the lowest rate, at about 80%. To be safe from the spread of measles, a community must be 95% immunized.
With Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cutting vaccine research, filling the health agency with anti-vaccine activists and spreading doubt about vaccination’s safety and value, little stands in the way of decisions by Florida officials that are likely to cause rates to sink further.
Ladapo’s department is ending mandates for shots against hepatitis B, chickenpox, and the bacteria causing meningitis and pneumonia. Early next year, the Florida Legislature is expected to take up reversal of a 1977 law requiring kids at school and day care to be vaccinated against seven other diseases that can kill children: whooping cough, measles, polio, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus.
After Measles, Which Disease Returns Next?
In the face of these attacks, scientists are attempting to predict which diseases are likely to make a resurgence and when.
A study published in April by Stanford epidemiologist Mathew Kiang and colleagues estimated that even at current vaccination levels, measles, declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, is likely to become a routine illness again. If measles vaccination rates drop by an additional 10%, there could be an average of about 450,000 cases yearly, with hundreds of deaths and cases of brain damage.
But the study may exaggerate the threat, said Shaun Truelove, an epidemic disease modeler at Johns Hopkins University who said he’s worried about losing public trust with alarmist predictions. Still, he said, an intensification of measles outbreaks seems certain. The country is already in the midst of its worst measles year in three decades, with more than 1,500 cases and current outbreaks in South Carolina and Minnesota.
“You don’t really need to model measles if vaccines stop,” Truelove said. “In the pockets where there are outbreaks, every kid who isn’t vaccinated will get infected.”
Measles is the “canary in the coal mine” for other vaccine-preventable diseases, said Sal Anzalone, a pediatrician with Healthcare Network in Naples, Florida. “When you start seeing measles, there’s more to come behind that.”
People who want vaccinations will still be able to get them if mandates are eliminated, Ladapo has said.
But the state’s message confuses parents, especially the poor and underserved, Anzalone said. It’s typically hard for them to get children to appointments unless they have to, he said, noting that 80% of his patients are insured through Medicaid. If policies put more of the payment burden on parents, fewer will vaccinate, he said.
And if vaccinations fall and infections increase, children won’t be the only people affected. Cancer patients and people in Florida’s numerous elderly communities would be at risk. Schools and businesses would be disrupted. Disease could disrupt the tourism industry, which brought 143 million people to the state last year. (The Florida Chamber of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.)
“Infectious diseases don’t stop with the people who say they are willing to bear the risk,” said Meagan Fitzpatrick, a University of Maryland vaccinologist. Because of their unpredictable spread, she said, “with an infectious disease, vaccination is never an individual choice.”
Clinicians fear that an end to mandates could allow hepatitis B, a chronic liver disease, to return with force, since an estimated 2 million Americans carry the virus. They also foresee a return to the days when infants with high fever had to undergo a painful and risky lumbar puncture and blood draw to rule out meningitis, as well as a blood infection caused by the bacteria Haemophilus influenzae type B that routine vaccination has prevented since the 1990s.
Barbara Loe Fisher, who co-founded the modern movement against vaccine mandates in the early 1980s after her son suffered a reaction to the pertussis vaccine then in use (and since replaced with a safer shot), is skeptical that Floridians will abandon vaccination en masse, despite the end to mandates.
Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, moved from Virginia to southwestern Florida in 2020. She said she believes that vaccine injuries are undercounted and that children are vaccinated without informed consent. She acknowledged that mandates have increased coverage but said their removal will increase trust in public health and medicine.
“It is time to allow biological products like vaccines to be subject to the law of supply and demand,” she said, “just like any other product sold in the marketplace.”
Sinnott, for his part, anticipates measles will come roaring back, along with intensified whooping cough, influenza, and covid outbreaks.
“They think nothing will happen. Maybe they’re right,” said Sinnott, the retired professor. “It’s an experiment.”
Polio could return, and that is not an abstraction for Sinnott, 77.
He was 7 years old when he contracted the disease, spending six months in a wheelchair. In recent years he’s suffered from post-polio syndrome — difficulty swallowing, and tightness and pain in his limbs.
The first polio vaccine was licensed in 1955, the year he got sick. “I remember one time my mother telling me, ‘The line was too long,’” he said.
Sinnott forgives his parents, and parents today who waver on vaccination. He’s less tolerant of certain public health leaders. They should know better, he said.
*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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an 10 25
ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl said MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon was communicating with President Donald Trump even as he sat in jail for contempt of Congress.
In his new book "Retribution," Karl reports Bannon managed to discreetly keep in touch with Trump and his camp during his 2024 prison stay through a "coded" system that allowed his daughter and top aide to pass along messages to Trump through the monitored email system he was allowed in prison.
"Bannon claims that an investigative officer at Danbury — an official he described as 'pure MAGA' — had warned him that his communications were being reviewed by 'Main Justice,' otherwise known as the Biden administration,” Karl wrote, according to ABC News.
"So he developed a coded system to let 'the girls' know which messages were to be passed on to Trump or to those around him, in particular the aide Boris Epshteyn: 'I had just a system to get to Boris, kind of in quasi-code, through [daughter Maureen] into [aide Grace Chong],' he said. Was there literally a code word? 'Well, we had — ' he began, before catching himself. 'I don’t — the Bureau of Prisons could go back through it. We had a way that they could get to him,'" Karl writes.
Karl reports Bannon remained an influence on Trump’s presidency after he was released from prison, and he was likely a source of Trump’s hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a controversial meeting earlier this year.
“In his book, Karl reported on a meeting of Trump's national security team shortly before Zelenskyy's visit to Washington in February where Trump stopped the meeting and asked then-national security adviser Michael Waltz to ‘get Steve Bannon’ on the phone,” ABC reports.
"Hey, Steve, I’ve got the boys here," Trump said. "I’m going to put you on speaker."
“Trump, keeping Bannon on speakerphone for half an hour, had the MAGA firebrand make his case to the national security team against the deal, and Zelenskyy, who he referred to as ‘that punk,’" according to ABC News.
“I f—— hate it," Bannon said, arguing that the deal "ties us to Ukraine."
"If that punk comes here, he’s going to want a security guarantee,” Bannon said of Zelenskyy to Trump and his top advisers. He told the group they "can’t trust Zelenskyy" or "any of the Europeans."
Karl claims in his book that the previously unreported conversation set the tone for Trump’s combative meeting in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy, which crumbled into a shouting match in front of reporters and international viewers.
“You’re not acting at all thankful,” Trump said to the Ukrainian leader, in contradiction of Zelenskyy thanking the U.S. profusely for weaponry and aid to defend itself against its Russian aggressor. Trump also accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with World War III,” despite Russia invading Ukraine in 2022.
Read the ABC News report at this link.
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OMFG
an 9 25
In between his highly publicized designation of Antifa as a domestic terror organization and his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, US President Donald Trump signed a little-reported national security memorandum that gives law enforcement new tools to target his critics.
Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Thursday. The directive, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” focuses exclusively on “anti-fascist” or left-wing activities, and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
“I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote in a piece raising alarm about the directive on Saturday.
Klippenstein argued that the memorandum was worrying on several fronts. For one, its focus on preventing crimes before they are committed opens the door to rights violations.
“In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report,” Klippenstein wrote.
For another, the memorandum casts a very wide net, targeting groups, individuals, funders, and “entities” and listing several protected beliefs as “indicia” of extremism.
These include:
- “Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;
- Support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
- Extremism on migration, race, and gender; and
- Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
What’s more, the memorandum entrusts enforcement to the FBI’s over 4,000-strong Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), which removes the legal challenges to directing the National Guard or other military forces to quash domestic dissent.
“For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level,” Klippenstein wrote.
The types of activities that will be targeted are also quite broad, with the document defining “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” as “domestic terrorist acts.”
The memorandum also targets any individual or group who might fund activity the administration deems terrorism and directs the Internal Revenue Service to “take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” which could be a means of threatening the status of nonprofits.
Finally, as Drop Site Newspointed out, the memo authorizes the attorney general to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations for the first time in US history.
“By targeting beliefs and protest activity, the directive positions dissent itself as a potential crime,” Drop Sitewrote.
The Trump administration’s focus on violence associated with left-wing beliefs and groups is not supported by the facts. National Institute of Justice data found that right-wing violence had led to 520 deaths since 1990 compared with 78 deaths due to left-wing violence. However, the administration removed that study from the Department of Justice website shortly after Charlie Kirk was killed, The Guardianreported earlier this month.
The administration’s efforts, while accelerated, build on processes that began during the US response to the September 11 attacks, as Klippenstein explained:
A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.
However, the Trump administration is expanding the War-on-Terror mandate with fewer guardrails.
“Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover ‘radicalism,‘” Klippenstein said, noting that the NSPM-7 breaks with post-Watergate national security documents by failing to mention the First Amendment rights to protest and organize.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is already eager to make use of the document.
“We are witnessing domestic terrorist sedition against the federal government,” he wrote on social media on Friday. “The JTTF has been dispatched by the Attorney General, pursuant to NSPM-7. All necessary resources will be utilized.”
In an interview with Greg Sargent for theNew Republic, Trump ally Steve Bannon confirmed that Miller and others in the administration were preparing to go after left-liberal groups and media whose criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could be interpreted as “goading” on violence against the agency.
Referring to Miller’s comments that calling ICE authoritarian incited violence and terrorism, Bannon responded, “Stephen Miller is correct—more importantly he’s in charge.
The threats of investigations put liberal and left-leaning organizations in a tough place. On the one hand, they want to prepare as best they can. On the other, they do not want to obey in advance.
“Officials at these groups tell me they must strike a balance between being clear-eyed about how bad this could get while not letting it discourage political activity,” Sargent wrote. “That latter form of surrender is exactly what Trump and Miller want. And under no circumstances should anybody willingly hand it over to them.”
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AN 8 25
FASCISM
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to a request from U.S. Senator John Cornyn to locate the Texas Democratic state lawmakers who exited the state in an effort to deny Republicans a quorum—part of a broader attempt to block Governor Greg Abbott and President Donald Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps and boost GOP-held House seats, the Texas Republican announced Thursday.
“We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities,” Senator Cornyn said in a statement that referred to the Texas Democrats as “supposed lawmakers.”
Axios reported that “Texas issued civil warrants for the Democratic lawmakers, but local law enforcement can’t make arrests outside the state.”
The Texas Democrats are in Illinois, according to that state’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker.
READ MORE: Governor Wants Maps to Reflect State’s ‘Christian Conservative Majority’ Says GOP Lawmaker
Legal and political experts are blasting the move.
“There’s literally no federal law applicable to this situation. None,” Governor Pritzker
Jessica Yellin on Wednesday, according to Axios.
“The key question here is on what grounds would the FBI be doing this,” wrote MSNBC Justice and Intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian. “What is the crime they are investigating? The FBI can’t just use its vast surveillance powers to locate random citizens. In fact, that’s what conservatives have long been so concerned about re FISA authorities.”
“This is a patently unlawful, unconstitutional abuse of federal power,” constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis said on Thursday.
READ MORE: Trump Revives Constitutionally Conflicting Census Overhaul Plan
“We are in a deeply dangerous, illiberal place in America when the federal government will deploy law enforcement to force state legislators to act on legislation that’s contrary to their conscience and an attempt to undermine free elections,” Kreis added.
The Atlantic’s Dr. Norman Ornstein, a political scientist, addressed Senator Cornyn: “John, I understand your need to tilt crazy right to counter your lunatic primary challenger. But calling on the FBI to act illegally and wrongly to go after Texas Democrats is beneath you, and simply shameful. You used to believe in the law and the Constitution.”
Asking what “criminal interest” the FBI could have in this, U.S. Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) called it “yet another disgusting partisan abuse of power by the FBI,” and said that “any agent asked to assist should refuse to do so.”
Watch video of Governor Pritzker below or at this link.
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OMFG
On Friday, April 25, far-right FBI Director Kash Patel announced that Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan has been arrested on federal obstruction charges for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant "evade arrest."
On X, formerly Twitter, Patel posted, "We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest…. Thankfully our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public."
A law enforcement official told ABC News that Dugan was arrested at the courthouse.
READ MORE:'Afraid' Trump 'will lose': Lawyers blast firms capitulating to Trump in scathing letter
According to MSNBC, Patel's tweet on Dugan was removed from X.
During an MSNBC appearance, attorney Temidayo Aganga-Williams told host José Díaz-Balart that the arrest of a judge was "unusual" but added, "I think it's going to be a pattern going forward…. I think it's only going to pick up."
Dugan's arrest is receiving plenty of reactions on X, formerly Twitter.
Some MAGA Republicans are applauding the arrest.
READ MORE:How to prepare for the uprising
John Fabbricatore, a former field officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tweeted, "Judge Hannah Dugan arrested by FBI for allegedly helping illegal alien 'evade arrest' by ICE. 'Lawfare' by these judges has to stop. This is a good start!"
Far-right MAGA radio host Benny Johnson posted, "Another rogue judge down. FAFO."
But others see Dugan's arrest as MAGA ramping up its authoritarian disdain for the rule of law.
Journalist Kristian Ramos tweeted, "I see we are now at 'arresting judges' on our path to autocracy.
"On Democracy" host Fred Wellman noted, "Marshalls appear to be confirming she was arrested and other news outlets are picking it up now."
X user Iron Goodman wrote, "This is a chilling escalation of federal overreach and raises serious questions about the scope of executive power versus judicial independence."
Another X user, Laura Okazaki, posted, "We must not look away while the feds take us another step into authoritarianism."
X user Hannah Martinez tweeted, "This is a deeply unsettling development with huge implications for the rule of law and potential abuses of power. The optics are disastrous."
READ MORE: 'Obama 2028' trends after official Trump store starts selling $50 'Trump 2028' hat
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OMFG
AN 3 125
As Americans face the reality of President Donald Trump's second term and the mass firings, takeover of federal agencies by billionaire mogul Elon Musk, and looming trade war that have come with it, the direct democracy advocacy group Fairness Project warned of a "major attack" on voters' rights taking place at the state level across the country.
While many in the U.S. have been focused on the actions of the Trump administration, said the group in a Thursday statement, legislators in over 15 states have introduced more than 100 bills to stop citizen-led initiatives from being placed on ballots in upcoming elections—and to stop them from becoming law even if a majority of voters support the measures.
"We're sounding the alarm: Direct democracy is being threatened right under our noses," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project. "Ballot measures have been a lifeline to working people in red and purple states, allowing them to make change even when politicians fail to represent their interests. Legislators are trying to systematically take that power away."
The Fairness Project has supported dozens of successful ballot measure campaigns to expand healthcare access, raise minimum wages, and win paid time off policies for roughly 18 million people across the country.
The group was the biggest funder of abortion rights ballot measures in the last election cycle, working to ensure campaigners in Missouri and Arizona collected enough signatures to get questions about expanding abortion rights on ballots. Both ballot initiatives were approved by voters in November.
The Fairness Project was also involved in a 2023 campaign to stop a Republican-backed measure in Ohio that would have required a 60% supermajority to pass any future constitutional amendments.
In six of the states currently pushing attacks on ballot measures—Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho—Republicans are making similar attempts to raise the threshold for passing ballot measures from a simple majority to 60%.
If they succeed in passing the proposals, said the Fairness Project, the GOP will be "effectively enacting minority rule."
Lawmakers are also advancing bills that would apply onerous signature requirements to the ballot measure process.
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' proposed changes to ballot initiative laws include requiring individual voters to complete a petition in person at an election office or by mail in order to express support for a measure, instead of allowing sponsors to pay workers to collect signatures in public.
"They want to kill the process," Angelo Paparella, president of a group that has run several petition drives in the state, toldAxioslast month.
The Arkansas state Senate this month passed several bills regulating how citizen-led initiatives make it onto ballots, including one requiring canvassers to request a photo ID from signers; one requiring potential signers to read the ballot title of a petition or have it read aloud to them; and one requiring canvassers to file an affidavit certifying they complied with state law when collecting signatures.
"This is their playbook: When cowardly politicians know they can't win with voters on the issues, they try to change the rules of the game," Hall said Thursday.
Earlier this week, Mississippi voters once again lost out on the chance to place measures on statewide ballots, which was permitted in the state until the state Supreme Court struck down the ballot initiative process in 2021.
Lawmakers allowed a proposal to partially restore the process to die ahead of a legislative deadline.
"This means voters still have no direct way to propose new state laws, to change state laws, or to change the Constitution," reported Taylor Vance of Mississippi Today.
Hall said the Fairness Project will continue fighting attacks on representative direct democracy nationwide.
"Voters are paying attention to this widespread attack on their constitutional rights, and they're fighting back," said Hall. "Americans deserve leaders who respect our democracy."
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OMFG
HEGSETH JDV DUMP ON NATO, NOT PUTIN BUT ENEMY WITHIN, BOOST AFD NAZI
PUTIN WAR CRIMINAL INVITED TO WHITE HOUSE, UKRAINE TO BLAME FOR WAR, ZELENSKY A DICTATOR?!
AN 2 25
Trump was able to be elected president a second time partly by mobilizing his base of Christian nationalists. This anti-Democratic group has an “us vs. them” mentality, believing that America is on the verge of an apocalypse and that they are being persecuted. In her new book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy," journalist Katherine Stewart investigates this voter base. Salon published an interview with her Tuesday.
This subculture, Stewart argues, believes America should move past democracy. “They believe the U.S. is not founded on principles, but on a specific religious and cultural heritage,” she said. “They argue America is on the brink of an apocalypse, owing to the rise of equality and what they call ‘wokeness.’ They argue democracy, as a system, isn't sufficient to meet the ‘challenges’ of feminism and equality. They believe the democratic rules no longer apply, because we're facing this absolute apocalypse of equality. They want an authoritarian leader who puts himself above the law, who's going to seize the reins of power and scrap the rule of law in favor of the iron fist.”
One of the three major tenants of this mindset is the belief that the country is nearing an apocalypse.
READ MORE:'A lot of MAGA': 20 million Americans could lose health coverage under new GOP bill
“This is what authoritarian leaders do,” she explained. “Christian nationalism is not just an ideology. It's also not just a political movement. It's a mindset… First is ‘us versus them’ or ‘pure versus the impure,’ or those who properly ‘belong’ in the country, and those who do not. Second, there's a sense of persecution. They claim white conservative Christians are being persecuted more than any other group in society. Third is the sense that we're facing an apocalypse. They share this view with the new right. It's always, ‘If we don't win this election, we're gonna go under the control of the Illuminati and the devil's gonna be controlling us for hundreds of years. So it's any means necessary to ‘save’ us from this terrible fate.”
“Those three ideas,” she continued, “clear the way for the acceptance of an authoritarian leader, someone who doesn't respect the rules, who will punish their enemies, and who will suspend the rule of law. If you look at what's happening in our politics today, you can see it playing out before our eyes. In the first weeks of the Trump presidency, we're seeing a version of Project 2025. They've been telling us for a long time they're going to smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. That's what they're doing.”
But the members of this group have been “colossally misinformed.”
“Many of these supporters don't recognize that American democracy might be destroyed. Some don't care. They think it's more important to put a strong man in power to demolish the supposedly dangerous radical left. But whether they don't care or don't know, it's because they've been colossally misinformed. That's how they rationalize their choices at the ballot box. And I would have to say this is not just about Trump. Authoritarianism loves a misinformed public. The anti-democratic movement has funded this massive propaganda campaign that has led us to where we are today,” she said.
READ MORE:'Revoltingly un-American': Internet erupts after Trump posts photo crowning himself 'king'
Here is an excerpt from the book, published by Rolling Stone:
“Power has not softened the base of this movement. It’s not just blood that they’re after; they want a show. This is the thing that Trump surely understands best. Policy simply doesn’t matter. You can kill off grandma through vaccine denial, take away health insurance, bust unions, drive up inflation, and reward your billionaire friends with policies that benefit their bloated bottom lines. None of that matters as long as you give the people the pleasure of a good performance, where they can project their frustrations and resentments on the targets they have been trained to hate.”
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START
DISRUPTER primary 3 24 on bannon
main chaos disruption is mostly about real stability in physical world, eg ~ global weirding but
this is more about abstraction/ideas social system as of 11/20
see bannon trump admin state
see boom bust oscillation
hype fear/ anger to justify fascism urban migrant biden crime 2 24
tobacco fossil fuel want tosow doubt
putin wants to disrupt faith in elections
inequality --> instability, polarization --> demonization --> violence
gop rw wants to create doubt on ability of gov't to function
===
an 12 24
At least 27 House Republicans are urging President-elect Donald Trump to end the Internal Revenue Service's Direct File program as soon as he returns to the White House and begins his second term. But Direct File also has plenty of supporters, including MSNBC's Hayes Brown.
In an opinion column published on December 15, Brown argues that House Republicans have a motivation for wanting to abolish Direct File: making it more "painful" for Americans to file their taxes.
"In the fall of 2023, the Internal Revenue Service announced a pilot program that would allow some Americans to file their taxes directly to the agency — for free," Brown explains. "The Direct File service managed to go against at least a half-dozen federal government stereotypes: it was new and novel in a system that loathes change, it allowed people to be more efficient with their time, and the people who used it this past tax season had plenty of good things to say about their experience."
READ MORE:[New Kristi Noem proposal would fund Christian ‘segregation academies’
Brown adds, "In May, the IRS said the program would be expanded and made permanent. But of course, there are Republicans who would like nothing more than to strangle a popular government initiative in its cradle."
According to Brown, House Republicans who oppose Direct File believe that abolishing the program will make it easier for their party to carry out tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
"The more friction in the system, the more visible of a target the IRS becomes for average Americans," Brown explains. "The more people who are frustrated with the IRS, the better their case for cutting even more taxes for the wealthy. It also doesn't hurt to be in the good graces of massive tax preparation companies like Intuit, which have spent years and millions of dollars to ensure that filing taxes is as painful a process as possible. Among the reforms they blocked was a plan to go further than Direct File, letting many taxpayers file pre-populated forms for free."
Brown continues, "The net effect is that there's no upside to murdering Direct File ahead of tax season beyond making the federal government less responsive and useful in the eyes of Americans. Republicans can falsely claim that they're trying to save taxpayers' money from the clutches of the IRS. It's clear what they're really trying to claw back is a massive refund of Americans’ time and energy in the name of making everything a little bit worse."
READ MORE:['Trump ’28': Bannon calls for third term
*Hayes Brown's full MSNBC opinion column is available at this link.
ref 1 biz insider
- IRS has gradually rolled out a program to allow Americans to directly file taxes with the IRS.
- It's designed to make filing taxes simpler and easier.
- A group of Republicans want Donald Trump to end it, saying it's government overreach.
More than two dozen House Republicans are asking President-elect Donald Trump to terminate the Internal Revenue Service's free direct tax-filing system as soon as day one of his presidency.
Republican Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina sent a letter to the president-elect on Tuesday urging him to end the program via executive order, saying it posed a "threat to taxpayers' freedom from government overreach."
The letter was signed by 27 other Republicans and is also addressed to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leads of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The program came about as the result of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $15 million in funding to study the creation of a website allowing Americans to directly file their taxes to the IRS for free. That led to the rollout of a pilot program that was available in 12 states last year and is set to expand to 24 states in 2025.
A spokesperson for the IRS didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many Americans rely on tax-prep companies such as TurboTax and H&R Block to do their taxes each year. The new program is designed to compete with those programs and make filing easier and less costly for Americans.
Smith and Edwards argued in their letter that the program represented a conflict of interest for the IRS — that the agency shouldn't be in charge of both assessing taxes and enforcing them. The duo wrote that the agency "has little incentive to ensure hardworking Americans do not pay more than they owe in taxes."
They also cast the free Direct File program as an example of the "weaponization of government against Americans," a long-standing focus of Trump and the MAGA-aligned right.
It's unclear whether Trump will take the lawmakers up on their request, and the Trump-Vance transition didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Republicans have broadly sought to roll back the $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, saying it will be used to enable the agency to target conservatives and ordinary taxpayers.
ref 2
MOFO BIZZARROWORLD
Smith, Edwards, Colleagues Call for Day-One Elimination of IRS Direct File
December 10, 2024
Washington, D.C. - Today, Congressman Adrian Smith (R-NE) and Chuck Edwards (R-NC) along with 27 House colleagues sent a letter asking President Trump to immediately end the IRS' unlawful Direct File pilot program upon taking office in January. Copies of the letter were addressed to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump's selections to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as well as Treasury Secretary-Designee Scott Bessent, and Trump's selection to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought.
Cosigners of the letter include:
Reps. Mike Kelly (R-PA), Carol Miller (R-WV), Mark Alford (R-MO), Rick Allen (R-GA), Don Bacon (R-NE), Vern Buchanan (R-FL), Mike Carey (R-OH), Ron Estes (R-KS), Michelle Fischbach (R-MN), Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Kevin Hern (R-OK) Erin Houchin (R-IN), Young Kim (R-CA), David Kustoff (R-TN), Darin LaHood (R-IL), Greg Murphy (R-NC), August Pfluger (R-TX), Keith Self (R-TX), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Greg Steube (R-FL), Claudia Tenney (R-NY), William Timmons (R-SC), Beth Van Duyne (R-TX), Steve Womack (R-AR), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Nathaniel Moran (R-TX), and Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY)
In the letter the members said:
"We write to urge you to take immediate action, including a day-one executive order, to end the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) unauthorized and wasteful Direct File pilot program. The program’s creation and ongoing expansion pose a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach, and its shaky rollout and structural flaws have already come at a steep price.
...
"This is deeply concerning and a clear conflict of interest.
...
"Under the Biden-Harris administration, the IRS has undertaken an aggressive expansion of its influence, fueled by the exorbitant $80 billion provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, in which it has repeatedly overstepped its authority and targeted hardworking Americans with audits...Even prior, the IRS has a long record of abusing its authority to target political opponents.
How can we entrust the IRS to responsibly prepare and enforce taxes when it has encroached on Americans’ individual liberties at every opportunity? And how can we trust future administrations to not do as the Biden-Harris administration has done in wielding the IRS as a tool to silence political opponents and control private citizens? We should act now to end Direct File to protect Americans from further overreach.
...
"Instead of Direct File, the IRS should be focused on improving its functionality and service to American taxpayers. Under the Biden-Harris administration, Americans experienced significant delays in receiving their tax returns, and the agency has failed to reduce the federal deficit despite the bloated enforcement funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. The agency’s existing issues will only be compounded by an expanded Direct File venture..."
Read the full letter here.
BACKGROUND:
Smith and Edwards introduced legislation in July of this year to terminate the IRS’s unauthorized Direct File program. Smith also introduced legislation, passed by the House in January 2023, to repeal the Biden-Harris administration’s $80 billion IRS expansion.
an 3 24
according to Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon will have an outsized influence on a second Trump administration despite no longer being a key architect of his rise.
In a deep dive into Bannon's strong influence on the MAGA movement, Wilson told the Guardian's David Smith that Bannon is a great believer in sowing "chaos" to achieve his goals and his ramping up his rhetoric as the former president makes his third bid for the Oval Office should set off alarms.
With Smith reporting Bannon harped on Trump winning the 2020 presidential election before an enraptured crowd at CPAC recently, he added, "It was a blunt reminder that Bannon, an architect of Trumpism variously compared to Thomas Cromwell, Rasputin and Joseph Goebbels, remains a potent force in American politics as the 2024 US presidential election looms into view and the re-election of Trump looks a clear possibility."
With that in mind, Smith suggested Bannon would cast " a long shadow" over a second Trump administration.
Former GOP strategist Wilson agreed.
“Steve Bannon is a if not the primary spiritual and intellectual force of this nationalist movement that is in control of the Republican party," he explained. "He is a very powerful figure in today’s GOP [Grand Old Party] and it is inescapable in some ways that he will play a central role in whatever Trump administration emerges if Trump wins. He is the architect. As an avowed Leninist, he is a guy who is trying to engineer the revolution in his image.”
Continuing in that vein, he was asked what Bannon likely has in mind for a second Trump go-around.
“Concentration camps," he replied. "This guy keeps saying out loud they’re the enemies of the people, our opponents are deserve what they get, this hyperbolic rhetoric. He believes in power and chaos and will do whatever he can if he gets it. Whatever he could get away with in that circumstance, he will get away with it.”ENDIT
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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/decade-russian-infowar-republicans-weird/
alternet no lnx 2 24
A decade of Russian infowar has made Republicans weird
President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation hold a joint press conference | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks).
John Stoehr February 29, 2024
There’s a clip going around featuring Malcolm Trumbull, the former prime minister of Australia, describing for a home audience the few times he witnessed Donald Trump interacting with Vladimir Putin. He said: “When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team – ‘my hero!’ It is really creepy. It’s really creepy. … It struck everybody. You could touch it. The creepiness was palpable.”
I’ll leave it to worthies steeped in international relations to discuss the ramifications of a former leader of one of America’s closest allies defenestrating Trump’s great claim that all the world respects him.
For me, I’m interested in that adjective, “creepy,” and its cognates – “strange,” “weird,” “not normal,” and so on – because I’m going to suggest two things. One, that we are hearing those words applied to Trump and the Republicans with greater frequency by Americans rooted in mainstream culture. And two, that the more their behavior is called “creepy,” “weird,” etc, the more they are going to appear, to Americans rooted in mainstream culture, to be virtually foreign.
When you think about it, that makes sense.
As I said in yesterday’s edition, the Russian government has, more or less, been waging nonstop information warfare against the United States since at least 2015. During that time, Donald Trump and the Republicans have eaten, digested and metabolized practically all of it.
Their views are nearly indistinguishable from Vladimir Putin’s. State governments run by Republicans are increasingly Russian in practice. (“They have banned books, censored speech, outlawed history, suppressed individual expression and, therefore, individual liberty,” I said. “If they have not used the power of the state to control their populations, they have empowered snitches and vigilantes to reach the same goal.”) The heart of the GOP’s impeachment inquiry is a Kremlin lie. “Basically, the Republicans have become synonymous for [the] Russians at this point,” said Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.
I called this the transmogrification of the Republican Party. To see how thorough, complete and total that process has gotten, watch this clip. An MSNBC reporter asked Trump supporters for their thoughts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s threat to democratic Eastern Europe. After watching it, you may be reminded of this piece I wrote in September summarizing the Russo-Republican perspective:
'According to the rightwing view, Ukraine is not a democracy. It is a corrupt regime undeserving of aid. Moreover, it’s an enemy. Among other things, it colluded with Democrat Hillary Clinton in a scheme to undermine US sovereignty and defraud the American people in the 2016 election. The plan was thwarted by the victory of Donald Trump.'
'The rightwing view insists, moreover, that Donald Trump, as president, attempted to expose Ukraine’s corruption in 2019 when he demanded an investigation into then-former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, according to this view, abused his office and corrupted US foreign policy in 2016 in order to enrich himself and his son, Hunter Biden.'
That’s upside down, backward and prolapsed.
It’s also weird.
Consider that the president ordered and ate an ice cream cone recently. In response, Fox host Jesse Watters suggested not only that Biden has dementia, on account of people with dementia enjoying the taste of ice cream, but that he’s unmanly. “A grown man, especially the president, should not be licking ice cream in public.” (Watters also said a grown man should not eat soup in public. “It’s not a good look.”)
On the one hand, this was an attempt to “infantilize” the president. Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on authoritarian rhetoric, said last night it’s “another way of saying he’s weak and not a Übermensch. He’s not trying to be an overlord strongman. He’s trying to be a president. Ice cream is delicious and eating it is democratic. Fascists gonna fash.”
On the other, this is just weird. “I've said it before: rightwingers are the biggest weirdos,” one person said on Twitter. “It truly sounds awkward, like ‘decadent Westernized male degrades manhood with frozen treats,’” another quipped. James Surowiecki, formerly of The New Yorker and currently of The Yale Review, put the ice cream thing in context. “In the past four weeks, high-profile rightwingers have come out against adults eating ice cream, IVF, recreational sex, Taylor Swift, and the NFL. They're so in tune with mainstream Americans.”
Surowiecki was joking, of course. The Republicans and their media allies are not in tune with mainstream Americans. They don’t like people having abortions. They don’t like in vitro fertilization. They don’t like birth control. They don’t like a self-made female billionaires dating Super Bowl-winning football players. And they don’t like grown men eating ice cream cones in public. (Or soup). They, like Mother Russia, don’t like things that don’t fit into a human society ordered vertically – with straight white Christian men dominating the top.
These people are so far outside mainstream American culture that those on the inside might legitimately ask: “Wait, you’re not from around here, are you?” “The creepiness was palpable,” Trumbull said.
He’s right.
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federal overreach a kind of legal suppression, SEE RAGA
omg bizz 1 24 there is no pushback on this but dem admin DOJ and maybe good appellate circuit?!
SEE LEGAL SUPPRESSION
SEE NO ASYMMETRY
1 24 TRUMP SAYS HE WILL BE DICTATOR FOR A DAY, DRILL AND BORDER
with polarysis, esp with gop openly stated goal to make obama a one term president by gridlock, he had to move to executive order; neo-con had spend decades building up unitary /imperial presidency (nixon, if the prez does it, it is by def legal]see hypocrisy
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creating hype /violence by denouncing ? see bizzaro rubber glue reverse, projection on projection 12 23
mma 12 23
tasteful grey streak for gravitas?
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Tulsi, you're saying they're inviting someone to take a shot at Trump. I think you're right.
TULSI GABBARD (GUEST): Yes, this is what is dangerous. They're sending a message to a rogue actor, a lone wolf saying, "Hey, we need someone to save our country from this modern day Hitler-like person." And that is what should alarm every single American. This is not how the United States of America is. This is not who we are. And, yet, this is what these people in positions of power are doing and abusing their power and undermining our democracy, cause in their minds the end justifies the means.
INGRAHAM (HOST): I am terrified for our country right now, given that type of rhetoric. I mean, unlike the left, we don't believe in censoring people's speech, but by doing what they're doing and saying what they're saying, they can talk about dog whistles, that's a dog whistle to violence. If Hitler is in waiting, then you've got to stop Hitler. AND THEREFORE WHAT?
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bizzaroworld:
rubber glue
projection of projection
an 12 23
fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Sunday called for an "honest conversation" about how Democrats should be considered "communists and fascists."
During a discussion about Donald Trump's campaign stops in Iowa, Campos-Duffy praised Trumpfor attacking Democrats.
"As the Democrats have sort of removed the mask of who they are — and we've seen it on display in many ways, especially over the last couple months through these protests — I love that he is just naming it out, calling them communists and fascists," she said. "Let's just have a really blunt, honest conversation about what are the choices in this election."
"I like the phrase, the destroyers of democracy," co-host Will Cain added. "Now, listen, I don't know if it's a matter of human nature, but I definitely know it's a matter of political strategy, that the left has engaged successfully for a good half a decade now of accusing their opponents of the sins which they are committing."
"What they have done is demonize others for the things that they are secretly doing," he added. "And it's been revealed to itself as well through this lens of, you're a threat to democracy."
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mma 8 23
CAN'T MAKE IT UP
One of the funders behind Sound of Freedom, an anti-trafficking film that was widely embraced by right-wing media this summer, was arrested in July on felony child kidnapping charges, according to Newsweek and a Missouri court website.
Fabian Marta appears to have referred to himself as an “angel investor” in the film, according to a screenshot of a since-deleted Facebook post. (Media Matters has not independently verified the Facebook post.)
Newsweek reported:
Fabian Marta was charged with felony child kidnapping in July, while since-removed Facebook posts appear to show the same person revealing their pride in funding the film. Marta's name appears in the movie's credits among the "investors [who] helped bring Sound of Freedom to theaters."
…
St. Louis Metropolitan Police confirmed to Newsweek that Marta, 51, from Chesterfield, Missouri, was charged on July 21, and was arrested on July 23.
Police also provided a booking photo of Marta, which appears to show the same person pictured on a Facebook account of the same name. Screenshots of since-removed posts from multiple online sources, seen by Newsweek but which could not be independently verified, show Marta speaking about his involvement with the film.
Sound of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel, who pushed several QAnon conspiracy theories while promoting the film earlier this summer. Caviezel claimed that centralized cabals of pedophiles were torturing trafficked children to extract adrenochrome from them — what’s known in QAnon jargon as the “adrenochrome empire.” He additionally said Ukrainian biolabs were involved in the conspiracy and that the CIA and FBI were implicated in a cover-up.
Marta’s arrest isn’t the only controversy surrounding the film, which is based on the life of Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard. Ballard has long claimed that his organization saves children from trafficking rings, but critics allege that most of OUR’s work has been in service of glorifying Ballard and building his brand.
Following the film’s release, Ballard and OUR parted ways “after an internal investigation into claims made against him by multiple employees,” according to Vice News. Ballard was later removed as CEO of TheNazarene Fund, an anti-trafficking group funded by Glenn Beck. He had previously been ousted from the same position in 2021.
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indict jan 6
// rudy rubber invert 8 23 ingram deflect to biden
https://www.mediamatters.org/dick-morris/newsmax-contributor-vote-against-donald-trump-endorse-dictatorship
[[===
OMG evil crypto
https://www.alternet.org/gop-megadonor-citizen-ballot-initiatives/
https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/23/foundation-government-accountability-democracy
an 6 23
no lnx
This GOP megadonor is funding efforts to 'derail citizen-led ballot initiatives': report
Alex HendersonJune 23, 2023
Over the years, Illinois-based shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been major donors to the Republican Party. And these days, they have a preference for far-right MAGA candidates, including 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (who lost by double digits to Democratic now-Gov. Josh Shapiro).
In 2023, The Guardian reports, Richard Uihlein has been a major funder of a Florida-based group known as theFoundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — who are trying to make it more difficult to get initiatives on ballots.
The Guardian's Brendan Fischer, in an article published June 23, reports, "These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41 percent of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59 percent."
READ MORE: 'A stark illustration of our broken campaign finance system': Here's how rich mega-doners hacked US politics
Fischer notes that in "at least four states," FGA has "lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule."
He then explains, "The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60 percent support from voters — rather than a simple majority — and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds…. FGA's tactics in Ohio echo those used previously — and unsuccessfully — in Arkansas and South Dakota."
In 2021, Fischer reports, FGA "issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60 percent requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process."
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The Guardian's full report is available at this link.
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Florida group primarily funded by an Illinois billionaire is driving the recent attacks on direct democracy in states such as Ohio, Missouri, South Dakota and Arkansas.
The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based group affiliated with the alliance of conservative thinktanks called the State Policy Network, has played a key role in recent efforts to raise the threshold for passing citizen ballot initiatives from a simple majority to a supermajority, and to make it harder to place measures on the ballot in the first place.
These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41% of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59%.
In at least four states, FGA and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule, and in some cases have financed ballot committees advocating for those changes. FGA has also issued reports, legal memos, op-eds and polling that advocate for gutting direct democracy.
The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60% support from voters – rather than a simple majority – and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds.
The controversial plan is designed to derail an abortion rights initiative expected to be on the ballot in November.
Deuel Ross, center, plaintiff’s counsel in Allen v Milligan, speaks with members of the press after oral arguments outside the supreme court on 4 October 2022.]
‘Historic and significant’: key lawyer’s verdict on Alabama supreme court ruling
Read more
When Ohio Republicans first proposed the supermajority requirement last year, a representative of FGA’s lobbying arm was the only person who testified in favor. FGA’s lobbying arm again testified in support of the proposal earlier this year, in hearings before the House and Senate. FGA argued that the proposal was necessary to“make it more difficult for out of state billionaires and dark money groups” to change Ohio law.
As the measure moved through Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature, the Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein gave $1.1m to the newly created “Save Our Constitution PAC”, which ran ads pressuring state lawmakers to support the measure; Uihlein is expected to contribute more as the August vote approaches.
A foundation controlled by Uihlein is also the largest known source of FGA’s funding, giving $17.6m since 2014. Uihlein has also been one of the key funders of election denial. Among other things, Uihlein has poured tens of millions into his “Restoration of America” network that promotes ludicrous election conspiracy theories and which created a controversial database that published voters’ personal information online in the name of uncovering election fraud. In the 2022 cycle, Dick Uihlein and his wife, Liz, were also top donors to election-denying candidates like the Pennsylvania gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano and Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant.
FGA itself began to focus on “election integrity” in 2021, and boasted that it “achieved more than 70 election integrity policy wins across 19 states” last year.
FGA has also been promoting a supermajority requirement in Ohio and other states since at least 2021.
That year, FGA issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60% requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process. FGA and its lobbying arm also began testifying in support of state efforts to make it harder to enact ballot measures, andits in-house polling firm released Ohio polling showing voter support for a 60% threshold and for placing other restrictions on the initiative process.
FGA’s tactics in Ohio echo those used previously – and unsuccessfully – in Arkansas and South Dakota.
In Arkansas last year, FGA’s lobbying arm produced a fact sheet, an op-ed and social media posts advocating for Issue 2, which would have raised the ballot initiative threshold to 60%. As the billionaire-backed dark money group warned of “shady groups funded by billionaires you’ve never heard of” pushing ballot measures in Arkansas, it also gave $65,000 to the ballot committee advocating for the supermajority requirement. Arkansas voters defeated the measure by 19 percentage points.
In South Dakota, a representative of FGA’s lobbying arm testified in February 2021 in support of HJR 5003, which would require 60% approval for constitutional amendments. The legislation passed and was placed on the June 2022 ballot, with a goal of thwarting a Medicaid expansion initiative slated for the November 2022 ballot. FGA’s lobbying arm then gave $50,000 to the ballot committee advocating for the supermajority requirement – but voters rejected the measure by 35 points. Later that year, South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion.
FGA has also pressed Missouri lawmakers to create new hurdles for the initiative process.In 2021, FGA’s lobbying arm released polling claiming to show public support for “initiative integrity”, then sent a letter to Missouri legislative leadership arguing for a supermajority requirement and other changes to the initiative process. “Without reform,” the letter warned, “[o]ut-of-state billionaires will continue to pump millions of dollars to [promote] destructive, leftist policies like Medicaid expansion.” The group testified in support of Missouri HJR 22 that year, which would have created new requirements for putting measures on the ballot.
FGA’s lobbying arm would go on to testify in support offour different Missouri proposals to erect barriers to the ballot initiative process in 2022, and four more similar proposals this year. The Missouri house passed a measure to raise the initiative threshold, but it unexpectedly failed in the state senate.
This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is deputy executive director with Documented
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for decades, Florida had a reputation for being an incredibly volatile swing state. Floridians often split their tickets, and President George W. Bush won the state twice before it went to President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Democrats and Republicans had to work extra hard with Florida voters because the Sunshine State was neither ultra-Democratic Massachusetts nor ultra-Republican Alabama.
But that was before the Ron DeSantis era, which has found Florida moving way to the right. Republicans now dominate all three branches of Florida's state government: executive, legislative and judicial.
In a report published on June 20, Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard and Josh Dawsey describe DeSantis and his allies' campaign to push the Florida Supreme Court way to the right.
READ MORE: Ron DeSantis accuses teachers of 'forcing' students to pick pronouns
"For decades, the ambitions of Florida's Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning (Florida) Supreme Court," Reinhard and Dawsey explain. "That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected. The Court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it's poised to rule on the governor's plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state."
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The reporters emphasize that theFlorida Supreme Court's "hard-right turn" was "by design" —and encouraged by the right-wing Federalist Society.
"DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court," according to Reinhard and Dawsey. "He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor's inauguration."
Leo, known for his many years as vice president of the Federalist Society, played a major role in the demise of Roe v. Wade. And Reinhard and Dawsey stress that Leo helped give Florida "one of the most conservative state supreme courts in the country."
READ MORE: Ron DeSantis vows to 'destroy leftism' and 'woke ideology' if elected president
"(DeSantis) repeatedly points to his overhaul of the state court as a sign of how he would approach the (federal) judiciary if elected (president)," the reporters note. "He has called Justice Clarence Thomas 'our greatest living justice' and pledged to move the U.S. Supreme Court even further to the right than President Donald Trump did."
READ MORE: 'Boxed in': Why Trump’s 2020 fixation is a 'fundamental problem' for Ron DeSantis
Read The Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/20/gov-ron-desantis-used-secretive-panel-flip-state-supreme-court/
Democracy in America
Election 2024
Gov. Ron DeSantis used secretive panel to flip state Supreme Court
Leonard Leo, the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority, led the advisers who helped DeSantis reshape the state court
By Beth Reinhard and Josh Dawsey
June 20, 2023
A day after taking office, Gov. Ron DeSantis announces that Barbara Lagoa will be appointed to the state Supreme Court. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
For decades, the ambitions of Florida’s Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court.
That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected.
The court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it’s poised to rule on the governor’s plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state.
The hard-right turn was by design. DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court. He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor’s inauguration.
“So what I do is I convene a group of people that I trust — some people in Florida, some people outside of the state who you would know, who I’m not going to say, because you know, it’s private,” DeSantis later said on a conservative podcast. “Then they put these candidates through the wringer.”
After taking office in January 2019, DeSantis appointed three new justices in two weeks, flipping the court from what he described as a 4-3 liberal majority to a 6-1 conservative advantage.
More recently, two justices appointed by past Republicans stepped down and took more lucrative jobs with allies of the governor, allowing DeSantis to handpick his own stalwarts.
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The governor’s efforts have yielded one of the most conservative state Supreme Courts in the country, reflecting Florida’s shift from a politically competitive state to a testing ground for culture warlegislation over immigration, race and sex education that is now at the heart of DeSantis’s presidential bid.
He repeatedly points to his overhaul of the state court as a sign of how he would approach the judiciary if elected. He hascalled Justice Clarence Thomas “our greatest living justice” and pledged to move the U.S. Supreme Court even further to the right than President Donald Trump did.
In Florida, the governor’s confidential vetting process for the high court was one of the earliest examples of what would become a signature tactic of his administration — testing the boundaries of executive authority, while defying protocols aimed at transparency and accountability. It also foreshadowed the governor’s allegiance to the Federalist Society, the organization led by Leo that worked behind the scenes at the national level to build the conservative Supreme Court supermajority that overturned the right to abortion.
Conservatives are winning the battle for America’s courts, a triumph decades in the making. This is how they did it. (Video: Dalton Bennett, Jesse Mesner-Hage, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
DeSantis’s “core is not the Bible. It’s not the Catholic Church. It’s the Federalist Society and its constitutionalist principles,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, a religious conservative group that closely monitors judicial appointments.
The governor is battling to keep private the names of the other advisers who worked with Leo in a court case that could have sweeping ramifications for access to government records in Florida. But people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential panel, confirmed several participants to The Washington Post. The elite group of conservatives included a former U.S. senator from Florida and Chris Kise, now a top member of Trump’s defense team in his classified records case. The panel grilled the judicial nominees about whether their principles matched those of the Federalist Society, which has pushed conservative and libertarian judges onto the nation’s courts through multimillion-dollar influence campaigns fueled by secret donors.
“That panel was truly unprecedented when you consider Florida’s tradition of government in the sunshine,” said Craig Waters, a lawyer who was the state Supreme Court’s spokesman for 35 years. “The result is a court that lacks diversity of viewpoints, and that’s very troubling in terms of checks and balances.”
DeSantis, who has denounced diversity initiatives in higher education and the corporate world, has nonetheless touted the gender and ethnic makeup of his judicial appointments, which have included two Hispanic men, two Hispanic women and one Black woman.
The governor’s office declined to answer questions from The Post about his judicial appointments and relationship with Leo. DeSantis has picked five of the seven justices currently on the court, the most of any governor in a generation. “A huge, huge legacy,” he said recently.
“As governor, Ron DeSantis took a state Supreme Court from being one of the worst in the country to probably one of the best in the country, if not the best,” Leo told The Post in a rare interview.
A shadow panel
DeSantis was at Harvard Law School when he joined the Federalist Society, a club founded in 1982 to challenge liberal ideology in legal academia. An archived page of the group’s website from the 2002-2003 school year shows a close-cropped “Ronald DeSantis” in a collared shirt among 22 first-year students.
Leo, the organization’s executive vice president at the time, came to speak to the group in April 2003, the site shows. It’s not clear whether DeSantis, who is now 44, attended, but the 58-year-old Leo has said they first met while DeSantis was a law student. They reconnected after DeSantis’s election to Congress in 2012; Leo donated to his campaign and helped fundraise for his leadership PAC, according to campaign records and an invitation obtained by The Post.
After DeSantis narrowly won election as governor in 2018, one of his first moves was to bring in Leo to help him replace the high court’s three most liberal justices, who were stepping down in accordance with the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70.
DeSantis’s approach departed from a process established in state law dating back to the 1970s, when a string of public corruption scandals led to the abolishment of “patronage committees” openly used by governors to install supporters on the court. Instead, nonpartisan judicial nominating commissions — with members chosen by the governor and the Florida Bar — were set up to screen applicants for circuit and appellate courts and make recommendations for appointments.
The changes ushered in a generally liberal state Supreme Court that lasted for decades. It rejected Republican proposals for taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools, expanded casino gambling and a 24-hour waiting period before abortions. A law signed by Gov. Jeb Bush (R) in 2001 broadened executive control over the commissions and weakened the bar’s role, laying the groundwork for a conservative takeover.
Flipping the court “reduced a roadblock to getting my legislative agenda to ‘stick,’” DeSantis wrote in his book, “The Courage to Be Free.” “For years, the old liberal court had acted less as a judicial body than as a political council of revision, blocking conservative policy enacted by the legislature.”
As governor-elect, DeSantis received a list of 11 nominees the judicial nominating commission had chosen from a pool of 59 applicants in the final weeks of Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s term. He and Scott had a chilly relationship from the outset, and the governor-elect didn’t yet trust the sitting governor’s commission or its choices, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential process.
So he turned to Leo for an ideological backstop. He had been a top adviser to Trump on judicial appointments, including for Supreme Court Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who helped lead DeSantis’s transition into office, said in an interview that DeSantis envisioned Leo leading a “concierge screening process” to recommend which of the 11 nominees to choose.
“It was just Ron and the Fed Soc crew, and they made it clear they didn’t need any other help,” Gaetz said. “Ron delighted in the intellectual heft Leo brought to the transition.”
Under Florida’s open government laws, the judicial nominating commission’s interviews with court applicants were advertised and open to the public. By contrast, when Leo and his unofficial panel met with the finalists in Orlando over two days in mid-December 2018, neither the press nor the public was invited.
DeSantis described to conservative podcaster Hugh Hewitt how the nominees faced Leo and the other advisers, who later offered their assessments: “They will go into a room, and you’ll have six or seven pretty big legal conservative heavyweights, and they have to answer questions. And I’m not there for that, but then I get debriefed by them, and then I’ll sit and do interviews with each individual candidate.”
Leo and the panel asked the finalists about interpreting the Constitution according to its original intent and without applying more-current social, political or cultural lenses, as the Federalist Society advocates, according to the people familiar with the process interviewed by The Post. Those principles of “originalism” and “textualism” have been cited by Federalist Society judges in courts across the country to strike down legal protections for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the LGBTQ community.
“The reason why I think that’s the right way to do it is because you have to have some objective measure to go by,” DeSantis said in a Federalist Society speech in late 2019. “It can’t just be flying off the seat of your pants philosophizing and imposing whatever idiosyncratic views you have on society under the guise of constitutional interpretation.”
Soon after his inauguration, with the panel’s recommendations in hand, DeSantis established a new conservative supermajority on the court at the same time Republicans dominated the state legislature.
The governor publicly acknowledged Leo’s involvement months later. Two of the early judicial appointments, Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck, confirmed Leo’s role in written testimony to Congress after Trump appointed them to a federal appeals court in 2019. Lagoa said Leo and the panel did not ask about how she would decide particular cases. “I do not know how that group was selected,” she wrote. Luck said he didn’t recall the questions from what he described as “an advisory committee” that included Leo.
After the governor’s office resisted disclosing the names of the other advisers, a lawsuit filed last fall accused DeSantis of breaching public records laws. In January, stateCircuit Judge Angela Dempsey accepted DeSantis’s claim of “executive privilege.”
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“To effectively discharge his constitutional duty, the Governor must be permitted to have access to candid advice in order to explore policy alternatives and reach appropriate decisions,” Dempsey said.
That ruling is being appealed. Government watchdogs worry that the governor could cite executive privilege to aggressively deny public records requests.
“We are entitled to know how the people on the court of last resort in the state of Florida, that hears the most important matters, were selected,” said Justin Hemlepp, a First Amendment lawyer representing the plaintiff.
But people familiar with the process identified a number of the panel’s members to The Post. They included Kise; George LeMieux, a former U.S. senator who is chairman of the board of a major Florida law firm; and Joe Jacquot, who served as deputy chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and went on to be general counsel to DeSantis. DeSantis in his book identified another participant he describes as a friend: Robert Giuffra, a nationally known litigator at a New York-based white-shoe law firm. Ben Gibson, a Tallahassee lawyer who has served as counsel to the Florida GOP, notes in his professional biography that he advised DeSantis on his first three judicial appointments as general counsel to the transition team.
The group’s backroom conversations with the nominees tainted the process, according to Mary Adkins, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who has studied the state Supreme Court. “If the public isn’t watching, we don’t know what kind of information they’re getting and passing along to the governor. So it kind of subverts the purpose” of the judicial nominating commissions, Adkins said.
Kise was the only adviser reached by The Post who would comment about the interviews. “The process was a very fair and effective process, and the governor selected three outstanding jurists,” Kise said.
Jason Unger, a Republican lawyer who led the official judicial nominating commission when DeSantis was elected, said he wasn’t aware at the time that DeSantis was also seeking advice from Leo and others. But he said that was the governor’s prerogative.
“It was perfectly normal and appropriate for him to reach out to lawyers he knew and respected to help with the vetting process,” said Unger, who served on the official commission from 2008 to 2019, under three governors.
Handpicking justices
Early in his first term, DeSantis had built the clear conservative majority he’d sought on the state Supreme Court. But with several justices appointed by his Republican predecessors still serving, it wasn’t fully DeSantis’s court yet.
That would soon change.
Justice Alan Lawson announced his departure in April 2022, shortly after his colleagues chose one of the governor’s new appointees for chief judge. Lawson, a Scott appointee, went on to launch a law firm with Jason Gonzalez, a top adviser to DeSantis on judicial appointments.
In a recent podcast interview, Gonzalez said Lawson told him he was among the first to know he was stepping down from the court.
“He gave me the opportunity to go tell the governor, which was a nice honor that he gave me,” Gonzalez said. “Of course, the governor gets to appoint his replacement. So I knew he’d be excited to know that.”
Gonzalez, who said in the podcast that he met DeSantis years ago through the Federalist Society, did not respond to requests for comment.
Lawson, 62, said in an email to The Post that after a long career in state government, he left the court of his own volition. “This was a very personal decision and was made without the pressure of any outside influence,” he said, adding that he decided to help start the firm after a three-month sabbatical.
DeSantis secured another opening when Justice Ricky Polston, 67, resigned this year — just a few months after seeking and winning a new six-year term, as judges appointed by the governor must periodically do to keep their seats. Polston, who had been appointed by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, was recruited to work as general counsel for the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. by its new chief executive, Tim Cerio. Cerio is also a DeSantis appointee to the judicial nominating commission, which would help pick Polston’s replacement. Polston declined to comment.
Cerio said in an interview that the governor and his allies had no role in his efforts to lure Polston off the court. “That was my idea. I recruited him,” he said.
DeSantis used Lawson’s retirement to install Renatha Francis, a Jamaican-born circuit judge he had tried to add two years earlier. In response to a legal challenge, the high court had unanimously rejected her because she had not been a Florida Bar member for 10 years as required. DeSantis allies point to the decision as evidence of the court’s independence.
The governor successfully added her to the court in 2022 after she had crossed the bar threshold.
In his book, DeSantis wrote about looking for judicial nominees unpopular with the professional bar, legal academia and the media. “I insisted on justices who were willing to reject theseelite influences, and I hoped for nominees who would relish defying them.”
Polston’s vacancy initially attracted only three applicants. Longtime prosecutor Victoria Avalon, who was among 15 applicants after the deadline was extended, bluntly told the commission in her May interview that the apparent lack of interest reflects a widespread impression that DeSantis had already settled on a favorite. “I am not throwing shade at the judiciary, but that is the perception on the street,” Avalon, who has unsuccessfully applied to be a judge several times, said in an interview.
Fred Karlinsky, the commission’s current chairman, declined to comment.
A conservative court
With its new right-of-center majority, the Florida Supreme Court has repeatedly enabled DeSantis’s political agenda — and soon will decide his legacy on abortion rights.
In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the governor proposed a congressional map that expanded the number of Republican-friendly seats and eliminated a northern Florida district represented by a Black Democrat. The map was challenged by voting rights groups that argued it would dilute the power of Black voters, but the court declined to interfere.
More recently, DeSantis signed a law reducing the number of jurors needed to recommend a death sentence to the lowest threshold of any state with capital punishment. The law followed a series of court decisions making it easier to impose the death penalty, including the reversal of a ruling requiring a unanimous jury.
The court also did away with long-standing protocols requiring judges to take courses in diversity and fairness, describing them as “overbroad” in a ruling at the same time the governor was cracking down on similar efforts in higher education.
Barbara Pariente, one of the three liberal justices who retired after DeSantis took office, blamed what she called the current court’s lack of “respect” for precedent on a clubby appointment process.
“Our method of selecting justices and other appellate judges has gone from a merit-based system to a much more political one that’s influenced by a view of judicial decision-making that favors those in power who are willing to agree with the governor’s agenda,” Pariente said.
But to hard-line conservatives like Stemberger, who worked for decades to replace what they viewed as the “activist” liberal majority with conservative justices rooted in the antiabortion movement, “it’s become the court of our dreams.”
Under DeSantis, the court has impaneled statewide grand juries useful to the governor as political ammunition. The juries are typically approved by the high court and overseen by a statewide prosecutor picked by theattorney general — currently Republican Ashley Moody, a DeSantis ally.
In 2019, DeSantis requested a grand jury to investigate security failures surrounding the 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school; he later cited its report in suspending four Democrats on the Broward County School Board. A 2023 grand jury report blasted President Biden’s immigration policies and laid the groundwork for more-stringent penalties DeSantis recently signed into law.
The governor last year requested a grand jury to probe alleged fraud by coronavirus vaccine manufacturers, arguing that the vaccines were falsely advertised as preventing transmission. In fact, the companies touted studies showing the shots were effective at blocking symptoms and preventing serious illness.
Previous governors sought grand juries to investigate more wide-ranging issues of insurance, health care and securities fraud, but the process has become more politicized under DeSantis, said Jacksonville lawyer Hank Coxe, a former Florida Bar president.
“The creation of the statewide grand jury system was to identify and eliminate organized criminal activity,” he said. “Its current use does the original legislative intent an injustice.”
In coming months, the court will rule on a law DeSantis signed last year that outlaws abortions after 15 weeks. A six-week ban he approved this year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade also hangs in the balance. For decades, the state court has affirmed that an unusually explicit privacy clause in the Florida Constitution protects the right to abortion. Even its chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, whose appointment by DeSantis was hailed by religious conservatives, once wrote that one purpose of the privacy amendment was to buttress the right to abortion.
“That case is going to be a very important indicator of where the court’s going,” said Neil Skene, author of a 2017 book on the high court. “It will be seismic in terms of abortion rights and women’s rights and to see how this court approaches the reversal of a major constitutional precedent.”
On the presidential campaign trail, the court makeover is a major talking point for DeSantis. “We now have the most conservative state Supreme Court in the United States,” he said to loud applause at a recent event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
DeSantis also has pointed to the judiciary to draw distinctions with the Republican front-runner. He said last month that unlike Trump, who could serve only one more term, he would “have the opportunity to fortify” a far-right court over eight years. And this month, he said he would one-up Trump’s appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I would say we’ll do better than that,” DeSantis told Hewitt in another podcast episode. “I respect the three appointees he did, but none of those three are at the same level of Justice Thomas and Justice [Samuel A.] Alito. I think they are the gold standard.”
CORRECTION
This story originally misstated Jason Gonzalez's past work with Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was an adviser on judicial appointments.
Alice Crites, Shawn Boburg and Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
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https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/
twenty or 30 years ago, most consumers of right-wing media didn't know what critical race theory (CRT) was. Many liberals and progressives, for that matter, were unfamiliar with CRT — a college-level African-American studies discipline that, in essence, argues that racism of the past affects present-day institutions.
But in recent years, CRT has become a major boogieman in right-wing media and among MAGA Republicans. MAGA pundits and politicians, according to their liberal critics, have weaponized the term CRT and used it to attack any book or article that makes them uncomfortable — be it "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" or Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."
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Scholar Stanley Kurtz is among the right-wing figures who has been railing against CRT, but his efforts go beyond trying to keep books out of public schools.
READ MORE: Why Texas Republicans’ crusade against 'woke civics' does students a huge disservice: report
Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small, in an article published by The 74 on May 2, emphasizes that Kurtz has "spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls 'woke civics.'" According to Lehrer-Small, Kurtz's "advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve 'direct communication' between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers."
The reporter notes, "At the core of Kurtz's activism is a central idea: that hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to 'school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions'…. Accurate or not, Kurtz's depiction of 'woke civics' is now being felt in America's classrooms."
Lehrer-Small adds, "When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for 'lobbying' or 'advocacy' at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced."
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The reporter notes some specific examples of Kurtz's influence. In 2022, for instance, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, according to Lehrer-Smalls, proposed a bipartisan bill that called for increasing grants for civics education. But the bill was "stopped in tracks" when Kurtz labeled it CRT. AndFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis "mimicked" Kurtz's messaging by claiming that the bill would "award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like critical race theory."
READ MORE: 'Censorial filters are unconstitutional': DeSantis' aim to control FL colleges' academic freedom worsens
Read Asher Lehrer-Small's full report for The 74 at this link. https://www.the74million.org/article/the-conservative-scholar-who-convinced-gop-lawmakers-civics-conceals-crt/
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// aha 90% of rw punditry is just take legit crit of rt and flip it eg:
rubber inverse bizarro: remember when the libs made us feel bad for killing whales, well it turns out that...
via rww
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/offshore-wind-moratorium-whale-deaths_n_642599d9e4b02a8d518d12f0
no pix lnx twt
federal officials have repeatedly stressed that there is no evidence linking offshore wind development along the East Coast to a recent string of whale deaths.
Regardless, GOP lawmakers are citing those deaths in an effort to ban offshore wind — the latest in a growing, misinformation-rich campaign to stymie a ballooning renewable energy sector that stands to compete with America’s powerful oil and gas industry.
:{:{“The current system in place has allowed offshore wind to move forward too quickly & too recklessly in an attempt to solidify the legacies of green new deal advocates,”Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) wrote in a Twitter thread last week. “They hurt the environment, raise energy prices, & will destroy existing industry.”}:
Van Drew is part of a group of Republicans who introduced a resolution this month that calls for an immediate federal moratorium on offshore wind leasing and construction activity pending the outcome of an investigation to “determine the true impacts” of this development.}:
The resolution specifically notes that 23 dead whales have washed up along the East Coast since December and accuses regulatory agencies of having “an unclear process for determining all contributing causes of death of whales through necropsies.”
Along with Van Drew, the measure currently has five other GOP co-sponsors: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (Ga.), Andy Harris (Md.), Chris Smith (N.J.), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Anthony D’Esposito (N.Y.).
[ pix Offshore wind energy opponents gather during a "Save the Whales" rally on Feb. 19 in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.]
To be clear, there are a lot of unknowns about how offshore wind will impact wildlife and marine ecosystems in the short and long term. Like all other offshore industries, wind development has the potential to disrupt and harm whales and otherwise negatively impact the ocean environment.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and independent scientists have for months been pushing back against sweeping claims that offshore wind activities, including sonar surveys, are to blame for recent whale deaths. Such misinformation has featured prominently on Fox News and other conservative media in recent months.
“When you think about this obsession with green energy — the argument is always like ‘oil and gas is so bad for the environment,’” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on her show March 10. “How ironic that what they are doing is almost certainly killing large swaths of the whale population.”
Greene, one of Congress’ proudest conspiracy theorists, has peddled similar nonsense. In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in February, she claimed — again, without evidence — that whales are washing up because of “wind farms that are being placed all over the ocean.”
“People are calling the alarms over how [wind farms] are not only killing unknown thousands of bird species but also causing whales to beach themselves at record numbers,” Greene said.
There are only two small wind farms in operation in U.S waters, one off the coast of Rhode Island and another off Virginia. Together, they have just seven turbines and a capacity of 42 megawatts.
More than a dozen other large-scale projects are in various stages of permitting and development, but none are currently under construction — a reality that makes the conservative narrative particularly deceitful.
As part of a broader climate agenda, the Biden administration set a goal of securing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes for a year and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. So far, it has granted final approval to two major offshore wind projects: the long-stalled Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, and South Fork Wind project off Rhode Island.
The recent whale strandings are part of what federal authorities have classified as an “unusual mortality event” that dates back to 2016.
“At this point, there is no evidence that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys,” reads an FAQ on the NOAA’s website.
Rather, officials have pointed to vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear— the two biggest human threats to whales, including humpbacks and the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.At least 190 humpback whales have died along the East Coast since 2016. Forty percent of the animals that underwent necropsies showed signs of being struck by a boat or an entanglement.
“Since December 1, 2022, injuries consistent with vessel strike were identified in many of the animals necropsied,” Lauren Gaches, spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries, told Inside Climate News this month.
Conservative lawmakers and media outlets are following the lead of fossil fuel-allied groups in exploiting whales to fight offshore wind. As HuffPost reported in November, anti-offshore wind groups, including some of the nation’s most hard-line climate change denial outfits, have branded themselves guardians of the endangered right whale as they threaten legal action against newly approved offshore wind projects.
:{:{}:
Meanwhile, these same groups have advocated for increased offshore drilling while remaining silent about the documented threats to whales posed by oil and gas development. The NOAA estimates that 22% of the population of the endangered Rice’s whale in the Gulf of Mexico was lost as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.}:
[The Block Island Wind Farm off Rhode Island is the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States.
Those groups include the Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, better known as CFACT,both of which have long histories of peddling climate change disinformation and cheerleading for the fossil fuel industry. In one of the more ironic and laughable moves of this anti-wind crusade, Peter Murphy, a senior fellow at CFACT, labeled the Biden administration “deniers” on par with the tobacco industry.
“As with the tabacco [sic] companies of yesteryear that disputed their product caused cancer, the Biden NOAA and climate-change cohorts are deniers, claiming there is ‘no evidence’ off-shore wind sites are harming whales,” Murphy wrote in a March 18 post to CFACT’s website, without presenting evidence to the contrary. “Rather, the agency attributes some of whale fatalities to ‘pre-mortem vessel strike,’ while conceding ‘more research is needed.’”
It is no secret that the tobacco and fossil fuel industries have a shared playbook for downplaying and dismissing the harm they have caused. In fact, a trove of documents compiled in 2016 by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, showed that tobacco and oil giants have worked collaboratively for over half a century, sharing marketing and advertising strategies, research institutes, PR firms and even scientists.
:{:{}:
CFACT is a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of conservative charities and nonprofits “focused on dispelling the myths of global warming,” according to its website. Between 1997 and 2007, CFACT received nearly $600,000 from oil giant ExxonMobil.}:
Few if any oil companies have done more to sow doubt about human-caused climate change than ExxonMobil.
In this July 31, 2010, file photo, a dolphin swims through an oil sheen from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off East Grand Terre Island, where the Gulf of Mexico meets Barataria Bay, on the Louisiana coast.
In his post, Murphy concluded that “at the very least, there needs to be a moratorium on construction of off-shore wind turbines, which from a climate perspective alone are ineffective and a colossal waste, and now hazardous to the largest mammals on the planet.”
:{:{}:
Three days later, Republicans introduced their resolution for an offshore wind moratorium.}:
Among other things, the resolution declares that “Atlantic coast offshore wind leases represent a transformative industrialization of vital environmental and maritime resources of the United States.”
There is no question wind farms will industrialize large swaths of U.S. waters. But one of the biggest threats to global ocean health is the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels. Oceans have absorbed an estimated 93% of the excess heat from human-caused climate change. This ocean warming has come with devastating impacts, from mass bleaching of coral reefs to the collapse of fisheries.
The NOAA notes on its website that whales, including the endangered right whale, are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as warming ocean temperatures impact the availability of zooplankton and other prey.
Without a herculean global effort to shift away from fossil fuels and halt planetary warming, scientists warn the impacts to the ocean and marine life will continue to mount.
“The percentage of animal species exposed to potentially dangerous conditions increases significantly the faster the world warms,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe tweeted this month, summarizing a finding of the latest United Nations climate report. “In general, ocean species like coral and tropical species are most at risk.”
Offshore wind could ultimately help rein in fossil fuel emissions and combat the global crisis — if disinformation doesn’t get in the way.
Media Matters, a media watchdog group, published a report last week that found that of the 288 Facebook posts from right-wing media in January and February that mentioned wind energy, a whopping 84% included unsubstantiated claims that offshore wind farms impact whale populations. The most popular post was a clip from Fox News’ Jesse Watterstitled “Wind Surveying is KILLING our Whales.”
Related
Republican Party
renewable energy
Whales
wind power
Climate Deniers Exploit Endangered Whales In Bid To Kill Offshore Wind
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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/guide-stew-peters-violent-rhetoric-white-nationalism-anti-lgbtq-bigotry-and
mma 3 23
stew Peters is a right-wing streamer and influencer who has hosted numerous Republican officials and helped spread viral misinformation. He is also a white nationalist who alleged that Black people are genetically prone to criminality; claimed that Jewish people control the media and Judaism is a “death cult built on the blood of murdered babies”; repeatedly attacked LGBTQ people with slurs and suggested that they be shot; and told his audience that politicians, pro-vaccine advocates, and journalists must be executed.
Additionally, Peters is a purveyor of bizarre and dangerous conspiracy theories, including those related to QAnon, COVID-19, Pizzagate, flat Earth, the Uvalde and Sandy Hook mass shootings, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Peters is the host of The Stew Peters Show and distributes other programs on his streaming network. In the past, he has worked as a bounty hunter and had run-ins with the law. Peters also attempted to be a rapper with no apparent success.
Numerous Republican politicians and officials have appeared on Peters’ show, including Reps. Paul Gosar, Bob Good, Pete Sessions, and Louie Gohmert; Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers; Trump lawyer Christina Bobb; Trump administration officials Kash Patel and Peter Navarro; Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward; Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin; failed Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake; and Florida Surgeon GeneralJoseph Ladapo.
Peters routinely spreads false information through his show and online, including through Rumble (over 500,000 followers), Twitter (over 240,000 followers) and Telegram (over 270,000 followers) accounts. He is also a regular guest on the right-wing channel One America News.
Stew Peters pushes for the executions of politicians, pro-vaccine advocates, and journalists
- On his program, Peters has discussed “potential punishments” including death sentences for “these traitors that have stolen our country." His show has run the text: “Indict. Try. Fry.”
- At a white supremacist conference in Florida last year, Peters said that Anthony Fauci should be “hanging by the end of a noose somewhere.”
- On Telegram, Peters wrote of promotions for the COVID-19 vaccine: “The journos, anchors and hosts that participated should be indicted, tried and fried.”
- Peters wrote of COVID-19 vaccines: “Hold criminal trials for anyone who invented, manufactured, mandated or any public figure that knowingly endorsed the use of these deadly injections. The only appropriate punishment for the harm they have caused is the death penalty. Indict them, try them and fry them.”
- Peters wrote of FBI agents who allegedly tried to silence Trump: “This is TREASON. They should be rounded up, INDICTED, TRIED and FRIED!”
- Peters wrote: “We need a candidate for president to run on a simple platform: round up Big Pharma, Big Tech and any politicians and/or global elites under American jurisdiction. Then Indict, Try, and Fry them at Nuremberg 2.0.”
- Peters wrote of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “Indict. Try. FRY!”
Stew Peters is a white nationalist who uses bigoted rhetoric: “Diversity isn’t America’s strength”; “white replacement operation taking place in America”; “Jews control Media”
- Peters spoke at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ 2022 conference, where he said that “America’s enemy is ‘Satan himself,’ who is ‘flooding our schools with blood libel against white people’ and allowing an ‘Islamic insurgency’ in Minneapolis.”
- On Telegram, Peters wrote: “Blacks commit the most violent crimes. PERIOD. This is an inarguable fact, and if you believe or repeat anything different, you’re lying.”
- While promoting the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory on his show, Peters stated: “If America replaces its existing population with foreigners who are more violent or less capable, then this country will suffer. … Diversity isn’t America’s strength.”
- Peters wrote: “Don’t let the press gaslight you. Don’t let them get away with ignoring the OBVIOUS white replacement operation taking place in America!”
- Peters wrote: “Watching the hockey game on TV, and I have not seen ONE commercial with white people in it. The great replacement is not ‘conspiracy.’”
- Peters on Black people and crime rates: “Some of it’s probably cultural. … Some of it’s probably genetic.”
- Peters has praised the white nationalist website VDare and hosted its editor, Peter Brimelow.
- Peters wrote: “CONFIRMED: Gay Mafia, Jews Control Media.”
- Attacking a Jewish politician’s defense of reproductive rights, Peters wrote that Judaism “is a death cult built on the blood of murdered babies”: “This woman, who is Jewish, says that banning abortion violates her religious liberty. I have to take her at her word.”
- Peters wrote that “the enemy” is funded by the Rothschilds: “The enemy has the funding of Pfizer and Moderna and The Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. … We are DEFEATING the dishonest globalist-funded evil ‘media’ and we have to keep our foot on the GAS!”
Stew Peters on LGBTQ people: “F------,” “I hate their -------,” “This country is run by a bunch of cuck f------”
- On Telegram, Peters wrote, “Regarding f------: I don’t hate the f------, I hate their f-------.”
- Peters: “This is nothing to worry about because when China attacks us, our new troops are fully trained in gender fluidity and f-- acceptance.”
- Peters stated: “Nobody has any freaking testicles. This country is run by a bunch of cuck f------, because we allow it.”
- Peters wrote, “There’s no such thing as a ‘gay Conservative’. There’s nothing ‘conservative’ about two men getting the mud-flaps dirty, going off-roading, pretending to be ‘married’ and buying a baby out of a woman’s womb. Real Conservatives fear God. God hates gay. So let’s stop debating this issue. Walk away from the homo life and repent, or don’t.”
- Peters claimed, “Fake Conservatives like Richard Grenell push homo propaganda in your face, claiming to be ‘followers of Christ’ while sexualizing your kids and hoping to orgasm with anal sex.”
- Peters complained: “Our Butt-Banging Transportation Secretary is pushing anti-white racism in the middle of the BIGGEST TRANSPORTATION & ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!”
- Discussing U.S. Soccer’s pro-LGBTQ uniform, Peters wrote: “God blew up two cities over this degeneracy and depravity. These fudge-packing, pillow-biting Hershey highway butt bandits are always the perverts that target our kids for grooming and pedophilia.” .
- Peters: “Monkey pox is a HOMO-hoax!”
- On Telegram, Peters posted a meme of someone smoking next to pointing a gun at another person with the text: “Smoking a f-- in Britain vs. smoking a f-- in America.”
Stew Peters’ conspiracy theories: QAnon, COVID snake venom, Pizzagate, Sandy Hook, flat Earth
- Peters produced the film These Little Ones, “which promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of pedophile elites kidnap children and drink their blood.” In promoting the film, Peters mentioned the QAnon-linked conspiracy theories “frazzledrip” and “adrenochrome.” He also recently invoked adrenochrome when falsely attacking former senior Clinton adviser John Podesta.
- Peters was behind the film Watch the Water, which “ridiculously claims that the coronavirus is not a virus, but a synthetic version of snake venom that evil forces are spreading through remdesivir, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and drinking water to ‘make you a hybrid of Satan.’”
- Peters was also behind the film Died Suddenly, which featured numerous debunked and ridiculous claims about vaccines supposedly causing sudden death as “part of a depopulation scheme by global elites.”
- Peters falsely claimed that “Monkeypox is a complete fake sham, just like COVID-19.”
- Decrying “the bioweapon genocide,” Peters wrote: “We all know that the COVID agenda, combined with catastrophic lockdowns and the dangerous and deadly shots, is the first phase of the Mark of the Beast system. Without question, this is the biggest threat facing humanity.”
- Peters claimed that the May 2022 Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting “was a CIA Psyop for Gun Control.”
- Peters is a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist who filmed outside of Comet Ping Pong. He’s written: “Pizza Gate is VERY real. The difference now, is that they aren’t hiding their evil. The Globalists have made it CLEAR that they are coming for your children. Now, we need to make it clear that we’re coming for THEM.”
- Peters is a flat Eartherwho wrote: “Since I have recently been considering this conundrum, I have not seen any evidence to suggest that there’s any truth to what NASA or the government has been telling me since birth. I don’t believe them. I will NOT be gaslighted into just believing a lie, or assuming something is truth just because it’s repeated relentlessly. If the ‘globe’ is ‘round’, someone is going to have to prove it to me. Just like ‘viruses’ are real, ‘vaccines’ are ‘safe’ and elections are ‘fair’.”
- Commenting on the Sandy Hook judgement against Alex Jones, who claimed the mass shooting was a hoax, Peters said: “We know that what Alex Jones has said is TRUE! The Globalist are SO AFRAID of him that they are trying to destroy him.”
- Peters has pushed conspiracy theories about the recent train derailment and environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.
- Peters is a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin and has pushed conspiracy theories related to his invasion of Ukraine, including claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “is a flaming gay, cross dressing, high heels-wearing bondage freak” who “happens to be a full-blown Nazi.”
- Peters has claimed that the war in Ukraine is being staged.
- Peters referred to the recent assault on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband as “Paul Pelosi’s violent homosexual sex-capade.”
- Peters claimed that NFL player Damar Hamlin appearing in public after he was injured during a game was actually “fake.”
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KOCH TUCKER INCUBATOR
http://redgreenandblue.org/2023/03/15/climate-disinformation-daily-caller/
Climate disinformation is what the Daily Caller DOES | Red, Green, and Blue
Red, Green, and Blue
Related · Daily Caller has a fact checker! (But is now run by Koch-trained career disinformer Michael Bastasch) · No, Marc Morano, nobody wants a ' ...
as internal text messages prove what most have long known about Fox News (that it’s a conservative propaganda machine posing as a news outlet), it’s important to remember that these days, Fox is hardly alone. While Murdoch’s Fox and Wall Street Journal are the unquestioned Big Leagues of right-wing disinformation, there’s a whole set of bush league outlets serving as training grounds.
By Climate Denier Roundup
The Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller is one of the primary examples of how Fox and the Koch-funded climate change counter-movement are intertwined.
Back when they were mostly Koch-funded, Koch-trained Michael Bastasch was regularly running climate disinformation featuring Koch-funded climate deniers. These days, their funding has diversified a bit thanks to Carlson’s feud with Kochs, though giving the Daily Caller money still appears to increase the odds of the outlet writing favorable content about you.
But Bastasch** returned last year as Managing Editor of the Daily Caller’s non-profit tax dodge foundation, after a stint at Fox News writing for election-lie-spreader Laura Ingraham.
Since his return, we’ve been watching closely to note any changes, and at this point can say it definitely appears that Bastasch is using his position to spread climate disinformation through multiple channels at the Caller, not just the “Big Tent” opinion vertical we noted last week.
In the past, most of the Caller’s climate disinfo would come from just one or two employees who appeared to be tasked with turning press releases from Koch cronies into “news” as their job on the “energy” beat (like Thomas Catenacci, who now works for, you guessed it, Fox News).
But these days, attacks on climate change science, policy, and experts have become a feature of coverage across the website and its various staffers.
It really stood out between 5 and 7 p.m. last Wednesday, when the Daily Caller published a triple-play of climate disinfo: defending a fossil-fuel loving white supremacist, cherry-picking climate change from a US National security assessment, and attacked environmentalists organizing on TikTok to #StopWillow.
The first was from “news and commentary writer” Brianna Lyman, who provided a short write-up framed as criticism of Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who “accused one of the witnesses of being racist.” Who, you might ask? Well, despite the fact that ‘who/what/where/why/when’ is a basic tenet of journalism, Lyman didn’t identify the person at the center of the House committee meeting, and in fact, described Bush as “criticizing the oil industry before turning her attention toward an unidentified witness.”
Which is an absolutely astonishing thing for a supposed journalist to write, because Congressional hearings are very easy to look up. Alex Epstein, one of the “so-called ‘energy experts’” called by Republicans, is who Rep. Bush called “a philosopher who has previously espoused white supremacist views,” before Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) interjected to try and censor her by calling for the comment to be removed from the Congressional record.
But naming Epstein would require doing actual reporting, and apparently all Lyman did was watch a video clip of the hearing (that she embedded in the story). If you’d like to see what real reporting of the hearing looks like, as opposed to someone running cover for a fellow traveler, Timothy Cama covered it for PoliticoPRO and named Alex Epstein right up front.
Roughly thirty-six minutes after Lyman’s article defending a racist was posted, the Daily ‘whoopsie we keep hiring racists‘ Caller published a piece on the US intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment. The headline of “reporter” Micaela Burrow’s coverage? “Intel Community Warns Fight Over Green Energy Tech Will Worsen Global Tensions.”
The 10-paragraph write-up quotes the assessment just twice to justify the story’s thrust that fighting climate change will somehow make the world more dangerous. That’s probably because the 40-page assessment only devotes 2 pages to climate, and then otherwise focuses on a bunch of things that the Daily Caller doesn’t spread disinfo about.
Finally, rounding out a very busy day for the Caller, “Associate Editor” Ailan Evans’ hit piece ran at 6:49, attacking the #StopWillow campaign on TikTok because one of the participating groups is funded by “a Swiss billionaire with a documented history of philanthropy and political donations, primarily to left-wing causes and candidates.” Though it’s dressed up as some sort of scandalous revelation, at no point does Evans attempt to explain how or why this is somehow bad.
But that’s the kind of training you get from the Daily Caller. Both Evans and current Fox Production Assistant Kendall Tietz were 2021 fellows of the Daily Caller’s American Journalism Institute, where they train the next generation of political hacks to pretend to be journalists.
So next time you hear about some bizarre disinformation, rank political propaganda, or shameless defense of racism on Fox News, remember that it’s not an accident, they’retrainedto be that awful. There’s a whole farm league of conservative propaganda shops like the Daily Caller — the frack-backed Daily Wire and Heritage‘s Daily Signal come to mind — and while they’d all oppose a Universal Basic Income as socialism, they’re proof that as long as would-be-journalists are willing to play ball for the highest bidder, they’ll never want for work.
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ref jun 2019
just the other day we talked about how Tucker Carlson questioned who the climate culprits are on his Koch-funded Daily Caller website. So we’re reluctant to go back to that well quite so soon, but a new post on the Caller’s website cannot go without comment.
The story is a clip and rehash of one of Carlson’s recent segments on his Fox News show, in which he attacks Koch Brothers and questions their undue influence over the Republican party. In the clip, Carlson hones in on criticisms that the Koch brothers are libertarian and that their philanthropic aims don’t reflect the wants and needs of everyday Republicans.
yes, you read that correctly. Tucker Carlson, whose Daily Callerwebsite received 84%of its funding from the Kochs in 2016 and close to a million dollars in 2017, railed against the Kochs’ influence. Keep in mind the website with over a thousand Koch stories, few if any of which are anything but bootlicking.
That said, in 2017 Koch money only made up 38% of the Caller’s funding. Its trajectory does seem to be moving away from Koch money as its primary means of support. Perhaps the website really is trying to break free from the Koch’s funding, or at least dilute its funder pool so it’s not quite so obvious that they exist as a propaganda tool for the Kochs’ interests. It launched a subscription program back in April, inviting readers to become a “Daily Caller Patriot” offering access to special content and removing ads. The invitation includes a clip of Carlson talking about his crusade against “big tech” for “censoring” “conservatives” over the little tinsy matter of propagating hate speech that is radicalizing white terrorists.
And that’s a big part of Carlson’s new rant against the Kochs: targeting their upcoming work with the Anti-Defamation League to combat online hate speech. Since we know full well that the Daily Caller has quite a history of “accidentally” propagating white nationalism, perhaps that’s why Carlson is stoking division between himself and his followers and his Koch funders. If they’re anti-hate speech, odds are they’ll follow the lead of all the advertisers who have pulled their support for Carlson’s Fox program.
So maybe this new change in heart in response to the Kochs pulling away from supporting the website, and Carlson is pulling the old “you can’t fire me because I quit.” Back in November of 2018, Washington Post columnist Radley Balko wrote that Koch officials told him that “the Kochs and their foundations more generally find the Daily Caller abhorrent, and feel the same way about Tucker Carlson. One added that he was particularly troubled by the way the site objectives women as clickbait.”
And while the Koch donors Balko spoke to made it clear they saw their investment in the Caller to be aimed at training new journalists with free-market ideology, the lead investigative journalist at the Caller, per Balko, “doesn't inspire confidence.” Balko, who had previously worked with the reporter, Richard Pollack, wrote that Pollack is “a Trump toady” who “doesn't understand libertarianism” and is “a crappy journalist” who “isn't particularly smart.” But Balko conceded that Pollack’s “most marketable skill seems to be the ability to fool people into believing he has marketable skills.”
The same could be said for Tucker Carlson, and maybe the Kochs have finally realized it. Because as a millionaire funded by billionaires, it’s hard to comprehend why else Carlson would turn on his former patrons.
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yikes see state GOP: how much xian nat'l wacko? see earth2 polarization; mtg nat'l divorce
an kos 2 23
In today’s Republican Party it is no longer enough to deny that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The true Republican diehards demand that their leaders deny that Republicans ever lose any election.
That played out at the Michigan GOP convention over the weekend, with Trump’s pick for state party chair being defeated by a candidate who is even more extreme an election denier. It took three rounds of voting—counted by hand because Republicans have also made it an article of faith not to accept voting technology, even at their own convention—but Kristina Karamo prevailed over second-place finisher and Trump endorsee Matt DePerno.
Karamo ran for secretary of state in 2022, losing by 14 points. DePerno ran for attorney general, losing by 8.6 points. But DePerno conceded that he had lost, while Karamo refused to concede. At the state party convention, she made that part of her campaign message, saying, “Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do.”
When it comes to 2020, DePerno has been an election denier in good standing, having made his name as a Republican and earned Trump’s endorsement on the basis of his quest to prove fraud in that election. He’s even faced a criminal investigation for tampering with voting machines in 2021. That is the kind of stuff that gets you Donald Trump’s endorsement to lead a state Republican Party. But apparently it is not enough for Michigan Republicans. “Matt ran out on us; he didn’t fight for us,” one delegate told The Washington Post.
Election denial isn’t Karamo’s only angle, though. At the convention, she said, “My goal number one as a Christian is to bring people to Christ, and secondarily to save our country.” A few nights earlier, in a speech to a far-right “patriot” group, she went into a little more detail.
“When we start talking about the spiritual reality of the demonic forces, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy, we can’t go there,’” Karamo said. “No. It’s like, did you read the Bible? Didn’t Jesus perform exorcisms? … Scriptures are clear. And so if we’re not operating as though the spirit realities of the world exist, we’re going to fail every time.”
The convention that elected Karamo to lead thestate party was attended by 2,000 delegates—but not one of the outgoing party co-chairs or any member of the state congressional delegation. But Karamo claimed the party would move forward unified. “We cannot wait to get work done as one Michigan Republican Party,” she said. “And we are going to beat the Democrats.”
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yikes
poll xian natl
https://www.alternet.org/white-christian-nationalism-2659398796/
maya
A new national survey conducted by the Public Research Institute and Brookings Institution found that a majority of Republicans in the U.S. "are sympathetic to" Christian nationalism, The Guardian reports.
The survey finds more than 50 percent of Republicans identify as one of two groups, showing that 29 percent “of white evangelical Protestants qualify as Christian nationalism adherents,” and 35 percent “qualify as sympathizers.”
The Guardian reports:
The survey comes as the US experiences an increasing number of Americans shifting away from religious affiliations, as well as a declining number of churches across the country. Data released last year by the Pew Research Center found that Christians in the US could be a minority group by 2070.
READ MORE:Are evangelicals distancing from Trump?
:{:{Additionally, the survey shows that 50 percent of Christian nationalism supporters and 38 percent of sympathizers favor the “idea of an authoritarian leader ‘who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.’”}:
}:
Last year, NBC aired a clip of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)
on the ideology.
"We need to be the party of nationalism," she said. "I'm a Christian and I say it proudly: We should be Christian nationalists."
Around the same time, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and potential 2024 GOP presidential nominee urged a private Christian college audience to "put on the full armor of God. The Tampa Bay Times reports DeSantis "is increasingly using biblical references in speeches that cater to those who see policy fights through a morality lens."
Futhermore, in the same year, Politico and The University of Maryland also conducted a survey raising questions around Christian nationalism to U.S. Republicans. The survey found 61 percent of Republicans would be in "favor" of "the United States officially declaring the United States to be a Christian nation."
Building on that data, PRRI and Brookings Institution's survey now finds 57 percent "of Christian nationalism adherents disagree that white supremacy is a major problem in the country," while 70 percent "reject the idea that historical discrimination contributes to current challenges faced by Black Americans."
Additionally, 23 percent of Christian nationalism supporters "believe the stereotype that Jewish people in the United States hold too many positions of power," while 67 percent "say that people from some Muslim-majority countries should be banned from entering the U.S."
READ MORE:'QMaga': How QAnon, MAGA and 'Christian nationalism' have pushed the GOP into 'madness'
As political violence increases in the U.S., supporters of Christian nationalism “are nearly seven times more likely than” non-supporters to believe “true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country."
The Southern Poverty Law Center asserts "the [white nationalist] movement’s energy has shifted into more mainstream spaces in the aftermath of Jan. 6."
Of the population who agrees with resorting to said violence, the survey finds12 percent “personally threatened to use or actually used a gun, knife or other weapon on someone in the past few years.”
The Guardian's full report is available to read at this link.
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aha recall you cannot negotiate with irrational, so only force violence defend yourself family; rabid dog foams at mouth
not just foreign, black but horde mob is powerful and irrational thus must kill; note hype fear; two scary mysterious tech cell phone [5g] and dna germ [ plus brainwash
https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-says-gang-racist-foaming-mouth-black-people-are-coming-your-family-advises
// an 2 23
Infowars host and chief conspiracy theorist Alex Jones warned on Sunday's show that "foaming-at-the-mouth Black people" would wage war on white populations after they flee "race-specific bioweapons" attacks in Africa later this decade. Jones issued these racist predictions while declaring himself a "vessel" of God.
"They intend on making the world so hellish in the build-up to 2030 that everybody will just 'wink, wink' when they release the race-specific bioweapons starting with Africa that are gonna wipe that continent absolutely out. And you'll be under such invasion from the refugees of the economic warfare in Africa that you will quietly, while you're playing cards with your buddies say, 'well, it had to be done.'And when you go along with that metaphysically, spiritually, culturally, the devil's got your soul," said Jones.
"So I don't like the big giant African hordes being brainwashed against us and the left programming brown people to hate white people. It's all part of a plan, folks. It's all part ofa very sophisticated planand I don't just study history. I don't just study the New World Order," Jones continued. "I have the Holy Spirit. Doesn't mean I'm a perfect vessel, far from it. But I do have deep connection to God and God tells me that if I take part in wiping out the brown people, the Black people, that I will be cut off from God. We’re supposed to lift each other up."
Jones then encouraged responding through violence.
"Now that doesn't mean when a gang of racist,foaming-at-the-mouth Black people come to rape, rob, or kill you, which is just, it's out of control right now, that you don't defend yourself and kill every person you need to protect your family if they're attacking you," he suggested.
"That said though, just because they're brainwashed, some of them, and are being part of that doesn't mean we have to fall into the brainwashing either," the right-wing provocateur added. "And they tell you everything they're doing in the movie, the 'Kingsman,' where they send out the program through the cell phones andcell phone towers to make everybody start killing each other. That's what Klaus Schwab talks about, the angrier world, this is part of that plan. And so the Black people that have succumbed to this have succumbed to it through mind control. Doesn't make them any less dangerous."
Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.
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aha hmn earth2 bizarro rubber reverse: it's wind green that actually harms eagles and whales [polar bears not declining?]; you libs tired to make us real murkins feel bad for selfishly trashing the planet for profit, but it's really YOU b/c dumb/ greedy hypocrites
mma 2 23
Over the past several days Fox networks have aired numerous segments insinuating that the recent deaths of whales across New York and New Jersey beaches are due to the development of offshore wind turbines.
There is no evidence to back up these claims.
NOAA Fisheries, the office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration responsible for the management of marine life, specifically addressed the question on January 24. NOAA stated that the recent whale deaths are “not related to offshore wind development.” The agency further wrote, “Of the whales examined, about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales.” Indeed, nearly 3,000 ships passed through the Port of New York and New Jersey, near where whale deaths are occurring, in the last year — “a figure that vastly undercounts all the ocean traffic in the region and dwarfs the number of vessels that have anything to do with offshore wind.”
Importantly, NOAA Fisheries noted climate change as a contributing factor in the whale deaths. The world’s oceans are rapidly warming, with temperatures reaching a record high in 2022. This is forcing a change in the migration patterns of marine life, including whales, and “can lead to increased interactions with humans as some whales move closer to near shore habitats,” the agency writes.
Additionally, there aren’t even any wind turbines off of the coast of New Jersey. The whale deaths have also been happening at an increased rate since at least 2016, the NOAA reports, which long predates any offshore wind development in the region.
This is not stopping Fox from promulgating claims that offshore wind is killing these whales
On the January 30 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker Carlson sarcastically mocked a Politico article which stated that “there is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked.”
“We have no idea why a dozen whales just turned up dead on the beaches of New Jersey,” Carlson said. “Does it have anything to do with the construction of wind turbines off the coast? ‘That's speculation,’ Politico reported. ‘Probably climate change.’ So the story was ridiculous, but what we didn’t get at first was that Politico was paid to run it.”
Carlson took issue with the fact that the article was featured in a newsletter sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, later calling Politico “prostitutes” for publishing another article sponsored by offshore wind turbine manufacturers. In reality, Politico’s energy newsletters are typically sponsored by energy companies, not environmental groups — with the vast majority of these sponsorships coming from fossil fuel companies.
The next night, Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to bekilling large numbers of whales.” Carlson then hosted a local Republican politician from Nassau County, New York, who called “going all-electric” a “danger to our America,” and stated that “there will always be fossil fuels, at least in my lifetime.”
Carlson’s two recent segments follow a January 13 segment detailing “The Biden whale extinction.” (Another chyron during that episode read “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.”)
Questions about offshore wind development were also raised on Fox during the January 31 editions of both America’s Newsroom, with reporter Alexis McAdams stating, “As the whale deaths continue, some lawmakers and activists are calling for a hold on the preparations for offshore wind projects,” and The Story, with guest anchor Trace Gallagher stating, “It's the eighth whale to die along the shore of New Jersey and New York in the last two months, fueling the debate about whether the deaths are natural or maybe related to nearby offshore wind projects and the push to go green.”
Several more such segments covering the whale deaths ran on February 1. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the costs of offshore wind development without noting the massive economic benefits to local and state communities before stating, “All of this is the cost of this clean energy, but as you heard these conservationists saying it's costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.”
“Not in my backyard,” concluded host Stuart Varney.
Another segment on The Story began with Gallagher stating that, “The mayors of a dozen New Jersey towns [are] now calling for an immediate halt on plans to build thousands of offshore wind turbines as coastal communities raise concerns about the number of whales washing up dead on nearby beaches and soaring financial costs threaten the push to go green.”
Later, Alworth began a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier by claiming “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” She ended the report by again mentioning the economic costs associated with wind turbines and none of the financial benefits.
Finally, Jesse Watters Primetime ran two segments linking offshore wind development to the whale deaths. In one, Alworth cited “conservationists” concerned with whale deaths saying “this clean energy might not be clean at all,” and she again brought up the economic costs of wind turbines without mentioning their benefits. In the second, host Jesse Watters interviewed ex-Greenpeace Canada member Patrick Moore to rail against renewable energy and complain that Greenpeace has been compromised by wind companies. Watters ended the segment by stating that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.”
Fox’s guests are not scientists — they have fossil fuel connections and an interest in blocking renewable energy development
Moore is a climate science denier who has consulted for polluting companies. He also (falsely) claims that he is a founder of Greenpeace, which allows Fox to paint him as a credible guest on climate, energy, and environmental issues.
Watters also tried this trick — obfuscating the credibility of an environmental advocate — in an earlier segment on offshore wind and whale deaths. On January 11, Mike Dean of Protect Our Coast NJ was labeled as an “ocean advocate,” and Dean went on to baselessly blame wind development for whale deaths, declaring, “The harms with these projects and the costs are limitless, and it’s really hard to find any benefits at all.” Fox did not note that Dean’s group appears to be backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank with a history of hostility toward climate and environmental policies. The institute has also received funding from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of blocking renewable energy projects.
On the January 13 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson hostedMeghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze. Lapp claimed, without evidence, thatoffshore wind development means “essentially carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound.” In fact, Lapp has been appearing on Fox News since at least 2019 insinuating that offshore wind development is killing whales. She even appeared in Carlson’s 2021 anti-wind documentary which was chock full of misinformation and debunked talking points.
What has not been mentioned on Fox, and what has been excellently reported on by climate writer Michael Thomas, is that Lapp is a fossil fuel industry ally. Her campaign to stop offshore wind development has beenbankrolled by T:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}::{exas Public Policy Foundatio**n, a fossil fuel-funded think tank that has fought climate policies tooth and nail. TPPF, of course, has spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling — choosing to downplay the horrific environmental impacts of that practice while embellishing the impacts of offshore wind development.
Finally, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association appeared on the aforementioned Varney & Co., The Story, and Special Report segments on February 1. Brady, like Lapp, is being backed by TPPFin her campaign to stop offshore wind development. Last year, both Lapp and Brady appeared in a TPPF film entitled “A Heavy Wind: The Threat to an American Heritage,” which detailed commercial fishermen fighting offshore wind projects.
One recent Fox segment interspersed with their offshore wind coverage illustrates the complete hypocrisy of Fox’s climate-related programming
During Fox’s fearmongering about offshore wind development on February 1, America Reports ran a segment with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that sang the praises of the Willow Project, a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska’s national petroleum reserve. Sullivan called the project “actually really good for our environment,” while Fox anchor John Roberts noted some benefits of the project, including billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs created.
While Roberts did ask a question about climate advocates not wanting to lock the U.S. into more fossil fuel extraction, this segment did not mention the massive environmental costs associated with the project. Environmental advocate and journalist Bill McKibben noted in a recent article on the project that Alaska is “already warming faster than almost any place on the planet.Warming so fast that taxpayers are already having to pony up huge sums of money to relocate coastal villages inland. Emissions from the Willow project’s oil would cause $19.8 billion in climate damages; it would generate $3.4 billion in federal tax revenue, which is…a lot less.”
McKibben also cited a Center for American Progress analysis of the project which found that “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”
Contrast Fox’s fawning coverage of an oil drilling project with its dismissive, conspiracy theory-laden, and climate denial-infused coverage of offshore wind, and you get a perfect sense of why Fox cannot be trusted on climate and environmental issues. While it’s true that there are valid concerns with offshore wind’s impacts on the environment and local marine life — something that has been taken into consideration by government authorities in reviewing previous offshore wind projects —the reality is that fossil fuel projects are significantly more detrimental to the environment and climate than renewable projects.
You will rarely if ever hear these facts reported on Fox, as the network has time and again proved to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and its offshore wind coverage cannot be taken seriously.
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toxic knowledge:
aha yikes nexus: algo amp alt fact earth2 polarization socmed echo escalator qanon covid conspiracy
mma 1 23
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): There's also another thing that I've been watching happening on the right, and I think this is because of the sort of polarization around low trust, high trust. But the InfoWars-ization of right-wing media, and I say this even in the like, even when you move it outside the bounds of polarizing, like did aliens build the pyramids? This is like a hoary conspiratorial cliché for decades, right? That’s the kind of thing you’re seeing right-wing media people talk about now. It doesn’t even score a political point. It's just this view that, like, everything they tell you is a lie, that is more and more taking over that entire universe.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yes, and I think that what's concerning about that, and sort of the fact that has led into it is that, one, obviouslysocial media and, in particular, the metastasizing of the QAnon conspiracy in the spring of 2020 coupled with all of the COVID stuff really helped that sort of, just that toxicity spill over.
But the other factor is that, it's worth keeping in mind that a very large segment of Republican leaders started to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And as they started to increasingly organize power on what used to be considered the fringes, using the right-wing media as a conduit for accessing that, they brought all that stuff that, you know, used to be on the fringes more toward the center. That's why something like groomers and pedophilia would be sort of far out there stuff years ago. And that is mainstream Republican orthodoxy now, it's not even controversial to say that, you know, Democrats are sexualizing children. Everyone is saying that in Republican politics. You don't have to be an extremist to make that point.
HAYES: There is a final point here, which I didn't note in the monologue, which is Elon Musk's particular role in this, who purchased Twitter and one of the first, most notable things he did in Twitter. And it was the first time I ever encountered this ludicrous, gross conspiracy theory that the two men had some relationship and that this was, like, a lovers' quarrel or something like that, was Elon Musk tweeting about it in a response to Hillary Clinton. That really put rocket fuel. He has since said he's apologized, but, like, Elon Musk owns a huge share of this entire thing.
CARUSONE: He does, because -- and this is exactly the danger for him being in charge. I mean, he supercharged that conspiracy theory. And it's worth noting that that is sort of the function of Twitter now after Elon Musk, is that it's kind of become a red pill PEZ dispenser, where these conspiracies, these really far out things are increasingly getting supercharged because they're gettingalgorithmic boosts.So even things that Elon Musk doesn't promote, we're actually seeing get supercharged all the time now.
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01/27/23 MMA Tucker Carlson says white people are victims of “racial hatred” amid coverage of Tyre Nichols killing
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): So, whatever you think of them, white people did not play any role in this particular tragedy.Whatever this story may be about, it's not about racial bias. Any honest person could see that immediately. But you would never know it from watching the so-called news coverage of this tape today. The only person whose race most media outlets identified was the victim. "Another unarmed black man murdered by the police," they said.
Moments ago on MSNBC, they just described what you just saw as white supremacy. Really? How? CNN's Van Jones did acknowledge that the police who hit Tyre Nichols were black, but, "they might still have been driven by racism." Van Jones didn't take the time to explain how. It was a lie, of course.
They're all lying, and Joe Biden himself, the president of the United States, swiftly reinforced that lie.Referring to an event in which every single participant -- and their supervisors -- was the same color, Biden lectured the United States that "fatal encounters with law enforcement have disparately impacted black and brown people."
So the one thing we know, no matter how you feel about the video, most people don't think that's right. But the one thing we know for sure is that there is a highly aggressive propaganda campaign underway tonight, designed to manipulate you, and using the sad death of a young man in Memphis to do it. That propaganda campaign, like all propaganda campaigns, is, by definition, dishonest.
But it's more than that. It's worse than that. This is yet another attempt by our leaders of our country to inflame racial hatred in the United States.
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an maya 1 23
For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly funded, initiated, and supported efforts to dismantle democracy in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.
Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”
The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.
READ MORE:How Koch Industries is fighting democracy both 'at home and abroad': journalist
Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively spent more than $1 billion on the 2020 election.
One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.
Soon after the election, Koch released Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”
The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.
READ MORE:Charles Koch must be held accountable for his climate disinformation campaign
But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.
Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.
The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.
Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.
READ MORE:'That's oligarchy': Bernie Sanders batters billionaires over election spending
Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.
MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”
Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.
READ MORE:Koch keeps doing business in Russia as top journalist says family fortune came from Hitler: report
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griner BS prefer BOUT?!
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/ron-desantis-and-triumph-anti-vax-right
no lnx vid
fox News founder Rupert Murdoch became one of the first people on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 when he received his first jab in December 2020. He thanked “the amazing scientists who have made this vaccine possible,” in a statement at the time, adding, “I strongly encourage people around the world to get the vaccine as it becomes available.”
Two years later, such unqualified gratitude and support for the miraculous medicines are scarce among American conservatives, even as a new study found that COVID-19 vaccines have saved the lives of more than 3.2 million Americans and prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations. Instead, thanks in no small part to the paranoid rants of Murdoch’s employees, Republican anti-vaccine sentiment has spiraled to the point that former President Donald Trump’s role in their development may hurt his chances of gaining the party’s nomination in 2024.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was on Murdoch’s Fox on Tuesday night talking up his call for the state’s supreme court to impanel a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the vaccines and “bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct.” It’s unclear precisely what such a grand jury would target or the impact it might have. As a signaling effort, however, DeSantis’ announcement put him squarely on the side of the anti-vax kooks at Fox and the faction of the GOP they influence.
DeSantis fielded softball questions from primetime hostLaura Ingraham, who praised him for having “fought relentlessly against [the] medical cartel’s silencing campaign.” As the governor spoke, on-screen text touted him as “still leading on COVID” and drawing mainstream press outrage for “challenging Covidians.”
Video
CitationFrom the December 13, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle.
DeSantis is likely to challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. He enjoys broad support in recent primary polls and across the right-wing media spectrum, from Fox primetime hosts to anti-anti-Trumpers at publications like National Review to, reportedly, Murdoch himself. And it is clear to everyone – including Trump’s advisers – that in preparation for that run, he is staking out ground as the vaccine-skeptical candidate.
DeSantis is following the path blazed by Fox hosts like Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. Anti-vaccine sentiment would likely have become a problem for the vaccination campaign under any circumstances. But it took the network’s patented ability to manufacture grievances to turn it into a compelling primary issue for Republican politicians.
Fox spent the last two years sabotaging the U.S. vaccination effort. The network had a unique moral responsibility to try to convince their viewers to get vaccinated. Instead, its most prominent and trusted figures waged a nightly battle against the shots, stoking fears that they were useless or dangerous and that their distribution was part of a sinister plot to control Americans. The discourse was “great for ratings” – but deadly for Republicans, who were vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates and died from it at higher ones.
Some right-wing commentators, even at Fox, tried to push back against that narrative and encourage vaccination. But ultimately, they lost the argument within the movement.
DeSantis followed the shift in right-wing public opinion, choosing to preserve his political viability rather than the lives of his constituents.DeSantis once touted his own efforts to distribute the vaccines, which he credited with “saving lives.” But once he saw which way the wind was blowing on the right, he started trying to appeal to the anti-vaccine right. Meanwhile, Trump himself has been flummoxed, getting booed by a crowd for saying he got his booster and eschewing the word “vaccine” on the stump.
It is a testament to the power of Fox’s propaganda that the network was able to turn life-saving drugs into a poisoned chalice for Trump – and that perhaps his greatest rival adjusted his views on them to appeal to its viewers.
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apparently not Joe and Greta's fault?!:
no lnx twt
These 5 ‘deeply malevolent’ things that Trump did to hurt Ukraine must not be forgotten: journalist
Alex Henderson March 01, 2022
With Ukraine now being invaded by Russian troops on orders from President Vladimir Putin, MAGA messaging on the crisis has ranged from praising Putin to blaming President Joe Biden for the crisis. One of the most ludicrous MAGA talking points is that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president.But liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, in a scathing column/listicle published on March 1, stresses that the things Trump did to hurt Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky when he was president must not be forgotten.
“With the Russian invasion of Ukraine getting more horrific,” Sargent writes, “Donald Trump and his allies are frantically erasing the truth about Trump’s relations with Ukraine. Trump absurdly claims that as president, he stood strong behind Ukraine and NATO, even as his spinners comically downplay his corrupt and deeply malevolent betrayal of our ally.”
Sargent continues, “The obvious rejoinder to this spin is that Trump got impeached for withholding military aid to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into manufacturing propaganda to help Trump’s reelection. This came even as Zelensky pleaded for help against Russian aggression, which the world is now witnessing unfold in all its horror.”
The columnist notes that when Trump was president, he repeatedly “aligned our interests with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin and against those of Ukraine, NATO and the West.” And Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman agrees. Vindman, who testified during House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry against Trump in November 2019, told Sargent, “Trump acted against U.S. interests with the consequence of aiding Russian interests.”
Sargent goes on to list and describe five examples of Trump doing things to hurt Ukraine. Trump, Sargent recalls: (1) “spread propaganda about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election,” (2) “ousted the well-regarded U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,” Marie Yovanovitch, (3) “froze military assistance to Ukraine,” (4) “withheld a White House meeting from Zelensky,” and (5) “turned Ukraine policy over to (Rudy) Giuliani.”
“All this has important forward-looking implications, now that Trump may run for president again,” Sargent explains. “As president in 2025, he’d be stewarding relations with Russia, Ukraine and NATO, but after this war has unfolded. Right now, we’re seeing extraordinary unity among the United States and its allies as it imposes harsh sanctions on Russia and otherwise tries to dissuade Putin’s invasion. Trump would almost surely rupture that.”
Vindman, during his interview with Sargent, warned that it will be great for Putin if Trump becomes president again.
“With Trump as president in 2025,” Vindman told Sargent, “we’re quite likely looking at a world in which Russia may have achieved its objectives and folded Ukraine back into its sphere of influence.”
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OMFG
you can't make this up: https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/10/1/21497568/former-coal-ceo-robert-murray-files-black-lung-benefits-crandall-canyon-mine-robert-murray-energy
Former coal CEO Robert Murray files for black lung benefits
By Associated PressOct 1, 2020
[Robert Murray, founder, owner, president and CEO of Murray Energy Corp. gives a briefing on efforts to find trapped miners at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah. Murray stated it would take a minimum of 3 days to get to the miners. A mine collapse trapped 6 miners about 1700 hundred feet below the surface. They believe the collapse was caused by an earthquake about a mile below where the miners were working. Aug. 7, 2007 Photo by Stuart Johnson], Deseret News]
CHARLESTON, W.Va. —Former coal CEO Robert E. Murray, who has fought federal regulations on the industry, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for black lung benefits, according to a published report.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Ohio Valley ReSource report the former head of Murray Energy said on the form that he is still board chairman of the company but can no longer serve as president and CEO due to his health.
Murray has fought federal mine safety regulations for years. His company filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in 2014 over regulations to cut the amount of coal dust in coal mines to reduce the incidence of black lung disease, saying they were overly burdensome and costly to the industry.
Murray owned the Crandall Canyon Mine in Emery County, Utah, where two collapses in 2007 killed nine men — six who were trapped and three trying to rescue them. In one volatile news conference outside the mine, Murray vehemently defended the mining industry, went off on global warming and called out by name reporters and news outlets whose stories on the collapse he deemed nonfactual.
The government later fined Genwal Resources, the operator of the mine at the time, $1.34 million for violations that contributed to the deaths of six miners plus nearly $300,000 for other violations. In 2012, Genwal Resources admitted in federal court to misdemeanor criminal charges of violating federal mine health and safety laws, though the charges weren’t directly related to the fatal collapses. The company was fined $500,000.
In the black lung claim, Murray, 80, says he is heavily dependent on oxygen and is “near death.”
Murray Energy Holdings emerged last month from federal bankruptcy protection under a new name and ownership group.
The new company, St. Clairsville, Ohio-basedAmerican Consolidated Natural Resources Inc., is the largest privately owned U.S. coal operator with active mines in Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Utah.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Ohio Valley ReSource confirmed the authenticity of Murray’s claim documents by entering his last name, birthdate and a case ID number into an online portal maintained by the Labor Department. If the claim goes before an administrative law judge, some parts would become public.
Murray says in the claim that he worked underground while supervising operations for several years.
“During my 63 years working in underground coal mines, I worked 16 years every day at the mining face underground and went underground every week until I was age 75,” Murray wrote.
Murray declined to speak on the record with the news outlets, but said he has black lung from working in underground mines and is entitled to benefits. He also disputed that he fought regulations to stop black lung and threatened to file a lawsuit if a story was published indicating he fought federal regulations and benefits, the outlets said.
Murray told NPR last year that his lung disease was not caused by working in underground mines.
“It’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF, and it is not related to my work in the industry. They’ve checked for that,” Murray told NPR. “And it’s not — has anything to do with working in the coal mines, which I did for 17 years underground every day. And until I was 76, I went underground twice a week.”
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omfg
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/rittenhouse-2655770737/
no lnx pix req
Rittenhouse verdict championed on right-wing social media as green light for killing protesters
[Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally. Far-right Oath Keepers patrol Emancipation Park. Credit: Anthony Crider]
David Neiwertand Daily Kos November 21, 2021
The exultation on right-wing social media following Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal has been sickeningly predictable: Mainstream conservatives loudly valorize Rittenhouse as a "hero," while more extremist voices, applying the same logic, demand that more Americans follow his footsteps—urging the likeminded to take to the street now to begin using guns to "be like Kyle." They have even appropriated his name for their future plans, voiced in numerous celebratory threads: Any leftist protester shot by a right-wing "patriot" henceforth will have been "Rittenhoused."
As we forecasted, the acquittal is now a beacon-like green light granting permission to violent right-wing extremists to openly wage the kind of "civil war" against "the left"—which ranges from liberal Democrats like Joe Biden to the "antifa" bogeyman they have concocted—that they have been fantasizing about for the past decade. In the words of Charlie Kirk's interlocutor, it's the signal that now they "get to use the guns."
The bloodlust has been palpable. Online trolls celebrated that "it's Open Season on pedo-commies" and boasted that the verdict means "there's nothing you can do about it." A neo-Nazi channel on Twitter urged readers to "let this win fuel your rage." A fan of pseudo-journalist Andy Ngo commented in a retweet: "Every one of these anarchist criminal thugs should be shot in the street like the worthless dogs they are."
Far-right maven Ann Coulter posted a meme showing a gantlet of [marvel nazi nerd wet dr] comic-book superheroes bowing to Rittenhouse. On Facebook, Ben Shapiro framed any future violence as being left-wing: "The Left accepting the verdict in a peaceable manner remains the sizable elephant in the room."
The white-nationalist site VDare also extolled Rittenhouse's heroism:
This much is true: Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we've been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.
[Coulter-RittenhouseMeme.jpeg]
Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire blamed the media for there even having been a trial:
The verdict is right and just but Kyle Rittenhouse never should have been on trial at all. Now themedia will go to work, like the demonsthey are, to ensure that Kenosha burns because they did not get their blood sacrifice.
Walsh then added:
I hope Rittenhouse bankrupts all of you dirtbags in media who smeared him as a white supremacist. [sue for libel based on verdict? // charlottesville ~ KKK case finished ] I hope he ruins your life. I want you to suffer. It's what you deserve. It's justice.
Idaho legislator Tammy Nichols, a Republican, posted a meme featuring the Gadsden-flag "Don't Tread On Me" design, but with a graphic of Rittenhouse firing from a seated position as he did in Kenosha.
The Gun Owners of America (GOA)—a gun-rights extremist group headed by far-right militia figure Larry Pratt—joined in the celebration by announcing it was giving Rittenhouse a new gun.
Alert: GOA will be awarding Kyle Rittenhouse with an AR-15 for his defense of gun rights in America. Join us in saying THANK YOU to Kyle Rittenhouse for being awarrior for gun rights and self defense rights across the country!
Other "Patriot" Movement extremists saw the verdict as vindication for vigilantism and militia organizing. The "Washougal Moms," a militia-friendly group from eastern Washington state, opined:
Today the jury and legal system has reaffirmed our rights as citizens. The second amendmentin all aspects, to form a well regulated militia, the right to bear arms in self defense, and against enemiesboth foreign and domestic!
Kurt Schlichter, the right-wing troll with over 380,000 followers, taunted MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who had expressed concern about the double racial standard that the verdict reflects, on Twitter.
Your pain delights me. Kyle Rittenhouse killed two leftistcatspawsand bisected the bicep of another and there's nothing you can do about it.
A white-nationalist Twitter account called "Based Teutonic" celebrated the verdict by posting a fantasy that Rittenhouse would now embark on an action-hero-like mission—with the help of Judge Bruce Schroeder, who oversaw the trial in markedly biased fashion.
About to exit court room
Judge yells from behind:
Rittenhouse turns around
You forgot this
Tosses him his AR15
Credits roll, Eye of the Tiger plays
"Based Teutonic" wasn't alone in celebrating Schroeder's role in the verdict. On Telegram, a commenter in a Proud Boys channel observed:
Kyle's case shows how important is to have your guys in power on a local level. One vaguely conservative boomer judge made all of the difference in a monumental trial.
Other Proud Boys were more focused on their long-anticipated civil war. "There's still a chance for this country," wrote one. Another wrote: "The left wont stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights monitored a number of far-right chat forums (particularly Telegram) following the verdict, and found an outpouring of extremist bile, much of it anticipating the ability to inflict lethal violence on "leftists," as well as Black "parasites" and, of course, Jewish people. A user called The Western Chauvinist commented: "The parasites are planning multiple 'protests' across the United States."
One user calling himself "Proud Boy To Fascist Pipeline" replied to one of these comments mocking Black leaders protesting the verdict as "parasites": "Your 17 year olds are already armed and terrorizing our neighborhoods, n----er."
Fittingly, Charlie Kirk fans—following the example of his Idaho audience member—were focused on the violence: "Arm up and tell them f**cking bring it!" one replied to predictions of leftist protests after the verdict. "Shoot these phukers," commented another.
Nick Fuentes' "Groypers" were also unbridled in their anticipation of gunning down their opponents. "The most American thing you can do is Killing Commies," opined one on the white-nationalist forum Gab.
Another Gab user exulted with a meme showing Joaquin Phoenix as The Joker, dancing: "When you find out it's officially Open Season on pedo-commies." Mocking "wannabe street thugs upset with the verdict," another Gab user replied, "you're gonna get Rittenhouse'd. Bitch."
Gab-OpenSeason.png
"Getting Rittenhoused" became a popular way of threatening leftists. After Ngo posted a handful of tweets from leftists angry about the verdict, hundreds of his fans piled on, making threats of violence against them. "Someone will Rittenhouse them too," one responded. Another replied: "I came here to say that!"
Antisemitism also was a common theme. Right-wing troll Keith Woods, who has 23,500 followers on Twitter, declared after the verdict: "Huge L for the Jews." His followers piled on; one responded with a GIF meme of Gollum and the text, "Curse you goyim." Another replied, "hopefully they take an L in Charlottsville trial too. WHITE BOY WINTER!"
White nationalist Eric Striker was more explicitly antisemitic, as well as strategic, in his commentary:
Beating the Jews to the narrative as incidents unfold is more important than anything that happens in court.
Once you frame a story with the facts (and the facts have to be 100% accurate) and disseminate it with an effective propaganda network, Jews will struggle to challenge it once it's cemented.
Notorious white nationalist and antisemite Mike "Enoch" Peinovich put out a statement through his National Justice Party: "This victory for Kyle Rittenhouse over the cosmopolitan elite forces that plague the nation isn't only a victory for the young man himself, it's a victory for justice and for all White people who take a stand," Peinovich said.
On Telegram, a white nationalist commented: "The victory of Kyle Rittenhouse over thejewish forces that plague the nation isn't just a victory for the man himself, it's a victory for justice, and for the masses of disenfranchised White people which populate the globe.
The neo-Nazi group White Lives Matter had this advice for its white-supremacist followers:
Don't let this one victory lull you back to sleep. That's what they want. They know small "victories" can placate the angry masses more than anything else. Instead let this win fuel your rage.Never forget the simple fact that this clear-cut self-defense should never have gone to trial in the first place. Muslim, Hispanic, and African invaders have raped millions of our women, WHITE women.Their time ofterrorizing our People with 0 consequences is coming to an end. The Rittenhouse verdict is a single tick in the scoreboard on our side. Our enemy doesn't have a scoreboard big enough for their victories. Fight harder, stronger, fiercer, and with the same remorse they have shown us. None. Get going, White man.
"This might be interpreted across the far right as a type of permission slip to do this kind of thing or to seek out altercations in this way, believing that there is a potential that they won't face serious consequences for it," Jared Holt of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council told NPR. "I worry that that might end up being interpreted by some people as a proof of concept of this idea that you can actually go out and seek a 'self-defense situation,' and you'll be cheered as a hero for it."
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