#but biden is *definitely* from the right side of center right - a republican | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

squirrelwithatophat · 11 months ago

Text

@kyrianne Might Brunner be confusing Bethel Park (Allegheny County) with Bethel (Berks County)? Both the voter registration record for “Thomas Matthew Crooks” and federal campaign finance records for the $15 donation by “Thomas Crooks” (middle initial missing on form) list the zip code 15102 — which is for Bethel Park (Allegheny), a suburb of Pittsburgh. It’s still possible that the donation could have come from a different Thomas Crooks, although it’s hard to say. There are multiple individuals named “Thomas Crooks” living in Pennsylvania, some in the Pittsburgh area, according to my Anywho.com search — although none are listed under the zip code 15102 (not even including the shooter), so this obviously isn’t exhaustive. The 52-year-old Thomas A. Crooks is currently living in zip code 15201 (also around Pittsburgh, but not Bethel Park).

But, assuming that the shooter did make the $15 donation, it does seem that a lot of news outlets are ignoring obvious context and downplaying evidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks is probably right-wing. For example, the NYT amended their story to read, “Investigators were scouring his online presence and working to gain access to his phone, but so far had not found indications of strongly held political beliefs. In fact, the clues he left behind were confusing: He was a registered Republican but had also donated to a progressive cause in 2021; his parents were registered as a Democrat and Libertarian.” But this isn’t actually weird or confusing (again, assuming the donor and shooter were the same individual) considering that…

For one, as Brunner alludes to, Crooks was 17 years old at the time of the $15 donation (January 20, 2021). He probably wasn’t spending his own money either — the donor is recorded as “Unemployed,” and (shooter) Crooks’s only known job was obtained after graduating from college two months ago. The $15 for the liberal voter turnout group probably came from his parents, a Democrat and a Libertarian, and was apparently in response to an email about the Biden inauguration. It’s also worth noting that Crooks (or at least the email address associated with the donation) made no further donations and had unsubscribed from the Progressive Turnout Project by 2022, by which time Crooks was identifying as a Republican. Given his parents’ political affiliations (Democrat/Libertarian), support for centrist-Democrat Joe Biden with his parents’ money could indicate either an attempt to please his parents or simply that his initial political leanings reflected his parents’ views (which is pretty standard) or the views of his slightly pro-Biden neighborhood and predominantly-liberal classmates.

He explicitly indicated that he was a Republican just a week after he turned 18 (September 2021). This is over 8 months after the donation, a significant time gap that undermines the argument that his beliefs were necessarily inconsistent or mixed. If anything, 8 months is more than enough time for a teenager to either change their beliefs (center-left to unambiguously right-wing) or move from casually accepting whatever their parents or peers say to thinking independently. He is also confirmed to have voted in the 2022 midterms shortly after registering as a Republican. Former classmates report either that he didn’t talk about politics in front of them, that he was “slightly right leaning,” or that he was “definitely conservative.” To further quote the last student: “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.” This suggests that he was either right-wing for a long time (and that the donation was externally-motivated or from his parents), or his views changed to right-wing within the 8 month interim. (The most recent version of the Wikipedia page as of writing still chooses to describe these characterizations as varying “considerably” and “inconsistent,” as did some now-amended news articles). And again, by age 18, he had severed any ties with the pro-Biden organization, meaning that his only known political affiliations as an adult are right-wing (Republican Party).

He was a fan of the gun-enthusiast YouTube channel Demolition Ranch and died in his fandom t-shirt. While this isn’t an explicit statement of political alignment and the creator claimed to steer clear of explicit political statements in his channel content, these fandoms do tend to be predominantly right-wing libertarian.

A neighbor recently reported seeing MAGA signs in the yard a few months ago.

All of this is of course as of writing (morning of July 16), though, so new information is likely to emerge, and the picture could potentially change.

Good news for American minorities: shooter was white

#trump shooting #Thomas Matthew Crooks

70K notes · View notes

xkittzkornerx · 5 months ago

Text

considering removing the whole Bible Belt leftist thing. not bc i’m turning right or center but bc a lot of people have preconceived notions of me based off that label and it’s annoying. wish people would understand groups that large can’t be a hivemind. i acknowledge that many people in different political groups than mine have their own independent perspectives and aren’t just a caricature in a political cartoon. (i only generalize to simplify conversation and to avoid diluting the point—i don’t believe, for example, all republicans, think the same) stereotypes often exist for specific reasons but there are always exceptions. we’d all be better off if we asked people their opinions and why they think that way rather than assuming their stance based off their political affiliation and getting angry at their theoretical view.

it’s fine to hypthosize what they’re likely to belief based off their actions, but we’ve gotta remember that nothing is set in stone. literally just ask ffs. we have this hush-hush culture around politics in the US and it stinks. time and place is important but it’s expected to just not speak your mind or else you’re being divisive. it’s dumb. we never learn how to talk to one another bc we’re told not to, then we wonder why we’re always so misconstrued. it breeds a lot of room for propaganda to further divide us and damn, does it work. we should be structuring shit around learning how to disagree, and debate (if both parties wish), civilly. as long as you’re not throwing punches right out the gate, swinging around accusations and slurs, idk why we can’t just fucking talk to one another. actually talk, not shout at or spend the entire time trying to point out how stupid the other is. it is never lost on me how most people never ask the question why. i always want a why. i want to understand, even if i think it’s wrong. even if it’s immoral. how can you counter what you do not know?

people see on my blog that i’m an intersectional feminist and assume i hate all men, or that i hate cis women, or that i automatically believe what CNN publishes, or that i must love Biden. none of these things are true. they get so red over the word ‘feminist’ they didn’t bother looking into the specific branch of it i cited, and they don’t ask me my personal takes on any of these topics either. conveniently, they also ignore that right next to me saying i’m an interfem, i also say i’m an ethical humanist. my guy, that second half would answer some of your questions regarding my core values. it lays the foundation of which my feminism sprouts from.

humans are complex. i still don’t think labels are the problem, it’s how we use them so definitively w no wiggle room or nuance. people should be allowed to use terminology they identify w to communicate having similar beliefs/experiences, to form community, w/o having to list a fifty-page disclaimer that they, too, are a three-dimensional being. words are a concept, concepts are often fluid.

i just can’t understand how people jump to accusations so quickly, on all sides, so confidently. w their entire chest out and head high. i’ll shit talk Biden or criticize Harris and all of a sudden i’m part of MAGA. i’ll get a message saying i’m a collectivist and that i believe in cult-like loyalty and blind obedience. i have only ever stated that i believe the exact opposite and i actively fight against anything that perpetuates that thinking. lotta y’all don’t wanna “intellectual debate,” you want someone to verbally abuse.

#us politics #xkittzkornerx #leftist #progressive politics #neoliberals

1 note · View note

yourleastfavoritetran · 6 months ago

Text

my big conspiracy theory atm is that biden was not really president and kamala was not really president and it was all an orchestrated act by the republicans to give donald trump a virtual third term. i think there was a little bit of a blowback after the 2020 election where a lot of republicans were trying to distance themselves from trump but overall the shit that the democrats ended up doing was 100% in line with what the republicans would've done in the same situation. truthfully, trump would've sent money and guns to ukraine in all likelihood, his only reason for criticizing it was that he was running counter to everything that the dems were doing for the full time they were "in office". plan goes like this

have them get in power

have them do everything that you were already doing, especially the shit that would make the economy worse or make them look bad

point out accurately the ways they are bad

court public opinion

win the next election

this method works because in the opposition doing what you would've done but that is publicly a bad look or directly bad for the common person you can demoralize their own base and make them less likely to give full support to their own party. you don't even need to propagandize very strongly. local elections in this race were the main ones to engage in propaganda, there were far more ads being aired on local tv, cable or streaming services for senators or representatives than there were for the president on either side. kamala's ads were largely sms based and the youtube ads that she produced were too direct and formal and were shot in such a high definition that the age showed greatly on her skin. meanwhile it's difficult to find a picture of donald trump that is both in good quality and not photoshopped or color corrected in some way to make him look more flattering. the trump campaign relied almost entirely on their own base doing their advertising for them, spreading lies and conspiracy theories and making people disconnected from the political process in general. it was not hard for them to do with first biden being the candidate, then there not being a primary for the democratic candidate, them shoving kamala in who won no primaries, not even in 2020 when she ran for president.

not to mention the whole mail in voting thing. I think that this was a major flaw in the democrat's strategy that has been going on since the pandemic. in 2020 there was a sort of normalization of mail in voting by democrats, a reaction to the far right accusing mail in ballots of all being fraudulent in nature. this normalization mirrored in a lot of ways the "normalization" of queer people in society, that is to say that we are a lot more out and proud but because we never got real liberation, only minor assimilation, that should society swing hard in another direction, this normalization would be void immediately, vetoed en masse in favor of a fascistic worldview. And so is the mail in ballot, the normalization therein relied purely on the fact that more people were doing it and that the government was encouraging it. if the right wing were to have a bunch of people in the voting centers voiding every single mail ballot, then the lean would go far more toward the republicans. and this is something that a lot of people experienced, a lot of voting centers in blue cities were largely empty toward the end of the night where normally they would be busy long beyond the cut off, even during local elections.

people showed out in 2020 for the election as a reaction to 4 years of donald trump flaunting what an asshole he can be as president in everybody's faces. then you had 4 years of biden being the worst and doing all the same shit and flaunting how incompetent he can be as president. now we will move into the final stage of this plan, which is likely either the seizure of state powers more directly in the executive branch, giving trump and his list of tv celebrities and far right pundits more breathing room on anything they feel like gutting from the lifeless american corpse, or the outright declaration of martial law and the summative rounding and execution of trump's enemies, starting with his personal grievances before moving on to his political enemies. this might include queers, brown people, women, and/or foreigners of any type.

the main people who will be safe are straight white men, who will simultaneously complain of any pushback or political literature which springs up surrounding trump's decisions as being short sighted or misdirected, that the real problem is the thing that trump is talking about and not whatever you said. tik tok will be filled with messages about how the real big brother is the fag tranny dykes who want to make your kids transracial furries with binge eating disorders. ben shapiro will be taken seriously for his new hit sitcom about how the leftists can't have healthy families because they all want siscon orgies and forcefem each other and trump will reference the theme song in one of his speeches. bernie sanders will make a scathing criticism of the trump presidency and will be forced to flee the country as a result, stripped of his titles and rank and shoved into the woods a cold broken old man. these things will happen because they have been trying as desperately as possible to make them happen for the past 8 years, if not longer.

0 notes

dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago

Link

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 12, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

As expected, this morning the House Republicans removed Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from her position as conference chair after she refused to stop speaking out against the former president for instigating the January 6 attack on our Capitol and the counting of electoral votes for President Joe Biden. The Republicans ousted her by voice vote, which meant that no one had to go on the record for or against Cheney, and the Republicans kept the split in the party from being measurable. It also ensured that she would lose; she has survived a secret ballot vote before.

Before the vote, Cheney allegedly told her Republican colleagues: “If you want leaders who will enable and spread his destructive lies, I’m not your person; you have plenty of others to choose from.” After the vote, she went in front of the cameras to say that she would lead the fight to reclaim the party from Trump, and said: “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again goes anywhere near the Oval Office.”

After her ouster, Trump Republican Representative Madison Cawthorn (NC) tweeted ““Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney.” The former president echoed Cawthorn: “Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being. I watched her yesterday and realized how bad she is for the Republican Party. She has no personality or anything good having to do with politics or our Country.”

After convincing his caucus to dump Cheney and embrace Trump, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told reporters: “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with.”

This was a breathtaking statement. McCarthy himself challenged the certification of Biden’s win, and just last week, Trump made a big announcement in which he called the election of 2020 “fraudulent.” The Big Lie animating the Republicans today is that Trump, not Biden, really won the 2020 election.

But McCarthy is not alone in his gaslighting. Yesterday, in the Senate Rules Committee markup of S1, the For the People Act protecting the vote, ending gerrymandering, and pushing big money out of our elections, Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “I don’t think anyone on our side has been arguing that [voter fraud] has been pervasive all over the country.”

The false claim of widespread voter fraud is, of course, exactly what Trump Republicans have stood on since the 2020 election. It is the justification for their voter suppression measures in Republican states, including Texas, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, and, as of yesterday afternoon, Arizona.

In today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the January 6 insurrection, Republican lawmakers in general tried to gaslight Americans, as they tried to paint that unprecedented attack on our democracy as nothing terribly important. Although 140 law enforcement officers were injured, five people were killed, more than 400 people have been charged with crimes, and rioters did more than $30 million worth of damage, Republican representatives downplayed the events of the day, insisting that they were not really out of the ordinary. Representative Andrew Clyde (R-GA) said that calling the attack on the Capitol an insurrection is a “bald-faced lie” and that “if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit…."

CNN later called Clyde’s remarks “absolute nonsense.” Even the definition of insurrection Clyde quoted—“an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country usually by violence”—showed the attack of January 6 to be an insurrection. And, as lawyer and CNN analyst Asha Rangappa noted tonight on Twitter, at his second impeachment trial even Trump’s own lawyers did not dispute that the events of January 6 were a violent insurrection. The record is clear.

Republican lawmakers like Clyde did, though, echo the former president’s interview on the Fox News Channel in March when he said that when his supporters went into the Capitol they posed “zero threat” and were “hugging and kissing the police and the guards…. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out.”

The former president appears to be continuing to exercise control over his underlings. Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller provided testimony at the House Oversight Committee hearing, and what they would not say was revealing. Rosen refused to answer questions about whether Trump asked him to try to overturn the 2020 election. Miller’s prepared remarks had included a sentence that said “I stand by my prior observation that I personally believe his comments encouraged the protesters that day.” In his testimony, he omitted that line, and later tried to walk it back, trying to draw a line between people who marched on the Capitol and those who broke into it.

But with Cheney and her supporters now in open revolt, and with news about the Capitol attack dropping, and even with more information coming about the ties between the former president and Russia, will Republican Party leaders manage to sweep everything under the rug?

Today, at a hearing on domestic extremism today before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas both testified that the most serious domestic national security threat in the U.S. right now is that of white supremacist gangs. “I think it's fair to say that in my career as a judge, and in law enforcement, I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol,” Garland said. “There was an attempt to interfere with the fundamental passing of an element of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. And if there has to be a hierarchy of things that we prioritize, this would be the one we'd prioritize. It is the most dangerous threat to our democracy. That does not mean that we don't focus on other threats.”

For his part, President Biden is refusing to get sucked into the Republican drama, instead focusing on the country. Today an advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer vaccine for children as young as 12, and the CDC signed off on the recommendation, making it easier to reopen schools in the fall.

Today Biden met at the White House with Republicans McCarthy and McConnell, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), to try to hash out an infrastructure plan, although the Republicans have said they will absolutely not consider raising the corporate tax rates from where Trump’s 2017 tax cut dropped them. It was the first time McCarthy and McConnell had visited the West Wing since Biden was elected.

It was in the context of visiting the president that McCarthy tried to say that there was no Republican questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election (although, of course, more than two thirds of Republicans currently believe in the Big Lie). “We’re sitting here with the president today,” he told reporters.

Will today’s gesture be enough to make swing voters forget the party’s wholehearted embrace of the former president? Shortly after House Republicans removed Cheney from her leadership position, nine out of 14 voters in an Axios focus group said they would be willing to vote for a Republican in next year’s congressional races. But of those, 8 said they would not back any Republican who supports Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #the big lie #Liz Cheney #January 6 2021 #white supremism #democracy

12 notes · View notes

stitchieau-the-actual-one · 4 years ago

Text

Fuck what or where can I vent about this...

WARNING: IF YOU DON’T LIKE OTHER PEOPLES OPINIONS OR HAVING A THOUGHTFUL DISCUSSION, THEN THIS POST AIN’T FOR YOU! MOVE ON!

we good?

Are the Radicals gone?

yes?

good.

Honestly, America has gone to shit since Biden came into office. Actually no... It’s been shit since Obama’s administration. just a constant shit show, an awful comedy of errors.

I legit no longer feel safe or comfortable in my own country.

I feel like I am not being heard as a US citizen, and how I vote or what I say no longer matters because some rich Democrat or rich Republican decided it just doesn’t. I feel like nothing I say or do matters anymore and that if I speak at all, people are either going to label me as a “Bigot.” or “TERF.” on one end or “Snowflake.” “SJW.” on the other. Or just flat out be told to “pick a side.” when both are shit.

One is spray painted gold.

The other is covered in literal gold.

And I hate it, I hate every single second of it. the fact I have to constantly pick the lesser of two evils and that if I vote “wrong” or “Wrong think” people are just going to silence me. In a country of free speech. It’s ass backwards but its true.

so here’s some stuff that may or may not ruffle your jimmies:

1) The Riots are and ALWAYS will be unwarranted and should DEFINITELY be stopped:

I feel like it should go without saying, but apparently this is a controversial statement... which it shouldn’t be. Look, you were taught as a kid that stealing, breaking, arson, assault, battery, destruction of private and public property is bad and unacceptable. So why do you think that suddenly changes when you’re an adult? You still got spanked and/or sent into timeout didn’t you? You got disciplined (not punished there IS a difference) for it right? Well as an adult, news flash! It’s the government instead of your parents who discipline your shitty behavior. (Also furthermore: ACAB just helps the rich since their the only people who can AFFORD personal protection, so Defunding police would just help criminals find victims and get away with a variety of crimes. Since there’s no longer any scruples to prevent this.)

Do I believe that the national guard and riot police should’ve been called in:

Yes.

Do I believe that EVERYONE involved was being shitty?

No.

Do I believe that in cases like these Potentially fatal force is nessecary to control a growingly restless and violent crowd?

AbsoFUCKINlutely!

Do I believe children should be at large protests?

No.

Do I believe the entire situation could’ve been avoided if people ignored Social Media?

Fuck, Yes.

But sadly I and the rest of us do not live in a perfect vacuum of morale and decency, which brings me to another point.

Can we please stop the whole Marxism/Communism trend? Please?

Tldr of my opinion on this issue: If it doesn’t work the first time it won’t work for the *insert whatever number it is* time either. just let this fantasy die already PLEASE!

my actual explanation on how I feel about it:

So Marxism is a type of Communism. Which if you didn’t know, Communism is the extreme of Socialism... and the Extreme/Radicalized version of literal ANYTHING! ISN’T GOOD! FULL STOP!

I honestly feel like the current education system fails to teach kids the issue as to WHY Communism and more accurately Marxism just... doesn’t work. Like at all, not even a little bit. But in order to talk about Marxism and why it just fails in a spectacular way we need to take a Rrrrreally old piece of text into consideration.

Plato’s utopia.

Plato based his utopian world off of a fantasy, a morale void, a perfect vacuum that was the foundation to a squeaky clean world. Of rainbows, gumdrops and candy cane frogs. where everyone was a productive and virtuous citizen that strived to better mankind.

however it suffers a major flaw.

that’s just not how Humanity let alone how the universe works in general. We don’t live in that perfect virtuous vacuum Plato so desperately wanted us too.

Humans are by default, infallible, selfish, self centered, bratty, judgmental pricks who no matter how virtuous have dark and destructive tendencies. Whether it’s aimed towards ones self or their community, it doesn’t matter. Humans are just naturally assholes and if you don’t believe me go sit down, pick any point in history and just listen. History is filled to the brim with examples of why we don’t live in a perfect vacuum of virtue. Even with the best of intentions people still make one another miserable whether they know it or not. People are greedy, selfish, self serving and otherwise shitty one way or another. so ultimately even if its intent if founded in the purest, kindest, sweetest whatever have yous. It won’t work.

Similar to how Plato’s utopian society doesn’t work, neither does Marxism nor Communism. it realize to heavily on that Vacuum that just doesn’t exist.

if you don’t believe me, just ask anyone from a Communist/Marxist country or if you’d rather read instead. Go read “Animal Farm” and come back, its okay I’ll wait.

On the other hand this absolutely DOES NOT mean I am okay or fine with Facism or really ANY radicalism in general. if it isn’t clear already.

not that brings me to the most controversial opinion I have and one not a lot of people (yourselves included) won’t like me for (most likely)

My stance on BLM:

Don’t

Like.

Supremacy.

Of.

ANY.

Kind.

And you know what, that’s just how I feel. If your movement involves challenging something by doing more of the same thing by design but just a different coat of paint. then no. I don’t like your thoughts or your movement because that’s just toxic and literally detrimental to everyone around you.

if you feel like the only way to fight “White supremacy” is with “Black supremacy” then expect me to think your a horrible (closeted) racist. The people who bang the table the loudest about an issue, are usually the people causing it in the first place. So how do we solve the issue of racism, the same way you deal with terrorists actually. By making fun of them and mocking their awful opinions.

Everyone is special and one of a kind, and even considering the notion of it not and taking it seriously is beyond the scope of any sane logic one should have. Treating racism with even a monikerum, a snibblie of seriousness is only feeding into and perpetuating the said issue.

if you make fun of it, like how we make fun of outdated ideals like Sexism and Terrorism. laugh at the people who do toxic shit, they fucking HATE being mocked or laughed at since they honestly want you to be a misreble as they are. So don’t let them. Also education is good, ignorance bad.

anyways may write a part 2 later, my second dose of the covid shot (moderna) kicked in and I am suffering...

#chill political chat #politics #rant #chill rant #tired #ow

9 notes · View notes

americanredragger · 4 years ago

Text

A Letter to My Mother (That I am too scared to send)

Okay. We’re having this talk now. I have been putting it off because there’s never been a way for me to keep my cool long enough to say it straight. I’ve been nice, I’ve been polite. I’ve walked away from conversations rather than address this directly because I don’t want to lose my mom.

Yesterday was unlike anything in American history. There is no both-sides-ism to be taken here. There is no even vaguely similar violence unleashed by the Left. This isn’t to say that NO violence has ever been unleashed by the left, it can and does happen. But nothing like this. This is unprecedented in both it's scope and audacity.

Unless you can point to an instance in which a Democrat president (or Senator, or Governor) whipped up a riot and unleashed those rioters on the Seat of Government of the United States of America, causing it to be breached and overrun by a hostile force for the first time in 207 years, the things don’t equate at all.

Unless you can point to a riot held by alt-right wingers in which the police cracked down on them HARD to the level of being condemned by the International Criminal Court as bordering on war crimes, the things don’t equate at all.

This was a direct assault on our government by a crowd whipped up by a sitting president. This has never happened before.

The Capitol Police removed the barricades and guided the insurrectionists in.

They chatted and took selfies with them. Exchanged fist bumps with them.

The seditionists were allowed to leave with few arrests, just… gently guided out once the barbarian hordes had their fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaPTjQZBLhQ

And yes, Trump (eventually) told them to go home, but refused to condemn what they'd done and finished his speech with "We love you. You're very special." and continued to refer to his political opponents as "evil".

This is quite literally unprecedented in American history. As in, nothing comes close. That's what "unprecedented" means.

If this had been BLM, the response would have been entirely different. DC would be on lockdown. The police would be bringing WAR to the streets. There would be helicopters, APCs, and beat cops dressed like the US Army rolling into Baghdad in 2003. The DC area hospitals would be overwhelmed with rioters suffering from horrific head and spine injuries from trigger-happy use of rubber bullets and night-sticks. Hell, Trump tear-gassed ACTUAL peaceful protesters last summer just so he could stage an awkward photo op in front of a church, which even the Clergy called him out on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzBhYhu7NYI

Don't you DARE equate the two.

I'm tired of the whataboutisms. I'm tired of ignoring the evidence right in front of you. Donald Trump is the single most corrupt, evil man America has ever elected to the presidency. He has worked hard to transform the Republican party into something that actual Holocaust survivors and experts have called "Neofascist" and even less flattering terms.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/16/its-not-wrong-to-compare-trumps-america-to-the-holocaust-heres-why/

https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/2020/10/25/holocaust-survivor-fears-rising-tide-ugliness-blames-trump-opinion/3740781001/

https://forward.com/scribe/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-survivor-compares-trump-to-hitler/

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article223718330.html

Historians and victims of fascism the world over point to what Trump and his transformed Republican party have been doing as president when asked how the Weimar Republic fell and the Nazi regime rose.

The overwhelming amount of terrorist attacks in the last five years have been Trump supporters (Well over half stemming from that singular cause, with the rest divvied among a MASSIVE swathe of motives), but none more so overwhelmingly so than yesterday's.

There is no left wing equivalent for this in America until you go all the way back to the Weather Underground bombings, and even they were not goaded on by the incumbent politicians of a party.

Your party has been STOLEN from you. The Party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is no more. And now it’s stealing you from your children as we have watched you and dad drift further and further into the Hannity-Limbaugh-Carlson echo chamber.

88 years ago next month, right wing extremists set fire to the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic. Over the next few days, they seeded reports that it was actually the communists, maybe socialists, no, it was definitely anarchists… or was it trade unionists? Either way, it HAD to have been The Left who burned down the Reichstag.

This was used to expand and hold onto the power of the Chancellor, a man who need not be named. The next few years proved to be sorrowful for everyone.

That same blame-shifting is already happening again, but it's not in some far away country, it's happening here, where we all thought it couldn't.

This sort of event is unprecedented in the United States, or it was until yesterday. It is not so unprecedented elsewhere.

The only difference is that this attempt failed.

The attempt was made because Trump’s own administration found that this was the most secure election in American history, and Trump’s lawsuits to the contrary were laughed out of court by Trump-appointed judges, including his Supreme Court justices, and his exceedingly incompetent and well-documented attempts to get state officials to overturn a legitimate election all failed.

I still believe you and dad are good, honest people. Patriots who want America to do well in the world.

You can not-like Nancy Pelosi, or Obama, or Biden, or Hilary Clinton. That’s your prerogative, and we’ll agree on plenty in that regard. You’re well within your rights to believe that my preferred economics don’t work. We’ll disagree heartily, but that’s normal for families, especially between parents and their kids.

But your party has been hijacked by neofascists, malignant narcissists, and white supremacists.

I am on my knees BEGGING you to see what so many experts and victims have been warning you about for years.

The Left did not do this.

Trump did.

You have been led astray by an vain, selfish, greedy demagogue, a well documented honorless grifter who embodies everything Christ opposed, and uses people until they have nothing more to give him and discards them. He has cloaked this latest grift in the American flag and set a cross upon it, the only way Fascism ever COULD take root in America, as we saw with Joe McCarthy in the Second Red Scare.

It’s changing you. You can’t see it because it’s happening to you, but those around you can, and it’s scaring us.

Please, finally, truly see this. I want my parents back. You’re going down a path I can’t follow and it’s breaking my heart.

In 2016, I broke from the Republican Party because I saw calamity coming in the nomination of Donald Trump. Only 4 years later, and history has soberingly showed me that I was more right than I could have ever guessed, and my world view has never been the same since. I have looked back at the political opinions I wrote and posted then, and they were so selfish and hateful that it was physically painful for me to put myself through that review. I was a puppet. I couldn’t have seen it at the time because I was at the center of it, and I still live in dread of the monster I would have become if I’d kept to that path. I see that same kind of speech coming from you now - the jingoism, the recycled talking points, the Orwellian denials, and the near-unquestioning loyalty to the stars of the Republican Party and their mouthpieces at Fox, OAN, Newsmax, and the AM Radio circuit. I see the most selfish parts of who I used to be, and I know that deep down, you are not that person because I still see you constantly striving to be a good mother, a good Christian, and a model human being.

I’m imploring you to finally look at the evidence, the boundless clear and present evidence, and see what men like Gingrich, McConnell, and Trump have turned your party into. What they are turning you into, the same as they tried with me.

I know you wouldn’t be happy as a Democrat - I myself am only begrudgingly a Democrat because the system doesn’t allow for a viable alternative (and that’s a whole different issue that deserves it’s own library of articles). I’m not trying to convert you. I just need to know that you can look at the evidence with your own eyes like I did and see that you’ve been played for a sucker by men who cry wolf and distract you by having you chase shadows while they line their pockets with money and power. Please stop listening to these monsters, stop swallowing their poison. I know how easy it is to be in that world because I myself have lived in it for most of my life. I fully understand the appeal: there are easy answers for everything, you always know who the enemy is and who your supposed allies and benefactors are. But I also left that behind, and yes, it hurts. It hurts a lot, and frequently. But despite the pain, I know I am better off for having done it.

Yes, I have to question the people who claim to represent me more. I have to question EVERYTHING more because I now know that nothing is as clear cut as I thought it was - once removed from Plato’s Cave, I no longer had the luxury of a simple world. And yet I am still happier because I am so much more my own person now. Yes I falter, and worse still, some days I fall back into the old ways of thinking, but now I recognize that for what it is and it is easier to deal with.

You’ll always be a Conservative, Mom, but I see you on the path that I was on, a path that nearly robbed me of my critical thinking and objectivity, and one which would have weaponized my sense of patriotism to benefit people who are not me. You have kept that course far longer than I. Please put aside the whataboutisms, the both-sides-isms, and finally see the evil, ravenous monster that killed your party from the inside and now wears its skin to deceive you into feeding it further.

I don’t ask that you agree with my politics or economics. I AM begging you though to split from this political machine which is changing you into something I no longer recognize. I want the parents I used to have, the ones who could look at things objectively and form their own opinions instead of repeating talk show buzz lines.

Please, recognize the shadows on the wall of the cave that wicked men are showing you are NOT reality. Please, join me in the truth of the world outside.

#I very nearly sent it #but she's already having tremendous issues between her and my sister and I didn't want to compound those and split the family apart #more than it already has #at any rate #if she doesn't start cooling down by fall #well #at least I have it written down here for easy access #politics #family #trump #republicans #democrats #echo chamber #republican #mitch mcconnell #conservative #conservatives #family issues

7 notes · View notes

foreverlogical · 5 years ago

Link

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — As the world races to find a vaccine and a treatment for COVID-19, there is seemingly no antidote in sight for the burgeoning outbreak of coronavirus conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anti-mask myths and sham cures.

The phenomenon, unfolding largely on social media, escalated this week when President Donald Trump retweeted a false video about an anti-malaria drug being a cure for the virus and it was revealed that Russian intelligence is spreading disinformation about the crisis through English-language websites.

Experts worry the torrent of bad information is dangerously undermining efforts to slow the virus, whose death toll in the U.S. hit 150,000 Wednesday, by far the highest in the world, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. Over a half-million people have died in the rest of the world.

Hard-hit Florida reported 216 deaths, breaking the single-day record it set a day earlier. Texas confirmed 313 additional deaths, pushing its total to 6,190, while South Carolina’s death toll passed 1,500 this week, more than doubling over the past month. In Georgia, hospitalizations have more than doubled since July 1.

“It is a real challenge in terms of trying to get the message to the public about what they can really do to protect themselves and what the facts are behind the problem,” said Michael Osterholm, head of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

He said the fear is that “people are putting themselves in harm’s way because they don’t believe the virus is something they have to deal with.”

Rather than fade away in the face of new evidence, the claims have flourished, fed by mixed messages from officials, transmitted by social media, amplified by leaders like Trump and mutating when confronted with contradictory facts.

“You don’t need masks. There is a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel promised in a video that promoted hydroxychloroquine. “You don’t need people to be locked down.”

The truth: Federal regulators last month revoked their authorization of the drug as an emergency treatment amid growing evidence it doesn’t work and can have deadly side effects. Even if it were effective, it wouldn’t negate the need for masks and other measures to contain the outbreak.

None of that stopped Trump, who has repeatedly praised the drug, from retweeting the video. Twitter and Facebook began removing the video Monday for violating policies on COVID-19 misinformation, but it had already been seen more than 20 million times.

Many of the claims in Immanuel’s video are widely disputed by medical experts. She has made even more bizarre pronouncements in the past, saying that cysts, fibroids and some other conditions can be caused by having sex with demons, that McDonald’s and Pokemon promote witchcraft, that alien DNA is used in medical treatments, and that half-human “reptilians” work in the government.

Other baseless theories and hoaxes have alleged that the virus isn’t real or that it’s a bioweapon created by the U.S. or its adversaries. One hoax from the outbreak’s early months claimed new 5G towers were spreading the virus through microwaves. Another popular story held that Microsoft founder Bill Gates plans to use COVID-19 vaccines to implant microchips in all 7 billion people on the planet.

Then there are the political theories — that doctors, journalists and federal officials are conspiring to lie about the threat of the virus to hurt Trump politically.

Social media has amplified the claims and helped believers find each other. The flood of misinformation has posed a challenge for Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, which have found themselves accused of censorship for taking down virus misinformation.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about Immanuel’s video during an often-contentious congressional hearing Wednesday.

“We did take it down because it violates our policies,” Zuckerberg said.

U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat leading the hearing, responded by noting that 20 million people saw the video before Facebook acted.

“Doesn’t that suggest that your platform is so big, that even with the right policies in place, you can’t contain deadly content?” Cicilline asked Zuckerberg.

It wasn’t the first video containing misinformation about the virus, and experts say it’s not likely to be the last.

A professionally made 26-minute video that alleges the government’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, manufactured the virus and shipped it to China was watched more than 8 million times before the platforms took action. The video, titled “Plandemic,” also warned that masks could make you sick — the false claim Facebook cited when it removed the video down from its site.

Judy Mikovits, the discredited doctor behind “Plandemic,” had been set to appear on the show “America This Week” on the Sinclair Broadcast Group. But the company, which operates TV stations in 81 U.S. markets, canned the segment, saying it was “not appropriate” to air.

This week, U.S. government officials speaking on condition of anonymity cited what they said was a clear link between Russian intelligence and websites with stories designed to spread disinformation on the coronavirus in the West. Russian officials rejected the accusations.

Of all the bizarre and myriad claims about the virus, those regarding masks are proving to be among the most stubborn.

New York City resident Carlos Lopez said he wears a mask when required to do so but doesn’t believe it is necessary.

“They’re politicizing it as a tool,” he said. “I think it’s more to try to get Trump to lose. It’s more a scare tactic.”

He is in the minority. A recent AP/NORC poll said 3 in 4 Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — support a national mask mandate.

Still, mask skeptics are a vocal minority and have come together to create social media pages where many false claims about mask safety are shared. Facebook has removed some of the pages — such as the group Unmasking America!, which had nearly 10,000 members — but others remain.

Early in the pandemic, medical authorities themselves were the source of much confusion regarding masks. In February, officials like the U.S. surgeon general urged Americans not to stockpile masks because they were needed by medical personnel and might not be effective in everyday situations.

Public health officials changed their tune when it became apparent that the virus could spread among people showing no symptoms.

Yet Trump remained reluctant to use a mask, mocked his rival Joe Biden for wearing one and suggested people might be covering their faces just to hurt him politically. He did an abrupt about-face this month, claiming that he had always supported masks — then later retweeted Immanuel’s video against masks.

The mixed signals hurt, Fauci acknowledged in an interview with NPR this month.

“The message early on became confusing,” he said.

Many of the claims around masks allege harmful effects, such as blocked oxygen flow or even a greater chance of infection. The claims have been widely debunked by doctors.

Dr. Maitiu O Tuathail of Ireland grew so concerned about mask misinformation he posted an online video of himself comfortably wearing a mask while measuring his oxygen levels. The video has been viewed more than 20 million times.

“While face masks don’t lower your oxygen levels. COVID definitely does,” he warned.

Yet trusted medical authorities are often being dismissed by those who say requiring people to wear masks is a step toward authoritarianism.

“Unless you make a stand, you will be wearing a mask for the rest of your life,” tweeted Simon Dolan, a British businessman who has sued the government over its COVID-19 restrictions.

Trump’s reluctant, ambivalent and late embrace of masks hasn’t convinced some of his strongest supporters, who have concocted ever more elaborate theories to explain his change of heart. Some say he was actually speaking in code and doesn’t really support masks.

O Tuathail witnessed just how unshakable COVID-19 misinformation can be when, after broadcasting his video, he received emails from people who said he cheated or didn’t wear the mask long enough to feel the negative effects.

That’s not surprising, according to University of Central Florida psychology professor Chrysalis Wright, who studies misinformation. She said conspiracy theory believers often engage in mental gymnastics to make their beliefs conform with reality.

“People only want to hear what they already think they know,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Beatrice Dupuy in New York, Eric Tucker in Washington, and Amy Forliti in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

VISIT WEBSITE

7 notes · View notes

rotationalsymmetry · 5 years ago

Text

Why it’s bad — not just not helpful, but actively harmful — to go out on your way to shit on* people who might not vote Biden:

(Premises: truth is good and important, kindness is good and important, my audience is generally left of center and does not like Biden’s opposition, anybody reading this basically wants to do the right thing, the idea that the means justify the ends is kind of situational: sometimes how important your end goal is does actually affect what methods of getting there are appropriate (pushing someone away from you is excessive if they said something you didn’t like but appropriate as defense against assault), but also some things are always just wrong. Also, that climate change is a global existential threat, covid-19 is real, imperialism is bad, Black lives matter, there is no moral justification for the US to restrict immigration at all let alone anything about how undocumented immigrants are being treated, the prison system is extremely racist in practice and not actually a good idea in theory either, etc.)

People are stubborn cusses who don’t like being told what to do. Personally I’m not going to hold up “be nice to me or I might do the opposite of what you want just to spite you” as a threat because fuck I’ve got more self control than that and I know the stakes are sky high. But realistically: some people really are contrary enough to do that. So, demanding rather than asking or arguing for a thing is always a risk. (Demanding often feels safer. But that’s an illusion.)

People are stubborn cusses who don’t like being told what to do. And especially certain kinds of people — people with a history of being bullied or abused — tend to be very sensitive to being pressured, manipulated, or coerced into doing what other people want them to do. So it can harm relationships between people and between factions of the Left when some people/factions are demanding that others act a certain way, especially when the demands come attached to negging-like statements. (I get there’s a place for eg just shutting down terfs or Nazis. This isn’t that kind of thing; no one’s argument is based on the idea that other people aren’t really people here. At least not on the “don’t tell me what to do” side of this. Also, it’s possible to deplatform people without telling them they don’t really believe what they say they believe.)

It’s not polite and is not really ethical either. Consider: “if you cared about me you’d wash the dishes”, vs “hey, it’s your turn to wash the dishes.” “If you really held progressive values, you would vote Biden (and by implication, not criticize him until after the election)” follows the same pattern. “The fewer people vote Biden, the more likely it is that (the Republican candidate) will win the election” is a neutral statement of fact, and not one of the things I’m objecting to. It’s also not something I’ve actually heard anyone say this election cycle.

It’s not constructive, because getting people who are already likely to vote Democrat to actually vote is a better use of everyone’s time than trying to persuade someone who has already decided not to.

It’s not constructive, because if you want to change someone’s mind this is not how you do it. See point 1.

It’s not necessary: it’s possible to express support for Biden as a candidate and encourage people to vote for him without mentioning the existence of people who might not vote for him at all. Even if in the moment you feel motivated to express support for Biden because you read a post by someone expressing a lack of inclination to vote for him.

If you’re not sure about that claim that it’s not constructive (fair — you should be suspecting me of motivated reasoning), look at what people who actually run campaigns do. Is Biden insulting people who don’t want to vote for him on Twitter? Is the Democratic Party asking volunteers to insult people who don’t want to vote Democrat, as a way or contributing to the campaign? Is it paying people to do that? No? I wonder why that is? Maybe that’s because insulting people who don’t want to vote for a candidate doesn’t actually win campaigns?

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Remember a time when someone insulted you for not agreeing with them. How did you feel? Conversely, think of a time when you changed your mind about something. How did that happen?

Why it’s actually OK to talk about being unenthusiastic about voting Biden (even if you really want him and not his opposition to win the election):

Well, fuck, look for another post on the subject I guess.

Some notes on impulse control:

Sometimes, another person says something on tumblr and you’re like “fuck yeah” and it just feels right to you and you reblog it. Maybe that’s where some of this is coming from: people who’ve decided to definitely vote for and fully support Biden (reservations notwithstanding) see a post, feel frustrated, go “yeah that’s right,” and reblog without really thinking about how it’s going to come across. That’s understandable. People tend to use social media to relax and unwind; we don’t necessarily bring our full game to it.

If that’s going on, maybe learn to recognize this pattern (recognize when a post that’s a feel-good vent to you is really hurtful to someone else, because it’s manipulative af) and think twice before clicking post? Maybe in general get in the habit of taking a breath/five seconds before posting or reblogging something? I realize for many of us that’s easier said than done, and it can be a work in progress. I’m not proud of everything I’ve hit post on even after I’ve given it some thought.

Maybe some people have an attitude of “well, if anyone is hurt by this, I don’t want them on my blog anyways.” I’d suggest, as an in between measure, tagging this stuff. “Biden” or “us politics” or “election 2020” or something. Explanation for why people who might have this kind of reaction might still be people who share your values either right before this post or right after, depending on what order I decide they’re done in.

Now, I messed up here. My first five or six reactions to this sort of post was not a positive one, but I wasn’t sure whether I had a good reason to not like them or was just...reacting. I have mental health issues and sometimes have much stronger reactions to things than the things warrant. So I just...didn’t say anything or do anything until it got to be too much and I lost my shit. Not ideal. If I had to do it over again, I’d send politely worded messages to people I wanted to keep following who were posting this stuff, asking them to not do that and briefly explaining why. But, I’m at a point where I can’t do the politely worded thing, which makes actually directly addressing the people who are doing this a much trickier proposition. So. Here we are. And I’m blogging to whoever the fuck reads my blog (other than my husband, who really doesn’t deserve any of this) like that’s actually going to help.

At least it’s making me feel better.

* “shit on”: this isn’t about the sort of posts that are all “vote for Biden!” Or “vote for Biden because ... ” or “I’m voting for Biden because...” or “here’s some non-straw-man arguments for not voting Biden that I’m going to disagree with in a way that basically respects that someone can make one of those arguments and be a fundamentally decent person also.” This is about the posts that are all “if you’re considering not voting Biden you are a tentacle monster from the dimension of non-Euclidean geometry, and also incredibly stupid because the only reason someone might do this is this tissue-thin straw-man argument.” And it’s certainly not about the posts that are “you might want to deliver your mail in ballot in person if that’s possible where you live” or “check to make sure you haven’t been dropped from the voter registry” or other posts that actively address barriers to voting or getting one’s vote counted. Those are good, keep doing those.

#political #us politics #biden #election 2020 #swearing #long post #rage post #personal #appeal to reason and decency #thinking things through #i hope this comes across as vulnerable and trying to engage in authentic dialog #and not just angry #although i’m not sure i want actual dialog in the sense of anyone responding to this #because i’m not confident in anyone who defends this behavior being able to argue in good faith

1 note · View note

kathleenmcgregor · 5 years ago

Text

September 6, 2020 (Sunday)

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo warned that American democracy is ending. He pointed to political violence on the streets, the pandemic, unemployment, racial polarization, and natural disasters, all of which are destabilizing the country, and noted that Republicans appear to have abandoned democracy in favor of a cult-like support for Donald Trump. They are wedded to a narrative based in lies, as the president dismantles our non-partisan civil service and replaces it with a gang of cronies loyal only to him.

He is right to be worried.

Just the past few days have demonstrated that key aspects of democracy are under attack.

Democracy depends on the rule of law. Today, we learned that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who rose to become a Cabinet official thanks to his prolific fundraising for the Republican Party, apparently managed to raise as much money as he did because he pressured employees at his business, New Breed Logistics, to make campaign contributions that he later reimbursed through bonuses. Such a scheme is illegal. A spokesman said that Dejoy “believes that he has always followed campaign fundraising laws and regulations,” but records show that many of DeJoy’s employees only contributed money to political campaigns when they worked for him.

Democracy depends on equality before the law. But Black and brown people seem to receive summary justice at the hands of certain law enforcement officers, rather than being accorded the right to a trial before a jury of their peers. In a democracy, voters elect representatives who make laws that express the will of the community. “Law enforcement officers” stop people who are breaking those laws, and deliver them to our court system, where they can tell their side of the story and either be convicted of breaking the law, or acquitted. When police can kill people without that process, justice becomes arbitrary, depending on who holds power.

Democracy depends on reality-based policy. Increasingly it is clear that the Trump administration is more concerned about creating a narrative to hold power than it is in facts. Today, Trump tweeted that “Our Economy and Jobs are doing really well,” when we are in a recession (defined as two quarters of negative growth) and unemployment remains at 8.4%.

This weekend, the drive to create a narrative led to a new low as the government launched an attempt to control how we understand our history. On Friday, the administration instructed federal agencies to end training on “critical race theory,” which is a scary-sounding term for the idea that, over time, our laws have discriminated against Black and brown people, and that we should work to get rid of that discriminatory pattern.

Today, Trump tweeted that the U.S. Department of Education will investigate whether California schools are using curriculum based on the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which argues that American history should center on the date of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Chesapeake shores. Anyone using such curriculum, he said, would lose funding. Government interference in teaching our history echoes the techniques of dictatorships. It is unprecedented in America.

Democracy depends on free and fair suffrage. The White House is trying to undermine our trust in the electoral system by claiming that mail-in ballots can be manipulated and will usher in fraud. While Trump has been arguing this for a while, last week Attorney General William Barr, a Trump loyalist, also chimed in, offering a false story that the Justice Department had indicted a Texas man for filling out 1700 absentee ballots. In fact, in 2017, one man was convicted of forging one woman’s signature on a mail-in ballot in a Dallas City Council race. Because mail-in ballots have security barcodes and require signatures to be matched to a registration form, the rate of ballot fraud is vanishingly small: there have been 491 prosecutions in all U.S. nationwide elections from 2000 to 2012, when billions of ballots were cast.

Interestingly, an intelligence briefing from the Department of Homeland Security released Friday says that Russia is spreading false statements identical to those Trump and Barr are spreading. The bulletin says that Russian actors “are likely to promote allegations of corruption, system failure, and foreign malign interference to sow distrust in Democratic institutions and election outcomes.” They are spreading these claims through state-controlled media, fake websites, and social media trolls.

At the same time, we know that the Republicans are launching attempts to suppress Democratic votes. Last Wednesday, we learned that Georgia has likely removed 200,000 voters from the rolls for no reason. In December 2019, the Georgia Secretary of State said officials had removed 313,243 names from the rolls in an act of routine maintenance because they were inactive and the voters had moved, but nonpartisan experts found that 63.3% of those voters had not, in fact, moved. They were purged from the rolls in error.

And, in what was perhaps an accident, in South Carolina, voters’ sample ballots did not include Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, although they did include the candidates for the Green, Alliance, and Libertarian parties. When The Post and Courier newspaper called their attention to the oversight, the State Election Commission, which is a Republican-majority body appointed by a staunch Trump supporter, updated the ballots.

Democracy depends on the legitimacy of (at least) two political parties. Opposition parties enable voters unhappy with whichever group of leaders is in power to articulate their positions without undermining the government itself. They also watch leaders carefully, forcing them to combat corruption within their ranks.

This administration has sought to delegitimize Democrats as “socialists” and “radicals” who are not legitimate political players. Just today, Trump tweeted: “The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before.”

For its part, the Republican Party has essentially become the Trump Party, not only in ideology and loyalty but in finances. Yesterday we learned that Trump and the Republican National Committee have spent close to $60 million from campaign contributors on Trump’s legal bills. Matthew Sanderson, a campaign finance lawyer for Republican presidential candidates, told the New York Times, “Vindicating President Trump’s personal interests is now so intertwined with the interests of the Republican Party they are one and the same — and that includes the legal fights the party is paying for now.”

The administration has refused to answer to Democrats in Congress, ignoring subpoenas with the argument that Congress has no power to investigate the executive branch, despite precedent for such oversight going all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Just last week, a federal appeals court said that Congress has no power to enforce a subpoena because there is no law that gives it the authority to do so. This essentially voids a subpoena the House issued last year to former White House counsel Don McGahn, demanding he testify about his dealings with Trump over the investigation into the ties of the Trump campaign to Russia. (The decision will likely be challenged.)

On September 4, U.S. Postal Service police officers refused Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) entry to one USPS facility in Opa-Locka, Florida and another in Miami. Although she followed the procedures she had followed in the past, this time the local officials told her that the national USPS leadership had told them to bar her entry. “Ensuring only authorized parties enter nonpublic areas of USPS facilities is part of a Postal Police officer’s normal duties, said Postal Inspector Eric Manuel. Wasserman Schultz is a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

And finally, democracy depends on the peaceful transition of power. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not leave office because the Democrats are going to cheat.

So we should definitely worry.

Convincing people the game is over is one of the key ways dictators take power. Scholars warn never to consent in advance to what you anticipate an autocrat will demand. If democracy were already gone, there would be no need for Trump and his people to lie and cheat and try to steal this election.

But should we despair? Absolutely not.

And I would certainly not be writing this letter.

Americans are coming together from all different political positions to fight this attack on our democracy, and we have been in similar positions before. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln spoke under similar circumstances, and noted that Americans who disagreed on almost everything else could still agree to defend their country, just as we are now. Ordinary Americans “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach---a scythe---a pitchfork-- a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver,” he said. And “when the storm shall be past,” the world “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

1 note · View note

beesandwasps · 2 years ago

Text

The Democratic Party has proclaimed the entirely inadequate Dodd-Frank Act, combined with the ludicrously ineffective Sarbanes-Oxley rules, is All We Really Need, despite the fact that current events are demonstrating that the financial sector as a whole finds them trivial to render moot. As you say, the Republicans had been trying to repeal the Glass-Steagall rules for years. The reason they had not succeeded was because the Democrats refused to let them do it. Clinton specifically twisted arms and called in favors among Congressional Democrats to make them stop resisting. The only “of-the-day economists” who thought the bill was a good idea were right-wingers who any sane, well-informed person already knew at the time were biased as hell.

If you’re going to claim that Hastert was somehow an unstoppable force — the Democrats had more than enough votes in the Senate to block any piece of legislation they wanted, and enough positions on committees in the House to keep bills from reaching the floor, so he absolutely was not — and Clinton had no choice whatsoever but to sign any bill handed to him, then you are implicitly admitting that during the last 2 years of the George W. Bush administration, the first 2 years of the Obama administration, and the first 2 years of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party — which has held comparable majorities in Congress as the Republicans held in 1999 — must have been consciously betraying the country by refusing to pass legislation to accomplish their stated campaign platform policies. (Why were we still in Iraq until 2011 when they said they’d have us out by the end of 2009? Why were no bankers prosecuted for the 2008 meltdown? Where were our expanded stimulus payments — we got more from Trump than we got from Biden! Why are there still immigrant detention centers? Why are the cops more murderous than ever, and receiving increasing amounts of federal funding and equipment? According to you, they should be an unstoppable force, and they didn’t even have to convince a President of the opposition party for two of those three periods!)

More or less the same story is true of NAFTA. I know that since Trump derided NAFTA a lot of Democrats suddenly want to proclaim it a brilliant deal, but it was an idea of the Reagan administration, designed primarily to destroy labor unions in the US (which it did with alarming efficiency) and which has had a number of other undesirable side effects like destroying small family farms in Mexico (who suddenly had to compete with American factory farms) which is responsible for some significant share of their social turmoil of the last decade. The Clintons even quietly admitted in 2015, before Trump started banging away, that NAFTA was a massive mistake that they wish they hadn’t pushed for. It’s a deal to benefit only the rich, at the expense of everybody else in all three countries. The anti-union part and a certain amount of the rest of the side effects were predicted exactly by the Democrats when NAFTA was proposed, which is why although George Bush signed the treaty in 1992, it was not ratified and therefore was not valid, the same way the TPP (which is the same idea and inspiration as NAFTA, basically) was signed by Obama but never ratified and has never taken effect (thank goodness, for once, that the Republicans were knee-jerk opposition to Obama, because it is exactly what they’ve been trying to accomplish for at least the last four decades). It was not until Bill Clinton, the right-of-center pro-1% corporatist, twisted enough Democratic arms that the party dropped resistance and Congress ratified NAFTA. Otherwise it never would have taken effect.

(Oh, and incidentally: Clinton’s support of NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall was very definitely brought about because he was a right-wing corporatist who had very little grasp of practical economics and was constantly being seduced by Libertarian theory. He befriended Alan Greenspan, who literally hung around with Ayn Rand and who was very open about trying to use federal economic policy to get people to move their assets out of banks and into the stock market because it was easier for the rich to get at their money that way. And the Democratic Party has become so completely useless in the last couple of decades precisely because the Clintons managed to put enough of their fellow-travelers from the DLC into the DNC that the DLC disbanded on the grounds that they didn’t need a second organization to influence policy any more. All policies and candidates approved by the national Democratic party are from the same people who thought it was a brilliant idea to repeal Glass-Steagall and supported the Iraq invasion of 2003.)

If you’re going to claim that it’s all the Republicans’ fault, then you are implicitly admitting that the Democratic Party is useless, either a group so stupid it can’t do anything, or a bunch of frauds deliberately preventing anybody from stopping the Republicans by occupying and deliberately not using the only platform from which stopping them might be accomplished without literally overthrowing the government. Either way, this is not the flex you think it is.

95K notes · View notes

theliberaltony · 6 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Black voters effectively delivered Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. She and Sen. Bernie Sanders ran about evenly among white voters, but black voters overwhelmingly backed Clinton. So did the Democratic establishment.

That team-up — black voters and the more establishment candidate — is not unusual.

We don’t have detailed exit polls of Democratic primaries for most other offices, but according to pre-election polls and precinct results in a number of high-profile House and gubernatorial primaries since 2016, black voters have tended to back the candidate from the party’s establishment wing over a more liberal alternative. And at least for now, we’re seeing the same pattern in the 2020 Democratic presidential race: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders are fairly competitive with Joe Biden among white Democrats, but trail the former vice president substantially among black Democrats.

Why, though? After all, African Americans have dramatically less income and wealth than white Americans, so messages of “big, structural change” (Warren) or a “political revolution” (Sanders) should, in theory, be particularly appealing. Because a higher percentage of black Americans than white Americans don’t have health insurance, a program like Medicare for All, for example, would disproportionately benefit black people.

So what gives? I’m going to offer some potential answers to that question, but let’s first get a couple caveats and complications out of the way.

First, it’s hard to come up with a definitive explanation for the establishment-black voter alliance because the “establishment” is a fuzzy concept. Exactly which candidate is a center-left, establishment Democrat and which is anti-establishment or “the liberal alternative” is all a bit subjective.

Second — and this is important — black Democrats are not a monolith and are divided in some of the same ways white Democrats are divided. Young black voters are less supportive of Biden (and were less supportive of Clinton in 2016) compared to older black voters. Similarly, black voters without college degrees are more supportive of Biden than those with degrees.

That said, blacks of all demographics are more supportive of Biden than their white counterparts, according to Morning Consult polling data. Young black voters are more supportive of Biden (and were more supportive of Clinton) than young white voters. Older black voters were more supportive of Clinton than older white ones in 2016 and now are strongly behind Biden. Black college graduates are more supportive of Biden than white college graduates. Nuances aside, the weakness of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with black voters is a well-known phenomenon that people in the Warren and Sanders camps and anti-establishment liberal activist groups are openly grappling with.

So here are a few explanations for why black voters have tended to side with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. I have tried to order these explanations from strongest to weakest (in my view, at least):

Establishment candidates typically have existing ties to the black community

This will sound tautological, but an establishment candidate is … well … established. A candidate who is part of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party likely has fairly strong ties to major constituencies in the party, such as labor unions, women’s rights groups and, of course, black leaders and voters. So when black voters backed Gov. Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in New York’s Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, or Andy Beshear over Adam Edelen in Kentucky’s Democratic gubernatorial primary earlier this year, that was not shocking. Not only did Beshear and Cuomo spend years developing their own ties with the black communities in their states, but their fathers did, too. (Steve Beshear was governor of Kentucky, Mario Cuomo the governor of New York.)

Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 similarly entered the primaries with longstanding ties to black voters. It’s worth considering if the story here is not that establishment candidates are smarter in appealing and connecting with black voters during the campaign, compared to anti-establishment candidates. Maybe it’s that the establishment candidate in a race is likely to be the person who enters the campaign with the strongest support among black voters.

Black voters are pragmatic

White Democrats are significantly more likely than black Democrats to describe themselves as liberal. Perhap that’s the simple explanation for why most black voters eschew more liberal candidates. But scholars of black voters argue that the liberal-moderate-conservative framework does not apply well to predicting the actual policy positions and voting behavior of black Americans.

In other words, it’s not clear that “moderate” black Democrats are moderate in the way that the word is most often invoked in white-dominated, elite settings, such ascable news and Twitter. They’re not demanding David Brooks-style centrism on economic and cultural policy. If, for instance, Biden endorsed Medicare for All and the elimination of most private insurance plans — the position of Sanders and Warren — I think it’s likely that black voters who like Biden would begin to feel more favorable about Medicare for All rather than breaking with Biden to find an anti-Medicare-for All candidate. Similarly, if Biden were out of the race, I’m skeptical that much of his support among black voters would go to Mayor Pete Buttigieg or Sen. Amy Klobuchar who are also positioning themselves as centrists on policy issues.

“The fact that blacks describe themselves as moderate or conservative on these measures is virtually meaningless, and results mostly from the fact that these ideological labels carry such little currency among black voters,” Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies black political attitudes, told me.

Instead, in interviews with black Democrats in 2016 and 2020, I’ve seen more pragmatism than moderation. In 2016, black primary voters were very fearful of Trump getting elected and felt Clinton was the best person to face him in a general election. They were skeptical that the broader electorate would like Sanders’s farther-reaching ideas, and even more doubtful Sanders could execute them if elected. During the 2020 cycle, black voters have regularly told reporters that they like Sen. Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates but view Biden as the person most likely to defeat Trump.

Why would black Democrats be more pragmatic than white Democratic voters? In interviews, black voters often suggest they have a lot to lose if a Republican takes office. They don’t necessarily say this explicitly, but the implication is that they have more to lose than white voters, making them more risk-averse. That’s at least partially true. A higher percentage of black Americans (compared to white Americans) use government programs like Medicaid, for example, so cuts to those programs by Republicans are more likely to affect blacks than whites.

“On doorsteps in South Carolina, black voters sensibly asked me why I thought Bernie Sanders could accomplish more than Obama, whom the Republicans had done everything they could to stop,” wrote Ted Fertik, in a study of the Vermont senator’s campaign.1

“They saw no reason to believe that Sanders would be more effective, and given the fulminating racism of so many leading Republicans, they sensibly felt that the costs of a Republican presidency would fall more heavily on them,” he added. “They were therefore not inclined to take a risk on Bernie Sanders … even when they agreed with his proposals.”

Black leaders are part of the establishment and support its candidates

This is a slightly different point than No. 1, above. It’s not just that Sanders in 2016 and Warren in 2020 entered those races with weaker connections to black leaders than Clinton or Biden. During the primary process, black leaders weighed in — on the side of the establishment candidate.

In February 2016, fairly early in the primary season, the Congressional Black Caucus’s PAC formally endorsed Clinton. Eight black caucus members have endorsed Biden this year. None are behind Warren or Sanders. You might say that politicians just like to endorse front-runners, so they can be on the side of the winner. Not quite. Ten black caucus members have backed Harris, another candidate whose politics are best described as center-left establishment. (More on her in a bit.) And Biden and Harris are also getting the vast majority of endorsements from other high-profile black figures, such as state representatives and prominent mayors.

Why are elected black officials more likely to side with establishment candidates? Many of these candidates have long courted black community leaders, including elected officials, as I mentioned in No. 1. But I also think it’s the case that many black Democratic elites spent much of the last several decades courting the establishment, and are thus tied to it. You see this on Capitol Hill, where black House members are among the strongest defenders of Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her internal battles with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the progressive wing of the House. Black elites also express the same pragmatism that black voters do and are wary of pushing forward candidates they view as unable to win a general election.

It’s not clear that black voters follow high-profile endorsers. That said, the lack of high-profile black support for Sanders, Warren and other anti-establishment Democrats creates a self-reinforcing problem. They don’t have much support among black voters or black elites, so the press covers their lack of black support. A candidate defined by the press as lacking black support is going to have a hard time getting black voters to support her or black elites to endorse her.

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party appeals to the well-educated more than other groups, and the vast majority of black Democrats don’t have college degrees

Education has become an increasingly powerful predictor of voting behavior in U.S. politics in recent years. That’s proving true in 2020 as well. Warren, in particular, has significantly more support among Democrats with college degrees than those without them. But if education is a dividing line, it’s likely to divide white and black Democrats. Only about 24 percent of black Democrats have college degrees, compared to about 42 percent of white Democrats, according to Gallup data.

In other words, the alliance between black voters and establishment candidates may be partly about education, not race. Perhaps Warren’s limited support among black Americans is simply indicative of her broader challenge with people without college degrees.

We don’t have great data about how Sanders or other liberal Democrats did among black college graduates compared to non-college educated black voters, so I’m reluctant to emphasize this point too much. But there is a lot of evidence that the activist left wing of the Democratic Party is more educated than the rest of the party and perhaps is not connecting with voters — both black and non-black — who don’t have degrees.

The left wing isn’t running enough black candidates

There is some evidence that African Americans are more likely to turn out to vote if there is a black candidate. (These studies are generally of general elections of congressional races, so they’re not perfectly analogous to a presidential primary.) In recent Democratic primaries, the candidate who is well-liked by the white liberal activist wing of the Democratic Party has struggled with black voters (Bill Bradley in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, Sanders in 2016, Sanders and Warren in 2020.) The exceptions were two black candidates: Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Barack Obama in 2008.2

So it would probably be helpful if the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was running more black candidates. It’s not that the liberal bloc of the party has no prominent black voices. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts is a part of the Ocasio-Cortez bloc on Capitol Hill. Andrew Gillum ran to the left and defeated a more establishment candidate in last year’s Democratic primary for governor in Florida, with black voters playing a key role in his victory.

But aspiring black politicians often need to downplay their liberalism to advance in elected office so that they can seem “electable” in a general election. This probably rules out some black candidates — Sens. Cory Booker and Harris, potentially — from becoming “liberal alternatives.” You might say that’s a problem for Booker and Harris, who are trailing Warren and Sanders in most polls. But it’s a problem for the anti-establishment wing of the Democratic Party, too. If the anti-establishment wing of the party were backing a black candidate in 2020, that person would likely present a stronger challenge to Biden, because he or she could more easily cut into his advantage among black voters.

We could come up with some other explanations, but I think those are the strongest. And this analysis points to a blueprint for the left wing of the Democratic Party if it wants to win more black votes:

Align with black candidates or non-black candidates with strong ties to black voters and leaders

Aggressively court black leaders for endorsements

Directly address black voters’ concerns that more liberal candidates have a greater chance of losing races to Republicans

And target black voters under 45 and those with college degrees, who might be less inclined to vote for establishment candidates.

So could that approach work for Sanders and Warren against Biden? Maybe. You could imagine Warren in particular getting endorsements from younger liberal black figures like Gillum or Pressley (particularly if Warren wins one of the early primary states and Harris finishes far behind and is no longer viable). And maybe those endorsements and Warren’s campaigning then lead her to become the candidate of black voters under 45 and those with college degrees, even if Biden still gets most votes from older and less educated black voters.

Remember, Sanders or Warren don’t necessarily have to win the black vote to become the Democratic nominee — they just can’t lose it by 60 percentage points, as Sanders did in 2016. (Biden is getting between 40 and 50 percent of the black vote in most polls now, so nowhere near Clinton 2016 levels. But Clinton was in a two-candidate field, and I would expect Biden’s support among black voters to go up as this gigantic field shrinks.)

But even if Sanders or Warren gets more support among black voters in 2020 than the Vermont senator did in 2016, I tend to think Biden will remain fairly popular with black voters overall — because of his ties to Obama and other black leaders and the perception that he can defeat Trump. So there is a very real possibility that black voters will play the same role in the 2020 presidential primary that they have played in Democratic politics over much of the last four years: blocking the path of the liberal left as it attempts to dethrone the party’s establishment.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

5 notes · View notes

ear-worthy · 3 years ago

Text

“Serious Trouble”: A Podcast For Those Who Care About The Rule Of Law

In 2018, a spin-off of KCRW’s Left Right & Center — which is billed as a civilized yet provocative debate about politics, policy and pop culture — launched, called All The President’s Lawyers, and the show never went hungry for courtroom dramas in the Trump and post-Trump years.

On the legal show, host Josh Barro and legal expert and co-host Ken White probed the legal tea leaves for inspiration of the current week’s investigations, grand juries and legal rulings.

From Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, the Mueller Investigation and, of course, the crown prince of legal buffoonery, Rudy Giuliani, Barro and White analyzed the legal maneuvers of Trump allies or government entities like federal judges, Inspectors General and Congressional Committees. The show continued into the Biden administration until Barro, who was the long-time host of KCRW’s Left, Right & Center, quit in December 2021 to start his own podcast and Substack newsletter called Very Serious with Josh Barro.

Serious Trouble is Barro’s second podcast since leaving Left Right & Center and is, in essence, “getting the band back together.” The podcast’s format is the definition of simplicity. Barro and White discuss the latest news on the numerous legal tornadoes swirling constantly around Trump, our polarized national dialogue, and the legal duels that are generated by culture wars.

If, as anticipated, the Republicans take control of the House and Senate, the legal thumbscrews will be wound tightly on Hunter Biden, every word uttered by President Joe Biden, and numerous Congressional investigations will ensue into Italian computer servers controlling voting machines, socialist conspiracies, and abortion / lifestyle legislation.

In effect, Barro and White will be hard-pressed to keep up with all the legal tornadoes swirling in the news cycle.

Barro is not a lawyer but has great instincts for legal issues and his probing questions to legal expert White make for immersive listening and could qualify as receiving three credits for taking a class in Law.

White, who is an attorney at Brown White & Osborn LLP in Los Angeles, has the benefit of being on both sides of the legal fence. He was a federal prosecutor, and now his practice includes both criminal defense and free speech issues.

The co-hosts explain in detail how the law works and often point out its inherent weaknesses and strengths. White is forever explaining that federal prosecutors move at a snail’s pace to build a case, often frustrating Trump opponents who hope for a legal rather than an electoral decision.

Barro and White often explain the difference between a courtroom legal strategy with pleadings and motions and a public relations legal strategy with social media posts, inflammatory interviews on Fox News and posturing to the press. White always warns that a client’s public relations strategy, no matter how successful, should not hurt the client’s actual legal strategy.

Barro and White are constantly amazed at people under indictment or the subject of an investigation shooting off their mouths in the media. White explains how damaging that can be when prosecutors use some of these freewheeling and loose-lipped comments in court. The number one target of their disdain is former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who now seems to more like a pissed-off motorist at municipal court fighting his road rage and DUI violations rather than the former federal prosecutor he once was.

What makes Serious Trouble so enticing is that— like its predecessor, All The President’s Lawyers — it eschews picking sides in any political battle. Instead, the show addresses the legal issues surrounding these political battles.

It’s a good sign that Barro and White can infuriate Republicans and Democrats during their legal analysis. This podcast will not appeal to either the “Trump is God” or the “Trump is the Devil” crowds. It will appeal to those who are concerned about the rule of law in our nation and for those rational people left who understand that laws are not subservient to the political ideology.

#podcast #legal current awareness #legal

0 notes

patriotsnet · 4 years ago

Text

Why Does Fox News Support Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-does-fox-news-support-republicans/

Why Does Fox News Support Republicans

False Claims About The 2020 Election

Alabama columnist: What does support of Moore do to the GOP?

After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Fox News promoted baseless allegations that voting machine company Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems had conspired to rig the election for Joe Biden. Hosts Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and promoted the allegations on their programs on sister network Fox Business. In December 2020, Smartmatic sent a letter to Fox News demanding retractions and threatening legal action. However, Pirro, Dobbs, and Bartiromo refused to issue retractions as they played a three-minute video segment consisting of an interview with an election technology expert who refuted the allegations promoted by the hosts, responding to questions from an unseen and unidentified man. In February 2021, Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against the network and the three hosts. On March 26, 2021, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network. On May 18, 2021, Fox News filed a motion to dismiss the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, asserting a First Amendment right “to inform the public about newsworthy allegations of paramount public concern.” A Dominion lawyer said that Fox News dismissal of the lawsuit would give them “blank check” to lie.

Fox News Will Be ‘loyal Opposition’ To Biden Fox Ceo Says

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Thursday that it is the job of Fox News to serve as the opposition to the Biden administration, clearly stating the political biases of a network that until 2017 billed itself as “fair and balanced.”

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference, Murdoch said Fox News stood to benefit from Biden’s presidency because the network would act as “the loyal opposition” to his administration.

“The main beneficiary of the Trump administration from a ratings point of view was MSNBC … and thats because they were the loyal opposition,” Murdoch said of the rival cable network. “Thats what our job is now with the Biden administration, and youll see our ratings really improve from here.”

A spokesperson for NBCUniversal News Group, which includes NBC News and MSNBC, said in response that “our role, and the role of any legitimate news organization whether it includes an ‘opinion section’ or not is to hold power to account, regardless of party.” Comcast NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC.

Murdoch’s remark is an on-the-record acknowledgement of something that has long been obvious to fans and critics but never stated so publicly by the executive leadership itself that Fox News is firmly aligned with Republicans and the right and intends to use its platform to fight Democrats.

There Is No Equivalent For The Left

Fox News, especially post Trump, so relentlessly and consistently praises Trump for successes, papers over failures and tries to twist them into successes, and deliberately omits anything they cannot twist. Their only criticism of the Republican party is when they perceive it to be insufficiently loyal to Trump. They talk about their enemies as evil and prize pundits that will drill their opinions of the news into their viewers over actual journalism that informs them of the facts. There isn’t really another side in mainstream media. MSNBC has strayed to the center lately, and the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN all have a centrist, corporate bent to them, so even if they criticize Trump or Republicans, they do so sincerely, and get upset about the actions of the left just as often. Nothing in mainstream media, not even MSNBC, has ever in history had a leftwing tilt to it like Fox News has a right wing tilt, or non-mainstream sources like the Young Turks have a left-wing one. There is just nothing equivalent to Fox News in size, scope, or depth of partisanship supporting the Democrats. They have several sources that lean in their direction, but none so slavishly devoted to them as Fox News is to Trump and Republicans, and none with such a wide audience.

Submit

You May Like: Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

Fox News Channel Responses To Criticism

In June 2004, CEO Roger Ailes responded to some of the criticism with a rebuttal in an online Wall Street Journal editorial, saying that Fox News’ critics intentionally confuse opinion shows such as The O’Reilly Factor with regular news coverage. Ailes stated that Fox News has broken stories harmful to Republicans, offering, “Fox News is the network that broke George W. Bush’s DUI four days before the election” as an example, referring to Bush’s DUI charge in 1976 that had not yet been made public. The DUI story was broken by then-Fox affiliate WPXT in Portland, Maine, although Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron also contributed to the report and, in the words of National Public Radio ombudsman Alicia Shepard, Fox News “sent the story ping-ponging around the nation” by broadcasting WPXT’s coverage. WPXT News Director Kevin Kelly said that he “called Fox News in New York City to see if we were flogging a dead horse” before running the story, and that Fox News confirmed the arrest with the campaign and ran the story shortly after 6 p.m.

Former Fox News personality Eric Burns has suggested in an interview that Fox News “probably gives voice to more conservatives than the other networks. But not at the expense of liberals.” Burns justifies a higher exposure of conservatives by saying that other media often ignore conservatives.

Fox News personalities have also taken part in back and forth disagreements with media personalities such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Who First Buried The Dead

Anthropologist Donald Brown has studied human cultures and discovered hundreds of features shared by each and every one. Among them, every culture has its own way to honor and mourn the dead.

But who was the first? Humans or another hominin in our ancestral lineage? That answer is difficult because it is shrouded in the fog of our prehistorical past. However, we do have a candidate: Homo naledi.

Several fossils of this extinct hominin were discovered in a cave chamber at the Rising Star Cave system, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. To access the chamber required a vertical climb, a few tight fits, and much crawling.

This led researchers to believe it unlikely so many individuals ended up there by accident. They also ruled out geological traps like cave-ins. Given the seemingly deliberate placement, some have concluded the chamber served as a Homo naledi graveyard. Others aren’t so sure, and more evidence is needed before we can definitively answer this question.

Read Also: Why Did Republicans Vote Against Equal Pay

Walked A Fine Line: How Fox News Found Itself In An Existential Crisis

The rightwing channel was the first to call Arizona for Biden and Trump and his supporters have been furious ever since

It was about 11.20pm on election night when Fox News made the call. The Democratic candidate had clinched a key swing state, a win that could set them on a path to be president of the United States.

In the Fox News studio, Karl Rove, conservative panelist and longtime Republican strategist, was apoplectic. Around the country, Republican supporters were bereft. Fox News launched an immediate inquisition into its own decision, but the network stood by the call.

Barack Obama had won Ohio, defeating Mitt Romney. Obama would be sworn in as president, for the second time, on 20 January 2013.

Fast forward eight years, and Fox News found itself in a strikingly similar position on 3 November 2020. The rightwing news channel was the first to call Arizona, which has gone blue once in the past 72 years, for Joe Biden.

Donald Trump and his campaign were furious, barraging the network with a series of phone calls in an attempt to get the decision overturned. The presidents supporters were upset too.

At protests outside a vote counting center in Phoenix, Arizona, a crowd chanted: Fox News sucks!, turning their ire on a channel whose hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have spent the past four years praising Trumps almost every move or utterance.

That makes the effort to look like a news organization increasingly difficult.

Obama Administration Conflict With Fox News

In September 2009, the Obama administration engaged in a verbal conflict with Fox News. On September 20, President Obama appeared on all the major news networks except Fox News, a snub partially in response to remarks about the president by commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and general coverage by Fox News with regard to Obama’s health care proposal.Fox News Sunday hostChris Wallace called White House administration officials “crybabies” in response. Following this, a senior Obama adviser told U.S. News that the White House would never get a fair shake from Fox News.

In late September 2009, Obama senior advisor David Axelrod and Fox News founder Roger Ailes met in secret to try to smooth out tensions between the two camps without much success. Two weeks later, White House officials referred to Fox as “not a news network”. Communications director Anita Dunn claimed that, “Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” President Obama followed with, “If media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing, and if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another,” and then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel stated that it was important “to not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following FNC.”

Also Check: How Many Republicans Voted For Impeachment

Do Hair And Fingernails Grow After Death

Nope. This is a myth, but one that does have a biological origin.

The reason hair and fingernails don’t grow after death is because new cells can’t be produced. Glucose fuels cell division, and cells require oxygen to break down glucose into cellular energy. Death puts an end to the body’s ability to intake either one.

It also ends the intaking of water, leading to dehydration. As a corpse’s skin desiccates, it pulls away from the fingernails and retracts around the face . Anyone unlucky enough to exhume a corpse could easily mistake these changes as signs of growth.

Interestingly, postmortem hair and fingernail growth provoked lore about vampires and other creatures of the night. When our ancestors dug up fresh corpses and found hair growth and blood spots around mouths , their minds naturally wandered to undeath.

Not that becoming undead is anything we need to worry about today.

Fox News Is The Republican Party

This is why Democrats’ massive spending bill could pass | FOX News Rundown

Trumpism will endure because Murdochs Fox News made that choice on behalf of the Republican Party it commands.

To see what is in front of ones nose, George Orwell wrote, is a constant struggle.

Orwells wise, timeless counsel is often lost on writers who prefer to bury the plain truth beneath a blizzard of distractions and obfuscations.

The tendency of Americas punditocracy to miss the glaring point has, once again, been on grating display in the still smouldering residue of the mad January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill conceived, planned and executed by thousands of Donald Trumps rabid disciples who were, on cue, unleashed en foaming masse by the former president.

Beyond considering Trumps political future, the punditocracy was seized with debating the existential implications of the deadly mayhem for the Republican Party.

The quick consensus was that a reckoning was certainly in the offing. The Republican Party confronted an inflection point the media-manufactured cliché du jour that required either finally abandoning Trumpism in the wake of the bloody insurrection or continuing to embrace it.

The assumption was that the Republican Party, including its congressional leadership, would make that seminal choice. But who constitutes the Republican Party and its leadership and how would they go about deciding which path to take?

These questions were largely left adrift.

What a chilling prospect.

It is a silly, almost comical, suggestion.

Also Check: Why Do Republicans Say Democrat Party

False Claims About Other Media

CNN’s Jake Tapper

In November 2017, following the 2017 New York City truck attack wherein a terrorist shouted “Allahu Akbar”, Fox News distorted a statement by Jake Tapper to make it appear as if he had said “Allahu Akbar” can be used under the most “beautiful circumstances”. Fox News omitted that Tapper had said the use of “Allahu Akbar” in the terrorist attack was not one of these beautiful circumstances. A headline on FoxNews.com was preceded by a tag reading “OUTRAGEOUS”. The Fox News Twitter account distorted the statement even more, saying “Jake Tapper Says ‘Allahu Akbar’ Is ‘Beautiful’ Right After NYC Terror Attack” in a tweet that was later deleted. Tapper chastised Fox News for choosing to “deliberately lie” and said “there was a time when one could tell the difference between Fox and the nutjobs at Infowars. It’s getting tougher and tougher. Lies are lies.” Tapper had in 2009, while a White House correspondent for ABC News, come to the defense of Fox News when Obama criticized the network for not being a legitimate news organization.

Fox News guest host Jason Chaffetz apologized to Tapper for misrepresenting his statement. After Fox News had deleted the tweet, Sean Hannity repeated the misrepresentation and called Tapper “liberal fake news CNN’s fake Jake Tapper” and mocked his ratings.

The New York Times

Low Gravity And The Troughs

: University of Georgia / NASA / JPL

It has been assumed, says Cheng, that the “troughs are fault-bounded valleys with a distinct scarp on each side that together mark the down-drop of a block of rock.”

However, there is a problem with this theory. It is based on the way rocks and debris behave under the force of gravity on Earth; Vesta’s gravitational pull is far less. Indeed, Dawn found Vesta’s gravity consistent with an iron core having a 140-mile diameter; the Earth’s, by comparison, is about 2,165 miles in diameter.

Cheng notes that “rock can also crack apart and form such troughs, an origin that has not been considered before. Our calculations also show that Vesta’s gravity is not enough to induce surrounding stresses favorable for sliding to occur at shallow depths. Instead, the physics shows that rocks there are favored to crack apart.”

Cheng summarizes, “Taken all together, the overall project provides alternatives to the previously proposed trough origin and geological history of Vesta, results that are also important for understanding similar landforms on other small planetary bodies elsewhere in the solar system.”

So while still consistent with the prevailing theory that the impacts resulted in the troughs, the researchers suggest that they did not cause landslides on Vesta. The impacts cracked it.

Also Check: When Will Republicans Do The Right Thing

Down In The Polls Trump Seeks Familiar Embrace Of Conservative Media

The president considers many Fox News figures among his closest advisers. These include Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and others. He has drawn from the ranks of Fox contributors to fill senior White House appointments and even considered stars for Cabinet positions. And they, in turn, have been ferocious in relaying the president’s baseless claims, winning his frequent appearances on their programs and stratospheric ratings in response.

Earlier this year, Fox News stars helped whip up protests in opposition to shutdowns related to COVID-19 and orders to wear masks. Fox News stars stoked potential scandals involving Biden’s son Hunter based on unauthenticated reports from Murdoch’s New York Post material Fox’s own reporters largely could not validate.

As one small sign of the ways in which Fox and Trump Republicans can orchestrate programming, on Friday evening, NPR reviewed an internal GOP memo sent to top party officials to prepare Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel for her appearance on Hannity’s show that night. It set out in great specificity the intended flow of the show’s lengthy opening segment including its guests, articles and subjects and the primary points Hannity would make. The two jointly focused on stoking suspicions of voter fraud.

The network stood by its decision desk.

What To Watch For

Trump is reportedly considering launching his own media company to compete with Fox News after he leaves the White House, Axios reported Nov. 12. The offering would reportedly take the form of a subscription-based digital streaming channel online, rather than a pricier cable television network, but Trump aim to replace Fox as his supporters top destination for news, Axios reports.

Don’t Miss: Who Supported The Republicans In The Spanish Civil War

Why Do All The Women On Fox News Look And Dress Alike Republicans Prefer Blondes

From pundits like Ann Coulter to Kellyanne Conway, American rightwingers are a uniform vision of dont scare-the-horses dressing

Why do so many rightwing American women have bottle-blond hair, often worn girlishly long? Im thinking of Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter and almost any woman on Fox News.

Jonathan, London N16

Excellent question, Jonathan! I was pondering something similar myself recently while looking through Ivanka Trumps fashion collection on ivankatrump.com, which seems to be one of the only places it is stocked these days. The grimly bland suede pumps, the simpering floral shifts, the just-flirtatious-enough body-skimming little black dresses welcome, people, to death by mainstream feminine. You know how your mother goes on about how you wear too much black/denim/weird stuff, and you cant figure out what the hell it is she expects you to wear? Well, allow me to introduce you to Ivanka Trump. What a shame it seems to be sold almost nowhere these days, as these are the clothes your mother dreams of. Oh well, looks like shell have to put up with you in your awesome Bella Freud jumper and Topshop wide-legged culottes combo for another weekend!

0 notes

statetalks · 4 years ago

Text

Why Does Fox News Support Republicans

False Claims About The 2020 Election

Alabama columnist: What does support of Moore do to the GOP?

Fox News Will Be ‘loyal Opposition’ To Biden Fox Ceo Says

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference, Murdoch said Fox News stood to benefit from Biden’s presidency because the network would act as “the loyal opposition” to his administration.

There Is No Equivalent For The Left

Submit

You May Like: Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

Fox News Channel Responses To Criticism

Fox News personalities have also taken part in back and forth disagreements with media personalities such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Who First Buried The Dead

Anthropologist Donald Brown has studied human cultures and discovered hundreds of features shared by each and every one. Among them, every culture has its own way to honor and mourn the dead.

Read Also: Why Did Republicans Vote Against Equal Pay

Walked A Fine Line: How Fox News Found Itself In An Existential Crisis

The rightwing channel was the first to call Arizona for Biden and Trump and his supporters have been furious ever since

It was about 11.20pm on election night when Fox News made the call. The Democratic candidate had clinched a key swing state, a win that could set them on a path to be president of the United States.

Barack Obama had won Ohio, defeating Mitt Romney. Obama would be sworn in as president, for the second time, on 20 January 2013.

Donald Trump and his campaign were furious, barraging the network with a series of phone calls in an attempt to get the decision overturned. The presidents supporters were upset too.

That makes the effort to look like a news organization increasingly difficult.

Obama Administration Conflict With Fox News

Also Check: How Many Republicans Voted For Impeachment

Do Hair And Fingernails Grow After Death

Nope. This is a myth, but one that does have a biological origin.

Not that becoming undead is anything we need to worry about today.

Fox News Is The Republican Party

This is why Democrats’ massive spending bill could pass | FOX News Rundown

Trumpism will endure because Murdochs Fox News made that choice on behalf of the Republican Party it commands.

To see what is in front of ones nose, George Orwell wrote, is a constant struggle.

Orwells wise, timeless counsel is often lost on writers who prefer to bury the plain truth beneath a blizzard of distractions and obfuscations.

Beyond considering Trumps political future, the punditocracy was seized with debating the existential implications of the deadly mayhem for the Republican Party.

These questions were largely left adrift.

What a chilling prospect.

It is a silly, almost comical, suggestion.

Also Check: Why Do Republicans Say Democrat Party

False Claims About Other Media

CNN’s Jake Tapper

The New York Times

Low Gravity And The Troughs

: University of Georgia / NASA / JPL

It has been assumed, says Cheng, that the “troughs are fault-bounded valleys with a distinct scarp on each side that together mark the down-drop of a block of rock.”

So while still consistent with the prevailing theory that the impacts resulted in the troughs, the researchers suggest that they did not cause landslides on Vesta. The impacts cracked it.

Also Check: When Will Republicans Do The Right Thing

Down In The Polls Trump Seeks Familiar Embrace Of Conservative Media

The network stood by its decision desk.

What To Watch For

Don’t Miss: Who Supported The Republicans In The Spanish Civil War

Why Do All The Women On Fox News Look And Dress Alike Republicans Prefer Blondes

From pundits like Ann Coulter to Kellyanne Conway, American rightwingers are a uniform vision of dont scare-the-horses dressing

Why do so many rightwing American women have bottle-blond hair, often worn girlishly long? Im thinking of Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter and almost any woman on Fox News.

Jonathan, London N16

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-does-fox-news-support-republicans/

0 notes

dipulb3 · 4 years ago

Text

Analysis: Biden's big climate pledge is another promise it will be hard to honor

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-bidens-big-climate-pledge-is-another-promise-it-will-be-hard-to-honor/

Analysis: Biden's big climate pledge is another promise it will be hard to honor

So while the President has enjoyed a fast start, remarkable success in accelerating vaccines to fight the pandemic, and with signs the economy is stirring, real questions are mounting over his capacity to follow through. A treacherous road lies ahead that will require Biden to convince the public to embrace all of his programs and to make his opponents pay a price for opposing them.

That’s one reason why Biden’s remarks opening a climate summit that included leaders like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin sounded more like a speech in a Pittsburgh union hall than the blueprint of a leader bent on a costly crusade to save the world.

“When people talk about climate, I think jobs,” Biden said, billing the fight against global warming as an extraordinary economic opportunity that will put Americans to work capping abandoned oil wells and assembling electric cars.

The speech was characteristic of an emerging foreign policy in which Biden seeks to seize back the US global leadership role scorned by Donald Trump, but on terms that benefit American workers, which does not necessarily contradict the sentiments behind some of the ex-President’s populist policies.

The summit came with a pledge from the President to cut US carbon emissions by up to 52% from 2005 levels by 2030 — a significant step but one that US allies fear could be reversed by a future Republican president.

The new climate promise follows Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 rescue law — passed with only Democratic votes — and a $2 trillion package that reinvents the definition of infrastructure. Next week, that proposal, which is already meeting fierce GOP opposition, is expected to be complemented by an “American Family Plan” that could hit $1.5 trillion. If Biden can somehow leverage those policies into law, his first year in office really would stand comparison with FDR’s Great Depression policy blitz. But with an evenly divided Senate, that’s easier said than done.

Using popularity to pass big bills

Biden’s big promises are not limited to the economy.

The President added to high expectations from many of the Black voters who helped him win office by forcibly backing a bill to overhaul American law enforcement after an ex-police officer was convicted for George Floyd’s murder this week. After a series of mass shootings, he threw his support behind new gun safety bills that have passed the House, the latest occasion in which he has come out in support of a Democratic priority after previous questions in Washington about how much political capital he would deploy.

Biden has also voiced support for a sweeping election reform bill that is, like the policing measure, awaiting action in the Senate. The bill would reverse many of the efforts GOP-controlled state legislatures have undertaken to limit the vote, and many Democrats believe that passing it — which would likely lead to all out political war in the Senate — is necessary to preserve the party’s hopes in future federal elections, not to mention American ideals about equal access to the franchise.

So far, Biden has skillfully used his early popularity and goodwill, finally putting in place an organized, science-based approach to the pandemic, to ease the way for his political priorities. His Covid rescue plan was widely backed by the public, allowing him to redefine bipartisanship by arguing that while GOP lawmakers were opposed, many of their constituents were not.

Polls also suggest that Biden’s infrastructure plan — at least at the start of what is likely to be a bitterly divisive fight over its fate on Capitol Hill — is popular.

But while no one could make a case that the start of a presidency born in the worst public health crisis in 100 years and a consequent economic meltdown was easy, the politics facing Biden’s agenda are set to get much tougher.

Ultimately, perhaps not this year, but certainly next, the President will likely face a choice on whether to shelve some of the most ambitious goals or to overcome his opposition to removing or amending filibuster rules that allow Republicans to block his proposals by demanding a 60-vote Senate supermajority.

At that point, the straddle between more moderate voters in his national coalition and the increasing impatience of progressives in his Democratic Party will be tough to sustain.

Biden’s infrastructure problem

While Biden did not lay out a plan for how he will honor his pledge on carbon emissions, which will require a significant retooling of the US economy, he repeatedly stressed the need for huge involvement from the private sector. But it is likely that a significant portion of the funding and initiatives for the emissions cuts depend on the passage of the infrastructure bill that lays the groundwork for a 21st century green, sustainable economy.

That is where Biden has a problem.

It is far from clear that the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate is on board with an infrastructure proposal that splashes funds on projects far removed from the traditional understanding of such a plan. Biden wants to use tens of billions of dollars, for instance, to fund home health and elderly care. If the President cannot get 50 Democratic votes, even apparently uncertain efforts to pass it with a budget tactic known as reconciliation could be in doubt.

A group of Republican Senators on Thursday sought to exploit this conflict with a rival proposal worth nearly $600 billion — far short of the President’s target — that takes a traditional approach to repair roads, bridges, highways, airports and public transport.

It does not include funding to create new electric vehicles and environmentally friendly projects, or to deepen the US social safety net.

“We see this as an offer that is on the table and deserves a response,” West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said on Thursday, in remarks apparently calculated to play into the penchant for some moderate Democrats — like her fellow Mountain Stater Sen. Joe Manchin — to seek bipartisan solutions.

The size of the package is similar to a counter offer that Biden rejected to the Covid-19 rescue plan and captures the massive gulf in perception about America’s greatest challenges between Republicans and Biden.

Traditionally both sides would get in a room and decide a compromise, which Democrats and Republicans could brand as victory because each walked away with something of what they wanted.

But modern politics, where power has tended to be used to the maximum and compromise is near extinct, doesn’t work that way. For Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Republicans, who are tied to a pro-Trump base, depriving Biden of a win could be a greater victory than fulfilling some legislative goals. That’s especially the case since many of the most controversial Democratic priorities like election reform are likely to move to the center of debate far closer to next year’s midterm elections.

And for all Biden’s talk of unity and bipartisanship — a useful political device that has so far not seemed much in evidence in his presidency — he has given clear signals that he is not willing to pare down his aspirations.

Accepting the GOP offer on infrastructure — or even one that meets him halfway — would force Biden to abandon his entire sense that a moment of history has given him the chance of a radical reforming presidency.

Police reform is the next big test

A similar dynamic is playing out over the police reform bill, which is being held up over the question of dismantling qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that critics say shields police officers from civil lawsuits.

Civil rights campaigners say the change is crucial to removing the sense of impunity that they feel has contributed to law enforcement’s excessive use of force against minorities, like ex-cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. But senior Democrats understand that the policing issue is also politically fraught — trapping the party between a core constituency of African American voters and White moderates in the suburbs — some of whom were influenced in the last election by Republicans’ largely misleading accusations that Democrats want to “defund the police” — an attack that’s reemerging ahead of 2022.

As part of a compromise proposal, South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott is suggesting a new approach whereby police departments, rather than individual officers, could be liable for misconduct. But some key progressives believe that having the ability to hold individual officers accountable is the only way to change the dynamics between law enforcement and minorities.

There are some positive noises coming from Democrats involved in the talks, so an ingenious compromise that satisfies all sides seems possible.

But any backing away from overhauling qualified immunity would dismay progressives and civil rights advocates, who believe the Floyd case could and should mark a turning point in US history that helps usher in fundamental reform.

And the issue of police reform is just one of a flurry of priorities that will challenge Biden’s own moderate instincts and require the application of relentless, and potentially inflammatory, presidential power.

0 notes