Steve King has promoted ANOTHER white nationalist on Twitter. This time, Faith Goldy, who once gave a chummy interview to The Daily Stormer, a website that advocates gassing Jews, and who has recited the “14 words,” a white supremacist slogan

https://twitter.com/letsgomathias/status/1102613901718536195

Luke Perry -- the TV icon and heartthrob who rose to fame on "Beverly Hills, 90210" -- has died after suffering a massive stroke ... TMZ has learned.

Luke passed away Monday morning at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank. As we first reported, he was rushed to the hospital last Wednesday morning after suffering the stroke while at his Sherman Oaks, CA home.

His reps said doctors had sedated Luke, hoping to give his brain a fighting chance to recover from the trauma of the stroke ... but apparently, the damage was too extensive.

Luke had a prolific acting career on TV and in movies -- getting his start in the early '80s -- and became a household name on '90210.' After that, his career exploded. Most recently he's had a starring role as Archie's dad on CW's hit show, "Riverdale."

He also filmed a role in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Charles Manson movie, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."

https://www.tmz.com/2019/03/04/luke-perry-dead-dies-stroke-beverly-hills-90210-riverdale/

Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda?

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house

Six years in the trenches on troll patrol.

For six years, from 2012 to 2018, my job was to read and delete the most inappropriate comments on a conservative news site. Not all the inappropriate comments. Just the most inappropriate comments. Hundreds of comments an hour. Thousands of comments a day. Tens of thousands of comments a week. More than a million comments a year.

I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”

...

This was the only job that made me cry. I’ve had jobs where I got chewed out by bosses or customers. That’s not fun. I’ve had to deal with people who made me angry, but this was the only job that made me lose faith in humanity. The night Trayvon Martin died, before his body was even cold, I had to work through hundreds of comments about how he deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I sat at my computer and cried.

...

Even in the early days of the campaign, cultural conservatives, fiscal conservatives, the weirdos who talked only about chemtrails — they all had one thing in common. They wanted a president who would stick it to the liberals. They didn’t care that supporting him would mean changing their positions on any number of issues.

All they knew was that he drove the liberals crazy. He was just like all of the anonymous internet commenters. He justified their existence, and they justified his. And they all rallied around him. The campaign was seemingly born out of, and supported by, comment sections. Our job became tougher. As a news blog, we were covering stories featuring a man running for president saying things that I would have deleted his account for had he been just another troll on the site. But he wasn’t just another troll.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/right-wing-site-comments.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

There were several crucial questions surrounding Saturday night’s Gridiron dinner, that exclusive, annual white-tie gathering hosted by a club made up of Washington’s most elite journalists: First of all, would President Trump turn up?

The answer to that one came early in the evening: Nope, the president wouldn’t attend as he did last year. Instead, his daughter and top White House adviser, Ivanka Trump, gave remarks.

The younger Trump appeared at the Renaissance Hotel before a crowd of about 700 of the city’s swampiest of swamp-dwellers, offering up a few remarks in the spirit of the night, which traditionally features jokey remarks from the president (when he’s in attendance — presidents since Benjamin Harrison have joined in on the 134-year-old tradition), a prominent Democrat and Republican and a slew of skits by the Fourth Estate.

Ivanka Trump, who said her father had asked her just that afternoon to represent him, got a cringeworthy laugh with a line that poked fun at her conservative bona fides — and her notoriously difficult boss/dad. “The press seems to think it’s ironic that I, born of great privilege, think people want to work for what they are given,” she deadpanned. “As if being Donald Trump’s daughter isn’t the hardest job in the world.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/03/03/gridiron-dinner-ivanka-tries-laughs-if-being-donald-trumps-daughter-isnt-hardest-job-world/?utm_term=.3df7a68995af

Parker Molloy
?Verified account @ParkerMolloy

I feel like tweeting “So triggered...” at the widow of someone you mocked during a speech the day before is the most accurate description of the conservative movement in 2019

There are too many unanswered questions about the White House’s role in advancing Saudi ambitions.



Jared Kushner slipped quietly into Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, so the question I’m trying to get the White House to answer is this: Did they discuss American help for a Saudi nuclear program?

Of all the harebrained and unscrupulous dealings of the Trump administration in the last two years, one of the most shocking is a Trump plan to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Even as President Trump is trying to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, he may be helping to nuclearize Saudi Arabia. This is abominable policy tainted by a gargantuan conflict of interest involving Kushner.

Kushner’s family real estate business had been teetering because of a disastrously overpriced acquisition he made of a particular Manhattan property called 666 Fifth Avenue, but last August a company called Brookfield Asset Management rescued the Kushners by taking a 99-year lease of the troubled property — and paying the whole sum of about $1.1 billion up front.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/saudi-arabia-jared-kushner-nuclear.html