January 30, 2021

REPUBLICANS CAN'T BELIEVE DEMOCRATS DON'T WANT TO WORK WITH THEM JUST BECAUSE OF THE GUNS...

AND THE DEATH THREATS AND THE CRACKPOT CONSPIRACY THEORIES!

What gives, honestly? Who wouldn’t want to work alongside such well-adjusted, not at all dangerous people?

While there’s been a lot of talk lately about “partisan rancor” and claims, by the GOP, that Democrats talk a big game about unity but then refuse to work across the aisle, the left is actually in the unique position of having to explain to the world that it’s not simply angry at the other side over ideological differences but because of the fact that it feels like Republicans are literally a threat to their lives. “The enemy is within the House of Representatives, a threat that members are concerned about, in addition to what is happening outside,” Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference on Thursday. That statement might’ve sounded over the top if you had no idea what’s been happening in Congress of late but was actually entirely appropriate given the violent coups, the guns, and the calls for Democrats to be killed. According to The Washington Post, some Democrats have purchased bulletproof vests and sought other protective measures against Republican colleagues they believe can’t be trusted—an entirely reasonable response given what and who they’re dealing with.

Of course, the time to “have a conversation” with the congresswoman about her calls to have Democrats killed—in addition to other comments about 9/11 being an inside job, Muslims not belonging in government, and a “Jewish space laser” causing the California wildfires—was before she was elected to office. Speaking of Greene’s path to power, according to a new report from Axios, House Republican leaders met multiple times last summer to chat about fears Greene was a deranged lunatic who’d be a disaster for the party and then did…basically nothing.



https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/democrats-dangerous-republicans-marjorie-taylor-greene

January 30, 2021

Former QAnon believer to Anderson Cooper : "I apologize for thinking that you ate babies"

https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1355544878990688259

January 29, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Green Blamed Wildfires on (checks notes) Secret Jewish Space Laser

Greene’s views are just a bit more controversial. They include, but are no means limited to, the following:

• The QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a worldwide child-sex-slavery ring that was supposed to culminate in the mass arrest of his political opposition, is “worth listening to.”

• Muslims don’t belong in government.

• 9/11 was an inside job.

• Shootings at Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas were staged.

• “Zionist supremacists” are secretly masterminding Muslim immigration to Europe in a scheme to outbreed white people.

• Leading Democratic officials should be executed.

The most recent Greene view to be unearthed comes via Eric Hananoki. Just over two years ago, Greene suggested in a Facebook post that wildfires in California were not natural. Forests don’t just catch fire, you know. Rather, the blazes had been started by PG&E, in conjunction with the Rothschilds, using a space laser, in order to clear room for a high-speed rail project. Here is Greene’s entire post, via Media Matters:



The Rothschild family has featured heavily in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories since at least the 19th century. Anti-Semites have generally updated the theory by replacing the Rothschilds with George Soros, a more contemporary and plausible-seeming mastermind for a global conspiracy to spread left-wing ideology. Greene’s version has instead updated the theory by giving the Rothschilds possession of a secret, powerful space laser.

Now, you might wonder why, if an international cabal of Jewish bankers wanted to finance a rail project, they would go about it by using their space lasers to set a catastrophic blaze. Aren’t there easier ways to get your rail stations approved by the state legislature? If you can pull off a massive conspiracy like that and keep it quiet, and you have a space laser you can use to immolate basically any target on Earth, there have to be more direct profit-making opportunities than burning down trees in order to arbitrage the land value for a public-transit contract.

You’re probably not going to get Greene’s answer, though, because the last news crew that showed up at one of her events was threatened with arrest by the local sheriff.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-wildfires-space-laser-rothschild-execute.html

January 28, 2021

Jennifer Rubin: The Republican Party is about doing nothing

For years, the Republican Party has not been about policy or governance. It is certainly not about encouraging voting or expanding its party to reach new demographics. Instead, it has become a select club of malcontents. It has created a self-perpetuating grievance machine designed to further inflame their base.

Why do Republicans even want to hold power? Aside from appointing judges, the Senate has accomplished virtually nothing of significance since the 2017 tax cut. While running for reelection, the former president was continually stumped when asked what he would do in his second term.

The party’s antagonism toward the federal government has now morphed into hostility toward truth and governing at all. Its agenda is a list of buzzwords and lies to justify why it should do nothing (Climate hoax! Socialism!), culminating in the mother of all incendiary messages: the Big Lie that the election was stolen. The GOP seems to exist solely to promote resentment and to engage in performance art for intellectually dishonest and vapid right-wing media.

Maybe Republicans should give up running for office altogether because they have no interest in policy or governing. They can cut out the time-consuming task of showing up for their day jobs and devote all their time to what really drives them — raising money, stoking anger, tweeting and appearing on right-wing media. They at least demonstrate some interest and talent for those activities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/28/republican-party-is-not-about-governing-or-policy/

January 28, 2021

The yoga world is riddled with anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers

In my day job, I monitor the spread of online disinformation and conspiracy theories. I never expected to find them at my yoga class



In the early days of the pandemic, I was idly scanning social media when an Instagram story by a yoga teacher I followed appeared in my feed. It depicted a cartoon syringe with the message: “Thinking of having the vaccine? Ask yourself some questions.”

As a yoga teacher in my spare time, I’m part of an online community of wellness enthusiasts. But in my day job, as a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, I monitor the spread of online disinformation and conspiracy theories.

-snip-

The researcher in me became curious – I started digging. Instagram and Facebook’s algorithms took me to new corners of the yoga, wellness and holistic health world. In the early days of lockdown, I saw posts about how juices, miracle cures and turmeric could boost my immunity and ward off the virus. As the pandemic intensified, disinformation became darker, from anti-vaxx content and Covid denialism to calls to ‘question established truths’ and wilder conspiracy theories.

At the same time, QAnon, the conspiracy which claims Donald Trump is – or was – fighting a deep-state cabal of Satanic paedophiles, was spreading in Europe. Protesters waving QAnon signs demonstrated in front of Buckingham Palace, similar scenes took place in Germany. In my homeland of France, conspiracy theorists exploited pre-existing anti-vaxx sentiment to propagate misleading and false claims about vaccination.

-snip-

The historical links between yoga and New Age pursuits and extremist politics are well-documented, including Nazi Germany’s interest in astrology and alternative medicine and the way yoga has sometimes served as inspiration to fascist ideology, including in Britain. Yoga, in addition, has embraced a ‘transgressive’ vision of itself, with the figure of the ‘rebel yogi’ a potent symbol in collective imagination.

The yoga and wellness online communities are largely female, educated and middle-class – seemingly unusual candidates for the spread of conspiracy theories. Yet, research has shown that women are more likely to believe anti-vaxx disinformation, with female-dominated yoga and wellness groups a gateway to these beliefs.

Lack of investment in women’s health has created a yearning for ‘natural’ and ‘alternative’ responses to painful problems, with disbelief in conventional medicine in the wellness industry sometimes resulting in tragedy. The anxiety caused by the pandemic has allowed yoga influencers to whip up fear while selling the solution in the form of food supplements, individualistic fixes, and guidance.

Wellness and yoga influencers already had products to sell before the pandemic – be it guidance material or just time with themselves. The pandemic “validated content they already had” Remski says. Some of the influencers who embraced QAnon saw their engagement rates skyrocket online. Krystal Tini, a yoga teacher and owner of a yoga mat business, gained thousands of followers in the early days of the pandemic after posting long videos in support of QAnon, becoming one of the movement’s most successful wellness representatives.

The yoga industry, which has shied away from political engagement and built itself around ‘self-care’, has had a hard time responding to the problem, but awareness has grown. Influencers and active community members are advocating for the industry to get into the fray. Seane Corn is the co-founder of the California-based not-for-profit ‘Off the Mat and Into the World’ aimed at translating the principles of yoga into progressive civic engagement.

“After the pandemic hit, I started seeing a lot of misinformation going back and forth in the community about Covid being a hoax,” she says. “The anti-vaxx stuff was not new, but this time the tone was different. There was hostility and paranoia, and it was attached to other beliefs about a deep state conspiracy. I felt like I had a responsibility to speak up as a member of the community. I hoped that by interjecting, I would help some of the students that were getting drawn into this rhetoric.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yoga-disinformation-qanon-conspiracy-wellness

January 27, 2021

MAGA Voter Suppression: Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says

These criminal acts of voter suppression took place in 2016 and were investigated in 2017. Although the article does not say so, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the four year delay in bringing criminal charges is yet another grotesque example of the political weaponization of the US Justice Department during the Twittler years.

=============

Douglass Mackey, a right-wing provocateur, was accused of spreading memes that made Hillary Clinton supporters falsely believe they could cast ballots in 2016 via text message.

A man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by phone instead of going to the polls.

Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.

The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked Alaska,” who was arrested this month for participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

-snip-

In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda.

Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it made the M.I.T. Media Lab’s list of the top 150 influencers in the 2016 election, ranking ahead of the Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge Report and CBS News.

Mr. Mackey faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting.

The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/nyregion/douglass-mackey-arrested-far-right-twitter.html

January 25, 2021

Does anyone get the impression the Trump/Terrorists/etc. are just going to skate?

Judging from today's Supreme Court ruling, Manchin's futzing on the filibuster and Schumer's "I'll ask Mitch McConnell first..." about the Nuclear Option - that feckless FUCK and his army of knuckle-draggers is going to get away with EVERYTHING.

Does anyone else feel that way? Talk me down.

January 25, 2021

Hawaii GOP cites Holocaust Denier as high quality analysis...

https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1353536472406773762

January 24, 2021

Farewell to Trump's Baby Sociopaths

Good riddance to the fake redneck, the cancer-charity grifter, and the amoral Florida Woman.



Today we say goodbye and good riddance to Donald J. Trump, the worst, laziest, and most tangerine-hued of our 45 presidents. He left a path of destruction in his wake that included 400,000 dead Americans, a decimated economy, shattered norms, broken laws, and endless grifting. And if his venality, corruption, and incompetence weren’t enough, he punctuated his tenure in the highest (and before now, most respected) office by inciting an attempt to overthrow the same institutions that empowered him—the act of a malignant and sociopathic narcissist who is also, to use a diagnosis not technically listed in the DSM, a giant baby.

But we also must bid farewell to the Trump children: the ambulatory evidence that narcissism, incompetence, and corruption are genetically inherited traits. Like their decency-challenged paterfamilias, they hardly bothered to veil their contempt for democratic norms, and used every available opportunity to exploit their positions—and by extension, taxpayers—to make money and accumulate unearned power. They deserve their own send-off, especially considering the persistent rumors that they have political ambitions of their own and that some form of recidivism seems inevitable. Each one is unique and memorable, much in the same way that every individual experience of food poisoning is similarly horrible and yet surprisingly varied in its repulsiveness.

A personal favorite among the things that won’t be missed: Donald Trump Jr.’s redneck cosplay. As a rural Alabama native who grew up in a family full of hunters, it’s sometimes entertaining to watch Junior—a New York City–native, Ivy-educated, Buckley School grad who probably spent many high school weekends doing coke in the bathroom of Dorrians—suit up like a Duck Dynasty extra and awkwardly pantomime those things that he thinks red-state Trumpists do (bless his heart). Only the unfettered racism comes naturally to him. It’s unnerving to watch him wave around such a vast assortment of absurdly souped-up guns, each one more accessorized with far-right stickers and gratuitous vanity mods than the last. As a rule, you never want a guy with unresolved anger issues to have easy access to high-powered firearms, let alone a collection that he probably has to transport with a forklift.

-snip-

On this front, Eric Trump seems a little more put together, or at the very least, I’ve never seen him look like he was on the verge of bursting into tears, which is a semi-regular feature of Junior’s appearances. Neither of them was supposed to be involved in their dad’s campaign, but the entire Trump family interprets “conflict of interest” as an ethical conflict that may be “of interest” in the participatory sense. Eric’s contributions to the Trump legacy mostly include guaranteeing his wife a $180,000 salary via marriage and funneling money from a kid’s cancer charity into his business—and admittedly, stealing money from children with cancer is so cartoonishly villainous it wouldn’t be plausible in a Marvel movie. My most controversial Trump-related opinion is that Eric is not actually The Dumbest One, but the competition is so heavy for the title that it’s sometimes hard to tell.

Which brings us to Ivanka, who once got into an argument at a dinner party about the difference between liberal and libertarian, which she maintained were the same thing, and when the person she was arguing with suggested she Google it, she replied that she’d “take it under advisement.” Now she is in the position of having to take her own “advisement” and “find something new,” as she recently counseled millions of newly unemployed Americans (presumably because “Let them eat coding” was too awkward a construction).

-snip-

So Ivanka will soon be a Florida Woman, and will presumably adopt the in-state tradition of insisting that parts of Florida are “not really Southern” and that other parts are “lower Alabama,” but in a breathy voice that’s inexplicably two octaves lower than it should be. Her on-camera appearances will continue to have a certain hostage video quality, and the expert hair and makeup will not compensate for the unsettling uncanny valley effect she exudes when she tries to speak with authentic human emotion.

She won’t be alone. Jared Kushner is not literally a Trump child, but he might as well be. He is as qualified as Ivanka to be a senior White House adviser, benefitted from the same nepotism, and has many of the traits most pronounced in the Trump children: an inflated sense of entitlement; a belief that his wealth is simultaneously a product of meritocracy and dynastic fate; and a visceral allergy to any kind of knowledge acquisition that involves listening to experts, talking to anyone with a lower net worth, or reading anything longer than the first paragraph of this column that doesn’t contain his literal name.

https://newrepublic.com/article/160982/goodbye-trump-children-ivanka-jared

January 23, 2021

Share with MAGAts: Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes

The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.

Looking at the analyses of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation at the time the December 2017 tax bill was enacted, we see very clearly how different income groups are affected by the Trump tax plan. And it’s disturbing.

The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed. The C.B.O. and Joint Committee estimated that those with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 would owe an extra $365 next year — these are people who are struggling just to pay rent and put food on the table.

Of course, the poor have never mattered much to the Republican Party, but those on the edge of poverty have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic and the recession it has caused, so Trump’s planned tax increases seem especially heartless, and impractical, when you consider that their higher tax payments, while a huge burden for them, will add little to the budget.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/opinion/republicans-biden-taxes.html