Month: June 2021

This wild QAnon endorsement of a Myanmar-style military coup to reinstate Dear Leader didn’t come out of nowhere. Josh Kovensky at TPM tracked down the origins:

When Michael Flynn registered his support for a Myanmar-style military coup this week, he wasn’t just advocating for the violent overthrow of the government.

Flynn was playing into a specific fantasy that’s been brewing in the QAnon fever swamps since a February coup took place in Myanmar. The fantasy posits that the country’s military takeover offers a preview of what will happen in the U.S. to reinstate Trump.

QAnon supporters have tacked on to some similarities between the Myanmar coup and what the conspiracy foresees taking place in the U.S., using it as a touchstone for their own vision of the military overthrowing a fraudulently elected Biden and replacing him with Trump. The former president himself has reportedly said that he thinks he will be “reinstated” in August.

“Q always had the ideation of the military stepping in,” Mike Rothschild, author of the forthcoming book “The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” told TPM. “The Myanmar coup was the next evolution of that, because while Donald Trump was president, they didn’t want the military to overthrow him – but now with Joe Biden in office, they need the military to overthrow him to get Trump back into office.”

The Myanmar coup plotters used claims of voter fraud during their own November 2020 presidential election as a justification for taking power. The Myanmar military’s claims were broad, with one general alleging that 8 million fake votes had been counted. International observers at the election say that there were no major irregularities.

When the Myanmar coup first took place on Feb. 1, Q supporters reacted with recognition.

“QAnon is jealous of Myanmar’s military coup,” ran one Feb. 4 headline in Vice.

Jordan Sather, a QAnon video blogger with 59,700 subscribers on Telgram, wrote in the app that “Myanmar MIL moves today against what looks like a globalist puppet who had help rigging their elections.”

“I know many will cry “why didn’t our MIL do it before inaug!”, and as much as I wanted that too, there are sound arguments supporting the choice to let Biden have it for a moment and get DT “out of the picture” (temporarily),” Sather added.

On Feb. 5, Q News Official TV posted that “Myanmar Military just overthrew their government, claiming massive election fraud, and arrested their civilian ‘leaders,’ held them inside their government buildings and are promising an election redo that the citizens of Myanmar can trust.”

It’s all breathless, and maps closely on to what Q supporters want to occur in the U.S.

It came after Trump supporters spent months grasping at examples of real-world occurrences that match their fantasies of mass electoral fraud uncovered, leading to the reversal of an election.

Bruce Marks, a Philadelphia attorney who consulted on the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania litigation , was himself involved in an early 1990s race in which instances of voter fraud were verified. Those allegations map closely on to what Trump and his supporters were claiming.

Like that long-forgotten early 1990s race, the Myanmar coup has become something of an exemplar for QAnon adherents, who continue to believe that Trump was not defeated, but has merely receded into the distance before a forthcoming military takeover returns him to power.

“It’s an example of the military and the people throwing off the shackles of the deep state, taking control and giving it back to the forgotten men and women, which is not whats actually happening,” Rothschild told TPM. “But that’s what they want.”

Other Q accounts have also boosted Myanmar-related messaging. Q-Tip, a Telegram channel with more than 108,000 subscribers, wrote in mid-February that “Don already gave control to the military to move forward with the plan under guise of a National Emergency.”

“Soon, the military will publicly step in, as they did in Myanmar and election fraud will be proven,” the post reads.

GhostEzra, another leading QAnon Telegram channel, shared a Reuters story in March about the U.S. government blocking Myanmar’s junta from withdrawing $1 billion from the country’s account at the New York Fed.

Flynn was asked “why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here” at the For God & Country Patriots Roundup in Dallas, Texas.

“No reason,” Flynn replied. “I mean, it should happen here. No reason.”

Flynn’s language echoes that of many Q accounts that have mostly migrated to Telegram since major social networks began to shut down access following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

Flynn has tried to walk back his remarks, denying that he was advocating for a coup.

Rothschild pointed out that the remarks fit perfectly into the Q narrative.

“He knew that this was a crowd of Q people who idolize him and want this to happen,” Rothschild said.

I just don’t know what to say. The Republicans are in a state of mass hysteria and I don’t know what it will take to snap them out of it.

Asked as he's exiting a room if he's still confident in Dr. Fauci, President Biden turns around, sticks his head around a door and tells reporters, "yes, I'm very confident in Dr. Fauci." pic.twitter.com/afKEUJ61On

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 4, 2021

Thank goodness. Quite a few government officials have been undone by Donald Trump’s petty, personal grievances. I think about people like Peter Strzok or Marie Yovanovich as examples. Dr Fauci is just one more example …

For over a year, Anthony Fauci has been a bogeyman for conservatives, who have questioned his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of quietly undermining then-President Donald Trump.

But those attacks took on a whole new level of vitriol this week, to the point that one social media analysis described it as highly misleading and at least one platform pulled down some posts, citing false content.

It all stemmed from a tranche of Fauci’s emails that were published as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by various news outlets. Within hours of publication, the hashtag #FauciLeaks was trending on Twitter, accusing the nation’s top infectious disease doctor of lying under oath about the origins of Covid. It became a trending topic on Facebook too, where detractors added an inaccurate and more nefarious framing that the emails were secretly “leaked” — drawing on a playbook that has worked for partisans on the right in the past, despite the fact that Fauci’s publicly disclosed emails were not state secrets.

Reddit and Facebook lit up with a fresh round of Fauci attacks, some of which called him a war criminal. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), perhaps Fauci’s most prominent bete noire on the Hill, quickly released Facebook ads demanding to “fire Fauci” and requesting a campaign donation.

And a round of conservatives, cherry-picking individual emails out of more than 3,000, argued that Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had privately supported a theory that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and lied about masks in an effort to amass political power. Neither was true. Fauci has said he thinks it’s more likely that the virus spread from animal to human but would not rule out a lab leak, and while he initially downplayed the need for masks, it was, he said, out of fear that medical professionals would lose access to them if the public began panic purchasing.

The veracity and velocity of the new attacks, nevertheless, underscored the growing intensity with which Fauci animates conservatives some five months after Trump has left office. And they raised difficult questions for political and medical professionals about how much they should push back on the anti-Fauci campaign and what the cost would be if it went ignored.

“Targeting Fauci erodes trust in scientific institutions and makes them seem partisan – just as universities are increasingly seen as partisan, the media, the bureaucracy,” said Karen Kornbluh, senior fellow and director of GMF Digital at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. “These strategies don’t have an easy response. You try to ignore them when they’re not that widespread and even if you eventually refute them it can seem he said-she said. The best strategy — which the White House and Fauci seem to be taking — is to push ahead with an alternate positive narrative and action — in this case around vaccinations.”

For the White House, this has created a quandary: to defend Fauci from the incoming and risk elevating it, or to ignore it and assume it only gains traction with an audience that would never trust the Biden administration anyway.

On Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki called Fauci an “undeniable asset” but said the White House would let him speak for himself. In an interview later in the day, Rob Flaherty, the White House’s digital director, would not directly comment on Fauci but said that while the White House regularly pushes back on false information it must also balance out whether its response will exacerbate false information or quash it.

Fauci declined to comment for this piece.

Career government officials don’t often become political lightning rods. But Fauci’s role, the crisis in which he has operated, and the flow of information on social media, has created the perfect conditions for just that. A mild-mannered infectious disease specialist who has earned the admiration of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, Fauci is prone to bluntness. That has served him well as someone communicating to the public about complex and high-stakes pandemics and public health issues. But, starting in the spring of 2020, it has made his life tricky.

Trump insisted that he and Fauci worked fine together. But in the early days of the pandemic, the former president rarely hid his jealousy as Fauci became something of a public deity. Often Trump would proclaim that his judgments on Covid proved more prescient over time, like an early call to shut down travel from China. But Trump also routinely flouted the public safety guidelines that Fauci touted and their divergent approaches became an emblem for the then-president’s much criticized pandemic response, writ large.

This just breaks my heart. Fauci is a scientist who was respected by everyone on both sides of aisle, even through the AIDS crisis which was viciously polarizing in its day. He’s not n oracle or a god, but he is an honest broker who shouldn’t be held responsible for Trump’s massive failures which is what this is about.

These supposedly anti-cancel culture fuckers sure do love to assassinate the characters of anyone who comes into their crosshairs. They’ve done it for decades.

I think we all knew on some level that the grand plans of the new Democratic administration and Congress were going to be tough sledding. After all, the Democrats’ congressional majority is about as slim as it can be and the Republican Party has dissolved into mass hysteria and cynical obstructionism. It is not a recipe for easy legislative accomplishment. Considering all of that, it was a good sign that the Democrats were able to get the COVID relief package done quickly and money flowing into the deeply distressed economy on party-line votes. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has now pulled his caucus together and any slim hope of bipartisan cooperation has evaporated.

This is not Donald Trump’s doing. He has certainly turned the GOP into a cult organized around his Big Lie, but obstructing Democratic initiatives, even those that they previously championed, has been standard Republican policy for decades now. Ever since the 90s, at least, they have operated under a rule that to allow Democrats even a very slight claim to bipartisanship is to be avoided at all costs. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s 2005 book “Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy” skillfully deconstructed how they managed to accomplish this. Republicans have been at this for a while — and the Democrats have never successfully countered it unless they had a huge majority. (Even then, Democrats go to extreme lengths to avoid the filibuster, as we saw with the tortured passage of Obamacare.)

In fact, there have always been a few Democrats in both chambers of Congress, but most crucially in the Senate, who actually enabled this obstruction by arguing that they were above petty partisanship and would ensure the integrity of the system by being personally independent of all this unpleasant party politicking. Some of you may recall the painful process of trying to pass legislation back in the ’90s when you had diva Democrats like David Boren, D-OK, and Bob Kerrey, D-NE, whom you could always count on to be “wavering” over some detail that could blow up the bill. Later, during the Obama years, we had similarly annoying grandstanders like Ben Nelson, D-NE, and Blanche Lincoln, D-AR, gumming up the works over and over again. In the end, they were always pawns of the cunning Republicans who understand the utility of raw partisan power and aren’t afraid to use it.

But you will notice that the four I mentioned all came from red states that sometimes were willing to send a certain kind of Democrat to Washington — the conservative kind. This was happening as the old order, which had previously produced northeastern liberal Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats, was breaking down rather dramatically. As the long process of realignment of the two parties finally settled when the old guard leftovers from the 1960s and 70s finally retired, the fundamental problem with the U.S. Senate became clear: There are simply more rural, conservative, small population states than there are urban, liberal large population states and under the rules that govern that chamber, they essentially have veto power over everything. And that is often true even when the liberal, urban, large state party has a majority because the only way they can get one is if some of those conservative states elect conservative Democrats to the Senate.

Today, there are fewer of those than there used to be. And with shifting politics in places like Georgia and Virginia, Democrats have managed to change the dynamic and vote less flamboyantly “maverick” senators into office. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist anymore, as we are currently observing with the intense focus on West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, who are playing that familiar role in the current Congress.

But today, the stakes are much higher than they’ve ever been.

Republicans have completely lost even the small attachment they may have once had to our Constitution and our democratic system and are engaged in what can only be described as a slow-moving insurrection, one which I would say actually began in November of 2016. They are leveraging the power Donald Trump’s Big Lie has over the GOP base to institutionalize their minority rule through undemocratic subversion of the electoral system and nullification of Democratic votes. Unless the current Democratic Divas agree to eliminate the filibuster, an archaic relic of Jim Crow that was never contemplated by the Constitution, they are very likely to get away with it.

Democratic Party leadership, including President Biden, seem to finally have understood this and they appear to be attempting to cajole and pressure these holdouts. Biden subtly called out Manchin and Sinema in a speech this week and is “negotiating” with Shelly Moore Capito, the Republican senator from Manchin’s state, over the infrastructure bill which he almost certainly realizes by now will not garner the 10 GOP votes necessary to kill the filibuster. This indicates that it’s really kabuki theatre at this point and he’s really negotiating with Manchin to get him to agree to vote for the bill through reconciliation, which only takes 50 votes. (As of Thursday night, Manchin still says no-go to reconciliation.)

Beyond that, the Daily Beast reported on Thursday that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is planning to bring up a slew of bills during the month of June —including S1, the For The People voting rights bill — all of which will fail due to GOP filibusters. Democrats openly admit they are trying to illustrate in living color that the Republicans are intent upon blocking all legislation which they hope will lead the stubborn holdouts to agree to some kind of filibuster reform.

But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s also possible they want to clear the decks of legislation that more than few Democratic senators don’t really want to pass but also don’t want to have to vote against, which would not be all that surprising. It’s clear that some of the bills they plan to bring up on topics such as LGBTQ rights and gun safety are already non-starters with Manchin so they may not even get to 50. This wouldn’t be the first time the Democrats ostentatiously showed off their impotence in a vain attempt to gain conservative votes and please big-money donors.

Whatever happens, I think we have to agree that we have a fundamental, probably insoluble problem and it goes beyond the filibuster.

Our federalist system that gives Wyoming the same number of senators as California simply doesn’t work in an age of partisan polarization, particularly when one of the parties is batshit insane and its party establishment is willing to win by any means necessary. Getting rid of the filibuster is absolutely necessary for the survival of our democracy. But it isn’t a panacea and I don’t see any way to fix the rest of it unless the Republicans come to their senses. What are the odds of that happening?

President Biden won New Mexico’s First District by 23 percentage points last November. Former congresswoman Deb Haaland, now Biden’s interior secretary, won reelection there by 16 points. NBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why the GOP’s loss in the New Mexico special election to fill Haaland’s seat on Tuesday was disappointing for Republicans if not unexpected:

“What Republicans were hoping for was not necessarily to win this — obviously they would have been thrilled to win this seat,” Kornacki said. “What Republicans were really hoping for more realistically was for a race that was closer than these two numbers,” 23 points and 16 points, and preferably “a single-digit race.” Beating expectations, as the Democrats did in special elections running up to their 2018 blue wave, would be seen as a harbinger of a GOP House takeover in 2022.

With all of the expected vote counted, Stansbury beat the Republican candidate by 24.6 points. “Take these special elections with a grain of salt — there always sort of varying circumstances involved — but Republicans came into tonight hoping they could get a big talking point, hoping they could get some momentum that would point to a big midterm year for them,” Kornacki said, “and it’s Democrats who are going to be coming out of New Mexico 1 bragging.”

About 2022. Guy Saperstein is not a household name. Now retired, the storied civil rights attorney and major Democratic donor from Oakland predicted last Friday on the Nicole Sandler Show that such results are harbingers of things to come in 2022 and 2024. Saperstein predicted in 2014 that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Saperstein predicts Republicans are headed for “the biggest destruction of a political party in American history”(segment begins at timestamp 14:10):

“They’re completely devoid of any agenda. They have nothing to offer the American people. They’re offering chaos and insurrection. They are led by lunatics like Marjorie Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Kevin McCarthy. They’re experiencing the biggest loss of party registration in party history. They are now running nine points behind Democrats, 49 to 40, and it’s going to get worse. They are divided by the biggest divisions I’ve ever seen in a political party. They’re just a total mess!” 

Republicans have even lost corporate support, Saperstein adds.

And Democrats? Despite their propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, “They’re doing a fucking good job” of promoting wildly popular policies, says Saperstein. Democrats will have the wind at their backs by 2022 with a booming economy. He expects Democrats to win 300 House seats.

He’s serious. “You can take it to the bank.”

I’ll take more convincing. But it’s refreshing to see someone on the progressive side not in panic mode over where the country is heading. Unsettlingly so.

Nonetheless, Saperstein is moving soon to France where violence, he says, is nineteen times less than in the U.S. “It’s safe to walk the streets at night in Paris.”

Did the Chinese learn lessons in rewriting history from the 1921 Tulsa massacre? Not likely. Nevertheless, from The Guardian:

Over the weekend, a diminutive, white-haired woman carrying a yellow umbrella and a homemade cardboard sign saying “32, June 4, Tiananmen’s lament” was arrested on suspicion of taking part in an unlawful assembly. She had been marching along the pavement alone. This Kafkaesque scene happened not in China, but in Hong Kong. The fate of “Granny Wong”, a 65-year-old protest veteran called Alexandra Wong Fung-yiu, underlines the rapidity of Beijing’s clampdown in the city where, just two years ago, 180,000 people attended the annual vigil remembering the 1989 killings in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

This year the Hong Kong vigil has been banned. Anyone gathering at the vigil site in Victoria Park on Friday could face five years in prison. Even publicising the event could lead to one year in jail under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security law, imposed sight unseen at the end of last June following a year of massive pro-democracy demonstrations. Public commemoration has become so risky that one Hong Kong newspaper even suggested writing the digits “64”, to commemorate the date of the protest, on light switches, so that flipping the switch became an act of remembrance. These moves underline the dangerous power of public memory, and how the events of 32 years ago still represent a suppurating sore at the moral heart of China’s Communist party.

This approach seems designed to prevent a rerun of last year, when tens of thousands of Hongkongers defied a Covid-inspired ban to flock to the vigil, where they quietly held candles aloft in socially distanced groups. At least two dozen people, including the newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and the activist Joshua Wong, have been charged with unauthorised assembly as a result of the gathering, with some sentenced to as much as 10 months in jail. This is just one in a welter of public order offences laid against the territory’s most prominent politicians, lawyers, journalists and unionists, creating a kind of perp walk of conscience through the courtrooms as a generation of activists is criminalised.

Tulsa’s suppression of collective memory after 1921 was so effective that it did not require such draconian measures to “disappear” both the murderous actions of the White mob or the mass graves they filled with the bodies of their Black neighbors.

American History pic.twitter.com/XE0g7qX7KP

— COMMON (@common) May 31, 2021

In its 100th anniversary remembrance of a White mob’s attack on Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, the Washington Post writes:

For decades after the massacre, there was silence about what happened. Few in Tulsa learned about it at school. Or at church. Or at family dinner tables.

The Chinese would like to do the same to memory of the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

For a second year, Hong Kong has banned the annual vigil there for the victims (Reuters):

Hong Kong sealed off a park where tens of thousands gather annually to commemorate China’s 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and arrested the vigil’s organiser on Friday, in what activists see as suppression of one of the city’s main symbols of democratic hope.

A blanket of security was thrown over the former British colony to prevent people gathering to light candles for the pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese troops in Beijing 32 years ago.

Media reported police were conducting stop-and-search checks at three cross-harbour tunnels leading to Hong Kong island, causing long tailbacks during the evening rush hour. Water cannon and armoured vehicles were spotted.

The heightened vigilance from authorities was a marked departure from Hong Kong’s cherished freedoms of speech and assembly, bringing the global financial hub closer in line with mainland China’s strict controls on society, activists say.

Hong Kong’s annual June 4 vigil, the world’s largest, is usually held in Victoria Park, to the east of Hong Kong’s central business district, and is widely seen as a symbol of the semi-autonomous city’s democratic aspirations and desire to preserve its distinct way of life.

This year’s anniversary is the first under a sweeping and contentious national security law Beijing imposed on its freest city last year.

Chinese authorities can inhibit the memorial but not the memory. For that, you’d have to visit Tulsa.

The billionaire’s heir and alleged high level international businessman is selling personalized video messages for $500 a pop. I’m not kidding:

Donald Trump Jr has followed the growing list of minor celebrities, social media influencers and once influential politicians to join the personalized video messaging service Cameo.

The former president’s eldest son, listed on the site under the category of “activist”, is charging fans $500 a video with an undisclosed amount of the proceeds being donated to his chosen charity.

He follows a number of other “Maga celebrities” to join the platform, including his partner Kimberly Guilfoyle ($200 a video), convicted felon and former campaign adviser Roger Stone ($100 a video) and far-right political commentator and former presidential adviser Sebastian Gorka ($99 a video).

“Fortunately for you at least you have a family that has the sense to not be a lib and that they’re full of Trump supporters. So that’s pretty awesome,” he says, adding: “I hope your family rides you like Seabiscuit.”

A number of Maga celebrities on Cameo have been tricked into humiliating videos by users, including Gorka, the conservative host Tomi Lahren, former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who all recorded videos thanking Satan for supporting Trump.

Trump’s move into the world of personalized videos for cash reward comes after he complained about the “millions” the Trump family has sustained in legal bills due to ongoing criminal investigations into the Trump Organization.

Trump told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he believed investigations being led by New York attorney general Letitia James were “political persecution”.

In April, it was reported that Trump and Guilfoyle had bought a mansion in south Florida for $9.7m.

Even aside from the greed, there’s the embarrassing lack of self-respect and pride. But then that’s what the Trump cult loves about them.

And ROTFLMAO:

His bio says “a portion of proceeds will be donated to Shadow Warriors Project” supporting military contractors, although it’s not clear what percentage of the proceeds are being donated.

This from Jonathan Chait is alarming. But he’s right. While the GOP establishment is eager to pretend that January 6th was all a bad dream, the Trump cult, which numbers in the tens of millions, have other ideas:

In the Trumpiest portions of the party, the view is quite different. The rioters are martyrs, their plight needs redress, and their cause remains very much alive.

Maggie Haberman and the Washington Post report that Donald Trump has been proclaiming to anybody who would listen that his return to power is imminent. Trump is obsessively following a so-called “audit” in Arizona, which actually consist of right-wing grifters conducting alchemical procedures on ballots in order to supply a predetermined conclusion that Trump was robbed. The defeated president “has become so fixated on the audits that he suggested recently to allies that their success could result in his return to the White House this year, according to people familiar with comments he has made,” reports the Post.My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.

The comical proceedings in Arizona have attracted Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, who are interested in staging their own farcical ceremony to uphold Trump’s claim to power. In the Trumpist mythology, the Arizona cyber-ninja “recount” will be the “first domino,” followed by other states overturning their election results, culminating in Trump’s “reinstatement.”

Trump’s self-styled presidency in exile continues to focus on somehow seizing power. Pillow-monger Mike Lindell has reportedly persuaded Trump that his restoration will occur in August (though, as the Daily Beast notes, his timetable presumes a series of Supreme Court rulings that should have already begun to drop, but obviously have not). Trump recently met with Jeff Brain, CEO of the social-media site CloutHub, who helped organize the January 6 caravans, reports Hunter Walker.

Meanwhile, American Greatness, a journal dedicated to the proposition that one can stay loyal to Trump while maintaining a highbrow affect, has undertaken an editorial crusade to rehabilitate the Capitol rioters. One AG essay claims the real insurrectionists are “running the country and the bureaucracy, having imprisoned a few sad-sack political opponents who did not understand the rules of the game being played.” Another proposes that the rioters are heroes who should be elected to Congress.

Trump obviously is not going to be reinstalled as president this summer, or any time before 2025. But the neo-insurrection is no joke. Trump and his dead-enders have won the argument, or at least staked a claim to a large enough segment of their party that they can’t be cut off.

The party elite may roll its eyes in private, but its public agenda is to placate the insurrection. The Republican mainstream is refusing to talk about it not because it’s too weak to be taken seriously, but because it’s too strong. In the red states, Republicans are laying the groundwork to make the next insurrection easier. Trump and his diehards are busily rehabilitating the last one.

I’m not sure what the plan is to deal with this. It seems as though there are plenty of voices raising the alarm right now but it feels as if we are all just watching the spectacle as if we’re at a NASCAR race waiting to see if there’s a crash or if our team avoids one.

Hello?

This is so gross. Carlson went through Fauci’s emails (released under the FOIA) which show nothing amiss — but leave it to Tucker to dazzle his addled audience with a load of bullshit anyway. The WaPo’s Philip Bump does a detailed fact check on Carlson’s bogus claims and concludes:

We’ve seen this pattern over and over in recent years: Big caches of documents are released and motivated parties cherry-pick questionable elements and present them as somehow definitive. We saw it with the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2015 and 2016. We saw it with the material stolen by Russian hackers in 2016 and released by WikiLeaks. We saw it with the text messages between two FBI officials released in 2017.

That’s perhaps the best example, in fact. One of those messages, from former FBI agent Peter Strzok, mentioned an “insurance policy” — a phrase that has been used countless times to suggest an effort to blackmail Trump, though the actual reason for its use was entirely different. But it was lifted out of the pile, framed in a particular way and it stuck, despite a more obviously accurate alternative later emerging.

That’s the risk with Carlson’s attacks on Fauci. It’s not just that Carlson is leapfrogging over the evidence. It’s that he’s helping to establish a framing of this material that is far more compelling than it is well founded. Carlson’s presentation of Fauci as a liar and a criminal is planted in thin soil, but it will have an entire community working to nurture it. That’s the recent pattern, too: using isolated, decontextualized bits of material to support other such material, building out an accusatory house of cards.

Last year, Fox News attorneys deflected slander allegations against Carlson by arguing that his show was obviously an exercise in “ ‘exaggeration’ and ‘nonliteral commentary’ ” that viewers should understand is often not “stating actual facts.” They don’t.

Get ready to hear a slew of Trump cult man-on-the-street interviews spewing a bunch of incomprehensible gobbledygook about Fauci and Wuhan. It’s tragic.

All the people who have denied the pandemic and those dismissing it as just a little bit worse than the flu and haranguing anyone who takes it seriously as being killjoys really need to read this. Five million of our fellow Americans are in a state of horrible grief and I would guess many more have more distant friends, colleagues and relatives who died in this thing. It’s a nightmare:

With nearly 600,000 in the U.S. lost to covid-19 — now a leading cause of death — researchers estimate that more than 5 million Americans are in mourning, including more than 43,000 children who have lost a parent.

The pandemic — and the political battles and economic devastation that have accompanied it — have inflicted unique forms of torment on mourners, making it harder to move ahead with their lives than with a typical loss, said sociologist Holly Prigerson, co-director of the Cornell Center for Research on End-of-Life Care.

The scale and complexity of pandemic-related grief have created a public health burden that could deplete Americans’ physical and mental health for years, leading to more depression, substance misuse, suicidal thinking, sleep disturbances, heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure and impaired immune function.

“Unequivocally, grief is a public health issue,” said Prigerson, who lost her mother to covid in January. “You could call it the grief pandemic.”

The stories recounted are heartbreaking. And it’s not just the people over 60 (who many people have made very clear they believe are totally expendable anyway) these are stories of younger people with kids still at home and others who were vital members of their families. The way they died alone in the hospital, sometimes very quickly, with no family there makes it an exceptionally cruel disease.

All of us whose families made it through should count our lucky stars and be grateful. This is a terrible burden for a whole lot of people.

Remember how last month’s jobs figures created bipartisan handwringing because they failed to meet expectations and the sky was falling? Well:

Private job growth for May accelerated at its fastest pace in nearly a year as companies hired 970,000 workers, according to a report Thursday from payroll processing firm ADP.

It was a big jump from April’s 654,000 and the largest gain since the 4.35 million added in June 2020 as the national economy came out of its Covid-19 lockdown. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 680,000 in May.

The April total was revised sharply lower from the initially reported 742,000.

ADP’s private payroll count, done in conjunction with Moody’s Analytics, serves as a precursor to Friday’s more closely watched nonfarm payrolls data from the Labor Department. However, the two numbers can differ substantially, as they did in April when the official count showed just 266,000 new jobs compared with expectations of a million.

“Private payrolls showed a marked improvement from recent months and the strongest gain since the early days of the recovery,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.

The ADP figures showed a boom in leisure and hospitality jobs. In a continuing recovery for the industry hurt most by the government-induced lockdowns, the sector added 440,000 new jobs for the month.

Education and health services added 139,000, though most came from health care, while trade, transportation and utilities contributed 118,000. Professional and business services saw 68,000 new hires while the other services category had 69,000.

On the goods-producing side, construction payrolls increased by 65,000 while manufacturing added 52,000.

Overall, services were responsible for 850,000 jobs and goods-producing made up the balance of 128,000.

Job gains were distributed almost perfectly even by company size, with medium-sized businesses of 50-499 employees contributing 338,000. Small firms hired 338,000 and large companies had 308,000.

“Companies of all sizes experienced an uptick in job growth, reflecting the improving nature of the pandemic and economy,” Richardson said.

The official nonfarm payrolls count for May is expected to show growth of 671,000 a drop in the unemployment rate to 5.9%.

This was predictable, of course.m The country is re-opening and as they become vaccinated the public is desperate to get out of the house and start living their lives again. And May was when the bulk of the population became fully protected from the virus.

Now, get ready to hear from the same people who were freaking out over last months report to quickly switch gears and say the economy is overheating and the government has to stop spending immediately. They’ve always got something.