“There is no way they win elections without cheating” — Trump in Arizona, July 24, 2021
That is what Trump is telling his deluded cult and I think they believe it because they see that there are a bunch of people around them dressed like clowns, cheering for this demagogue and assume the whole world is just like them.
What are we going to do about this? Is the idea that it’s just a phase and they’ll eventually go back to accepting election results they don’t like? This seems extremely dangerous to me and yet we all seem to be just accepting that the GOP has gone crazy but oh well, they’ll snap out of it.
“You know it’s getting bad when the propaganda machine that the Democratic socialists control in this country — they control 95% of the media or so,” he opined. “And then you take the big tech oligarchs that control and censor what we receive via social media. When that poison gets to the average independent American, that propaganda, you know it’s bad when they can’t even find a 15- or 30-second soundbite out of a full-hour town hall that they can plug into their own propaganda machine.”
Nunes added: “I mean, it’s getting really bad. It’s not just the president. They can’t get any soundbites from the vice president either.”
The Republican lawmaker claimed that deep state actors are “almost to the point where they’re going to have to start using computer-generated graphics in order to give to the propaganda machine because they can’t get good clips to sell what they’re trying to sell here in Washington, which are policies that are running the country into the ground.”
As you can see in the clip, he’s not joking. Not even a tiny twinkle in the eye.
There have always been cynical manipulators, cranks and fringies on the right and a handful of them ended up in congress. And there have always been a few who ended up running committees or in leadership. (I’m thinking of Dan Burton or Tom DeLay.) But Donald Trump has completely eaten this guy’s brain and he seems to be headed toward QAnon if he isn’t already there.
Apparently, there is some QAnon conspiracy theory that Biden is actually a computer generated hologram or something, which they call “Bidan.” Trump was referencing it obliquely in his rally speech last night. It’s out there but then so is the idea that Democratic leaders are all pedophile cannibals so what else is new?
It’s the kind of validation from nationally known GOP politicians like Nunes that’s mainstreaming these nutty conspiracy theories. After all, he could have just said that Biden sucks, his performance is terrible and that Kamala Harris isn’t much better which makes it hard for the libs to help them sell their program. It’s wrong and it’s dumb. But it isn’t a paranoid conspiracy theory. These guys are so wedded to the Trump Cult that they naturally speak in their kooky language now. It’s getting creepier and creepier.
First of all, teams have changed names, changed cities, changed the name of their stadiums many, many times. In fact, the stadiums seem to be changing their names every year now as they get new sponsorship. It is commonplace.
Therefore, Trump is objecting to the reason they are changing the name, which we knew. He believes racism is bedrock American culture and he wants to preserve it. So do his followers.
But culture changes too. After all, there was a time when a man who wore flamboyant make-up and hair, as he does, would not be taken seriously as a politician. Our culture has changed. It changes all the time. And the kind of racism that casually dismisses the demands of racial minorities that they not be used as mascots is finally changing as well.
As for the new name, I like it. It has a connection with the city (there are two huge “Guardian” statues at the entrance to a big bridge) and the logo evokes the history of the team without demeaning anyone. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the native Americans who objected to this for many years are “guardians” of America by pushing so hard for our culture to recognize this sort of casual racism and change it.
Trump is a throwback who tickles America’s lizard brain every chance he gets. He knows his people.
And I’m not talking about COVID. I’m talking about anti-vax conspiracy theories.
Check out this rally in London yesterday:
Speaking at today’s anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown rally in London’s Trafalgar Square, former nurse Kate Shemirani – who was struck off in June – says Covid vaccines are “Satanic”, citing “the pattern 060606”. The graphine oxide single-molecule sheet “is a conductor”, she adds.
Former member of the London Assembly and leader of the Heritage Party David Kurten says: “These vaccines are not actually vaccines, they’re experimental injections.” “The people sitting in the parliament are doing the bidding of evil,” he adds.
German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich says “these vaccinations are experimental gene therapies without any scientific study as a basis”. “In all likelihood”, he says, there will be “500,000 dead after vaccination in the US alone”. He adds: “There is no evidence for a pandemic.”
Kate Shemirani says masks are “subjugation tools used by the freemasons”. “Within 10 minutes of wearing it is full of a bacteria that causes pneumonia,” she says. She asks the crowd whether they’re gonna have the “daily depopulation injection”.
Kate Shemirani says “5G is a direct energy weapon”. “In your injections, the hydrogel is a conduit, it has an antenna that links you. It transmits and receives. This is surveillance technology.”
Anti-5G activist Mark Steele says the vaccine is a “biological, chemical weapon” and “the virus is a hoax”. He says what’s happening in the UK is “domestic terrorism” and “genocide”. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) “is a terrorist organisation”, he adds.
Mark Steele says 5G is a “directional weapon system”. He says “the street light outside your home” is “the biggest risk” to everyone. “Microcells on street furniture, LED street lights” are “biologically toxic to all life”, which is why insects don’t fly around them, he adds.
Katie Hopkins calls on the crowd to “rub yourselves up against each other”. Referring to her deportation from Australia, she says: “If it makes me happy to answer a hotel door naked, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do and you’re gonna have to deport my arse to stop me.”
David Icke’s son, Gareth, says: “The best vaccine against Covid-19 is the realisation that’s it all bullshit.” He adds: “These Great Reset psycopaths have had us in their gunsights from the beginning… But now those gunsights have moved to our children.”
Former GP Vernon Coleman says the “manufactured, fake” Covid-19 “is just the flu rebranded”.
He says people who wear masks are “killing themselves” and “will be demented in ten years’ time” and children who wear masks in school “will be the stupid kids in a few years’ time”.
Vernon Coleman says “once the pathogenic priming gets going in the autumn” people who have had Covid vaccines “will start dropping like flies”. He brands the vaccine “toxic material” and “napalm”.
“The criminals in government are building four new super prisons,” says Ms Shemirani. “I’m so glad, because that’ll be their home.” And doctors and nurses who vaccinate, police officers “not acting under their oath” and “possibly even the Queen” will give them “good company”.
Piers Corbyn claims “you’re much more likely to die or get ill from the jab that you are from Covid, whatever it may be”.
He says there are four legs and a tail to the New World Order: “the Covid con”, “the climate con”, “the jab evil”, “the 5G evil” and “the one class system”.
Last up is David Icke, who says “demons” persuaded millions around the world to believe in “their plan” and “global tyranny” by using “a fake virus, a fake test and fake death certificates to give the illusion of a deadly disease that has never and does not exist”.
Davie Icke claims “staggering numbers of people worldwide will die from the fake vaccination”. “It’s the pandemic of the fake vaccinated,” he adds.
Mr Icke ends his speech by playing YNWA, which he calls “the Covid karaoke”, and asking the Trafalgar Square crowd to sing along.
Today’s rally was the third round of global protests in more than 100 towns and cities organised by a small group of activists in Kassel, Germany, called “World Wide Demonstration”.
Finally, there was a remark made by Kate Shemirani about Nuremberg trials for nurses and doctors, a belief that’s been spreading like wildfire in Covid conspiracy circles for months, that I deliberately chose not to include in the thread due to its violent nature.
Today like last week mass protests were held in Amsterdam and Paris against governments authoritarian corona vaccine policy leading to exclusion of people who insist on their free self-determination. No obligation can be imposed on free people.https://t.co/OYpTqDRzgN
The answer is obvious. There should be no mandates. The unvaccinated should just not be allowed to mingle with vaccinated people. Easy peasy.
The problem,of course, is the kids who can’t advocate for themselves. I don’t know what to say about tat except that the evidence shows so far that the irresponsible, unvaccinated parents are at higher risk of getting very ill from their kids than the other way around so at least there’s that.
Anti-lockdown protesters clash with London police outside Parliament on Monday. (Screen cap via The Independent.)
“Solidarity forever” this ain’t. Surging Delta variant Covid cases look to make the next few months tense ones. Along with protests against vaccinations, protests against another round of Covid restrictions to control the new case spike broke out around the globe over the last week.
London
Clashes outside Downing Street during latest London anti-lockdown protest. There were ugly scenes outside Downing Street as scuffles broke out between protesters and police, as well as between demonstrators themselves. #londonprotests#londonprotestpic.twitter.com/tW3mYJKF0H
Instead of blaming the government charged with protecting public health, when are people going to start pointing fingers at the unvaccinated for proloning their suffering? Brian Stelter believes U.S. opinions began shifting this last week as Americans got fed up with vaccine refuseniks and the Republican politicians egging them on. It may explain the sudden about-face on vaccines by many G.O.P. officials.
I think Brian really gets it here. Most of the adult population is vaccinated. Those people are starting to see that we're now going backwards because a big minority is refusing. People are getting pissed. That's what's driving the GOP switcheroo. https://t.co/j8pwJcM0eY
But there’s at least one idiot in every village, someone so full of himself/herself that they’ll make life worse for their neighbors. Like this asshole.
That rickety bridge in the village of Uryum in eastern Russia was temporary, built to replace the permanent one swept away in an earlier flood. Thanks to this jerk, villagers now have no way to cross the river. He survived.
When they win, they’re all “Elections have consequences.” And when they lose, somebody cheated. That pattern was established well before Donald Trump came along to upend the Republican Party. This he did not upend.
Yes, I heard for months from friends with conspiracy theories about the 2004 results in Ohio. Don’t show me statistical analyses of exit polling by some researcher, or a hacker demonstrating that with access he can alter one machine’s vote totals, I said. Show me a whistleblower with the means, the motive, and the opportunity to rig lots of machines and vote counts and we’ll talk. I’m still waiting. Contrary to Politico’s take, those voices died out pretty quickly on the left.
After November 2020, Trump the Ungratious spun up rumors of a stolen election into a national obsession and quite nearly a toppled government. As for evidence, what sore losers on the Trumpist right lack in quality they make up for with quantity. Classic conspiracist move.
All this brings us to Greg Sargent’s Friday column asking why we should be any more sensitive to Triumpists’ “Snowflake Syndrome” than we were to lefties’ feelings in 2004. Why they hell is it, Sargent writes, that “from voting rights to covid-19 to the legacy of Jan. 6 — we’re being told these voters are afflicted with a deeply fragile belief system that must be carefully ministered to and humored to an extraordinary degree”?
Why must we take their conspiracy theories more seriously than those of 2004? Or not confront their vaccine reluctance “too aggressively … lest they feel shamed and retreat into their anti-vax epistemological shells”? They of the Fuck Your Feelings tee shirts.
I’ve argued repeatedly that deriding people as stupid for “voting against their best interests” is no way to persuade anyone to change their minds. Sargent agrees. But making obesiance before their looney delusions neither placates not respects them either.
Take Texas, please. Republican legislators there are shepherding a bill that would require an audit of 2020 results by a third party appointed by Republicans:
But tellingly, as The Post reports, the audit would be required only for the largest counties — virtually all of which backed President Biden.
This is being justified by the notion that Republican voters no longer “believe in their election system,” as its chief sponsor, Republican state Rep. Steve Toth, put it.
But why audit just in larger counties? Behold this remarkable answer:
While Toth said he would support a statewide effort, he also argued the undertaking would be too expensive and time-consuming. Asked if he would consider including some smaller counties, Toth replied, “What’s the point? I mean, all the small counties are red.”
This “confidence” story line is nonsense. Sargent writes, “It’s being widely abused to keep alive the myth of the stolen election and to justify an unprecedented wave of efforts to disenfranchise the opposition’s voters. It is not designed to build confidence in our elections, but to further undermine it, for illicit purposes.”
Republicans have in fact spent decades working to instill in their base the belief that when Republicans win it is because they represent “real” America, and when Democrats do — let’s not mince words — it is because Black people cheated.
Vaccine hesitancy? Same deal. For some reason, we must take conspiracy theories about microchips and “needle Nazis” and stolen Bibles seriously lest we hurt the delicate feelings of manly antidemocracy agitators with guns. “It’s a tired act,” writes Sargent, “not to mention a transparently disingenuous and even dangerous one.”
It’s fine and good to insist on and search for ways to be empathetic and more communicative with the other side. But we need a limiting principle here. This requires forthrightly grappling with the true motives of these bad actors, and with the constraints on how far good-faith persuasion can get in a right-wing information environment that they are polluting daily.
Many Republicans are airing concerns about “voter confidence” to justify further efforts to suppress votes and undermine that confidence. Many demanding understanding of vaccine hesitancy are working to inculcate further vaccine distrust.
Voter confidence is not their problem, anyway. It’s more like the “civilizational confidence” Mark Steyn once warned the West lacked with all the “Wake up, America!” subtlety of the parody right-wing radio commentator, Earl Pitts – American. The encroachment of the Muslim world on western civilization was a clear and present danger, Steyn wrote. Admitting conservatives’ real concern was the encroachment of brown people on White political hegemony was a bit too confessional for the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
Steyn argues that just ground-pounding the Muslims wouldn’t prevent the fall of the Christian west. We suffer from an alarming birthrate gap vis-à-vis the Muslim world, Steyn warns, and the Christian world risks being eventually overrun because of “our lack of civilizational confidence.” (The cure for which is, no doubt, civilizational Viagra.) Americans are not afraid enough of the urgent threat posed by Muslim children and must retaliate by stockpiling more of our own.
And if treating the lack of White confidence by boosting the birthrate doesn’t work (conservative Christians are trying), pass laws to make it difficult if not impossible for brown people to vote when they come of age — just what G.O.P.-led legislatures are doing in Texas and elsewhere. Republicans are not worried about hurting their feelings.
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death. I mean, if you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know exactly what I mean.
– Woody Allen (screenplay), Love and Death
Comedian: Well, there’s a nice-looking young man over there. Hi, how’d ya die?
Daniel Miller: On stage, like you.
– Albert Brooks (screenplay), Defending Your Life
I think it is safe to say that Life’s greatest mystery is “what happens to us when we die?” As the dead remain irritatingly consistent in shedding absolutely no light on this matter, theologians, scientists, writers, poets, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers and erm…insurance salesmen have had carte blanche to mine the associative uncertainties and anxieties; proselytizing, theorizing, philosophizing, or fantasizing about possible scenarios (as of this writing only the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” part can be confirmed).
Writer-director Harry Greenberger’s seriocomic romantic fantasy Here After is the latest entry in a venerable genre that took firm root in the 1940s with films like HereComes Mr. Jordan (1941), A Guy Named Joe (1943), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), although I sense it’s more directly influenced by (relatively) contemporary fare like Made in Heaven (1987), Wings of Desire (1987), Ghost (1990) and Defending Your Life (1991).
So the dead guy getting his “second chance” here is a starving NYC-based actor named Michael (Andy Karl). After creating a public scene breaking up with his girlfriend in an airport terminal, he hops in his car and races onto the thruway in a fit of pique. A textbook case of distracted driving puts him on a (literal) collision course with Destiny.
When Michael comes to, he’s in a high-rise executive-style office with a commanding view of New York City (or a spectral facsimile thereof) and face to face with an ethereal woman (Christina Ricci) who matter-of-factually informs him of his unfortunate demise. He’s dead, but not quite ready to continue to his final destination. This is, of course, quite a lot for Michael to take in. Ricci proceeds to lay down the ground rules of his purgatory.
He is in what some might call a “special hell” (of sorts) reserved exclusively for single New Yorkers who check out before finding their soul mate (they only “go” in pairs, she tells him). Michael is tasked to “return” to the city, where he will be given a limited amount of time to find a nice dead girl to spend eternity with (how many times have we heard that story?).
He can’t see the living, nor can they see him. However, like Haley Joel Osment, he sees dead people. Initially, he can’t figure why they rudely ignore him when he tries to engage anyone in conversation, until one of them takes pity on the newbie and points out being dead doesn’t change the fact that they are still New Yorkers (it’s one of the funniest exchanges in the film).
On a hunch, Michael looks up a late friend (played with scuzzy aplomb by Michael Rispoli of The Sopranos), who advises him on the dating dos and don’ts for the afterlife. When Michael finally does meet “the one” (French actress Nora Arnezeder) …she’s a living person (don’t ask).
Despite some unevenness (a dark subplot involving a psycho stalker feels incongruous) Greenberger has fashioned a (mostly) charming tale with appealing leads and a good supporting cast (it was a pleasant surprise to see Jeannie Berlin pop up in a brief scene as Michael’s mom). I like Greenberger’s choices for the soundtrack, particularly his use of “Have You Seen the Stars Tonight?” by Jefferson Starship in a lovely interlude. If you’re looking for light midsummer popcorn escapism without capes and Spandex, Here After may be your ticket to heaven.
(“Here After” has opened in New York and is available everywhere On Demand)
Whether they move votes is unknown. But you’ve got to give the Lincoln Project credit. They know how to get under the Worlds Greatest Sore Loser’s skin:
This story about South Carolina Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace called “How a Trump critic fell back in line” says it all. If she was a true patriot, she would have done the right thing. Her first instincts were to do it. And then she decided her political career meant more to her than the country:
It would be hard to come up with a tougher test of willpower than the one Mace received at the Citadel. She was not the first woman to attend: Shannon Faulkner, who waged a long legal battle for admission, preceded her in 1995, but left the school after experiencing unrelenting harassment, not only by cadets but by members of the public. (Popular in Charleston at the time were anti-Faulkner T-shirts reading 1,952 bulldogs and 1 bitch.) As Mace recounts in her memoir, In the Company of Men: A Woman at The Citadel, she endured more of the same when she enrolled in the fall of 1996: Students at the school called her a “dyke” and a “whore” and vowed to keep her from graduating; members of the crowd harassed her at football games; someone wrote, “GO HOME, BITCH” on her bedroom door in shaving cream.
Mace had grown up hearing stories of the Citadel from her father, one of the school’s most decorated graduates. His reminiscences were fond but didn’t exactly paint a rosy portrait. As Mace recounts, they included some rather brutal incidents; once, she writes, her dad shut an insufficiently deferential freshman cadet in a room with an alligator. But in spite of these stories—or maybe because of them—she was obsessed with proving that she could make it through. The summer before she started, she trained so hard for the physical fitness exams that she ended up outperforming all but four men in her battalion. More than anything, Mace dreaded failure: “I would have to face that fear,” she writes, “or I would spend the rest of my life running from risks.” When, on May 8, 1999, she became the first female cadet to graduate from the Citadel, she made headlines around the country; an Associated Press photo from that day shows the 21-year-old grinning like a young Julia Roberts.
You can draw a pretty straight line from that person—the Nancy Mace who survived the Citadel—to the Nancy Mace who responded to December’s death threats by growing more stridently anti-Trump. Maybe she believed that her constituents would share her alarm at the president’s behavior in January. Her district, which runs along South Carolina’s coast from Charleston to Hilton Head, is a somewhat swingy place—more socially moderate and environmentally conscious than most GOP districts—and she’d just been elected on a campaign platform that didn’t line up neatly with those of her Republican peers.
To be clear, she hadn’t exactly shied away from Trumpism during her campaign: In ads, she promised to build the wall and condemned “arson, looting, and anarchy” in a reference to the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. To elect her was to guarantee that Trump “will have an ally in Congress,” she assured her constituents. Still, she hasn’t embraced either Trumpism or her party’s policies across the board: While serving in the statehouse and in Congress, she’s supported bipartisan conservation legislation and criminal-justice-reform bills. “You will see me drop cannabis legislation too,” she volunteered in the car after breakfast.
But in trying to establish herself as a born-again Trump critic, Mace had clearly made a miscalculation: State and local party leaders complained about her in local papers. One constituent wrote a letter to the editor saying she felt betrayed by Mace; another person called into Rush Limbaugh’s show to say she was furious at the congresswoman. South Carolinians ranted about Mace on Facebook, and right-wing blogs published takedowns of her. At least one Republican has already promised to challenge her from the right in 2022, and Team Trump is said to be recruiting other primary contenders. Despite her district’s sometimes moderate inclinations, winning reelection will require first winning the Republican primary—and in South Carolina, that’ll be hard to do without embracing Trump. Mace appears to have realized this.
Earlier this summer, Mace posted photos to Twitter showing the sidewalk in front of her home covered in graffiti. The scrawled messages included a fairly straightforward “Fuck you, Nancy” but also the deep-cut anarchist phrase “No gods, no masters.” (Some Twitter users were quick to allege an inside job: One tweeted photos of Mace’s handwriting, while others pointed out that the culprit seemed to have targeted the parts of Mace’s property that would be easiest to powerwash. Mace has denied vandalizing her own home.) It’s not clear who was behind the graffiti; authorities are still investigating. What is clear is that Mace saw an opportunity to score political points and ran with it. Her campaign used the vandalism as an excuse to send out a fundraising email. In an interview with Sean Hannity, she vowed never to back down from her beliefs: “We’re seeing the left burn, loot, and destroy our cities and our property,” she said. She posted to Instagram a video of herself stress-eating a Twinkie, and a photo of herself at a gun shop. “Buying another firearm,” she captioned it. “Feeling safer today than yesterday.”
We know she’s not afraid of the “left.” She’s afraid of Donald Trump’s cult.
If she couldn’t summon the courage to try to save America, she could quit her job and move into a different line of work. Instead, like so many other GOP officials, she’s joined the cult herself. It’s pathetic.
Read the whole thing if you have the chance. She’s just awful.
