Month: October 2021

First there’s a big split with drunken Trumper Corey Lewandowski. Now there’s trouble in war criminal paradise:

Bitter TrumpWorld donors want their money back after Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, once an outspoken pro-Trump voice opposed to President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, apparently turned on his far-right supporters and slammed former President Trump in a Facebook post.

This latest TrumpWorld internal drama began last month when Scheller faced discipline from his Marine Corps superiors after speaking out against his bosses over the Afghanistan withdrawal.

In what became a viral video in right-wing media, on Aug. 26 Scheller said: “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down. And none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.'”

Shortly thereafter, the Marine officer lost his post and was briefly jailed for his social media posting, in violation of orders to halt his online activities. On Tuesday afternoon, he was apparently “released from the brig.” Throughout the multi-week affair, his parents, Stu and Cathy Scheller, have spoken out, claiming that the Marine Corps told them their son could face “a long prison term.” 

That’s possible: Scheller now faces a series of serious charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including charges of “willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer” and “failure to obey an order.” 

The right-wing ecosystem roused itself, and financial aid from pro-Trump online forces poured in on Scheller’s behalf, directed to his family and legal defense team.

Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of murdering an Iraqi POW in 2017 but later acquitted, stepped in with his Pipe Hitter Foundation, which to date has raised north of $2.5 million on Scheller’s behalf. But here’s the rub: After Scheller expressed mild criticism of the twice-impeached ex-president in a recent Facebook post, TrumpWorld donors are livid and want their money back.

This donor backlash appears to have been sparked by a Sept. 25 post in which Scheller said, “President Trump. I was told by everyone to kiss the ring because of your following and power. I refuse. While I respect your foreign policy positions, I hate how you divided the country. I don’t need or want your help. You do not have the ability to pull [the] U.S. together. You may even win the next election. But your generation’s time is running out.”

Next Schiller took aim at Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, stating: “Tell your son to stop tweeting about me. Your whole family knows nothing about [the] U.S. or our sacrifices. I could never work with you. I’d rather sit in jail and be released with a dishonorable [discharge] than make compromises in my beliefs.” 

Oh my word: Trumpist donors, by the hundreds, are beside themselves. One donor who identified herself as Barbra wrote: “What a scam artist you are! Worse than BLM last year! Give the money back! Cry baby! You are mental and your kids and wife will suffer. Karma all the way here. You knew damn well what you were doing to prey on people for Money!”

Barbra, by her own account, had given $3. She concluded: “A real Marine doesn’t have mommy and daddy crying for him!”

Gallagher and his Pipe Hitter Foundation didn’t return Salon’s request for comment on this story. 

Another anonymous donor wrote: “You and to your family [sic] are frauds! Tell your parents to cry on the fake news channels. You hate Trump, his kids, and you think he divided this Country? You need help? Tell your loser family this E9 said [to] go to hell.” 

“Yes, I am making the MINIMUM $3 donation to let everyone else know to look you up before they consider any $$$ support for you,” another disgruntled donor wrote, in an apparent effort to warn away other Trump supporter. 

Another unhappy donor named Gretchen Smith wrote, “I sent Pipe Hitter an email for a refund of my $52.23 on 10/05/21.”

“How dare you disrespect President Trump,” wrote Marc. “Please refund my earlier donation. If the election wasn’t stolen, you wouldn’t be in jail right now because Trump would NEVER have allowed it. Thanks for your service, but maybe it’s your big mouth that’s causing all your issues.” 

Since Scheller went rogue with his anti-Trump comments, Gallagher’s organization has been tasked with issuing refunds to angry Trump supporters who had initially flocked to the cause. 

“We have been working all day today in giving people their money back, if they are asking for it,” Gallagher told Steve Bannon on his “War Room: Pandemic” podcast earlier this week. “It’s understandable,” the former Navy SEAL added. 

Gallagher insisted his foundation would not back down from supporting Scheller and his family, despite the backlash from Trump loyalists: “We are going to continue to raise money for them and help them out.” How that will be received remains to be seen. 

I think that what surprises me most is that last thing. Doesn’t Gallagher know that one simply does not defy Dear Leader? Is he crazy? (Don’t answer that…)

Donald Trump secretly thanks the Pentagon every single night that they stopped him from withdrawing from Afghanistan while he was in office. Now he gets to have it both ways — criticize Biden for withdrawing while insisting that he would have left victorious as a great conquering hero. His followers will believe anything.

It’s amazing how many great heroes there were in the Trump administration who Kept Us Safe. Remember Anonymous who assured us that, really, the grown-ups were in charge? And of course, there’s that great, amazing hero General Milley who took it upon himself to ensure Trump didn’t nuke the planet. This time it’s Pat Cipollone:

On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.

Such a hero. But I have a question:

If he was such a hero, what the fuck was Cipollone doing there in the first place?

A real hero would never have agreed to work in the Trump administration. A real hero, if s/he was somehow blind to Trumpism before then, would have left loooooong before January 3.

Please remember this as the number of self-proclaimed Great Heroes Who Stood Up to Trump and Saved the Republic continues to proliferate in the coming years:

The real heroes were those who resigned in January, 2017, or delayed government service until Trump was gone. The guys who stayed and are now claiming they “made a difference?” They’re not heroes. They’re just Sloppy Joes.

Adding: To those who say I should be grateful to Anonymous, Milley, and many others for standing in Trump’s way: Masha Gessen and others have made the point that you can’t really mitigate the harm an autocrat inflicts. It just prolongs the authoritarian regime. No one in the government can effectively prevent the harm Putin causes, and no one could really blunt Trump’s harm either (for example, see Jan 6). The truly principled competent people let autocrats fail, and they hasten their fall by refusing to work for them in the first place, not by threatening to resign when things, as they inevitably will, spiral downwards.. By that time, it is far too late to stop the madness and horrors (for example, see Jan 6).

Susan Roesel:

I was 30 years old.
I was married.
We were happy.
We were established.
Our 401k runneth over.
We decided to start a family.
I got pregnant right away.
Like right away.
We were over the moon.
I kept a journal of every day of the magic.
I got a bump.
…

I felt our baby kick.
I embraced it fully.
I rejected tests because "it won't change our path"
Emily sent out baby shower invitations.
The nursery was under way.

And then.

I'm almost halfway there!
I'm 18 and a half weeks pregnant.
The doctor called.
It was 7pm.
…

I was out at dinner with my friend Deb.
I stepped outside.
The day before on a whim I agreed to a blood test.
"There's probably nothing to worry about but we need you to come in. There's a 1 in 36 chance something is wrong"
I called Liza sobbing.
…

My sister told me to lay out 36 straws and see that there's still such a good chance that everything is fine.
I didn't sleep.
We drove up to Forsyth because that was the first available amniocentesis.
The needle was long.
The room was dark.
The news was really bad.
…

I changed in that moment forever.

It's a girl!
We had named her Audrey.
Audrey Roesel — the girl who will make me a mom.

She was missing her nasal bone.
Her kidneys were tiny.
Her heart was missing a chamber.
She had an extra chromosome.
Part of her brain wasn't formed.
…

Her head was growing at a rate 4x faster than her limbs.

I want to be a mom.
This is my girl.
This situation could really hurt my body.
She will be in immeasurable pain.
I didn't understand "incompatible with life"
I cried.
I cried some more.
I was already a mom.
….

Moms keep their children from pain.

Time is ticking.
I'm 19.5 weeks now.
We are in Georgia.
There's a time limit, you know.
It's Labor Day now.
Doctors go on vacation.
Somehow the world around us keeps on.
Not for me.

In the interest of time…

They sent me to an abortion clinic.
Me.
At an abortion clinic.
After 20 weeks, it's illegal, you know.
It's the night before.
I ran a bath.
I said goodbye to my daughter in that tub.
Just the two of us before the world turned upside down.

Did you know…

You have to go 2 days in a row?
1 to dilate
1 for a D&E
It was brutal emotionally.
It hurt physically.
I begged to be put under.

A kind doctor took my hand.
His hands were large and warm.
He told me I would be a mom one day.
He was an angel.
…

I woke up in a group recovery room.
In a recliner. Next to a young girl. Maybe 13. She was also recovering. I took her hand.
My milk came in.
Nobody told me.
It hurt in my body and my soul.
I grieved. Hard.
For months and months.
I held onto a teddy bear…

the size of a newborn.
I ached everywhere inside and out.
It was a fluke they said.

Fast forward four months.
Pregnant again.
Scared.
Excited.
First ultrasound.
Baby’s gone.
Go to the hospital for D&C.
This is also considered abortion.
They tested the tissue.
it was a boy!…

Chromosomes were normal.
Isn’t that good news?
Grief ensued.
So did genetic testing B and me.

I’m not ashamed.
I never was.
I’m what abortion looks like.
So is the 13 year old girl in that recovery room.

In Texas we’d be criminals.
…

Access to safe abortion is a woman’s right.
And abortion is a decision to be made between a woman, her doctor, her family, and her god.
…Not a majority white male cohort of politicians with a false sense of morality.

And your judgement?
It matters not.
<end>

Originally tweeted by #RandyResistED Authoritarianism (@RandyResist) on October 6, 2021.

The title of the interim report issued today from the Senate Judiciary Committee majority contains a spoiler. Well, not really. Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election. Republicans on the panel think not. No spoiler there either.

The Washington Post summarizes the findings:

On Jan. 3, then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and a handful of other administration officials met in the Oval Office for what all expected to be a final confrontation on Trump’s plan to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who had indicated he would publicly pursue Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud.

According to testimony Rosen gave to the committee, Trump opened the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” For three hours, the officials then debated Trump’s plan, and the insistence by Rosen and others that they would resign rather than go along with it.

In fact, all Justice Department’s assistant attorneys general would resign en masse if Trump went through with the scheme.

Katie Benner at the New York Times first reported:

• • The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.

  • The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.

  • The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.

The panel hopes Clark will sit for an interview. In the meantime, it has asked the District of Columbia Bar to begin a disciplinary investigation into Clark’s actions.

The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.

The Senate panel found that Mr. Barr personally demanded that the department investigate voter fraud allegations, even if other authorities had looked into them and not found evidence of wrongdoing. These allegations included a claim by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a prime force behind the unfounded election fraud allegations, that he had a tape that showed Democratic poll workers kicking their Republican counterparts from a polling station and fraudulently adding votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. into the count.

In July, Giuliani has had his law license suspended in New York and D.C. over “false and misleading statements” about election fraud.

Is anyone suprised by any of this except for the fact that no one has yet been indicted for plotting a coup?

An appeals court is likely to weigh in, but on Wednesday U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled in Austin, Texas that the state’s freshly minted all-but-ban on abortions is done. For now.

The Department of Justice brought the case against the state of Texas after it passed a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

“From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution,” Pitman wrote in the ruling (pg. 112). “This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.” Whatever higher courts may rule after him. Pitman ruled that the state forfeited any right to a stay on his order pending appeal “by pursuing an unprecedented and aggressive scheme” to undermine “a significant and well-established constitutional right.”

John Seago, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, which supports the law, expects the ruling to be reversed on appeal, saying Pitman’s ruling shows “extreme prejudice.”

But terminating the law with extreme prejudice was exactly Pitman’s intent.

Pitman bluntly ordered that the state “publish this preliminary injunction on all of its public-facing court websites with a visible, easy-to-understand instruction to the public that S.B. 8 lawsuits will not be accepted by Texas courts.” Pitman preliminarily ordered the state, “including its officers, officials, agents, employees, and any other persons or entities acting on its behalf” to cease all enforcement of the law in any of its aspects. Included in that order are state court judges and state court clerks with any administrative authority. The scope of his ruling means private individuals’ efforts to bring actions in abortion cases is for now moot.

What makes this case especially egregious, Pitman concludes, is that not only does the federal government believe not only because the United States believes S.B. 8 violates Texans’ constitutional rights, “causing widespread, significant injuries,” but alleges Texas lawmakers drafted S.B. 8 specifically “to preclude the ability of those whose rights are being violated from vindicating their rights” (pg. 110).

For a federal judge, them’s fightin’ words. No way would Pitman allow the law’s vigilante enforcement scheme stand as a model for abortion opponents or gun control advocates in other states to follow.

Texas will appeal.

New York Times:

Nancy Northup, the president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement that clinics her group represents “hope to resume full abortion services as soon as they are able, even though the threat of being sued retroactively will not be completely gone until S.B. 8 is struck down for good.”

Whole Woman’s Health, a group that operates four clinics in the state, said in a statement that it was “making plans to resume abortion care up to 18 weeks as soon as possible.”

A spokeswoman said she did not know precisely when that would be.

Politico:

Democrats on Capitol Hill celebrated the ruling but called for legislative action, pointing to the precarious state of abortion rights in the hands of a right-leaning Supreme Court that is set to revisit Roe vs. Wade in December. Should the high court decide after hearing a case from Mississippi in December that states can ban the procedure before the point of fetal viability, laws like the one in Texas will quickly proliferate.

“We can’t continue to rely on the whims of the courts in this fight,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Col.), who co-leads Congress’ Pro-Choice Caucus.

DeGette and her colleagues are pushing the Senate to approve the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill to impose federal protections for abortion access that narrowly passed the House last month and is currently awaiting a Senate vote that it is not expected to survive.

Survival of a nonviable fetus is not a concern for Texas lawmakers. Pitman includes a host of footnotes in his ruling, stories from abortion providers that speak to the impact of the law on women, including the suffering of pregnant women unable to terminate doomed pregnancies.

Footnote 86 (pg. 96), for example:

“One Texas patient had planned her pregnancy but recently learned that the fetus had an anomaly incompatible with life. She was told by her doctor in Texas that there is no exception under S.B. 8 for her circumstances, and that her only options were either to carry to term with the fetus dying after birth, or to leave the state to receive the needed care to terminate the pregnancy. Understandably, she was stricken with grief in dealing with this added burden. Our patient does not want to incur the trauma of being forced to carry the pregnancy to term, and is hoping to move past this loss to continuing planning her family. Faced with this heartbreaking “option,” she decided to make the long trip to Colorado to seek care out of state.”

Should the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans rule S.B. 8 constitutional, the Supreme Court might decline to hear the case and allow that ruling to stand. If not, the case could end up before the Supreme Court within weeks.

This fight is not over.

Hey Sinemanchin. Are you ok with this?

The Democrats are trying to mitigate this with their agenda. Republicans and at least two Democrats are against it. It is a travesty:

Typical 2-year-olds in Denmark attend child care during the day, where they are guaranteed a spot, and their parents pay no more than 25 percent of the cost. That guaranteed spot will remain until the children are in after-school care at age 10. If their parents choose to stay home or hire a nanny, the government helps pay for that, too.

Two-year-olds in the United States are less likely to attend formal child care. If they do, their parents pay full price — an average $1,100 a month — and compete to find a spot. If their parents stay home or find another arrangement, they are also on their own to finance it, as they will be until kindergarten.

In the developed world, the United States is an outlier in its low levels of financial support for young children’s care — something Democrats, with their safety net spending bill, are trying to change. The U.S. spends 0.2 percent of its G.D.P. on child care for children 2 and under — which amounts to about $200 a year for most families, in the form of a once-a-year tax credit for parents who pay for care.

I suspect you can trace this neglect to the ignorance and personality dysfunction of so many of our fellow Americans. We are a first world country with all that that implies but we treat our people as if we live in the third world

This just makes my head hurt:

​A recent gathering in a Quality Inn ballroom in rural Bradley, Illinois, offered a glimpse—terrifying to most epidemiologists, thrilling to longtime vaccine “safety” activists—of America’s growing political divide over vaccinations and its implications for the nation’s health. Ostensibly, the meeting was a community forum about employer mandates for COVID vaccines that the organizer expected to draw 80 people in this overwhelmingly Republican exurb of Chicago. Instead, more than 300 people piled in, mostly to complain about the notion that anyone—a boss, a school, a government—could force them to take any vaccines at all. As one Libertarian county commissioner told the crowd: “I will fight for your right to believe in whatever god, medicine or way of life you choose.”

The event is being replicated in some form or another in cities and towns across America, emblematic of a growing grassroots movement of people who believe that vaccine mandates—for COVID, yes, but increasingly for other diseases as well—are an affront to their personal freedom. That represents a marked shift from pre-pandemic times, when vaccine opponents typically based their reasoning on medical concerns and were largely comprised of a few religious sects and a small number of left-leaning activists seeking explanations for rising rates of autism. As the anti-vaxx mandate movement gains political traction, particularly on the right, medical experts fear it could not only cripple efforts to eradicate COVID but could also lead to a surge in long-conquered diseases, from mumps to whooping cough to smallpox.

“Those [more established] vaccines have had a long history of use, so there’s certainly data that suggests that they’re relatively safe. But it always has to be a choice of individuals. You can’t have government forcing that on us” – Conservative group Action 4 Liberty president Jake Duesenberg

“There are some more conservative states where we are likely to see other non-COVID vaccine mandates under attack, and it is very worrisome,” says Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “If we have some of these pediatric infectious diseases come back, it will be horrific.”

Even before President Joe Biden’s September 9 announcement of a litany of aggressive COVID vaccine mandates—covering an estimated 100 million Americans, including federal health workers and companies with more than 100 employees—evidence of changes in policy and sentiment toward such rules was cropping up, led by the right. This summer the Tennessee Department of Health, reportedly pushed by GOP lawmakers, directed its staffers to stop conducting “proactive outreach regarding routine vaccinations,” including those for childhood diseases, HPV and influenza. Larry Elder, the top Republican vote-getter in the failed recall effort against California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, told the Los Angeles Times editorial board in August, “I don’t believe that the state should tell a parent whether or not a child should be vaccinated. That’s an intrusion of state power.” In Minnesota this month, the conservative group Action 4 Liberty, which boasts an email list of more than 100,000 recipients, began hammering a leading Republican candidate for governor for refusing to sign the group’s “Stop Vaccine Mandates” pledge.

As the article says, there have been anti-vaxxers from all over the map for a while, including a contingent on the left which is just as anti-science as the right wing. But that is a vanishingly small faction compared to this new group of “freedom fighters” who have no reason to not vaccinate their children except to make a political point. It’s child abuse.

It turns out that the braindead revolutionary wingnut channel that could was actually the brainchild of AT&T. Imagine that:

One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world’s largest communications company.

A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Once again, this myth of “liberal media” is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever run in America. Those AT&T executives may or may not have believed it but they knew there was a market for rightwing extremism that wasn’t being fully tapped and they wanted to exploit it. Who cares about what that would do to the country, amirite?

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

“They told us they wanted a conservative network. … When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”OAN founder Robert Herring Sr in a 2019 deposition

Dallas-based AT&T, a mobile-phone and Internet provider, also owns entertainment giant Warner Media, which includes CNN and HBO. AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 and in August spun off the satellite service, retaining a 70% share in the new, independently managed company. AT&T’s total U.S. television subscriber base, including satellite and streaming services, fell from 26 million in 2015 to 15.4 million as of August.

AT&T spokesman Jim Greer declined to comment on the testimony about OAN’s revenue streams, citing confidentiality agreements. He said that DirecTV broadcasts “many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum.”

“We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry,” Greer said. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

Although the contracts are confidential, in court filings Herring cited monthly fees included in one five-year deal with AT&T. According to an AT&T filing citing Herring’s numbers, those fees would total about $57 million. Greer said that figure is inaccurate, but declined to say how much AT&T has paid to air OAN, citing a non-disclosure agreement.

Herring and his adult sons own and operate OAN, a subsidiary of their closely held San Diego-based Herring Networks. Their AT&T deal includes Herring’s other network, a little-watched lifestyle channel, AWE. The Herrings declined interview requests.

Herring, who just turned 80, is a self-made businessman who amassed a fortune in the circuit board industry, then turned to television and boxing promotion. OAN’s influence rose in late 2015, when it began covering Trump rallies live, at a time when some of the media still saw the New York celebrity businessman as a longshot presidential contender. The network continues to shower Trump with attention and often provides a friendly platform for his Republican allies.

As president, Trump frequently urged supporters to watch OAN. In his final two years in office, Trump touted the network, known as @OANN online, to his 88 million Twitter followers at least 120 times.

“Hope everybody is watching @OANN right now,” Trump tweeted on December 1, citing a dubious report about a truck carrying more than 100,000 fake ballots. “Other media afraid to show.”

[…]

America’s post-election turmoil, punctuated by the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, continues to roil the country. Dozens of election administrators in battleground states Trump lost have received a barrage of death threats, Reuters has reported. A Reuters poll in May showed that a quarter of Americans – and 53% of Republicans – wrongly believe Trump won the 2020 election.

OAN caters to this audience. Trump’s loss was OAN’s gain, social media data show.

The network’s online audience soared in November, after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Trump and his camp blasted Fox. A record 767,000 people installed the OAN app that month, nine times as many as in October, according to data firm Sensor Tower. In January, Trump supporters, including at least one carrying an OAN flag, stormed the U.S. Capitol. That month, app installs spiked again to 517,000.

The OAN website averages 8 million visits a month from desktop and mobile users, having peaked at 15 million from November through January, data firm Similarweb found in an analysis for Reuters. Two in three people on desktop computers return to the website after an initial visit, about the same loyalty rate as Fox News and Newsmax, another rival conservative news channel.

One America’s television ratings are harder to measure, partly because it is available in only about a quarter of the estimated 121 million TV households in the United States. Ratings services Nielsen and Comscore, which both show that Fox News continues to be the leading cable network, do not release OAN figures. In an internal email, an OAN news director told staff that the week of the Capitol assault produced the network’s “best ever” ratings, but gave no statistics.

OAN says it is the fourth-rated news network, behind Fox, CNN and MSNBC, and ahead of CNBC, the BBC and Newsmax, but has not provided figures to back this up. (Each of these networks, including One America News, pays Reuters fees to publish the news service’s stories, videos and/or pictures.)

Even so, the number of viewers OAN reaches may be less important than the kind of observers it attracts and galvanizes, said John Watson, an American University journalism professor specializing in ethics and media law.

“If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many – and here, it’s literally millions,” Watson said of the OAN audience. “When you have that sort of poisonous influence on mass media, it’s a problem; because elections in the United States tend to be so close, a few percentage points here or there can really make a difference.”

At least one self-described regular OAN viewer recently sent a threatening note to an election official. In August, Sheila Garcia of Riverside County, California, sent Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold a scathing message. Biden beat Trump in Colorado, and Garcia accused Griswold, the state’s top election official, of treason – warning her that punishments for that crime are hanging and legal injection. “Within several months you will have to decide between the two,” Garcia wrote.

In an interview, Griswold said she considered threats like Garcia’s message a credible threat on her life. That threat and dozens of others caused her to seek extra security measures, she said.

Garcia, 55, told Reuters she’s convinced Biden stole the election and said she gets most of her news from OAN. She compared U.S. mainstream media to state propaganda outlets in China and Cuba. Her message to Griswold, she said, was legal. “If you’re afraid of a little old lady in a trailer park in California, I feel sorry for you,” she said in an interview.

It isn’t just big tech. It’s corporate media as well. All of them are poisoning our democracy out of greed and avarice.

A Black family of veterans with small children moved into a new house in Virginia Beach. Their neighbor installed motion sensors that trigger cameras and lights pointed at THEIR driveway. This is the audio that plays whenever they go in or out of their home.

They have gone to the police who say while it is “offensive” they cannot take any action since no laws are being broken. Their child is terrified

Originally tweeted by chris evans (@chris_notcapn) on October 5, 2021.

America 2021:

The loud music started in 2017 — roughly one year after the family of five moved into a cul de sac in the Salem Lakes neighborhood.

After Martinez called Virginia Beach police about a noise complaint in July, she said her neighbor started playing the sound of monkeys screeching from a speaker in the window of the house’s far left side.

On Sept. 16, she could hear the N-word coming from the same room next door closest to Martinez’s house. It frustrated Martinez, who said she couldn’t enjoy something as simple as sleeping with the windows open. Some days, she didn’t want to leave her house because she didn’t want to hear the sounds.

Her 7-year-old son feared the man next door. He would often ask his mother what the N-word meant.

He was 2 when they moved into their Salem Lakes home. Martinez laments that her son has had to grow up experiencing their neighbor’s behavior for most of his life.

The mother of three sought help from police, the Virginia Beach Magistrate Office and a civil judge, who all said there was nothing they could do because the neighbor didn’t break any laws or threaten Martinez and her family.

Virginia Beach police issued a statement Wednesday calling the neighbor’s behavior “appalling and offensive.” But despite multiple nuisance and loud music complaints, the department “has had no authority to intervene and warrants were not supported.” The statement also said officials will monitor and help as long as it’s “within the limits of the law.”

In the same statement, police said the magistrate office and city attorney concluded the neighbor’s actions don’t “rise to a level that Virginia law defines as criminal behavior.” The city attorney’s office pointed The Pilot to a city ordinance which states officials cannot intervene if doing so might violate their First Amendment rights, but its lawyers but did not answer when asked whether the law prevents the city from taking action in Martinez’s case.

“At the end of the day, the law is the law,” Martinez said during an interview Wednesday at her home. “What more can (the city) do than they’ve already been doing — unless something changes, and unless the law changes.”

Nancy Eleftheratos, a homeowner on Jessamine Court, said she expected the department’s response after a police officer came to talk with Martinez and herself last week. The officer told both women it was “protected speech,” Eleftheratos said.

The neighbor did not respond to requests for comment from The Virginian-Pilot.

Since The Pilot’s story was published Monday, the Virginia Fair Housing Office reached out to the Martinez family through a reporter and it is now looking into their complaints. The office investigates alleged cases of “coercion, intimidation, threats or interference with any person in the exercise or enjoyment of their fair housing rights.”

Neither Martinez nor Eleftheratos expected an outpour of support from hundreds of people locally and across the nation.

When a crowd gathered outside their neighbor’s home Sept. 24 to denounce the behavior, Martinez said her son showed courage. He told his mother he wanted to make his own sign like the ones he saw community members holding.

His inspiration came from the sign his mother made. As he sat on the living room’s wooden floor with colorful stencils scattered in front of him, he traced the letters to spell out the chant that filled his cul de sac:

“Spread Love Not Hate”

This is heartbreaking and infuriating. It’s hard for me to believe that there isn’t anything the authorities could have done if they wanted to.

They just didn’t want to.

I have often observed that shamelessness is the American right-wing’s superpower and that is never better illustrated than when they call for the smelling salts over Democratic “incivility.” We are once again undergoing such a phony hissy fit in the case of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, who was accosted by protesters who followed her into a public restroom, in one instance, and asked her questions on an airplane flight in another. 

Let me just say that I think the bathroom thing was ill-advised, and cornering anyone on an airplane is pretty aggressive since there is literally no escape. It’s not like a business owner asking someone to leave the premises, such as what happened to Donald Trump’s former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders or when his former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen was taken to task by fellow diners in a restaurant in Washington, both of which also caused right-wingers to froth and fume. Sinema was in no physical danger from these protesters and neither were Sanders and Neilsen. As President Biden said when asked about it on Tuesday, “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody … it’s part of the process.”

The right-wing is staging this fit because they are currying Sinema’s favor in the hopes that she will destroy the Democratic agenda. But this is a common tactic — hypocritical faux outrage about left-wing misbehavior is one of their oldest tricks.

As Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo reported, former Trump adviser turned podcaster Steve Bannon railed about the fact that the protesters were “illegal aliens” (always a good bet to get the right-wing base riled up.) Breitbart News claimed that the protesters “stalked and harassed” Sinema and Red State wondered if a crime had been committed. A Fox News anchor declared that Sinema was “assaulted” on the airplane and wondered why the FAA didn’t intervene. And in one of the more embarrassing examples of right-wing self-righteousness, the National Review’s Charles Cooke wrote this:

If, instead of a left-winger berating a moderate Democrat in the loo, a right-winger had berated a moderate Republican, it would have been the biggest news of the year. Within minutes, the incident would have had a name — the “Arizona Attack,” perhaps. Within a day, it would have been deemed to be representative of everything that was wrong with the American Right — and with the United States itself. Within a week, we would have been drowning in breathless TV segments, tendentious op-eds, and mawkish lectures about the sanctity of democracy in the United States.

I don’t know how to break it to him but you don’t have to imagine it. It’s happened. A lot.

Last January, just before the joint session of Congress to certify the presidential vote, GOP Senator Mitt Romney was accosted in the Salt Lake City airport and rudely confronted by Republicans angry at him about his unwillingness to object to the electoral count. On the airplane full of people coming to the rally scheduled for January 6th, they chanted, “traitor, traitor, traitor!” and yelled at Romney to resign. (At the insurrection rally on January 6th, President Trump asked the crowd, “I wonder how Romney liked his flight last night,” to the delight of the crowd.)

Likewise, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was angrily confronted by a mob of Trump supporters at Reagan National Airport a couple of days later. They called him a traitor too and crowded him to the point that airport security had to escort him to safety. In one of the videos of the incident, a woman was heard saying, “one day they will not be able to walk down the street; it is today.”

Last month Republican Congressman Anthony Gonzales of Ohio dropped out of his race for re-election citing the fact that he had to have police escorts for himself and his family at airports due to threats from Trump supporters angry over his vote for impeachment. I’m sure Congresswoman Liz Cheney has similar stories. And while they didn’t manage to find Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th, we know what they planned to do with him if they did, don’t we?

Video of the mob chanting “hang Mike Pence.” https://t.co/K4EcKK2rab

— American Times ★ Docuseries (@ExportedFromMI) January 9, 2021

Right-wing protesters aren’t just attacking politicians. All over the country, they are threatening health care workers, election officials and school board members about everything from masks to vaccines to critical race theory. It has gotten so bad for local school officials and teachers that the Department of Justice has announced a plan to intervene. But yet, in another example of egregious shamelessness, Senator Josh Hawley took the other side of the argument in a Senate hearing this week, arguing that these were just fine examples of parents looking out for their children. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes rounded up some examples of such civic protest for Hawley since he didn’t seem to have the full picture of what’s been going on:

https://twitter.com/allinwithchris/status/1445555425416384518

Meanwhile, we have the predictable claims that the protesters who confronted Kyrsten Sinema were financed by the great leftwing boogeyman, George Soros. It’s true that the group they belong to got money from Soros’ foundation in 2017 and 2019, but there is no evidence that the foundation is involved in the protests in any way. It certainly isn’t directing the protests with talking points and strategy as the Washington Post reported the Koch brothers network has been doing with the school board protests.

This is nothing new for GOP activists. In 2009, the very similar angry protests over the Affordable Care Act were likewise directed from on high by groups financed by big-money donors who bused activists all over the country with instructions to disrupt the town hall meetings. They put out a strategy memo that said:

— Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

— Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

— Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

Recall that all those nice “protesters” even gathered in Washington one day to yell racist epithets and spit on congressmen? Clearly, the right thinks that protesting masks and vaccine mandates will deliver them the same win that the Obamacare protests did in 2010, which is highly debatable. We have 700,000 people dead from COVID and the majority of Americans are not amused at these antics.

But no matter what, Trump or no Trump, the Republicans will still be wringing their hands about at the alleged incivility of the left and whining about the supposed denial of their rights even as they do everything they claim the other side is doing. As I said, shamelessness is their superpower.