Month: April 2022

“This nugget will be presented to 12 jurors at Trump’s eventual prosecution as a little thing we call, “a statement of a party opponent” (FRE 801(d)(2)). In other words, an admission of guilt. Hey DOJ, #LetsRoll (#JusticeMatters video dropping later today),” tweeted former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner.

The “nugget” is from a video posted at The Atlantic in which Donald John Trump admits he did not win the 2020 presidential election.

After conspiring (still allegedly) to overturn the election in a self-coup .

After inspiring the Jan. 6 insurrection in which hundreds were injured and several died.

After insisting for years that the election had been stolen.

After bilking millions of supporters out of hundreds of millions for his legal fight to steal it back. (Most went to his Save America PAC to be spent as he pleases.)

“I didn’t win the election,” Trump told a Zoom call with historians (The Guardian):

The admission came in a video interview with a panel of historians convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. The interview was published on Monday by the Atlantic.

Trump also claimed that the 2020 election was “rigged and lost.” Consistency is not his strong suit. Nor is accuracy (The Atlantic):

When the Yale historian Beverly Gage brought up the president’s relationship with the FBI and the intelligence community—the subject of her chapter in our book—he eventually turned to the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. According to his memory, the expert opinion was off. The “real story,” Trump argued, “has yet to be written.” When Congress met to certify the Electoral College results, Trump told us, there had been a “peaceful rally,” more than a “million people” who were full of “tremendous love” and believed the election was “rigged” and “robbed” and “stolen.” He made a “very modest” and “very peaceful” speech, a “presidential speech.” The throng at the Capitol was a “massive” and “tremendous” group of people. The day was marred by a small group of left-wing antifa and Black Lives Matter activists who “infiltrated” them and who were not stopped, because of poor decisions by the U.S. Capitol Police when some “bad things happened.”

Perhaps Trump can give his friend Vladimir Putin some pointers on defending himself against his Ukrainian “bad things.”

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As an intelligent, sane reader, you may have noticed recently some rhetorical similarities between a former U.S. president and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The repeated lies. The threats. The encouragement of violence. The inversion of reality. The wild fabrications. Throw into the mix Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. They spent hours serving up red meat for their QAnon followers about pedophiles during the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Let’s go now to Ukraine (Washington Post):

LOTSKYNE, Ukraine — When the Russian soldiers came to town, they went door to door confiscating residents’ guns, cellphones and sometimes even their homes. They asked everyone to identify the “Nazis” in the neighborhood, also referring to them as “Banderites” — a group of Ukrainian nationalists formed during World War II.

The Nazis would be dressed in back, the Russians told villagers, and asked where they were in the neighborhood. Putin had told his country and is troops, many conscripts, that they were in Ukraine to denazify the country.

“They said they wanted to liberate the town from the Nazis and where were they, and I told them in my 30 years in this town I’ve never seen a single Nazi,” said Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of the Ukrainian town of Melitopol. Russian troops kidnapped and questioned him for five days in March.

The cant against imaginary Nazis has become so fixed in Russian public consciousness that guests on a state TV show, The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev  invoked term Nazis on Friday to the point of meaninglessness. Anyone who opposes Putin is a Nazi (Daily Beast):

On Soloviev’s show, political scientist and professor of history Elena Ponomareva asserted: “We’re fighting not only against NATO, but also against the Nazi European Union.”

Two days earlier, on a state TV show 60 Minutes, journalist Andrei Sidorchik rode the concept all the way down the hill when he exclaimed: “Joe Biden is a Nazi. The U.S. congressmen⁠—Democrat and Republican⁠—are Nazis… German chancellor is a Nazi… EU leaders are Nazis… because their sanctions are attempting to preserve neo-Nazism in Ukraine.”

Such rhetoric has consequences (New York Times):

BUCHA, Ukraine — When a column of Russian tanks drove into the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in the first days of the war, Tetiana Pomazanko thought they held Ukrainian soldiers and went out to her front gate to see.

But the troops opened fire on Ms. Pomazanko, 56. Bullets ripped through the wooden gate and fence around her house, killing her instantly. Her body still lay in the garden on Sunday, where her 76-year-old mother had covered her as best she could with plastic sheeting and wooden boards.

“They were driving up the street,” said her mother, Antonina Pomazanko. “She thought they were ours.”

Ms. Pomazanko’s killing is just one of scores being uncovered days after Russian troops withdrew from the outlying suburbs of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, after weeks of fierce fighting. On Sunday, Ukrainians were still finding the dead in yards and on the roads amid mounting evidence that civilians had been killed purposely and indiscriminately.

Russia denies the allegations its troops committed mass murder. The bodies strewn across the town and dumped into mass graves must have been planted there by the Ukrainians after the Russians retreated. The New York Times debunked those claims using video and satellite imagery.

Breaking News: Satellite images refute Russia’s claim that the killing of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine's capital, occurred after its soldiers had left town, a New York Times analysis found. https://t.co/2pDlly6EHs

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 4, 2022

Let’s go back a few days to Olya from Mykolaiv’s Russian aunt:

“The Nazis torture people,” the aunt says. “They show on TV how they abuse girls and youngsters. They rape and abuse them,” Svetlana says. “Olya, they just hide that from you.”

For anyone who’s heard right-wing and QAnon propaganda spread in the U.S., the effect is chilling. Svetlana supports Putin. He’s liberating Ukraine from the Nazis.

And to this from March 31:

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire wrote (roughly) in 1765. Rep. Jamie Raskin quoted that at the close of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial one year ago. Trump convinced millions to believe his absurdities. Countless thousands from his separate reality died believing them before his presidency culminated in atrocity.

Russia simply has more practice at convincing its populace to commit them.

Now, strike Nazi. Insert pedophile. People who will believe anything can be convinced to commit atrocities. Don’t think it can’t happen here.

We asked a Trump supporter if she’d rather have Biden or Putin as president. pic.twitter.com/UUqdM2ZEBd

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) April 4, 2022

Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. 

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Looks like it. But what would you expect when you put a farmer wingnut like Devin Nunes in charge of a media company?

Top executives from Former President Donald Trump’s social media venture, Truth Social, have departed the company as the site has struggled to gain traction with users.

Three top executives quit Truth Social, including chief technology officer, Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, the head of the company’s product development, and chief legal officer, Lori Heyer-Bednar, according to two people familiar with the matter. Reuters first reported the departures of Adams and Boozer.

Trump has been upset with the state of his social media venture, Truth Social, and is eyeing major shake-ups to the company, including positions on the board of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group, according to one of those people familiar with the matter and a separate person as well.

Trump’s frustration comes as the site has struggled mightily upon launch, with low traffic and persistent tech glitches. It is also now suffering from personnel issues too — neither Adams nor Heyer-Bednar list their job titles with Truth Social on their personal profiles, despite previously having listed it.

A spokesperson for Truth Social did not return a request for comment.

Trump launched the Truth Social app as a way to take on “Big Tech.” He and his allies argued it would rival major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which both removed the former president from their platforms following the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill.

So far, however, Truth Social has failed to gain traction or popularity among users. The app has seen a 93 percent drop in sign ups since its launch, and installs declined by 800,000 users, according to data from Sensor Tower, a mobile analytics firm. Following news of the decline in usage, shares for Digital World Acquisition Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that is joining with Trump Media and Technology Group (the company backing Truth Social), declined by over 30 percent, according to Bloomberg.

Trump himself has only posted once on the app. He had 827,000 followers as of Monday morning.

Former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) quit his job in Congress in order to serve as CEO of Truth Social. In interviews, Nunes acknowledged early issues with the app’s roll out and insisted the platform would be “fully operational” by the end of March.

But so far, users have complained about a lack of engagement on the app and have faced issues signing up. Thousands of potential users still remain on a waitlist, unable to log on. And while the app is available for iOS users, there is still no app available for Android users.

Every single thing he touches turns to shit. Including our country.

This woman is obsessed:

Judge Jackson is beholden to the radical concept that judges aren't responsible for teaching anatomy at their job interviews https://t.co/XaCNiWe9gm

— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) April 4, 2022

I’m reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketch last weekend:

I don’t know if they were aware of Blackburn’s obsession with “baby body parts” but she is. The following ad was banned from twitter for its lies about Planned Parenthood:

This is from her website:

As Chair of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, I led the investigation into the illegal and morally-repugnant practice of selling baby parts, which resulted in fifteen criminal referrals.

It’s hard to believe they had a “Senate Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives” but they did. (This proves, once again that the crazy conspiracy theories didn’t start with Donald Trump.) That whole panic was based upon lies from yet another right wing ratfucking outfit. It’s how Blackburn made her name.

Today she is obsessed with how to define what a woman is. And as that SNL clip shows, it pretty much comes down to baby body parts. Again. They just can’t stop talking about them.

Most artists have been there. Overwhelmed by terrible finances, or seeking to curry favor with their often shady presenters and gallery owners, or driven by personal insecurity, many good artists will inevitably make numerous compromises with scoundrels to get their work out there. Many artists I know think that that it is not up to them to take a “political” stand and will work blindly for anyone who pays them. Others rationalize their compromises by hoping that the beauty of their work will, somehow, balance the scales towards a better world. Fair enough; unless you live entirely off the grid, you are, at least to some extent, complicit in actions that may be personally disagreeable or even repellent.

But there are limits. And by any reasonable criteria, the atrocities knowingly committed by Putin — a mass murderer whose embrace was warmly returned by numerous world-class Russian performers — require universal condemnation and disavowal.

Recently, an opinion writer in the Washington Post wondered whether Russian artists should be shunned if they refuse to sign statements disavowing Putin’s war:

With the invasion of Ukraine, everyone and everything associated with Russia, the aggressor, is newly measured by their position on the war. Western institutions are canceling Russian artists, sometimes for being too close to President Vladimir Putin — sometimes regardless. Music providers like Sony are suspending their Russian operations, laying off hundreds of employees. The Royal Opera House in London scrapped a summer season featuring the Bolshoi Ballet. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra just postponed three shows by 20-year-old pianist Alexander Malofeev, despite the fact that he has stated publicly, “Every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.” Long-dead artists, too, are under scrutiny. The Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales pulled the 19th-century liberal homosexual Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky — hardly a nationalist — from its repertoire.

What is the purpose of these cancellations, beyond signaling moral solidarity against Putin’s war? Some benefit presumably accrues to companies and cultural organizations that respond to popular sentiment and fashionable trends; participating in the antiwar movement by demanding anti-Putin statements from Russian artists can help bottom lines. Yet these acts of protest, symbolic and emotionally satisfying for us, deprive vulnerable artists of livelihoods, place them at risk and don’t otherwise accomplish much. What’s more, they play into Putin’s hands by treating artists not as individuals but as cultural ambassadors for his grandiose vision of Russia. This affirms his sense that Russians have been wronged by the world — that Europe and the United States are out to get them, as he has long argued — and therefore justifies further draconian clampdowns and stronger fortifications for Holy Rus.

As for the artists, there’s no easy way to navigate this treacherous terrain, whether they work outside or inside Russia, or consider themselves ambassadors of higher causes and blanch at the conflation of art and politics. Touring artists can make a lot of money, so many of them tend to choose silence to protect their personal brands even in the most compromised circumstances. But now they face pressure to speak out, which can cause trouble for them or their families back home, and in any case doesn’t inoculate them against cancellation.

First, it is very hard for anyone to speak out in an autocracy, especially one like Putin’s. Certainly, it’s silly to cancel a performance of Tschaikovsky. And of course, a single member of the Bolshoi Ballet corps has very little clout. But the larger point is badly wrong.

If mass graves in Bucha — easily predicted back in March when the essay above was published — are not enough to trigger public disavowals of Putinism (even by Russia’s artists without household names), then what will it take? When do the atrocities become so utterly egregious that it becomes incumbent upon anyone with a public presence — including individual artists and their institutions — to openly denounce the barbarity? Will Putin need to open crematoria filled with Zyklon B? Will there need to be widespread chemical attacks before the “trouble for them or their families” beomes outweighed by the prospect of world catastrophe? Or will the use of nuclear weapons finally cross that line?

When the threat is existential — as it is with Putin, with Trump, and other 21st Century monsters — the problem with not speaking out is that your moral sense is damaged and your family gets harmed anyway. No one leaves unscathed. Masha Gessen’s 5th Rule of Autocracy applies to artists and artistic institutions as well:

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises… damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when [autocratic] mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case…that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

The midterm election campaigns are in full swing and we know this because there is a ton of new polling coming out every week. If you are a Republican you are enjoying them immensely. If you’re a Democrat, not so much.

So far the consensus is that this will be a typical midterm election which means that the party in the White House is likely to lose seats. It’s not written in stone, of course. The post-Trump political world remains volatile and world events have a way of changing the predictable electoral trajectory. From the looks of the polling, the country is still in a bad mood. Two years of dealing with the pandemic has taken its toll both socially and economically. Inflation is biting, even with strong wage growth. And for half the country, the assault on democracy engineered by Donald Trump and the Republicans feels like a dangerous threshold has been crossed while the other half thinks the election was stolen from the rightful winner. The culture is raging again at home while we are witnessing yet another horrific war, this time in Europe, and the whole world is holding its breath in the hopes that it ends quickly. 

Personally, I think the last five years of divisiveness and chaos at the hands of Trump and the Republicans left the country with a collective case of PTSD. But the reality is that on a number of levels, the country is climbing back out of the Trumpian abyss.

First of all, the unemployment numbers are excellent. There are a lot of jobs out there and wages are growing too. People have the freedom to quit and find other work and the confidence to do that is something many haven’t felt since before the financial crisis over a decade ago. Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate is down to 3.6% with 416,000 jobs created in March alone. In fact, 6.4 million jobs were created in 2021 and 1.7 million so far in 2022. That’s an astonishing turnaround in a very short period of time.

Unfortunately, the media always seems to find a way to give this news a negative spin. This one from Axios is dizzying:

Biden's campaign pledge to create "millions" of jobs has hit a challenge: finding workers. https://t.co/KvmnrllTx3

— Axios (@axios) April 3, 2022

It’s very hard to understand the need to put the word millions in quotes in a headline like that unless you want to suggest that number isn’t real. Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat, quipped in response, “His campaign pledge to create millions of jobs is complicated by having created millions of jobs.”

That sort of spin from Axios may explain why polling shows that 37% of Americans think jobs have been lost over the last year while only 28% think jobs have been gained. That’s with 3.6% unemployment!

If you think that all of this is one big contradictory mishmash of economic illiteracy, you are right. Here’s living proof, with Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich, at Trump’s rally over the weekend telling the crowd that unemployment is at a 40 year high and that we also have a labor shortage:

Rep. McClain: What we have now is a shambles. It’s a complete mess. Unemployment, 40 year high pic.twitter.com/wEaem0LF4w

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 2, 2022

This is somehow Biden’s fault, too.

Politico explained the incoherence as the result of the Biden White House’s inability to properly “message” the global problem of inflation which is taking precedence over all other economic concerns. They quote a gleeful Republican operative saying that “When Republicans are talking about people encountering rising prices every minute of every day versus Democrats talking about bridges that might be built in three years, it’s like an NFL team going against a peewee football team.”

Maybe. But Republicans shouldn’t measure themselves for a Super Bowl ring just yet. Their “NFL team” is getting more dysfunctional by the day.

There’s no need to recapitulate all the ways in which Donald Trump is complicating the GOP’s hopes for a big win in November. From his endorsements of fringe candidates to demands for a litmus test on the 2020 election to his incessant ranting against the so-called RINOs, Trump is making the GOP’s campaign much more difficult than it should be.

But he’s not the only problem and he may not even be the biggest one. No, that would be Florida Senator Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who decided it would be a good idea to defy the Senate Majority Leader and put out an agenda for Republicans to run on. That might be reasonable in the abstract, but his 11 Point Plan to Rescue America is batshit lunacy and the Republicans know it.

Much of it is the usual right-wing cant about work and family and law and order. But there is some stuff in this thing that will make for some beautiful ads if the Democrats can find it in themselves to get off the defensive and tell the American people about it.

Scott proposes to reduce the federal workforce by 25% in five years and limit all federal employment to 12 years. He wants to move most Government agencies out of Washington and sell off most of the federal government’s assets, buildings and land. He wants to gut the IRS by 50%, even as he proposes to raise taxes on the poorest Americans. Oh and he pledges to sunset all federal legislation in five years, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as the Civil Rights Act. All of it. Every five years, it would all have to be passed again.

And he proposes to “finish building the wall and name it after President Donald Trump.” Isn’t that sweet?

The shocking thing is that Scott really isn’t out of the GOP mainstream with these ideas. For all the talk of “populism” in Trump’s GOP, it’s always been more about culture war and xenophobia than anything else. The average Trump voter hears “drain the swamp” and “deep state” and thinks it’s about punishing the woke Democrats and traitorous RINOs and many of them are probably on board with taxing the poor and ending medicaid for people they think don’t deserve it. But the minority of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who aren’t bought in to the Trump cult will be reminded of just how nuts the Republican Party has become if they look at Scott’s plan. This is the Republican Party, it’s not Trump.

I’m not saying that the Democrats have an easy row to hoe to keep control of Congress. But despite their delusions of NFL grandeur, it’s not as if the other side is a juggernaut. Between Trump’s terrible candidates, the toxic white supremacist, QAnon conspiracy, Putin adoring faction of weirdos making news every day, and now this right-wing wet dream of a legislative agenda from Rick Scott, the Democrats have plenty to work with — if they can bring themselves to take it to Republicans instead of waiting to be run over. 

Salon

Twitter could be in big trouble.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. according to a Monday filing from the SEC.

Twitter’s shares jumped more than 25% in price following Monday’s news. Musk now controls nearly 73.5 million shares of the company, making him the largest shareholder, and individual stocks were priced at $49.81 on Monday morning.

Musk’s purchase comes roughly a week after the billionaire criticized Twitter for a lack of commitment to free speech.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Musk tweeted March 26. “What should be done?”

“Is a new platform needed?” he tweeted later.

Although there has been some excitement from certain vengeful quarters, this doesn’t sound like the kind of person you want running a media company:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied allegations in the past that he has a propensity for rage firing people, but a new book tells a different story.

“Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century,” by The Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins details numerous instances when the CEO appeared to fire employees and contractors out of sheer anger.

The book, released on Tuesday, reveals that Musk developed an atmosphere of fear at Tesla — an environment where the billionaire had a reputation for exploding at top executives and employees on the assembly line alike. 

In 2006, ahead of Tesla’s first Roadster reveal party, Musk had his head of marketing Jessica Switzer, as well as a public relations firm, ousted because he was unhappy with Switzer’s decision to spend money on marketing. Higgins said Musk thought his name alone would be enough to incite interest in the vehicle.

Shortly after the executive’s departure, Musk threatened to fire another PR which was later hired to take on the Roadster reveal, citing his anger over a New York Times story on Tesla that did not mention Musk.

“I was incredibly insulted and embarrassed by the NY Times article,” Musk emailed the firm. “If anything like this happens again, please consider [your] relationship with Tesla to end immediately upon publication of such a piece.”

Mark Goldberg, a Morgan Stanley banker that helped take Tesla public in 2010, told Higgins that Musk repeatedly threatened to fire bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs before Tesla’s IPO launch in 2010.

“I don’t have time for this,” Elon Musk reportedly yelled during an episode. “I’ve got to launch the f—— rocket!”

Musk’s fury caused several executives to leave the company, Higgins said. Peter Rawlinson, the executive leading the development of the Model S, left Tesla after a series of spats with Musk. Musk put pressure on CFO Deepak Ahuja and Rawlinson’s key deputy Nick Sampson to bring Rawlinson back to the company. When they couldn’t, Musk fired Sampson in a fit.

Later, Tesla found itself without the heads of its manufacturing department ahead of the Tesla Model 3 launch due to Musk’s ire. The CEO went into a rage during a factory visit over issues with the Model X’s window. When a worker on the assembly line proposed a solution, Musk lit into the worker’s manager.

“This is totally unacceptable that you had a person working in your factory that knows the solution and you don’t even know that,” Musk reportedly said before firing the head of the factory.

Higgins writes that when an employee disagreed with the CEO they were often fired. For example, a paint shop manager was fired on the spot when he told Musk his production goals were not possible, and Kate Pearson, an executive in charge of delivery operations, was ousted for saying it was not feasible to hit Tesla’s delivery goal of 100,000 during the quarter.

By 2017, Musk began flying to Tesla’s Gigafactory to frequently address issues that often led to verbal spats. Longtime Tesla employees told Higgins Musk’s fury was unpredictable and often focused on public humiliation.

“He’d always been quick to fire people, but it had historically been through managers, not in person,” Higgins wrote. “Now it might be whomever he came across on the factory floor.”

Tesla did not respond to Insider’s request for comment. Ahead of the book’s release, Musk disputed some of the claims in Higgin’s book, calling them “false” on Twitter. Last month, Musk denied assertions he rage-fires employees, saying he gives “clear and frank” feedback.

“Free speech” is always a very situational concept with these people. Check this out:

Veteran Republican operative and longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone claims he’s being “censored” on the ex-president’s social media site Truth Social.

On Saturday night, Stone took to Truth Social—which brands itself a free-speech haven—to post about “radical Islam,” including a picture of an old Trump campaign button and the comment, “Trump also warns again a growing threat of terrorism by radical Islam mix in the predicted the 9/11 attack.”

Truth Social, which has artificial intelligence censors working in the background, later applied a “sensitive content” warning, adding that Stone’s post “may not be suitable for all audiences.”

“Why would this be censored content on TruthSocial?” Stone wrote in a follow-up post featuring the same Trump campaign button. Notably, the second post was not slapped with a content warning.

My favorites are the people who appear regularly on Fox News complaining about being censored.

consumer-reported prices in @BillGravell’s town pic.twitter.com/ptueUsMiRC

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) April 4, 2022

I try to avoid giving this child’s outlandish statements oxygen. Master Cawthorn went to Congress not to govern but to do ideological battle and you, the taxpayers, are paying his way.

But consider: Madison Cawthorn faces an 8-way primary; he is reportedly spending his war chest on campaign signs planted all over the most progressive and populous county in NC-11 where even UNAffiliated (independent) voters smoked him in 2020 (by an estimated 56%); and UNAs can vote in the May 17 GOP primary in North Carolina.

So, posting this little demonstration of immature, pretty-white-boy privilege is perhaps not out of bounds. It’s a two-minute video from a traffic stop on October 18.

Madison Cawthorn traffic stop video from October just obtained by Queen City News. He was going 89 in a 65, didn’t have a wallet or driver’s license on him, and said the car was his but it was registered in his dad’s name. pic.twitter.com/2mDnwhGw0x

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 4, 2022

Transcript via Queen City News:

In the video, you can hear the trooper ask Cawthorn for his license. Cawthorn proceeds to tell the trooper that he doesn’t have his wallet. The trooper asked Cawthorn if he was the registered owner of the vehicle, which Cawthorn confirmed he was.

Trooper: “What’s your name?”
Cawthorn: “Madison Cawthorn”

The trooper asked Cawthorn why he was speeding. You can barely hear Cawthorn explain he was on his way back from a meeting before the audio became inaudible due to the traffic conditions.

The trooper returned to his car to run information on Cawthorn’s car. After a few minutes, the trooper returns.

Trooper: “Alright, let me grab your information from you, I think, it looks like it’s registered to, I guess, your dad?”
Cawthorn: “Is it really?”

After getting Cawthorn’s official name, David Cawthorn, and his birthdate, the trooper returns to his car to run information on Cawthorn.

A few minutes later, the trooper returns to Cawthorn’s car with a citation.

Trooper: “Alright sir, there’s gonna be this for you.”
Cawthorn: “Alright.”
Trooper: “Do your best to make sure you have your driver’s license on you, it is something we can charge you with. I didn’t do it today. Just make sure you have that on you. It is gonna be a citation for your speed, I clocked you going 89 [mph].”

The trooper can then be heard explaining to Cawthorn the details of the citation, including a court date of January 4, 2022, at the Buncombe County-Asheville Courthouse.

Trooper: “They want to talk with you, let you know what if anything they’re willing to do or what the penalty is going to be. You have any questions about the citation?”
Cawthorn: “No sir, is this something I can just go in and pay?”
Trooper: “You have to show up and talk with them. They may be willing to bring it down to something you can pay, but it’s not something you’re going to be able to pay before that date. You’re gonna have to show up and talk to them.”

No license. No request to see registration or proof of insurance. Claimed the car was registered to him and it was not. (He seems not to know.) Odds are good that the trooper recognized him.

Over the years, two people I know (both white men) were stopped in North Carolina for driving on expired out-of-state tags and with expired licenses. They were summarily thrown in jail. One was on his honeymoon. Really.

Queen City News has a shorter video of Cawthorn’s second speeding stop on January 8 in which Cawthorn announces he has a firearm in the car. He was stopped a third time on March 3 and cited for driving on an expired license. “QCN has yet to learn what Cawthorn did to get his license revoked between the time of those first two traffic stops.” Perhaps he failed to appear in court on Jan. 4 for his first citation.

This is a man-child who has skated through life on affirmative action for pretty white boys so baked into American culture that it is all but invisible. Except here on video. No patrolman’s hand on the gun (1st video, daytime). No “Step out of the car and put your hands on the hood.” No jail for driving on an expired license after two speeding stops.

Three times in under six months and he walks away each time. This system has no lessons to teach him. Only voters can do that.

Sen. Thom Tillis has endorsed one of Cawthorn’s seven challengers, state Sen. Chuck Edwards, a Republican from the same county as Cawthorn (Henderson). The word on the street is Edwards is no better, just more discreet about his extremism. A split vote in Henderson will likely trigger a July 26 runoff.

Frankly, Cawthorn might be easier for a Democrat to challenge in November, so soiled is his brand. But NC-11 is red enough that Cook’s does not consider it competitive. Still, Cawthorn won’t be missed if he loses the Republican nomination. Fox News will find him something to do even if he isn’t blonde.

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The “liberal media” certainly does a shoddy job of promoting the left. So much so that another “bad news for Biden” article from Politico over the weekend set off press critic Dan Froomkin.

Sam Stein tweeted, “A shocking data point that explains much of Biden’s political troubles. More people think jobs have been lost over the last year (37%) than those who think they’ve been gained (28%). Unemployment is at 3.6%.”

Froomkin linked to one of his Press Watch posts from March and replied, “Hey @samstein! When the public thinks up is down, it’s time to rethink coverage”

Froomkin’s post begins:

Imagine you’re the editor of a major national news organization and you learn that the general public is terribly misinformed about an important issue that your reporters cover intensely — say you see poll results showing that a lot of people believe something that is diametrically opposed to the truth.

You’d probably call a meeting. You’d say: “Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working.” You’d ask: “What are we doing wrong?” And once you figured out, you’d say: “Well, let’s stop that. Let’s try something else.”:

But you aren’t the editor of a major national news organization, are you.

And what they say is: “Whatever.”

In assessing why voters get wrong basic economic facts, Froomkin looks to Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) economist Dean Baker who wrote in November, “The nonstop hype of ‘inflation, inflation, inflation’ unsurprisingly leads many people to believe inflation is a really big problem, even if their own finances are pretty good, because they hear all those wise reporters at CNN, NPR, the NYT and elsewhere telling them it’s a really big problem.”

Baker, commenting on the press’ doomsday narrative, tweeted in November, “I have never seen such a one-sided hit job on a U.S. president (foreign leaders maybe).” In a later Substack interview, Baker said (and Froomkin quotes):

The media has basically branded Biden as a failure. 

They’ve substituted this “failure” branding for reality again and again. And Afghanistan is probably the most dramatic example. It’s true that Biden made a serious blunder with his foolish statement that we wouldn’t see a Vietnam-style collapse and evacuation—I’m not sure whether Biden got bad information or actually ignored good information. But the media routinely refers to the withdrawal as disastrous when in reality Biden managed to get somewhere around 120,000 people out of the country in the span of two to three weeks—that’s truly remarkable and far more than most observers had thought possible. So rather than giving Biden credit on a remarkably successful evacuation performance, the media pushed the idea that the withdrawal was a disaster. 

In fact, the economic recovery under Biden has been just short of miraculous: unprecedented wage hikes, more freedom to switch jobs for better pay and conditions.

And yet we hear almost none of this positive story. Most families actually have a considerably higher inflation-adjusted income now than they had before the pandemic, but the media talks about inflation all the time and gives us endless stories of inflation-caused hardship—it makes no sense to say that people were doing well in 2019 and that people are now experiencing great hardship, since people’s real incomes are actually higher now.

Eric Boehlert at Press Run has the same complaint this morning: Biden is on pace for 10 million new jobs and tumbling unemployment in two years compared to Trump’s three million lost in four years. And yet?

The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)

Just look at the relentlessly dour economic coverage. For the press, inflation remains the dominant, bad-news-for-Dems economic story. Even on Friday, the day the stellar jobs report was released, “inflation” was mentioned on cable news nearly as often as “jobs,” according to TVeyes.com.

I’ve complained lately about bitter, leftier-than-thou activists who insist on finding a dark cloud in every silver lining. They cannot understand why no one wants to jump on their bad news bandwagon. If that’s what’s meant by liberal media, well, perhaps there are job opportunities there.

Boehlert might agree. Inspecting another set of “bad news for Biden” economic headlines from the weekend, he throws up his hands, writing, “The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news.” Or buries it 87 headlines down the page.

Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.

With a large (hopefully diminishing) fraction of the country slapped Chinatown silly by propaganda and conspiracy theories over the last several decades, they’ll believe anything they are told no matter how contradictory. Like, unemployment is the highest it’s been in 40 years and there’s a labor shortage.

The best part? Immediately after she falsely claims unemployment is at the highest point in 40 years (when it’s actually 3.6%) @RepLisaMcClain asserts that there’s a “labor shortage.” https://t.co/J3D6JMmzpN

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) April 2, 2022

Reporting should be clarifying. It is not. Not often enough. The press wants its horse race.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.