Month: October 2022

Michaelangelo Signorile on the lesser known Fox media platform and its crusade against LGBTQ rights:

Fox News Digital, Fox’s online presence, has for a while been a sort of supercharged MAGA platform, going further than even MAGA-fied Fox News television.

Like many extremist platforms, it’s also been emulating Libs of TikTok, the Twitter account that, among many other vile things, attacks drag shows as a sinister force out to snatch up children, fueling politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, who rail against parents who take their children to drag events and have suggested criminalizing it.

Twitter has continually suspended the account (including in the past week), which many hold responsible for threats and harassment against children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, only to let it back on Twitter in a matter of days.

Of course, Fox News Digital doesn’t have to worry about being suspended by Fox, and is able to push the same kind of hate on its website. One story caught my eye today because the entire premise of the story was that an LGBTQ pride event in Kentucky at which their will be “drag shows” and “kids activities” is “church-sponsored.”

The headline reads, “Church-sponsored LGBTQ pride event promotes ‘kid’s activities,’ ‘drag shows’” while the subhead reads, “Church sponsoring LGBTQ pride event says, ‘We mean it about inclusivity.’”

This doesn’t seem at all shocking to me, nor does it seem like much of a story.

Many churches support LGBTQ rights, and same-sex marriage, and embrace transgender people. They are guided by their faith and have a mission to stand up against discrimination. You can disagree with them — and a great many other churches do — but they are free to practice their faith as they wish.

And that’s what we’ve been told is the conservative agenda: Freedom of religion and religious liberty. We continually hear those words from right-wing evangelical groups, including as they file court cases against LGBTQ rights.

The churches in question — Bridgeport Christian Church in Frankfort, First Christian Church in Lawrenceburg, and South Frankfort Presbyterian Church — are in fact expressing their religious freedom, and one of them sent Fox Digital a statement: “Bridgeport Christian Church is an open and affirming church where all are welcome. We felt it was important to co-sponsor PRIDE to show our support for God’s LGBTQIA+ children in our community.”

But the reason the anti-LGBTQ evangelical right more accurately should be called Christian nationalists is that they don’t really believe in freedom of religion. They only believe in one true religion — theirs — and believe it must be melded with their political beliefs, undergirding their theocratic impulses and zealotry.

If that wasn’t true then this story about “church-sponsored” LGBTQ events wouldn’t be a story.

The piece, by Jessica Chasmar, presents it as outright shocking that a religious group is sponsoring Pride with drag shows:

A church-sponsored LGBTQ pride event in Kentucky is advertising “kid’s activities” and “drag shows” in the state’s capital this weekend. 

Capital Pride Kentucky is hosting a festival on Saturday at the Old Capitol Lawn in Frankfort, where children can partake in activities like jewelry making and a scavenger hunt.

Banners advertising the event posted on the LGBTQ group’s Facebook page list a number of activities for attendees, including “drag shows,” “vendor fair,” “kid’s activities,” “entertainment,” “food & beer,” and “fun for everyone.”

Sounds like great fun for all!

Except of course that Chasmar and her audience view drag performers, who’ve been part of American culture forever and certainly part of civilization since the dawn of time, as some kind of evil force trying to “indoctrinate” children. It’s all entwined with the vile “grooming” lie that DeSantis and others have promoted — and by doing so they also wrongly conflate drag queens with transgender people, whom the right has vilified — even though parents have allowed their children to watch drag ever since Milton Berle did it as stand-up and before. (And did these fire-breathing haters, many in them in their 60s now, really not watch “Mrs. Doubfire” with their kids?)

The piece makes it seem as if Capitol Pride is so afraid of being found out — which is hilarious, since they’re proudly publicizing the event — that they refused to respond to questions about their supposedly subversive, demonic actions:

Capital Pride Kentucky did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s inquiry asking whether children are invited to the drag shows. Pictures on the group’s website, however, showed an earlier event this year when children were clearly present while drag queens were performing.

By the way, reporter Jessica Chasmar did not immediately respond to The Signorile Report’s inquiry as to why this is a story, and how she responds to those who charge that these kinds of stories embolden those on the extreme right who engage in harassment and threaten violence against the organizers of such events.

Pride events have seen a surge in violent threats this year, including a plot, thankfully thwarted by the FBI, by a white supremacist group to attack a Pride event in Boise Idaho during Pride Month:

Extremism researchers have long warned of an escalating risk as hard-right Republicans and militant groups portray LGBTQ people as “groomers” targeting children, along with other baseless smears. Now, provocateurs are acting on those messages in what President Biden last month called “rising hate and violence” targeting LGBTQ communities.

The attacks have intensified this month during the first big Pride events since pandemic restrictions were lifted, most notably with the white nationalist Patriot Front’s foiled attempt to disrupt a celebration in northern Idaho.

In recent days, right-wing politicians and preachers have openly called for killing LGBTQ people.

This is grotesque coming from any rando on Truth Social. But Fox News, digital and otherwise, is mainstream.

From the Fox Grievance Network

Peddling pettiness for a quarter century.

This is real. pic.twitter.com/tz5sEMs5cu

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 6, 2022

Who Wears Heels to a Hurricane? Dr. Jill Biden — Washington Free Beacon

Media Silent On Jill Biden’s Hurricane Heels After Melting Down Over Melania Trump’s — The Federalist

Seriously?

Fox never tires of it.

Time for another cuppa.

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Insincerely,
Roberts Court conservatives

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, was on message Wednesday night. Asked about passing judicial ethics reform to address the legitimacy crisis in the Supreme Court, she went right to “We’ve got an election coming up.”

Democrats need to build their majority in the U.S. Senate and hold their majority in the House. Bottom line.

Don’t just scream at your TV between now and November 8, Warren said. Ask, “What can I do to influence the outcome of the election in November?”

How much power the court will have to determine our lives going forward is on the line. Abortion rights are on the line. If Republicans gain enough power in 2022 and 2024, they will ban abortion nationally, either directly or effectively, and states’ rights be damned.

Each of the GOP’s court nominees swore under oath that Roe v. Wade was settled law. [Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.] As soon as conservatives had the court majority, they overturned Roe and eviscerated a constitutional right protected for the last half century.

Other rights are now negotiable. Rights to personal autonomy and privacy. Voting rights. Same-sex marriage. Labor protections. Equal protection under law. Democratic theory underlying the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives representing an autocracy-curious fringe minority have set their sights on making democracy a mockery. In Jesus’s name.

Or in Donald’s. They’re not sure.

Take them seriously. David Neiwert (“Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us” and “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump“) noted Wednesday night that he’d warned nine years ago that its crackdown on LGBTQ rights signaled Russia’s descent into fascism. “Me too!” chimed in Jeff Sharlet (“The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” and the upcoming “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War“).

Revanchists want to put women back in their places. They won’t stop with women, a majority in this country. Every minority not on Team Theocracy is wearing a judicial target on their backs, or worse. We’ve only been warning about the New Apostolic Reformation and its “seven mountains mandate” here for over a decade.

“It’s hard to know what will happen if these people begin to exert even stronger influence over the Republican party in a time of great stress and transition in this country,” Digby wrote in 2010.

Now we do.

What are you going to do about it?

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The right’s fear mongering about immigrant smuggling is BS

The WaPo’s Philip Bump:

One line of political rhetoric that’s proved particularly popular as the midterm elections approach goes something like this: President Biden’s open-border policy has allowed dangerous drugs like fentanyl to flood into the country, imperiling our children.

The evidence for this is often patchy, with Republicans — generally the people articulating this line of argument — often pointing to things like drug seizures as evidence. That those are seizures, drugs generally stopped at the border, doesn’t seem to derail the argument. After all, the same rhetorical trick is applied to immigrants themselves; that most of those stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border were prevented from entering doesn’t exclude them from being added to what’s meant to be a scary-sounding total number of people seeking to come to the United States.

But there’s another point that’s worth drawing out here. Seizures are a dubious metric not only because those drugs will not be sold in the United States but also because of where and how those seizures occur: usually at border checkpoints and often in the possession of U.S. citizens.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provides detailed data on drug seizures. Those include seizures throughout the country, not just at the U.S.-Mexico border, and seizures undertaken by the CBP’s Air and Marine Operations (AMO) unit. But it breaks down the data usefully, allowing us to see the quantities of drugs seized by agents and where those seizures occur.

It is true that the amount of fentanyl being seized by CBP has increased in the past few years. In the third quarter of calendar year 2019, some 668 pounds of fentanyl were seized by the Border Patrol, the Office of Field Operations (which manages border checkpoints, including at airports) and AMO. In the third quarter of 2020, that surged to 2,357 pounds. In the third quarter of 2021, the figure was 2,921 pounds. Full data for the third quarter of 2022 isn’t available yet, but the total in the first two months was over 4,400 pounds.

Most of that, in each quarter, was seized at the U.S.-Mexico border. In the period from the fourth quarter of 2018 to the end of August 2022, an average of 87 percent of seized fentanyl was stopped at the southern border. But most of that was stopped by OFO at border crossing points.

If we look at this not as raw totals but, instead, as percentages, the scale of stops that occur at border crossings becomes obvious. On average, just under three-quarters of all fentanyl seized by CBP is seized at U.S.-Mexico border crossings.

Only about 11 percent of fentanyl is seized by the Border Patrol between checkpoints — the sort of scenario that often gets amplified as a point of political pressure.

It is necessarily true that some percentage of drugs is not seized at the border. After all, there are illegal drugs in the United States that originate elsewhere. But it’s not fair to simply assume that enormous quantities of drugs simply aren’t detected.

We recently considered this question in terms of migrants seeking entry to the country. Yes, some portion of migrants enter the country illegally and are not detected by the Border Patrol. But the percentage of migrants who do so has declined in recent decades thanks to both expansions of barriers on the border undertaken in the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and because of improved surveillance tools deployed at the border.

It’s also because many migrants want to be stopped by government officials, in order to make an asylum claim that might allow them to remain in the country legally for some time. In other words, in many cases it’s simply easier to use the border checkpoints in the first place. Part of the goal of installing barriers on the border is to increase the likelihood that people will use manned crossing points.

Then there is simple physics. Fentanyl isn’t like marijuana, which is voluminous and hard to hide in a car or on your person. If you want to smuggle a large volume of pot, you aren’t going to throw it in the trunk of your car. But even a relatively large volume of fentanyl can be tucked easily out of sight. Multiple government officials have testified in recent years that most drugs enter at border crossings.

So who is being stopped with drugs at the border? Well, consider what’s occurring at those checkpoints. Thousands of vehicles and people are lined up, waiting to come in. At the San Ysidro crossing point, authorities have about 40 seconds to identify signs of smuggling, USA Today reported several years ago. The less suspicion a smuggler can draw, then, the better. And who better to reduce suspicion than a U.S. citizen?

CBP doesn’t have compiled data on the percentage of seizures that are U.S. citizens. But a perusal of the organization’s website turns up a large number of news releases in which fentanyl seizures involve Americans. In March, for example, CBP published a notice in which it identified four people who had been detained for attempting to smuggle fentanyl. All were identified as citizens.

Donald Trump has a new talking point that he’s pimping at every rally these days: perfunctory show trial then immediate execution for drug smugglers. I’m sure it wouldn’t bother him, but some of his followers might think that’s going a bit far when it’s their own relatives, neighbors and friends getting the death penalty.

Fox News is all over this with the RNC piggybacking on their nonsense as well. They’re even fear mongering that people will put fentanyl in the Halloween candy.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel argued on Fox News that parents should be afraid of their children stumbling across candy-colored fentanyl in their Halloween baskets. https://t.co/BXhAog6eqE

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 20, 2022

Fentanyl is a problem. But it isn’t caused by extreme Biden laxity at the border.

You may not have heard of this guy but he writes for The Daily Wire one of the most important right wing publications and has a podcast on that media company’s very successful podcasting network. He’s not fringe, unfortunately:

Matt Walsh advocates for the impregnation of girls as young as 16 because it's "technically when they're at their most fertile" in a newly unearthed rant about how teenage pregnancy isn't "the problem it's unwed pregnancy that's the problem in society" pic.twitter.com/SSoKLkfR3f

— The Serfs (@theserfstv) October 5, 2022

This is a man who has been obsessing about “grooming” and transgender kids:

I believe that gender ideology is one of the greatest evils in human history. There is nothing they can threaten that would make me back down from this fight. I’d rather be dead than surrender to this madness. It’s as simple as that for me.

— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 3, 2022

I was protesting at school boards last year and the DOJ said we were terrorists. Now I'm reporting on hospitals that mutilate children and the DOJ might start investigating us. I'm starting to think the federal government wants to date me.

— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 3, 2022

He’s also a racist and hardcore no-exceptions anti-choice. I guess we now know why he is against birth control as well. He wants to “groom” 16 year old girls for forced birth purposes.

I only wish this guy was a super fringe character. But he’s a big deal on the right who works with one of the biggest right wing publications — which also happens to be the number 1 circulated on Facebook. These people aren’t hiding their extremism.

There are many reasons why the right wing is pro-Putin and pro-Russia. We’ve been talking about them here for years now. Everything from the affinity with fellow white nationalists to antipathy toward Europe to a similar hatred for gay and transgender people. And more, I’m sure. But you may not know exactly what it is they are pushing on their propaganda channels. Here, William Saletan at the Bulwark lays out the various arguments:

1. America is marching into a world war. On Saturday night, Fox host Dan Bongino warned viewers that “the U.S. is slow-walking its way directly into World War III.” He repeated this phrase three times, each time citing a different alleged American provocation. First he pointed to the recent sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, suggesting that the United States may have done it. Then he cited President Joe Biden’s warning to Putin that America would defend every inch of NATO territory. Then he cited a bulletin from the U.S. embassy in Russia, which urged Americans to leave that country. No matter what we do, Bongino has the same warning: It might trigger a world war.

It’s true that Russia might escalate the conflict in response to American acts. But by framing our acts as the cause of Putin’s behavior—and indiscriminately applying that framework to anything we do—Bongino’s advice would paralyze the United States. And he’s hardly alone. On Friday night, another Fox host, Will Cain, blamed American leaders for Russia’s deployment of planes that could carry nuclear weapons. Cain asked Fox viewers: “Why is virtually every politician [in] both parties trying to provoke Russia into using those bombers?”

2. Lower the temperature. In his Friday monologue, Cain proposed that “given” Russia’s nuclear threats, “Every NATO country now needs to answer a very basic question: How are you going to lower the temperature? How are you going to prevent global nuclear war? It’s really the only question that matters.”

The key word in this argument is “given.” Like several other Fox hosts, Cain accepts Putin’s behavior as a given but treats America’s behavior as a variable. This puts the onus on us to appease Putin, regardless of what he does. And Cain, like Bongino, has an endless supply of American acts or statements that in his view might unduly trigger Putin. He accused Biden of “deliberately provoking Russia” merely by suggesting that Putin sabotaged the pipeline.

3. Putin is invincible. No matter how many losses Putin suffers in Ukraine, the appeasement caucus insists he can never truly be defeated. “There is no way Putin is going to give in,” Gutfeld scoffed on Friday. “Older generations like him” in Russia, said Gutfeld, and “the younger people, they’re leaving. So . . . I don’t think he has any reason to worry.” By depicting Putin as relentless and politically secure—more secure than he really is, judging by Russia’s domestic unrest in response to his latest mass conscription—these advocates of conciliation strengthen his hand.

4. Submit to any nuclear threat. Last week, Carlson called for immediate capitulation to Russia. “Putin is making nuclear threats,” he noted. “Whatever the reason he is making them, the fact he is making them . . . is enough for any responsible person to say, ‘Now we stop.’” On this view, any dictator could paralyze America just by issuing a plausible nuclear threat.

5. Helping Ukraine just prolongs the suffering. “We just keep sending billions and billions and billions of dollars” to Ukraine, Gutfeld complained on Friday. “We’re not affecting the outcome. . . . All we’re doing is making [the war] longer.” And “the longer it goes, the worse it gets,” he argued. By this logic, American aid is harmful, and for Ukraine’s sake—never mind what Ukrainians claim to want—we should cut a deal that placates Putin.

6. Give peace a chance. “I don’t understand the problem with the P-word,” Gutfeld pleaded on Monday. He fretted that “everybody is pro-war,” and “we’re just pouring the money in.”

This depiction of military conflict—if you resist the aggressor, you’re for “war,” but if you reward him by capitulating, you’re for “peace”—used to be associated with the left. Now it’s spreading on the right, and conservative isolationists are using it to pose as idealists. Last week, Carlson brought former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard onto his show to make this case. “Our leaders and European leaders are the ones fueling and funding this war,” said Gabbard. Instead of “pushing for more destruction, more war,” she proposed, we should “fight for peace” by using our leverage to “push for . . . a negotiated ceasefire.”

7. Helping Ukraine costs too much. Ingraham, Carlson, Gutfeld, and other conservatives complain about the war’s price tag. But to make this concern sound less selfish, they also enlist nominally progressive guests who talk about America’s domestic needs. On Thursday, Ingraham invited journalist Glenn Greenwald onto her show to praise Republicans who “step up and say, we don’t think billions and billions of dollars should be sent to a war in Ukraine, where we have no vital interests at stake, while Americans are suffering at home.”

8. Sanctions hurt us, not Russia. On Friday, to punish Putin for his illegal annexations, Biden announced new sanctions. To this, Cain responded by rebuking Biden, not Putin. “Why would more sanctions deter Russia?” he asked. “The last seven months of sanctions have led to blackouts and food shortages in Europe. Meanwhile, in Russia, the ruble got stronger,” and “our economy tanked.” By understating the damage to Russia and overstating the damage to Europe and America, this argument seeks to persuade citizens in the West that Putin can hurt us more than we can hurt him, and therefore we should give in. Cain also implied that sanctions were to blame for any further escalation by Putin. “Sanctions don’t deter,” he asserted. “They provoke.”

9. Split the difference. “Picking sides” between Ukraine and Russia is “folly,” Gutfeld told Fox viewers on Friday. To reach a settlement that might end the war, he proposed that we “table the animosities and grudges” and “ask both parties what they want to get out of this.” He sounded like the character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who—on behalf of a knight who has just butchered wedding guests—pleads, “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who.”

10. Russia only wants part of Ukraine. On Monday night, Carlson and Greenwald argued that the stakes in Ukraine weren’t worth risking nuclear war. The stakes aren’t “even Ukraine,” said Greenwald. They’re just “the Donbas, the eastern region in Ukraine, where a majority of people actually identify as ethnic Russians and want to be part of Russia.” Greenwald’s claim about the people of Donbas is false. But it supports the narrative that Russia’s rape of eastern Ukraine is somehow a consensual relationship and that Putin is only asking for territory to which he’s morally entitled.

11. The war is an attack on Putin. Carlson, casting America as the villain, frames the war as a Democratic plot. “Biden’s advisers wanted a total regime-change war against Russia, apparently to avenge the election of Donald Trump,” he told viewers last week. He claimed that this was why the Biden administration wanted to label Russia a state sponsor of terror: not because Putin really does commit terrorism, but because we’re looking for an excuse to “topple” him. Cain extends this argument to NATO, accusing it of conspiring “to remove Putin from power.” The war isn’t “really about keeping Ukraine safe,” he says.

On this view, Russia is just defending itself. According to Cain, Ukraine triggered the war by seeking to join NATO, which aimed to oust Putin. All Putin wanted was a promise from Ukraine to stay out of the alliance. In fact, Carlson asserted last week, the United States “could end this war tonight” by securing a deal to which Putin would readily agree: “Russian troops leave. Ukraine promises not to join NATO. Everything is at it was in January of this year. And everything’s fine.” That’s a preposterous scenario, but it follows logically from Carlson’s comically benign account of Putin’s motives.

In his Monday appearance with Carlson, Greenwald portrayed Putin as a besieged man protecting his homeland. NATO’s “escalating” aggression in Ukraine, “right across [Russia’s] border,” is turning the conflict into an “existential war” for Russia, he alleged. Naturally, he concluded, this threat to Russia might prompt Putin to use nukes.

12. Ukraine is just like Iraq. Many Americans who opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are sympathetic to arming Ukraine because this time, Russia, not America, is the invader. But Carlson says there’s no difference. Our involvement in Ukraine is “designed to topple Vladimir Putin, just like we toppled Saddam Hussein,” he asserts. On Monday, Greenwald echoed that comparison. Americans are being lured into war based on demonization of Putin, he argued, just as we were lured into war by demonization of Saddam.

13. The “elite class” is pushing us into war. On Monday, Ingraham played video of foreign policy experts and a retired American colonel talking about the risks of nuclear escalation in Ukraine. “You would think that the elite class would call for calm,” she told viewers, but “they don’t seem to want calm.” In the view of Ingraham and several other Fox hosts, everything the experts and the media tell us—about vaccines, election results, and the importance of thwarting Russian aggression—is presumptively wrong. “We’re sending another $12 billion to Ukraine,” she complained on Thursday night. “Is there any real debate about how things are going in Ukraine? Or are we just going to agree with whatever CNN says?”

14. This is another Russia hoax. Some Fox hosts and their guests deride anything said about Russia by current or former U.S. intelligence officials. They assert, falsely, that the Russia investigation exonerated Donald Trump, and therefore nothing said about the current crisis in Ukraine by American intelligence experts—in particular, former CIA Director John Brennan—can be trusted. “John Brennan and the CIA . . . invented the hoax of Russiagate,” Greenwald told Ingraham on Thursday. They “spun all of these tales about how Russia was responsible for infiltrating the United States. . . . They blamed Russia for everything, and it turns out to be lies.” On Monday, Carlson chimed in: “John Brennan used to run the CIA. He knows which lies work. He’s an expert.”

15. America is coercing Ukraine to fight. According to Cain and Carlson, Ukraine wanted to sign a peace deal in April but was blocked by the United States so that Biden could “fight to the last Ukrainian” to oust Putin. This story, which wildly distorts a temporary proposal to which Putin never agreed, is designed to sucker Americans who sympathize with Ukraine. In this version of the Carlson-Cain alternate universe, the real aggressor against Ukraine isn’t Russia; it’s America. “Who cares what the Ukrainians want? America and the U.K. demand total war with Russia,” says Carlson. “The Ukrainians, caught in the middle, had no choice but to concede.”

16. Ukraine is manipulating us. Carlson and his protégés alternate between portraying Ukraine as our victim and portraying it as a wicked temptress. On Friday, Cain showed viewers a clip of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signing an application for admission to NATO. “It’s yet another slick, well-produced video from Kyiv,” Cain smirked.

17. Ukraine is a spoiled parasite. As U.S. military aid to Kyiv increases, some Fox hosts are depicting Ukraine as a greedy welfare recipient. “Ukraine feels entitled to endless support from the West, mostly the United States,” Ingraham groused on Monday. “We’re the ones who pay the bills.”

18. Ukraine is pushing us to start a nuclear war. In his diatribe last week, Carlson accused Zelensky of demanding that the United States “launch nuclear weapons now,” “before Russia actually launches missiles.” This assertion, like much of what Carlson says, was a remorseless lie. It’s also laughably inconsistent with his simultaneous story about how Ukraine just wanted to end the war and has been dragged into combat by America.

19. Ukraine is an arm of the Democratic party. “Zelensky is not the independent leader of a democratic nation,” Carlson declared Monday. “Zelensky is a client of the Biden administration, which runs his country.” In fact, he’s “the puppet of the Democratic party of the United States.” Carlson went on to denounce “Democrats and the defense establishment they control.” By smearing the U.S. government and the U.S. military as partisan enemies of Republicans, Carlson makes it easier for his viewers to think of themselves as patriots, even as they blame America.

20. As Ukraine’s sponsors, we should force Zelensky to settle. Despite their bogus allegations that Biden coerced Ukraine to fight, some Fox hosts are now suggesting that we should, in fact, coerce Ukraine to do what they want: cut a deal. Ukraine should respect our wishes because “we’re paying” for the war, says Gutfeld. Carlson goes further. “We are funding this war. We could end it,” he declared last week. He demanded that Biden “shut this whole thing down and force a negotiated peace.”

Many people who support a strong foreign policy, or who simply believe in telling the truth, still work at Fox News. They report on Russia’s war crimes, they speak frankly about Putin’s illegal annexations, and they interview guests about the urgency of arming Ukraine. But in primetime, their good work is buried by propaganda that misleads the public, blames America, and empowers Putin.

I still can’t get over this. I grew up in a time when the right wing was ready to launch nuclear war against Russia at the drop of a hat, damn the consequences. Dr. Strangelove was a very “serious” satire. Now this. It’s just so weird.

I get that the whole thing is incredibly dangerous. But Putin is a tyrannical menace and may just be losing it. Taking his side in this is as short-sighted as it gets.

Even GOP candidates for Governor believe that schools are putting litter boxes in schools for “cat identifying” kids

I’m not kidding. We knew these nuts were obsessed with the non-existent “threat” of trans-kids in schools. But apparently, that’s not enough for these kooks. Get a load of this:

The Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota repeated last week a bizarre hoax claim which has been debunked that children are being told they can identify as anthropomorphic cats and are being allowed to use litter boxes to urinate in schools.

Scott Jensen, the Republican candidate and a former state lawmaker, made the comments while speaking to supporters, according to a video of the event posted on Facebook.

“But what about education?” Jensen said. “What are we doing to our kids? Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry? We’ve lost our minds. We’ve lost our minds.”

Furries are a subculture that sometimes involves people dressing up as anthropomorphic animal characters and attending conventions.

The unfounded internet rumor has been repeatedly denied by various school officials who have had to continuously dispute the false claims. Republican officials across the country have continued to cite it, most recently in Colorado by the Republican nominee for governor.

The claim reportedly originated from a community member at a local school board meeting last year and has since spread across the internet. They have been repeatedly shot down by fact-checkers from major news outlets as false. The bizarre conspiracy has spread so much that it even has its own dedicated Wikipedia page.

Here’s the GOP nominee for governor of Colorado:

@heidiganahl says educators are lying when they refute her claim that “kids are identifying as cats” in schools all over Colorado. “The school districts are not being truthful,” Ganahl told KNUS today. “I will tell the truth even if it is uncomfortable.” #cogov #copolitics

Today, @heidiganahl confirmed to KNUS host @GeorgeBrauchler that her campaign is collecting and distributing photos of children they believe are identifying as animals. “We provided pictures but we blurred out the faces,” Ganahl said.

It’s unclear how the Ganahl campaign is confirming that the individual children in the photos they are distributing identify as animals (as opposed to simply dressing up in cat ears or other type of animal costumes).

Ganahl said her campaign is providing the photos they’ve collected to journalists. When 9News asked for proof of her claim last week, a Ganahl spokeswoman provided a screenshot of a photo of someone in a furry costume which appeared to be from a conservative parents FB group.

The Ganahl campaign referred 9News to the Facebook group’s organizer for proof of her claim. Lindsay Datko asked parents to come up with examples prior to deleting her Twitter account earlier this week. Her FB group remains private.

Here’s a sample of her comments:

“Not many people know that we have furries in Colorado schools. Have you heard about this, Jimmy?” Ganahl asked during her September 24 interview with KNUS host Jimmy Sengenberger. “Yeah, kids identifying as cats. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, but it’s happening all over Colorado, and schools are tolerating it. It’s insane! What on earth are we doing? Knock it off. Schools, put your foot down. Like, stop it. Let’s get back to teaching basics and not allow this woke ideological stuff to infiltrate our schools. And it is happening here in Colorado. It’s why I moved from Boulder Valley to Douglas County, because it was happening in my kids’ schools four years ago.”

It’s been reported for some time that some idiot parents believe this nonsense. It’s been a wingnut internet rumor for a couple of years. But I didn’t realize that actual politicians were railing against it on the stump.

I don’t know if any of these weirdos actually believe this stuff, but judging from the comments of these two, and others, I actually think they believe it. They are so terrified of the world in which they live — so scared they actually think little girls wearing cat ears in elementary school is a threat to the American way of life — that they’ll believe anything. I would assume these are just the usual right wing conspiracy mongers but these are nominees for Governor. What????

He’s meeting with Biden today as the president tours the disaster area. I’m sure they will be cordial. But never forget, this guy is a total asshole:

the sort of crazy talk you get from a governor who hires operatives to lure immigrants in another state as unwitting pawns in a political stunt he thinks will help make him president https://t.co/cWBC01PZ8p

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 5, 2022

Nobody in the media was rooting for massive destruction and death in order to hurt poor baby DeSantis who gets no respect. Why half the country equates being a whiny wingnut bitch with manly toughness I will never understand.

Obamacare repeal disappears from the agenda

I’m so old I can remember a time before critical race theory, Mr. Potato Head and library books about gay teenagers were the greatest threats to America. I know it’s hard to believe that anything could ever be more dangerous to all we hold dear, but once upon a time millions of people were convinced that affordable health care spelled the end of the republic as we know it. They took to the streets, mobbed town hall meetings and screamed bloody murder when the government proposed a law that would ban insurance companies from refusing to cover sick people and offered government help to people who could not afford the sky-high premiums those companies charged.

It seems like ancient history now but just a few years ago the hottest, most contentious issue in America was the passage of the Affordable Care Act (also known, for better or worse, as Obamacare). The Republican Party organized itself for almost a decade solely around a promise to repeal it. In fact, they actually voted to do so 67 times over the course of seven years. As president at the time, Barack Obama would have vetoed any repeal, of course, but the act of voting against it was enough to keep the base in line, outraged and on the march from one election to the next.

In the 2016 election, all the Republican candidates had ACA repeal as a top priority. By that time the program was becoming part of people’s lives and broadly gaining in popularity, so the GOP had landed on “repeal and replace” as their slogan — a promise to enact something different but equivalent, the details of which they always failed to spell out. Inevitably, the best they could offer was some kind of vague, voluntary state-by-state insurance plan that would be more expensive and grossly inadequate. Nonetheless, it seemed to animate their voters like no other issue. The American right just hated Obamacare, even more than the ancient shibboleths of “welfare” and “affirmative action.”

Donald Trump, as usual, took the “replace” promise to new heights. Just days before the 2016 election, he made this vow:

My first day in office, I am going to ask Congress to put a bill on my desk getting rid of this disastrous law and replacing it with reforms that expand choice, freedom, affordability. You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it’s going to be so easy.

Well, it wasn’t so easy. The House passed a terrible replacement bill in 2017 but it failed in the Senate bill by one vote, after that legendary thumbs-down by Sen. John McCain, who was near the end of his life but wanted a final measure of revenge against Trump, perhaps over his spiteful comments about McCain’s record of military service. (I think he was the last Republican, before Liz Cheney, to land a truly damaging blow against Trump.)

Trump tried to move on to tax cuts but must have gotten some blowback from the base. In October of that year he tried to have it both ways, tweeting, “As usual the ObamaCare premiums will be up (the Dems own it) but we will Repeal & Replace and have great Healthcare soon — after Tax Cuts!”

By that time, Republicans in Congress were counting on the Supreme Court to gut the Affordable Care Act for them, and kept a lower profile on the issue. Nonetheless, Republican candidates for office still ran on the promise and Trump kept saying the bill was almost ready, so the base was supposedly still excited at the prospect — dampened a bit, no doubt, by GOP losses in 2018. As the 2020 election cycle began, Trump started campaigning on repeal-and-replace again, claiming he would announce a new plan “in two months, maybe less.” That didn’t happen, and as usual he just started saying whatever he thought people wanted to hear: A plan would be “ready in two weeks” or “by the end of the month,” or he was just about to issue an executive order “requiring health insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions for all customers,” something he claimed had “never been done before.” His crowds cheered deliriously, no doubt believing that just as he’d surely finish his wall he’d get that done in a second term as well.

Trump kept promising a new health care plan “in two months” and then “two weeks,” and then vowed to issue an executive order to force insurance companies to cover everything at no cost. Somehow we never got to see this fabulous plan.

Trump lost that election — in reality, if not in the collective imagination of his fans — so we never got to see that fabulous health care plan that would cost nothing and cover everything. Still, losing elections had never stopped the Republicans from running on the issue anyway. Repealing Obamacare was their holy grail for almost a decade, until they suddenly stopped talking about it. So what gives? Why haven’t we heard anything at all about it this election cycle?

Well, as NBC News reports, the Republican commitment to ensuring that millions of people suffer from unnecessary illness, death and bankruptcy just isn’t sexy anymore:

With slightly more than a month before the next election, Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail aren’t making an issue of Obamacare. None of the Republican Senate nominees running in eight key battleground states have called for unwinding the ACA on their campaign websites, according to an NBC News review. The candidates scarcely mention the 2010 law or health insurance policy in general. And in interviews on Capitol Hill, key GOP lawmakers said the desire for repeal has faded.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent “Commitment to America” made no mention of it either, although the chairman of the ultra-conservative Republican Study Committee did put out a plan that included an unspecified reversal of “the ACA’s Washington-centric approach.” When asked about it, however, he told NBC that it would be up to McCarthy, the presumptive incoming House speaker, to put it on the agenda.

Interestingly, while it’s true that Obamacare is popular, it’s not all that popular. A Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll found that 55% of U.S. adults approved of the ACA while 42% disapproved. So it’s not liek the GOP base hasn’t come around. They’re just bored with being angry about it and have been distracted by all the more exciting new grievances of the moment.

Kevin McCarthy and Rick Scott don’t talk about Obamacare in 2022 — maybe because the GOP base likes their racism undiluted these days.

Repealing government-guaranteed health care has been a fundamental principles of the right wing for as long as I can remember. Medicare and Medicaid (aka “entitlements”) have perennially been on the chopping block. I assume Republicans still hate it for the same reason they’ve always hated it: The wrong people may benefit, and that makes it unacceptable. They’ve got no major problem with government social programs — as long as they’re targeted to “real” Americans, if you know what I mean. 

Over the past few years, however, the principles that have always been just below the surface of conservative hostility toward egalitarian government programs have evolved from implicit racial animosity to more explicit demands for racist policies and a full-blown assault on the democratic process. The impulses really haven’t changed but the right is now willing to experiment with extremist tactics to achieve their goals.

Still, I would never say they’ve entirely given up on repealing Obamacare. While Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the Senate Republican campaign chairman, doesn’t specifically mention it in his audacious governing agenda, he still wants to “rein in” Medicare and Social Security (through unspecified cuts in benefits or services). Some things never change. I would imagine that Obamacare will soon be viewed as another “entitlement,” which must be cut for our own good. For the moment, however, let’s take a moment to recognize that Democrats managed to defeat Republicans in one of the biggest policy battles of this generation. The war, needless to say, continues on other fronts. 

Here’s a brief explainer of Trump’s Supreme Court petition yesterday. It’s a little bit complicated but worth understanding:

Having fully digested Trump’s emergency application to #SCOTUS, here’s a quick #thread on what it’s really asking for, why it’s not *entirely* laughable, and why I nevertheless think that it’s both (1) doomed to fail; and (2) unlikely to accomplish much even if it succeeds:

In short, Trump is asking #SCOTUS to vacate *part* of the Eleventh Circuit’s stay in the Mar-a-Lago case. In essence, he’s arguing that the 100+ classified documents at issue *should* be part of the pile before Judge Dearie, and that under the 11th Cir.’s stay, they’re not.

Critically, he’s *not* arguing that the 11th Cir. was wrong to stay that part of Cannon’s order that *enjoined* DOJ from using those documents. So the relief he’s seeking wouldn’t stop DOJ from continuing to do whatever it’s doing; it would just *also* add to the Dearie mess.

To get there, the brief tries to thread a very fine needle, arguing that, although the *injunction* was properly before the Eleventh Circuit, the rest of the order was not, so Dearie shouldn’t be affected. This gets into the messy doctrine of “pendent appellate jurisdiction.”

Short course on pendent jurisdiction: At pre-final (“interlocutory”) stages of litigation, appeals are generally disfavored, limited to specific issues (rather than the whole case). The question is whether the rest of Cannon’s order is intertwined with the injunction (or not).

Personally, I think DOJ has a very good argument that the issues *are* pendent, and so the Eleventh Circuit had the ability to do everything that it did in staying Judge Cannon’s order. If that’s correct, then Trump’s argument for emergency relief fails on the “merits.”

But emergency relief is (supposed to be) about *more* than the merits. To vacate a lower-court stay, Trump also has to show that the stay is causing him irreparable harm (harm that justifies #SCOTUS‘s emergency intervention, rather than waiting for a later plenary appeal).

And this is what’s most conspicuously absent from his application: Any argument about how the stay, by itself, is harming Trump in a way that can’t be ameliorated later. Without meeting that criteria, Trump can’t make out the *procedural* case for the relief he’s seeking.

To be sure, the Supreme Court in recent years hasn’t always been … consistent … in its analysis of irreparable harm in ruling on emergency applications. But here, it provides an easy and obvious off-ramp to dodge what is a non-frivolous dispute over pendent jurisdiction.

So my best guess is that the Court will deny the application, although some Justices may write separately.

Two last points on what to take away from this filing:

First, what Trump is asking for is *very* modest. Even *if* he wins, it won’t stop DOJ from doing *anything.*

Second, this is what good lawyers who are stuck do to appease bad clients: The jurisdictional argument is narrow, technical, and non-frivolous. It’s a way of filing *something* in the Supreme Court without going all the way to crazytown and/or acting unethically.

That point reinforces the big takeaway: This is a very specific and narrow request by Trump the merits of which turn on a technical jurisdictional question, but which runs into fatal procedural obstacles long before that. It’s not laughable, but only because it’s small.

Coda: Yes, this filing goes to Justice Thomas as Circuit Justice. But for as cynical as I know many people have become, I don’t see a universe in which he grants it by himself rather than allowing the full Court to resolve it. And even if he does, the full Court can overrule him.

It doesn’t sound like a huge deal. But with Clarence Thomas in the mix and this Supreme Court, who knows?