Month: December 2022

You may be under the impression that the most important high-society event in New York is the Met Gala, where celebrities from the world of entertainment, media, fashion and politics dress to the nines in avant-garde couture and come together to get their pictures taken and be seen mingling with their fellow famous people. It’s quite a spectacle. But it has nothing on the demented carnival of the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala, which was held this past weekend. It didn’t have the glamour of the Met’s event, but it had its own luminaries in attendance — and while the fashion may not have been avant-garde the politics were certainly striking.

According to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, it was a gathering of some of of the most divisive figures of the far right including Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., the white nationalists Peter Brimelow and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE, provocateur Jack Posobiec of “Pizzagate” fame and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, among many others, including elected Republican officials:

Republican speakers repeatedly voiced an anti-democracy, authoritarian ideology, and extremists in the audience cheered wildly. White nationalists such as the Brimelows of VDARE and leaders from extreme far right European parties like Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), whom German officials placed under surveillance for their ties to extremism, and Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), ate and drank in the same room as newly elected Republican congresspeople, such as Long Island and Queens-based George Santos, Georgia-based Mike Collins and Florida-based Cory Mills.

It sounds like the speeches were exciting, starting off with the address by the organization’s president, Gavin Wax, who declared:

We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets. This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power.

That seemed to set the tone for the evening. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made the threat explicit when she said that if she and Bannon had been in charge of the Jan. 6 insurrection, they “would have won.” But she didn’t stop there:

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s January 6th comments at last night’s New York Young Republican Club Gala:

“I got to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” pic.twitter.com/KtiecOAlgd

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) December 11, 2022

There was a time when a member of Congress might think twice about making a comment like that. Even today, you can sense that there were people in the crowd, despite the cheers and whistles, who understood that she had pushed beyond even the boundaries of this chummy right-wing gathering by saying such a thing in public. Basically, Greene said that if it had been up to her, the insurrectionists would have stormed the Capitol with guns blazing and executed the coup plot successfully. Fortunately for all of us, she was brand new in Congress at the time and was not intimately involved in the planning, so that didn’t happen.

Greene is now one of the most powerful and influential members of Congress and she hasn’t quite completed her first term. She has been working the levers of the power effectively, agreeing to endorse presumptive Speaker Kevin McCarthy, reportedly in exchange for investigations, committee assignments and her ability to keep the extreme right on board. She’s been pretty clear about what she expects, telling the New York Times, “I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway. And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it.”

Greene, who tweeted last September that “Joe Biden is Hitler,” with the hashtag #NaziJoe, is on a roll and there’s no way any member of the GOP House leadership will dare to cross her.

So where does this leave Kevin McCarthy? The oddsmakers and pundits believe he’s unlikely to lose the speakership contest, but it isn’t going to be the cakewalk he was expecting. He’s got Greene’s endorsement, with all the baggage that entails and the inevitable trouble it’s likely to bring him down the road. But at the moment, there are at least five Republican members who say they definitely won’t vote for him. That means if every member shows up that day, he can’t win. The GOP margin is that thin.

Now McCarthy has an announced opponent, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who leads the far-right House Freedom Caucus. Biggs can’t get anywhere close to the necessary 218 votes either, and he knows it. But according to HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney, Biggs has a theory: If the right can defeat McCarthy, another candidate will emerge to take over, much like what happened back in 2015, when McCarthy was shoved aside for “consensus candidate” Paul Ryan. This is a total fantasy: There’s no nationally-known boy wonder just waiting around — as Ryan, a former vice-presidential nominee, was seen at the time — and Greene, along with several other Freedom Caucus members, are already backing McCarthy. In fact, she has thrown down the gauntlet, saying: “The Freedom Caucus is responsible for making Paul Ryan speaker. Is this group going to do something like that again?”

You can see McCarthy moving closer to Greene in real time. On Sunday he pledged to drag 51 former Intelligence officials in front of a House investigative committee to answer for a letter they signed about the brouhaha surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Their letter didn’t directly claim that the infamous 2020 New York Post article was Russian disinformation, but suggested that, given what had happened during the 2016 campaign, it might be. McCarthy and friends are reacting to the “Twitter files,” with the so-called revelations about Twitter’s decision to suppress the Post story for a couple of days, which Republicans now claim was the reason Trump lost the election. (These things don’t have to make sense, they just have to “feel” right.)

McCarthy knows that all of this is ridiculous, and knows that continuing to relitigate the 2020 election is a losers’ game for Republicans. (We can see how well that approach played out in the midterms.) But he’s trapped. He has to do everything he can to keep Greene on his team while desperately trying to persuade other far-right fanatics not to sabotage his narrow majority. The result is that he’s being forced to move further and further to the right just to remaining standing. The extremists don’t much like him, but they’re all he’s got. 

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d care to put a few coins in the stocking, we’d be very grateful…

Rule of law for thee, socialism for the rich, etc.

The Respect for Marriage Act codifying marriage equality passed Congress last week. Once LGBTQ Americans made their presence felt in large numbers and “even the most traditionally minded discovered that people they loved, respected and cared about were not heterosexual,” passage became inevitable, E.J. Dionne observes in the Washington Post.

But was it? You could have fooled those who fought for years to secure marriage equality via the courts and then, given signals sent by Justice Clarence Thomas, via federal legislation.

During arguments last week in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the court appeared to favor the argument of lawyers for a Colorado graphic artist (a religious conservative) that creating a website supporting same-sex marriage would violate her free-speech rights (notably, not her freedom of religion). The public accommodations law must give way else the artist’s work under duress constitutes compelled speech.

But, liberal justices argued, where do we draw the line? If we allow a free-speech exemption for same-sex couples, why not for interracial ones or for discrimination unrelated to marriage? Why do conservative Christians feel so strongly about this particular human expression? Dionne asks:

That question is neither naive nor rhetorical. Many traditionalist Christians view homosexual relationships as sinful. I think they are wrong, but I acknowledge that this is a long-held view. Yet many of the same Christians also view adultery as a sin. Jesus was tough on divorce. “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he says in Matthew’s Gospel.

But unless I am missing something, we do not see court cases from website designers or florists or bakers about refusing to do business with people in their second or third marriages. We do not see the same ferocious response to adultery as we do to same-sex relationships. Heck, conservative Christians in large numbers were happy to put aside their moral qualms and vote twice for a serial adulterer. Why the selective forgiveness? Why the call to boycott only this one perceived sin?

Because “Do as I say, not as I do” is as old as the Golden Rule? Grace for me but not for thee. That’s a tradition as well.

What we are seeing in the opposition to same-sex marriage is less about religious faith than cultural predispositions. American attitudes toward homosexuality have certainly changed radically but so have our attitudes toward racial and gender equality. Are not these moves toward greater openness all expressions of the equal, God-given dignity of every person?

Not if some can help it.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d care to put a few coins in the Holiday stocking we’d be grateful…

9/11 should have been a wake-up call. And ISIS. And Jan. 6.

A couple of head-scratching social media threads are worth your consideration this morning. Let’s begin with a thread by Eric Blair (of Deep Narrative) on Mastodon. He references a post by my friend Dave Johnson.*

Blair begins:

Fascist billionaires and MAGA Republicans criticize government.
Because their goal is to destroy the government to cut taxes on the rich.

Democracy is an obstacle to their privatization and private wealth accumulation. They want to hurt all of us, destroy our society, to enrich themselves.

A bit oversimplified, perhaps. Wealth is simply a proxy for power. Dominance is their goal. But regarding attacks on Anthony Fauci:

Today Elon Musk attacked Anthony Fauci. The post got at least 600,000 likes.

Whatever this means for #TwitterMigration (should be: let’s leave!),
it also means many have been radicalized against Fauci and science and gov’t. While many of us have been carrying about our business, rightwing media has been creating vast hate for science. Vast.

“Lots of scientists and lots of people who get news from NYT and NPR and WaPo have their heads in the sand about this radicalization,” Blair continues. More on that in a moment.

The tendency to ignore this online radicalization, Blair believes, is “dangerously naive.” Fight them, he urges.

Again: “Prosecute Fauci”, *six hundred thousand* likes on twitter.

Next, a thread by Will Stancil who, in turn, keys off a Semafor post by Max Tani about the Biden White House’s dismissal of Twitter’s radicalization under Elon Musk. The administration is “totally clueless about how the digital ecosystem works,” Stancil argues.

So predictable and stupid that Biden's White House would look at Twitter becoming a vortex of right-wing radicalization and misinformation and say "We're smart, we know this doesn't matter." Totally clueless about how the digital ecosystem works, as usual https://t.co/qCn1KMoCyG pic.twitter.com/2FqkPJHosz

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) December 12, 2022

Tani writes:

The administration does not consider Twitter a vital part of any political strategy that reaches beyond the chattering classes. One former White House official told Semafor the platform is an “afterthought” in communications and press meetings, which tend to focus first on television and traditional media and on Facebook, a declining service that still reaches a mass audience.

[…}

The disdain for Twitter inside the White House has little to do with right-wing control of the platform, and more to do with its role inside the Democratic Party: Biden’s wing sees Twitter as fuel for activist voices who push ingroup thinking, left-of-center bias, and socioeconomic bias.

When Biden ran for president in 2016, his staff’s mantra was “Twitter isn’t real life.” Now, aides point to data from The New York Times suggesting that Democrats are “more moderate, more diverse and less educated” than those on the social media platform.

The problem with that view of Twitter’s radicalization should be obvious to anyone who watched the rise of ISIS and its successful efforts to use online radicalization in its terrorist recruiting efforts.

“Twitter is at the very center of a vast informational web, stuff that circulates on here ends up on EVERY OTHER WEBSITE AND NEWS SITE” eventually, Stancil writes. Yet the Biden administration still believes the way to reach Americans is via an op-ed in USA Today. They understand the media ecosystem in terms of audience reach rather than influence. This is a mistake.

“The comparison I always use is Fox News: its actual viewership is low, much much lower than the number of people on Twitter. But its influence on politics is enormous, directing the whole GOP agenda,” Stancil adds.

It's embarrassing, frankly. Just a complete failure to grasp the channels through which political behavior is being shaped. It's like a Democratic administration in the 1950s dismissing radio and television as distractions – "TV isn't real life, worry about newspapers."

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) December 12, 2022

People’s heads remain in the sand. The Silents’ strategy was that a problem ignored was one that would go away. There are enough problems going around that even later generations neither want nor need more. We ignored or dismissed the impacts of the right-wing echo chamber, Facebook’s algorithms, the rise of the attention economy, and foreign troll farms too. We wound up spectators to a near-successful overthrow of our government.

I don’t know how best to fight online and offline radicalization, and I’m not yet fully off Twitter. But if social media were once imagined as a global town square, it’s best to consider what kind.

Ezra Klein writes:

[W]hat matters for a polity isn’t the mere existence of a town square but the condition the townspeople are in when they arrive. Town squares can host debates. They can host craft fairs. They can host brawls. They can host lynchings. Civilization does not depend on a place to gather. It depends on what happens when people gather.

So much genius and trickery and money have gone into a mistaken metaphor. The competition to create and own the digital square may be good business, but it has led to terrible politics. Think of the hopeful imaginings that accompanied the early days of social media: We would know one another across time and space; we would share with one another across cultures and generations; we would inform one another across borders and factions. Billions of people use these services. Their scale is truly civilizational. And what have they wrought? Is the world more democratic? Is G.D.P. growth higher? Is innovation faster? Do we seem wiser? Do we seem kinder? Are we happier? Shouldn’t something, anything, have gotten noticeably better in the short decades since these services fought their way into our lives?

I think there is a reason that so little has gotten better and so much has gotten worse. It is this: The cost of so much connection and information has been the deterioration of our capacity for attention and reflection. And it is the quality of our attention and reflection that matters most.

*I have not figured out how to display Mastodon posts cleanly in WordPress (or WordPress hasn’t) so bear with me.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to put a little something in the holiday stocking you can do so here…

The Republicans assumed they had the Latino vote in the bag. They were wrong:

Leading up to Election Day last month, Republicans were poised to claim major victories, from a red wave in the House to control of the Senate. As part of those grand expectations, they hoped the results would show that Latino voters were continuing to join their ranks. That prediction proved off the mark.

Like so much about the midterm elections, what didn’t happen is as important as what did. Democrats did not lose ground among Latinos, but neither did Democrats significantly regain the ground they lost in 2020.

The big exception was Florida, where the two Republicans atop the ticket — Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio — rolled up impressive majorities among Hispanic voters. Elsewhere, however, the story was one of steadiness rather than slippage by Democrats.

“Outside of Florida, we saw a portrait of stability,” said Melissa Morales, president of Somos Votantes, a Latino advocacy and organizing group that was working to support Democratic candidates. “We held on.”

The 2020 election set off alarms among Democrats — and bold predictions among Republicans — about a realignment of the Latino vote. In 2020, President Donald Trump saw his support among Latinos jump 10 percentage points nationally, to 38 percent from 28 percent in 2016. In South Florida and South Texas, Trump made even bigger gains in some heavily Hispanic counties.

There were other reasons to think a major shift could be underway. Latinos are not a monolithic group, and many Hispanics share some things in common with Republicans, among them religiosity and small-business economics. Some analysts have long seen Latinos as a potential swing vote — and still do.

But while Republican gains in South Florida and South Texas drew the most attention, many strategists and academics tracking Latino voting patterns said the true test of whether the Democrats were continuing to lose ground would come this year in Arizona and Nevada, a pair of midterm battlegrounds each with hard-fought races for Senate and governor.

“It was going to be the ultimate testing ground,” Carlos Odio of Equis Research said of the two Southwestern states. “While there was no reversal to pre-2020 levels, neither [of the Republican senatorial candidates] improved on 2020. … You have to judge it as a failure of Republicans to exploit what seemed the best opportunity they were going to get.”

Democrats held the Senate seats in both states and picked up the governorship of Arizona while surrendering the governorship of Nevada. Exit polls showed that Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona won 58 percent of Latino voters, down slightly from President Biden’s vote share in 2020.

In Nevada, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who was seen as her party’s most vulnerable incumbent, captured 62 percent of Latino voters, almost identical to Biden’s performance in 2020.

Analysts are still sifting through election data. Exit polling, while scientific, can be imprecise because it does not fully represent raw vote totals. Odio recently posted a series of tweets looking preliminarily at patterns in heavily Hispanic precincts. He described Arizona and Nevada as examples of “perfect stability.”

One reason Democrats did as well as they did in Arizona and Nevada was because of a significant disparity in resources invested in Spanish-language advertising. Overall in those two states, the Democrats outspent Republicans by a margin of about 5 to 1, according to an ad tracking source.

Oopsie. I guess they thought there wasn’t any necessity to spend money. Big mistake.

The “Latino vote” is actually not a thing. There are regional differences, economic differences, ethic differences among American Latinos. The party that wants their votes has to listen to their voters and be responsive to their needs. And if it requires special outreach in Spanish and in local communities they have to do that too. There is no multi-ethic coalition possible without doing all of that.

I don’t think Republicans have any idea about that, beyond screaming “commie, commie!” which has some limited appeal among right wing Hispanic communities from places like Cuba and maybe Venezuela. But it’s not going to cut it elsewhere. Let’s hope Democrats are paying attention to all this as well and continue to work hard to reach out to then various Latino constituencies where ever they are.

And it’s all because of lies

This interview with Dr. Fauci is super great but this final part just makes me depressed. What a sick, sick culture we are right now.

Judy Woodruff:You and I were just talking, as we wrap up this interview, about the reaction you have gotten from many in the American public about your work overall, especially during this pandemic.Is there a message there for other — and a lot of it’s been very ugly, as you shared.

Dr. Anthony Fauci:Right.

Judy Woodruff:Is there a message there for other government workers, other public servants?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:It’s been a tough row to hoe over the last three years, because public health officials, physicians, nurses and scientists, and public health officials have really had a lot of pushback in an anti-science, somewhat hostile approach to them.My word of advice to them is, stick with what we’re doing. It’s a noble profession. You get a great deal of satisfaction and gratification about helping others. And even though we’re in a somewhat bizarre situation, where there’s attacks on public health officials, that will pass and we will get back to a world, I hope, where people appreciate when a group like public health officials have devoted their lives to the safety and the health of the American public.And they should be looked upon with some degree of appreciation for that.

Judy Woodruff:Dr. Anthony Fauci, stepping down after 54 years in service of the federal government, thank you very much.

Dr. Anthony Fauci:Thank you for having me, Judy. Good to be with you.

Dear God …

If you’d like to slip a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, you can send to the address on the left sidebar or go through the links below. Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Oh what fun…

The shadow speaker and her friends gathered in New York this weekend for a big gala celebrating themselves. It was, unsurprisingly, horrific:

We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax declared to a room full of supporters at 538 Park Ave., an event venue on New York’s Upper East side.

“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.

At the five-hour event, which Hatewatch reporters attended, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance.

Republicans publicly lauded members of an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era German Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.

“Then Jan. 6 happened. And next thing you know, I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon,” Greene said, referring to allegations that she had led reconnaissance tours of the Capitol for soon-to-be insurrectionists in the days prior to the violence.

“I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won,” she said, as attendees erupted in cheers and applause. “Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

I’m sure Musk and his fellow travelers will make sure we see more of this:

Trump did not change the @GOP, he revealed it. This is the @NYYRC cheering for end to American Experiment. Spare me the “Trump voters in Ohio diner” profiles. Wealthy, privileged & dangerous. No point in trying to understand this. Just burn it to the ground. https://t.co/8y5DvtvqPu

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) December 11, 2022

The place was crawling with white supremacists and far right dirty tricksters. And they were all applauding violence and armed revolution.

Read the whole thing. Yikes.

“It’s your job to get out all the sex pictures,” Burra said Bannon told him.

Yep. Steve Bannon and his Chinese benefactor:

On the evening of October 24, 2020, a guy who goes by the name Wenyang tweeted a picture of Hunter Biden. Hunter was facing a mirror in what looked like a hotel room, with his penis exposed.

Within an hour, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign asked Twitter to take down the post. We know this because journalist Matt Taibbi—using documents that Twitter owner Elon Musk provided to him—has been tweeting out internal communications between Twitter executives who, at the time, were discussing how to deal with material from Hunter’s laptop. Wenyang’s tweet is the third of five listed in a screenshot of an email from one Twitter staffer to another. “More to review from the the Biden team,” the email said. “Handled these,” a Twitter employee responded a few hours later.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

Taibbi did not explain what those five deleted tweets contained. But using the Internet Archive, you can see that three of them featured explicit images of Hunter Biden. One doesn’t work. Another is a video, which won’t play now, but probably showed sexual activity. All of those I was able to access violated Twitter’s rules.

The Trump White House also successfully asked Twitter to delete certain material, Taibbi noted. Still, many MAGA believers have cited the Biden campaign’s successful request as evidence that Twitter colluded with Democrats in 2020. Taibbi’s tweet revealing this exchange has been retweeted about 46,000 times so far. Musk, who has 120 million followers, replied to it with the question: “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” (It isn’t a violation of First Amendment, as Musk later claimed he knew.) Fox News has given the matter extravagant coverage. Donald Trump responded to this supposedly unconstitutional activity by calling for “the termination” of the Constitution.

Mostly overlooked in the howling is that Twitter blocked two different kinds of material connected to Hunter’s laptop. The first category was reporting by the New York Post, which detailed—in some cases, inaccurately—Hunter’s efforts during and after the Obama administration to profit off being the son of the vice president. The second category was far different: scores of photos and videos that showed Hunter having sex and using drugs.

Twitter’s decision to suppress reporting on Hunter’s business efforts was purportedly based on suspicions that the stories relied on documents that might have been hacked by Russians—the precise scenario that occurred in 2016—and that those documents might include forgeries mixed with real material, a tactic Russian agents reportedly tried in France in 2017. But those fears were not borne out. In retrospect, as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later acknowledged, the decision to block the Post story appears to have been a serious misstep.

But Taibbi, Musk, and company seem to have focused a lot of their fire on Twitter’s suppression of Hunter’s dick pics and similar stuff. The currently accessible tweets cited in the email that elicited Musk’s First Amendment comment were about sex, not political corruption. All that is revealed by the emails in that screenshot is Twitter following its own terms of service. Nonconsensual pictures of people’s junk are not protected speech. As Jeffrey Lebowski once told Walter Sobchak, “This is not a First Amendment thing, man.”

Asked about this, Taibbi argued the Biden campaign’s direct line of access to Twitter honchos mattered more than the specifics of the material they got removed. “Do you really think just any person can pick up the phone, dial a Twitter exec…and instantly get their dick picks taken off Twitter?” he told Mother Jones in an email. Taibbi also said that the tweets Twitter removed weren’t all explicit. They included “a Gateway Pundit article that had pics of Hunter smoking crack and merely a warning-labeled link to Hunter porn,” he said. That particular tweet doesn’t appear to be cited in correspondence he published.

But let’s look at who was posting those pics in the first place. The third tweet cited in Taibbi’s screenshot, the Internet Archive shows, came from an account that features a logo and slogan indicating the user is a member of New Federal State of China. The NFSC is an organization set up in 2020 by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul, who has aggressively promoted false claims about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election. 

[…]

I have previously reported on various messages and recordings detailing what Guo and Bannon and their backers were up to in 2020. One thing this material shows is that in October 2020, Bannon—working with Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer—arranged for Guo and his followers to spread salacious videos and pictures from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Giuliani has said he got the laptop material from the owner of a Delaware repair shop where Hunter reportedly abandoned it in 2019. Giuliani, after considering various ways to use the material, eventually worked with other Trump backers to seek mainstream media coverage of Hunter’s business ventures. Bannon, who was informally advising the Trump campaign, also helped to distribute the sex stuff.

It was natural for Bannon to tap Guo, who has paid Bannon to help him launch Chinese-language media companies. Bannon was even living on Guo’s yacht in the summer of 2020 when Bannon was arrested for allegedly defrauding a nonprofit. In October of that year, Bannon instructed employees of his War Room podcast to send Guo backers copies of material from the computer. Vish Burra, then a War Room employee, told me that Bannon put him in charge of that part. “It’s your job to get out all the sex pictures,” Burra said Bannon told him.

Starting on October 22, 2020, Guo then personally managed minute details of the distribution of pictures and videos. In audio messages he sent to groups of supporters using WhatsApp, which I obtained, he set up a process in which key backers would post Hunter Biden pictures on his streaming website, GTV—a sort of Chinese-language YouTube knockoff—and others would then amplify them. He decreed that much of the material would first be posted by followers living abroad, to help prevent any lawsuits seeking to block the effort.

“Look at the video copied from Hunter’s computer,” Guo said in a WhatsApp messages to underlings on October 27. (He spoke in Chinese. The messages have been translated.) In another message, referring to various Hunter videos, Guo ordered: “Post one right now, one every hour from now on…I want everyone to fully promote it.”

[…]

And it’s worse than that. From the start, Guo and his supporters accompanied the pictures of Hunter Biden with repugnant lies. According to multiple people involved in distributing the material, Guo ordered them to claim that the laptop material included images of Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls. There is no evidence supporting this allegation against Hunter. Guo also told subordinates to assert that the Chinese government had obtained the material and used it to blackmail both Hunter and Joe Biden. That, too, was made up, people involved said. …

But the lies got traction. One of Guo’s concocted claims about China blackmailing the Biden family was repeated by the Washington Examiner and the Daily Mail in stories that quoted from the text accompanying a sex video of Hunter that Guo backers had posted. Versions of the allegations about sexual abuse of children were picked up by multiple Guo websites, by other right-wing publications and figures; by Giuliani; and, after the election, by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. 

Bannon later said he believed that the Biden campaign’s reluctance to address false claims helped them spread. “Nobody came out and said anything you’re saying’s not true,” Bannon asserted in an October 31 meeting with Guo backers. “Even the wildest allegations.”

During that meeting, Bannon acknowledged passing the material to Guo’s backers and then praised their lies, which he laughingly described as “editorial creativity over the pictures.” Bannon said in this meeting that he thought the onslaught had made an impact. “The negatives just keep going up,” Bannon claimed, “because people are sitting there, going, ‘I didn’t know that about Joe Biden.’”

Bannon argued the effort had made the presidential contest close enough that Trump could execute a plan to falsely declare victory and try to use bogus voter fraud claims to persuade the courts or Congress to help him remain in office.

All of this was explicitly against twitter’s rules and their removal was more than justified. Taibbi’s lame response that Biden got special treatment that others don’t get just because he was running for president is ridiculous. The fact that everyone can’t get the twitter people on the phone doesn’t mean that it was wrong to delete those salacious photos.

And now that we know this was a Bannon special — no surprise there — it’s even more egregious that Taibbi would defend this grotesque ratfucking as an example of free speech that must be left unfettered on major social media platforms, including, apparently, the lies. I guess he and Musk and the rest of these so-called free speech absolutists believe there should be no recourse for dirty tricks, revenge porn and other repulsive acts of sabotage except to tut-tut it and let it be disseminated freely.

This is a mess. And we have progressives out there naively helping them do it in the name of free speech without stopping for a moment to ask whether in this case they are being useful idiots. The free speech principle obviously required defending. But when you take this sort of thing out of context and go on FOX news to defend it— you aren’t defending free speech. You are defending right wing ratfucking as a constitutional value.

If you actually care

Sadly, you probably should. It is is a powerful platform and it’s being run by a cretinous monster.

Really struggle to see how Twitter’s former management used their power over the platform to do anything more abusive/contrary to free discourse than libelously branding someone a pedophile for arguing that gay hookup apps need safety features that protect adolescents https://t.co/tkYXKO07gv

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) December 11, 2022

Yoel Roth is twitter former head of moderation and standard. Chaiya Raichik is the person who is siccing her following on doctors and hospitals that care for trans people, resulting in death threats and bomb scares. She is also a monster.

Here’s the latest from Musk himself

*sigh* … He has the emotional maturity of a 12 year old.

Eric Levitz at NY Magazine takes a look at the so-called scandal. It’s an exceptional analysis of everything that’s come out and it’s a devastating indictment of Musk and the alleged journalists doing his bidding. I urge you to read the whole to for a full explanation of what the hell this is all about. Whatever you do, do not rely on any hysterical right winger, every single one of whom is screeching in 100% bad faith.

Here’s Levitz’s conclusion:

The Twitter Files provide limited evidence that the social-media platform’s former management sometimes enforced its terms of service in inconsistent and politically biased ways. The project offers overwhelming evidence that Twitter’s current management is using the platform to promote tendentious, partisan narratives and conservative misinformation. In that sense, Taibbi and Weiss have performed revelatory journalism.

Right. The grossest violations of decency are now being posted by the owner of twitter himself. And his minions are all following suit. It’s becoming a cesspool.

Feel the magic

The Onion has an early look:

On Feb. 28, 2023, HarperCollins will publish a memoir by controversial Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis. Here are the biggest revelations from his forthcoming campaign book The Courage To Be Free.

His memoir reveals that DeSantis was spewing hateful remarks at a college level when he was only 7 years old.

While he doesn’t say it outright, DeSantis refers to Florida at various points in his book as “up in the hills,” “the big island,” “bordering Honduras,” and having “that southwest sizzle.

Made The Tough Decision To Let 80,000 People Die Of Covid In Exchange For A 2% Bump In Florida’s Economy: He later added that it was the most difficult sacrifice he’s ever had to ask other people to make.

He Served In Iraq: DeSantis wanted to see how we were destroying nations overseas before implementing those tactics in the United States.

As A Child, DeSantis Struggled To Come Out As Homophobic: As A Child, DeSantis Struggled To Come Out As Homophobic

The Book Features Drawings Of DeSantis’ Proposed Anti-Woke Disney Character: DeSantis reportedly told Disney that if they wanted to keep their special tax status, they’d have to green-light a film franchise about a manly cat who wears a jean jacket.

There Was No Covid in Florida:The brave author reveals that the virus never touched a single Floridian, and that the reported 7.23 million total cases was simply a typo.

While In The Navy, DeSantis Was Stationed At Guantánamo And Saw That Prisoners Were Given Their Rights: He personally saw to it they were waterboarded with filtered water.’

He Was Raised By Drag Queens, But Doesn’t Seem To Realize It: Despite multiple passages referring to “papa’s beautiful wigs” and his uncles arguments about getting stage time at a club called the Drag Strip, DeSantis is somehow still blind to the fact that all the men in his family were prominent members of a drag community.

Lol….

Honestly, if his ads are any indication, it is going to be a celebration of self like we haven’t seen since “Art of the Deal.” The man does think highly of himself:

I mean … The Onion can’t really do justice to this guy.

That’s what its called on Mastodon

Yup, Twitter is still swirling the drain.

Missed spotting Erik Prince my first rscan through this tweet. Isn’t this, um, interesting.

Brett Kavanaugh was seen hanging out at a Republican party with Matt Gaetz, Sebastian Gorka, Sean Spicer, and Erik Prince, per @politico. pic.twitter.com/nNjcIy2HSt

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) December 10, 2022

Meanwhile, on the Bird site, Aaron Rupar gets a tweet of the day:

🏆 Tweet of the Day goes to @atrupar (who you should be following) for dragging this absurd @nytimes article pic.twitter.com/SSPm4RTPtt

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) December 11, 2022