Fascinating:
Personally, I’m not into the ancestry craze. I don’t care much about that stuff. I’m old fashioned. But it is fascinating to see how much an immigrant country like the United States has evolved in this way.
"what digby sez..."
Month: February 2023
In his newsletter today, Dan Pfeiffer notes the contrast between President Biden and Ron DeSantis on President’s Day, when Biden went to Kiev and DeSantis went to Fox:
On the other side was Florida Governor and putative Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis appearing on Fox and Friends to slam President Biden for his offering “blank checks to Ukraine.” DeSantis told the hosts:
I and many Americans are thinking to ourselves, Ok, he’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own borders here… we have a lot of problems accumulating here.”
This moment was revelatory in two key ways. First, it demonstrated the challenge for Republicans trying to run against the Fox News caricature of “Sleepy Joe.” It’s hard to overstate the stature gap between a commander in chief astride the world stage and a Governor chopping it up Steve Doocy on a cable morning show. You can’t credibly argue that Biden isn’t up to the job, when he is blazoned across every screen doing the job in historically courageous ways. Presidents usually win reelection in part because they have the consistent opportunity to create made-for-media moments that dominate the national conversation.
Second, DeSantis’s decision to criticize Biden on Ukraine policy while the President was in a warzone speaks to the emerging isolationist politics in the Republican base that will shape the primary with potential consequences for the 2024 general election.
The Politics of Ukraine
Since the Vietnam War, Americans have had limited appetites for prolonged engagements overseas. This dynamic was greatly accelerated by George W. Bush’s poorly conceived and even more poorly executed War in Iraq. There is a rhythm to it. An event like the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurs. It dominates media coverage and conversation. Most of the country rallies to the cause. Over time, the media stops covering the story with the same intensity. Support begins to erode. Frustration develops that focus and resources are being spent abroad instead of at home.
This is largely how things have played out with the politics in Ukraine. While most Americans remain supportive of the U.S. support for Ukraine, support has waned in the last year. According to a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs conducted in December, about two thirds of Americans support providing economic assistance to Ukraine, sending weapons and military supplies, and further economic sanctions on Russia. But the poll also shows that patience is not endless. The percentage of Americans who think that the U.S. should support Ukraine “as long a it takes” dropped from 58 percent in July 2022 to 48 percent.
While the public has expressed more support for Biden’s policies than confidence in his approach to implementing those policies, on its surface, the politics of Ukraine seem clear. The public — particularly Independents — very much sides with Biden and Zelensky over Putin and DeSantis — which raises the question of why DeSantis spent his President’s Day pushing an unpopular position.
The Ukraine Test
As the Republican base has gotten further radicalized, a chasm has grown between their politics and those of the rest of the country. This irreconcilable tension is perhaps most present on the issue of U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
Congress is going to have to pass more funding for Ukraine in the coming months. Enfeebled GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy has expressed reticence about agreeing to the Biden Administration’s request. During the Speaker’s race, McCarthy repeatedly stated his opposition as he sought the votes of the MAGA extremists. McCarthy’s position doesn’t just put him at odds with the majority of Americans and a plurality of Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and most other elected Republicans are big backers of aid to Ukraine. To the extent that they criticize the Biden Administration, it’s that more aggressive weapons should be sent more quickly.
McCarthy is picking a fight, he will almost certainly lose. So what the hell is he doing?
Well, the answer can be found in a very clever poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov. The pollsters broke out Republicans and Republicans that self-identify with the MAGA movement. Nearly half of Republicans want their Representative to support aid to Ukraine but only 36 percent of MAGA Republicans agree.
MAGA Republicans are not a small faction. CBS has tracking MAGA Republicans for a year and they have consistently accounted for about half of all Republicans.
This poll finding explains McCarthy’s losing gambit, DeSantis’s Fox and Friends interview, and most of what will happen in the upcoming Republican Presidential Primary.
It’s safe to infer that MAGA Republicans are more likely to vote in primaries, donate to candidates, and attend rallies. They generate the energy in the party and therefore given a choice, Republican politicians will appeal to them even at the risk of making their general elections more challenging. As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver put it on Twitter in response to the DeSantis comments:
Granted, voters don’t care about foreign policy that much, but the emerging GOP stance on Russia/Ukraine is likely to be unpopular with swing voters and is giving Democrats a free wedge issue where they’ll be on the right side of public opinion in 2024.
DeSantis had a choice. He could have looked serious and Presidential in a serious moment. Instead, he chose a crass and cynical appeal to the base. It was a test and Ron DeSantis failed.
A lot can and will change before the first Republican primary, let alone the general election. The politics of Ukraine could shift dramatically as they did on the Iraq War. But in the meantime, the Republicans are replicating the exact same dynamic that cost them dearly in 2022.
Breaking out the MAGA voters is an interesting way to look at this. But I have to assuyme tht most of them are married to Dear Leader, right? Does Desantis have a prayer of winning them over with Trump in the race?
DeSantis went full MAGA this morning in his daily event for his 2023 Outrage Tour:
Someone mentioned this morning (sorry can’t recall who) that DeSantis is pulling outrageous stunts and holding provocative press conferences and events every day because he’s using the Trump method of shock and awe with the media. That makes sense. But I’d still give Trump the edge on all that. The wingnuts went nuts over his visit to McDonalds yesterday. Can DeSantis compete with that?
Democrats must respond to McCarthy’s full capitulation to MAGA
Democrats have loudly expressed outrage about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to grant Fox News’s Tucker Carlson exclusive access to surveillance footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Democrats say this will compromise security and enable Carlson to rewrite the day’s history with cherry-picked footage shaped into cleverly concocted propaganda.
But Democrats have a better response to the California Republican’s tactic than fulmination: They can access the footage themselves. They can either allow news organizations to view all of it or at least respond to any distortions Carlson might conjure up by making whatever footage is relevant available to outlets.
This would be smart politics, but it would also be good for the country. Carlson says his producers have gained “unfettered” access to about 44,000 hours of footage and already insists some of it does “contradict” what’s publicly known.
But Carlson has a track record of falsely depicting the attack as a “false flag” operation, absurdly portraying rioters as political prisoners, and pushing other distortions and lies. It’s obvious Carlson will selectively pick from footage to try to further obscure public memory of that day with confusion and agitprop. Democrats can’t let that go unanswered.
I had heard rumblings that the Senate majority would release the tapes to the public but nothing official. Sargent says the House minority could do it too:
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who served on the Jan. 6 committee, says strategic decisions should be left to Democratic leaders. But Lofgren told me, “Should Mr. Carlson try to distort, we would have the opportunity, I presume, to get information and rebut the distortions.”
Of course, Carlson’s threat to air footage might be pure grift. In this scenario, Carlson and Republicans are just throwing the base a fake sop in the form of advertised revelations to come.
Notably, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has been priming the base to think big things are afoot, tweeting that McCarthy’s decision means “the video tapes are coming.” The goal might be to create the impression that the official story of Jan. 6 is about to collapse. Following this, even nothingburger footage will be hyped by right-wing media as damning.
Democrats might be reluctant to respond to such a pathetically hollow gesture, instead preferring to let the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations speak for themselves. But at a minimum, Democrats should be prepared.
I’m not sure who could be considered a neutral arbiter these days. In the past you could ask retired judges or trusted media like the Shorenstein Center to do it but there really isn’t any agreed upon neutral source these days is there? So perhaps the Democrats should just do it themselves as Sargent suggests by being prepared to counter Carlson’s narrative.
Or, they could just release the tapes to all media and let the chips fall where they may. Allowing Carlson to cherry pick the tapes and put out a “report” similar to Elon Musk’s laughably partisan twitter files un-rebutted is not a good idea.
They’re clowns, yes, but….
Following up on my post below on the right’s decades-long war against “created equal” and against everyone not conforming to their narrow view of who counts as a Real American™, here is a long Brynn Tannehill thread (at Heather Cox Richardson’s suggestion) of where it could lead if the American left cannot screw itself up to vigorously fight back and now:
I’ve seen a lot of people jump on Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s comments about needing a national divorce. Based on other (seemingly unrelated, but not really) events, this is way more complicated than “We had one civil war already.” 1/n
When Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘National Divorce,’ She Means Another Civil WarGreene in effect wants a new Confederate States of America, but like the old one, it won’t emerge peacefully.https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greenes-national-divorce-was-the-civil-war.html
First, it needs to be acknowledged that the US is going in a bad direction. The GOP wants to assume authoritarian control over the US, and Gov. DeSantis is providing a roadmap on how to ban freedom of speech and the press, silence corporations, and drive LGBT people out. 2/n
But, at a fundamental level, our system of government is not able to handle this moment: we are effectively gridlocked to real issues (health care, the environment, labor, the economy, gun violence, immigration, etc..) 3/n
At a more fundamental level, we have two competing visions for America that are mutually exclusive, both sides really don’t like each other, but one of the two is violent, delusional, and willing to destroy democracy to get its way. 4/n
Divisions in America Are Even Worse Than You Thought | Dame Magazinehttps://www.damemagazine.com/2021/11/11/divisions-in-america-are-even-worse-than-you-thought/
The term irreconcilable differences comes to mind.
In my cover story for The New Republic, I wrote about how there is actually a limited number of ways this can turn out. I thought the tipping point would happen after 2024, but it may be much sooner. 5/n
Preparing for the WorstUnless voters wake up—and Democrats wake them up—we’re on the verge of permanent, minoritarian, single-party rule.https://newrepublic.com/article/168784/democrats-preparing-worst-republican-minoritarian-rule
We are going to see relatively soon (next few years) more clearly what path we go down, because Tennessee (and other red states) are forcing the issue, similar to how they forced the issue at Fort Sumter in 1861. 6/n
To review, Tennessee has passed a bill out of committee that would bar insurers from doing business with the state if they cover health care for trans people anywhere in the US. The goal is to get big carriers to drop all coverage. 7/n
This will get challenged in court, both for commerce clause violations and ERISA. However, raise your hand if you have any confidence in this current SCOTUS? Yeah, after the SB8, Dobbs, and Hawaii v. Trump rulings, you shouldn’t. 8/n
The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to BelieveJustices love to proclaim their impartiality, all evidence to the contrary.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/lie-about-supreme-court-everyone-pretends-believe/620198/
With 6 staunch conservative Catholics on the court, an opportunity to nearly eliminate trans health care nationwide would make them absolutely drool. They’ll likely find a reason why they can’t strike it down, or use the 10th Amendment as a rationale. 9/n
It should be noted that this sort of blackmail can be used on any topic: whether it’s Disney for promoting “woke” material, coverage of abortions, drug manufacturers and Mifepistrone, or anything else they want to ban. 10/n
Let’s assume this survives judicial review. If Anthem / Kaiser / BCBS tell Tennessee the go pound sand, it’s likely that Texas and Florida jump in to add pressure. If they give in, it increases the likelihood of blue states jumping in as well. 11/n
So, what happens if California and New York say, “Ok, fine, we won’t contract with any insurers who don’t cover trans health care, because laws in this state say it has to be covered.”?
Now, companies have to decide: do they want to do business in CA & NY, or TX and FL? 12/n
Thus begins the economic process of national mitosis. Companies are forced to decide which parts of the US they want to do business in. It absolutely can happen: remember how Gov. Newsome trolled SCOTUS after SB8? 13/n
Governor Newsom Issues Statement After Court Strikes Down Provision of Gun Safety Law | California GovernorSACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today issued the following statement after a U.S. District Court deemed the fee-shifting provisions of California’s SB 1327 unconstitutional: “I want to thank Judge…https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/12/19/governor-newsom-issues-statement-after-court-strikes-down-provision-of-gun-safety-law/
The other possibility is that blue states meekly accept red states dictating how everything happens there, from access to health care, to Governor DeSantis sicking the FL State AG on CA citizens who criticize DeSantis online. 14/n
This is the path of no return that leads to a future that looks like Russia or Hungary where there’s no hope of political change, nowhere safe for women, minorities, or LGBT people, and freedom of speech and the press exist in theory only. 15/n
The other path, that I wrote about all the way back in 2015 (again, being Cassandra sucks) is a country that’s increasingly “Two Americas”, where there is diminishing cultural and economic exchange. 16/n
Two Americas for LGBT PeopleAfter the 2014 election we knew we would be losing ground for a couple of years. The crop of incoming conservatives featured many new, terrifyingly crazy anti-LGBT legislators.https://www.huffpost.com/entry/two-americas-for-lgbt-people_b_6842066
This presumes that red states, and the courts, don’t press the issue. In reality, they will: they want to end abortion, trans health care, and teaching truthful history throughout the country. They want to establish the supremacy of religion in public life. 17/n
The proposed law in Tennessee, and laws proposed by MTG about trans people, illustrate that the right is incapable of not pressing the issue. SCOTUS, for its part, is entirely disinterested in heading off a national crisis or stare decisis as seen after their Dobbs decision. 18/n
Which puts us in the position of blue states eventually either deciding between protecting their citizens and uphold their own democratic values (freedom of the press, speech, bodily autonomy) or respecting the authority of the courts and the federal government. 19/n
You can only pick one. Regardless of which one you pick, the results are catastrophic: de facto secession or accepting a descent into a Russian-style dystopia.
Tennessee’s bill is the first cannonball sailing over Fort Sumter. 20/n
It’s a declaration of intent, and the only hope is that someone comes to their sense and the bill dies on the floor, or the courts overturn it. That’s a bad risk.
There’s also nothing to say that other states won’t imitate it, on trans health care or other issues. 21/n
So, all this talk of MTG being nuts is both correct, and incorrect. The pressure to create secession and a civil war is coming entirely from the right, just like the South was creating the pressure in 1861 out of their own paranoia. Lincoln had no intention of ending slavery 22/n
But, to say that secession is unthinkable… No, it’s not given the Sophie’s Choice that is going to be presented to blue states in the very near future if SCOTUS consistently rules in favor of TN and other conservative states. 23/n
Indeed, as I wrote a year ago, it seems highly likely that SCOTUS will eventually make another Dredd Scott ruling that locks the US in on a course where the choice between autocracy and splitting becomes inevitable. 24/n
The U.S. is barreling towards Dred Scott II“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905https://www.losangelesblade.com/2022/04/24/the-u-s-is-barreling-towards-dred-scott-ii/
From a trans person’s perspective, they’re both terrible outcomes, but in the end I’d rather have half the country I can flee to rather than none of it.
Which is why we must save democracy now, before one of these two is locked in. 25/n
Solidarity more than ever. But it cannot be theoretical or spiritual or keyboard-warrior stuff alone.
Bills like those in Tennessee and Florida seem like trolls intended to bait the left into amplifying the extremist right message, but the extremist right’s footsoldiers take them seriously. An increasing number of them are legislators.
Remember, the country overall is not as divided as the loudest mouths make it seem. They just bump loudest in the night. Bump back.
A new invisible empire strikes back
The backlash to the “created equal” decisions and policies of the last century percolated along for decades. First, resistance to 1954’s Brown v. Board decision with the growth of segregation academies. Then the blue to red flip of former Confederate states in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 under LBJ. Then the promotion of the religious right by the conservative movement.
By the end of the last century, the internet and right-wing media facilitated isolated cranks and bigots bonding with others of their kind, including flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists.
The election of a Black man to the White House threw accelerant onto white grievances building for half a century. What has grown into a white grievance industrial complex pairs racial and ideological goals with commercial ones supported by YouTube, Fox, and other social media.
Charles Blow examines the next generation of efforts by unsettled whites to turn back the clock and return nonwhite minorities to their proper places at the bottom of the social order. Chris Rufo, the man who turned critical race theory (CRT) into a popular, right-wing bugaboo, is moving on from CRT to DEI:
D.E.I. stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a concept that goes far beyond just the racial prism of critical race theory, and moves into the worlds of ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age and class.
What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Certain Americans, anyway.
Republican pols like Representative Chip Roy of Texas and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida are among the happiest of Rufo’s culture-war comrades, along with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law limiting D.E.I. in the workplace last April, Rufo likened him to Teddy Roosevelt and praised his “muscular” strategy for combating “corporate malfeasance.” “Conservatives,” he wrote, “need to build on these efforts by developing a comprehensive agenda for pushing back against left-wing ideology in corporate America.”
In fact, Rufo sees Florida as the seeding ground for his censorship, where it can take root and spread, and Texas has already followed suit. Earlier this month, just a few days after DeSantis announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on D.E.I., the office of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, issued a memo warning state agency and public university leaders that the use of D.E.I. in hiring was illegal.
The backlash has moved from public schools to private boardrooms. The South may not rise again, but if the right gets its way, patriarchal white supremacy will.
This is the New Right’s strategic plan: a relentless push to re-establish and strengthen the straight, cis, patriarchal, white supremacist power structure. And as [Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of CRT’s developers] put it: “This thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish, in a wider, broader battle to make racism unspeakable, and basically to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women, and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”
In fact, every perceived win will only embolden the extremists. The objective is to win the war against progress and to freeze America in a yesteryear image of itself. This is a swing-for-the-fences play. They are seeking to widen the conservative aperture in their quest to suppress and reverse, to promote a universal vision on oppression, to apply uniform pressure.
The demographic handwriting is on the wall. The U.S. Constitution’s slave-era, structural biases notwithstanding, White America has not had full control of the polity or culture for decades. The 50-50 outcomes of many national elections should have been a clue. Conservatives may have hated Bill Clinton, but he was still a white hound dog from Arkansas, if an overeducated one. It was not until Barack Obama’s election that the alarms right-wing pundits had been sounding about whites’ falling political and social potency set conservatives’ hair on fire.
For the last decade and a half, white conservative “patriots” have been mounting their last stand against “created equal.” Not just against racial minorities, but against all marginalized Americans asserting their rights to be and to be free. Crenshaw tells Blow, “I believe that this is the battle for the next century.” White conservatives mean to defend their treasured place atop the social pyramid by putting everyone else back in theirs.
I’m just going to leave that here for you to contemplate. He’s lying. We are not looking at insolvency. The shortfall we are facing is largely because of the big bulge of the baby boom coming on line. It is easily fixed if they will just do what’s necessary to lift the cap.
Mike Pence will never be president. But he is speaking for Republicans, even if they’ve been admonished not to say it out loud as long as Dear Leader is still in charge. They will never stop believing that those programs must be destroyed. It’s fundamental Republican ideology.
Jack Smith subpoenas the spawn and her hubby
Former President Donald J. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have been subpoenaed by the special counsel to testify before a federal grand jury about Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election and his role in a pro-Trump mob’s attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The decision by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to subpoena Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner underscores how deeply into Mr. Trump’s inner circle Mr. Smith is reaching, and is the latest sign that no potential high-level witness is off limits.
The disclosure about the subpoena comes two weeks after it was revealed that Mr. Smith had subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence to testify before the grand jury. Mr. Pence plans to fight the subpoena, invoking his role as the president of the Senate to argue that it violates the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will seek to block Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner from testifying on the grounds of executive privilege, as he has tried with some other witnesses. Both of them served as White House officials in the Trump administration. Mr. Trump declined to try to stop them from testifying before the House special committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack and what led to it.
He knows that Javanka won’t ever truly stab him in the back. They’ll dance around the questions. But the mere fact that Smith subpoenad them rather than requested an interview says that he’s moving right along in this investigation. But I wouldn’t expect too much from these two.
I wonder if anyone’s ever going to investigate Kushner’s massive corruption, selling out the United States foreign policy for billions of dollars. Not holding my breath about that either…
Like so many others, he couldn’t completely do the right thing.
Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time.
Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.
In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat —released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.
His office then compiled an “Election Review Summary” in September that systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties — from state lawmakers to self-styled “election integrity” groups — had presented any evidence to support their claims. Brnovich left office last month without releasing the summary.
That timeline emerges from documents released to The Post this week by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat. She said she considered the taxpayer-funded investigation closed and, earlier this month, notified leaders on Maricopa County’s governing board that they were no longer in the state’s crosshairs.
The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his administration privately disregarded fact-checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence not just in the 2020 vote but in subsequent elections.
The documents — two investigative summaries and a draft letter with edits, totaling 41 pages — are far from an exhaustive record of Brnovich’s investigation. But they fill in details about the sometimes-enigmatic actions of the state’s former top law enforcement officer.
Brnovich did not respond to questions about his conduct of the probe, his decision not to release additional documents or differences between his public statements and his office’s private findings.
Brnovich quickly affirmed then-President Trump’s loss in Arizona in November 2020, angering fellow Republicans. And he went on to resist Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. Yet he flirted with claims of fraud as he courted GOP support over the subsequent two years, trumpeting his interim report on a far-right radio show and saying, “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020.” It was only in the final days before the November 2022 midterm election, several months after Brnovich had lost his Senate primary, that he began to denounce politicians who denied Trump’s defeat, calling them “clowns” engaged in a “giant grift.”
This is what passes for integrity in the GOP these days — only lying a little bit, maybe leaving some stuff out, not completely joining in the fantasies and conspiracies. That makes him a hero? It’s nice that in the final few days before the election he said some things condemning the massive pile of wingnut horseshit in Arizona. But I’m sorry — he gets no medals. He’s still a coward.
And we’re supposed to take him seriously?
Here’s some of what’s keeping the far right up at night.
People are just suddenly dropping dead.
Actually, dying suddenly is something that has always happened to people. But now we know why: It’s the COVID-19 vaccines. They’re killing us. Every sudden death can be used as evidence.
These vaccines, which have saved the lives of more than three million Americans, are being blamed for killing off unknown-but-large numbers of people. Among them: a six-year-old girl in Ohio who died as a result of lifelong health problems including epilepsy, asthma, and respiratory problems. Someone tweeted an image of the kindergartener alongside a syringe. A Facebook user sent a message to her mother, calling her a “murderer” for having gotten the child vaccinated.
Vaccination has also been framed for killing a bull rider who died from a rare disease and an actress who died from a bacterial infection. And it’s been implicated in the near-death of Buffalo Bills superstar Damar Hamlin from a heart stoppage caused by impact.
An online “documentary,” Died Suddenly, contends there’s been a sharp rise in this phenomenon. It shows a series of headlines, one of a young man who died in a car crash in 2017, two years before COVID-19 was even a twinkle in some diabolical scientist’s eye. This film has been viewed more than 20 million times.
Pink-haired Communists are teaching our kids.
Donald Trump, casting about for a viable campaign message, just announced that “public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs” and warned about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids.” Trump pledged to shut down federal money going to promote “critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on to our children.”
The former president has called for giving parents the authority to elect and fire school principals. Meanwhile, one of his likely GOP rivals for the presidency, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has forbidden instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity prior to fourth grade; blocked high schools from teaching a new AP course on African American studies; and signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which bars discussion that might make students feel guilty for historic wrongs because of their race.
Another potential rival, former Vice President Mike Pence, is going after schools that embrace transgender-affirming policies, saying “we cannot stand idly by as the radical left attempts to indoctrinate our children behind parents’ backs.” And everyone agrees on the danger of critical race theory, which Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has helpfully explained is “a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin is not equal to black skin.”
Nailed it.
The country is flooded by a true invasion every single day.
Rep. Greene has pledged to use her new clout as a member of key House committees to crack down on illegal immigration. It’s a longstanding priority of hers: She introduced her signature bill addressing the issue, the Protect America First Act, in early 2021. (Back then, Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred the bill to nine committees, an unusually large number, especially for a bill that was going nowhere. But now her House colleagues might decide it’s ready for prime time.)
Greene’s proposed legislation would impose a four-year moratorium on all immigration, speed up extraditions, cut federal funding to sanctuary cities, finish Trump’s border wall and name it after him, and revoke the Deferred Action on Child Arrivals (DACA)—or, as she called the policy protecting Dreamers in a press release, “Deferred Action on Child Aliens.”
Conspiracy theories had been gaining ground in the GOP before Trump, but after he became…
“When a country is flooded by a true invasion every single day, it’d be a good idea to take a pause and work through the overwhelming amount of unknown people we have in our country,” Greene said. In recent weeks, illegal border crossings have sharply declined—apparently thanks to stronger border enforcement measures adopted by the Biden Administration.
But Rep. Jordan of Ohio, the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says the crisis at the border is raging out of control, and that this is happening on purpose: “I think it’s intentional. I don’t know how anyone with common sense or logic can reach any other conclusion. It seems deliberate, it seems premeditated, it seems intentional.”
Corrupt individuals within federal agencies are working to defeat their political opponents and promote left-wing ideology and government control over our lives.
In his prepared statement at the February 9 inaugural meeting of the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blew the whistle on the mother of all conspiracies. As he explained it, “corrupt individuals within federal agencies are [operating] as vital partners of the leftwing political movement that includes most members of the mainstream media, big tech social media giants, global institutions and foundations, Democrat Party operatives, and elected officials.” Their goal is to “defeat their political opponents and promote leftwing ideology and government control over our lives.”
Johnson said “my eyes began opening” to what is going on when the Obama administration sicced the IRS on Tea Party groups; then over its kid-glove treatment of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server; then “the most destructive political dirty trick in U.S. history: the creation and promotion of the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative.” Add in Hunter Biden’s laptop, the harsh treatment of January 6th insurrectionists, the refusal of federal authorities to acknowledge “the significant injuries caused by the COVID vaccines,” the fact that the World Health Organization “has been captured by the Chinese government” and that “global institutions in general have been captured by the left,” all topped off with Johnson’s claim that he had “barely scratched the surface in describing the complexity, power, and destructive nature of the forces we face,” and it’s clear: The select committee has its work cut out.
The radical left is setting our money on fire and teaching our children to hate each other.
In her response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, newly installed Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly a spokesperson for President Donald Trump, said this about the man who now occupies the Oval Office:
He’s the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is. In the radical left’s America, Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race, but not to love one another or our great country. Whether Joe Biden believes this madness or is simply too weak to resist it, his administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left. The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.
Sanders, in this dichotomy, sees herself as being on the side of normal.
Everything Joe Biden does is wrong, as balloon saga shows.
When the president did not immediately shoot down a giant Chinese spy balloon that had entered U.S. airspace, Republicans in Congress howled with outrage. “Would Trump have let China fly a spy balloon over our country?” demanded Rep. Jordan on February 3. (Actually, it turns out, similar balloon incursions occurred when Trump was president but went undetected.)
Two days later, after the balloon was shot down on Biden’s orders—he waited to authorize the strike until it no longer posed a danger of raining deadly debris over American homes—Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas clucked that the president “allowed a full week for the Chinese to conduct spying operations over the United States” before taking action, which “telegraphed weakness” to the Chinese government.
On Feb. 14, after three more objects flying over North America were blasted from the skies, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas declared that Biden “owes the American people an explanation” and “should speak on camera directly to the American people.” Two days later, the president did just that, explaining that the objects likely had nothing to do with China. GOP lawmakers were still upset. Sen. Steve Daines of Montana said in response to the speech, “President Biden continues to lead from behind” and “is not providing for the safety and security of the American people.”
Others on the right ripped the president’s rashness and waste of good missiles for shooting down the objects, one of which may have belonged to the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobby club in Illinois.
“Joe [Biden] shot a $12 balloon with a half-million-dollar missile,” exclaimed Jesse Watters on his Fox News show. Biden, he said, “sent a clear message to the Bottleneck Balloon Brigade: The United States will not rest until every father/son balloon hobbyist has their $12 helium balloon violently removed from Northern American airspace.” He added, “‘No more enjoying hobbies on my watch,’ said Joe Biden.”
Woke culture is turning M&M characters into lesbians.
A year ago, Fox News host Tucker Carlson reacted indignantly to changes in candy packaging in which the brown M&M lost her stilettos to kitten heels while the Green M&M traded her go-go boots for white sneakers, as part of an effort to promote “inclusivity” and keep up with current trends. Carlson said it made the characters “less sexy” and warned his audience: “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”
Now the threat is back, with a new ad showing the gals and their footwear. “Woke M&M’s have returned,” Carlson told his audience. “The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian, maybe?”—an apparent reference to a 2015 viral tweet from the official M&M’s account that showed Green and Brown holding hands.
Attentiveness to such topics—and not, say, proof positive that Fox News hosts actively conspired to lie to their audience about the 2020 election to maintain market share—is what passes for normal among MAGA Republicans. As opposed to crazy.
This is at the heart of the DeSantis craze — he’s cynically tapping into this lunacy and using the power of the state to promote it.
Trump is bringing his spectacle to Palestine Ohio today.
A Fox Business report indicated that former President Donald Trump would treat residents of East Palestine, Ohio to something “like a campaign rally” while they are suffering from a noxious train derailment.
Before Trump’s Wednesday visit, Fox Business host Stuart Varney and Fox News reporter Mike Tobin reflected on the former president’s plans.
“He’s going to put on a big show,” Varney revealed. “It’s going to be like a campaign rally.”
“It probably will be something like that,” Tobin agreed. “And you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that he will make the statement that he would have handled it better.”
Tobin revealed schools were closed in the town due to security for Trump’s visit.
“The mayor of this town says he doesn’t want this to become a political circus, and frankly, Stuart, it’s a little late for that,” the reporter concluded.
Oh, I have a sneaking feeling that the mayor will welcome this political circus:
There’s nothing Biden can do for these people for which they will thank him. Unlike Trump who constantly threatened to withhold federal aid to California in natural disasters because we didn’t vote for him, Biden won’t do that. The aide will arrive regardless. And these folks will never believe that Trump is the one who reversed needed rail safety regulations and is far more responsible for this failure than Biden. This mayor clearly has Fox news brain rot.
I wonder how the large Ohio Ukrainian population thinks, though? Do any of these people care?