YouTube temporarily suspends, demonetizes Dan Bongino's channel
YouTube took action against conservative commentator Dan Bongino’s channel Friday, suspending it for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy and demonetizing it for at least 30 days.
The weeklong posting suspension stems from a video where Bongino said that masks are “useless” in stopping the spread of the disease.
YouTube’s COVID-19 policy specifically prohibits content denying the effectiveness of wearing masks, which the vast majority of the scientific community agrees reduces the risk of infection.
The video was Bongino’s first “strike” under the policy, resulting in a one-week suspension from posting.
If the Bongino account violates the policy again within a 90-day window, a two-week suspension would be applied. If a third violation were accrued in the same timeframe, the channel would be permanently removed.
YouTube also removed Bongino’s channel from its Partner Program, which allows users to monetize their content through advertising, on Friday for “repeatedly violating” guidelines on harmful and dangerous acts. A company spokesperson declined to specify what remark triggered the removal from the program.
Bongino, who currently hosts shows on Fox News and Fox Nation, will be able to reapply for the program in 30 days if the underlying issues that led to the removal are addressed.
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It's almost like these lowlifes want to prolong the COVID agony for their shee..., er, listeners.
Maybe Bongino should start a talk show on OAN? Oh, right....
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...Originally posted by Reuters
'What a moron': Dr. Anthony Fauci on Senator Roger Marshall after heated exchange
11 January 2022
After a heated exchange with Republican Senator Roger Marshall over Dr. Anthony Fauci's financial disclosures, the top U.S. infectious disease official could be heard muttering ‘what a moron’ on a hot mic.
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Originally posted by CNN
McCarthy says he will kick Dems off committees if GOP takes House
11 January 2022
California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy vowed during an interview with Breitbart to remove some Democrats from their committee appointments if the GOP takes control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections.
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Op-Ed: Today's right-wing conspiracy theory mentality can be traced back to the John Birch Society
If you’re looking for the roots of today’s bizarre conspiracy-and-anger-driven politics, you need to look further back than the presidency of Donald Trump or even the rise of social media or talk radio — back to the accusatory, inflammatory, wild-eyed rhetoric of the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 1970s.
It’s beginning to fade into history, but the John Birch Society was once the most formidable anticommunist organization of the Cold War era. Named for an American army captain killed by Chinese communists, it was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a North Carolina-born candy magnate. (His company created the caramel “Sugar Daddy” on a stick.) Most Americans learned of the society after March 20, 1961, when it was widely reported that Welch had called former President Eisenhower a communist.
It was an outrageous and ludicrous assertion, but Welch was just getting started in weaving his tapestry of paranoia. He saw communist conspiracies lurking in colleges, high schools and the government.
Fluoride was being used to enervate Americans in advance of the coming communist occupation, he said.
Welch also called the civil rights movement a communist conspiracy.
Welch’s conspiracies fed postwar America’s growing suspicion of government and its belief in cover-ups in high places. He had particular influence in California, which played an outsize role in the growth of the John Birch Society.
With epicenters in Orange County and Los Angeles, California’s “Birchers” were instrumental in helping to ensure Richard Nixon’s gubernatorial loss in 1962, Barry Goldwater’s Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial victory in 1966. Several California members of Congress were Birchers, including Reps. Edgar Hiestand and John Rousselot, who both represented parts of Los Angeles County.
As the years passed, Welch’s theories grew wilder. He eventually concluded that communism was just another name for the conspiracy begun by the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776. He also said that the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers (a group that sought to foster dialogue between Europe and North America) were the puppet masters of U.S. foreign and economic interests. The society also called for the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations and for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
In the 1970s, the John Birch Society became even more influential. Despite a widespread belief that the “responsible” right of William F. Buckley had purged the conservative movement of the Birchers, Welch was never excommunicated. His style of American conservatism remained potent.
In those years, Welch broadened the society’s focus by opposing abortion, high taxation and sex education — issues that propelled the Reagan revolution. Bircher Lewis Uhler was instrumental in passing Proposition 13 to reduce California’s property taxes in 1978.
All the while, Welch continued to press his extreme theories.
In the 1970s, Americans began receiving some confirmation that perhaps conspiracies weren’t really as rare and nutty as they seemed. In 1973 and 1974, Watergate demonstrated that a president could secretly abuse his constitutional authority. Americans learned that more government officials had spied for the Soviet Union and had worked with mobsters in an unsuccessful effort to kill a foreign head of state. The CIA turned out to have conducted LSD experiments on Americans. After a while, anything seemed plausible. Over the years that followed, the number of people who said they trusted the government plummeted.
Welch is important today because, beginning in the 1980s and continuing on, his world has become ours. The depth of his influence on the transformation of the Republican Party — and therefore on America — has never been fully appreciated. His style of politics remained extremely potent after his death in 1985.
Reagan espoused conspiracy theories, such as his claim that Gerald Ford staged assassination attempts against himself to win sympathy votes. In the 1990s, partisanship became more central, ideology more crucial. On the radical fringe of the far right, private militia members armed themselves to the teeth. Both major parties, they claimed, wanted to end American sovereignty. After the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco in 1992 and 1993, the militia movement grew even more conspiracy-focused.
It was only a few years later, in 1996, that Alex Jones started his conspiratorial radio show “The Final Edition.” Jones asserted that the government had planned the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 and had plotted to murder the Branch Davidians in Waco. Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton were in a similar vein. Hillary covered up the murder of Vince Foster, Limbaugh suggested.
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Jones declared that “all terrorism that we’ve looked at, from the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City to Waco, has been government actions.” By 2006, at least one-third of Americans thought their government had either planned the attacks of 9/11 or allowed them to happen. And conspiracy theories began to thrive on new social media sites: Facebook. YouTube. Twitter. Facts went unchecked.
Tea party members argued that a conspiracy of globalists had caused the economic downturn. In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted “an extremely credible source ... told me @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” By 2015, Trump was running for president.
And so it continues. Welch-like logic and Welch-like rhetoric have taken over much of the right with false myths that tempt the weak mind. More than two-thirds of Republicans still don’t believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which holds that Democrats in the so-called Deep State undermined Trump to cover up their child-sex racket — has at least one adherent in Congress.
Millions of Americans won’t take vaccines to prevent COVID-19 because they don’t trust science.
Today, all of us are stuck on the roller coaster of Robert Welch’s political imagination, and we can’t get off.
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Opinion: Donald Trump Is Not Going To Prison
If Donald Trump runs for president again in 2024, Robert Palmer, a 54-year-old Florida man, will still be in prison for assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officers during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Palmer, who was sentenced to 63 months, has received the longest sentence of the more than 150 defendants who have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the storming of the U.S. Capitol. He was just one of the hundreds of Trump supporters who rushed law enforcement in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election.
After losing to Democrat Joe Biden in November 2020, Trump spent weeks promoting the lie that the election was stolen from him, culminating in the attack the following January.
Trump incited the riot that left five people dead and dozens of law enforcement officers injured. But while countless people are facing consequences for what they did that day, Trump still hasn’t.
Instead, in a darkly ironic twist, Palmer and countless others will watch behind bars should Trump launch his next presidential bid.
The punishments for the insurrection have ranged widely. Texas real estate agent Jenna Ryan, who famously said she “definitely” wasn’t going to jail because she has blond hair and white skin, received 60 days. Paul Hodgkins, a Floridian, was sentenced to eight months in prison for entering the Senate chamber. Hundreds of people have been charged with various crimes, so there are more sentences for defendants on the way. But one year later, it’s becoming increasingly likely that Trump will not be held accountable.
I’ve heard this question from Democrats in my life and seen tweets from large public interest groups: Why isn’t Donald Trump in prison?
The answer is simple: People like him rarely end up behind bars.
As his supporters languish, incarcerated, Trump’s inner circle will continue plotting to finish destroying what’s left of American democracy.
It seems as if the worst thing that’s happened to Trump as a result of the insurrection is that he’s been banned from Twitter. Although it’s still early, Trump is still leading among Republicans as a choice for the 2024 presidential nominee. And, more important, according to an AP/NORC poll, only 30% of Republicans believe the U.S. Capitol insurrection was “somewhat” violent, despite the multitude of videos depicting just how much violence occurred that day. Republican lawmakers are either busy promoting the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, keeping quiet out of a desire to keep their office or, in the case of Rep. Liz Cheney, being ostracized for embracing reality. Are these the conditions under which Trump is supposed to face consequences for his actions?
Here’s how the criminal justice system really functions in this country. Marginalized people, such as people of color, poor people, and religious and gender minorities, are more likely to be swept up in the system. Black people are more likely to receive life in prison and death sentences. Those with fewer resources often face harsher punishments due to insufficient counsel. Meanwhile, whiter and wealthier people often receive more lenient sentences if they are charged at all.
Many of the people facing charges in the insurrection are awaiting their day in court at the federal jail in the District of Columbia, known for its harsh conditions. Trump supporters see the insurrectionists as political prisoners, but nonetheless they don’t seem too concerned about the conditions under which they are held. Aside from some camera-ready moments from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), when they inexplicably linked horrific conditions of the jail to critical race theory, conservatives have paid scant attention to their actual state of incarceration. Instead, the GOP machine is working to change voting laws to circumvent that pesky problem of not having enough votes to win an election outright.
During his inauguration speech, President Joe Biden vowed to combat right-wing extremism, music to the ears of the people who had just witnessed the horror of Jan. 6. But, of course, that’s easier said than done. Congress, for its part, has been engaged in an investigation of the insurrection, and though many more details have been brought to light, it’s unlikely to end in the imprisonment of the former president.
The issue at hand is that there isn’t a precedent for this type of crisis. Before Trump, every outgoing president graciously accepted a loss and peacefully handed over power because that was simply the norm; it’s what every president did before him. As a result, we’re ill-equipped to handle norm-breakers. I guess the Founding Fathers, beloved as they are to many in the U.S., forgot to write into the Constitution what to do when a president incites an insurrection.
It’s important to remember that Trump going to prison would be a long way from solving the country’s current problem. A prison sentence may not even stop him from running for president, and there are plenty of Trumps-in-training waiting in the wings who would be more than thrilled to carry the mantle.
The damage he and his ilk wrought on our democracy is here to stay. It’s better to embrace the obvious. Donald Trump is not going to prison. But at least he can’t tweet.
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All he says about vaccines are: A talk to your doctor and make the best decision for you about them.
B: he got vaxxed and boosted (cancer survivor) and it did not work and he ended up with a breakthrough case serious enough to require monoclonal antibody treatment.
He absolutely believes in building out a completely seperate infrastructure away from liberals. Everything from commenting on the difference in U-Haul rates going to and away from Florida and Texas, to getting away from the censorious Left on social media. He owns/ is an owner in Rumble, Locals and Parker iirc. He thinks conservatives should completely decent of any involvement with liberal states or instatutional and let them stew in their own progressive juices. He tells conservatives to pack up and move to red states and tells liberals to stay out in the messes they made.
He detests political violence. He calls it a redline you cannot take back ( I agree).
He absolutely scorches Leftist media 5x a week on radio over the bias, misinformation and lies. However unlike say Hannity who often doesn't have any proof to his wilder claims. Dan backs every assertion up. He says, "I show you the receipts", and tells his listeners to go look for themselves.
His pacing is aggressive, but if that's stichk or bring a kid from the Bronx I don't know.Leave a comment:
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'Slow-motion insurrection': How GOP seizes election power
In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans — well-known politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block then-President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.
In the year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time.
In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.
They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.
All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support. Trump has praised the Jan. 6 rioters and backed primaries aimed at purging lawmakers who have crossed him. Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.
The result, experts say, is that another baseless challenge to an election has become more likely, not less.
“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”
American democracy has been flawed and manipulated by both parties since its inception. Millions of Americans — Black people, women, Native Americans and others — have been excluded from the process. Both Republicans and Democrats have written laws rigging the rules in their favor.
This time, experts argue, is different: Never in the country's modern history has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.
Republicans who sound alarms are struggling to be heard by their own party. GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, members of a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, are often dismissed as party apostates. Others have cast the election denialism as little more than a distraction.
But some local officials, the people closest to the process and its fragility, are pleading for change. At a recent news conference in Wisconsin, Kathleen Bernier, a GOP state senator and former elections clerk, denounced her party’s efforts to seize control of the election process.
“These made up things that people do to jazz up the base is just despicable and I don’t believe any elected legislator should play that game,” said Bernier.
LOCAL CONTROL
Bernier’s view is not shared by the majority of the Republicans who control the state Legislature in Wisconsin, one of a handful of states that Biden carried but Trump wrongly claims he won. Early in 2021, Wisconsin Republicans ordered their Legislative Audit Bureau to review the 2020 election. That review found no significant fraud. Last month, an investigation by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty came to the same conclusion.
Still, many Republicans are convinced that something went wrong. They point to how the nonpartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission — which the GOP-led Legislature and then-Republican governor created eight years ago to run the state’s elections — changed guidance for local elections officers to make voting easier during the pandemic.
That's led to a struggle for control of elections between the state Legislature and the commission.
“We feel we need to get this straight for people to believe we have integrity,” said GOP Sen. Alberta Darling, who represents the conservative suburbs north of Milwaukee. “We’re not just trying to change the election with Trump. We’re trying to dig into the next election and change irregularities.”
Republicans are also remaking the way elections are run in other states. In Georgia, an election bill signed this year by the GOP governor gave the Republican-controlled General Assembly new powers over the state board of elections, which controls its local counterparts.
The law is being used to launch a review of operations in solidly-Democratic Fulton County, home to most of Atlanta, which could lead to a state takeover. The legislature also passed measures allowing local officials to remove Democrats from election boards in six other counties.
In Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislature is undertaking a review of the presidential election, subpoenaing voter information that Democrats contend is an unprecedented intrusion into voter privacy. Meanwhile, Trump supporters are signing up for local election jobs in droves. One pastor who attended the Jan. 6 rally in the nation's capital recently won a race to become an election judge overseeing voting in a rural part of Lancaster County.
In Michigan, the GOP has focused on the state’s county boards of canvassers. The little-known committees’ power was briefly in the spotlight in November of 2020, when Trump urged the two Republican members of the board overseeing Wayne County, home to Democratic-bastion Detroit, to vote to block certification of the election.
After one of the Republican members defied Trump, local Republicans replaced her with Robert Boyd, who told The Detroit Free Press that he would not have certified Biden’s win last year.
Boyd did not return a call for comment.
A similar swap — replacing a traditional Republican with one who parroted Trump's election lies — occurred in Macomb County, the state’s third most populous county.
The Detroit News in October reported that Republicans had replaced their members on boards of canvassers in eight of Michigan's 11 most populous counties
Michigan officials say that if boards of canvassers don’t certify an election they can be sued and compelled to do so. Still, that process could cause chaos and be used as a rallying cry behind election disputes.
“They’re laying the groundwork for a slow-motion insurrection,” said Mark Brewer, an election lawyer and former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.
The state’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, warned: “The movement to cast doubt on the 2020 election has now turned their eyes ... to changing the people who were in positions of authority and protected 2020.”
TRUMP’S RETRIBUTION
That includes Benson.
Multiple Republicans have lined up to challenge her, including Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who alleged fraud in the 2020 elections and contended that the Jan. 6 attackers were actually antifa activists trying to frame Trump supporters.
Trump has been clear about his intentions: He is seeking to oust statewide officials who stood in his way and replace them with allies.
“We have secretary of states that did not do the right thing for the American people,” Trump, who has endorsed Karamo, told The Associated Press this month.
The most prominent Trump push is in Georgia, where the former president is backing U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who voted against Biden's Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, in a primary race against the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. He rejected Trump's pleas to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner.
Trump also encouraged former U.S. Sen. David Perdue to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp in the GOP primary. Kemp turned down Trump's entreaties to declare him the victor in the 2020 election.
In October, Jason Shepherd stepped down as chair of the Cobb County GOP after the group censured Kemp. “It’s shortsighted. They’re not contemplating the effects of this down the line,” Shepherd said in an interview. “They want their pound of flesh from Brian Kemp because Brian Kemp followed the law.”
In Nevada, multiple lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden's victory were thrown out by judges. A suit aimed at overturning his congressional loss was filed by Jim Marchant, a former GOP state lawmaker now running to be secretary of state, and it too was dismissed. The current Republican secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, who is term limited, found there was no significant fraud in the contests.
Marchant said he's not just seeking to become a Trump enabler, though he was endorsed by Trump in his congressional bid. “I've been fighting this since before he came along,” Marchant said of Trump. “All we want is fair and transparent elections.”
In Pennsylvania, Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who organized buses of Trump supporters for Trump's rally near the White House on Jan. 6, has signaled he’s running for governor. In Arizona, state Rep. Mark Finchem's bid to be secretary of state has unnerved many Republicans, given that he hosted a daylong hearing in November 2020 that featured Trump adviser Rudolph Giuliani. Former news anchor Kari Lake, who repeats Trump's election falsehoods, is running to succeed Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who stood up to Trump's election-year pressure and is barred from another term.
Elsewhere in Arizona, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who defended his office against the conspiratorial election review, has started a political committee to provide financial support to Republicans who tell the truth about the election. But he's realistic about the persistence of the myth of a stolen election within his party's base.
“Right now,” Richer said, “the incentive structure seems to be strongly in favor of doing the wrong thing.”
HIGH STAKES RACES FOR GOVERNOR
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors have been a major impediment to the GOP's effort to overhaul elections. Most significantly, they have vetoed new rules that Democrats argue are aimed at making it harder for people of color to vote.
Governors have a significant role in U.S. elections: They certify the winners in their states, clearing way for the appointment of Electoral College members. That raises fears that Trump-friendly governors could try to certify him — if he were to run in 2024 and be the GOP nominee — as the winner of their state's electoral votes regardless of the vote count.
Additionally, some Republicans argue that state legislatures can name their own electors regardless of what the vote tally says.
But Democrats have had little success in laying out the stakes in these races. It's difficult for voters to believe the system could be vulnerable, said Daniel Squadron of The States Project, a Democratic group that tries to win state legislatures.
“The most motivated voters in America today are those who think the 2020 election was stolen,” he said. “Acknowledging this is afoot requires such a leap from any core American value system that any of us have lived through.”
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Trump’s GOP Has Five Simple Tricks for Promoting Antisemitism
Why does America tolerate the GOP’s blatant antisemitism?
I again asked this question after listening to former President Trump’s unabashed antisemitism on fully display during an interview with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid. Here, Trump invoked the hateful “dual loyalty” trope, saying, “I’ll tell you, the Evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country,” and complaining that The New York Times hates Israel in the same breath that he said the newspaper is run by Jews. He capped things off by reminiscing about when “Israel had absolute power over Congress.”
Trump had previously assured people that he’s “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.” Of course, he also tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton’s face on top of a pile of cash next to the Star of David, “joked” that his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, is “more loyal to Israel than the United States,” and complained that American Jews who vote for Democrats show “great disloyalty” to Israel.
Maybe it’s just “economic anxiety”? Or maybe Trump’s hateful comments reflect a modern conservative movement that has gradually mainstreamed antisemitic conspiracies that create and inspire violent terrorists targeting Jews, yes, but also Muslims, immigrants of color and Black people.
We’re all “invaders” according to the vicious replacement theory spewed almost nightly on Tucker Carlson’s top-rated Fox News show without any pushback from corporate sponsors or media institutions. GOP elected officials, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who blamed Jews for using space lasers to start wildfires, and Paul Gosar, who is the friend of white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, openly endorse the theory as well. It’s the cornerstone of the QAnon movement, a national security threat, whose supporters are now running for office as Republicans.
This is just a lousy remake of the Elders of the Protocols of Zion, a debunked conspiracy that emerged from Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and claimed a small, international cabal of sinister Jews were using their wealth and connections to gain control of and weaken Western civilization. In 2021, it’s called “the deep state,” with Jews supposedly using immigrants of color, Muslims, feminists, and LGBTQ groups as their pawns in a plot to gain control of and weaken Western civilization by replacing white people, especially men, in Europe and America.
They’ve even updated the blood libel conspiracy for the modern era. The conservatives aligned with QAnon believe liberals are part of an international cabal of sex traffickers who bear the “mark of the beast,” and kidnap, molest and kill children. Asked if he would disavow QAnon, and thus many of his supporters, Trump infamously said he didn’t know enough to do so, adding, “What I do hear about it, they are very strongly against pedophilia.”
And so these conspiracies persist and flourish, radicalizing the likes of Ashili Babbitt, who showed up at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 committed to unleashing “the storm,” a QAnon codeword for violence, before being shot and killed by a Capitol police officer. They radicalized the man who came carrying an automatic weapon to a Washington DC pizzeria convinced he was going to find children kidnapped and enslaved by Hillary Clinton in its basement. The supposed “great replacement” radicalized the man who shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 including Holocaust survivors because, he said, the Jews were bringing in “the invaders.”
Despite all this evidence of blatant antisemitism, Republicans nonetheless have been able to avoid being labeled antisemitic despite bathing in it nearly every day though a simple five-step plan: 1) Deny, 2) Project, 3) Deflect — those first three steps, by the way, are straight out of Roger Stone’s “rules” to “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack” — 4) Praise Israel, and 5) Attack Ilhan Omar.
These Republicans are following Trump’s lead. Recall, Trump also claimed he’s the least racist person in the world despite promoting the Birther conspiracy, running a campaign fueled by Islamophobia and anti-Mexican bigotry, telling four Congresswomen of color to “go back, where you came from” and lamenting the arrival of Black and brown immigrants from “shithole countries.” Republicans realized this strategy, often employed by 4-year-olds, works like gangbusters in an overwhelmed and timid media ecosystem where most journalists lack the courage and skills to push back and challenge power. The rare time there’s outrage, you just “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon advises, and the news cycle moves on, unable to keep up with all the daily outrages any one of which would have made Barack Obama a one-term president.
Second, the GOP has perfected projection, where they pivot and blame Democrats for all their sins and vile deeds. Just last week, GOP Rep. Scott Perry, who has been identified as one of Trump’s main coup minions, accused Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of being an antisemite and terrorist sympathizer. He did this on the heels of the House passing a bill condemning Islamophobia and Reps. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene proudly doubling down on their anti-Muslim bigotry, which resulted in death threats against Omar. However, Perry has yet to condemn Gosar for his antisemitism or asked Matt Gaetz why he invited a Holocaust denier to attend the State of the Union.
Third, the GOP is able to deflect criticisms of antisemitism by claiming that they’re merely asking questions, joking, or speaking out against “the globalists” and “elites” seeking to crush the common man on behalf of the “deep state,” sometimes with a nod toward George Soros thrown in. It’s the same way “urban crime” means “violent Black people,” and “welfare queen” means “lazy Black woman abusing the system.” When that fails, they say they’re being politically incorrect and asking the hard questions necessary to protect our country, its values and its demographics from “those” seeking to wish us harm.
Fourth, Republicans have loudly emerged as the biggest defenders of Israel and accuse anyone, including Jews and especially progressives, who is critical of Israel’s policies of being antisemitic. But in fact, Republicans are really into Israel but they’re just not into Jews. In fact, Jews are just used as a convenient political and religious pawn to placate their real base, white Evangelical Christians, who believe Jews must control the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, as one of the necessary pre-conditions of the Second Coming. Unfortunately, Israel has been successfully used as a wedge to split up natural alliances between some Jewish, Muslim and POC communities in America, who need to unite immediately to confront the rising tide and political power of white supremacists, who are coming after all of us, and who use antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracies to gain recruits to their sick cause.
Finally, Republicans rely on the double standards that exist in American political, media and cultural institutions, including among all too many Democrats, when it comes to progressive women of color, as evidenced by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. If you doubt this, I recommend you play the game: “What would happen if Ilhan Omar said this?” I’ll start. What would happen if Ilhan Omar openly called for the destruction of one of Jerusalem’s holiest sites, calling it an ”abomination”? She’d be thrown under the bus by Sen. Chuck Schumer, who’d reverse the bus and run over again.
But that’s exactly what Paul Gosar said last week with the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it wasn’t even headline news. It’s a statement so inflammatory and dangerous, with the potential to inspire actual violence, that even the most hard-right politicians in Israel never say it out loud. Yet, here we are, still talking about Omar’s “controversial” tweets, but not a word on Gosar, who has yet to be condemned by GOP leadership for that, or his hateful tweet against AOC, or his keynote speech at a white nationalist conference.
Everyone has moved on from Trump’s latest antisemitic outburst because the zone is indeed flooded with shit, but our communities can’t afford to brush it off, laugh, refer to it as a “trip up,” or be complacent. These hateful words, mainstreamed, praised and promoted by our elected officials, are a green light for extremists to “stand back and stand by” as they prepare to unleash violence against fellow Americans.
The GOP’s antisemitism is fuel for their fire, and silence and apathy makes people into complicit co-arsonists.
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The MAGA Perversion of Patriotism
Making sense of the rise of the citizen’s arrest.
Diane Vargo may look like a fashion model, but she isn’t. For eight years, she’s been the principal of Mesquite Elementary School about 20 miles south of Tucson. It seems like an impressive school. Students from kindergarten through fifth grade can study in English or in a Chinese immersion program. The school has won awards. All seems normal, but as in so many places in 2021, it’s not.
In September, after a student who tested positive for COVID-19 was told he had to quarantine for several days, the boy’s father barged into the principal’s office and demanded that the kid be allowed back into school immediately. “I didn’t come here to challenge you, I came here to tell you this is not going to happen.” After the aggressive parent refused to leave, Vargo and her assistant attempted to get help, and were even more alarmed when the intruder told her that others were on their way, warning, “If you keep doing this, we’re going to have a big problem.” Two other men did arrive within a few minutes, one carrying military-style zip ties. They told Vargo that they were going to make a “citizens’ arrest.”
As it happens, the intruders were the ones arrested—by the police. Vargo has continued to receive threatening messages, such as an email reading: “Hi. Next time it will be a barrel pointed at your Nazi face.”
Journalism traditionally treats the two parties as equals, but Republicans are fabricating an alternate reality and sabo...
The same month, in Michigan, a meeting of the Barry-Eaton District Board of Health was disrupted when a man threatened to make a citizen’s arrest of a county health official after a school mask mandate was announced. That was mild compared with the death threats Genesee County officials have received over masks. And that, in turn, was less serious than what happened in Kent County, where someone tried to run a health official off the road.
Stories of threats and violence aimed at ordinary Americans who are simply serving on school boards, supervising elections, holding public office, opening a mobile vaccine clinic, or having the effrontery to be elected as secretary of state are not new. It’s a mashup of pandemic-induced mania, social media misinformation, Trump-incited disinhibition, and something in the water.
Every now and then, usually through the vehicle of tort law, someone is held accountable, most recently in the case involving the notorious liars at Gateway Pundit. The site is being sued by two election workers, mother and daughter, after Gateway Pundit identified them as the election officials in Fulton County, Georgia who supposedly pulled fraudulent ballots out of suitcases. These malicious lies, according to the pleading, “devastated” their reputations and “instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.” One went into hiding. And just in time. Crowds with bullhorns showed up at their homes.
The citizen’s arrest has become a theme running through some of the most sinister of the recent plots. It has a long pedigree, originating in English common law. In the U.S., it has been codified in a number of ways by states. Some require that a bystander actually witness a felony in progress to undertake a citizen’s arrest. Others forbid it except in certain situations (such as a shopkeeper holding an armed robber until police arrive). Some critics, like Professor Ira Robbins, have argued that these laws are harmful, giving rise to racial profiling and other harms. The Ahmaud Arbery case would seem to vindicate his warnings
But the invocation of the citizen’s arrest as an excuse for political violence is new. Trump set this table with his “lock her up” chants in 2016, his accusations of treason against New York Times guest editorialists, the FBI, and anyone else who damaged his fragile psyche. His 2019 Twitter tantrum at Representative Adam Schiff was the gold standard: “I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason” he tweeted on a Sunday. He followed up the next morning with one saying, “Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President. . .Arrest for Treason?”
Back in 2020, when a gang of 14 right-wing nuts, drunk on Trump incitement, plotted to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, they claimed that they were actually effecting a “citizen’s arrest.” In a normal world, such a claim would be instantly dismissed as risible. But we’re not in that world. We’re in the world where the sheriff of Barry County, Dar Leaf, who had appeared at the “Michigan Patriot Rally” with at least one of the suspects, seemed to think it had merit. “It’s just a charge, and they say a ‘plot to kidnap’ and you got to remember that,” Leaf told a local Fox affiliate. “Are they trying to kidnap? Because a lot of people are angry with the governor, and they want her arrested. So are they trying to arrest or was it a kidnap attempt?”
“Lots of people are angry with the governor,” he said. And then, as if the next words flowed logically, he added “and they want her arrested.” Right, because when we dislike the policies of duly elected officials, we arrest them?
The threats are proliferating. The Washington Post reported that lawmakers were subjected to 3900 threats in 2017. By 2020 that had more than doubled to 8600, and in 2021 the rate rose even faster. As Tim Alberta noted in his Atlantic profile of Representative Peter Meijer, the fear factor in Republican politics has dramatically changed. Without doubt, Republicans displayed a total lack of political courage in dealing with Trump from 2015 to the present. But because they didn’t stand up to him when the consequences would have been merely political, they/we now face a very different climate. Now they must fear for their safety and for that of their families. Describing a colleague who said he couldn’t vote to certify the 2020 election, Meijer said, “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of. If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”
Many, perhaps most, of the members of the January 6 mob didn’t conceive of themselves as criminals or coup plotters (in contrast to those in the Oval Office). They thought they were vindicating democracy, not destroying it. As they were storming the Capitol, they were exchanging text and audio messages that reflected the treason talk Trump had normalized. One Army veteran involved in the attack said “We have about 30-40 of us. We are sticking together and sticking to the plan,” according to court documents. Another responded: “You are executing a citizen’s arrest. Arrest this assembly, we have probable cause for acts of treason, election fraud.”
It’s not enough to see these people as revolutionaries or criminals or dupes. Some may be all of those things, but there is a substrate of perverted patriotism here. The frequent invocation of the citizens’ arrest signifies a wish for legitimacy. They yearn to be responsible citizens, upholding the law and the Constitution and the duties of the individual. They have been corrupted, but that’s all the more reason for the rest of the American people to assert their uncorrupted patriotism more boldly. They must get active and defend the election workers, health care workers, school board members, journalists, politicians, secretaries of state, and anyone else who is being intimidated, hounded, or abused by the mob. If patriotism animates only the worst among us, we are lost.
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Help Desk Software has made leaps and bounds in the last 8 years. Our last helpdesk was considered state of the art when we rolled it out in 2009. By 2016 it was decrepit. And for my current system we moved to Service Now which integrates 29 desperate hardware and software systems into a single help desk system. It occurred seamlessly and allows for real time video chat with customers. This integration has really saved several million dollars and have several other government organizations evaluating it for their use.Originally posted by zraver View Post
Help desk services in 2021-22 are much different than 2013.
Here is their website if interested. It really is a banger. I've been in the help desk business for over 20 years and never experienced anything like this.
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If it works. The government is using multiple systems using multiple computer languages located in multiple locations, some air-gapped designed by multiple different companies for multiple different functions. I remember how bad the Obamacare website rollout went. I smell boondoggle.Originally posted by Albany Rifles View PostLeave a comment:
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Taxpayers will be given new online tools to make filing more easy, and filers will have the option to schedule customer service callbacks instead of waiting on hold.
This alone is a game changer.
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