Think last week was stressful? Brace yourself for next week

The insurrectionists are back-pedaling frantically. Charlie Kirk is claim now that it was “stupid” and “unwise” to invade the capitol, but not criminal. They didn’t mean it! Another benefit of the collapse of Parler (and it’s sloppy coding) is that their plans in the runup have been exposed, and while I can agree that they are “stupid”, the intent is transparent. A sampling:

Is anyone surprised that Amazon and Apple removed all support for Parler?

What I find ominous, though, is that only a few in that sample mention the 6th of January — most were focused on the 20th, the day of the inauguration. Next week. Will the Washington DC police finally take these threats seriously? Will the bad guys try to sneak in by mingling with the inauguration crowds? Are some of the planning acts of terrorism against random people?

Maybe they just want to make sure that the inauguration is even smaller than Trump’s. Mission accomplished, I suspect: I wouldn’t recommend attending.

I sure won’t. That’s the day after my classes begin!

Candace Owens is the right-wing persecution complex on steroids

Candace Owens is suing the “fact checkers” because they keep checking the facts in her videos. How dare they! In the name of free speech, she is therefore suing a couple of news sites to silence them.

Our freedoms are being stripped away. The overlords of Big Tech are determining what Americans can and cannot say, share, like, and post. Support our legal efforts today as we fight back against Facebook’s fact-checkers, confronting those who are suppressing free speech, thought, and expression across our great country.

We have begun pursuing two of Facebook’s fact checkers, Lead Stories & USA Today, for wrongfully “fact checking” posts that I put up earlier this year. Both USA Today & Lead Stories silenced me when I posted a different opinion on Covid – in their minds there is only one opinion: theirs. Censorship of conservatives across the world of social media is rampant and without challenging these alleged “fact checkers” we will all be silenced, disenfranchised and marginalized.

As a result, we have filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Delaware against Lead Stories LLC, a Colorado company & Gannett Satellite Information Network LLC, d/b/a USA Today for malicious publication of false “fact check” articles, wrongfully leveraging their power as Facebook Third Party Fact-Checking partners for the purpose of redirecting web traffic away from me, abusing Section 230 of the Communications Deceny Act and interfering with the commercial enterprises of Candace Owens LLC. Access the lawsuit HERE.

We will be seeing them in Court in 2021.

She made this announcement on multiple social media outlets. On Instagram, she has 3.1 million followers; on Periscope, the video got 1.2 million views; on Facebook, she has 4.5 million followers; she has 2.6 million followers on Twitter. She uses her social media clout to spread misinformation about the coronavirus and BLM and the election. The announcement video itself is a fancy production shot in a professional studio, with what seems to be multiple camerapersons, slick lighting, and a backdrop with glowing letters spelling out “Candace” — there is clearly a lot of money backing her. Yet she claims she is being silenced, disenfranchised and marginalized.

Meanwhile, over here in the real world, here’s the status of my last YouTube video.

Maybe you couldn’t hear me over the sad trombone playing loudly in the background, but who do I sue? I’m clearly being oppressed.

Also, I’m putting myself in great danger here. Notice that I did not link anywhere to any of Candace Owens multiple sites, and I’m telling you that she is a dishonest fraud, and that her message is string of lies — she’s an anti-vaxxer, a Trump enabler, an anti-democratic propagandist, and a shill for the rich. Next thing you know, she’s going to sue me. You are not allowed to criticize Candace Owens or expose her mendacity!

Tacky slime all over the place

The list of awardees of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is kind of a mixed bag already — for every Anthony Fauci there’s an Antonin Scalia, for every Toni Morrison an Irving Kristol, for every Jesse Jackson a James Watson. It’s political, it’s by whim and by credible honor, it’s a mess. It’s nice to see someone you favor get the recognition, but it’s never been anything but a too-freely given token that a president liked you.

Now it’s that much more meaningless. Donald Trump is handing one out to Jim Jordan, the cowardly hack who looked the other way as student athletes were sexually molested, the political leech who is one of the far right hard cases who still insists that Trump won the last election, who even now refuses to admit that there was no “steal”, and whose ambition far exceeds his ability. He’s the perfect Trump apparatchik, in other words.

Boy, Trump is determined to leave a thick layer of slime over everything as he exits, isn’t he?

If Chauncey Gardiner were a malicious, hate-filled bigot…

Maybe nobody else remembers the movie Being There, but I thought of it when I read this account of the president’s day last week. While the Republic was falling into chaos after he had incited a mob to march on the capitol, while his aides and cabinet and senators were desperately trying to get him to respond, what do you think he was doing? He was watching TV.

But as senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who — safely ensconced in the West Wing — was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.

“He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” said one close Trump adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”

Even as he did so, Trump did not move to act. And the message from those around him — that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost — was one to which he was not initially receptive.

This is what he does and has been doing for the last 4 years: TV, golf, rallies to feed his ego, and appointing incompetent sycophants to high office. Oh, and tweet. That’s it. That’s all he has done. If only we’d known we could distract him into total paralysis just by running video of him talking 24 hours a day.

They couldn’t get him to mobilize the national guard. They couldn’t get him to do anything, other than send out a reluctant tweet. He didn’t even want to do that!

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., the group finally persuaded Trump to send a tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he wrote. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

But the Twitter missive was insufficient, and the president had not wanted to include the final instruction to “stay peaceful,” according to one person familiar with the discussions.

He was persuaded to make a short video, which he poisoned with his own views.

“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said in the video, released shortly after 4 p.m. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”

You can tell his sympathies were entirely with the insurrectionists. He wanted a democratic election overthrown, he is openly pandering to a violent mob.

He mustered the energy for another tweet (how pathetic), and this one was even worse, declaring once again that he was the rightful winner of the presidential election, in a landslide no less, and declaring that he was the victim of an injustice. This was not going to quell the violence.

At 6:01 p.m., Trump blasted out yet another tweet, which Twitter quickly deleted and which many in his orbit were particularly furious about, fearing he was further inflaming the still-tense situation.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so ­unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

This is all so revealing, and it tells you what he is going to do after the 20th: he’s going to go on tour, making more false claims and inciting more violence and rage. He fired up the QAnons and Trumpkins and right-wing militias and religious fanatics, and he’s going to keep on doing the same thing, and because he doesn’t have the authority of the office of the president to prop him up, he’s going to have to make increasingly extreme and inflammatory comments…to get back on TV. Because that’s what he really wants.

All this recent talk of healing and reconciliation is going to accomplish nothing as long as they let this walking talking bomb stroll about in public, and as long as enablers like Cruz and Hawley and Graham are allowed in congress.

Corporate talk radio has noticed someone is looking at them

Wait! There’s more good news! Talk radio is feeling the heat!

After months of stoking anger about alleged election fraud, one of America’s largest talk-radio companies has decided on an abrupt change of direction.

Cumulus Media, which employs some of the most popular right-leaning talk-radio hosts in the United States, has told its on-air personalities to stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or else face termination.

This is big. Talk radio has been a pernicious poison in the country for even longer than the internet. Living in the big open spaces of rural America, I’ve done a fair bit of driving, and one thing I learned 40 years ago was to not turn on the car radio, ever. It was all ranting televangelists and Rush Limbaugh raving about ‘Murica and how them liberals are destroying the country, when the real truth is that it was the conservatives doing the damage all along.

Since I don’t listen to it (EVER!), I had to read about who the current stars are. Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino? Jesus.

Also unsurprisingly, it is revealed that these loudmouths have been corporate puppets all along.

“It’s naive not to recognize that a corporate imperative goes into all media,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, which covers talk radio. “Corporations have always called the tune ultimately. Everyone pays attention to the guys at the top and always has.”

Talk-radio hosts, Harrison said, “never expected” their critiques of the election “to get out of hand” in the manner seen Wednesday. Cumulus and other broadcast companies “recognize they’re in the hot seat right now because the national eye is on them,” he said.

Yeah, right. They were only getting out of hand on Wednesday. From my perspective, they’ve been out of hand since the Reagan years.

A little glimmer of satisfaction every morning

After years of watching the news feature right-wing idjits every day, whining about being oppressed while advocating the shooting of black people, screaming “lock her up!” at politicians only slightly less conservative than they are, and posturing stupidly in racist groups and gun-toting militias, it’s nice to wake up to new schadenfreude every morning, as they receive their just deserts.

So, the guy capering about in the “Camp Auschwitz” shirt during the Capitol riots? Identified. His name is Robert Keith Packer, and I hope he’s about to suffer some severe economic stress and is anxiously twitching every time someone knocks on his door. The media are already digging through his arrest record! I thought that only happened with black people who were murdered by the police.

You know who else is twitching behind closed doors right now? The guy who inspired Mr Packer.

In other fantastic news, after months of far right jerks announcing that they were stomping off to join Parler, the new social media site for just fascists, all the rich tech companies like Amazon and Apple and Google abruptly pulled the rug out from under them and withdrew all support, and Parler has gone dark. Oh dear. Now they’re all going to come crawling back to Twitter and Facebook, those media sites they found intolerable, even though they had willingly given free reign to their Big Cheeto to spread propaganda, medical misinformation, and lies right up until next week.

Even better, they’d signed up for Parler even though it required them to hand out sensitive info, like their social security information, and now it’s revealed that all the GPS information for their criminal activities in Washington DC was uploaded with their photos and videos! It turns out that Parler was the world’s ugliest Honey Trap!

I’m going to find something in the news to enjoy every day for the next few weeks, I think. Then I think it will go back to normal as all these awful people get slaps on the wrist and go back home to start fundraising for Trump monuments and fomenting insurrection again.

How to wipe a cocky grin off a Trumpkin’s face

Aww, poor Florida Man (Adam Christian Johnson). After fleeing Washington DC, it looks like he figured he’d shave to avoid recognition…only it didn’t work.

Now the regret and rationalizations are setting in as the FBI tracks these traitors down and arrests them. Actually, the rationalizing started early.

Asked why they were storming the Capitol, one woman became angry, saying they weren’t storming, and that that was a “media narrative.” They were just making their voices heard, she said. Then she continued climbing over a wall.

They hold the presidency, the senate, and the supreme court, and they still think their voices aren’t heard. I’m personally a bit tired of constantly having to hear these shrieking assholes.

It has only taken four years for the media to wake up

Now, at last, in the last few weeks of the Trump presidency, do our newspapers start ringing the alarm bells.

It’s a bit late, gang. All these years you’ve been printing pro-Trump columnists, and only now you notice what kind of monster you’ve created?

Facebook has finally banned Trump, Twitter is still thinking about whether maybe a fascist might be a legit part of their brand.

And Fox News…oh jesus, fuck Fox News.