I think Tom Tomorrow is being sarcastic here.
I tried to think of what we, the resistance, could be sincerely grateful for, and one happy phenomenon is that MAGA seems to be weakening. They’re going through a fair bit of civil strife, Trump is becoming so incoherent that even some of his fans are noticing, I am hoping that he will die of natural causes sometime soon. See, that’s something to be optimistic about.
Aren’t all “influencers” phony to some degree?
Strange news: analyzing the top MAGA users on Twitter reveals that many of them are not American.
The account MAGANationX, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”, is actually operated from eastern Europe, according to the Daily Beast. Another popular profile, IvankaNews, an Ivanka Trump fan account with around one million followers that frequently posts about illegal immigration, Islam and support for Trump, was revealed to be based in Nigeria.
Another user also uncovered several additional cases. Dark Maga, a smaller account with roughly 15,000 followers, is run from Thailand. MAGA Scope, which has more than 51,000 followers, operates out of Nigeria, while MAGA Beacon is based in south Asia.
Users on Reddit also joined the exposé effort, posting examples of accounts that appeared to misrepresent their origins. One Reddit user posted a screenshot of a woman who claimed to live in Texas but instead appeared to be located in Russia, though as of Sunday, the user named in the post appears to have a US location. Many in the comments posted other examples they found.
Bots spreading misinformation and propaganda has been a long-running problem on Twitter, a problem that has been significantly exacerbated since Musk bought it in October 2022 and then renamed it X. Its AI chatbot, Grok, has also been found to frequently make and amplify false claims.
You have to wonder what the incentives are for these influencers. Is it just the account/advertising revenue? Are they subidized by foreign governments, or by American billionaires? Or perhaps they’re just patriotic Eastern Europeans or Nigerians or SE Asians who hate America?
It does say something that these popular MAGA jerks, who have managed to fool a great many Americans, aren’t actually interested in making America great.
We have preprofessional programs here at UMM, which, if we gave a good goddamn about the opinions ot the Trump administration, we’d have to revise, because they’ve deleted one of our popular majors from the category.
Nursing has been excluded as a “professional degree” by the Trump administration as the Department of Education prepares to make massive cuts to providing student loans.
That’s a surprising absence. If you go to the doctor, you’re most likely first going to encounter a nurse. Nurses get all the grunt work in health care, and are an indispensable part of the medical system, yet somehow the Trump Department of Education (I thought he was going to get rid of that?) has decided it’s less worthy, and is reducing nursing students’ eligibility for loans. Maybe this is a first step in making nursing training free? Somehow I doubt that.
Even worse, they have designated certain other fields of study as “professional” and worthy of encouragement. Notice anything peculiar in this list?
I will admit that after the destruction wrought by RFK’s Health and Human Services, many people might feel a need to call on a priest.
Oh, get stuffed with your ludicrous “free speech” whining.
I’ve been on a news fast the last few days — it’s a tool for maintaining my sanity — and I totally missed this unexpected news:
Greene abruptly resigned from Congress, effective 5 January, in a 10-minute video post outlining her unhappiness with Republicans on issues including the public release of the Jeffrey Epstein files in the government’s possession, US financing of foreign conflicts, Trump’s decision to potentially back a candidate against her, and the cost of living and healthcare.
Well, good riddance. Of course she also spoiled her exit by comparing herself to a “battered wife,” which was wildly inappropriated — she’s getting rich off her connections, is featured on the national news all the time, and has more power to influence public policy than most of us. I’m not buying it. At least Ocasio-Cortez sees right through her.
“She’s carefully timing her departure just 1-2 days after her pension kicks in,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement on her Instagram account, and criticized her voting record on healthcare.
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But Ocasio-Cortez said Greene “is saying a lot but her ACTIONS have not backed up the rhetoric. For all her talk, she’s STILL voting with them to gut healthcare … ”Greene voted in the summer for cuts to Medicaid and the reduction of enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, but then in October criticized the ACA cuts as premiums soared.
She’ll be back, unfortunately. She loves the spotlight too much.
They even dress the part of criminal thugs
The police just busted a sex trafficking ring in Bloomington, Minnesota — a dozen men were caught in the act of trying to coerce sex out of a minor. Among the arrested was a revelation: who would be the person most aware of vulnerable individuals? Who is normally protected by the police and is able to freely extort and threaten people? Who would really be a great benefit to a criminal organization, who was used to trampling on the rights of people? You guessed it.
One of the men, he said, is an employee for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who could face federal charges. Hodges said the ICE employee works as an auditor.
“When he was arrested, he said, ‘I’m ICE, boys,'” Hodges said during a press conference Tuesday. “Well, unfortunately for him, we locked him up.”
It is amusing that he thought announcing that he was ICE was a get-out-of-jail-free card. If I had my way we’d just automatically arrest every ICE officer and strip them of their position.
Twenty years ago, Larry Summers gave his infamous speech in which he declared that the shortage of women in science was due to their intellectual deficiencies — women just weren’t smart enough to succeed in science. It was all part of a disturbing favor for genetic determinism that still afflicts science.
Just days before the 17 January national holiday, an African-American professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) charged that racism was a factor in his tenure denial. And on 14 January the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, triggered a national uproar when he said at an academic conference that genes and personal choices may help explain why so few women are leaders in science and engineering fields. Summers later apologized, but his contrite words aren’t expected to end the controversy.
No one denies that science and engineering faculty members at major research universities remain overwhelmingly white and male, despite large numbers of women and minorities at the undergraduate and graduate levels. But why this is the case is an explosive subject. Summers lit the fuse last week at a meeting on women and minorities in science and engineering, put on by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he cited data showing that more boys than girls score at the high and low ends on standardized math and science tests. Nearly simultaneously, MIT biologist James Sherley charged publicly that colleagues undervalue his research because he is black.
According to participants at the off-the-record NBER meeting, Summers argued that women typically do not work the 80-hour weeks common to professions like law, business, or science. And while noting that socialization and bias may slow the progress of women, he cited the gender variation in test scores as a possible explanation for the larger number of men at the top of the professional ladder.
It’s true that that stupid speech had consequences. A year later, that (and some financial conflicts of interest, but don’t we all expect that of economics/business guys? They’re an unethical bunch) led to him stepping down from his position as president of Harvard. But don’t worry for him, he then bounced right back, serving as Director of the White House United States National Economic Council under Obama, and more recently, he’s on the board of directors for OpenAI (another collection of lying opportunists who don’t even know what ethics is.) He’s still a tenured professor at Harvard.
Ironically, a writer for the Harvard Salient, a conservative student paper at that university is now defending Summers, claiming that his lecture on women’s inadequacy was the start of “cancel culture.”
Twenty years ago, Harvard President Lawrence Summers delivered a speech at an economics conference which, as a later Crimson article asserts, “started the war.” As a student in 2005, I viewed the event as a simple battle between open inquiry and political correctness. As an alum looking back, I see it as the debut of what we know today as cancel culture.
That’s sort of true, in that “cancel culture” has been mysteriously ineffective at delivering real consequences to its targets. Please, please, please…you can get me fired for being politically incorrect if afterwards I’m brought in to advise the president and to take a seat on a very wealthy board.
Well, Larry Summers might be paying the price soon, as the heat from his association with Jeffrey Epstein rises. He has made a shame-faced admission. He wants out of the limelight!
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” he told Politico in a statement.
“I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein. While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
The left-leaning thinktank Center for American Progress told the Guardian that Summers is ending his position as “distinguished senior fellow”.
His comments come after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle urged companies and institutions to cut ties with Summers. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN that Summers should be held accountable for his years-long relationship with Epstein.
This should have happened twenty years ago. For some reason, a lot of people have maintained and sought out relationships with this old arrogant asshole, why, I don’t know. He was poison in 2005, people should have run away from any association with him at all. It took a few words from Epstein to finally kill his career. Also, why did the Center for American Progress affiliate with him at all?
It’s Republicans who demonstrate the greatest hypocrisy, though.
A senior Trump administration official told Politico that institutions should end their association with Summers, given the relationship he had with Epstein, who referred to himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man”.
“It’s shocking that Larry Summers remains a paid contributor to Bloomberg News, on the board of OpenAI and tenured at Harvard,” the anonymous source told Politico. “What more revelations about him and his “wing man” will it take for institutions to cut him loose? The British government immediately sacked their ambassador to the US over much less.”
Oh, really? He should have been denied various professional associations thanks to his friendly relationship with a known pedophile? Fine, I agree. Now apply the same reasoning to Epstein’s bestest buddy and fellow party animal, Donald Trump. What will it take for senior Trump administration officials to wake up and realize their boss is even more entangled in Epstein’s slimy web?
I remember, over 20 years ago, there were furious online debates where some of the worst people in the world were making repulsive arguments about what children were old enough to fuck. They were claiming that you weren’t a pedophile if the children were adolescents — you were a “hebephile,” as if that made a difference. It doesn’t.
Now Megyn Kelly is echoing that same stupid claim. I thought we were done with that stupid nonsense.
MEGYN KELLY (HOST): As for Epstein, I’ve said this before, but just as a reminder, I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything. Not everything, but virtually everything. And this person has told me from the start years and years ago that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realized this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.
And that is what I believed, and that is what I reliably was told for many years. And it wasn’t until we heard from Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged — forgive me, they used to call it kiddie porn, now they call it child sexual abuse material — on his computer that for the first time, I thought, oh, no, he was an actual pedophile. I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. She’s never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.
BATYA UNGAR-SARGON (GUEST): Or anything else.
KELLY: Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference. There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?
What is that difference, exactly? They’re both under the age of consent. They’re minors, you don’t suddenly become fair game for sexual abuse when your breasts begin to grow. For that matter, adults aren’t sexual objects either, but I don’t think the people who make these bad arguments really care about that, either. But then, Megyn Kelly has long been prone to making idiotic claims — remember when she was irate that Santa Claus could be anything but a white man?
It’s nice that she doesn’t trust Pam Bondi, but I don’t trust Megyn Kelly, either. She went on to say…
Kelly acknowledged Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, telling Ungar-Sargon,
[Epstein] did like them young, and there were several young women who he did this to who were minors, who were underage. There’s just no question about that.She then insisted that Trump was not involved, adding,
That is a true fact about Jeffrey Epstein. But that is not a true fact about Donald Trump.
We’re learning all kinds of surprising things about Donald Trump lately.
That’s Epstein’s brother asking him about some compromising photos; there was a flurry of speculation that “Bubba” was Clinton, in a verified email, but the brother has come forward to say it wasn’t the former president. Interesting…a partial denial suggests that the rest might be true, that Putin has some blackmail material on Trump.
This whole affair has gotten unbelievably slimy. Now I’m worrying that we might be suffering under a President Vance in the near future.
In the latest example of insanity, congress wants to penalize scientists who dare to work with Chinese scientists.
Scientists and research advocates in the United States are mobilizing to fight a bill that would essentially prohibit researchers with any ties to China and other countries deemed hostile from receiving federal funding. Nearly 800 academics signed a 29 October letter opposing the ban, part of a bill passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives that sets spending priorities for the Department of Defense (DOD). A coalition of higher education and research advocacy groups has also urged Congress to strike the language as members reconcile the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with what the Senate adopted last month. Final passage is expected by the end of the year.
The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act would deny federal funding to any U.S. scientist who collaborates with anyone “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity,” a category that includes four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.
You know, collaboration is an essential part of good science — both partners benefit from working together. There are many highly qualified, expert Chinese scientists we could profitably work with, and this kind of bill is only penalizing Americans, denying them research funding and restricting who they can partner with. The bill is sponsored by yet another short-sighted, ignorant MAGA Republican.
The act’s author, Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI), wants to “stop federal [science] funding from going to universities or researchers that collaborate with China’s military and intelligence services.” Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has produced a slew of reports in the past 2 years decrying what it sees as a rising tide of such harmful collaborations.
We have a whole committee on the Chinese Communist Party? Chaired by a jingoistic conservative fanatic? Do they also oppose the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace?
Well, at least it looks like constituents are getting disgusted with him.
The Democrats have been releasing damning emails from the Epstein files, which is a good start. There’s nothing too surprising in them, though. We already knew Trump and Epstein were pals, we’ve always known that Trump was a nasty little sleazebag with a thing for underaged girls, and the right-wing side of the electorate has been able to ignore that all along, so I expect nothing to change. Also, the Republicans are playing the victim card and howling about it was all innocent banter and Trump didn’t do nothin’, anyhow.
Except that conservatives are hypocritically complaining about emails that expose the president for what he is, and simultaneously fishing through the emails that make Democrats look bad. I’m all for it! Expose all the dirtbags, no matter what side of the aisle they sit on.
For example, Larry Summers, good buddy to Bill Clinton and ex-president of Harvard, was quite chummy with Epstein.
Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers maintained a close personal relationship with convicted sex criminal Jeffrey E. Epstein until just months before his death in August 2019, according to emails released by Congress on Wednesday.
The cache, released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, details how Summers and Epstein regularly corresponded about women, politics, and Harvard-linked projects. They appear to have maintained a close correspondence as late as March 2019 — just months before Epstein’s arrest and death.
Some of the emails are casually venal, as when Summers tried to cajole huge financial gifts to specific projects at Harvard.
The correspondence reveals that Epstein had planned to donate $500,000 to Poetry in America — a television show and digital initiative spearheaded by Harvard English professor emerita Elisa F. New, who is married to Summers. In 2016, Epstein donated $110,000 to Verse Video Education, the non-profit organization which funds the initiative.
Cool. It’s quite the inbred tangle of scholars they’ve got there at Harvard.
We also get the slimy side of Summers, as he asks Epstein for dating advice.
In dozens of emails, Summers — corresponding from his personal account — also appears to have written to Epstein with ease about his personal life. At times, he confided in Epstein about his relationship with an unnamed woman, referring to the topic and his requests for advice as the “dear Abby issue.”
He recounted a conversation between himself and the woman to Epstein, telling him that at one point it had turned tense.
At one point, he told Epstein, the woman brushed him off with the phrase “I’m busy.” Summers told Epstein that he responded to the woman by telling her “awfully coy u are.” Summers then asked her, “Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming,” he wrote to Epstein.
“I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Summers recounted to Epstein, adding that “she must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”
Epstein supported Summers’ response, saying that the woman was making Summers “pay for past errors” but “no whining showed strength.”
Oh, ick. He was trying to arrange a weekend together with this woman (remember, he’s married), and she clearly wanted nothing to do with it. Epstein praises him for his strength. Come on, this was a homely, middle-aged man hitting on a woman, not a profile in courage.
And then there is the sexism, a trait that we’ve known Summers to have for many years.
In an October 2017 email to Epstein, Summers appeared to joke to Epstein that women were less intelligent than men — and suggested that having “hit on” women should not damage one’s career prospects.
“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population….” he wrote to Epstein, without elaborating further.
The message invoked one of the most controversial episodes of Summers’ career — his 2005 remarks at an economics conference suggesting that innate differences between men and women might help explain the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering at elite universities.
Yeah, fine, throw Summers under the bus. If you can hurl Bill Clinton under there at the same time, I’m not going to complain…I’m probably going to cheer. But please understand you can’t condemn Summers for being a sexist asshole without also condemning Trump.
