Alex Jones may have disappointed some of his followers

Alex Jones is discovering that his appeals for privacy about what happened at his home on Christmas Eve that resulted in the police being called ind his wife arrested are falling on deaf ears. The Daily Beast has obtained the police report of the incident.

Alex Jones’ wife Erika Wulff Jones allegedly struck the far-right conspiracy theorist “over 20 times” and threatened to hit him in the head with a stone ball, causing him to “fear for his life,” according to police documents reviewed by The Daily Beast.
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Film review: Don’t Look Up (2021)

Netflix has just released a new star-studded dark comedy that sends up the current times in which we live. The film is allegorical, particularly of the Trump era.

The story begins with a graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) who discovers that a 10 km wide comet is headed straight for the Earth and will collide with it in just over six months, destroying the planet. Along with her advisor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a top government scientist (Rob Morgan) they try to alert the Trump-like president (Meryl Streep) but she, along with her idiot son (Jonah Hill, no prizes for guessing who he is based on) who is her chief-of-staff, does not take the threat seriously enough and instead worries more about her poll numbers and how to use the news to her political advantage. The news media represented the form of a happy-talk TV show with co-anchors (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) also make light of the situation.
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Oh, so now he cares about people’s privacy?

On Christmas Eve, the wife of hate monger and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was arrested by police in their home.

The wife of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was arrested on Christmas Eve on a domestic violence charge the rightwing provocateur said stemmed from a “medication imbalance”.

Sheriff’s deputies booked Erika Wulff Jones into an Austin jail around 8.45pm on Friday. Jail records showed the 43-year-old faced misdemeanor charges of assault causing bodily injury to a family member and resisting arrest, search or transport. By the afternoon of Christmas Day, she had not received a bond.

Alex Jones, an Austin resident and founder of the rightwing media group Infowars, declined to say if he had been injured or to elaborate on what happened beyond that he believed it was related to a recent change of medication.

“It’s a private family matter that happened on Christmas Eve,” Jones said. “I love my wife and care about her and it appears to be some kind of medication imbalance.”

A ‘private family matter’? This is rich from a man who hounded the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, claiming that the whole thing was a staged hoax, and that they were paid ‘crisis actors’. His followers took up this lie and made the lives of those bereaved parents, already traumatized by the murder of their children, a living hell. Now he wants people to respect his privacy?

It would serve him right if those parents returned the favor by making up all manner of bizarre and disgusting scenarios about what happened at his house and spreading it all over social media.

Desmond Tutu represented the best of religion

The indefatigable South African fighter for human rights died today at the age of 90.

His achievements are well known and the many, many obituaries and articles that will be written in the next few days will review them. What I liked best about him was that he used his eminence to speak out boldly, not caring about taking on sacred cows or tribal allegiances. He criticized the ANC after they took power, for which they retaliated by initially not inviting him to nelson Mandela’s funeral. He was one of the earliest major figures to label Israel as an apartheid state. That carried immense weight since who would know better than he what apartheid looked like? That outspokenness did not endear him to the apologists for Israel and it is suggestive that the Guardian article linked to above or the obituary does not even mention that particular stance of his, highly impactful though it was.

On a personal note, my daughter and son-in-law visited South Africa for a college friend’s wedding at which Tutu was to officiate. At an informal lunch, they met him. He was wearing a Morehouse College t-shirt and they said that he was playful and mischievous, joking around. I have a photograph of just the three of them and you can see the wide grin and the twinkle in his eyes. He was clearly someone who was serious about his work but did not take himself too seriously. He is the kind of person that one would enjoy just hanging out with.

Tutu clearly was a religious person, the kind who believes that his faith requires him to fight for justice for all. That is the best kind of religion.

Jesse Watters may be stupid and juvenile but he is dangerous

Fox News personality Jesse Watters has a juvenile sense of humor that he should long have outgrown. He is the kind of grown person who still thinks that childish pranks are funny.

At a gathering of young right-wingers organized by the group Turning Point, he took aim at Anthony Fauci, the highly respected infectious disease specialist who has become a prime target of anti-vaxxers because of his relentless urging of people to take safety precautions such as getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and avoiding large gatherings.

Speaking on Monday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, Watters encouraged attendees to rhetorically “ambush” Fauci with dubious questions about the National Institutes of Health allegedly funding “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Now you go in for the kill shot. The kill shot? With an ambush? Deadly. Because he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said.

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The growing divide within the American evangelical movement

CBSN looks at the growing split within the evangelical movement between those who take extreme ideological stances and those who try to provide a more unifying message.

Vice News looked at the rise of evangelical churches that echo the conspiracy theories of Q. This has alarmed some evangelical leaders who see this as a dangerous trend. One of them said that it used to be that evangelicals looked for churches that reflected their theology and beliefs about God. But he says that now some are looking for churches that reflect their political ideology. They want to hear their political views affirmed from the pulpit and this has given an opening to some preachers who are willing to go all in on extremist views and thus garner followers.

One thing that immediately strikes you when the camera pans over the congregations of these extreme churches is that they are almost exclusively white.

Another thing is that at one of the churches that is heavily featured in both clips, there is not a mask to be seen in the crowded tent where about a thousand people crowd together to hear the pastor say that he will throw out anyone who wears one. They are practically begging to be an Omicron superspreader source.

Such reckless behavior truly boggles the mind.

The reactionaries are in decline, not ascendant

It is easy to feel a sense of despair at the news these days. The coronavirus seems to once again have defied predictions and infections are on the rise with the new omicron variant. We have ignorant but influential people still discouraging people from taking vaccines that could save their lives. We have a Republican senate, aided by Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema block legislation that would improve the lives of so many people. And we have a US Supreme Court seemingly poised to roll back the right to an abortion and otherwise advance a reactionary right wing agenda.

Rebecca Solnit is one of the most thoughtful writers and analysts and she has come out with an opinion piece that suggests that what we are witnessing is not the rise of a major reactionary movement but the dying gasps of a desperate minority waging a bitter rearguard battle against historical forces that they realize are going to overwhelm them and take away the power they have held for so long.
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The desperate defenses of the January 6th rioters

As I wrote before, so many of the January 6th rioters gleefully posted vivid accounts of what they did on that day on social media that they pretty much eliminated any reasonable legal defense that could be mounted in court. The only option left was to throw themselves at the mercy of the courts, using permutations of “I am really sorry”, “I was stupid”, and “I was misled by Trump and others”. That defense is getting mixed results.
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Journalists should seek to be pariahs

One of the corrupting influences in US journalism lies with people shifting back and forth between the roles of reporter, a talking head pundit, political advisor, and press spokesperson for a public figure or organization. Being a reporter is the hardest job involving having to do real work and research and yet it is likely the least remunerative and has the least visibility. So it should not be surprising that reporters can be lured into those other roles. While they may think that they can remain untainted, it is not easy to maintain the intellectual separation.

In some case, they do not even try that hard to maintain a separation between what they do when working for a media outlet and advising the people they are supposedly covering. A good example of this can be seen in the report released a few days ago that Fox News personalities were privately sending messages to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the January 6th riot expressing alarm at what was going on and calling on him to persuade Donald Trump to call off the mob.
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Live by social media, die by social media

We live in an era when people have the opportunity to broadcast the minutiae of their lives far and wide via social media. It is surprising to me that so many people do not seem to realize that along with the attention they receive, there are also serious pitfalls. In the rush to be in the spotlight and impress their circle of friends and relatives, they seem to lose all sense of judgment. Nowhere was this more evidence on a large scale than in how so many of the people who invaded the Capitol building on January were eager to tell everyone of their exploits.

First of all, they gave the authorities information about their identities that allowed them to be arrested. Secondly, their online posts were effectively confessions of guilt. The best they could hope for was leniency on the grounds that they were too stupid to know that they were breaking the law. But judges are taking their posts into account in determining how harshly to sentence them and they are not amused.
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