Russia's Weapons In the Form of Words

Update 9/9/24: Thanks again to the Crooks & Liars crew especially Steve in Manhattan for promoting this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please remember to GET THE VOTE OUT America and stop Republican/Russia sabotage of our elections! Also, please consider my book Notice a Trend as a stocking stuffer this coming Halloween uh Turkey Sacrifice Day hold on, Saturnalia!

 I am an arms dealer fitting you with
Weapons in the form of words
And don't really care which side wins
As long as the room keeps singing
That's just the business I'm in
-- "This Ain't a Scene," Fall Out Boy

The Department of Justice this week dropped a bombshell in the form of indictments and sanctions towards Russian operatives who were paying off Far Right media outlets and "influencers" to undermine our nation's elections and policies (via Shannon Bond, Jude Joffe-Block, and Caitlin Thompson at NPR):

On Wednesday, the Justice Department charged two employees of RT, the Russian state media broadcaster, in a scheme to secretly fund and direct the production of social media videos that racked up millions of views.

The RT staffers, named in the indictment as Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, have been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They’re accused of funneling nearly $10 million to an unnamed Tennessee company that contracted with online influencers with big audiences...

“The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Wednesday.

Still, didn't anybody on the RT payroll suspect they were all working from the same script, all so favorable to Putin and to Russia? Or are these Far Right "influencers" so twisted by their own world-view - that Ukraine is the enemy, that liberals are Commies, that there's a global conspiracy to destroy Alpha Males - that they didn't care how much like puppets they are?

The charges against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva come as U.S. intelligence officials say foreign efforts aimed at swaying the outcome of the election are escalating. On Wednesday, the government seized 32 internet domains connected to a separate Russian influence operation, while Iran has recently been accused of trying to hack both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.

What sets the RT operation apart from many other interference efforts is that it appeared to reach a real audience, thanks to the recognizable names attached.

“Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real,” wrote Renée DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, about how online influencers spread propaganda and rumors, in a post on Threads...

The thing every American - especially the ones getting hammered repeatedly by these propagandists - knew that what was coming from these influencers wasn't home-grown but a coordinated effort by a deep pocket source: They tended to repeat the same messages and stick to the same talking points. Now there's proof in a courtroom that the Far Right Noise Machine was getting paid to attack the rest of us. That the money was coming from Russia is what stings.

The money itself is obscene. One person getting $400,000 A MONTH to spew the pre-scripted content? About 90 percent of most Americans don't see that much income in a YEAR. The greed of these pro-Russian influencers barely equals the severity of their anti-American output.

A good number of social media commentators - most of them doing it for free by the by - pointed out how these Far Right influencers have been screaming for decades about "leftist bloggers and pundits getting paid by George Soros" so the irony is not lost. It may not be irony actually: It's certainly deflection and confession on their parts. 

What the mainstream media - affected by the revelation that there is this kind of corruption in their own circles - need to realize, what a majority of Americans need to understand is how all of this is Putin's psychological (psyops) war on the United States.

This may not be a real-world warzone like Ukraine with tanks guns and bloodshed, but our airwaves and information sources are battlegrounds now. Putin can't afford a direct war on America - Gods help us, it would end in nuclear fire if that happens - but he's bitter and enraged at how our government has imposed economic sanctions not only on Russia but on himself ever since the Magnitsky Incident in 2009 led to congressional legislation that targeted Putin and his corrupt regime.

You can see the uptick in Far Right rhetoric around that time as the Tea Party stirred anti-Obama resentment into anti-government outrage. It helped Putin that many of the Far Right are synced to his own political and social world-views - nationalist, extremist, evangelical/orthodox Christianist, expressing open contempt and horror towards women, ethnics, gay/lesbian/trans people - to where these so-called "patriotic Americans" would happily - for a high fee - turn against their fellow Americans to side with a foreign despot.

There used to be anger and outrage from the Far Right Republicans back at the height of the Cold War if ANYone was caught working on the Soviet Russia payroll. Today, you have to think that everyone from Fox-Not News to Newsmax on down to InfoWars (what's left of it) have their hands out for the Russian oligarchs to tickle their palms for another $400k each (I would like to think National Review have higher personal standards than to sell out like that, but even now I have doubts).

If we were at actual war, what these Far Right media elites are doing would be considered treason.

Thing is, we are at war: Engaged by an enemy nation in Russia that is overwhelming our media with disinfo, conspiracy tripe, brazen lies - what we'd call "flooding the zone with shit" - to where almost half our fellow citizens can't tell what's real or fake news anymore. All thanks to Russia's front-line Fifth Columnists spewing all that shit at us from Facebook to Twitter to podcasts to facetime on the prime time talk shows.

Half the reason the United States is on the brink of civil war is because Putin is paying those wingnut bullshitters to confuse and defame Americans, to make us fear and hate each other at the expense of our own common cause to support and defend this nation.

Goddamn them. Every single one of these greedheads betrayed America for Putin's cash. Send them to prison first, and let Hell take them when they die.

It's Campaign Time 2024 and the Beltway Is Still Broken

As the Democratic National Convention continues this week, apparently the national punditry are raging into the void about how they got bamboozled by the Biden retirement/Harris promotion (via Meredith Shiner at New Republic): 

...Trump (in 2016) was unique among that field of suits in that he did not slide from Polite Washington’s slick political candidate widget factory. He didn’t care to perform the same canned lines on tax rates, entitlements, or the national debt. And he showed the world that audiences didn’t care about that long-running political vaudeville act, either. The Trump era, however you define it, yielded few gifts and cured little about the broken political discourse coming out of Washington. But if it didn’t wreck the political press’s performative vacuity, it at least exposed it for all to see.

Now, with nearly four years of Trump out of the White House, Trump back on the trail, and a Democrat at the top of the ticket who can actually campaign, the gap between the Beltway Truman Show and what people outside of D.C. actually are experiencing is widening. And this rift in reality imperils the media at a time when journalism is fighting a multifront war against anti-truth Republicans, declining revenue, and predatory venture capital mismanagement...

The problems of campaign coverage from 2016 wasn't entirely all about trump: The National Media had been suffering with embarrassments and acts of self-immolation ever since they went all in on Bill Clinton's sex scandals and wondered how the hell the rest of the nation stopped trusting them. It didn't help in 2016 that Hillary was there to incite the media mob into a dangerous binary world-view that made Hillary a threat to everyone and not trump. But I digress.

When Trump burst onto the scene, I was still a reporter in Washington covering national politics and Congress. I watched as the journalism-industrial complex of D.C. reporters and operatives around me tried to cast Trump as an atypical candidate who blew up the Republican Party. Casting Trump as an outlier—trying to make him an aberration instead of an outgrowth of a decades-long Republican effort to break our country—obscured the collective national gaze from something much more troubling for the people who make their living on politics: Trump didn’t break the Republican Party at all. He just broke the made-up Washington rules that empowered every lobbyist, reporter, and staffer to attend parties together without fear or reservation.

The Republican Party had been dying for some time, when as a party they decided to shift to a Culture War narrative light on policy and heavy on demonizing fellow Americans. trump merely saw the weak spots in the GOP relationship between leaders and voters and overtook control of the wingnut base. The national media elites had no idea how to explain that - not only to the citizenry but also to themselves - and so have been flailing about trying to find anything that would fit their "both sides!" or "let's have bipartisanship!" world-views. America's punditry are stuck in a bubble of their own. Back to Shiner:

Because if this summer has revealed anything, it’s that, just like the Scott Walkers of yore, we are watching the national media short-circuit before our very eyes. They are insular. They are unprepared. And after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own-goaling themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government.

For years, largely because Republicans are better at working the refs and crying foul about any effort by the media to hold them accountable for their actions, the idea that the media are dyed-in-the-wool liberals has become the orthodoxy. Of course, the Beltway media are conservative. This is not a novel argument by any means: It’s an industry run by (increasingly reactionary) plutocrats, who reliably summon their charges to lead a highly effective, “But how will you pay for it?” pincer movement against anything resembling liberal policy. Meanwhile, there is seemingly no sin grievous enough to earn a Republican the same sort of nullifying skepticism—the Trumpists who aided and abetted the former president’s attempt to overturn a lawful election remain in the good graces of America’s cable news bookers.

Still, we need to acknowledge that the media are conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word: They are clinging to a status quo, their status quo, that has not matched our reality since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Tea Party emerged as the energized manifestation of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s fever dreams. Their rules, their conventional wisdom, their savvy takes become more stale, more detached from normal life, and more cartoonish with every passing day...

I argued about this earlier about how the modern Beltway media elites are still obsessing over the Reagan Era like it's still 1985, with Green Eagle making a solid case that the ultra-rich owners of the media outlets have their own (anti-tax and deregulation) agendas to pursue. Either way, we are talking about an entire profession - journalism - unable to fulfill even the most basic functions of that job - to provide Objective (fact-driven) reporting - because they've sunk entirely into Subjective self-absorbed pandering to each other in the news business.

The problem is that we as a nation - we Americans as a people - need objective factual reporting to keep us informed properly about our choices when it comes time to use our power to elect our representatives and our leaders. We're not getting any of that when the headline writers and the front-page opinion pundits and the talk show guests can't even be correct about what they're selling us in their columns and podcasts.

Just again a reminder: For the national media elites, there is no accountability for being wrong (or self-centered). Maureen Dowd could spend the first half of 2024 screaming that Biden needed to step down from the presidential campaign, and less than a month after he did so accuse the Democratic Party of "pulling a coup" that she refuses to admit her own role in it. THIS is how that punditry acts - and reacts - and when things don't go their way they'll throw a conniption far bigger than anything crybaby trump puts out.

Until the national press comes to terms with the current reality that they are biased (and towards trump and other Far Right wingnuts); until the punditry realizes they are not the heroes of their own narratives, they are accomplices in the Far Right's schemes; until the likes of Dowd and David Brooks and the majority of swelled heads at the New York Times and Washington Post settle the fuck down: We are not going to get an honest story out of any of them.

And it's still up to us to tune out their ego-driven narratives and focus on what matters most: keeping criminal trump out of the White House and banishing the Republican Party from the national stage this November general election.

Get the damn votes out, everyone.

I've Taken The Crazy Pills, Haven't I: July 2024 Edition

WHAT DID I JUST SAY?

Jesus. Even in the moment of donald trump's self-crowning - with an oversized bandage on his ear and every lapdog at his feet - at an overtly racist and sexist RNC, the Democratic Party cannot get out of their own way.

WaterGirl over at Balloon Juice is feeling the same frustration I am about the Dem party leadership buying into the mainstream media freakout and getting caught in more rumor-mongering to force Joe Biden to step down from the 2024 re-election bid:

I am heartsick at the spiraling anxiety, and angry at the own-goals.  This madness needs to stop – if not in the media, then at least in Balloon Juice threads that I put up.

So until something changes, this will be my last post related to “Biden, will he or won’t he, should he or shouldn’t he”.

We are wasting so much time and energy on this, at a time when there is so much work to be done. There is so much work to be done.  So much work, and so little time.

I’m sure there will still be plenty of Balloon Juice threads where anyone who wants to can continue to endlessly hash this out, with both sides endlessly repeating the same things, over and over, sincere people and trolls, alike.  But I’m done.  And I’m pretty sure the other side is laughing...

This panic - which echoes a lot of the Dem panic from 2004 when they worried Howard Dean was more vulnerable than John Kerry all because Karl Rove made them second-guess themselves - isn't doing them any favors. It's feeding into the Beltway narrative of "Dems In Disarray" and is going to upset / discourage millions of primary voters who already sided with Biden as their choice.

If anybody is thrilled to the idea of an "open convention" this August, please punch yourself in the face. This 2024 primary season didn't present the party with any strong alternatives to Biden, and such a convention between up-and-comers like Governors Newsom or Whitmer or some third person suddenly flush with questionable dark money will turn bloody and divisive, which once again favors the goddamn trumpsters.

Anybody thinking that things will get easier if Biden steps aside for his Vice President Kamala Harris need to remember just how racist the mainstream media let the Republicans play it when it was Obama as the candidate in 2008 and 2012, and will just as easily allow trump and his cohort to attack Harris over the same goddamn racist dog-whistles bullhorns. And Harris is going to face the same kind of sexism that Hillary faced in 2016, by the same mainstream media that cannot overcome their own misogyny when dealing with "ambitious women" as candidates. You know how many reporters are itching to jump on the stories that came out during 2020 about the bad blood within Harris' primary campaign back then, eager to pull that same shit if she becomes the ticket headliner?

We've gotten 81 million voters to side with Biden in 2020 and a supermajority (90 percent or more) of primary voters to stick with Biden against the likes of Dean Phillips (a conservative congresscritter who got talked into undermining party incumbancy), and yet the Democratic party leadership is getting brow-beaten by a hostile Beltway media desperate to keep their horserace and "Dems in Disarray" narratives going until November.

There's a reason why I've got "Democrats Are Cowards" as a blog label, and you're watching it as it happens. Goddamn them.

Man up. Support Biden, here and NOW. Get the vote out. Get those 81 million voters back. Get every man and woman who supports abortion rights. Get every man and woman who opposes even one tidbit of that hideous Project 2025 agenda. Get every American voting for a unified Democratic Party.

For the LOVE OF GOD. Turning on each other now does not help.

The Tucker Carlson Hate Machine Unplugged

Let's just get to the facts. This Monday morning, without ceremony or forewarning, Fox Not-News kicked their prime-time fearmonger Tucker Carlson to the curb. To refer to David Folkenflik at NPR:

In an austere, four-sentence statement, Fox News announced Monday that prime-time star Tucker Carlson is leaving the network, effective immediately.

"FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," the network said in a statement released by a spokesperson. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor."

Fox said Carlson's last day hosting his show was Friday, April 21. Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executives of Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. respectively, had decided Carlson's fate on Friday, a source with knowledge told NPR...

The ouster of Fox's top opinion host comes less than a week after Fox settled an epic defamation lawsuit by an election technology company for more than $787 million. Dominion Voting Systems sued over segments promoting bogus claims that election fraud cheated then-President Donald Trump of victory in 2020...

Oddly enough, the follow-up reporting on Carlson's ouster wasn't the damaging revelations from Dominion's civil suit - although it should have been the reason - it had more to do with the pending damage involving the lawsuits from former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claimed a harmful sexist workplace and apparently had the receipts to back her up.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, Grossberg accused Carlson and Fox of sexism and harassment, alleging that his show's workplace was replete with examples of misogyny. Her lawsuit claims, among other things, that mocked-up photographic images depicted then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "in a bathing suit revealing her cleavage" and that staffers were polled — on two separate occasions — on which of two female candidates for Michigan governor they would rather have sex with.

"Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying, and conspiracy-mongering claimed by our client," said Tanvir Rahman, one of Grossberg's lawyers, in a statement Monday afternoon. "Mr. Carlson and his subordinates remain individual defendants in the S.D.N.Y. case and we look forward to taking their depositions under oath in the very near term."

All that said, let's go to the man in the street to get his opinion on how Tucker Carlson deserved this shoddy mistreatment by his billionaire bosses. (checks notes) Actually let's go to Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog for more:

Whatever is happening, it's odd. Fox put election denialism on the air in 2020 because rejecting one of the Fox audience's core beliefs was seen as likely to damage the Fox brand. But in 2023 nothing could damage the Fox brand in the eyes of viewers more than letting Tucker Carlson go. Has Rupert Murdoch stopped caring about the brand? Or does he resent Carlson's demagoguery about "globalism," which he might regard as an indictment of people like himself?

I assume everything will settle down soon. There'll be a Jesse Watters or Greg Gutfeld show in Carlson's slot and the vitriol will be flowing again as if it never stopped.

But Carlson was worse than other Fox hosts, and it will be good to have him gone -- possibly for a while. Does he have a non-compete clause? If so, how long will it silence him? For a long time, I hope.

As Steve notes, the Fox Not-News network was chugging along just fine with its brand of Far Right toxic fearmongering before Tucker showed up. After all, he filled the gap left open by Bill O'Reilly, who also departed under a cloud of sexual misconduct. And the network will happily plug in a fresh face who'll figure out the proper mix of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism that made Tucker their number one guy (until he was a millstone).

That Tucker is getting forced out over the same troubles with women that O'Reilly departed, and considering how Roger Ailes' tenure as network overlord ended over sexual harassment charges, we should all notice how misogynistic that whole network seems to be (they may hire a lot of women but they sure as hell mistreat them).

But Tucker Carlson was a monster in his own right, a horrifying blend of upper-class privilege and white-boy grievance. He began with a conservative bent and skewed further rightward towards fascism. If Tucker wasn't shilling lies about the January 6th insurrection, he was sucking up to Putin and his dreams of Russian empire.

What made Tucker truly dangerous was his mostly-open support of the odious Replacement Theory at the base of every racist, anti-Semitic attack on American norms. It formed the foundation of every rant, every outrage towards The Dread Other - immigrants (mostly Hispanics), Blacks, Jews, women - that Tucker aired on his shows.

For all of Tucker's - and Fox Not-News' - pretensions of being a journalist, this was all he ever was: A Fearmonger. He spewed lies about others in order to have his audiences recoil in fear and then respond in anger. Tucker - and many other Far Right pundits and writers and celebrities - reveled in the controversies he stirred up, playing himself a victim to "woke" critics and getting his followers more addicted to the hate he sold.

Everything about Tucker Carlson and Fox Not-News echoed the practices of the authoritarian regimes of a fictional dystopia, Orwell's 1984. In that work, the powers running Oceania behind the leadership of Big Brother organized daily sessions of Two Minutes Hate, where workers were brought together and overwhelmed by propagandistic showings of "enemies of the state":

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started...

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically...

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. - 1984, George Orwell

This was what Tucker Carlson brought to Fox Not-News every night. This is what Fox Not-News wanted every night. They served up Fear and Hate like drugs and their audiences got addicted to it even more.

And gods help us, the Fox Not-News overlords will find a replacement for Tucker who will provide another session of Two Minutes Hate for a full hour (minus the 27 minutes for ad space).

None of this is going to end until the whole nation wakes up to the reality that the Hate Speech Tucker and his Far Right allies are shilling - getting us to shout at screens at enemies of their state of mind - is a danger to us all. None of this is going to end until the Murdoch family and their business partners owning Fox can no longer profit from this Hate.

They unplugged Tucker Carlson today. The rest of us need to unplug Fox Not-News and finish this moment.

The Damage of Far Right Lies

I don't know if I'd mentioned this on the blog, but one of the outcomes of the 2020 post-election madness - where trump claimed "rigged" or "stolen" voting happened, to incite his followers into acts of insurrection - was that one of trump's targets decided to fight back against the Fox News network for promoting trump's falsehoods.

Dominion, one of the companies that manufactures voting machines, got targeted with allegations of rigging their machines to where it cut into their ability to win contracts with states (and I believe other nations). So they filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Fox, and thanks to the discovery process of acquiring evidence to back their suit, revealed a lot of intraoffice scheming and plotting by the media corporation to shill trump's lies to keep their audiences and their profits.

To quote from Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact...

The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy...

The Fox executives knew they were violating journalistic ethics - yes, those do exist - in pursuit of ratings.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to...

Not only is there a closed wingnut echo chamber, that chamber is bolted shut by an audience that wants to remain ignorant of the facts and angered by their own fears.

There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

This is where decades of Fox Not-News - and other Far Right media figures like Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and James O'Keefe (who's not having a good month anyway) - twisted free speech protections to shill conspiracy instead of facts, lies instead of truth.

There shouldn't be a First Amendment right to lie, especially when those lies are malicious, designed to enrage a handful of followers into acts of violence driven by unfounded fear and hatred. We've seen the effects of conspiracy "replacement theory" racism towards Blacks and Jews that have led to mass shootings and constant harassment of innocent Americans.

What Fox Not-News does on a nightly basis - promoting fear, selling rage - has done legitimate harm to the American political discourse. This lawsuit by Dominion could well put a clamp on that harm, but we need to understand that the Far Right punditry will continue to shill that fear and rage until they can no longer profit from it.

We are long past due bringing out the big guns of fraud charges and going after that Far Right Noise Machine with professional malpractice laws. Go after Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's wallets, people. Every penny they earn comes from lying, and no one should be allowed to profit from lies.

Escalation and Evasion

Over the weekend, the Republican War on Everybody escalated when a deranged man - prodded on by years of Far Right demagoguery - broke into the California home of U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and physically attacked Nancy's husband. The details are not pretty. Quoting from Nicole Narea's reporting at Vox:

It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing what insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he confronted Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. The attacker faces federal assault and attempted kidnapping charges.

It gets worse, because the bastards who pushed the violent rhetoric are now (of course) evading their accountability, blaming it all on the victim, blaming it on "urban crime," blaming it on everything but themselves:

Republicans have dismissed any connection between their rhetoric and the attack. Instead, they’ve blamed Democratic policies on crime and suggested that growing political violence may be the result of general anxiety around election legitimacy. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who was cheered by Republicans when he bought Twitter last week, has advanced a right-wing anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory around the circumstances of the attack. Though he deleted his post, it remained on Twitter long enough to be amplified and repeated by many on the Right...

The conspiracy rumors hinged on the Far Right's homophobia, and was utterly unproven, and yet for days the Republican Party leadership and their Congressional candidates made jokes and insults at the Pelosi family's expense.

Never mind the reality of what investigators got out of the attacker's statements to the police. Via Julia Jacabo at ABC News:

The suspect accused of attacking Paul Pelosi told authorities he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's kneecaps to show members of Congress that there are "consequences to actions," according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court Monday.

The new revelation came Monday as the Department of Justice filed federal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping against the man suspected of attacking Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, last week...

(The accused David) DePape was charged with one count of assault of an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He is also charged with one count of attempted kidnapping of a United States official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison...

The attacker reportedly broke into the house - it remains a huge question why the Speaker's home didn't have tighter security - and confronted Paul Pelosi with the same threats and challenges that the Insurrection rioters on January 6th were chanting. DePape was caught with the same zip ties the rioters carried with them in case they caught themselves any congresscritters that day, and DePape had even bigger plans than just assaulting Speaker Pelosi (back to Jacabo's report):

DePape allegedly later told officers "that he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her" and that he wanted to use the House speaker to lure another unnamed individual, the affidavit states.

The suspect also allegedly told investigators that he intended to break Nancy Pelosi's kneecaps if she didn't tell him the "truth" about "lies told by the Democratic Party" and said she would have to be wheeled into Congress, therefore showing other members of Congress that there are "consequences to actions," according to the criminal complaint...

DePape's agenda was to intimidate and injure a sitting Congressperson, especially the House Speaker who is technically the third-most powerful person in the federal government. He was motivated by the anger and ambitions that the Far Right have been openly screaming - to hunt liberals, to punish Democrats - for almost 20 years. And he hoped to target someone else higher on the GOP's Hit List than Pelosi herself.

This is where we are in the violent rhetoric constantly drummed and shouted through the televisions and video clips of the Far Right media. The George Tiller Effect in full display, where the demagogues on Fox Not-News push their Narrative of "Evil Democrats" that deserve punishment, and who then sit back and let their foot soldiers among their audiences do their dirty work for them.

And when presented with the evidence, those same demagogues laugh it off, claim "it wasn't us," and nowadays even joke about the damage done in their name.

Gods help us. This is a clear example of stochastic terrorism - the violence of extremism - and the Far Right fearmongers are going to keep escalating even as they evade accountability.

It won't be just the congresscritters next time. The goddamn wingnuts of the Fox-watching Proud Boys/Oath Keepers brigades are going to target ordinary Americans on a bigger scale than before, all because they were told to. And all because they can.

Blood on the Streets of Buffalo

Welcome to America, where every public place - our schools, our churches, our movie theaters, our music concerts, our city halls, our grocery stores - are just wonderful targets for the gun nut mass shooters who want to rack up a body count. Yesterday, Buffalo joined the list of cities that have suffered gun violence by an AR-15 wielding asshole (per Carolyn Thompson, John Wawrow, Michael Balsamo, and Dave Collins with AP News):

A white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday in what authorities described as “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Police said he shot 11 Black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch...

One of the things these mass shooters love to do, they love to show off how easy it is for them to kill others.

The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people...

The article didn't mention the shootings in Milwaukee the night before, or the number of domestic violence shootings that happen pretty much every day, but we've become so overwhelmed by gun violence the past 20 years it's all a blur now.

The suspected gunman in Saturday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as (name redacted because the SOB wants to be famous), of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Buffalo.

It wasn’t immediately clear why (redacted) had traveled to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. A clip apparently from his Twitch feed, posted on social media, showed (redacted) arriving at the supermarket in his car.

The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, security guard Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, fired multiple shots. A bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof armor but had no effect, Gramaglia said.

The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims...

There was a "good guy with a gun" at the store, just as the pro-gun advocates say we need to really stop gun violence, but guess what? The mass shooters have access to body armor too, and they plan ahead for that shit. The "good guy with a gun" excuse doesn't work, it never really did. All we have now are just more and more heavily armed people believing they have license to shoot anybody they want.

The shooter also drove over 200 miles, literally going out of his way to find a place where he could find enough targets for his rage to shoot at. This is similar to the shooter who drove eight hours across Texas to attack a Wal-Mart in El Paso.

And much like the mass killer in El Paso, the mass killer in Buffalo was driven by racism, programmed with hateful ideology based on a "Replacement Theory" lie that "Jews and Blacks are going to replace Whites in a massive genocide." Photos of the gunman's assault rifle highlighted the number "14", which refers to the word count of the wingnut motto. Witnesses noticed the N-word painted on the rifle as well. There shouldn't be any confusion about what motivated the mass murderer. Back to the AP article:

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators were looking into whether he had posted a manifesto online. The official was not permitted to speak publicly on the matter and did so on the condition of anonymity.

Buffalo police declined to comment on the document, circulated widely online, that purports to outline the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs, including a desire to drive all people not of European descent from the U.S. It said he drew inspiration the man who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019...

Each of these mass shooters do not work in a vacuum. They watch others who share the same rage and who share the same bullshit White Power lies. If it's not Christchurch it's getting inspired by the murderer in Norway, or the church shooter in Charleston, or the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh. These aren't lone wolves: They are part of a global violent movement, raging against the world, feeding off of each other's ill-formed conspiracy junk.

Only it gets worse here in America, because the goddamned Second Amendment is - thanks to an increasingly wingnut Supreme Court - no longer an amendment allowing states to well-regulate their militias, it's become a license for death-worshipping gun nuts to shoot anybody they hate.

And it's worse here in America where we have a Far Right media environment that pumps out that "Replacement Theory" bullshit on a daily basis to where it's programmed White extremists into a conniptic rage. This is an article from last week about Fox Not-News pundit Tucker Carlson (via Cynthia Miller-Idriss at MSNBC):

Before he was indicted on charges of killing 22 people and injuring 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019, the identified gunman had been linked to a document posted online that referred to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The motivation behind that horrific incident — that there is an intentional, global plan orchestrated by national and global elites to replace white, Christian, European populations with nonwhite, non-Christian ones — gets at the core of a recent three-part New York Times series on the rise and ideology of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

In part one of the series, journalist Nicholas Confessore describes Carlson’s efforts to stoke “white fear” of immigrants and changing U.S. demographics as “recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste.” In so doing, Confessore shows, Carlson has drawn repeatedly on the leading far-right conspiracy theory of demographic change, known as the “great replacement.”

Coined by a French scholar more than a decade ago, the term was quickly taken up globally by white supremacists, for whom the theory now provides a single, overarching framework for ideas that had already been percolating for years. Last September, Media Matters reported that Carlson spent a year embarking on a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.” Carlson has repeatedly used the language of replacement to suggest or directly argue that Democrats are orchestrating “demographic replacement” to gain political power. The day before the September Media Matters report, Carlson told his viewers that President Joe Biden aimed to “replace ‘legacy Americans’” and “change the racial mix of the country” for political gain... 

It's not just Carlson and Fox Not-News (via a report from the Anti-Defamation League):

One of the most visible Great Replacement propagandists is Fox media personality Tucker Carlson, who claimed during a September 22 broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that the point of Biden’s immigration policy is “to reduce the political power of the people whose ancestors live here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly-arrived from the third world.” He went on to refer to the policy as “The Great Replacement” which he explained is “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Carlson’s rhetoric was immediately echoed by U.S. Rep Brian Babin (R-TX-36) in a September 23 Newsmax interview, when he said that Biden and the Democrats are using immigration to "replace the American electorate with a third world electorate."

One day later, Charlie Kirk of the far-right student group Turning Point USA said on his show that Texas should “deputize a citizen force and put them on the border” to protect “white demographics in America.” He added that the left is focused on “bringing in voters that they want, and they like, and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”

The same day, during an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, Tucker Carlson criticized the ADL for calling out his Great Replacement comments and reiterated his view that the Democrats are “going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for” them.

On September 25, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL-1) voiced his support for Tucker Carlson and The Great Replacement theory, tweeting, “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America. The ADL is a racist organization.”

White supremacists celebrate: “We are mainstreaming now...”

All of this talk isn't just talk. It builds up an environment that encourages believers to act out, commit violence towards their targets, justified in their fear and hate that the ones they're killing "deserved" to die. It's known as the George Tiller Effect, where Far Right pundit Bill O'Reilly openly named an abortion doctor often as a threat to the unborn, driving a gunman to kill Tiller in Tiller's own church.

What's happened here - like in El Paso and Charleston and a hundred other racially-motivated mass shootings - is formally known as Stochastic Terrorism: Using a constant barrage of rhetoric and accusations to encourage others to commit violence for your cause. It's stochastic because there's no one specific target named, just a general population to pick and choose, making it "random" enough that the demagogues fueling the rage can claim they weren't responsible. But it's not random, when you look at the bigger picture.

It's still Terrorism: These Far Right White Power wingnuts are convinced they need to kill ethnic minorities, and that they've been given license to do so.

This is the war the Far Right wants: The wingnut pundits and politicians who stoke their audiences to commit acts of insurrection and public displays of violence, they love this shit because they will go onto those Far Right media outlets and actually flip the narrative around to make themselves still be the victims of our outrage while dead bodies pile up in our streets.

They're not even hiding their glee for it anymore.

Goddamn them all.

When, for the Love of God, is someone in our federal government going to recognize these mass shootings are not isolated, they are all part of the same terrorist movement of White Separatist bullshitters, and we need to officially declare them a domestic threat under the Patriot Act? When are we going to admit we're in an actual shooting war with extremists who want to destroy everything a free and diverse America represents?

Why Fox Not-News, and the Rest of the Far Right, Loves Putin and Not America

So Putin chose war this week. The invasion of Ukraine is underway and bloody already.

(Also, did they send troops to CHERNOBYL?!?! Where one bad artillery exchange could CRACK OPEN THE GODDAMNED RADIOACTIVE TOMB TO REACTOR NUMBER FOUR?!?!?! Do you want mutant radioactive bears, Putin? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MUTANT RADIOACTIVE BEARS.)

In the past couple of days, the Western leaders making up NATO - formed in opposition to a belligerent Soviet Union and stayed in alliance to keep the peace across Europe when the USSR fell - have done what they can in the early stages: Sanctions issued, diplomatic representatives recalled, public outrage, and promises of future action if Russia doesn't stop the invasion and walk their troops back. It's a delicate matter: blindly rushing in with NATO troops or issuing our own No-Fly Zone over Kyiv to stop Russian air bombings would clearly escalate to a broader war.

This is a serious moment for the United States. Much like previous situations where our foreign policy compels our nation to act in defense of our allies and interests overseas, you would think this is a moment similar to previous struggles like the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or our nation's reactions to 9/11.

A moment for national unity regarding a grave and potentially tragic matter - straight-up war in Europe! - that almost assures American troops going into harm's way to end the conflict on our best possible terms.

Except you wouldn't know that if you tuned into Fox Not-News for all your Putin-loving, pro-Russia propaganda. Everyone on the Far Right - from the usual suspect donald "Putin's BFF" trump to Tucker Carlson - is taking Putin's side instead of President Biden's (via Meryl Cornfield at Washington Post (paywalled)):

As the United States seeks to rally its allies and impose tough penalties for Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, a vocal group of Republicans and right-leaning commentators is expressing praise and admiration for the president’s strength and shrewdness. President Vladimir Putin, that is.

While most congressional Republicans back Biden’s tough line against Moscow — or argue it should be even tougher — a faction made up of conservative Republicans, supporters of former president Donald Trump and conservative media figures says Putin should be left alone, or even congratulated, by Americans.

Trump complimented Putin on Tuesday, saying it was a “smart move” by the Russian president to send “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the Ukraine border.

“This is genius,” Trump said in a conservative talk radio interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort, echoing his past praise of the Russian president. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re going to go out and we’re going to go in and we’re going to help keep peace.’ You’ve got to say that’s pretty savvy...”

Of course trump is parroting Putin's lie about "peacekeepers" going into Ukraine. This is the same idiot who as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) essentially did everything he could to give Putin more global prestige and even met with him in a meeting so private not even our own Intelligence agencies know what was shared.

In the meantime with the likes of Carlson:

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, like many others on the right, minimized Russia’s move to invade and overpower a neighboring country as a “border conflict” that should not concern Americans.

“It may be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: ‘What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much?’” Carlson said Tuesday. “‘Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?’”

In Carlson's view, the Far Left critics and progressives here in the United States are more his enemy than Putin is. So to him, Democrats are Evil and Russian autocratic kleptomaniacs are Good. All because Carlson and those autocrats are on the same wavelength.

There are several vulgar ironies at play.

Back when our nation faced a foreign policy crisis of this magnitude, it was 9/11. Middle Eastern terrorists had directly attacked our major cities and caused the deaths of thousands. War against those terrorists - primarily hiding in Afghanistan - required our nation to mobilize for war.

Fox News was one of the greatest voices screaming for war. And not just in Afghanistan: Fox punditry and other Far Right commentators pushed for an invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2002 into 2003, based on flimsy evidence and long-standing rage towards Saddam Hussein. President George W. Bush (The Lesser) pushed for that invasion, and anyone protesting against that - protesting against Dubya - felt the full wrath of Fox News' outrage.

Now here we are 20 years later, and with the United States edging to a war-time footing these same pundits - who proudly waved the Stars and Stripes screaming "USA! USA!" and demanded the rest of us obey their bloodlust - are now pushing for division and criticism of the current President and rooting for the other side... partly because this current President is a Democrat (boo hiss).

The horrifying thing is that the major reason why Fox Not-News and the rest of the Far Right Noise Machine is supporting Putin is because they share the same belief: This nationalist, Christian White Power identity common between Russians and racist extremists across Europe and the U.S.

Here's an NBC News report by Matt Bradley from 2017:

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia is working to empower Europe’s far-right and Eurosceptic parties with offers of cooperation, loans, political cover and propaganda. Such love has not gone unrequited: European populists are answering back with fulsome praise for Russia, its foreign policy and its strongman leader...

From the Russian side, empowering anti-European Union populists has the obvious benefit of helping erode the strength of European institutions that Moscow has long considered enemies.

For Europe’s extreme right, the benefits of embracing Putin are more abstract and ideological, said Markus Wagner, a political science professor at the University of Vienna. They see Putin as the kind of patriotic hero who prizes national traditions and realpolitik over the internationalism and openness that have long characterized Western liberalism...

Here's a report by Michael Edison Hayden from the Southern Poverty Law Center about one such link to an extremist White Supremacist group:

Hatewatch found an email address ending with a Russian domain name referenced across the source code of a network of three extreme, far-right websites that operate primarily in the U.S. Those three websites share the same Google Analytics account, one that was first used by a notorious pro-Kremlin propagandist named Charles Bausman.

All three websites feature bylines used by members of The Right Stuff, a white nationalist organization that helped plan and promote the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The Right Stuff is also the same white nationalist organization for which U.S. State Department Official Matthew Q. Gebert covertly recruited members, as Hatewatch first reported in 2019. At least two of the websites have published inflammatory, racist rhetoric in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the U.S. in recent months. Members of The Right Stuff have also defended eruptions of far-right violence in response to civil unrest this year...

Bausman has a long history of promoting Russian President Vladimir Putin to an English-speaking audience and communicated with a pro-Putin oligarch about money around the time Russia Insider first launched.

In 2015, the website The Interpreter published emails showing Bausman asked for money from pro-Kremlin Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev through his associate, Alexey Komov. The U.S. Department of Treasury sanctioned Malofeev in December 2014 “because he is responsible for or complicit in, or has engaged in, actions or polices that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine and has materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of [pro-Kremlin separatist activity].”

Natalia Antonova, a journalist and Russia expert who lived in Moscow for seven years, overlapping the time when Bausman launched his website, told Hatewatch the timing of Russia Insider’s creation is significant, because it launched when Putin needed positive press in the U.S., due to backlash over Russia’s conflict with Ukraine.

“Russia Insider is founded in 2014, which is the same year that Russia attacks Ukraine. And Konstantin Malofeev is fingered as a financial link between so-called rebels in Ukraine and Moscow,” Antonova explained. “Russia was feeling embattled [by the Western press] because most people were not big fans of what Russia was doing to Ukraine. Then, here comes [Russia Insider] where if your takes are too extreme for [Kremlin controlled] Russia Today, that’s where you can get them published...”

This has been happening for a long time, almost a decade, and Putin's been cultivating these relationship with American hate groups to achieve his own agenda against Ukraine.

And the Far Right - the hate-driven, the money-driven - enjoy this cultivation because it gives them both money and power. Remember Russia's involvement with the National Rifle Association? The NRA got suckered into a money laundering scandal, all because they saw the money and they saw the chance to spread their hateful rhetoric with the aid of a foreign dictator they admired.

What's involved here is Christian Nationalism, an underlying ideology for a lot of the White Supremacist militias running around rioting in our streets and nation's Capitol. It's an ideology that abhors a diverse and open culture, and therefore rails against democracy, civil rights, women's choice, and everything else under the sun. It's an ideology reflected in Russia through Putin's alliance with a Russian Orthodox church that promotes the same anti-gay, anti-woman, racist trash you hear from Far Right Republicans every day (especially now in Texas and Florida, God help us).

The (mostly) White Evangelical crowd that makes up the Far Right voting base, and the Fox Not-News audience, worships the likes of Putin - and trump, who poses as a similar autocratic leader - because Putin offers them a chance to remake their own nation in their own Christianist image. In spite of the reality that Putin's (and trump's) actions and statements are so clearly in opposition to Jesus' teachings.

The hypocrisy of such adoration from the Far Right is lost on them. Their greed and their ideology blinds them to the reality that the United States - a nation formed, if flawed, on basic democratic norms and human rights - has to stand against the likes of Putin, who openly mocks everything we've built from 1776 to 1865 to 1945 to 1965 to 1991 to now.

Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Far Right media are convinced they are backing the right side, even when it's in full opposition to their own nation's security and interests.

Goddamn them.

Part of me wants Biden to ask Congress to declare a state of war existing between the United States and Russia, not so that we are prepared to defend our NATO allies when (not if) Putin escalates the violence in Eastern Europe, but because that declaration would trigger certain laws that would make it harder for the goddamn wingnuts to openly praise Putin and even cut into all the business dealing they've got with Russia.

We're at war against all the spiritual wickedness - violence, corruption, deceit - that Putin represents, thou hypocrites. There's two sides: America's, or the bloody kleptocratic dictator Putin.

You're choosing poorly, Fox Not-News, you're all one step removed from outright treason against the United States. Keep it up, and you'll deserve to pay for your folly.

What If: Gaming Out The Far Right's War (w/ Updates)

This is where the mindset of your average Far Right trump-worshipping Fox Not-News consuming wingnut is today (via Raw Story (paywall)):

An audience member asked a disturbing and stunning question at a speech given by close Trump family ally and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in Idaho on Monday, but instead of denouncing and disavowing the question itself as being anti-democratic, morally repugnant, illegal, based on falsehoods, and against his repeatedly avowed Christian values, Kirk offered an equally disturbing response.

"At this point, we're living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny," claimed the unidentified man, as Media Matters reports. "When do we get to use the guns? No, and I'm not — that's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?..."

Charlie Kirk tried to downplay it, trying to deflect the blame onto the liberals the wingnuts are desperate to kill:

"They are trying to provoke you and everyone here. They are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties, the likes of which we have never seen," Kirk fear-mongered...

But Kirk can't hide this reality. Just look at the Far Right today. Driven by trump's Big Lie about a "stolen election" that wasn't. Inundated with misinformation across Facebook and Twitter and Dark Web rabbit holes. Every night Fox Not-News has wingnut talking head after wingnut talking head attacking Dr. Fauci and any vaccination efforts to end the COVID pandemic, clinging to unproven conspiracy theories and desperate to undo any efforts by Biden to bring America back to normal. There's Tucker Carlson violating every journalistic ethical norm shilling a ludicrous "false flag" story about the January 6th Insurrection, trying to both vindicate trump's coup attempt and hide the facts of what really happened at the same time.

The entire Far Right political environment is full of rage and hate right now, has been at this level ever since trump entered the White House and turned into the Hater-In-Chief. And none of this has calmed down after Biden won in 2020 and tossed trump to the curbside.

And this isn't a recent development. How far back to the wingnuts' "Librul Hunting Licenses" idea go, back to Obama's era or Bill Clinton's? Remember the John Birch Society putting up Wanted flyers for JFK accusing him of treason? The Far Right call to violence towards everyone they deem Liberal - and thus in their eyes Un-American - has been going on for decades, if not a full century of post-Civil War "Redeemer" and Klan-led violence.

This is the world we live in now: Daily threats of violence from enraged, ill-informed Far Right wingnuts raiding every school board meeting and driving every county elections official into hiding.

The question(s) remaining: Just how far is this all going to go? Where is the tipping point? When is that "other shoe" finally going to drop?

If you follow the likes of Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice, he's already noted that our nation has been enduring a low, simmering violent insurrection for some time. Not necessarily the violent backlash of the southern conservatives against the Sixties Civil Rights movement (there was kind of a cut-off point in the Seventies), but more along the anti-government flareups of militia groups inspired by the Turner Diaries and anti-immigrant haters feeding off of ancient anti-Semitic "Replacement Conspiracy" bullshit. What's caused all this to flare up now was the reactionary response to having someone like Barack Obama become President in 2008. The so-called Tea Party that rose up to challenge Obama's economic and health care policies quickly shifted into the old habits that kept the Far Right hating for decades.

To Silverman (and others in the Intelligence Community tracking national threats), it's stochastic terrorism: A situation where a person or group (usually ethnic/racial/gender) is targeted with demonization, to the point where an individual or small group is enraged enough to act against that target. In short: Fear-mongers/Rage-mongers accuse others of being EVIL and those mongers' audiences react with violence towards those others.

We've seen it with George Tiller, we've seen it with abortion clinic bombings, we've seen it with Black churches getting burned down, we've seen it in Charleston where an enraged racist killed Black parishioners at a prayer service, we've seen it with attacks on Jewish temples, we've seen it in Charlottesville, we've seen it on the Capitol steps this past January 6th.

We're already in this stage of violence, with no end in sight. As long as the Far Right media spews out their misinformation, as long as they point out others for demonizing, as long as they skirt the ethics of the First Amendment to sell their fear and hate without accountability, we won't see an end of the bloodshed.

What's for debate is the escalation. 

Fear and hate are like drugs. At some point, the same hit isn't going to give you the same high. You start upping the dosage, looking for that high, never mind the damage the drug's toxicity does to your body, mind, and soul.

Just railing against Libruls and Black Lives Matter protestors and Immigrants and Muslims and Jews and Women won't cut it. Someone's going to want to push further into acts of insurrection. Not just the Republican voting base that does all the screaming, but a Republican leadership finding themselves egged on by pressure - from trump, from that rabid base - to openly rebel against a Biden regime they deem tyrannical.

The ongoing anti-vaccination movement, for example, has done a good job of getting Republican governors to reject the science and argue for FREEDOM against mandates to get vaccinated for workplaces and schools. Thing is, legal history has supported federal mandates before and even this hard-conservative Supreme Court will be loathe to overrule precedence. So any Republican Red State governor is going to run into a political conflict they might not win.

The pressure from the Far Right base to reject federal authority is going to increase, no matter how the GOP leadership will try to manage the message and keep the anger and violence limited to controllable outbursts. You can see it now from the anger of the mobs at the wingnut rallies. Any threat to the Far Right Narrative - any official investigation into the January 6 riots leading to arrests of the major ringleaders, any official shutdown of trump's Big Lie of a "stolen" election, any successful enforcement of the vaccine mandates - is going to require a disproportionate reaction from the Republicans that could trigger honest-to-God open warfare.

It most likely won't be straight-up secession. The political dynamics of such a move - even for a big state like Texas - would create utter chaos and likely fail (much faster than it did in the 1860s). I could go into greater detail of the problems building a new nation-state in the 21st Century can be, and I might do so later on... 

With secession an unlikely event (for now), what will happen will be an ongoing legal battle between the Red State governments filing lawsuits against the U.S. government: To delay and obstruct any final enforcement of anything long enough for the 2022 or 2024 elections coming into effect and changing the political landscape to favor the Republicans (this is where all the damn gerrymandering of Texas, Florida, and Georgia is gonna suck). Insubordination and obstruction from the state agencies instead of open secession.

But if the Republicans delaying tactics fail, if their attempts to suppress voters and gerrymander things to hell and back fail, if the Democrats hold onto Congress in 2022 and then Biden wins re-election 2024 in spite of Republican howls of stolen votes, we can expect things to escalate even more. Because those losses will only enrage the Far Right base to believe trump's Big Lie even more.

At that point, the arguments against secession would go out the window. Convinced that they are losing power - similar to how they feared things would go in 1860 - and falling to minority status, the Far Right conservative elements will fall back into the desire to just quit what they'll see as a game rigged against them. In spite of the reality they have never proved in the past they were cheated, and likely won't prove it in the future.

So if it comes that far, will we see actual secession?

Any Red State looking to split from the United States in protest will find few overseas allies to help them, for starters: The most likely suspects - Russia, China, and Iran - just happen to be anathema to a majority of Americans, create an open act of hypocrisy (seeing how many Far Right ideologues hate those nations in principle), and create further schisms among their own secessionist ranks.

Those Red States will also find few financial allies. National and global banks will be reluctant to do business with a rebel state, and may pull back doing business with any corporations that tries to operate there. Considering many Red States already have low Gross Domestic Products, and rely too much on federal subsidies, those states will find themselves with economic crises right off the bat.

Even the need to start your own currency - the U.S. government is not about to let a seceding state rely on the federal dollar - would be a major headache. You'd have to consider exchange rates to other currencies, run the risk of inflation, and establish a fiscal policy to manage the money you have (or need to print). With few banks or foreign nations likely dealing with you - lest they anger the United States, which is still an economic powerhouse - any loans to provide a fiscal foundation won't be there for you. Considering the mindset of the Far Right, they'll likely try to set it to a Gold Standard (which could lead to inflation and immediate Panics) or worse go with a bitcoin (which would be vulnerable to speculation).

A small populated state without much of a tax base or commodities of value will find itself isolated real quick. A singular state in secession will get cut off from most interstate trade and shipping. Train shipping will also get cut off. Supply chains could fall apart. Considering the U.S. government will be in a hostile mood, you're likely to see your seaports and airports shut down. Any tie-ins to the nation's power grids will get cut off. If you think you can survive on your own electrical supply, just ask Texas how that worked this past winter.

Of the Red States that COULD pull of seceding on their own, Texas has enough resources and financial wealth to pull it off. However, they'd STILL run into the hostility of the remaining United States government cutting them off from any overseas allies. They'll even run into the hassles of suddenly having Mexico as a neighbor, which could come knocking with an army at the Rio Grande to discuss just where the border really is (remember kids, the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War was with the UNITED STATES, not Texas).

That's not even getting into the trouble any Red State will have with their own residents. Sure, in some Republican-led states the population is thoroughly conservative and eager to fight. But even in places like South Carolina or Kansas or Iowa or Indiana, there are pockets of Democratic Blue. 

A seceding Red State is going to run into the likelihood of their Blue Metropolises seceding themselves. There is historic precedence: During the Civil War, most Confederate state had pockets of resistance from various counties or cities dominated by people who still thought of themselves as Unionists (or hated the slaveowners' political control). The current political landscape is the same: Much of the Republican control in large-populated Red states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio) are only that way due to extreme gerrymandering. The dense metro areas (Houston and San Antonio/Austin, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa/St. Pete, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cleveland) in those states are reliably Democratic and would resist any secession efforts.

Even then, this isn't 1860. Back then, it took time and effort to flee a state if you were no longer politically accepted anymore. Any Whig/Republican in the South by 1861 either kept their heads down and mouths shut, fled to the safety of a friendly county, or spent time more than once in Confederate jails until Union armies liberated the place.

Any Blue Democrat in 2024 can hop into an SUV with their family, pack up for a month's vacation, get the hell out of the Red State, stay with relatives in a safe Blue State until the secessionists are rounded up by the National Guard, and drive back to file any insurance claims on any damage their Red State neighbors may have inflicted on their homes in their absence. The Red State secessionists may try to blockade the Interstate highways but those would be the first points retaken by federal agents to ensure refugees can get out okay.

If the Red State in question succeeds in seceding, expect a brain drain of the more educated, more wealthy Democratic residents fleeing, reducing the value and business strength of that Red State. Colleges would likely shut down (especially as more liberal young adults will flee for their lives). Any educational investment generated by universities gone.

And if any Red State governor is foolish enough to call for secession, they better not plan on sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row. In this day and age, the U.S. army doesn't even have to drop paratroopers on your location to arrest you for treason: They can just fly in drones to target your cell phone's GPS and make you say bye-bye. Considering how the rest of the world views the wingnut trumpian factions with contempt, the only ones who'll file a war crimes complaint to the UN would be Russia and Bulgaria (maybe Brazil).

That's just the basic stuff I can game out if any Red State Republican leadership - any trumpian cultist - think they can win a fight here against the federal government if things escalate the way they want.

The end result no matter what - until the madness can break, until the liars are held accountable and facts and truth can reclaim our sanity - is still going to be suffering of innocent lives, bloodshed, and heartbreak.

But they can't win. The Far Right just can't win. They think they have the numbers but they don't. They know they have the weapons but they can't shoot us all. They think they have the rich and powerful on their side but the elites will abandon them in a heartbeat if their own asses are on the line. They think they'll own the courts and they believe they'll reclaim the reins of power, but they're not as good at cheating as they used to be, and the Constitution that forged this nation is stronger than they think.

All we have to remember is that we - the real Americans, the diverse, the loving and living, the moderate and the liberal and the progressive - outnumber them, and all we have to do is stand united and fight back.

(Update 11/5/21): Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog to Crooks & Liars ongoing Mike's Blog Round-Up! I'm a bit busy this month with NaNo but I may post every so often if something crazy happens...

(Update 11/9/21): We got demagogues like Dan Bongino out here encouraging his audience to rise up "against vaccine mandates" and that "we outnumber them" when talking about confronting evil liberals. We got Senator Ted "Cancun" Cruz openly talking secession for Texas in front of college students just in case Republicans don't retake the federal government in 2022/24.

This isn't idle talk. This is the ongoing Far Right Narrative pushing the stochastic terrorism of demonizing The Dread Other Libruls to further extremes right up to the point where another insurrection/coup takeover takes place. These wingnuts are spoiling for a fight, and it's horrifying how the mainstream media still laughs it off as "Free Speech" pandering. Right up until the blood spills...

The Big Lie And the One Truth (w/ Update)

(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up! As always, you're invited to leave a comment and visit the rest of the blog. Today (Wed. May 12) is looking like it's going to be an insane day...)

So the Republican downward spiral seems to be gaining speed. Via Zach Beauchamp at Vox: 

Remaining in the GOP’s good graces requires that elected officials either actively embrace lies about 2020 or, at very least, refuse to condemn them. As a result, 2020 conspiracy theories are exerting a dominant influence on the party — shaping both legislation and the base’s worldview...

From top to bottom, the GOP has been conquered by the Big Lie (note: trump claiming the 2020 results were stolen and that he won both the Popular Vote and the Electoral College). Much as North Korean state press proclaims that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger, Republicans must now proclaim that was something fishy about Joe Biden’s victory...

Trump’s pronouncements, endorsed and spread by a number of prominent Republicans, radicalize the base — undermining faith in democracy itself. Republicans inclined to challenge this view realize they’re out of step with the party and mostly stay quiet; those that do speak up publicly, like Cheney or Raffensperger, get marginalized or stripped of their power. This weakens the constituency to challenge any future lies from Trump and other like-minded Republicans.

It’s a one-way ratchet, where a faction of the GOP elite led by Trump pushes the party further and further down an anti-democratic road. And there’s no obvious way to stop it...

What is happening now is that the Republican Party and all of its apparatus - not just the elected officials but the party handlers and above all their media punditry allies at Fox Not-News and elsewhere - are stuck defending an incredibly Big yet easily-disprovable Lie. 

They got stuck partly because they got stuck with a Big Lying Bullshitter in trump placing himself at the head of their table. trump came in lying on Day One, proclaiming himself the most popular and most beloved even at the emptiest Inauguration in memory, and forced not only his underlings to shill that lie but got the rest of the GOP to either buy in or stay silent (which re-enforced the lie's power).

I said it before: Once you become trump's Bitch you will ALWAYS be trump's Bitch. Once he gets you lying for him to prove your worth, he will make you lie even more with even flimsier bullshit until your reputation is worthless.

But this isn't entirely trump's fault the Republican Party has caught itself trapped defending an indefensible Big Lie.

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots. (Letting the Far Right Christian forces take control of the Party had a lot to do with that mindset winning out)

The ongoing slander of accusing liberal Democrats of being Socialists or Communists or both from the 1940s grew like a cancer into the belief - even as Socialism faded and Communism collapsed in the 1990s - that Democrats are destructive and anti-American. It doesn't help that a lot of liberalism brought Blacks and Jews (and slowly among more Women) in large numbers into the Democratic ranks to where the Republican paranoia fell even more into racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.

All of that fuels the fear and anger and paranoia of not only the Republican voting base but also a Republican leadership that has driven out any moderating voices and replaced them with more rabid and aggressive haters. It's gotten harder and harder for the GOP to even reconsider its world-view against Democrats because it keeps adding more members to their ranks who will never change their hatred of the Dreaded Other Democrats.

This Republican Truth - Democrats Should Never Hold Power That Rightfully Belongs To Us - fits easily into trump's Big Lie - Democrats Stole My God-Given Rightful Power - and now those two parts have fused into one.

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

The Republicans' One Truth has become their Big Lie.

It's just a question now of when they pay for that lie, because it's too big to avoid.

The Republican War On America Isn't Over Yet

(Update 3/5: Batocchio has once again offered this article on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Welcome to all new visitors, please leave a Comment)

I am seeing of late various post-mortems about the evermore-Right-Wing Republican Party, either in their death throes or close to it. For example, this bit in the Atlantic (behind a paywall) from Tom Nichols:

Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.

I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes...

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.

Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of “Marshal of the American Republic” and strike a medal for a “Hero of American Culture,” Trump would have them both by now...

The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last summer’s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo about “antisocial elements” and “hooligans.” They blame their failures at the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.

Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.”

Or this from David Atkins as he covers the CPAC wingnut-cosplay convention for the Washington Monthly:

But CPAC isn’t a sideshow. It’s the main stage of the conservative movement, predicting its future behavior in an era of widening asymmetric polarization.  CPAC presaged the rise of the Party of Reagan over that of Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower. It heralded the scorched-earth confrontational politics of Newt Gingrich in the Bill Clinton era. It elevated George W. Bush at a time when the mainstream GOP still saw itself more in the mold of John McCain. It celebrated the Tea Party before GOP legislators had fully embraced it. And it promoted openly racist birthers and conspiracy theorists like Donald Trump at a time when the the mainline GOP was producing superficially anti-racist autopsies and promoting candidates like Marco Rubio and Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush.

So if we want to know where the Republican Party is heading today, we should pay close attention to CPAC. So what’s the theme now? Where is it going?

The answer seems to be doubling down on Donald Trump, white supremacy, insurrection and conspiracy theories...

Trump himself is set to headline the conference, whining about insufficiently groveling members of his own party and playing up his usual fantastical claims, even as a ridiculous golden statue of Trump (made in Mexico, by the way) wheels its way through the halls like a blasphemous idol...

Shared via Vox, video captured by William Turton

Oh Dear Lord. Yes indeed: The so-called Christian fundamentalist-led Far Right Conservatives brought in a literal Golden Calf (or Shitgibbon in this case) in violation of Deuteronomy (Deut 13 for example), as well as the Commandment forbidding the worship of other gods and idols (Exodus 20:3-5). I may be Unitarian, but I was raised with Christian values and even *I* find this offensive to Faith in the One Graceful God.

This is how hypocritical, if not outright false, those conservative religious leaders in the GOP really are. This isn't even tone-deaf. They had to know what that idol symbolized and they did not care how religiously offensive it would be.

To build on Atkins' coverage, one of the common descriptives I've seen on social media is comparing this year's CPAC to an unhinged, borderline-violent comic-con convention filled with militia cosplayers and hucksters galore. To which I note, as a regular attendee of comic-cons, our cosplayers and vendors have far more dignity than CPAC attendees, sheesh.

To get back to Atkins' final thoughts:

It’s unconfirmed yet whether it was intentional or an unfortunate coincidence, but it seems at least symbolic that even the CPAC stage itself is shaped like a symbol adopted by Nazis and subsequent white supremacist movements.

All of it points to a grim future for the country if the movement currently animating the conservative movement holds majority power over the next decade. Defeat has not chastened the movement, but rather emboldened it. And if CPAC is the predictor it normally is, the next incarnation of Republican power will be even more aggressively racist and authoritarian than its predecessor.

In this, he has a point. The Republican Party may be bereft of values or integrity anymore, but it's still here and still a danger. 

It's a danger that's not going anywhere anytime soon. Above all, the Republicans are still here because they're too entrenched into too many elected, executive, and judicial offices to just disappear overnight. The GOP still has political control at the state level, holding governorships and legislatures standing opposed to any ideal of bipartisanship or acceptance of Democrats in control at the federal level.

The second reason the Republicans are still here is due to our Winner-Take-All system of voting: It encourages two major parties and keeps any other viable third option out of contention. You can vote for a Third Party candidate but the major ones (D and R) are such behemoths that too many on-the-fence voters worry that third choice won't win. Even WITH two major parties, the voting bloc that's most likely to swing between the two - the Moderate/Centrist voters who can avoid partisan fealty - are still stuck choosing partisan candidates. If there were a functioning Moderate Third Party (Libertarians and Greens don't count) then maybe the extremism in either Democrat or Republican parties would doom the party that slides too far... But there isn't an organized Moderate Party to begin with.

This is the third reason why the Republicans won't go away: They got deep pocket fundraisers keeping them alive. As the official "Party of Big Business," the GOP is the favorite go-to for the billionaires in finance and industry who want to keep their wonderful tax cuts going. Even though those billionaires and businesses aren't thrilled with the overt racism/sexism/pretty much open acts of evil that the modern Republican Party now promotes, you don't see any of them going to the mattresses with a plan to build a Moderate pro-Business rival party to compete against the corrupt Republican party. Those billionaires will likely keep their mouths shut and their wallets open to fund the one major party that will keep them rolling in their untaxed capital gains.

Nobody is coming to rescue the nation from the racist corrupt trump-led Republicans.

It's only up to the voters, any of them with any level of sanity left to them, to see how far gone into zombie decay the Republicans are now, and walk away from that. It's a lot, asking for millions of registered voters across America to make the effort to quit their party alignment to the GOP, even if it's to get them to flip to Independent/No Party Affiliate. People identify to their teams, their tribes, who they root for. It's like asking millions of Americans to give up their personal sports team, or quitting on their favorite musical artist from their teen years.

But it's the only way to beat the Republicans. Don't give those Far Right wingnuts any power, don't give them your money, and sure as hell don't give them your vote.

Look at them. With an unbiased, open eye, look at those Far Right conservatives bouncing around at that CPAC convention. Look at their hypocrisy, look at what they are happily, openly worshiping.

The Republicans are not celebrating America. They're burning it.

For the Love of God, they are waging war against their fellow citizens, their neighbors, all of humanity, in the service of their greed and hate.

Please don't join that. Fight it. 

That monstrosity is not going away until ALL OF US make it go away.