As previously announced, I’ve moved from Substack to Ghost.

The new address of this newsletter on the web is: https://unprecedented.ghost.io/

If you subscribed (free or paid) on Substack prior to the migration, you should now receive articles from: Unprecedented <noreply@unprecedented.ghost.io>

So far you should have received two articles!

(If you didn’t, please check your spam folder!)

If you subscribed here on Substack after the migration, please update your info on Ghost:

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These are the two articles I’ve published on Ghost so far:

One:

“Banning Anne Frank” further exposes the lie that astroturf book banning group Moms for Liberty and wannabe-fascist Ron DeSantis are only interested in keeping “pornography” out of children’s hands.

You can read that here: https://unprecedented.ghost.io/archive/banning-anne-frank/

Two:

“Saudi Arabia’s Useful Idiot” looks at what Saudi Arabia gets out of being Twitter’s biggest outside investor—and how the brutal regime’s desire to persecute people for things they say or tweet may align with the benefits they get from investing in Elon Musk, including “special access to confidential company information.”

You can read that here: https://unprecedented.ghost.io/archive/saudi-arabias-useful-idiot/

As I previously mentioned, I overcame my inertia and left Substack after reading about how Substack’s lead VC investor, Andreessen Horowitz, is now “openly courting Saudi Arabia” despite the fact the regime that chopped up Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw is not just an enemy of writers, it is also openly siding with Russia and China against the US.

Over on Ghost, everything seems to be working fine in terms of emails going out and web links being sharable. All of my old Substack articles are now archived on Ghost. I’m still figuring out how to add likes and share buttons. But comments are activated (theoretically).

For now, I’ll also be leaving all my old articles here on Substack. But quitting Substack, like quitting Twitter, will present new challenges to me in attracting and retaining new subscribers to this newsletter. For example, since I turned off paid subscriptions on Substack, I’m still getting more new free subscribers here than on Ghost.

All my articles on Ghost will continue to be free to read and share, made possible by the generosity of my paid supporters. For those who ever wish to support this ad-free newsletter without the commitment of a paid subscription, I will also keep my “tip jar” open on Buy Me a Coffee (buttons are below).

I hope you will continue reading and commenting on my Ghost posts—and sharing on social media if you feel inclined.

Thanks!

Richard

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What that means for you: You’ll be getting emails from a new “ghost.io” address

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m in the process of moving this “Unprecedented” newsletter from Substack to Ghost. Which means you will soon be receiving this email from a new address (likely ending with @unprecedented.ghost.io).

The final straw that inspired my leap to Ghost was the recent news that Substack’s VC-investor Andreessen-Horowitz is courting more investment from Saudi Arabia.

As I said in my latest post, Ghost is open-source and run by a non-profit.

As one of my 182 paid subscribers (or as one of my original 24 “comp” subscribers"), the migration should (theoretically) be seamless to you.

However, I’m not 100% sure that if you subscribed at discount that you will see that same discount when the time comes to renew. (If a promised discount fails to materialize, please feel free to contact me at thedailyedge@yahoo.com).

Thank you for your support!

As you can see from the image at the top, being one of my paid subscribers puts you in an elite group.

Since I launched at the start of 2020—and especially since I took down the paywall at the start of the pandemic—nearly 5,000 people have subscribed to Unprecedented, 96% of whom are either free or comped.

Your support as a paid subscriber has helped me keep this newsletter going for 3+ years and it is now helping fund my switch to Ghost.

Because I will need Ghost to support all my subscribers, I have enlisted the Ghost Pro “concierge” service to help with that (cost = $720/year).

And to keep things as seamless as possible for my readers, I’ve also invested $59 in the 3rd-party “Substation” newsletter theme so the newsletter will still look as Substack-like as possible. (In case you want to help subsidize this switch any further, I also have a “tip jar” at Buy Me a Coffee.)

The move may happen soon and all my past articles will make the leap to Ghost, but I’m not sure that comments will.

I hope you will continue reading, commenting and sharing when I reappear at my new location.

Thanks again!

Richard

In right-wing nutjob circles, “The Twitter Files” are an even bigger scandal than Benghazi or Pizzagate or Migrant Caravans or Tucker Carlson’s edited highlights of that innocent January 6th tourist visit.

No one has done more to help preach the “Twitter Files” disinformation gospel than former “liberal” journalist Matt Taibbi who in recent years has transformed himself into a wilfully bonkers alt-left shit stirrer.

Taibbi’s shift not only proves the point that those who move far enough to one extreme on the political spectrum will eventually join up with the most radicalized voices on the other side. It has also—conveniently—allowed him to cash in on the new era of fascist-friendly grifting.

Using Elon Musk’s Dark MAGA Twitter patronage, Taibbi has generated national and international attention, helping him expand his YUGE and lucrative Substack audience, bringing him an estimated seven-figure annual income.

More money, less reporting

Taibbi’s shameful alliance with the Saudi-backed, journalist-hating Twitter owner has resulted in him making the leap from independent reporter to, in the words of Mehdi Hasan, a “Musk scribe.”

It’s a transition at odds with Taibbi’s previously stated but now abandoned journalistic principles.

As Sam Seder noted in December 2022, in 2021 Taibbi told Joe Rogan that the worst thing for a real reporter was getting information “spoon-fed” to you by those who might be looking to manipulate a story: “Once you start getting handed things, you’ve lost… They have you… You can’t cross that line.”

On 9 March 2023, Taibbi was invited by GOP Rep. Jim “The Knife” Jordan to testify to Congress about the Benghazi—oops, sorry—Twitter Files “scandal.”

The smirking Taibbi told the friendly Rethugs on the committee that the Musk nothingburger he had flipped and garnished was “by far the most serious thing” and “the most brave story” he had ever worked on.

But Democrats shredded his contentions.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz read to him from the Society for Professional Journalists’ code of ethics: “Journalists should avoid accepting spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if it’s likely to be slanted, incomplete, or designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed or invalid conclusion.”

Wasserman Schultz then dunked on Taibbi with the clip of him saying virtually the same thing to Joe Rogan.

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Of course, Elon’s bestie was undeterred by the facts or the ethics lessons he had to endure in the hearing.

The now Fox News friendly Taibbi was soon eagerly posing for a photo op with Senator Ted Cruz who, as Mehdi Hasan noted on Twitter, the former reporter had previously called an “incurable skin condition.”

Hasan continued using Twitter to get under Taibbi’s thin skin until March 25 when Taibbi responded to a comment referencing Musk’s censorship of Twitter in India with a challenge to invite him onto Hasan’s show.

The bad news for Taibbi: Hasan accepted his challenge

The full interview is posted at the top of this page and it’s worth watching in full. But here’s the short version, via Techdirt:

Hasan came prepared with facts. Lots of them. Many of which debunked the core foundation on which Taibbi and his many fans have built the narrative regarding the Twitter Files….

Since the interview, Taibbi has been scrambling to claim that the errors Hasan called out are small side issues, but they’re not. They’re literally the core pieces on which he’s built the nonsense framing that Stanford, the University of Washington, some non-profits, the government, and social media have formed an “industrial censorship complex” to stifle the speech of Americans….

A key (error) is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact).

Meanwhile, on MSNBC’s The ReidOut Blog, Ja’han Jones writes:

Taibbi had asked to appear on Hasan’s show to discuss the suppression of anti-establishment voices in India — but he had virtually nothing to say on the matter when it came time to put up or shut up.

You can see Taibbi refusing to talk about India when Hasan asks him (at 22:53): “What is your view on Musk working with Modi to censor speech?”

When Hasan asked Taibbi to say a word of criticism about his patron Elon Musk who, as Ja’han Jones notes:

Has publicly pondered fomenting coups; banned American journalists on Twitter after buying the platform; falsely labeled the NPR news organization as “state-affiliated media”; and whose platform is actively suppressing voices in India that are critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” Taibbi refused.

Here’s how that dialogue specifically reads:

Hasan: How did you go from being the scourge of Wall Street to being unable to say anything critical of a rightwing billionaire, Elon Musk?

Taibbi: I like Elon Musk.

Hasan: Would you like to criticize Musk now?

Taibbi: No I don’t particularly want to.

How the mighty have fallen. The once-respected Matt Taibbi now has less credibility than Catturd.

Update: Taibbi Now Says He Is Leaving Twitter

I finished writing the above article on Friday afternoon April 7, ending (I thought) at the point where Matt Taibbi, in the midst of being humiliated by Mehdi Hasan, was still ignominiously refusing to bite the hand that was feeding him.

But on Friday, Taibbi himself fell victim to Elon Musk’s latest petty assault on free speech and finally realized how swiftly—because it belonged to Elon Musk—the hand feeding him could become the hand now punching him in the face.

As Taibbi wrote on his own Substack:

Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.

It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.

Apparently, the “Twitter Files” author is able to get answers from Elon Musk’s Twitter quicker than the President, the FBI or the CIA—and not just the poop emojis that real journalists receive.

But Taibbi has decided to quit Twitter anyway, based on the principle he was only in it for the money.

Meanwhile: My Substack “Stay-or-Go” Debate

In mid-December 2022, I talked to @LOLGOP here about my reservations about staying on Elon Musk’s Twitter before resolving to quit Twitter at the end of 2022. In that conversation, I also brought up my reservations about the Twitter-alternative Post because, like Substack, it has the backing of Andreesen-Horowitz.

As I said to @LOLGOP:

What bothers me most about Post is that Marc Andreesen’s VC firm is the number one backer. Andreesen’s the number one backer of Substack, too, which we’re both on, but which created the Matt Taibbi’s, the Glenn Greenwald’s, the Bari Weiss’s.

There are other things that irk me about Substack, but inertia has kept me here so far. However, recent news that Andreesen-Horowitz is not only courting investment from Saudi Arabia but is, like Elon Musk, already-backed by the butcherous Saudi regime, has pushed me over the edge.

That means that I will be looking to move to Ghost quite soon. It’s open-source and run by a non-profit. Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, the migration should (theoretically) be seamless to you.

Thanks for reading—and see you on the other side!

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Cancel culture is real. Especially when it comes to Black history and the “discomfort” it might cause snowflake white children being raised in pro-gun, anti-book “Christian” homes.

In fact, it’s gotten to the point where even PG-rated Disney movies depicting real events are getting banned in schools.

That’s what happened this week when a lone parent was able to have the Disney movie “Ruby Bridges” banned in a Pinellas County, Florida school, despite it having been shown without complaint for years before now.

In 2023, the sanitized 1998 telling of a true story of what happened in 1960 is too much for Florida kids to handle. And the episode veered into “1984” territory when the school district launched into “doublespeak” to claim that the accurate reporting that the school had cancelled all showings of the film didn’t actually constitute a “ban.”

This is just the latest example of Black history getting cancelled in Florida (and other Ultra-MAGA states)—along with the growing movement to ban books with LGBTQ+ content in the hate-filled, dark-money funded effort to erase individual identities along with national history.

Florida… Disney… Racism... LGBTQ+ Erasure…

… Clearly, it’s time for me to check in again with my friend Clay Rivers, who I interviewed here in 2020 and here in 2022. As I wrote last year:

In his 2012 memoir “Walking Tall”, Rivers introduced himself as “Short. Black. Christian. And gay.” His 2015 essay “How I Talk to White People About Racism” was published in the New York Times’ feature “A Conversation About Race.” And since 2019, he has been both the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Our Human Family (OHF), an online magazine about achieving equality with the mission of “fostering meaning conversations that broad perspectives and offer hope.”

As readers of his memoir know, Clay Rivers is also a former Disney employee, with a storied career that began at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida and encompassed roles as art director for Walt Disney World Resort Design and The Disney University, The Disney Stores, Disney Imagineering, and Disney Consumer Products.

With all that’s going in Florida and beyond, I sent the Orlando-based Rivers a few more questions which he answered via email.

Q & A with Clay Rivers

In a recent Editor’s Letter for OHF Weekly, you wrote: “Our forced labor, blood, sweat, and tears quite literally built the United States… Black history is American history. To learn this chronology will only unite, not splinter, the nation.” How do you respond to what’s happening in schools and colleges today regarding teaching Black history—and the imperative not to teach anything that will cause “discomfort” to white students?

Clay Rivers: The more than 400 years of Black history, from the first Africans through today, is a cruel and inhumane story, but it is also a history of fortitude, resilience, ingenuity, hope, and survival in a land of vicious and oppressive enslavers. It is also inextricably woven into the fabric of America.

I’m disheartened by the movement to eradicate Black history from the American educational system, but it’s neither unexpected nor is it new. I just never thought it would happen in my lifetime. Noted Harvard professor, historian, and author, Dr. Henry Louis Gates refers to the period after Reconstruction as the former Confederacy’s Redemption, “when the gains of Reconstruction were systematically erased and the country witnessed the rise of white supremacist ideology that, we might say, went rogue.” That’s what we’re experiencing now. Conservative Christians et al are attempting to erase the teaching and cease the discussion of the actual history of Black Americans.

But I’m also encouraged because the thinly veiled anti-Black hate and vitriol Black people have spoken about for decades have been given permission to shamelessly strut and preen about in public for all the world to see. Hoods and robes not required, see Charlottesville. Keep in mind, the folks who, at the mere mention of racism, segregation, and the fight for civil rights, are experiencing all this manufactured self-professed unbearable discomfort are the very same people who respond with rabid jeers of “F— your feelings,” whenever the shoe is on the other foot.

What of the discomfort of the Groveland Four, Emmett Till, the residents of Rosewood, and the countless men, women, and children lynched from sea to shining sea? What of their discomfort? If the ancestors of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color can live through the aftermath of those events, white descendants can surely live through the telling of those events.

The hypocrisy astounds me.

From that which we create or innovate to our physicality, the Black influence is writ large across America and its culture. Despite a rapacious hunger for the next Black-inspired trend to cannibalize/capitalize, this country loves Black culture; but Black people, not so much. Are white students truly so emotionally fragile that they will dissolve into ethereal nothingness at the mere mention of a history that is not Euro-centric? Come on now. We all—and I do mean “all”—know better than that.

Dr. Carter Woodson, the founder of what has become Black History Month, wrote “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Essentially, what we’re experiencing is a concerted effort to rob America in general of its full history and Black Americans specifically of our legacy. This is no accident.

In one recent example of allowing white parents to dictate what all children get to learn, one Florida mother complained about—and got cancelled—screenings of “Ruby Bridges,” a 1998 PG-rated film about the Louisiana 1st grader who braved angry mobs to become the first Black child at a previously all-white school. What does it say about America when what a first grader lived through in 1960 is deemed too “controversial” for second graders to learn about 2023?

CR: It speaks volumes about the poisoned heart of America more than people realize.

First teachers are certified to hold those positions, many study years to enter the profession. And so entire school boards and teachers’ unions must now bend the knee to the will of a single parent who has a beef with a lesson that they subjectively feel is inappropriate for their child? Not so long ago, if parents disagreed with a specific lesson, they had the option to keep their child home from school that day. They still have that right. They should exercise it.

Let’s be clear here.

Ruby Bridges didn’t capriciously waltz into William Frantz Elementary School to bring chaos. The Supreme Court of the United States ordered the desegregation of public schools. The city of New Orleans provided a qualifying test for Black students to attend white schools. Much to their chagrin, Bridges was one of six children who passed the rigorous written test designed to weed out all Black students and maintain segregated schools. She would be the first, youngest, and only Black student to attend an all-white elementary school in the South.

After five months of stalling and resisting a federal court order, Louisiana’s state legislature allowed desegregation in November 1960. For the remainder of the school year, Bridges was driven five blocks to and from school under the protection of four federal marshals because of racist mob violence. Think on that for a minute. For the majority of a school year, seven out of nine months, a six-year-old child had to be protected by armed United States marshals from the reach of a mob of white people who so hated her that they didn’t want her to attend their school. The racism didn’t end at the school’s front doors. The parents of Ruby’s would-be classmates withdrew them from Ruby’s class and none of the other teachers would teach her because of their unbridled racism. All, except one. Barbara Henry, a teacher from Boston who was new at the school that year.

That any child would be subjected to the jeers and racist behavior Ruby Bridges faced is shameful. My heart broke all over again retelling Bridge’s story because I started first grade six years after Ruby. 1960 was not that long ago. If white readers aren’t moved by reading the facts of what happened to this brilliant six-year-old girl, I entreat you to imagine your six-year-old in a similar situation. You don’t have to be Black to relate to this facet of Ruby’s story, you only have to be human. People need to accept the fact that the Black experience is a human experience.

While Ruby’s experience was the first, it was not a singular event. With the increasing frequency of Black children integrating white grade schools, incidents like Ruby’s took place all across the country.

The film Ruby Bridges is an award-winning, 1998 TV movie by Disney. The point of telling Ruby’s story is not to shame or incite an overthrow of schools by second graders. The benefits of sharing these factual and historical events are manifold. First, by examining what happened, to whom, and why, we lessen the likelihood of these events happening again. Second, kids and adults grow in their understanding that we share more in common than what separates us. Third, we learn to appreciate and value the differences in others. Fourth, children learn empathy.

One of the most banned authors in American schools today is Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, an author to whom you recently devoted an entire edition of OHF Magazine. Why do you think her work is being banned? What are today’s students being deprived of because of this censorship?

CR: The long answer: Toni Morrison’s work is being banned because her work fearlessly depicts Black people front and center as the main characters within the context of Black culture, hopes, trauma, relationships, and dreams. Toni puts readers squarely in the heart and soul of her characters. In doing so she reveals for some an unimagined humanity inherent to Black people and all mankind. It’s one thing to observe a character in a detached, third-person manner. It’s quite another to identify with and understand not only what her characters feel, but why they feel the way they do.

Diving into a Toni Morrison novel is an enlightening process in which white people often discover their long-held biases about Black people are unfounded, and virtues they reserved only for themselves also hold true for Black people. To have the unfeeling rock in one’s chest transformed into one of flesh and blood isn’t a mere paradigm shift. It’s a heart transplant.

What are today’s students being deprived of because of this censorship? They’re missing out on the opportunity to become more fully human, to grow in their understanding of what it is to be human.

The folks who seek to ban Toni Morrison’s books are content with their hearts being three sizes too small. They’re content to wallow in their ignorance of the fact that theirs is not the only way to experience life. They fear having to reconcile the reality that their beloved Meemaw and Peepaw may have been active participants in one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity: the enslavement of Black people in America. They fear having to admit . . . wait for it . . . they were wrong.

The short answer: Banning books by Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison serves two purposes: 1) It keeps people ignorant because they aren’t challenged to grow, reconsider, or evolve in the light of facts they’re unaware of, 2) Banning books by any Black perpetuates anti-Black sentiment while upholding white supremacy.

The New York Times featured your essay “How I Talk To White People About Racism” in a feature called “A Conversation About Race” back in 2015. A lot has changed politically since then. Do you think the conversation is any easier now?

CR: Ha! That depends on who you’re speaking with. The world was a very different place eight years ago. The 2020 murder of George Floyd was the tipping point for a lot of Americans. Who will ever forget the scores of people who protested against the acts of police brutality? The footage of Mr. Floyd’s murder was proof positive of what many Black people had been saying for decades: that racism is real and a number of law enforcement officers were killing unarmed Black people without provocation. If not for the footage of Mr. Floyd’s murder and the testimony of the bystanders, the conviction of the police officers involved might never have happened. Their conviction set the precedence for the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. The inconceivable became a reality.

On one level, I think people of different ethnicities are more likely to engage in conversations about racism as a result of well-known, well-documented contemporary instances people can use as a shared frame of reference. Now what happens during and the outcomes of those conversations, that’s a-whole-nother topic. Outcomes depend on whether or not the participants are willing to treat each other with respect and care, and willing to practice listening.

One thing I’d like to add to that original article is that when people engage in conversation about racism, they both have to be willing to extend a little grace to each other and themselves. No one has the skill to spontaneously deliver words and thoughts in precisely the right way to perfectly convey their ideas without misinterpretation. On the fly. To everyone. It’s impossible. As long as there are humans involved in conversations, there will always be some degree of misinterpretation. You use a word or phrase that has a benign meaning to you, but that same word or phrase more than likely has a different meaning to me. And vice versa.

When we engage with people it’s incumbent upon participants to remember that people will make mistakes or clumsily say something not to intentionally be offensive, but simply because they lack the skill or nuance. Then what are we supposed to do? We ask for clarification without intentionally putting the other person on the defensive. Yes, it takes work. For some people, it’s too much work, and that’s okay. No one is obligated to give an account of their experience, but at the same time, no one is obligated to listen to someone else’s rationale. This is why people have to treat one another with respect and care, listen with the intention of learning, and have the willingness to extend the other person a little grace or wiggle room.

That’s not to say there aren’t bad actors out there. There are. And there are plenty of them. My personal strategy is to leave them to their own devices. Bad actors aren’t interested in anything I have to say, so why waste my time. I’m not here for their entertainment.

How will Our Human Family be covering race—and other issues—in the months ahead? Are there any recent articles you’d like to highlight here? Any final thoughts?

CR: Our Human Family will continue to cover racial equity, allyship, and inclusion as we always have, openly and honestly. With this clampdown on Black history that’s in effect, readers can plan to see more stories with a historic bent.

Here are a few of our recent articles your readers can check out—

• “Black History: Learn It and Never Forget”
  OHF Weekly fan favorite William Spivey on the relevance of Black achievements, turning points in history, and atrocities committed against Black People

• “Groveland: Restoring its Historic Black Cemetery”
  OHF Weekly editor in chief Clay Rivers on how the efforts in Groveland, Florida, to restore its desecrated Black cemetery nullify the belief that learning about Black history divides people and makes matters worse

• “Racism and Bias in the Media”
  OHF Weekly managing editor Sherry Kappel on the racial bias that exists in the news and how that news is reported

• “The Way Forward: Race, Gender, Class and Queer Intersectionality as Survival” an address by OHF Weekly writer Max S. Gordon given at Union College for LGBTQ Pride

• And our collection of stories tagged Black History

You know, if things look dark these days, it’s because they are. But even in a world brimming with hatred, violence, and bigotry, we are well served to heed the words of inaugural poet Amanda Gorman. “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be.”

Richard, thanks for your time. Always a pleasure.

Love one another.

More about Our Human Family:

Our Human Family celebrates the inherent value of all human beings. It is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that advocates for racial equity and inclusion in America by creating and offering workshops, panel discussion groups, targeting key educational programs for sponsorship, hosting guest speaker events, and much more to help achieve racial equity and inclusion for everyone.

OHF Weekly is a newsletter and website inspired by the reality that despite the racial bigotry, hate speech, and acts of violence, there are scores of people working to make the world—their world, their sphere of influence—more equitable by dispelling the lie of race and the practice of racism, and replacing them with the truth of love and equality.

Subscribe to OHF Weekly and support the work of Our Human Family to help further the national conversation on better race relations and widespread equality in America.

All content to this ad-free email newsletter is free—there’s no paywall. But the support of paid subscribers is always welcome!

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“Parents lie.

It’s sad but true.

Mine lied to me.

Yours lies to you.”

So begins the song “Parents Lie” from the 2016 Disney musical version of “Freaky Friday.”

And it is true. All parents lie. They may say there are no more cookies when there really are. They may pretend that Santa or the Tooth Fairy are real. They may even give their kids a book filled with tales of “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” and tell them it’s the literal word of God.

Traditionally, America’s parents have been given broad latitude to tell their own children whatever lies they wanted to tell them.

In the new age of Christo-Fascism, the power to lie to your own children is no longer enough

Dark-money-funded, anti-American book-banning groups are now literally demanding the power to control everything your children are allowed to learn at school.

This week (like most weeks in recent memory) was filled with more examples of how the most rabid right-wing moms and their boosters are using the mantra of “parents’ rights” to accelerate the GOP’s ugly, extremist white supremacist agenda.

These hate-powered astroturf groups have innocent-sounding names like “Moms 4 Liberty” and “Parents Defending Education.” They are being endorsed by prominent GOP leaders such as Trump and DeSantis. And they are being amplified by the worst racists and bigots in the extremist right-wing media and social media ecosystem, including Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder.

These “parents’ rights” groups have inflamed many parents across the country by sharing “pornographic” images from obscure books not being taught in any schools—ensuring the images are seen widely on TV screens and across social media. Their vicious political operatives have even gone so far as to print their own versions of “porn magazines” so they can hand them out to the very kinds of unsuspecting young children they claim they are trying to protect.

Their ultimate goal: Give one parent the power to control all the books at an entire school or in a whole school district.

Nazi tactics, Nazi lies

I’m not the only one who sees the forces of fascism at work here.

At a school board meeting in Martin County, Florida on 21 March, 2023, 100-year-old Grace Linn—a true “Mom For Liberty”—told the 500 people assembled:

I’m here to protest our school district’s book-banning policy.

My husband Robert Nichol was killed in action in World War II at a very young age. He was only 26, defending our democracy, constitution and freedoms.

Here’s her full speech:

Grace Linn concluded:

Banned books and burning books are the same.
Both are done for the same reason: Fear of knowledge.
Fear is not freedom.
Fear is not liberty.
Fear is control.

My husband died as a father of freedom. I am a mother of liberty. Banned books need to be proudly displayed and protected from school boards like this one.

Martin County in the “Free State of Florida” also got the attention of Joy Behar this week, who was also alarmed that students in DeSantistan were being denied acccess to dozens of books including 2013’s bestelling novel “The Storyteller” by Jodi Picoult, “about the grandaughter of a Holocaust survivor who learns that her neighbor is a former Nazi officer.”

Behar also noted that a 2020 study found that Americans’ “knowledge of the Holocaust is declining,” even as “anti-Semitic incidents in the US are their highest levels since the 1970s.”

Enter Jim Jordan and “The New Liz Cheney”

The Christo-Fascist lies that Moms 4 Liberty and Parents Defending Education are hoping to tell all children mostly involving canceling American history (lest it cause a single snowflake any “discomfort”) and erasing LGBTQ identities.

But telling the truth about their intentions wouldn’t get them very far, so instead they’ve made their propaganda focus very simple: pornography.

This week, the thug Jim Jordan (who failed to protect the hundreds of students raped on his watch at Ohio State) allowed the House Judiciary Committe he chairs to become a showcase for the lies and weak arguments being put forward by political operatives like Nicole Neily, “an established political operative with Koch-affiliated non-profit interest groups,” who is now the president of Parents Defending Education and Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the dubiously named Moms for Liberty.

Also invited was Nadine Farid Johnson, the managing director of PEN America’s Washington DC office who, in addition to affirming the rights of parents to have a role in their own child’s reading choices and a voice at school board meetings, also spoke eloquently about the First Amendment rights of students, the professionalism of teachers and librarians, and the need to prepare America’s children “for life in a participatory democracy, one that requires us to debate, to understand, and to discuss.”

The “Penthouse Magazine and First Graders” lie

Republicans at the hearing were not interested in hearing about the educational priorities most parents and students care about. They weren’t interested in listening to Grace Linn’s call to stand up to the fascists who would trample our First Amendment freedoms. They weren’t even willing to consider the fact that students are citizens with Supreme Court-mandated rights that exist independently of their parents.

They wanted soundbites for their social media trolls. And when they couldn’t get any, they simply made one up.

Here’s how it went down: Halfway through the hearing, Harriet Hageman, Liz Cheney’s kooky Congressional replacement, used her time at the mic to ask PEN America’s Johnson: “Do you believe it is censorship to prohibit teachers from exposing First Graders to Penthouse Magazine?”

Johnson, reasonably, pushed back at the ridiculous—literally WTF?—premise of the question: “I don’t know of any incidents in which the—”

After a little more back-and-forth, during which Johnson remained admirably calm in the face of Hageman’s nonsensical, purely-for-the-cameras hostility, Johnson told Hageman it is “of course not” appropriate to show Penthouse Magazine to First Graders, to which Hageman replied, “Thank you.”

Here’s the tape:

That, however, was not enough of a “gotcha” for Moms 4 Liberty and the right-wing lie machine, who immediately began promoting the easily disprovable lie that Johnson had refused to answer the question altogether.

In a sane world, that dishonest tweet would have been the end of the story. But fascists don’t work that way.

A selectively edited version of the exchange was pushed out on social media, claiming that Johnson had refused to answer the question.

Two hours later, the Daily Caller (6.2M Facebook followers, 1M Twitter followers) had published an article headlined: “GOP Rep Grills Witness On Whether Banning Pornographic Magazines For First Graders Is ‘Censorship’.”

On Rumble, where the Daily Caller has 279,000 followers, the Tucker-Carlson-founded fake news site posted the video with the headline: “Witness Won’t Say If Penthouse Is Inappropriate For First Graders.” (If you actually watch the video to the end, you will discover—as noted above—that the witness does indeed say it is “of course not” appropriate. But as the Daily Caller knows, only a tiny percentage of people viewing online videos watch until the end.)

By March 24, the day after the hearing, the Louder with Crowder fake news website (“Horrific racist” Steven Crowder has 3M followers on Facebook, 2M on Twitter) was framing it as: “GOP congresswoman corners anti-parental rights activist: ‘Do you support showing Penthouse Magazine to first graders?’”

And the same day, Ben Shapiro (8.9M Facebook followers, 5.5M Twitter followers) pushed the lie hardest of all, stating categorically on his podcast that Johnson refused to answer the question.

The impossibility of honest debate

This particular lie may be small in the overall scheme of things. But it highlights the fundamental dishonesty of right-wing extremists and offers further proof that Moms 4 Liberty, the Republican Party and the vicious operatives and seedy right-wing grifters who support them have no interest in an honest debate about what’s best for America’s children.

The idea that teachers and librarians are “groomers” is becoming a central tenet of the anti-woke, pro-bigotry movement.

But that idea has been dismantled time and again. Here’s a tweet from a lengthy Twitter thread by PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel earlier this month:

The sad reality, as PEN America’s Nadine Farid Johnson stated in her testimony this week, is that, “today, we are in the midst of the broadest attack on First Amendment rights in schools and universities this country has seen in generations.”

We all need to fight against the Nazi lies and the Nazi tactics used by astroturf groups and the extremist right-wing propaganda machine.

Grace Linn was 7-months pregnant when her husband was shot down by the Nazis in 1944. As she reminded us in Martin County, Florida this week: “One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned.”

If 100-year-old Grace Linn can keep pushing back against the steamroller of fascism, we can too.

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As longtime readers of this newsletter know, Trump is more than just a liar. More than just a cheat. More than just a criminal. More even than a malignant narcissist. He’s a psychopath. And when he’s frantic—like at times like these—he’s at his most dangerous.

But that’s no reason to let him get away with anything—even his “smallest crime.”

The Stormy Daniels hush money case is being discussed as the least “serious” of the crimes that Trump may yet be prosecuted for. We’re told that Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s Georgia election interference case and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into the insurrection and Trump’s theft of classified documents are more legally significant.

But none of those other crimes would have been possible if Trump hadn’t cheated his way to victory in 2016—a crime that ultimately resulted in hundreds of thousands of Americans dying unnecessarily when Covid arrived and Trump was revealed as the most incompetent (and psychopathic) pandemic President imaginable.

In 2016, Trump ran the most corrupt and dishonest campaign in history, combining all the worst dirty tricks and underhand dealings of the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, replacing Bush I’s racist dog whistle with a megaphone, and making the unashamed lies of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan look like amateur hour.

We may never know exactly how many votes Trump stole or suppressed from Hillary Clinton’s tally thanks to Putin’s interference and the Trump campaign’s active collusion with Russian operatives.

But we do know that, in the wake of his Access Hollywood assault confession, the self-confessed sex predator’s fitness for office was being seriously questioned by millions of Americans. Against that backdrop, it’s easy to imagine that the simple, thuggish crime of paying off Stormy Daniels for her silence was enough to help Trump get over the finish line by razor-thin margins in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—helping him and Putin steal the U.S. presidency even in the face of a massive popular vote defeat.

Trump should have been arrested the minute he left office. Let’s hope Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg succeeds in bringing him to justice now.

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Democracy’s bleeding to death and the planet’s on fire. But hey, wasn’t it funny when Marjorie Taylor Greene said “Gazpacho” instead of “Gestapo”? CNN covered it at least THREE different ways!

If you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably heard more about MTG’s brain farts than you have about the work of her fellow GOP representatives Don Bacon, Gus Bilirakis or Brian Fitzpatrick, the three Republicans in Congress ranked by the Common Ground Committee as the “most likely to seek common ground on important issues and solve problems.”

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MTG is best known for being a racist, anti-Semitic, QAnon-believing, insurrection-promoting conspiracy theorist who gets her kicks out of encouraging the assassinations of political rivals and bullying young survivors of school shootings. She rails against “groomers” and “pedophiles” while hanging out with unrepentant child-abusing perverts Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump. Like the other thugs in the GOP’s Putin Caucus, her only role in Congress is to set off the metal detectors while trying to make America fail at every level. If there were any chance of unseating her at the ballot box, she might be worthy of some media attention. But—spoiler alert—there isn’t. She won her last election by 32 points.

The shittier she acts, the more the news media love her

According to new research by Starts With Us, in partnership with the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University, loud, dumb Marjorie Taylor Greene—safe in her Dark-MAGA-red Georgia district—got TEN TIMES the press coverage in the ten top national news and media sites in the month before and after the 2022 midterms than Don Bacon, who was locked in a tight re-election battle in Nebraska. MTG got TWENTY-EIGHT times more coverage than Republican Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania. And if you’ve never even heard of GOP Rep. Gus Bilirakis it’s because he wasn’t even mentioned at all.

All in all, the major media cover the most “hyper-partisan” politicians more than four times as much as they do the most “bipartisan problem solvers.”

According to Starts With Us, 87% of Americans are “frustrated with extreme political and cultural divisions.”

But at corporate and/or partisan media companies, coverage of people working on solutions doesn’t drive enough clicks to max out the executives’ bonuses. So they’re sticking with the tried-and-true: acting as stenographers for America’s most hateful and most rage-inducing idiots.

Murdoch, Musk and MSNBC all reward bad behavior

Of course, Fox News and the ever-mutating brain-eating Cordyceps of right-wing hate media are to blame for putting America on course toward its ultimate, democracy-ending fascistic finale.

That effort is now being supercharged by Saudi-backed supervillain Elon Musk, who is using Twitter to spread misogyny along with misinformation.

But MSNBC and other top news and media brands—including The New York Times, CNN and People—are all playing along too, giving political performance artists the attention they crave, while mostly ignoring the quieter work of bipartisan politicians trying to save us from our worst selves.

Says Tom Fishman, CEO of Starts With Us:

The sheer scale of the coverage imbalance is shocking. We understand that media is a business, and partisan voices warrant a place in the coverage. But when the crucial work of bipartisan problem solving gets this dramatically overlooked, citizens despair and disengage. We’re rallying our community to let the media know there’s a hunger for the full picture, and we’re committed to amplifying those stories.

As the late Eric Boehlert once said, “we can’t fix America if we don’t fix the press.” Nearly a year after his tragic death, Boehlert’s commentary is missed more than ever. Because the problems he documented are only getting worse.

The power of a “Fox Detox”

As viewers of Jen Senko’s 2016 documentary “The Brainwashing of My Dad” may recall, the film ultimately “provides light and hope—it tells the story of how my mom saved my dad from the clutches of right-wing media and in his last years was once again himself.”

By simply stopping her husband consuming right-wing media, Jen’s mom turned Jen’s dad back into a normal person.

Last year a study by Yale University reinforced the power of a Fox detox. After one month:

The people who switched to CNN became more negative in their appraisals of Trump, including his management of the pandemic, his intelligence, and his honesty, according to the study. Switching to CNN also made people more aware of bias in Fox News’ coverage. For example, the switchers were less likely to agree that “If Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it.”

As the Dominion lawsuit has proven, Fox News can’t be trusted to do the right thing any more than Donald Trump can. And getting people to abandon their Fox News addiction for a more fact-based alternative is near impossible. The only way Yale’s researchers were able to complete their research was by paying their study participants not to watch Fox.

As Kevin Drum wrote for Mother Jones in 2021:

Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, largely by highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action.

Starts With Us is one of those initiatives that hopes to make America see sense before it’s too late. But so far their “movement” is only 1.4 million strong (including a Facebook page with 1,000,000 likes.) They have a host of seemingly reasonable people listed on their website as “partners,” including Chef José Andrés of World Central Kitchen fame, Lonnie Ali, founder of Muhammad Ali Enterprises, NFL star Kelvin Beachum, and actor and author Alan Alda. But it’s hard to imagine their current “ask”—that top websites and shows feature a few bipartisan problem solvers—will do much to stop the steamroller of fascism’s inexorable progress.

Newsflash: Defeating fascism does start with us

Unless we stop that steamroller we’ll all eventually get crushed. That means actively rejecting the Christo-Fascists’ plan to rewrite history, control women, erase LBGTQ identities, ban books and promote hatred against minorities, refugees and immigrants. That means speaking up, standing up, and connecting with others, even in places where you might otherwise feel like a blue dot in a red sea.

The forces of Christo-Fascism want you to think that the loudness of their extremist media “stars” combined with the belligerence of their brainwashed “base” makes them stronger than they really are. But they remain a weak minority. Through their antics on the news and social media they’re hoping that sensible majority will despair, disengage—and stop showing up.

But that hasn’t happened yet.

As I’ve said here before: From cities to suburbs, schools to libraries, churches to C-suites, we must continue to reject fascism—forcefully—everywhere it raises its head.

On March 8, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis released a porn video.

Like the astroturf group Moms 4 Liberty before him, DeSantis was nominally getting into the pornography business to try to “protect children” from porn.

But unlike the dark-money-funded “Moms” group, DeSantis wasn’t content to simply put his porn in a pamphlet and hand it out to kids.

He wanted it broadcast on free TV in the middle of the day. Or at least to create headlines that his foray into making porn videos was too shocking for TV.

Using selectively chosen content from four book-length works (not including the Bible) that are not being taught in any curriculum, DeSantis tried to make the case that claims he was banning books were a “nasty hoax.” In his telling, all he truly wanted to do with all his new laws and fascist intimidation tactics against teachers and librarians was stop those who wish to “pollute and sexualize our children.”

He wasn’t banning books at all, he said. But DeSantis picked the wrong week to attempt a lie so big.

1.6 million books were banned in Duval County alone

Unfortunately for DeSantis, his plan to fight “porn” in books you’ve never heard of by creating porn videos for free TV—and call book banning a bigger “hoax” than Covid—blew up in his face immediately.

As scandal enveloped the Duval Schools district covering Jacksonville, Florida, it emerged that 1.6 million books owned in the district had been removed from circulation to allow a lengthy review process.

Of the 1.6 million books, the district admitted only 10,000 had been put back on shelves.

0.625% of the books owned by Duval County schools are currently available to students

Even worse for the DeSantis narrative, it also emerged that the reason for all of these books being banned was that the woman in charge—Michelle DiBias—didn’t just have bias in her name, but in her heart as well.

She was on record calling lesbianism “morally damning” and “a lifestyle contrary to the design of humanity.”

Until DiBias resigned in shame this week, she was the person in charge of overseeing what books all 129,000 students in the Jacksonville area were allowed to read in school.

Meanwhile in Martin County…

DeSantis’ case wasn’t helped when news emerged that Martin County, Florida had banned 20 books by best-selling author Jodi Picoult—including one about the grand-daughter of a Holocaust survivor, causing Picoult to speak out on Twitter and to The Washington Post.

“Banning ‘The Storyteller’ is shocking, as it is about the Holocaust and has never been banned before,” Picoult told the Post in an email.

Meanwhile, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel thoroughly dismantled all of DeSantis’s false claims in a Twitter thread that, among other things, pointed out that:

• Florida has passed vague laws limiting what books can be in schools and libraries with stiff penalties. Every book in a school must be reviewed by a “media specialist” and schools were told to “err on the side of caution.” Thus the empty shelves

• Books banned include Booker Prize winner The God of Small Things, books by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, bestselling novelist @jodipicoult and many others. Biographies of Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente were kept off shelves in one district for almost a year.

• In the 2021-22 school year PEN America documented 565 books banned in Florida schools. Some were banned permanently, others temporarily pending investigations. The result is the same: students can’t access books.

Here’s how PEN America defines a book ban: https://pen.org/book-bans-frequently-asked-questions/.

What’s really going here?

DeSantis knows he’s lying. He knows students’ First Amendment rights are being trampled on. He knows he’s making life hell for teachers, librarians and principals. But he’s leaning into his role as a Christo-Fascist Crusader for “parents’ rights.”

Why?

It’s a clearly an area where Trump would have zero credibility, so “Meatball” Ron is staking out that turf as he positions himself to run against the One-Term-Loser in 2024.

But it’s also part of the GOP’s much larger war on public education—and the right-wing’s ongoing assault on Americans’ ability to think.

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January 20, 2020

On the same day the CDC “reported the first laboratory-confirmed case of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the U.S.,” The Washington Post published an analysis showing that Donald Trump had lied 16,241 times since taking office.

As The Post noted, Trump’s lies accelerated rapidly in 2019, a year in which “the president said more than the total number of false or misleading claims he had made in the previous two years.”

And like the novel coronavirus, Trump was just getting started.

For those who had worried in 2016 that “the next President must be ready to face sudden, unexpected, possibly terrifying challenges” that a career-criminal-turned-reality-star like Trump would be unable to handle, it was quickly becoming clear that America was now facing a Worst President Scenario.

January 24, 2020

Back in early 2020, when word started leaking about the new strain of coronavirus threatening to spread throughout the planet, there was much early chatter about where it came from.

Meanwhile, with the scam known as the “Trump economy” collapsing, “Trump was so desperate for an election-year trade deal with China that he pretended the coronavirus wasn’t a thing.”

On January 24, the day the U.S. announced its second confirmed case, even NPR was calling it the “Wuhan coronavirus.”

To many people, the idea that the “Wuhan coronavirus” might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China seemed perfectly plausible.

But Trump tweeted (with his usual authority) that China was “working very hard to contain the Coronavirus.” He even thanked his partial-trade-deal-signing buddy President Xi for his “transparency” in the matter.

Trump and Xi had everything under control. The “American people” had nothing to worry about.

March 16, 2020

Seven weeks later, Trump was singing an entirely different tune. On March 16, 2020, he tweeted his first reference to the “Chinese Virus.”

Despite leaning in early to the anti-Asian-hate-crime-inciting rhetoric that the name “COVID-19” was meant to avoid, Trump was still promising Americans that the whole “Carona” nonsense would gone by Easter.

April 23, 2020

Easter came and went, but soon after we thought we had a cure!

By June, thanks to Trump’s psychopathic recklessness, relentless incompetence and fairy tale thinking, more than 120,000 Americans were already dead.

Trump who previously claimed to have “shut it down coming in from China,” was now deflecting blame and inciting more attacks on Asian-Americans by calling Covid the “Kung Flu.”

By the time Trump left office, 400,000 Americans were dead from Covid, many killed by the lies and misinformation that spewed from the mouth of a one-term loser who left office in disgrace having told 30,573 lies.

Trump wasn’t the first lying Republican, of course. In 2012, Mitt Romney and Paul “Lyin’” Ryan famously refused to “be governed by facts” in how they waged their vicious and dishonest campaign to unseat Obama. But if there’s one thing Trump deserves credit for, he did complete the GOP’s rebrand as the “Party of Lies.”

So… where did COVID-19 originate?

In October 2021, Carolyn Kormann wrote in The New Yorker about the competing theories, but noted that:

In the spring of 2020, when President Donald Trump started promoting the lab-leak theory, (he) hijack(ed) it from any reasonable discussion.

But the people in favor of reasonable discussions weren’t done yet.

In May, 2021, a group of prominent scientists published a letter in Science, calling for an origins investigation that took the lab-leak hypothesis seriously… In response, President Biden called for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins.

According to Kormann:

Circumstantial evidence supporting a new narrative—that the pandemic might have started from a lab accident in Wuhan—began to accumulate in late 2020. Online data sets from the W.I.V. had disappeared, information on a previous outbreak had been elided, and W.I.V. researchers were conducting experiments with engineered viruses. Even Andersen acknowledged that the emergence of the virus in Wuhan is “a crazy coincidence.”

But was it indeed a crazy coincidence? As Kormann also notes:

The Chinese government shuttered and sanitized the Huanan market on January 1, 2020, essentially destroying a crime scene. China’s officials told W.H.O. investigators that no live mammals were sold there—a position they still maintain. But a virologist at Hubei University of Traditional Chinese Medicine had been, he wrote, “serendipitously” conducting monthly surveys to identify the source of a severe tick-borne disease. In June, he published a study containing documentary evidence that, in the two years prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, nearly fifty thousand live animals representing thirty-eight wild species—many of which are now known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2—were sold and butchered in Wuhan markets, including Huanan.

Meanwhile:

Spillovers happen far more often than anyone realizes. People are exposed to bats when they shelter in caves, harvest bat guano—the world’s best fertilizer—and hunt, butcher, and eat bats, which is a well-documented practice in various pockets across the region. “These small villages are at the edge of disappearing forests,” Kendra Phelps, a bat biologist with the EcoHealth Alliance and a co-author on the recent study, told me. “Inside that forest is densely packed wildlife, which is super stressed by things like encroaching palm oil and rice monocultures.” Stressed animals (just like us) are more likely to get sick and shed virus.

How often does that happen?

EcoHealth scientists built a model analyzing how frequently coronaviruses might spill over from bats to people across southern China and southeast Asia. They overlaid the habitats of all twenty-three bat species known to harbor SARS-related coronaviruses with maps of human populations. Based on bat-human contact and antibody data, they estimated that roughly four hundred thousand people could be infected with SARS-related coronaviruses annually. “People are getting exposed to them every year,” (Peter) Daszak (president of the EcoHealth Alliance) told me. “They may not know it. They may even get sick and die.”

As you may have guessed, I don’t know for sure where COVID-19 came from. Writes Kormann:

The lab leakers tend to be more interested in biosecurity, transparency, and human hubris. They exhibit an admirable drive to follow the money, to upend centralized power, to overturn academic hierarchy, and to expose the injustices of oppressive governments. Some are China hawks. By and large, they have not done virus-hunting field or lab work.

But I do know that in 21st-Century America—thanks to our toxic politics, the 24/7/365 influence of conservative propaganda “news” media, and a Republican Party intent only on “knifing Biden”—it’s impossible to have an honest, fact-based national discussion about the origins of Covid-19.

And, as with many things, our inability to have an honest debate leaves us less prepared to handle whatever extinction-level event comes next.

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We can be thankful to Donald J. Trump for one thing—and that is for making it super clear there is a serious threat to democracy which was enabled largely by right-wing media—most especially Fox “News.”

Dominion Voting Systems—one of the companies that sold and manufactured voting machines used in the 2020 election—is suing Fox over dishonest reporting by several of its most popular hosts, with Rupert Murdoch’s approval.

The “smoking gun” revelations from Dominion’s $1.6B lawsuit represents “a serious threat to the channel,” say legal experts.

It’s about time

The damage Fox “News” has inflicted on America—and millions of Americans—has been apparent for years.

For my father, it started with Rush Limbaugh, then came Fox. In my 2016 documentary, I likened the change he underwent to the 1950s movie, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as my formerly politically liberal father would suddenly explode anytime anyone challenged his now deeply conservative point of view. Then I watched in horror as subsequently his entire personality and relationship with our family changed. When his change was in the early stages, I was a bit relieved when David Brock, former right-wing journalist and later founder of the paid watchdog group, Media Matters for America wrote about being a paid operative tasked with taking President Clinton down. Surely my father would pay attention. He didn’t. Or maybe when Hillary Clinton talked about a vast right-wing conspiracy in ‘96.  He, along with most other Americans, still didn’t.

In addition to what he consumed on the radio and TV, my father became inundated with emails that supported all the false claims and blames that Fox and Limbaugh pushed. Years later, when I was beyond wondering where Rush and Fox put my real dad and my poor mom was ready to move out, I determined that “The Brainwashing Of My Dad” was to be my next documentary. It had become chillingly clear to me how these Democrat-hating hosts—who claimed to be ‘fair and balanced’ while they were anything but—all had the same campaign, which was to paint the Democrat and Democratic policies as evil, incompetent and corrupt. Reporting the news of the day was secondary to a dedicated campaign to destroy the Democratic party. I made it my mission to find out why and who was behind it.

So, first I made the movie and years later, I wrote the book.

Certain events in history were designed to pave the way for a right-wing takeover. For example, the creation of the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 and funded in part by Fred Koch. The Birch Society supported far-right libertarian ideas. At the time it was considered loony, which is why Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. Goldwater aligned himself with the Birchers, who were considered paranoid, with their ‘there’s-a-Communist-in-every-corner’ mentality. After Goldwater got hammered, the Right was pronounced dead by pundits. The Right panicked. Blaming mainstream media, they decided to hit back with an aggressive attack on mainstream media by painting it as liberal, (a term that they simultaneously intended to paint as lame and wildly wrong). This laid the groundwork for what would become an alternative conservative media (while also painting conservatives as the under-represented victim). Economist and conservative activist, Reed Irvine built a “media watchdog” group called AIM with the sole purpose of painting the media as liberal as loudly and as often as possible. Goldwater, by the way was the first to try to use the Southern Strategy. It didn’t work for him but it certainly helped Nixon become president.

The Southern Strategy was the strategy of division, using coded racism to get the prejudiced Whites in the South to vote Republican.  Nixon also had a little help from a 27-year-old genius television producer, Roger Ailes. Back in 1960 Nixon had done exceedingly poorly in his debate with Kennedy. Ailes helped Nixon understand television and how to use it.  Ailes saw how Nixon was batted around by the evening news and presented a secret memo to the Nixon White House called “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News”.  His plan to create GOP TV and present pro GOP policies in a positive light—orginally written in 1970—would come in handy in 1996, when Ailes would be tapped by Rupert Murdoch to create Fox “News”.

One year later, in 1971, there was another secret memo; the secret memo which has had an astounding impact on corporate influence in America today. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hired corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to come up with a detailed master plan on how to push a free-market economy philosophy and how to squelch the dramatic social movements going on at the time. It was basically hitting back against the New Deal.

Then came our 40^th president, Ronald Reagan.

Two of the most harmful things Reagan did was to make Rupert Murdoch a U.S. citizen and kill the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine policy and license distribution was based on how well broadcasters were to serve the public. They had to present differing controversial issues of public importance. Diversity of voices and ownership was essential in order to benefit the public and serve democracy. 

One year after the death of the Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh went national. His poisonous show was then able to play across the country. Satellite helped spread his spew. Limbaugh admitted his schtick was to get the listener mad so they simply had to listen again (anger is addictive). Limbaugh essentially defended the overdogs, like big oil or the tobacco company. He insisted there was no danger in smoking; that seat belts didn’t work and it was just the government telling you what to do; that there was no such thing as organic; and that gay people were awful. The list goes on. Feminists were Feminazis; minorities were all the stereotypes; every immigrant from Mexico was taking your job or raping your women; and Democrats were godless scum of the earth who wanted to kill Christmas. Rush essentially kicked the White (especially male) victim mentality into high gear. All these ‘others’ were out to take from you what was rightfully yours. He was a convincing liar. He was confident and entertaining. And he was creating a dangerous division in the country. And that was perfect, so of course, the Republicans had to get him on the Armed Forces Radio to play an hour a day every day where division continued to foster.

Limbaugh bashed Bill Clinton until Clinton got impeached. He crucified Hillary saying at once that she was a lesbian but that she was also sleeping with Vince Foster who killed himself and that it was Hillary who shot him. The contradiction didn’t matter to his Dittohead listeners. They just knew—‘Hillary bad’.

Bill Clinton was a corporate Democrat. He also liked to be liked. He buddied up with the Democrat-is-your-enemy Newt Gingrich and together they signed the Telecommunications Reform Act into law. It essentially destroyed FDR’s brilliant Communications Act of 1934 which in the effort to protect democracy, had limited the amount of ownership a media entity could have. So, a handful of entities gobbled up all the media. Cross ownership was allowed as well. It was a media free for all for the ones rich enough to buy it.

Months later, Rupert Murdoch was able to launch a monetizable tabloid-type network, pushing an ultra-conservative bias. He hired none other than Roger Ailes to create it. Ailes knew his television stuff. He understood the type of propaganda Murdoch wanted and was perfectly suited to deliver. Ailes had even studied the cinematography of the ground breaking Nazi propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl. Her cinematography wasn’t the only thing he understood. He understood how to use these propaganda techniques to get the Fox television audience to vote against their own interests and vote Republican. He understood that you had to create in-groups and out-groups: the Democrats and anything falling under that category such as Black and Brown people, poor people, immigrants, became the ultimate out-group.

Make the audience afraid. That fear turns to anger.

The feigned anger of the anchors was essential. Sometimes they were good actors. Sometimes they weren’t. It didn’t matter though because once people’s amygdalae were in control, rational thinking went out the window. They were addicted to their own anger.

Texts obtained by Dominion show that hosts on Fox, like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, etc. KNEW that the election fraud nonsense that Trump, Giuliani and Sidney Powell were pushing were lies, yet looking right into the camera, they lied straight-faced to their viewers as if it were sent direct from God’s mouth. They feigned anger and indignation and repetition and wore their ‘most serious faces’ to not only convince their viewers this was the truth, but to be the most competitive in the ‘rage-otainmnent’ complex. Dominion had told them countless times none of it was true. But the truth didn’t matter as much as their bottom line did. Their viewers were fleeing to Newsmax. They didn’t want Newsmax, who was spreading the lie, to steal their audience.

While making the movie and even long after the movie came out, Hundreds and hundreds of people have sent me their own heartbreaking stories about them losing their loved one to Fox “News” or some other bloviating angry right-wing host. Studies have shown Fox has changed people. In fact, I firmly believe there would not even be a Trump if not for Fox “News”.

Why did it take so long for some kind of action to be taken against Fox?

That’s a question that I ask over and over as I think of all the harm Fox has done to families, individuals and our country.

Fox “News” played a major role in instigating the January 6 insurrection with their stochastic terrorism. They were responsible for so many deaths as they downplayed and lied about Covid and the vaccines. They drummed up racism and downplayed police violence against Black people by blaming Black people, resulting against this pushback against ‘woke-ism’. And corporate media should have called out Fox more. Wasn’t the harm they were doing and the lies they were telling obvious?

To many of us it was obvious.

So today I am beyond grateful to Dominion for suing Fox. I think to myself, what took so long for someone or some entity to do this? But like all the media focused grassroots groups I’ve seen spring up of late, I am grateful for the action. I just pray that we frogs can still get out of the boiling water in time.

Further reading: The Brainwashing of My Dad, by Jen Senko.

Follow: @jen_senko on Twitter.

Follow: @brainwashingdad on Twitter.

Like: The Brainwashing of My Dad on Facebook.

Watch: The Brainwashing of My Dad on YouTube.

Visit: The Brainwashing of My Dad website.

Richard Hine’s December 2021 interview with Jen Senko: The Brainwashing Machine

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If there’s one message the world has sent to Russia and China over the past few years, it’s this: we don’t mind how evil you are—or how much you cheat at sports—as long as you keep hosting our major sporting events.

It sounds facetious but just look at the facts. 

Immediately after hosting the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Four years later, while the world still refused to recognize Russia’s new “Republic of Crimea,” it had no problem with Putin hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup. China has been committing genocide against the Uyghurs since 2017. Despite that, they were allowed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, China smashed its previous record for Winter Olympics medals in Beijing 2022. Then, four days after Russian athletes won a record 32 medals at those games, Putin invaded Ukraine.

Sportswashing is real. And the whole world is complicit.

For decades it’s been obvious that authoritarian regimes—from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to the People’s Republic of China to those “scary motherf**kers” in Saudi Arabia—use international sports to both achieve legitimacy on the world stage and to distract their own citizens from corruption and hardship at home.

Next to starting a war, there’s nothing that helps a tyrant bring a nation together quite like being treated as a sporting superpower. 

When Hitler hosted the Olympics in Berlin in 1936, it gave him a perfect opportunity to showcase the “new Germany” to the world.

Three years later, Hitler invaded Poland.

When Putin hosted the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, it gave him the perfect opportunity to showcase Russia to the world and simultaneously restore his severely battered image with the Russian people.

Russia exceeded all expectations at the games, winning a “surprising 33 medals,” topping the medal count, and earning more than twice as many medals as it did in Vancouver in 2010. At the closing ceremonies of that event, Putin laughed and smiled as his country celebrated.

Four days later, Putin began his military annexation of Crimea.

The 2017 Academy-Award-winning documentary Icarus makes clear how important the Sochi Winter Olympics were to Putin—and how he used every tool at his disposal to make sure that Russia cheated its way to the top of the medals table.

Remember, this was 2014. And Putin was in trouble. Unlike Obama, whose policies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis not only led the world out of recession but also put America on track for its longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in history, Putin had failed to make reforms that would have benefited his people. Instead, Russia’s power-hungry leader had doubled down on corruption, further enriching himself and his oligarchs, and turning his kleptocratic nation into an economic basket case, devastating the country’s once-growing middle class.

Icarus makes clear how much—and how rapidly—host nation Russia’s success at the Sochi Winter Olympics restored Putin’s domestic popularity.

In the latter part of the film (around the one hour and twenty-nine-minute mark), amid scenes of the triumphant closing ceremonies at the Sochi Winter Olympics, we hear a female newscaster’s voice telling us that, “Russia came out on top of the medal board, winning 33 overall, including an Olympic-high of 13 golds.”

Then, as images of Olympic fireworks merge into scenes of nighttime bombings in Crimea, we hear Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who first oversaw and then exposed Russia’s state-run doping program, saying that he felt “personal guilt” over Putin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

Rodchenkov draws a clear line between the surge in national pride based on Russia’s Olympics performance and Putin’s brutality in Crimea: “Would Russia had less medal, Putin would be not such aggressive.”

To hammer the point home, a male narrator talks over an animated graph showing the sudden turnaround in Putin’s popularity.

“Before the Olympics, his popularity rating in Russia had been falling steadily for years. But when the Games began, this:”

Russia’s Olympic “success” was, of course, as phony as the “Trump economy.”

Icarus exposes the massive, state-run doping program that, with Putin’s blessing, allowed Russia to take a “win at all costs” attitude to international events like the Olympics. As ABC News reported:

In the film, Rodchenkov claims of the 73 medals Russia won in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, 30 were “dirty,” meaning the athlete had been doping. For the 2012 London Games, Rodchenkov tells Fogel that of the 81 medals Russia won, “50 percent” were dirty.

It all led up to Sochi 2014, an event which filmmaker Bryan Fogel calls the “single biggest fraud in the history of sport”:

“They controlled everything… they had the lock, they had the key, they ran the bank, they operated the vault, they were the judge, the jury, the executioner, the police, they could essentially facilitate whatever they wanted.”

What price did Putin pay for cheating in Sochi and invading Crimea?

Well, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) took some medals back, Russia still got to keep 20 medals—including 9 golds.

More importantly for Putin, Russia got to keep Crimea.

By 2016, Russia (minus its now-banned track-and-field athletes) was competing not only in the Rio Summer Olympics, but an emboldened Putin was also actively participating in the US Presidential election and the UK’s Brexit vote.

Despite no track and field medals, Russia still finished 4th in the Rio medals table, ahead of Germany.

And Russia won golds in both the US Presidential election and the Brexit referendum, helping international money launderer Donald Trump steal the Presidency and tricking the people of the UK into sabotaging their futures by leaving the European Union.

At the end of 2016, the final anti-doping report released by the World Anti-Doping Agency found that: “more than 1,000 Russian athletes were involved in state-sponsored doping, and that the ‘institutional conspiracy’ extended far beyond previous evidence of cheating at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.”

By this point, you might think Russia had become such a global pariah that the sporting world (at least) would shun it completely.

But hold that thought.

Russia was still allowed to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup

It was a tournament that, according to FIFA, “had it all: incredible stories, great goals, huge performances.” Games were played in 11 host cities and the final match between France and Croatia attracted a global TV viewership of more than 1.1 billion.

After that, it was on to the delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics, where more than 300 Russian athletes were allowed to compete but only “under the Russian Olympic Committee flag.”

Take that, Putin!

Meanwhile, China got to host the 2022 Winter Olympics

China has its own history of state-sponsored doping and human rights violations.

As the BBC reports, since 2017, that country has been accused of committing genocide against the Uyghurs and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang.

Human rights groups believe China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls "re-education camps", and sentenced hundreds of thousands to prison terms.

Despite these crimes against humanity and its long history of doping (including at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics), the IOC allowed China to go forward with hosting the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, host nation China smashed its previous record for Winter Olympics medals.

And—somehow—athletes representing the “Russian Olympic Committee” managed to win 32 medals at Beijing 2022, setting a new Russian record (compared to the now-lowered Sochi totals).

The Beijing Winter Olympics closing ceremony took place on February 20, 2022.

And in an echo of his 2014 behavior, Putin pivoted from Olympics success to military action.

On February 24, 2022, four days after the Beijing closing ceremonies, Putin invaded Ukraine.

It’s interesting to compare the sex crimes of two different Congressmen in the Trump era: Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York, and Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida.

The “sexting” scandal that brought Weiner down was based on one guy misbehaving on his phone. Weiner never even met the underage girl he went to prison for communicating with.

The Gaetz sex-trafficking scandal is on a totally different level. Based on multiple reports, Gaetz was an active and willing partner in a multiyear sex trafficking operation that recently landed his partner-in-crime, former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, an 11-year-sentence. Published reports indicate that Gaetz was guilty of statutory rape and knowingly participated in the financing of the operation and was a likely accomplice in the identity theft and fake ID creation for which Greenberg was also convicted. The illegal drug-and-sex parties the pair organized for themselves and others in the GOP also created numerous opportunities for corruption and blackmail. The Gaetz-Greenberg operation wasn’t a case involving a “Jeffrey Epstein” and a “Ghislaine Maxwell.” It was more a case of two Jeffrey Epsteins. 

Let’s take a closer look at each case.

Anthony Weiner went to prison. And we all got punished too.

In May 2017, Anthony Weiner, the former Democratic Congressman from New York pleaded guilty to a charge of “transferring obscene material to a minor,” a crime for which he was subsequently sentenced to 21 months in prison.

In sentencing Weiner, U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote said: “This is a serious crime that deserves serious punishment.”

The Weiner sexting scandal played a big part in the closing stages of the 2016 presidential campaign. Emails found on Weiner’s laptop prompted then-FBI director James Comey—despite “strong discouragement” from the DOJ—to break with policy and send a letter to Congress re-opening the previously closed investigation into Clinton’s emails.

"Pervert” Weiner played a big role in “Pussygrabber” Trump’s scorched-earth, rabidly anti-Semitic closing argument commercials.

In November 2016, Hillary Clinton, despite winning the popular vote by a margin of nearly three million, fell to a suspiciously narrow Electoral College defeat.

Weiner eventually served 18 months of his sentence (he was released in May 2019 and required to register as a sex offender). But America was punished for four whole years as, in a single disastrous term, the dumbest, most compromised President in history destroyed US alliances, betrayed the Kurds, set the stage for the war in Ukraine, engaged in relentless corruption, displayed debt-ballooning economic incompetence, and, once Covid hit, acted with a level of psychopathic recklessness that caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die needlessly, even as less wealthy countries navigated the pandemic far more successfully by trusting science and encouraging citizens to use a bare minimum of commonsense.

But I digress.

Prison for Phone Fantasies, No Penalty for Physical Rape

While Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner was pleading guilty to the crime of engaging in sexual fantasies with a minor he had never met, another Congressman—Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida—was allegedly committing statutory rape.

Like Weiner, Gaetz clearly enjoys getting pictures of underage teenagers on his phone. But between May and November 2017, Gaetz wasn’t just cruising high schools to take selfies with children. According to published reports, during those months he and his now-convicted BFF Joel Greenberg were, among other things, having sex with a minor.

However, despite overwhelming evidence against Gaetz—including information obtained from a years-long cooperation deal with the now-convicted sex-trafficker Joel Greenberg and the girl they physically raped—the DOJ has apparently decided not to charge the Florida Congressman with any crimes.

Throughout the investigation, Gaetz has responded to every accusation against him in Trump-like fashion. He denies all the charges, but keeps tweeting things that appear to be confessions.

I’m not the only one surprised that Gaetz won’t face any charges. Joel Greenberg’s lawyer seems pretty f**king pissed about it, too. When Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in December 2022, his laywer Fritz Scheller said he expected “seven or eight more” men to be indicted on sex trafficking charges.

This week, following news that Gaetz would not face charges, that lawyer told The Daily Beast:

“While the decision is troubling, it’s not surprising. After so many years of defense practice, I've slowly come to the realization that our country has a two-tier system of justice. To be fair, why expend resources prosecuting the privileged, when there’s undoubtedly a minority out there with a small amount of pot?”

The Daily Beast had previously published:

A confession letter written by Joel Greenberg in the final months of the Trump presidency claims that he and close associate Rep. Matt Gaetz paid for sex with multiple women—as well as a girl who was 17 at the time.

In their latest article, Jose Pagliery, Roger Sollenberger and Josh Fiallo report that:

Private Venmo transactions showed how Gaetz sent Greenberg $900 late one night in May 2018, only to have Greenberg send the same amount of money to three young women the very next morning.

During the years when the two were close, Greenberg made more than 150 Venmo payments to dozens of young women, and to a girl who was 17 at the time—one whom the congressman had named in a private message.

Other aspects of the case also point to Gaetz’s criminality.

For example, in addition to admitting the sex trafficking of a child, Greenberg also pleaded guilty to other crimes including: illegally producing a false identification document and aggravated identity theft.

It was reported in 2021 that Matt Gaetz first got ensnared in the sex trafficking probe when text messages revealed he had a habit of visiting the Florida tax agency where Greenberg worked—and where Greenberg created the fake IDs—while the office was closed.

Other reports indicate that when Greenberg sent payments of hundreds and even thousands of dollars to pay young women for sex via Venmo, he labeled the payments as “ice cream,” “salad,” and “ass.” Payments were sent to 12 females under the description “school.”

When Gaetz Venmo’d cash back to Greenberg, he used the “love hotel” emoji.

While Gaetz was serving as a top advisor to Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial campaign in September 2018 (and while Anthony Weiner was still in prison), the Congressman also organized a sex trip to the Bahamas with a group of young girls (including his by-then-18-year-old rape victim) and two prominent Florida Republicans without Greenberg even attending.

On its surface, this trip alone would seem to have violated 18 USC Code 2423 which prohibits interstate and international travel for the purpose of hiring prostitutes. Gaetz, of course, maintains that the “ass” and “love hotel” money his escorts were paid wasn’t for sex, it was just for “ice cream.”

As the high-school-cafeteria-cruising Congressman told Tucker Carlson in 2021, he thinks of himself as just a generous guy who likes to pay girls to come on trips with him to maybe have sex with him and his friends.

As Politico reported in April 2021, the Gaetz-hosted 2018 Bahamas trip ended at least one political career:

Three of (the girls) looked so young when they returned on Beshears’ private plane that U.S. Customs briefly stopped and questioned him… As the investigation intensified this winter, Beshears abruptly resigned as Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation Secretary, a post that made him the state’s top business regulator…. (Beshears) confided to two friends recently that he believes he’s the subject of the investigation.

Gaetz, of course, was feeling the heat too.

While claiming innocence, Gaetz repeatedly sought a pardon from Trump

As even Sheriff Joe Arpaio now knows, you can’t accept a Presidential pardon without admitting your crime.

And the January 6th Committee exposed the fact that Matt Gaetz was desperate for a Trump pardon—specifically for crimes he committed prior to the insurrection.

It’s something John McEntee, director of White House presidential personnel, lawyer Eric Herschmann and, most famously, Cassidy Hutchinson all told the committee under oath.

But at the end of the day, Matt Gaetz didn’t need that pardon.

After all the illegal sex and drugs parties. After all the Venmo payments. After all the months when he was committing statutory rape. And after all the requests for a pardon that signaled his own consciousness of guilt, Matt Gaetz will walk free to commit more crimes against America.

As user @mick41 wrote on POST, it’s just one of those “things that magically went away with zero consequences because they’re rich white people.”

See also:

It’s not just Matt Gaetz. Sex traffickers, groomers and pedophiles have been given a greenlight throughout Ron DeSantis's Florida.

Further reading here on Unprecedented:

OK, Groomer (1/8/2023)

Republican Rapists in South Dakota (11/20/2022)

#RepublicanSexualPredators (9/6/2022)

The Rapist’s Best Friend (7/15/2022)

Who’s Really “Soft on Pedos”? (4/5/2022)

700 and Counting (12/12/2021)

Save the Children. From the GOP. (8/12/2021)

GOP: Gang of Pedophiles (5/10/2021)

The Apprentice (4/2/2021)

Perhaps you’re old enough to remember “Nipplegate,” the 2004 Super Bowl scandal involving half-time show performer Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.”

As Media Ethics Magazine noted, the incident caused national moral outrage, “brought the word ‘nipple shield’ into dinnertime family conversation” and led to both “congressional hearings and a federal investigation into indecency.”

Backlash against nipple shields meant that the 2005 Super Bowl on Fox Network was a tamer affair, with ads that would have been fine on primetime shows being censored before they aired, and even one ad—for Go Daddy—being shown once during the first half and then getting banned before its scheduled second airing.

It wasn’t until 2006, two years after Nipplegate, that Twitter was founded. Since then, the platform has become both “an essential part of every sport’s marketing mix” and a “second screen” millions stay engaged with during the year’s biggest live TV events.

Sunday will represent Twitter’s first Super Bowl under the leadership of the world’s richest exploding carmaker Elon Musk. And, even as the user experience gets more janky on his erratic watch, still-CEO (“Vox Populi” be damned) Musk will be trying to squeeze every possible ad dollar out of the game.

For Twitter advertisers in 2023, the problem won’t be nipples. It will be Nazis.

As documented by the Anti-Defamation League on February 9, “in recent weeks, a number of problematic groups and individuals have had their accounts reinstated on Twitter, have increased the use of their existing accounts or have joined the platform as new accounts.”

These include:

• Ali Alexander, who “has used the platform to endorse antisemitic figures such as Ye and Nick Fuentes and… made antisemitic references to ‘Jewish Supremacists.’”

• Andrew Anglin, “founder of the antisemitic neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer” who has “capitalized on his notoriety by tweeting conspiracy theories, racist tropes and support for figures like Ye and Nick Fuentes.”

• Liz Crokin, a “prominent Pizzagate and QAnon booster” known for “unfounded, conspiratorial allegations about Hillary Clinton’s ‘crimes against children’ and other false accusations based on the pervasive ‘groomer’ narratives of the far right.”

• Tim Gionet (Baked Alaska), a “white supremacist live streamer” whose reinstatement has resurfaced “many of his tweets targeting Jewish people.” On December 14, 2022, Gionet posted a Twitter poll asking his followers: “Should I say the n word?”

Others reinstated by Musk include Nick Fuentes, the traitor Mike Flynn, Laura Loomer and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, along with many more “notable users who have a history of spreading hate speech, misleading information and conspiratorial rhetoric.” 

On Super Bowl Sunday, Elon Musk will be cashing in on hate.

Also on Thursday, the same day the ADL sounded their alarm, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released new research that attempts to document how much cash Twitter’s “worst hate mongers and conspiracy theorists” are helping Elon Musk generate.

Simply looking at ad placements next to 10 of the most problematic accounts: “CCDH’s analysis estimates that continuing to place these ads next to the accounts of these 10 bad actors alone could generate up to $19 million in annual advertising revenue for Twitter.”

CCDH is a member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition, which consists of more than 60 civil-society and civil-rights groups. On Thursday, the coalition renewed its call for more companies “to join the 500+ advertisers that stopped advertising on Twitter and send a strong message to Elon Musk that they will not bankroll hate and disinformation.”

Thursday’s CCDH statement accompanying the new “Toxic Twitter” report specifically highlighted the potential damage to Super Bowl advertisers such as Apple Music, the official sponsor of the NFL Super Bowl halftime show, Amazon, an NFL national media partner, and the NFL itself, all of which continue to advertise on Twitter:

• In one example, an Amazon Prime Video ad promoting a film starring Jennifer Lopez appears next to a tweet by Andrew Anglin in which he claims that the “only career that a woman is actually capable of on merit is prostitution.”

• In another, an NFL Super Bowl playoff ad featuring comedian Kevin Hart is displayed adjacent to anti-vaccine disinformation posted by Emerald Robinson.

• An Apple ad featuring actor Timothée Chalamet is displayed next to a tweet in which Rogan O’Handley promotes the debunked claim that Ukraine was developing biological weapons with the assistance of the U.S. government.

Among those quoted by CCDH is Nicole Gill, Executive Director of Accountable Tech, who says: “No amount of shiny Super Bowl commercials can make up for paying to place ads next to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Elon Musk has made it clear that he will stop at nothing for clicks and profit — and companies that continue to play his game are only hurting their own brand and bottom line. It’s time for companies to stop funding Musk’s toxic Twitter. Full stop.”

In addition to Super Bowl advertisers the #StopToxicTwitter coalition is also urging other advertisers featured in the new report — including Merrill Lynch, Peacock TV, The Wall Street Journal and Wendy’s — to stop all Twitter advertisements.

On Twitter, this year’s Super Bowl advertisers aren’t just risking the reputational damage to their brand of a nip slip. They are actively funding Elon Musk’s misogyny and far-right extremism.

And if you spend time scrolling through Twitter during the big game, you’ll be joining these advertisers in “bankrolling hate & lies.”

Further reading: I discussed the Twitter “stay or go?” debate with @LOLGOP in December, before resolving to quit Twitter in 2023.

PLUS: Some bonus “Trump is a pussy ass bitch” content: Seth Meyers was as pleased as I was to note that Chrissy Teigen’s infamous tweet was now part of the congressional record:

Enjoy your weekend!

For those who remember Trump’s tweets from back in the pre-pandemic, pre-insurrection days of 2019, one of the more pathetic moments of the twice-impeached one-term loser’s four debt-ballooning years in office was when he attacked John Legend and his “foul-mouthed wife” on Twitter.

The tweet was standard fare from the aging pervert Trump, but the incident became more memorable when Teigen tweeted back: “lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.”

The incident is back in the news because of some otherwise uninteresting hearings today about a private citizen’s laptop and a social media platform that used its First Amendment rights to moderate some unverified content being pushed by extremist trolls and political operatives.

The news that stood out today was not that Chrissy Teigen called Trump a “pussy-ass bitch” (although that is now part of the Congressional record).

The news was that the Trump White House “immediately reached out to Twitter, demanding the tweet be taken down.”

So, thanks to Gym Jordan and the House GOP, we can now say without a shadow of a doubt that: a) Chrissy Teigen was right; and b) The only President violating Americans’ First Amendment rights was #PresidentPAB himself.

Funny how Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss missed this.

Last night’s Rachel Maddow show reprised the question I asked here on Substack in June 2021: Why Is Individual-1 Still at Large?

MSNBC has posted some highlights here in which:

Rachel Maddow reviews the “weird saga” of the investigation of Donald Trump's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and the efforts by Bill Barr's DOJ to make the whole case disappear. With Barr out of the way and Trump no longer in office, New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg is presenting evidence to a grand jury.

The facts are simple. Trump committed a proven crime to become President. Then he was let off the hook because he was supposedly immune from prosecution because he was President.

That changed on January 20, 2021.

But, as we are now we learning from David Firestone in the New York Times (read free with this link), Bill Barr’s unrelenting corruption in two years as Attorney General turned the DOJ into “an instrument of his ideology and politics.”

According to US Attorney Geoffrey Berman (aka the guy who arrested Jeffrey Epstein), Barr also did everything he could possibly do to interfere with investigations to ensure Trump would not be charged for his proven crimes after he left office.

And speaking of Jeffrey Epstein: Maybe it’s time to re-open that investigation too.

If you have spent any time listening to crazed astroturfers Moms for Liberty or watching bonkers Fox News presenters, you might think:

a) That kindergartners are being forced to read a picture book about two male penguins raising a baby penguin for one reason only: to turn them gay;

b) That when Drag Queens read books aloud in a public space, kids are in more danger than when they get into stranger’s van on the promise of free candy;

Or even:

c) That every shelf in the school library is filled with graphic pornography carefully selected by a teacher dedicated to “grooming” children for deviant sexual purposes.

In reality, there are three much easier ways for your kids to access “pornography” or meet sex-obsessed weirdos:

1. Attend a meeting of school board being targeted by Moms for Liberty.

2. Follow a “Christian” book banner on Twitter and watch him tweet pictures of the porn he thinks should be banned.

3. Go to a public event in defense of the First Amendment and get the porn handed to you and your kids directly.

Before I go on, here’s a brief reminder of what “astroturf” groups are:

Astroturf parent groups are supported by billionaires, and they usually have a sizable staff of well-paid people. They exist to carry out the goals of their funders.

Like the Tea Party before them, most of today’s “astroturf” groups are “deluded and inspired” by shady billionaires who know how easy it is to inflame and then steer their bovine hoards using simplistic, easy-to-repeat talking points.

In the case of “Moms for Liberty,” we are talking about a group that:

Incorporated as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(4) organization, a form that lends itself to dark money political shenanigans… exploded on the scene with its leaders being guests on Fox News and breaking into the Washington Post… has a well-developed website and extensive social media reach… three federal and one state political action committees, one of which is a SuperPAC able to accept unlimited donations…. (its) press is being handled by Calvary Strategies whose CEO is a former campaign manager and chief of staff to Sen. (then-Gov.) Rick Scott… (its) third founder, Bridget Ziegler…. (is the wife of) Christian Ziegler, vice chairman of the Florida Republican Party and the owner of a political marketing firm… (who) boasts that Moms for Liberty will provide crucial ground support for DeSantis’ re-election.

Egged on by Steve Bannon and Patriot Mobile, Moms for Liberty and others like them have turned school board meetings into hate-filled angerfests in which school librarians are vilified as the “arm of satan.”

They read the “dirty parts” of books (not including the rape, bestiality and incest-filled Bible) aloud at these public meetings.

To prove their points, they and their “dad” allies post sexual images from graphic novels on social media.

Note: One of the most popular images they have thrust in front of millions of kids of all ages is a drawing from the graphic novel Gender Queer showing a fake blowjob involving a strap-on dildo which occurs somewhere in the 240-page book, originally published in 2019. I think it’s safe to say more people have seen this picture thanks to “anti-porn,” “anti-groomer” activists—and the Fox News hosts that love to give it screen time—than would have seen it by self-selecting to read the book by themselves.

Partly because of the outrage stoked by a drawing of someone putting an inanimate object that is clearly established as not an actual penis into their mouth, Florida teachers are now being told to remove all unvetted books from classrooms or risk felony prosecution…. and North Dakota Republicans are actually looking to imprison public librarians for the crime of stocking books “depicting sexual or gender identity.”

Meanwhile, creepy guys are handing out material they call “obscene” to young kids.

As bestselling children’s book author Shannon Hale explained in a Twitter thread on January 29, the anti-porn brigade has even started showing up at public events to directly hand out what they insist is pornography to children, only “with no context, no warning, no discussion.”

That’s right. A creepy guy showed up at a family-friendly, book-loving “Let Utah Read” event at the Utah State Capitol on 25 January to hand out pamphlets to all the kids in attendance.

The pamphlets contained the “greatest hits” of sexual content that Moms for Liberty and the right-wing outrage machine want to make sure your unprepared kids are forced to look at.

As Shannon Hale tweeted:

This is the stuff they are saying is pornography—stuff kids should be protected from—and then they went and gave it to EVERY SINGLE KID there. If you truly believe it’s porn, then why are you directly handing it to kids, with no context, no warning, no discussion?

As PEN America points out:

Obscene material is not protected under the First Amendment, but a finding of obscenity requires satisfaction of a tripartite test, which requires, among other aspects, a holistic consideration of the material at issue. Simply declaring a book “obscene” does not make it so.

Using the accepted standards, as adjudicated by the Supreme Court, it would be easier to declare a pamphlet that contains a selection of random sexual images or written passages assembled merely to shock—like the pamphlet given to kids in Utah—to be “obscence” or “pornographic” than it would to say the same about a book-length novel or graphic novel.

And that’s not all.

The pervert who handed out the “porn” pamphlets to the kids in attendance also stuck around to stare at preteen girls in the audience—and then to verbally abuse Shannon Hale in front of her kids.

“My 12yo was shaking and crying for an hour after.”

Ironically, in the speech that Hale gave at the “Let Utah Read” event, she spoke about the ways in which books help kids empathize with others and noted that:

When kids aren’t allowed to even talk about sex, “predators flourish,” and treating books as pornography prevents them from accessing “a gentle form of storytelling that offer context to complex problems and help readers examine them in quiet, slow, thoughtful ways.”

Seemingly, one of the passages in the pamphlet Hale’s kids were given was a scene that appears more than 100 pages into the novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. As Hale noted on Twitter: “my 12yo wouldn’t have gotten… to this part in the first place because she’s not ready for it.”

A single complaint can now get a book banned or an author canceled

The current outrage about books—with school book bans predominantly targeting topics related to Black history or the LGBTQ experience—comes at a time when white students are becoming a minority in many states, including Florida.

Despite—or because of—that, MAGA Governors like Ron DeSantis are prioritizing the needs of white Christian parents and the “comfort” of their delicate children over everyone else.

As Anne Lutz Fernandez wrote here on Substack on 28 January in an article headlined: “Book banning is getting worse”:

Book banning has a long history in America, but it’s a mistake to hope that this too shall pass. The minority rule that allowed the Dobbs decision, the rise of right-wing extremism and political violence, and the proliferation and power of sources of mis- and disinformation make this an especially dangerous moment. It’s not going to pass if we don’t recognize the seriousness of the threat.

When it comes to banning books in schools, “Christian” parents are working from lists circulated within their astroturf groups—and are being fed graphic, out-of-context images and words from one or two books to justify demands to ban dozens of books at a time.

We’ve reached the point where one person has the power to deprive an entire student body of dozens or books that many students would value…

… and where one parent has the power to cancel the visit of a popular author on the eve of Black History Month.

In the words of Lisa Superina, as quoted by the Florida Freedom to Read Project:

Fascism isn’t just going to show up one day and say, ‘I’m here,’ and take all your rights away. It’s creeping in, in increments, and this is the start … right now it’s blatant, in our face, and they’re starting with the books.

It should go without saying that in a public school system, one parent or one teacher should not be allowed to dictate what all children are allowed to read.

But it’s also important to note that “parent’s rights” aren’t the only thing at stake.

Children are not possessions. They are autonomous people who can think for themselves—and who have their own rights.

Including the right to read.

This newsletter is always free to read and share—there’s never a paywall. So subscribe free and never miss an issue. Or, if you’d like to contribute and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber…

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Further reading from my archives:

OK, Groomer (January 8, 2023)

Censorship Is Unamerican (September 10, 2022)

Use Your Words (August 13, 2022)

1939 All Over Again (May 14, 2022)

We’re now just two years away from America’s next—possibly final—peaceful transition of power. The next 24 months will bring with them a deluge of stupidity, distraction, lies, misinformation, disinformation and attacks against America.

What should fact-based, liberal-minded people do to save America and the world from the forces of fascism?

How do we stay sane while giving our time and attention to stuff that can make a meaningful difference to the future?

For answers, I turned to Oliver Willis, who recently said on Twitter: “increasingly realize that a lot of my message is about telling liberals to give up on stuff that wont work and focus on stuff that can actually work. for instance, fixing the msm or convincing conservative voters to leave the cult are both dead ends doomed to fail.”

As his bio on Substack states, Willis was one of the first political bloggers in the world, launching OliverWillis.com around 2000 and was part of the first group of bloggers to interview a president, Barack Obama, in 2010. He was part of the team that launched Media Matters for America, where he spent 13 years reporting on conservative misinformation in the media. He is now a senior writer for the American Independent, a progressive news outlet.

Q&A with Oliver Willis

You recently wrote that Elon Musk is dumb. But how dangerous is he? What harm can his ownership of Twitter do to the US and the world?

A dumb person can be extremely dangerous—we just lived through 4 years of Donald Trump’s leadership proving that. My description of Musk is more about dispelling endless attempts to figure out his “secret plan” for whatever he is doing with Twitter, than to say he can’t be harmful. His attitude in favor of allowing racists and misogynists, literal Nazis in some cases, back on to Twitter has the extreme potential for danger and harm. We know for a fact that terrorists and people like the January 6 attackers have used social media to plan their activities, coordinate attacks, and to single out individuals or groups for harassment. That’s a big part of the reason these people were banned from Twitter in the first place. Letting them back on Twitter, while also doing harm to the company’s infrastructure and inhibiting the ability to respond to crises, should be of concern to people all over the world.

Many on the left applaud people like Pete Buttigieg for going on Fox News and “destroying” their talking points. Why do you think that’s a bad strategy?

I understand the visceral pleasure that comes from a viral clip of watching someone like Buttigieg or former White House press secretary Jen Psaki “dunk” on Fox News. But that momentary enjoyment undermines the fact that an appearance from major Democratic figures helps to legitimize the rest of Fox’s content. While the network is more openly partisan than when it launched, it still needs to hold on to some sort of fiction that claims that they are practicing journalism. But they aren’t. Fox News is the communications arm of the Republican Party and has been since it was first conceived as that by the network’s founder, former Nixon aide Roger Ailes. It doesn't make any sort of sense for Democrats to help a network that not only is designed to attack Democrats but has also spent decades smearing minority groups, women, and the LGBTQ community. Fox News does considerable harm to our culture and encourages violence and terrorism. When Democrats show up on Fox they help to normalize it—Fox is now able to say, “See? The president calls on us, we’re legitimate,” and this empowers more attacks. Better to freeze them out.

You recently wrote that “Nothing the Right Freaks Out About Is Real,” a point that has been proven time and time again. What’s the best way to fight back against the BS?

As liberals our natural inclination is to factually rebut conservative misinformation. It’s still useful to do this but what should really be done is forceful advocacy of reality, not just picking apart a conservative lie. Progressives, liberals, Democrats should push the truth about themselves and their agenda as loudly as the right spreads lies. For every claim about Democrats purportedly attacking one American institution or another, the left should be yelling ten times about how the social safety net has saved millions of lives, how liberal foreign policy has rescued the world from disaster after disaster, how left-centered economics has created multiple economic booms, and so on and so forth. Out yell the right at every opportunity instead of being stuck as their fact checkers.

What advice do you have for people over the next two years? What are the best ways to stay informed, involved—and effective? The best uses of our time and energy?

First of all, people should stop watching cable news. Cable news is easily the worst way to be informed about important issues. To keep on top of the day’s news it is far more useful and effective to set up news feeds through something like a Twitter list to check in on the top, reliable sources of news (even when they are problematic). A quick survey of the major political news sources, along with the wires, will inform you about what is going on in 1/100th the time as hours of cable news (and I mean all cable news is a problem, not just Fox). One of the best ways for the average person to be involved is to simply help to spread information. Never assume “everybody” has already seen a bit of information that crosses your desk, because the odds are they haven’t seen it, even if they are keen news watchers. Share it to your network of people online, even if it’s only a few people. Every bit helps. Approach the news every day with the mindset that people need to see important information—be it a news article, a clip of video, an infographic, whatever, and just share it and share more. Doing this kind of thing helps to keep people engaged, it puts important topics at the top of their minds and gets them motivated to vote or otherwise connect with leaders.

How damaging is MAGA/Fox News stupidity to America’s national security? Is there any long-term hope for convincing brainwashed right-wingers and Trump cultists that they are being lied to—just not by liberals?

I would argue that all of conservatism is dangerous to American national security. Foreign policy disasters like the Iraq War occurred long before “MAGA” was really a thing and before Fox News was very potent. The major difference with the MAGA brand is that it doesn't care much about the stupidity that was always there on the right, hiding behind a veneer of respectability. The vast majority of their stances on national security/foreign policy can easily and quickly be dismissed as absurd non-starters, because history has shown us that it doesn’t work and endangers us and our allies. We have a special role as the world’s major superpower to approach every issue with rationality and logic, which are the opposite of what we get from the right. We can’t have this kind of reckless mindset have any influence over our extremely large and powerful military and larger national security apparatus.

I am not much of a believer in convincing those on the right to “snap out of it.” They have shown us for decades now—since the rise of the modern conservative movement with Barry Goldwater in 1964—that this is a large cult. If you look at any other cult in history, it is difficult to get the vast majority of people to believe, because they are true believers. It sounds harsh but death, usually by their own deranged actions, is what tends to end these things. I think liberals need to focus more on our own rather than looking to pull a minority of the population (and conservative diehards are in a distinct minority) off the ledge. On most issues, the public agrees with center-left policy solutions but we aren’t strong enough advocates for them. We should focus on firing up the liberal base and appealing to a majority of voters that has been proven to agree with us. The Democratic Party has won the popular vote in every election but one since 1992. That isn’t a fringe movement, but it too often acts like its ideas are way out in the wilderness while conservatism is closer to the heart of most people. This is nonsense. 

For more from Oliver Willis, subscribe to Oliver Willis Explains.

Follow him on Twitter at @owillis and on Mastodon at @owillis@mastodon.online.

In case you were worried about how I’m doing since quitting Twitter, just a quick note to reassure you: I’m doing great!

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been outraged by the things I’ve seen and heard about that are happening on the toxic birdsite.

But it also doesn’t mean I will reward the world’s richest Nazi enabler with what he wants as much as my tweets, retweets and likes: my attention.

I’m not here to be that annoying person doing a “cleanse” and telling you all about it. Truth is, I still spend some time on Twitter for work-related reasons. But, I’ve not tweeted on my personal/political accounts and have only logged into Twitter on my laptop to check DMs. Most important, I’ve logged out of my personal and “The Daily Edge” accounts on my phone, which has freed me up to spend a lot more time on ad-free Mastodon!

What’s been going on at Twitter since I’ve been gone?

I don’t know much as I am no longer being served up tweets by people I don’t follow like Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert, which makes it easier to keep my outrage dial below 11.

But I did hear that QElon welcomed the Traitor Mike Flynn back to Twitter on the anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection.

And I also saw that Elon rewarded Ali Alexander for cheerleading the Bannon/Bolsonaro Jan. 6 reboot by reinstating the “Stop the Steal” grifter just one day after hundreds of domestic terrorists were arrested in Brasilia.

(Yes, they were arrested at the scene instead of being allowed to run, drive or fly home. Imagine that!)

Today I noticed Elon the Terrible helping Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald hype their “hot takes” on a new piece of research that, according to them, “proves” that Russiagate was a “hoax” specifically because the activity of Russian trolls on Twitter was not the single deciding factor in the 2016 election.

Never mind that nobody ever said Twitter was the only reason that popular-vote-loser Trump eked out an Electoral College win by 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Never mind, that the very article they are using to prove it was all a hoax states that the survey in question specifically doesn’t prove it was a hoax.

Never mind the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica psy ops campaign (including fake Facebook groups and fake real-world events). Never mind the 140 contacts between Trump and his campaign staff with Russians. Never mind campaign chairman Manafort sharing polling data with Russian spies. Never mind Trump asking the Russians to hack Hillary’s email accounts. Never mind the National Enquirer burying all their dirt on Trump while running stories like this all year long.

And never mind how Rethuglicans and QAnons and Fox News helped amplify Russian conspiracy theories against Hillary. Never mind the Russian spies infiltrating and bankrolling the NRA. Never mind the Comey letter, which by itself was enough to swing the election.

According to Matt Taibbi, the fact that Twitter cannot clearly be shown to be the single deciding factor in the 2016 election means that: “The only road to redemption for mainstream media orgs begins will a full self-audit of the Russiagate fiasco, which includes Pulitzers that need rethinking. It’s not a left or right issue, they just got this completely wrong on the facts, and need to own it.”

To which QElon replies: “Exactly.”

It’s almost as if Musk, Taibbi and Greenwald truly think Twitter is real life. Ten days into 2023, I can confirm, it’s not.

In a scene from his new HBO documentary This Place Rules, Andrew Callaghan interviews QAnon influencer Dave Todeschini, who tells him that self-confessed sexual predator Donald Trump: “is about as far from a pedophile as you’re gonna get. He’s after these people and that’s why they’re after him.”

Callaghan then holds up a series of photographs showing celebrities and Democratic politicians and asks Todeschini to comment.

To a picture of Oprah Winfrey, Todeschini responds: “Pfff. Pedophile.”

To Hillary Clinton, he says: “Pedophile, definitely. Because she eats the babies.”

To Biden: “I call him creepy sleepy chomo Uncle Joe.”

Asked what “chomo” means, Todeschini replies: “Chomo is a jailhouse term for child molester.”

Shown a picture of the actor Jonah Hill (who produced the documentary), Todeschini replies: “Pfff. Pedophile.”

At this point, Callaghan pulls out a file of paperwork and says: “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

The folder contains documentation of Todeschini’s past conviction as a child rapist.

“On May 19th, 1999,” says Callaghan, “you were convicted of sexual abuse in the first degree and sodomy in the second degree of an 8-year-old boy in New Jersey. So, according to this paper, you are a registered sex offender and a convicted pedophile.”

“On a false conviction,” says Todeschini. “I pled,” he says. “I did what Michael Flynn did. I knew I couldn’t win.”

“Have you ever heard the term projection before?” asks Callaghan.

“Yeah,” says Todeschini. “Hillary Clinton does it all the time.”

“Do you feel like maybe you’re projecting by—”

“No, I’m not projecting. I am engaging in revenge.”

“How are you going to get revenge?”

“I’m going to get revenge by taking down the whole goddamn cabal,” says Todeschini. “Like a protagonist in Law Abiding Citizen, I’m going to pull this whole fucking corrupt temple down around your fucking head. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Who are you calling a pedophile?

If any political party in America has a pedophile or “grooming” problem, the evidence would suggest that’s the GOP.

When it comes to child sex traffickers, child rapists and child porn perverts, the Party of Trump has offered a “Big Tent” to accommodate everyone from Matt Gaetz to Josh Duggar to Ruben Verastigui to Adam Hageman to Anton Lazzaro to Joel Koskan to name just a few.

Back in 2016 (as I wrote here in February 2020), the Pizzagate conspiracy theory gave Trump, Russia, the GOP and Fox News a convenient way to deflect and distract from Dirty Old Donald’s history of preying on women and girls, not to mention his documented habit of attending sex parties at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s NY mansion.

While it’s impossible to know how much Pizzagate contributed to popular-vote loser Trump’s razor-thin 2016 victory (by a combined 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan), we do know that: a) falsely smearing Hillary and Democrats as “pedophiles” was an element of the 2016 campaign; and b) that was just the start.

Today, QAnons and Tucker Carlson viewers are parroting demented talking points to accuse teachers, librarians and the LGBTQ community of being “pedophiles” and “groomers”—despite all evidence to the contrary.

And, as with the 2016 attack on Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant, the far-right’s stochastic terrorists are succeeding in promoting real-world violence against innocent people.

As Luke O’Neil wrote on his Welcome to Hell World newsletter in June 2022:

Violence and discrimination against LGBT people is not some hypothetical future we’re talking about. We’re not at the top of a slippery slope looking down at what may come to pass we are halfway down the fucking slide. It’s here now. It’s already happening and it’s only going to get worse.

Following the deadly mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Spings in November 2022, O’Neil highlighted again these words he wrote in June:

The conflation of LGBT people and those who support them with pedophiles is stochastic terrorism in its clearest form. It’s a license to murder. Wouldn't you want to protect children from people seeking to harm them after all?

O’Neil calls out even “centrist” media such as The New York Times who are, like Tucker Carlson (seen here the night before the Club Q shooting), “just asking questions” about trans people and their rights, warning that “the tip of the spear of American fascism at this point in time begins with transphobia and moves outward from there.”

The NYT’s still asking questions. Todeschini has it all figured out

In an earlier interview segment shown in This Place Rules, Dave Todeschini (aka “The Inglorious Patriot”) claimed that he had knowledge that was “kinda like intuitive” about “alien X-files type of shit.” This intuitive knowledge ran the gamut from Pizzagate to John F. Kennedy to Satanic rituals that involved “sacrificing children to Molek.” Todeschini claimed that “the pieces of the puzzle only fit together one way” and, having figured that puzzle out, the convicted child rapist told Callaghan he was ready to “pick up one of those weapons I showed you” to defend “my country.”

“You might kill me,” said Todeschini. “But I’ll get a whole goddam bunch of yous before I do that.”

It’s time to push back on the false “groomer” rhetoric

Regular readers of this newsletter have heard of Todeschini before. When I interviewed @cajsa (the Twitter user documenting #RepublicanSexualPredators) in December 2021, she called him out as “a Q-Anon peddler of pedophile conspiracies, including the idea that Hillary tortured children and drank their blood.”

Since then, the pedophile conspiracy theories have only gotten worse, becoming not only more physically dangerous but—as the attacks have broadened to include Drag Queens, teachers and librarians—also more harmful to our communities.

If you’re not fully aware of what’s happening across the country, listen to the abuse this Catholic grandma is getting simply for trying do her job as a librarian in Michigan.

It’s more important than ever that sensible people push back against the false “groomer” and “pedophile” rhetoric being promoted by bad actors from QAnon to QElon, from Fox News to the “Free State of Florida.” The lies and conspiracy theories are part of a culture war that has nothing to do with protecting children—but everything to do with giving Proud Boys and MAGA morons an invitation to commit more violence against the LGBTQ community.

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It’s been decades since I attempted any meaningful New Year’s Resolutions. The last serious one I made—to give up smoking—lasted only days (or possibly hours).

Back then, I decided that any future resolutions should be governed purely by my own resolve, not the calendar. I gave up smoking permanently soon after.

But New Year’s Day 2023 is coinciding with a resolution I’ve been contemplating making for a while—to get off Twitter.

For years, I’ve been what @LOLGOP calls a “weirdo”—or what Twitter (and The New York Times) might call a “power user.”

Says The NY Times:

Power users find Twitter notoriously hard to quit. In July 2021, the writer Caitlin Flanagan published an essay, “You Really Need to Quit Twitter,” in The Atlantic; as of today, she remains on the platform. And many of the prominent Twitter users who have created accounts on alternatives like Mastodon and Post are still active on Twitter.

On a personal level, my power user weirdness has allowed me to build three moderately sized accounts—@richardhine, @TheDailyEdge and my Trump parody account @RealDonalDrumpf—which currently have a combined 370,000 followers.

Since joining Twitter in 2010, I’ve enjoyed the fact that many people have responded favorably to my contributions (and attempted humor) and I appreciate the many friends I’ve made along the way. I’ve enjoyed the times my tweets have “gone viral,” been quoted in the news, and the times when list-makers have said The Daily Edge had some degree of political influence. I’ve enjoyed being followed and retweeted by celebrities and journalists.

But it’s not nearly as much fun anymore.

Without rehashing all the reasons Elon Musk has given—and keeps giving—Twitter users to quit, the main reason is he’s simply a bad person. And I don’t want to help bad people succeed. As @LOLGOP put it in our recent conversation, staying on Twitter means “enabling this guy.”

One reason to stay, of course, is to keep fighting. But there’s no indication that Elon Musk will allow anything resembling a fair fight.

Another reason to stay is that, around the world, many people rely on Twitter to organize and share information. But Elon Musk is so fundamentally dishonest and so beholden to foreign interests that it’s hard to imagine Twitter remaining a safe place to speak truth to power or share one’s real-time “assassination coordinates.”

Maybe there will be a bankruptcy and a reorganization that gives Twitter new life—even, possibly, a new owner.

Maybe there will be reasons to return in the future.

So I won’t delete my accounts.

I do have some clients for whom I will continue to use Twitter as long as they wish to stay on the platform.

But as long as Musk is in charge, I won’t be tweeting on a personal level.

Things I might normally tweet I will share instead on Mastodon or Post.

Things that I might have once put into a Twitter thread will likely wind up here on Substack.

You can also find me on other platforms like Facebook an Instagram through the links in these pages:

https://bio.link/thedailyedge

https://bio.link/richardhine

Thanks for reading. I wish you a very Happy New Year!