Category Archives: History and Politics

Context is crucial

Without context, the most idiotic, lying claim can fly, since there is nothing to really measure it against. Every single legal proceeding against the insane former president is a hoax, a witch hunt, a political hit job, yea, illegal partisan election interference, motivated by irrational hatred of the greatest man ever to be president of the smoldering carnage of this once great nation.

With context, well, that kind of broad, moronic claim can be easily seen as the idiotic manipulation it is.

I love the context for the superseding indictment in the documents case that former FBI agent Pete Strozk provided in about a minute. The day after a draft subpoena is sent to Trumpie’s attorney the obstructive frenzy begins: attempts to hide requested documents, destroy servers, delete surveillance video of lackeys hiding documents, deceiving his own lawyers, causing one to sign a false statement about retained documents. All starting right before (and after) the subpoena for the surveillance video was served on the Orange Polyp.

How’s that for context (and consciousness of guilt), Trumpie? Well, done, Pete.

Weaponizing the air we breathe

You wouldn’t think it possible to weaponize something like sensible health precautions during a deadly plague. It was very easily done here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Wearing a mask, at government demand, was turned, for tens of millions of free citizens, into a tyrannical indignity calling for armed resistance. The Covid vaccine the otherwise negligent president, to his credit, fast tracked, became, as soon as he was out of office, a hated injection of wokeness that would turn you into a transsexual.

It turns out that anything can be weaponized. I saw this recently with a small group of old friends after a couple I was very close to felt humiliated by what I’d witnessed between them. They share a characteristic with everyone who must always be seen as right, perfect and correct: they went to war to win the hearts and minds of the others and make sure I would never be believed. Life, to the sort who must always be right, is a constant and total war where no prisoners may be taken. All critics must be thoroughly discredited and silenced, on pain of unbearable shame.

The charge of weaponization is a great weapon, it turns out. If you are inclined to believe somebody you will not question their claim that someone who criticizes them is a fucking liar. You see how smoothly this works? I confide in you how hurt I was that my close friends maliciously lied about me. I did nothing wrong, they attacked me viciously, continued to attack, blaming me the entire time when all I tried to do was make peace. I’ll provide a few truthful examples, to cement my lies. You will be all sympathy. Unless – they got to you first with a convincing story.

Note: these motherfuckers will always get there first. A lie is halfway around the world while the truth is just putting its pants on, as it’s been aptly put. Maybe it’s shoes truth struggles to put on, while the lie is wildly boogying its way around the world. You get the point. Tell the story first, make your version definitive, lament the awful truth, grieve, be consoled. The end.

On that note, the corrupt political appointee who enabled a corrupt president to skate for obstruction of justice and his campaign’s 140 instances of collusion with a foreign power, now using the weapon of his bad breath to criticize the man he fought so doggedly to corruptly protect. The clip is short and sickening, as this “gutless pig” finally speaks truthfully.

https://youtube.com/shorts/YcZae05tqu4?feature=share

Trumpie seeks another writ of mandamus

He had his lawyers file papers in Georgia Supreme Court to force the Fulton County DA to stop her criminal investigation, remove her from his case, and suppress all of the evidence she has gathered, forever. To seek this extraordinary relief his lawyers had to argue that he has “a clear and indisputable right to the [extraordinary] relief requested” and that there was a serious error in the court below not granting this extraordinary relief.

There was no error and the extraordinary relief requested is only available if there is no other avenue to justice available and several conditions are all met. None of the conditions have been met. Trumpie caused another completely frivolous set of legal papers to be filed, wasting everyone’s time with vexatious delay, using the court as an offensive weapon.

To understand how ridiculous Trumpie’s request for a writ of mandamus is, see the dissent in MAGA Judge Neomi Rao’s erroneous ruling granting Mike Flynn the same extraordinary relief, to which he was also not entitled. Rao was appointed by Trumpie himself to fill the smelly seat on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals recently occupied by the supremely entitled, gassy Boof Kavanaugh.

In her highly deferential opinion, Rao states the law she is about to ignore (before being roundly reversed on appeal):

For this court to grant a writ of mandamus, “the right to relief must be ‘clear and indisputable’; there must be ‘no other adequate means to attain the relief’; and ‘the issuing court, in the exercise of its discretion, must be satisfied that the writ is appropriate under the circumstances.’” In re Cheney, 544 F.3d 311, 312–13 (D.C. Cir. 2008)

Here is very detailed description of the corruption of Trumpie’s first attempt to get Flynn’s guilty plea thrown out. It contains the dissent’s excellent description of what is required for a writ of mandamus and why none of those factors were present for Flynn. No matter what his new attorney, Sidney Powell, or corrupt religious blowhard Bill Barr had to say to the contrary.

Unfortunately for Trumpie, judges are still constrained by the law, until they reach the Supreme Court, of course. Even then, they cannot always wipe their asses with the Constitution. They need carefully constructed Federalist Society-hatched fact-specific cases, lawsuits brought to selected Federalist Society judges for particular outcomes. When these selected cases make their way up to the Supreme Court, where the majority, if sufficiently partisan, may wipe their collective asses with the Constitution. Trumpie’s desperate, frivolous filing is not such a case.

Protecting the right to lie is crucial for liars

Without the ability to lie those who rely on lies to prevail find themselves at a terrible disadvantage. Freedom of speech was designed to allow a full spectrum of speech, making no distinction between wise words and stupid words, truth and lies.

The only distinction made, in a unanimous Supreme Court decision, was between ordinary disgusting speech and speech that is a foreseeable and immediate incitement to violence. Where the line of is has long been a subject of furious debate on both sides. What removes certain speech from the broad protections of the First Amendment is the imminence of the physical harm it is certain to cause (or economic harm caused by defamation).

The absolute, unregulatable right to spread false information that has already led to violence is in a different category than an absolute right to call somebody else a fucking asshole.

More insightful reporting and analysis by historian Heather Cox Richardson:

Trump-appointed judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction saying the First Amendment prevents the government from trying to stop the spread of disinformation. 

Doughty has become the judge Republican attorneys general seek out in their challenges to the Biden administration, and in this case, that judge shopping appears to have paid off. In a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, Doughty temporarily prevented employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services from talking to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” 

At stake is the belief among right-wing figures that government officials and social media companies have teamed up to silence them, although in fact, studies show that social media algorithms actually amplify right-wing political content and that social media companies are reluctant to remove it out of fear of backlash from extremists. Right-wing complaints stem from the removal of disinformation during the pandemic, and of accounts linked to the violence of January 6, 2021. 

For years, the government has worked with social media companies to try to address terrorism, images of child sexual abuse, and disinformation about the pandemic and elections. But disinformation has become a key political tool for the Republicans, and going into the 2024 election season, they have doubled down on the disinformation that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and flooded the media with that lie. 

Fittingly, as Philip Bump pointed out in the Washington Post today, Doughty’s injunction accepts right-wing allegations at face value, meaning he cites as a mark against the administration something that, in fact, didn’t happen. 

Foreign accounts have amplified right-wing lies, and the injunction specifically targets the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which leads the push to identify and stop malign foreign influence in our social media. 

But there is a new twist there: Russia’s Yevgeny Prigozhin—the man who recently led his Wagner Group soldiers toward Moscow to demand changes in Russian military leadership—was key to the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign, and Reuters reported on Sunday that he announced on Saturday that his media company, including a troll factory that sought to influence public opinion in the U.S., is shutting down. 

That the injunction claims to protect free speech by forcing people to stop communication was not lost on observers. Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe called the injunction “blatantly unconstitutional” and noted: “Censoring a broad swath of vital communications between government and social media platforms in the name of combating censorship makes a mockery of the first amendment.” Tribe joined law professor Leah Litman to eviscerate the “breathtaking scope” of the order. 

The Department of Justice appealed the order today. It will go to the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Disinformation is also behind the attempt of far-right House members to undermine the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of which maintain the rule of law in the United States. The FBI was key to investigating Russia’s attempt to help former president Trump win the 2016 presidential election and the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while the DOJ has been central to making sure that those who have broken the law are held accountable.

Right-wing Republicans, many of whom are implicated in the events surrounding the 2020 election, insist that the FBI—overseen by Trump appointee Christopher Wray—and the DOJ are improperly targeting them. They are calling for Wray to be fired and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who heads the DOJ, to be impeached. Barring that, they want to starve the department and the bureau by slashing their budgets. 

Trump attacked the FBI and the DOJ from the beginning of his presidency, and today the House investigation into the FBI and DOJ includes the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. It is currently centered on right-wing insistence that President Biden’s 53-year-old son, Hunter, received a lenient deal from the DOJ and that the DOJ retaliated against an IRS whistleblower about the case. Legal analysts say that, in fact, the younger Biden got a harsher deal than others and point out that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney overseeing the case, was appointed by Trump. 

On June 7, Weiss told Jordan in a letter that Garland had given Weiss full authority over the case; on June 30, Weiss wrote to deny that the DOJ had retaliated against a whistleblower, reiterating that he had “been granted ultimate authority over this matter.” Wray is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), on July 12. Jordan is a key critic of what he claims is FBI focus on Republicans.

Disinformation was a key factor in the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin to the authoritarian power he now holds.

source

Freedom of Thought

I watched a short clip of autocratic billionaire Elon Musk talking about freedom of speech, and, presumably, why it is important to protect lying, even inflammatory, speech as vigilantly as truthful speech. The First Amendment is sacred to Musk, he claims, in much the way the Second Amendment is probably sacred to him. Freedom of Speech, to most billionaires, is directly related to any speech necessary to protect them from taxation or regulation of their businesses, both of which are forms of inhuman tyranny.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre, when there is no fire, is prohibited speech. Shouting “child molester!” while gesturing desperately toward a man with a child (who may be his own kid) to a crowd of drunken people with guns is similar. Shouting “Stolen Election!” after your own experts have all told you there was no widespread fraud found is the same thing. So is “Mask Mandates are Auschwitz!!!” and any number of rallying cries that excite volatile mobs of otherwise decent people who are well beyond the reach of critical thinking.

If this kind of panic/rage-inciting speech remains unregulated, freedom of thought begins to disappear. All discussion is reduced to an idiotic “true or false” test with reflexive answers from each of only two sides. There is only “right” and “wrong” in a world deliberately and systematically drained of nuance. Protecting incendiary lies is a direct road to mass idiocy, which is always beneficial to would-be tyrants.

For those who believe they are more important than everybody else, it is crucial to establish “freedom of thought” that aligns with their needs. To my great horror, I’ve experienced this in my personal life, in a grotesque mirroring of MAGA-mania. In the face of damaging lies about my character, evidence becomes as irrelevant as common sense. The question is not “did this person ever show signs of being a sadist, a brute, a bully, a liar, someone who cannot forgive, no matter how people beg him for mercy?”. Those questions are wiped away by an emotional stance, taken to remain united with others who share your love and views of right and wrong.

That the smartest and most sensitive of people will sometimes embrace these ill-intended fabrications is one of the great tragedies of our world. Every lynch mob in history has rushed forward convinced of the righteousness of their mission. That the occasional highly evolved person will sometimes see the point of the mob, or at least profess to take no side, is one of the hardest things in the world to swallow, for a sadistic, insanely vengeful asshole like me, anyway.