Since news broke that Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent dozens of text messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows promoting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans have pooh-poohed calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election and its aftermath.
“He’s a jurist who has a lot of integrity,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He’s going to make that decision and he has the right to do it.” Over on Fox News, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) argued, “I’ve watched Clarence Thomas for years and I’ve always seen him do the right thing.”
We shouldn’t have to guess whether Thomas will “do the right thing.” For far too long already, the justice and his wife have been allowed to play fast and loose with ethical standards.
Thomas will always “do the right thing” according to his far-right belief system, in which this innocent victim of a “high tech lynching” must do whatever he can to advance the cause of his deeply religious, yet always “transactional,” tribe.
BP, Shell and Exxon have poured nearly $100 billion into Russian fossil fuel projects since its 2014 invasion of Crimea.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Doha Forum in Qatar, asking oil- and gas-producing countries to up their output to reduce reliance on Russian imports. This comes as new data reveal Western oil giants including BP, Shell and Exxon have poured nearly $100 billion into Russian fossil fuel projects since its 2014 invasion of Crimea. The analysis was released by Global Witness, Greenpeace USA and Oil Change International.
Bear in mind that fucking Charles Koch (still open for business in Russia, one of thirty transactional US corporations ignoring the boycott, the profit motive never sleeps!) was the heir to a fossil fuel-based fortune created by his Nazi admiring father. Fred Koch, a man without love, instilled the spirit of war in his sons David and Charles, along with a tireless work ethic. He was a founder of the John Birch Society (direct fringe forerunner of the modern Q-tainted GOP) and an engineer who invented a technology that enabled him to use the dirtiest (and cheapest) crude oil to make top shelf fuel oil for even greater profit. His method polluted much more than others, because the crude he started with was filthy. That’s why you have to dismantle to Administrative State, they’re going to try to coerce you, take your liberty, tell you how much poison you can pump into the air in the bare knuckled fight for ever more personal billions.
Our oligarchs working with Russian oligarchs? What a surprise!Not much reporting on this story, as BP, Exxon and their fellow toxic polluters make record profits during a “supply chain crisis” as gas prices soar worldwide, because… Biden. What next, tax these “persons”?
How we came to this sorry situation here in the US, where absolute bullshit flies and is accepted by millions as truth, is laid out beautifully in a history of the fossil fuel industries cutting edge innovations in public relations, going back a hundred years. The entire season three of Drilled, tracing the development of the influential PR juggernaut, is worth listening to, but check out this fantastic summary of how the fossil fuel industry won the war against “climate change alarmists”. An amazing bit of history and reporting by Amy Westervelt. Here’s her description of the series: A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted and reported by award-winning investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. It’s all in the public relations, baby.
If you have any doubts about the power of an endlessly repeated narrative, no matter how little sense it makes, ask the tens of millions of Americans who sincerely believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Christ’s chosen protector of children from blood drinking pedophile socialist fascists.
Wake up and take a look at the headlines in the paper, if, like me, you cannot refrain from doom scrolling. I also check youTube for a quick, surveillance capitalism-curated primer on what people who don’t read the paper think is important and whoa!, there’s Will Smith charging up to a comedian and smacking him in the face on live TV then threatening him if he doesn’t take Smith’s wife’s name out of his fucking mouth. He angrily says this twice to make his point. The comedian behaved with great dignity, after Smith, who initially laughed at the in-poor-taste joke (at the expense of his wife’s alopecia), lunged on to the stage, Jack Ruby-like, and slapped Chris Rock, hard. Rock was philosophical “…that was the greatest night in television history” he said while managing not to rub his stung cheek.
Americans, of course, did not see this moment of TV history — you know how the fucking “f-word” can destroy a young life (it clearly destroyed mine). You can see it here:
On a similar censorship note, Putin’s Supreme Court has closed down the Russian archive that documented all the atrocities of the Second World War. That’s what you do when fighting Nazis. Here’s Brook Gladstone with the story The Death of Historical Memory.
Speaking of Nazis, the Washington Post had a long piece entitled Inside Ted Cruz’s last-ditch battle to keep Trump in power about hard-line Tea Bagger Lyin’ Ted Cruz losing friends after his ardent defense of the Big Lie (spread by Cruz who announced, on January 5th and 6th, that 39% of Americans believed his lie) and his pivotal, essential role in the January 6 insurrection conspiracy. My first thought was — Cruz had friends? One was J. Michael Luttig, the former federal judge, a movement conservative (as they call themselves) for whom Cruz, and John “Greenbay Sweep” Eastman, once clerked (don’t worry, Cruz and Eastman are still cool). Cruz said of Luttig “he was like a father to me.” Luttig was the author of a NY Times op-ed defending Barr’s decision to do Trump a favor in dismissing Mike “Lock Her Up” Flynn’s guilty plea (fucking Comey should’ve done the right thing), and his discretion in calling the lies Flynn pleaded guilty for telling “immaterial”. He has since come out against Trump’s riot at the Capitol, advocates closing loopholes in the Electoral Count Act that Cruz attempted to drive a convoy of anti-vax trucks through, and had some unflattering things to say about Cruz, about whom there is little flattering to say.
Unless, of course, you are Ginni Thomas, who used her protected First Amendment right to voice any opinion whatsoever, in this case in a series of texts to Trump’s chief of staff urging him to fight the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, the certified, recounted results of which horrified this apocalyptic right wing Christian extremist. Ginni is famously married to movement conservative Clarence Thomas. Thomas, always taking his cues from his master, the brilliant, evil Antonin Scalia, has refused to recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s high-powered political activism (among other things she’s on the board of the secretive non-profit that brokered the deal between Trump and the Evangelicals prior to the 2016 election [1]). Clarence Thomas did, however, recently disclose that Ginni had recently taken in over $600,000 for such work, as required when updating his financial disclosure forms. Now she’s being politely asked by the January 6 Committee to come in and invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, over and over. She will likely demand a subpoena, that she will refuse to obey, but presumably Clarence has her back if the case makes it up to his rarefied, unappealable court, the group of lifetime appointees that claims to enforce its own ethical obligations.
The Trump Six on the Supreme Court have been fairly loyal to the incompetent, insane fuck who appointed half of them, ruling (often on the Shadow docket, no debate, no legal reason needed) in a way sure to make America as great as it was in the era of de jure segregation, back alley abortions for the poor and homosexuals Biblically stigmatized, out of faithful loyalty to what the top preachers claim Jesus loves and hates, the only guide needed by these carefully vetted zealots.
Speaking of loyalty oaths, former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovich revealed the other day that Trump’s goons, before smearing her reputation with lies and having Transactional Trump unceremoniously remove her from office, tried to get her to sign an oath of personal loyalty to the leader of the GOP. A loyalty oath? As we call it the Führer Oath:
“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
Seriously though, Cruz had friends?
Cruz, with a damning placard implicating Ketanji Brown Jackson as a RACIST
[1]
Ginni Thomas sits on the board of directors for the powerful, secretive, right-wing political activist nonprofit Council for National Policy — here is their deal with Trump in 2016:
NELSON: . . . Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something like a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –
GARFIELD: We have a shopping list.
NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items.
The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal.
The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis.
The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.
Irony is dead, yo. Justice Coney Barrett made this claim at the fucking Mitch McConnell Center sitting right next to McConnell until she got up to speak. McConnell who had saved her a seat on the high court as well, and ram-rodded her historically quick-stepped nomination through the recently non-filibustered (by McConnell) confirmation on a partyline 51-49vote during the middle of the 2020presidentialelection.
To think that a judge of great integrity would participate in a sprint for an illegitimate Supreme Court seat, during voting in a presidential election, well, that’s partisan hackery right there, that!
Anyway, as Mark Meadows texted to Ginni Thomas in the days leading up toTrump’sMAGA riot at the Capitol:
“This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
Keep in mind that the legal standard for recusal (applicable to every American judge outside of the unappealavle top nine) is an APPEARANCE of impropriety or conflict of interest. From today’s New York Times:
Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”
Extremists will be extremists, especially if they believe the entire world is against them and they have to fight by any means necessary, as these right-wing, USA! USA!!! chanting motherfuckers herealways do, in their divine struggle.
The result of Stalin’s campaign was a catastrophe. In spring 1933 death rates in Ukraine spiked. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians. Police archives contain multiple descriptions of instances of cannibalism as well as lawlessness, theft, and lynching. Mass graves were dug across the countryside. Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were able to survive thanks to ration cards. Still, in Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses could be seen on the street.
Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.
On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
On a separate but related note, why hasn’t DOJ indicted Mark “Tea Partiers for Jesus” Meadows for his months’ old contempt of Congress?What the fuck, Merrick?
Ginni Thomas, wife of überconservative Supreme Court justice and victim of a “high tech lynching” Clarence Thomas, is an überconservative political activist who fancies herself an ardent follower of Jesus Christ. She would follow Jesus anywhere, apparently, including the overturning of so-called democracy. She worked closely with the deeply religious Donald Trump and communicated many times with his pious Christian final chief of staff Mark Meadows after the election was stolen by Satanists. The two exchanged fervent texts in the days after the Donald’s loss to Joe Biden in an election that horrified them both. Some of these texts were turned over to the January 6 Commission and written about in detail in today’s Washington Post. The fervent Christian tone of many of these texts citing the intercession of the King of Kings and casting the middle-of-the-road Joe Biden as the embodiment of evil has ’em saying “oy, for Christ’s sake!”
At the center of those who supported Trump in 2016 were the thousand Evangelical leaders who were told by the Council on National Policy (the secret far-right nonprofit organization that Ginni Thomas sits on the board of) to hold their noses at the stench of the prolifically sinning spray tanned Flawed Vessel, in exchange for sacred promises that would advance their Christian fundamentalist jihad. To cement this unholy alliance Trump swore to appoint religious Christian Supreme Courts justices who had been carefully vetted for conservative Christian values by Leonard Leo [1] at the Federalist Society (a Catholic, true, but we can’t always be choosy when fighting evil), appoint only Protestants to the president’s religious advisory council (created to promote interfaith dialogue and cooperation), to get rid of a poor woman’s right to abortion, cut taxes on the wealthy and the rest of the Jesus Agenda, all approved personally by the King of Kings.
It should come as no shock that the extreme right is full of messianic Christian evangelists who believe Jesus Christ wants the US to be a conservative Christian theocracy, the Framers’ so-called explicit First Amendment right of religious liberty in the be damned to hell. Christian fundamentalists have long been associated with far right campaigns of all sorts, going back decades. Why does every American president dutifully attend the Christian prayer breakfast where they can piously hobnob and pose for smiling pictures with far-right religious fanatics/lobbyists? Only Jesus, and the secret donors, know.
Here is an excellent piece by Greg Sargent, commenting on the shock of the conservative Joe Scarborough on reading the Thomas-Meadows texts that cast Trump’s struggle to remain in power in messianic terms, in the black and white total war terms of America’s white Christian punitive versionof Sharia law.
Leonard A. Leo is an American lawyer and conservative legal activist. He was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society, where he is co-chairman of the board of directors. Leo has led campaigns to support the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.Wikipedia
Authoritarians, who infantilize their followers by making them believe in a black and white world without any gradation or nuance, protect their sensitive followers from the psychological harm of unpleasant truths. Demagogues aggressively arm their supporters against harsh things in the past, like massacres, pogroms, unprovoked wars or genocide, things that could embarrass, shame or humiliate them.
Turkey made a law criminalizing the mention of the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians early on in WWI. Calling this mass murder, this “ethnic cleansing”, an act of genocide will land you in prison in Turkey. Never fucking happened. Holocaust denial anyone?
The unspeakably cruel Middle Passage (Africa to the New World, chained, naked, in a coffin-sized space under the deck), and the lucrative employment and torture of American slaves from Africa were actual, horrific, well-documented, centuries-long practices that happened, with reverberations into the present in terms of quality of life, life expectancy, wealth inequality, psychological and physical safety and a host of other issues. Horrific, the amount of guilt and anguish knowing any of this could cause innocent white schoolchildren.
In the US the party of aggrieved white people is convinced that the real victims of so-called racism are the innocent white people who never owned slaves yet are being made to feel shame, discomfort, chagrin, guilt, anguish and so on when the subject of the ‘peculiar institution’ is discussed by the merciless advocates of Critical Race Theory. The solution is as simple as the problem to an authoritarian — the subject of the Peculiar Institution may not be discussed in a way that could cause anyone to feel shame, discomfort, chagrin, guilt, anguish or in any way like a bad person. Talk about snowflakes…
The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 [2]? Relatively few Americans (outside of Black descendants of those massacred) heard about this massive atrocity until almost a century after it took place, accounts of it wiped from newspaper archives to ensure the children of the men who murdered countless souls, machine gunned some, bombed and burned down their entire neighborhood, then put them in an open air prison camp outside of Tulsa, would never feel shame, discomfort, etc. The massacre came in the context of the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan in the wake of World War One, though discussion of any of that could also cause shame, discomfort, chagrin, denial, anger etc. Here’s a footnote for those with a strong stomach [1].
Holodomor, the Stalinist terror famine that killed millions in Ukraine from 1931 to 1932? Not a deliberate act of vengeance by Stalin, a tragic mistake by bureaucrats that led to many deaths during that famine, the 3.9 million Ukrainians who died were not alone, many other Soviet citizens also died, plus, they were killed by fellow Ukrainians, plus, they were not loyal to the Soviet state that conquered them. So you see? Fuck Ukraine.
The My Lai Massacre [3], covered up by men famed for their integrity, guys like Colin Powell, was one of many, many such massacres in Vietnam during which locals were murdered by American boys crazed by the cruelty of a war where the enemy could be anybody, a war that no American really understood the actual reason for, except for the armament profiteers. How much shame, discomfort and guilt I have always felt when I consider that my government sent young men, a couple of years older than me, to a place where they’d be driven insane and wind up doing such things, in my name. Better to make it go away!
Postcards, issued in 1911, featured the hanging of African-American farm wife Laura Nelson and her castrated son from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma—an event that later inspired the activism of Woody Guthrie. Another postcard showed the burning of an unidentified Black man in Durant, and was captioned “Coon Cooking.” In 1917, 17 white members of the International Workers of the World were flogged, tarred, feathered, and turned loose on the prairie by Knights of Liberty dressed in black robes and masks. By 1921, according to historian Scott Ellsworth, a revived Tulsa Ku Klux Klan claimed an active membership of 3,200.
source(National Endowment for the Humanities, obviously an anti-white hate group…)
[2]
The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Alternatively known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, the event is considered one of “the single worst incident[s] of racial violence in American history”, and is believed to be one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the history of the United States. Wikipedia
[3]
The Mỹ Lai massacre was the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by United States troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968 during the Vietnam War. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division. Wikipedia
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