Octogenarian Rupert Murdoch, powerful autocratic media mogul with a distinctly fascistic worldview, never wastes a minute when he can be spreading patriotically packaged hate to convert another disgruntled citizen to his point of view. He gave up citizenship in the country of his birth, Australia, to become a naturalized, and ultra-nationalistic, highly influential U.S. citizen in 1985. In fairness to Murdoch, fascism is the ideal business environment for well-connected super-wealthy right wingers. Like other Nazi types, Murdoch and his propaganda machine are laser focused on relentlessly hammering home their message and never seem to fucking sleep. Even the enemy armies on the front in World War One took a truce in Jesus’s name on Christmas, came out of their bunkers, toasted each other, sang carols together, sometimes even exchanged gifts. Not Rupert, not today, not any day.

Here is a clip that FOX “news” posted to youTube shortly before Christmas Day turned into the day after Christmas. I am going to transcribe this articulate former elite soldier’s patriotic speech, calling for STRONG military leaders who believe in the exceptional greatness of our threatened nation, so that you can see its compelling, if simplified, “argument” plainly in front of you.

In full disclosure, my Instagram profile, my pronoun is listed as Attack Helicopter so you can let everyone know exactly where you are.

So, yeah, the military has a very specific and strategic job and that’s to keep our country safe and when you thrust them in to be the front line of a sociological experiment which has a pernicious ideology that makes people hate the United States, a soldier can very quickly start to despise the very thing he’s supposed to be protecting.

As the military is getting “woke” it is learning that its country is evil and racist and xenophobic and greedy and steals land and so why in the world should I defend something that is evil and awful? And the answer is “no, only evil people would defend evil things.”

And so it’s really less about whatever little headline is happening right now, it’s really more about the totality of what “wokeism” is doing to the military in general, the whole structure, the whole anti-everythingism that wokeism is is destroying the very fabric of why a soldier would even fight. You’re demoralizing the troops so it’s something far more at the heart of what a soldier is. You’re destroying their love of country and therefore their reason to fight and possibly die for their country. We can’t survive it.

My question for the general would be is are you studying the enemy’s playbook to war against them or to join them? And judging by things like the Afghanistan withdrawal, it looks like we’re more interested in supplying them all kinds of weapons that will absolutely be used, and have been used, to kill innocents. And so I wonder is the general reading to join them or to defeat them? And it looks like the former, not the latter.

My background was in special operations and I’m forever connected to that specific brotherhood, and I do know that that type of elite soldier, whether it’s Army Rangers or Seals or Special Forces they are highly pragmatic they’re intelligent and they’re very impervious to bullying. They’re not “woke”, they don’t go “woke”, you can’t make them be “woke”, wokeism, forced on the military will absolutely make you lose your most elite soldiers. We’ll lose them.

If we can’t get strong leaders who understand that their job in the military is not to play sociological games, but it’s to keep our borders safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic, we’re in serious trouble. That’s problems that we cannot survive.

There’s an ancient quote by a warrior poet named Thucydides and he says “the state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools”. We have to have strong military leadership that cares about pragmatic, in real-world results to keep people physically safe.

They’re everyday Americans, they’re civilians, they’re military, they’re police, they’re EMS, they’re doctors, bankers, lawyers, they’re all of us. And that’s what we’re after. We’re after the common man who loves freedom and who lives for higher purpose, is ready to sacrifice in the defense of others, and that’s the whole idea.

The military, even before its leadership was captured by what FOX calls the false and pernicious notion that our country has a deep history of racism, xenophobia and land seizure (not to mention the fake history of our government ‘disappearing’ of millions of indigenous Americans) has long been a democratizing institution, oddly enough. Not sociological games based on a pernicious ideology, but exposure to other Americans from different backgrounds in a hierarchy that rewards good service. I have a friend who grew up in Tennessee, had few contacts with Blacks and recalls he didn’t particularly like them as a group. In the army he became good friends with Black guys from different parts of the country, he found he had more in common with them than many others in the service. He says the army opened his eyes to how unwittingly racist some of his thinking had been, based on lack of contact and popular racist bullshit that other ignorant friends spouted. This insight came to him simply by his exposure to others, from other walks of life, other parts of the country, in an integrated military, everyone serving the same larger cause.

The strong military leaders this guy calls for never question that our country is the greatest in human history and will give their men good reason to fight and die for this greatest of all nations. It is as simple as good vs. evil. He clearly sees himself as something of a scholar warrior, like Thucydides, who he quotes. Presumably like pardoned felon General Mike Flynn of Q-Anon. As he points out, and follow this sophisticated argument:

And so it’s really less about whatever little headline is happening right now [1], it’s really more about the totality of what “wokeism” is doing to the military in general, the whole structure, the whole anti-everythingism [2] that wokeism is is destroying the very fabric of why a soldier would even fight. You’re demoralizing the troops so it’s something far more at the heart of what a soldier is. You’re destroying their love of country and therefore their reason to fight and possibly die for their country. We can’t survive it.

Fucking anti-everythingism will fucking destroy us, true dat. For example, as he points out, Biden gave the Taliban weapons to use against us, FACT, and Trump unilaterally negotiating the release from prison of 5,000 top Taliban fighters as a condition to our scheduled withdrawal from that unwinnable twenty year war had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The Al Qa-qaa explosives depot that our victorious army in Iraq inadvertently gave to the insurgents back in 2003 has nothing to fucking do with our woke “president” giving weapons to our enemies now!

Real Americans, Murdoch’s myrmidons remind us, know that we can’t survive a direct assault on our belief that we never fucking ever did anything wrong, to anybody!

It’s quite simple, really, are you on the side of good or evil? Choose a fucking side, buddy.

{1]

For example all these nefarious headlines about Trump’s inner circle and their conspiracy to overturn the election results, (presidential results only, mind you) employing every means necessary, including mob violence to do so. These little headlines are clearly designed to distract you from the real threat — “woke” people who hate our freedom, the mindless, godless anti-everything caucus.

The active and former military and police who participated in the totally legal protest at the Capitol to Stop the Steal did so because they sincerely believed their leader when he told them they’d all been robbed. Do not be distracted by headlines about “sedition” the real traitors are those 81,000,000 fake “woke” voters whose communist party claims to have legally defeated the man who got a record 74,000,000 totally legit votes.

[2]

You can’t compromise with Anti-everythingism. The supporters of Anti-everythingism are simply insane, evil, and should answer to superior force pursuant to the argument advanced by scholar warriors like Thucydides and Mike Flynn, and the MyPillow guy.

Self-proclaimed totally innocent rat fucker Roger Stone, one of Trump’s closest long-time advisors (unofficial! No legal connection to Trump!) and coiner of “Stop the Steal” (2000, 2016, 2020, 2024) appeared before the January 6 Select Committee for a few minutes yesterday to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He claimed that Democrats just want to trap people into fake perjury so they can persecute them. The multi-millionaire then began a crowd-funding campaign for his legal defense and to pay for around the clock security guards.

Dirty trickster Stone is an innovator in political dirty tricks who raked in a mountain of cash with his former partner Paul Manafort (no connection to Trump! He worked for free!). Stone has been integral to the disinformation, outright lying and threats of right-wing political violence culture we now live in.

Here is a capsule description of this cynical, destructive man’s career as a presidential campaign disinformation specialist from a recent episode of historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman’s Now and Then podcast called Disinformation and Democracy:

Heather Cox Richardson:

. . . And one of the things that’s interesting about the Nixon campaign . . . is that one of the people involved as a young man who carries an image of Nixon on his back to this day in a tattoo, and that is Roger Stone, who was a 20 year old operative in that campaign. And he did things in that, like making a donation from a fake organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, to somebody who was opposing Nixon in the primary, using things like that to go ahead and again, slime opponents. And that business of running politics by lying is going to make a huge difference in our lives in the year 2000. Thanks again to Roger Stone.

So Roger Stone, again, cuts his teeth in this idea of running politics by convincing people of things that are not true, by changing the trajectory of reality by creating narratives and creating images. And he is instrumental in, what’s known as the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000 after the election of that year. And the way that that played out was that the election of that year was on November 7th. And on that election, it became clear that the outcome of the 2000 election would depend on the electoral votes from Florida. There were a lot of problems with that Florida election; there was a butterfly ballot in which you didn’t actually read down one side of the page and then down the other, you were supposed to read page to page, which meant that a bunch of democratic voters get siphoned off to vote for a far-right candidate. There were a number of people kicked off the roles immediately before the election. But after the election, it becomes clear that Bush has a lead in the state, but as they continue to do recounts, the numbers of votes that put Bush in the lead start to drop, and they start up by a lot. Usually recounts don’t change the vote very much, but in fact, the recounts in Florida drop Bush’s lead in the state from 1,784 votes, to 327 votes,, then to 154 votes.

And finally, attention comes down to Miami-Dade County, which is a democratic stronghold. And there, it seems likely that Gore is going to pick up a lot of votes in a recount. So on November 21st, the Florida Supreme Court authorized a manual recount in four counties and set a deadline for November 26th on that. And then on November 22nd, the Miami-Dade County Canvasing Board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet their deadline. And so, they’re trying to hunker down, and trying to avoid the media frenzy that’s descending on them. And so in order to go ahead and avoid that they move into a smaller room on the 19th floor of the County Building, so that they can be close to the ballot scanning machine. That day hundreds of people from around the country, including a bunch of Republican staffers descend into South Florida to protest the recount.

There’s a New York Congressman, for example, a man named John Sweeney who was working for the Bush campaign, who ordered protestors to shut it down, meaning to shut down the recount. And there’s more and more pressure on the Miami-Dade recount that eventually becomes known as the Brooks Brothers riot, because the protestors who were trying to shut it down, come dressed in buttoned shirts and sport jackets. And they appear at the room outside where the counting is taking place, and they start screaming, “Stop the count, stop the fraud, let us in.” And the protestors increasingly accuse the Miami-Dade counters of stealing ballots and of stealing the election. The guy in charge of that was the democratic county chairman, a guy named Joe Geller. And six days after the Brooks brothers riot, Geller told Salon, and this is a quote, “This was not a Miami moment. It was outsiders, Hitler Youth sent in by the Republicans to intimidate the election officials.”

And that’s actually exactly what it was. It was a Stone operation to go ahead and orchestrate that protest in Miami. He recruited a bunch of Cuban American protestors by warning on the radio, for example, that democratic candidate Al Gore was going to stage a coup, the same way that Fidel Castro had staged a coup in Cuba. He’d organized phone banks to encourage Miami Republicans to storm the counting site. And on the day of the rioting, he actually was in a Winnebago outside, organizing the protests. So there was this sense that by manipulating the media and getting people to think that there was something untoward going on in what was really quite a legitimate recounting, that he could go ahead and orchestrate and end to that recount. And that is exactly what happened.

Joanne Freeman:

And think about the layers of impact of that. So first of all, you have the people doing the recount who have the impression there’s this mass of people banging down the doors, wanting to end it all, and that there’s mass opposition. You’re getting an awareness outside of that place that somehow or other there’s a mass movement, mass opposition against what, of course, must be some kind of illicit attempt to steal the election. And that the fact that there’s that kind of protest shows that things not right down there in Florida. So on many, many levels, this out and out fabrication can spread to voters, can spread to the public, can have an impact in Florida, and in the counting of votes in Florida, it echoes, it resounds out in a lot of different ways. And it’s completely fabricated.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well in a sense, we’re talking about information, and how in a democracy, you desperately need to have an informed public, but the manipulation of that information into disinformation that then can be transmitted increasingly quickly over first telegraph lines, then telephone lines, then radio, then television, and now the internet, means that we have a real problem with disinformation, and with its ability to whip people up to an emotional reaction to go ahead and change our history, change our political history. And in the case of 2000, stop a recount that looked as if it were going to put a Democrat who won the popular vote into the White House, rather than a Republican.

Joanne Freeman:

To act on impulse and act on emotion rather than to act on real information. So first of all, that in and of itself, not only is it disinformation, it’s anti-information. It’s trying to get people emotionally riled up. And that kind of emotion is always going to be more effective than plain old, boring truth when it comes to what’s being publicized and what’s catching the public eye. And as you just said, Heather, different forms of technology are helping that transformation, that spread of deliberately emotion rousing lies, to change the whole political picture and alter American political history.

You know, if you think about it, democracy in and of itself is a conversation of sorts between people who hold power, and the people who have given it to them. And the process of governing has to do with the communication back and forth of people with power, and the people who’ve given it to them, that’s where accountability comes in. But any form of technology that alters the nature of that conversation, alters democracy. It makes perfect sense, if democracy is a conversation between people with power and those who’ve given it, any technology that changes that conversation is going to transform democracy. And the question then really becomes: how does the nation adjust to that new technology? How is that new technology reigned in or accommodated what happens in that moment when people are trying to figure out in essence, a new language of politics. And depending on what happens there, really depends the direction of the nation’s politics.

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Exposure to prolonged fear of terrible sickness and death from a highly infectious disease, against which we are largely at the mercy of others doing their part, leads to changes subtle and dramatic in the human psyche. Some respond to this reasonable fear by lashing out, insisting on their right to infect whoever they want, in the name of opposing tyranny. Others isolate and wear two or three masks in public. The endlessly morphing pandemic is terrifying, worldwide and it has changed societies everywhere. It has changed families, friendships, relations between neighbors, mostly not for the better.

At the same time, life must go on. So there was an organized attempt, coming up on a year ago, by our avatar of Covid madness, Donald Trump, to overturn the 2020 election. They did this using a daft, quasi-legal theory that, under the 12th Amendment, the defeated Vice President, whose role it is to certify the electors as the last step in the peaceful transfer of power, is actually in charge of deciding who the new president and vice president will be. You know, democracy. The president’s top lawyers who espoused this bat shit crazy “theory”, or made unfounded fraud claims, or both, John Eastman and Jeffery Boessart Clark, are now standing on their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves by answering questions under oath.

The second paragraph of a NY Times article entitled “Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power” underscores the objective madness of our current moment in history. The Times ordinarily bends over backwards to present the reasonable-seeming side of utterly unreasonable situations and positions, in the interest of appearing always above the controversy in question. Last night readers saw this:

WASHINGTON — Two days after Christmas last year, Richard P. Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the waning days of the Trump administration, saw an unknown number appear on his phone.

Mr. Donoghue had spent weeks fielding calls, emails and in-person requests from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, all of whom asked the Justice Department to declare, falsely, that the election was corrupt. The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous lawyers, conspiracy theorists, even the chief executive of MyPillow — and they were stoking his election lies.

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The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous lawyers, conspiracy theorists, even the chief executive of MyPillow — and they were stoking his election lies.

Damn, Grey Lady! You too? Never mind, good to know that at this perilous moment, even you show a bit of relatable human emotion. Unscrupulous lawyers, indeed.