Maybe you heard the alternative facts:
The attack on Paul Pelosi was actually a gay prostitute tryst that went sideways. Ha! Ha!
We have normalized political violence on behalf of a desired political outcome.
The most self-destructive and dangerous phrase to come out of the George Floyd protests of 2020 was not "defund the police." That was number two. The most dangerous phrase was: "Violence is the language of the oppressed." Sensible Democrats made a clear distinction between peaceful demonstrations and violence, but not all Democrats did. Sometimes the lines got blurred. We heard that "well-behaved women don't make history." The opinion in the ether of ideas was that oppressed people need to break something to be heard.
Joe Biden is underestimated as a peacemaker and normalizer, but he does not have the skillset to be a national spokesman. He said the right words about violence surrounding the protests, but he could not communicate persuasively that violence is not us! Violence is bad, period! Democratic officeholders and candidates have awakened. All but the craziest fringe Democrats got the message, even in San Francisco and Portland.
Stronger, angrier voices on the right did a better job of creating the counter narrative: Democrats like violence. Democrats are just fine with crime if it is Black people or immigrants or drug-users doing it. A great many White Republican voters think they are the oppressed people in America. They worry about being displaced by Hispanics who work cheaper, by Asians and Jews who are smarter and better at school, and by Blacks who get affirmative action because of sins of the previous generation. White Christian Republicans feel oppressed by smarty-pants Democratic elitists. Violence, remember, is the language of the oppressed.
I am dismayed by the Republican response to the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi. Their response is dismissal and mockery. Ted Cruz quipped that since the intruder was from Berkeley and used drugs, he was really a leftist attacking one of his own. Ha! Kari Lake quipped that maybe it was just a problem of bad home security on the part of the Pelosi family. Ha!
Some trolling went viral. It was really a gay lovers' fight. A Fox TV reporter's original story said that the intruder was arrested wearing only underwear. No. The story was quickly retracted and corrected, but it gave Republican trollers a basis for an alternative story they keep presenting after it was found to be false. Underpants! How suspicious! Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk smirk about it.
Dinesh D'Souza, the author and producer of 2000 Mules, tweeted:
OK, it makes sense that Paul Pelosi was in his underpants at two a.m. He's at home. It's early in the morning, but why was the assailant in his underpants? And what if the assailant said 'Where's Nancy?' not because he was after Nancy, but he wanted to make sure she was not home. And how did they both get hammers? And how did Paul Pelosi get away--bathroom break to make the 911 call? And why did Paul Pelosi tell the police he knew the guy? His name was David, and he was quote 'a friend?' My conclusion: This guy--the assailant--is a sex partner or a male prostitute, and this is a sexual rendezvous that went--sideways.
How ridiculous. How contrary to known facts. He got his skull bashed in. The invader is talking to police saying he was trying to crush the knees of the Speaker of the House. What more does a person have to do to be understood as a victim of crime?
Who else would spread this? One was Monica Crowley, a Fox News contributor for two decades:
Another is a Member of Congress from Louisiana:
Donald Trump, Jr. would:
Then Donald, Jr. posted again this morning, tweeting, "Dear fact-checkers, this has nothing at all to do with anything going on in the news and simply posting a cartoon of what appears to be an altered South Park scene."
20 comments:
We are nearing the Hitler violence before he fully took over. After the midterm election if Republicans lose big, I expect violence, if they win big I expect further movement to the loss of democracy. Depressing to think, but is it really unrealistic?
"Well-behaved women seldom make history," coined in 1976 by historian (early American history) and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (born in 1938) is taken woefully out of context. To make life easier (Easy Tuesday), learn more on her Wikipedia page.
We often hear that African-American history needs to be taught in our schools - true. The same can be said for women's history, which focuses on the female half of the population.
It wasn't alternative facts that took on a life of their own in the wake of the Paul Pelosi attack. It was progressively lurid interpretations, based on specifics that various law enforcement sources themselves proffered in the immediate aftermath, then in some cases retracted, circumstances as yet unknown. Speculation abounds not least because of distrust in legacy media and especially federal law enforcement agencies, which quickly arrived to control the media narrative and the court priorities. A specious federal charge of attempted kidnapping (of Nancy) has even been filed. This should be a state prosecution only.
Democratic wishes notwithstanding, striking yet another pious pose will not save them on Election Day, because they have no moral standing. The Pelosi daughter herself chortled and cheered the politicized attack that put Rand Paul in the hospital. Little (read: no) time during this week's National Soul-Searching on MSNBC and CNN has been spent on the recent knife attack on Lee Zeldin at a campaign rally, nor the arrest of a crazed leftist assassin outside Justice Kavanaugh's home. On 1/7 the NYT and WaPo infamously led with the utter falsehood that a Capitol police officer had been bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher.
Democrats desire the political process, a dire meta-critique of a suddenly benighted electorate, to be the story of the midterm election. Instead, the story will be substantive policy decisions by those in power and their predicted, predictable consequences.
The grade school humor is a deflection from the truth. Likely he's one of theirs, acting on their behalf. We'll see.
This sad soul is like the guy who showed up at the pizza parlor with the assault rifle. A noxious mix of stupidity, delusion and panic; everyone of them at the Capital. The Michigan kidnap plot. Attacks on Asians during COVID and continuing.
Death threats to election officials. Bombing clinics.
These and others are committed by susceptible individuals, but incited by right wing Republican lies, often told for no other reason but profit.
It's not equivalent to the BLM protests, which are a response to systemic racism enforced by police, another charming Republican tradition.
Progressives are proponents of non-violent confrontation and protest as taught by Gandhi and MLK, and this is an undisputed bedrock principle. It's also an American value as evidenced by the hundreds of 1/6 convictions and the coming indictments of the perpetrators, who must be held accountable to uphold the rule of law.
I do not condone violence from anyone, but this is not apples to apples...let's at least admit that.
I am not sure what makes a crime federal or state. But I would think that possession of zip ties is evidence of restraint and I thought I remembered that after the Limburg kidnapping, kidnapping was federal, if they wanted to claim it.
The intruder's intent was to attract, restrain, and break kneecaps of a federal officer. Wouldn't that make it federal by itself? He has given Mirandized descriptions of his intent.
LD is doing a good job of trying to minimize the effort to create an intentionally false narrative. If you cannot trust the police and you cannot trust legacy media and if sometimes there are errors then Tucker and Dinesh and Don Jr. are morally free to just make up stuff, and indeed to sell it with a sincere face, the way Dinesh does, or with mocking the way Don Jr. does. In what moral universe is intentional lying OK. I don't believe it is sacred, but many people do, and I read somewhere that bearing false witness is wrong-disobedient-sinful. I don't recall the Bible saying that it is OK as long as you are lying about a Samaritan.
If the legacy media is imperfect, and it is, then people are free to choose to believe Don Jr. and Dinesh on Twitter. I have "done my research." If I get sued sometime I hope that person decides that "legacy lawyers" are untrustworthy because they sometimes make errors, so he or she decides to do their own legal research and filings and trust "their own research" received from the internet.
Peter Sage
In 2017, a gunman who hated Republicans wounded five at a baseball practice, including a Republican congressman. It’s apparent the madness afflicting our nation isn’t limited to one end of the political spectrum. However the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks these things, has pointed out that right-wing extremists were responsible for 75% of extremist-related murders in the last ten years.
There’s little doubt the Trump cult and white-wing media have normalized conspiracy theories and their attendant violence. Crackposts like to draw a false equivalence between the rioters in Portland and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, but there’s a big difference between mindless rioters running rampant and Trump supporters trying to overthrow the government.
GOP apologists minimize the threat these terrorists pose to our democracy, while Republicans continue their campaign of voter suppression, intimidation and election fraud lies. As Benjamin Franklin said, “It’s a republic if you can keep it.”
The National Women's History Alliance, founded in 1980, is one resource. They have a website, Facebook page and Wikipedia page. Also checkout the women's history section of your local library, favorite bookstore or online bookseller. And don't forget about books for children and teens.
Let's try a football analogy - it's forth quarter, the score is tied. The coach must win or he loses his job. They get the ball. The coach calls time out. He tells the players "Do whatever it takes to get the ball into the end zone!"
The Republicans feel the wind at their back and all their plays together have given them a slight advantage but they're still tied. They have a sizable majority in the courts (i.e. they bought some of the refs). Their side (GOP) traditionally wins the midterms and the polls show they have a shot. But NO! they want certainty of victory (Think Dick Nixon and the Watergate Plumbers.) So now up to the present, a few words of encouragement, and the dark forces are released as they were in Nixon's run where polls predicted he would win handily. It is the echo of this time in our history only now we have loosed the Internet forces with mass disinformation and half-truths. The coach (DJT?) feels he'll be back coaching for another season. So do what you must - grab the face mask if you can and try not to get caught. So what if the fans get upset and start fights. They (the GOP) are suppose to win! If we don't the other side cheated. The stadium erupts and a riot ensues. The coach smiles he can't believe how successful his "coaching" has been!
Of course all this is fiction. Nothing like this scenario could possibly happen here...could it?
As I assess it, anyway, a charge of attempted kidnapping of the Speaker is makeweight because it was a legal and/or factual impossibility. SHE was not there to be kidnapped. That is distinct from say prospective conspiracy to kidnap her, if applicable, or even burglary when the specified crime intended within the dwelling was kidnapping. The feds want control of the investigation, and hence control of the facts and public spin released.
As to Don Jr., etc. I don't know that they intend to create a false narrative. If they do, it's despicable instead of just reckless and immature. I think they believe their narratives, or at least that it's just as plausible as anything else amid standard protective obfuscation as with Pelosi's DWI crash. Meanwhile, Mr. Millward's apologia for the Floyd riots is self-referential: OUR ends justify or at least mitigate otherwise impermissible means.
Is "political violence" truly to receive zero tolerance after all, as President Biden declared in the Red Sermon? Or do we simply redefine what goes as "political" or "violence" based on, er, political sympathies and transactional partisanship?
The thrashing and gnashing of teeth continues to rage. The rainbow Jihad eats its own
as the rising of Tulsi Gabbard's Army of disaffected Democrats
rampages the gates of their deceivers as the masochistic media mashers massacre the facts and quickly bury it under a steaming San Francisco pile.
Yeah I got pretty hammered last night myself for Halloween. I was dressed as the "Prince of Walachia", aka, "Vlad Teppish", aka, "Vlad the Impaler", aka, "The Dragon", or, Dracul,,... as in Dracula. History knows him to be quite the Patriot to his country.
That country, in our present time, happens to be at war ...with itself.
If one to were to look any closer one would seem to notice that every country, every Nation, every state, every city, every town, every village, every neighborhood, ...every person, is at war with themselves.
What to believe, what to believe...
Peter said:
If you cannot trust the police and you cannot trust legacy media and if sometimes there are errors then Tucker and Dinesh and Don Jr. are morally free to just make up stuff, …
Incorrect logic.
The legacy media are way biased towards the left, and they have earned the mistrust many of us feel for them over and over again. This does not justify lying by anyone, on any side.
Rick said:
Progressives are proponents of non-violent confrontation and protest as taught by Gandhi and MLK, and this is an undisputed bedrock principle.
Not all progressives. We saw something quite different from what Rick describes in the summer of 2020 in Portland.
The Federal complaint states the case for violations of federal law in the introduction of the criminal complaint paragraph 1. Apparently we have a lot of Trump U law grads that know better than the federal agent and the federal magistrate that signed the complaint and who's signatures are held to a higher standard than a person who isn't an officer of the court.
The complaint is here with citations of which you're unlikely to understand unless you have a law degree.
Calling urban rioters "progressives" is simply willful ignorance.
I agree that lying about the an incident like the one at the Pelosi home is immoral per se. I hope my comment was clear on that. The fact that the legacy media is sometimes wrong does not justify being wrong oneself intentionally and cynically. I had hoped that my citing the Bible as my authority would make that clear.
I probably also was unclear in stating my position on the urban rioters in Portland. They are anarchists and nihilists, not progressives. They vandalized and burned public buildings. I love public buildings. They damaged the Democratic HQ. They share a belief that seems a little like a Bernie Sanders progressive that corporations have too much power and that an economic, social, and political system they dominate needs to be changed. But progressives aren't nihilists. Progressives want to build institutions; nihilists want no institutions.
Portland progressives were confused and immobilized for a while, in my opinion. They were eager to show solidarity with the BLM police reform effort and were eager to oppose anything that Trump seemed to believe. Trump is usually wrong, but not ALWAYS wrong. They under-reacted to the anarchists, because Trump hated them and because Trump thought they were progressives. They were hooligans, from no clear political party other than the opportunity to have six months of Halloween mischief night. Progressives should have demanded they be shut down, but in that period progressives hated to use police power even for the purpose of maintaining their own safety, the city's safety, and the clarity of their own protest. There were a lot of mistakes by the left.
It would be a mistake today, though, to call the anarchists progressives.
Peter Sage
The term “progressive“ has no precise, agreed-upon meaning. It is often used to refer to the part of the left wing that is further left than liberals. I don’t think that defining “progressive” as “the good people“ is an accurate rendition of how the term is commonly used, although I am sure that progressives would feel good about that definition.
Addendum:
It may not coincide with the Fox Noise version, but Merriam-Webster provides a pretty precise definition of progressive: "One believing in moderate political change and especially social improvement by governmental action."
It’s productive we’re defining or debating terms. For me, “progressive” reflects a hopeful definition of human nature. Humans are capable of peaceful, productive consensus. The proverbial Idea of Progress is real, if elusive to date. Hobbes is wrong about society.
Doctrinaire leftists, on the other hand, unlike progressives, believe that a sizable cadre of humans are irredeemable, pathological. Like orthodox Christians, just the other side of the same coin. This is the Noam Chomsky and Pol Pot conception of humanity.
Low and Mike are nailing it. You can tell which progressives are moving too far left because they all the sudden want to restrict the free flow of ideas, even ones they may not agree with. They miss the point of airing out the laundry in the sunshine, because they've grown accustomed to a machine taking away the inconvenience and replacing it chemically induced dermatitis.
Is it any wonder it's so easy to get under their skin with just an opinion?
And Peter, is it so hard to believe that propaganda has found its firm way to the internet age? Where corporations and governments hire people just to comment on social media all day? Where the Fairness doctrine still only applies to digital rabbit ear channels that almost nobody watches? Where the Smith-Mundt modernization act makes our global internet fair game for domestically cast information warfare?
Indeed 15 years ago no kid ever asked for my wifi password when they came to visit with their parents. Now no kid asks for it because they have unlimited data.
Information has become a commodity. Internet access is a loss-leader. This comes with demons to exercise, and it pains me to see the older population act as if it will all come crashing down because people spread fake news online. It reminds me strongly of this following link:
https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/
Don't forget, at one time reading fiction books was considered destructive to society, according to an aging population of scared people with political clout.
To quote:
Let the stories be told
Let them say what they want
Let the photos be old
Let them show what they want
Let them leave you up in the air
Let them brush your rock and roll hair
Let the good times roll...
For a final comparison, look at the media and political treatment of Jared Loughner. No failing society, no impending collapse of institutions, just a premeditated criminal who got less time than a hateful BLM counter protester despite, by today's standards, almost destroying our democracy.
The Bible has no moral authority. What is common decency? What is being a gentleman and a scholar? What is being a patrician ?
What is caring? What is generosity ? What is empathy? What is a man who walks on the outside of the sidewalk ? What is a man who opens the door for someone else? Good people. Sometimes we just need good people. Those that live the BIG CLICHE.
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