The incomparable Rick Perlstein describes the literal fascist origins of the right-wing Revisionist movement that now controls Israel. Read the whole thing; it’ll be as illuminating as it is heartbreaking, and Mr. Perlstein has received a lot of hate mail for this article – from liberals, one would think, though one always has to wonder these days how many are really right-wing agents provocateur. I presume that after fascism led to, you know, the Holocaust, Revisionists learned to mask their fascism a little better. And when you reaad about the, ah, memorabilia some folks have in their houses, you might even think the Revisionists’ post-Holocaust methods vaguely resemble sports teams’ methods of inducing loyalty among the locals.
Ho hum, Google will soon lay off thousands of workers even though its parent corporation, Alphabet, made record profits last month. The shills will say that Alphabet is making all that money, not Google, and while they’re circle-jerking over that, I’ll retort that people often think other people’s jobs are less essential than their own, and I’ll also retort that corporations own other corporations mostly to avoid accountability for their evil and that corporations owning other corporations should be illegal. Corporations want to be “people” but still want to own other “people”? The stupid, it burns!
When I hear Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) say that our Supreme Court “manipulate(s) facts in cases that benefit Republican special interests” and “the justices deliberately ignore() facts gathered by Congress and insert() their own conclusions,” you may be reminded of our Court’s ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the web-designer plaintiff filed suit against Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws before she’d ever designed a website and that the “request from a same-sex couple to design a website” very likely never even existed. Did our Court fail to find out these facts before ruling – or did they simply not care? I kid, of course; it’s that they don’t care.
How does one interpret Gov. DeSantis’s sudden concern that maybe book-banning has gone too far in his state? He wants you to think he really does weigh all the facts before making decisions or whatever, but he really doesn’t care about that – he got attention being a book banning supporter and a critic, and getting attention coming and going is a right-wing politician’s sole reason for existing. Remember, he is also the guy who “refuted” criticisms of his state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law by saying it only applied to young children – and then he expanded it to include all students. Maybe don’t listen to anything Ron DeSantis says?
Ho hum, anti-vaxxers publish putatively peer-reviewed article claiming that COVID vaccines kill way more people than they save, etc., but the online medical journal that published it has now retracted it. So when someone comes at you with this was peer-reviewed!, you come back with the journal that published it retracted it. Of course, anti-vaxxers don’t really care about all of that; all they care about is repeating the lie and hoping to catch folks unawares. In the meantime, if someone bold-faces entire sentences and uses more than one exclamation point at a time, maybe don’t listen to them. Also, maybe don’t listen to tech bros, ever, about anything.
In a peripherally-related note, I should be happier that a CNN reporter “cornered” Rep. Jim Jordan (E-OH) over the now-discredited FBI informant whose testimony, such as it is, has powered the Biden impeachment effort, but Jim Jordan doesn’t care; he was just trying to repeat the same “four fundamental facts” about the Biden impeachment effort over and over again. Know what those four facts are? No? Well, maybe you can’t just repeat any old thing, then! And as much as I want reporters to stand up to folks like Jim Jordan, I still wonder if the CNN reporter just played a role in a drama here. Our “liberal” media have sucked for a very long time, you know.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) supports both the Alabama state Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos are people and the in vitro fertilization the ruling now essentially outlaws (since IVF creates many more embryos than babies). His rhetorical contortions are even worse than the first three paragraphs suggest, but unlike the aforementioned anti-vaxxers or Jim Jordan, his game isn’t repetition – claiming he supports IVF but also supports the most-extreme-pseudo-anti-abortion-position-this-week that just so happens to make IVF illegal is just his way of hoping people hear what they want to hear. In a hyper-saturated media environment, this isn’t a bad bet – and when you have literally nothing else to offer as a public servant, it may be your only bet.
Finally, we’ve reached that point in our history where the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention features a speaker who says out loud “Welcome to the end of democracy! We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it” and replace it, of course, with a theocracy. Tell your Republican friends, if you still have any, that this is what they’re voting for, whether they think so or not. They’ll need to hear that more than once, because even though Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo rightly finds it significant that 40% of South Carolina Republicans still went out of their way to tell Donald Trump they don’t want him to be the nominee, almost all of them will still “hold their nose” and vote for him in November – unless we can get to them first.
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