Tales of mendacity, crackpottery and other radical right politics as usual

Boebert denies that words can cause harm

Vanity Fair writes:

Lauren Boebert Can’t Believe People Are Linking Her 

Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric to the LGBTQ+ Club Shooting

She recently said as much while…going on an anti-trans rant.

While speaking to Ross Kaminsky, a radio host at Colorado’s KOA station, Boebert called it “disgusting” to blame her for what happened over the weekend or accurately note the various ways she’s vilified LGBTQ+ people. “That is completely false,” she said, falsely. “I have never had bad rhetoric towards anyone and their personal preferences as an adult.” Then, because she’s a bigot—and not a very smart one at that—she immediately added: “What I’ve criticized is the sexualization of our children. And I’ve criticized men dressing up as caricatures of women.” .... Boebert, like many on the right, equates allowing gender-affirming medical care for trans youth with child “grooming.” She also believes that drag queens pose a threat to children just by simply existing, and we know this because she’s previously said as much:

On the subject of Drag Queen Story Hour events—during which a drag queen literally just reads stories to kids—Boebert bizarrely suggested that they operate like strip clubs, telling KOA, “We don’t need six-year-old children putting dollar bills in the thongs of grown men shaking and twerking in front of children…That is child abuse.” She added that she would continue to speak out against the “grooming” of children, a term that has been co-opted by the right to describe behavior by LGBTQ+ people they don’t like, rather than the way child molesters lure their victims.

The power of free speech to kill

The NYT writes:

A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths

Not long after Randy Watt died of Covid-19, his daughter Danielle sat down at her computer, searching for clues as to why the smart and thoughtful man she knew had refused to get vaccinated. She pulled up Google, typed in a screen name he had used in the past and discovered a secret that stunned her.

Her father, she learned, had a hidden, virtual life on Gab, a far-right social media platform that traffics in Covid misinformation. And there was another surprise as well: As he fought the coronavirus, he told his followers that he was taking ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic infections that experts say has no benefit — and in fact can be dangerous — for patients with Covid-19.  

Around the country, countless Americans are suffering a very particular type of Covid grief — a mixture of anger, sorrow and shame that comes with losing a loved one who has consumed social media falsehoods.

Dark free speech can deceive people. Sometimes they act on their false beliefs and it kills them. It is literally that simple. 

Ye’s campaign for president is gelling nicely

The ex-president is all excited about it 

The Hill writes:

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, said he asked former President Trump to be his running mate in 2024.

The rapper, in a Twitter video posted on Thursday evening, said he mentioned a campaign during a recent meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, also tweeting a series of “Ye 24” graphics.

“I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president,” Ye said in the video in the Twitter post. “I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off-guard.”

Ye went on to say Trump screamed at him during the meeting about a run.

What could be better than Trump screaming at Ye? Politics can’t get much better than this. One can only wonder what things were higher on the list of Ye things that caught Trump off-guard. Enquiring minds want to know.

Ye and his running mate Stump

The Republican Party’s propaganda Leviathan

closes down election time dark free speech effort

The Guardian writes:

Crime coverage on Fox News halved once US midterms were over

Just a week after elections, number of weekly segments focused on crime slashed in half on Rupert Murdoch’s flagship network

In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible.

With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared with the pre-election average.

One can speculate that a major dark free speech source like Faux News probably caused some people to act in accord with its anti-Democratic Party lies, slanders and crackpottery. Was Faux necessary, but not necessarily sufficient by itself, to hand control of the House over to the fascist Republican Party? Probably.

The toxic propaganda value of Faux to the Republican Party is enormous. For the 2022 elections, Faux was probably worth (i) about $1 billion in air time, and maybe (ii) 1 million votes by people who believed it the divisive lies, slanders and crackpottery Faux spewed in the months before the elections.

Faux News: A cancer on America and the world