Today's Trae

Trae Crowder, making an especially great overall point - ie: "what do y'all believe?" which to me is a good example of the main Daddy State goal of dictating reality to the devotees.

"...unlike anti-vaxxers, this shit's gettin' pretty old..." is the best line I've heard in a good long while.

What We're Up Against

At the risk of inadvertently helping the freakazoids spread their shit, I want to be sure we're at least a little mindful of the kinda thing these assholes are up to.

Mike Lindell - the My Pillow guy - recently put up a whole podcast or some such, during which he referred to his "evidence board":

Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong, but when everything points to one guy - isn't that when the cops bust down his door and haul him away in handcuffs and shit?

Moving along ... then, my Reddit feed planted this one on me, via r/QAnonCasualties:

Science.News

New report stuns the world: The vast majority of those now dying with covid are people who were VACCINATED against it

07/01/2021 / By Ethan Huff

I won't put the link up and I won't bother you with the bullshit they're putting out.

Here's the take from Media Bias Fact Check:

Daily KOS on "Ethan Huff":

Ethan Huff is a Prolific (Fake News) Reporter. But Does He Actually Exist?

By the looks of it, Ethan A Huff is a very busy reporter. Or, rather, a very busy poster. Content under his byline appears across various conspiracy, climate denial and anti-vaxx blogs like the Epoch Times, Natural News, NewsTarget, Climate.News, Science Clowns, Propaganda.News and elsewhere.

In just the past week Huff published stories about how climate alarmists are working with the LGBT community to depopulate the planet, how vaccines are causing polio and YouTube and other online giants are covering up this vaccine-caused polio outbreak, how 600,000 Mexicans were protesting abortion and “LGBT indoctrination,” as well as stories on Greta Thunberg, white people not being allowed to speak anymore, Hillary Clinton threatening Ronan Farrow, a Chinese bitcoin farm catching fire, Blizzard appeasing China, Johnson and Johnson facing lawsuits, vaping, Trump claiming Big Pharma is behind the impeachment hoax, climate scientists lying, and real scientists declaring there’s no climate emergency.

Aside from his prolific posting, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that he actually exists. Unlike most reporters, including others at some of his outlets, we couldn’t find a Twitter account associated with his name. There’s also no LinkedIn accounts or Facebook profiles that fit the bill.

What’s more, only one of the many sites he posts to list any contact info, such as an email address or phone number for readers to send tip. CriticalStudies.org, where he posted two stories in 2015, has a profile for him with both his picture and a contact email (ethan@huff.com). We found a picture associated with his name, and a reverse image search comes up empty, so maybe he is real.

But Huff.com is a real estate website, and an email sent to that address asking if he is indeed a real person bounced back, indicating the account doesn’t exist.

- more -

So there's today's little shit scramble. 

Remember - "The Big Lie" is not just one thing. It's a whole metric fuck ton of distortions and deflections and straight up lies, and the desired effect is to make us doubt everything except what the Daddy State tells us in the moment.

On Jan6

Take the American Democratic Process, rhetorically turn it upside down, inside out, and backwards, and you can sell it as Tyranny to a mob of stoopid hicks.

That's the game for The Daddy State - the method to their madness is to condition people to take your word as Gospel no matter how obviously false it is.

Do it right and they'll eat fresh dog shit off the grass, proclaiming to all the world that they love it more than their favorite ice cream.

Notice the rioters co-opting the please we heard from (eg) the Egyptians a few years ago - "You're one of us" - "We are one of you".

Chilling shit #1: "They believe they've been deputized by their president to stop a crime."

Chilling shit #2: "We're going to yank them out of their seats."

And the biggest chilling shit: "Hang Mike Pence."

NYT Video:

Opinion

DCP Officer Michael Fanone

Greg Sargent - WaPo:

As the despicable GOP whitewashing of the Jan. 6 insurrection continues apace, House Democrats are set to force a vote on the creation of a commission to examine the assault.

If you want to see why this should throw Republicans on the defensive, watch two videos. The first video shows D.C. police officer Michael Fanone angrily telling CNN that this GOP whitewashing is made up of “lies” and “bulls--t,” and that it’s “disgraceful.”

The second video shows Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) smugly refusing to back down from his widely circulated suggestion that Jan. 6 was akin to a “normal tourist visit.”

In a surprising bit of good news, House Democrats just announced a bipartisan deal on the makeup of the commission to scrutinize the attack. It was negotiated between the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Homeland Security Committee.

Predictably, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) immediately said he hadn’t agreed to the deal. What’s still unclear is how many Republicans will support it. The bill will pass in the Democratic-controlled House, but it will also need GOP support in the Senate, since it could theoretically be filibustered.

What’s in the deal over the commission

Perhaps the most important thing is that it focuses the scope of the commission on “the facts and causes” related to the Jan. 6 attack and to “the interference with the peaceful transfer of power.” It will also look at the “influencing factors” that “fomented” this attack.

Importantly, it describes Jan. 6 as a “domestic terrorist attack” waged against “American representative democracy.” That counters the GOP whitewash effort by framing the mission around the need to explore the deep radicalization that led to an effort to overthrow U.S. democracy itself.

Republicans wanted to obscure this. They wanted the commission to also look at allegedly widespread leftist violence, including protests against police brutality. Their aim was to bury the role of right-wing radicalization in driving us into crisis, and the active efforts by President Donald Trump and Republicans to feed and exploit that radicalization.

They appear to have lost that battle for now. But there are still questions about the makeup. It will have five members appointed by Democratic congressional leaders — including the chair — and five by GOP leaders. No current elected officials are allowed, which keeps away House Republicans who’d sabotage the inquiry.

Still, it’s unclear who Republicans would appoint. Subpoenas require a majority of the commission, or an agreement between the chair and vice chair (picked by Republicans), so Republicans might be able to block uncomfortable subpoenas.

But the chair alone has the power to secure relevant information from federal agencies, and to appoint senior staff, which should give Democrats some real control.

“Thanks to powers invested in the Chairperson alone, the Democratically-appointed members would have significant control over the direction of the investigation,” New York University law professor Ryan Goodman told me, adding that this would help prevent GOP-appointed members from “engaging in mischief.”

“The Chairperson would be able to move ahead quickly with getting information from the government without needing a vote,” Goodman continued, noting that the chair can “appoint staff” who would help “shape how the investigation and hearings unfold.”

Time to put Republicans on defense

The next step is for House Democrats to hold a vote on this right away. This could put Republicans on the defensive.

That’s because, as a senior House GOP lawmaker told Punchbowl News, as many as 20 Republicans might be willing to support it. And if the proposal did pass the House with bipartisan support, Punchbowl reports, a bloc of GOP senators might also support it, scuttling any effort to block it. It’s also possible Senate and House GOP leaders will accept the deal. We’ll see.

The bottom line is this: Broadly speaking, Republicans want to bury some fundamental truths. Many of them actually did go all in with Trump’s effort to overturn the election. They actually did sustain his lies about our political system’s ability to render legitimate democratic outcomes.

That deception campaign actually did help inspire the deadly mob violence. Trump actually did incite that violence for the express purpose of disrupting the peaceful transfer of power.

This is why Republicans such as Clyde are likening Jan. 6 to a “tourist visit.” It’s why other Republicans have said the rioters were “peaceful patriots,” that there’s no proof they were Trump supporters, that the real problem is leftist violence and that Trump didn’t incite them.

When Clyde was pressed by reporters on this Thursday, he smirked and dissembled and regarded his questioners with utter contempt, as if he’s entirely untouchable in his ability to rewrite the history of what we all saw with our own eyes.

‘It’s disgraceful'

Which brings us to Fanone. CNN obtained extraordinary footage from Fanone’s body cam that shows him under assault, screaming in pain and pleading for help. At one point he yelled: “I got kids!”

When Fanone was interviewed by CNN on Thursday night, he was scalding about the GOP efforts to rewrite the history of Jan. 6.

“I don’t expect anybody to give two shits about my opinions,” Fanone said. “But I will say this: Those are lies. And peddling that bullshit is an assault on every officer that fought to defend the Capitol. It’s disgraceful.”

This hints at how a real inquiry could look to the American people. Perhaps Republicans will oppose such an inquiry; perhaps they will not. But right now, the truth is overwhelming the lies. And that’s only going to continue, no matter what Republicans do.

Daddy State Awareness, Rule 5

They change history.

“you didn’t see what you saw"

"what happened isn’t what happened"

“I didn’t say what you heard me say”

Today's Radical Asshole

Josh Hawley presents as a perfect example of how it happens - how a young man (a child of high privilege) can become radicalized seemingly "overnight", superimposing his fantasies of victimhood on an existing ideology, and eventually doing great harm to the very institutions that were put in place to protect people like him from people like him.

But it's a scam. Hawley and his fellow plutocrats-in-waiting aren't populists - their loud protestations belie them in light of their positions of power and privilege.

Their claims of being victimized by "the powers that be" are designed to throw fog on the public discourse and keep the rubes het up over bullshit synthetic "issues" while guys like Josh Hawley grab and consolidate power.

They're the same phonies this world has had to deal with for 40,000 years.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Joshua Hawley was 13 years old, living comfortably as the son of a bank president, when his parents gave him a book about political conservatism for Christmas.

Hawley became enamored with the ideology. He began writing columns for the local newspaper that seethed with resentment against the political power structure. Even domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building, killing 168 people, sparked him to speak up for groups that express anger toward the government.

“Many of the people who populate these movements are not radical right-wing pro-assault weapons freaks as they were stereotyped in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing,” he wrote.

Twenty-six years later, those far-right rumblings reached a crescendo during another deadly attack on a federal building — this time with Hawley at the center of the action.

As a U.S. senator, Hawley had led the charge to object to the 2020 election on the false premise that some states failed to follow the law, bolstering the baseless claims from President Donald Trump that the election was stolen and should be overturned. Hawley had said the ascent of Joe Biden to the presidency “depends” on what would happen on Jan. 6, the day of a pro forma congressional vote to affirm the election. He had been photographed that day pumping his fist in the air as some Trump supporters were gathering on the grounds outside the U.S. Capitol.

Later, as rioters ransacked the building and several senators huddled in a secure room, fearing for their lives and trying to persuade their pro-Trump colleagues to withdraw their efforts to undermine democracy, Hawley remained combative in pushing the very falsehoods that had helped stoke the violence.

At 41, the freshman senator had become a face of a movement built on the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

“You have caused this!” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) erupted at him, referring to the events building up to the storming of the Capitol, according to a person familiar with the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Over the course of his rapid rise in politics — from law school professor to state attorney general to his 2018 election to the Senate — Hawley has followed two parallel paths, each reflecting a different political persona.

On one, he has pursued elite privilege, even relative to other senators, commuting to a private high school, attending Stanford University and Yale Law School, clerking at the Supreme Court, and working for a powerful Washington law firm, all while courting liberal professors and establishment Republicans who enabled his ascent.

On the other, he has expressed sympathy with some of the country’s most far-right, anti-government extremists, demonstrating a willingness to see the world through their grievance-infused prism even after horrific attacks — from Oklahoma City in 1995, when he was 15, to the Capitol attack in 2021.

In the wake of Jan. 6, Hawley has made clear that he is committed to just one of those personas. It is the one that propelled him to promote Trump’s baseless election claims and help inspire an insurrection — and it has made Hawley an instant star in today’s far-right Republican Party.

Now, former friends and supporters — a middle school classmate, a law school professor, a conservative columnist who promoted him and the Republican stalwart who recruited him to run for the Senate — say they are shocked that he has become a different politician than they expected, describing themselves as victims of political deception and personal betrayal.

“I feel very responsible for Josh Hawley being in the Senate. I feel terrible about it,” said former senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), who recently called his encouragement of Hawley’s Senate run the “greatest mistake of my life.” He added, “Josh Hawley played a central role in creating if not the darkest day in American history, one of the darkest days in American history.”

Hawley declined to comment for this article. In an interview last week with Washington Post Live, which he scheduled to promote his just-published book, he stood by his decision to challenge the electoral college results. “In terms of having a debate about election integrity, I promised my constituents I would. I did. And I don’t regret that at all,” he said. Hawley condemned the actions of Jan. 6 as those of a “lawless criminal mob” and said that he considers President Biden to have been legitimately elected.

To combat criticism that he is an elitist, Hawley has urged people to examine the place where he grew up. “I come from a town called Lexington, Missouri,” he said in his maiden Senate speech. “It’s a place that reflects the dignity and quiet greatness of the working man and woman. These are the people who explored a continent, who built the railroads, who opened the West.”

That, however, is a simplistic description.

A racist legacy

Lexington, a city of 4,700 by the Missouri River in a region still known as Little Dixie for its historical ties to the Confederacy, prides itself as a place rich in history.

But the history long told in Lexington, including during Hawley’s childhood, focused almost entirely on the story of Whites who backed the Confederacy, including a battle in which Union forces were defeated. Nowhere in town is there a commemoration of the fact that it was also here that thousands of Blacks were enslaved in the 19th century, the largest such concentration in Missouri, according to Gary Gene Fuenfhausen, president of Missouri’s Little Dixie Heritage Foundation.

“That’s not something we talked about,” said Mayor Joe Aull, who was superintendent of schools when Hawley was a student. “I just never really heard it mentioned.”

Lexington’s lack of recognition of its role in slavery has meant that the city did not have the kind of introspection about inequality that might have broadened Hawley’s outlook, according to his former classmates.

“It’s a small town. There’s a lot of ignorance and a lot of people that don’t leave the county and see the world,” said Patrick Keller, who went to school with Hawley. “He had an insular life in this small town.”

Hawley has said he was politically influenced by a Christmas gift from his parents when he was 13 years old, a book by a conservative columnist.

“I read George Will religiously,” Hawley later wrote about the columnist, whose work has long appeared in The Washington Post. He also was influenced by listening to Rush Limbaugh, the fiery conservative radio star, according to a classmate.

Andrea Randle, who went to school with Hawley from second to eighth grades and served with him in student government, initially was impressed. She recalled that, when she was one of a handful of Blacks at Lexington Middle School, he worked with her on an initiative for a middle school graduation ceremony that was designed to include people from all backgrounds.

“I thought he was being inclusive,” she said. Only later, like a number of other key figures in Hawley’s life, would she decide that she had been misled.

By the time Hawley completed middle school, his parents decided that he needed a more elite education and transferred him to Rockhurst High School in Kansas City, a Jesuit institution. As Hawley commuted to the school, he began his sideline as a conservative columnist for the Lexington News. His first column was titled “A Younger Point of View.” The following columns, which ran in 1994 and 1995, were called more grandly “State of the Union.” He said little in any columns about youth; he opined almost entirely about national political matters. The newspaper’s former editor said in an interview that he didn’t change a word, sending the columns directly to the typesetter.

In his column on the Oklahoma City bombing, which has received new attention after the Kansas City Star recently reported on it, Hawley wrote approvingly about an analyst who said that “the majority of these people who feel the U.S. government is involved in a ‘conspiracy’ against its citizens are average, middle-class Americans. … Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.”

As a result, Hawley concluded, they become “disenchanted” and believe “ ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them. … Those militias and ‘hate’ groups about which you read with your morning coffee are symptoms that mustn’t go unnoticed.”

In another column, which continues to upset Blacks who grew up with Hawley, he wrote that affirmative action programs designed to combat centuries of racism were a “perverted racial spoils system,” claiming that the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. would find it “repulsive,” even though King had said that such programs were essential before equality could be achieved.

A mentor is disturbed

As a history major at Stanford, Hawley met professor David Kennedy, who suggested a number of books on the American presidency for Hawley to read. Kennedy said in an interview that he was astonished when his student returned a couple of weeks later and made clear that he had read and absorbed the volumes.

Kennedy became Hawley’s academic adviser and oversaw his thesis, which became a book, “Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.” Kennedy wrote in the preface that Hawley had “an unusually questing intelligence, a breadth and depth of learning well beyond his years, and an intolerance for conventional thinking.”

In an interview, Kennedy said Hawley was one of the best students he had ever taught, but, like many others who helped enable Hawley’s rise, he now has deep regrets, saying he is “quite disturbed” about the senator’s role on Jan. 6.

“I think he is a thoughtful, deeply analytical person,” Kennedy said. “What I understand far less well is his particular political evolution. I had no inkling really just how conservative he was. I blame myself. The feeling on my part is that I simply was not paying attention to what he was doing in the arena of student culture where he was moving.”

Hawley became president of a conservative group called the Freedom Forum and wrote for a conservative magazine, the Stanford Review. In a letter published by the magazine that foreshadowed his strategy of using race and sexual orientation as political weapons, Hawley in 1999 mocked Democrats whose “self-righteous pronouncements on racial oppression and gay rights activism seem oddly out of place, like disco music at a swing dance.”

After Stanford, Hawley spent nearly a year in London teaching at the exclusive St. Paul’s School, an institution that says it is for “gifted boys.” Then Hawley, who had written in one of his Lexington News columns that people educated in the Ivy League were “elitist,” attended Yale Law School. He became president of the Yale chapter of the conservative Federalist Society.

He then won a succession of coveted clerkships, first for Michael McConnell, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, and then for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. during the Supreme Court’s 2006-07 term. That led to work at a Washington law firm then known as Hogan & Hartson and next at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where Hawley was co-counsel on the Hobby Lobby case, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in 2014 that certain corporations could not be required to pay for insurance covering contraception, a major victory for conservatives.

Hawley returned to Missouri with an eye toward laying the ground for a political career. His availability caught the attention of Thom Lambert, a University of Missouri law professor. Lambert aggressively recruited Hawley and his wife, Erin, to teach in Columbia.

Lambert, who said he is a gay evangelical Christian, said that after Hawley spent several semesters teaching at the university, he became alarmed that Hawley began making pronouncements that didn’t square with his background in constitutional law but instead appeared designed to attract political support. Lambert was especially shocked in 2015 when Hawley, then a candidate for attorney general, weighed in on a Kentucky case in which a county clerk was arrested for refusing to give a same-sex couple a marriage license or to allow her deputies to do so, citing her religious beliefs. Hawley said it was “tragic” that the clerk was arrested, and he promised to protect such government officials if he were elected.

“This is the moment when I realized, I’m not sure I know this guy,” Lambert said. “He was trying to establish his credentials as a religious-freedom warrior. This is where I thought, you’re kind of lying here. You’re misrepresenting how the Constitution works.”

A broken promise

Hawley won the race with the help of a television ad in which he blasted politicians who he said are “just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another.” The ad showed several men climbing ladders labeled “attorney general” and “U.S. Senate.”

But within months of winning the office, Hawley prepared to do exactly what he had mocked: climb the ladder to become a senator. He needed a way to explain to voters why he was breaking his promise. A fortuitous encounter provided a path.

Danforth, the former senator from Missouri, had delivered a speech years earlier at Yale, and Hawley sat next to him later at a small dinner. Now Danforth, who also had served as Missouri’s attorney general, was looking for a candidate to run against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.

A moderate establishment figure, Danforth by this time had emerged as one of Trump’s harshest critics, and he believed that Hawley could bring a principled vision to the Republican Party.

“You have the training and the ability to be a leading voice for the constitutional order, not only in Missouri but nationally,” Danforth wrote to Hawley in a letter co-signed by three other former Missouri Republican senators.

With Danforth’s letter helping provide an excuse, Hawley broke his vow against “climbing the ladder” and announced his Senate candidacy in October 2017.

Hawley, an evangelical, had seen how Trump captured the presidency in 2016, in part by winning the White evangelical vote by 80 to 16 percent.

So, when Hawley spoke before a group of ministers in Kansas City in December 2017, he sounded like a different person than the one who had written five years earlier that there were “distinct missions of church and state — is it really the role of government, for instance, to promote ‘Christian values’ or refurbish America’s Christian heritage?” The state, he had written, should not be used “to convert non-believers.”

But in his 2017 speech, he advocated going into “the public realm and to seek the obedience of the nations, of our nation … to transform our society to reflect the gospel truth and lordship of Jesus Christ.”

The speech drew a rebuke from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is dedicated to upholding the separation of church and state. The foundation wrote to the former constitutional law professor that his remark “stands in glaring defiance of the very Constitution that you swore an oath to uphold.”

Tying himself as closely as possible to Trump, Hawley beat McCaskill, 51 percent to 46 percent, and headed to Washington.

‘What’s with Hawley?’

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had played a crucial role, helping to fundraise for Hawley’s campaign. But the incoming senator would not say that he supported McConnell having another term leading the party. McConnell asked Danforth for an explanation.

“What’s with Hawley?” he asked, according to Danforth. (A McConnell spokesman, asked about the call, responded that “McConnell never solicited Hawley’s support for his leadership election and he ran unopposed.”)

Danforth said he called Hawley, who told him, “I’m going to go to Washington, and I’m not going to be part of the establishment, and I’m not going to be pushed around. I’m going to be independent, and I’m going to speak for the people.”

Danforth told The Post that Hawley’s “response was so aggressive that it struck me as strange.” Nonetheless, he remained supportive, dining with the senator-elect and writing a warm congratulatory note. But Hawley shut him off. He didn’t respond to Danforth’s letter, and the two have not spoken since their post-election meal, Danforth said.

“I think he would not be in the U.S. Senate except for me,” Danforth said. “Maybe that sounds like I’m promoting myself being a kingmaker, but my view is, I put him there and created this thing.”

Hawley made a striking declaration about his view of Americans in a June 2019 article in Christianity Today, titled “The Age of Pelagius.” He said Pelagius, a Greek scholar born about the year 350, had said individuals had freedom to be whatever they chose. “It’s the Pelagian vision,” he wrote. “Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning.”

Hawley found such liberty abhorrent.

He said it meant that an individual could “emancipate yourself not just from God but from society, family, and tradition.” He said those seeking this liberty became elitists.

This was too much for his onetime hero, George Will, who viewed individual liberty as an essential American trait. Will had been helpful during the Senate campaign. He had been urged to write about Hawley by Danforth, his longtime friend and the godfather of Will’s daughter. Will came to Missouri, rode with Hawley on a campaign bus and wrote a column praising the candidate as “an actual, not a pretend, conservative.”

But Will gradually concluded that his assessment had been wrong. He wrote a column in January 2020 ridiculing Hawley’s attack on individualism. As the two feuded, the senator fired off a Trump-like tweet at the man he once revered: “I’m told NeverTrumper and ex-Republican George Will attacking me again today for talking about working people. Oh George. Don’t you have a country club to go to?”

Will said in an interview that he found the tweet “surpassingly dumb.” He later condemned Hawley’s effort to reject the presidential election results and create a “synthetic drama” on Jan. 6, writing that the senator from Missouri, along with Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), must be “forevermore shunned. … Each will wear a scarlet ’S’ as a seditionist.”

The feud with Will — like the one with Danforth and other former key backers — demonstrated how separated Hawley had become from the establishment Republicans who had helped him win the Senate seat.

He moved further to the right, distancing himself from yet another mentor, Chief Justice Roberts. He pilloried last year’s 6-to-3 ruling by the Supreme Court extending civil rights protections to gay and transgender people. It was a decision written by Trump nominee Neil M. Gorsuch and supported by Roberts, for whom Hawley had clerked. But Hawley declared that “it represents the end of the conservative legal movement.”

Hawley then zeroed in on an issue that Trump had turned into a racial flash point: efforts to educate leaders about the history of racism to promote diversity in the workplace.

Under “critical race theory,” companies and government entities have examined the institutionalized racism that has marginalized minorities to low-level positions. Trump had issued an executive order, supported by Hawley, that prevented federal contracts from having such diversity training.

The senator, in a Nov. 30 tweet, echoed his column against affirmative action, written 25 years earlier. “Corporate liberals … love critical race theory and all the other warmed-over Marxist garbage,” he wrote. “They sell out working Americans and sneer at them at the same time. That’s the New Left.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor who coined the phrase “critical race theory,” said in an interview that Hawley is attacking her concept as a means of “race baiting.”

“He walks in the footsteps of many demagogues in America’s historical past, whose trajectory into the center of power has been through racialized scapegoating,” Crenshaw said.

A classmate reaches out

Andrea Randle, who had worked with Hawley on the middle school graduation ceremony, thought of her childhood friend after hearing about the killing of George Floyd, who died last year after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Randle said in an interview that she hoped Hawley could once again work with her, believing he could join the fight for racial justice. She sent him an email with the subject line: “Old Ally from Lexington.”

“Hi Josh,” she wrote on May 31, 2020. “I know you remember me. We grew up together in rural Lexington, ran student council & sang in honor choir. … You were always going to move on to do great things. … The death of George Floyd will be forever etched in every memory & in history. I haven’t seen where you have spoken out about it.”

Urging Hawley to be a leader on the issue, she wrote: “I know the young man who looked into the future & created an 8th grade commemoration … for our small little class of 98 lead[s] with empathy. America needs him desperately right now.”

Randle said Hawley never responded, which deeply disappointed her. “I was hoping he would be on the right side of history of this,” she said.

A month later, Hawley went on Fox News and attacked the Black Lives Matter movement as “Marxist” and belittled its efforts to fight for justice in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. He said it has “hatred for the United States of America” and that “the organization is trying to hijack any movement towards justice for George Floyd, for instance, they’re trying to hijack that conversation away towards their own political Marxist agenda.”

To Randle, Hawley’s dismissal of a group dedicated to civil rights for Blacks and his call to abolish affirmative action are rooted in what she said is his lack of empathy concerning the legacy of slavery in Lexington. She concluded that her initial impression of him as an inclusive person was wrong.

“It just doesn’t seem like that person he was is the person he is today,” Randle said. “It’s disappointing and disheartening. This denial of facts, the denial of the people who are marginalized in our culture, that there are historical systems in place that are still keeping people down. That he won’t even acknowledge it is just kind of crazy to me.

”‘Thanks Josh!’

After the electoral college vote giving Biden the presidency, McConnell wanted to head off the possibility that a single senator could force a vote in Congress on certifying the results. His prime concern was that Hawley would “breach the dam,” as an associate put it, and prompt other senators to follow him. He declared that “the electoral college has spoken” and urged senators to accept the result.

Hawley went ahead anyway.

He announced on Dec. 30 that he would challenge the results, prompting some other senators to follow his lead. Hawley defied McConnell despite the fact that more than 90 federal and state judges had rejected lawsuits seeking to overturn the outcome and Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, had dismissed allegations that there was widespread voter fraud.

Hawley focused on Pennsylvania, saying the state had violated its constitution by widening access to mail-in ballots. But it was a Republican-controlled legislature that approved universal mail voting in 2019, and the GOP had encouraged its use. When Trump lost the state, his allies sought to get those votes thrown out, but the effort was rejected by the courts.

The next day, McConnell tried again to head off Hawley, overseeing a conference call that was supposed to include all Republican senators. McConnell said the Jan. 6 vote was the most consequential of his life, and he asked why Hawley was going forward with an effort doomed to fail. The plan was for Hawley to explain himself and for Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) to rebut his assertions, according to a person familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

The senators waited for Hawley to respond but heard no reply. They did not realize, as Politico first reported, that Hawley had not dialed in as expected. Hawley then sent a fundraising letter that said he wouldn’t give in to “the Washington and Wall Street establishment.”

Two days after the teleconference, Toomey tweeted that Hawley and others “fail to acknowledge that these allegations have been adjudicated in courtrooms across America and were found to be unsupported by evidence.”

Trump, however, encouraged Hawley, tweeting, “Thanks Josh!” The senator then went on Fox News, where anchor Bret Baier asked about his plans to challenge the electoral college results. “Are you trying to say as of January 20 Trump will be president?” Baier asked.

“That depends on what happens on Wednesday [Jan. 6]; that’s why we have the debate,” Hawley said.

“No it doesn’t,” Baier responded, saying that most experts believe Congress does not have the right to overturn the certification.

A few days later, on Jan. 6, the president praised Hawley during his incendiary speech to supporters. Around that time, Hawley passed by a crowd of protesters at the Capitol and raised his fist in solidarity. Shortly thereafter, as he and other senators were on or near the Senate floor, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.

Senators were rushed to the safety of a secure room in an adjoining Senate office building. At that tense moment, fearing that their lives were at risk if rioters found them, a number of senators gathered in the secure room to discuss whether they could shut down the effort to challenge the election results. One senator recalled that every time he looked over, he saw Hawley “standing by himself in a corner,” according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirming a detail first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Romney, in a floor speech directed at Hawley and others, tried one last time to stop the challenges.

“Those who choose to continue to support [Trump’s] dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy,” said the senator from Utah, who declined to comment.

Hawley insisted he would proceed with his challenge to the Pennsylvania results. The Senate defeated his effort by a vote of 92 to 7.

Hawley later said that “it is a lie that I was trying to overturn an election,” and he has consistently condemned those who stormed the Capitol. But he has stood by his claim that Pennsylvania’s vote was unconstitutional and wrote that he was reflecting constituent “concerns about election integrity.” He did not point out that such concerns exist largely because Hawley, Trump and their allies stoked them with false claims.

‘We love Josh Hawley’

Hawley’s position has increasingly taken hold in the party, where leaders at every level have embraced the false claims of election fraud. Trump remains the most popular figure in the country among GOP voters, and lawmakers who opposed the electoral college challenge have been booed at home and faced withering criticism from local party officials.

Hawley raised $3 million in the first quarter of this year, according to federal records, and he has audaciously cast himself as the person best suited to redefine the GOP.

On April 17, in his first public appearance in Missouri since the events of Jan. 6, Hawley traveled to Ozark, a city in the state’s southwestern corner where he is building a new home, and strode into his fan base at Ozark High School, home of the Tigers. He was swarmed by several hundred people who had gathered at a Lincoln Day dinner fundraiser for Christian County’s Republican Party.

“We love Josh Hawley because he stands up for Missouri’s values,” said Wanda Marteen, 78, who organized the event. “The first thing, the big thing he stood up for, is the election. We feel like it was fraudulent.”

Most of the speech amounted to an outline of his effort to remake the Republican Party and possibly seek the presidency. Hawley blasted what he called “the giant woke corporations” that opposed a Republican-backed Georgia voting measure, said Democrats would “effectively cancel women’s sports” by allowing transgender athletes and argued that they back legislation “that would effectively close Christian colleges and universities.”

Five days after his Ozark speech, Hawley became the lone senator to vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, designed to combat discrimination against Asian Americans. It was in some respects an unlikely position for someone eyeing a presidential campaign, but to Hawley, it made sense. It was, he said, “dangerous” to broaden the federal government’s ability to prosecute hate crimes.

Hawley had taken his stand. Once again, he was defiant, beckoning others to follow.

The Ex-Emperor's New Old Clothes

The GOP is, itself, a fraud - fast losing even the hope for Paper Tiger status.

Listen to Lindsey Graham (eg) and you get the idea that Trump is the golden ticket. Graham has said straight out that Republicans are going nowhere without Trump - that he is absolutely the key to their hope chest.

But, then there's this at HuffPo:

GOP Leadership Reportedly Hid Trump's Weak Numbers At Recent Retreats

Internal data reveal that voters in "core districts" have unfavorable views of Trump — but rank-and-file Republicans don't want to hear it.

The Republican Party might be high on Donald Trump, but key voters are not, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

Internal GOP polling data revealing Trump’s weak numbers in key battleground districts was kept under wraps by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) at recent retreats for Republican lawmakers, sources told the Post. NRCC staffers reportedly held back the bad news, even when a member of Congress asked directly about Trump’s standing at a retreat last month.

The Post obtained the full results of the party’s data, which found that Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in “core districts.” In addition, nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of him than those who had a strongly favorable one in those areas, the newspaper reported.

The internal NRCC poll found that President Joe Biden was “perilously” (for the GOP) popular in core battleground districts, with 54% favorability, compared to Trump’s 41%. Vice President Kamala Harris was also more popular than Trump.

Trump’s weak numbers were reportedly also sharply downplayed at a retreat in March for GOP ranking members of congressional committees. Both situations revealed that the GOP leadership was eager to hide information to dodge the truth about Trump and the possible damage he could wreak on future elections. The debate over Trump’s potentially negative impact on swing districts is likely to escalate as vulnerable Republicans prepare for reelection.

The poll numbers were part of an extensive story in the Post about Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and her battle with colleagues over Trump. She has repeatedly bashed the former president for his lie that the presidential election was rigged, and for his incitement of the Capitol insurrection. While Trump’s weak numbers could theoretically bolster her fight, Cheney’s dissent may result in her removal from House leadership in an upcoming vote.

Despite the internal numbers — and Trump’s loss in the presidential election — the Republican Party appears to be marching into his camp more strongly than ever, and GOP leaders appear at a loss about where else to turn.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declared on Fox News on Thursday that the Republican Party “can’t grow without” Trump. “There is no construct where the party can be successful without him,” Graham said.

But Cheney warned in a Post op-ed earlier this week, “The Republican Party is at a turning point. Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

It's not time for the happy dance - Dems have plenty to worry about, including a coupla snags of their own in Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema - but it's really starting to pan out now that the more closely the Republicans cling to Trump's leg, the weaker they actually are.

And it's a little weird.

I've been saying for a long time: "Trump has not remade the GOP in his image - he's the near-perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for decades", meaning the party has been playing on lies and paranoia and racist bullshit for a long time, so it comes as no surprise when the voters in that party flock to a racist lying asshole in record numbers.

But except for poor little old Liz Cheney - bless her heart - it's like the Republican "leaders" have kinda recently decided they no longer have any chance to countervail all that negative sentiment (the monster they created can't be controlled and is on the loose), so they can't very well reverse course now - they'll have to double down again by fully embracing all that shit, thus becoming the totally empty null set that Trump himself is.

• We criticized them for being greedy, and they said, "Yup - we're greedy alright. Greed is good."
• We said they weren't treating people kindly, and they said, "Even Granny has to pull her own weight or get outa the boat."
• We said they were sounding kinda racist and intolerant, and they said, "Well, what about black-on-black crime, and the welfare queens in the inner cities?"
• We said maybe we oughta be doing something to cut back on pollution, and they invented "rollin' coal".
• We said they were behaving deplorably, and they adopted "Deplorables" as one of their nicknames.
• We pointed out 30,000 lies during 45*'s term, and now we've got QAnon, and Jewish Space Lasers, and fealty to a "president" who first became gravely ill with a disease he called a hoax, and then got vaccinated against the same disease that he continues to refer to as a hoax.
• and on
• and on
• and on...

...until they don't stand for anything but whatever's expedient at any given moment - or sounds about right, as long as nobody remembers what they said yesterday, which was exactly opposite of what they said this morning, which was exactly opposite what they said 30 minutes ago.

So, as they press towards the logical extreme (flying in tighter and tighter circles, as all Geejy Birds do) it just makes sense that they're about to disappear up their own assholes.

But remember the kicker: 

The rank-n-file Republican voters - the ones who aren't all that stoopid - the ones who just want low taxes and a police force willing to keep White Supremacy in place without it looking quite so obvious - those "good Republicans" are bailing out.

Being a Republican just isn't fashionable anymore. And maybe that's enough for now.

The Real Deal

The big lie

"If I lose to Joe Biden, 

you'll never see me again"

Das LügenMAGAt

The money quote from Kayleigh McEnany's first day.

And now - per Brian Tyler Cohen:

Summing Up

The 45* era encapsulated:

Democrats:
It looks like Trump is fucking with the Post Office to give himself an edge in the election.

Trump:
I'm fucking with the Post Office because that makes it easier for me to win the election.

Republicans:
Libtards are crazy - they think Trump is fucking with the Post Office to give himself an edge in the election.

A Mashup Of Mashups

VICE News

Checking

The Daddy State tells us lies as a means of demonstrating its power.

The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.

Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want ...

... so they can dictate reality to us.

WaPo:

Who caused the violence at protests?
It wasn’t antifa.

THE CLAIMS:

“The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters and anarchists. The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings.”
— President Trump, in remarks at a SpaceX launch, May 30

“I don't see any indication that there were any white supremest groups mixing in. This is an ANTIFA Organization. It seems that the first time we saw it in a major way was Occupy Wall Street. It's the same mindset.” @kilmeade @foxandfriends TRUE!”
— Trump, in a tweet, June 1

“Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists. Violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa and others.”
— Trump, in remarks at the White House Rose Garden, June 1

“We have antifa, we have anarchists, we have terrorists, we have looters. We have a lot of bad people in those groups. I mean, you watch and you see.”
— Trump, in an interview, June 3

On May 30 — five days after George Floyd was killed and four after protests erupted across Minneapolis — President Trump first said antifa forces were behind the violence that swept across the country. He has repeated this claim nearly 20 times since. Online activists and prominent right-wing Twitter personalities promoted the theory. And the nation’s top law enforcement officials — including FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Attorney General William P. Barr — appeared to confirm it, echoing Trump’s claim.

The Fact Checker video team spoke to witnesses and reviewed arrest records, federal charges, intelligence reports, online conversations and dozens of videos and photos of violent incidents from the early days of protests in Minneapolis to determine whether a coordinated antifa campaign was responsible for the violence.

The Facts:

Antifa is a moniker, not a single group with a clear organizational structure or leader. It is a decentralized network of activists who don’t coordinate. Their common ground is opposing anything that they think is racist or fascist. In recent years, antifa activists appeared whenever there was a large gathering of white nationalists.

And white nationalists, as counterintuitive as it might seem, have been known to attend Black Lives Matter rallies. That is what could then draw attention from antifa forces, according to Seth G. Jones, director of the transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at ADL, emphasized, “It’s a challenge [to identify antifa] because this is not an organized group. You’re essentially looking to try to identify what does somebody believe in.” Antifa has been identified by patches, flags, graffiti and black clothing, Segal explained. And at times, they can be identifiable by moving in “black bloc” formation. But, Segal hedged, looking to identify antifa by these visual cues is “not foolproof.”

Jones reviewed protests in more than 140 cities and spoke with U.S. officials within the joint terrorism task force. Most of the violence, Jones said, was committed by “local hooligans, sometimes gangs, sometimes just individuals that are trying to take advantage of an opportunity.”

“There were reports of some antifa at different protests,” he concluded. “But they stood back, did not engage, certainly not in a violent way.”

Officials have arrested more than 14,000 people across 49 cities nationwide since May 27, according to a Washington Post tally of data provided by police departments and included in media reports. Thousands were arrested for low-level offenses, including curfew violations and failure to disperse.

Roughly 80 federal charges, including murder and throwing molotov cocktails at police vehicles, reveal no evidence of an antifa plot. Four people who identify with the far-right extremist “boogaloo” movement are among those facing the most serious federal charges. Asked whether anyone who identifies as antifa had been charged, Department of Justice spokesman Matt Lloyd said via email, “We do not collect statistics based on potential inspiration but on unlawful acts according to statute.”

An intelligence bulletin issued by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center that was obtained by ABC News warned that “anarchist extremists continue to pose the most significant threat of targeted assaults against police.” The bulletin, which was distributed to police departments nationwide, mentions antifa only in a footnote differentiating those who self-identify with the group from anarchists.

Rather, the bulletin said that “the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies,” specifically pointing to boogaloo-related groups as likely to be “instigating violence” at the protests.

The DHS said in a June 1 internal intelligence report seen by Reuters that “most of the violence appears to have been driven by opportunists.”

The Nation revealed a separate FBI document that said the bureau found “no intel indicating antifa involvement” in the May 31 protests in Washington.

Even though tangible evidence of antifa’s involvement is scant, as protests multiplied, rumors regarding the movement’s alleged role spread across social media. “What we have seen at ADL is that there has been misinformation that has suggested that antifa has been in places where there has not been any proof that they’ve been,” Segal said. This effort, he said, was “more coordinated it seems than antifa has been at actually being on the ground.”

A Twitter account that claimed to be run by antifa activists and called for violence at the protests was later linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa. A viral May 27 tweet, from a popular QAnon account, alleged that the protests were an effort by the “deep state” to “start a race war before the election,” arguing “antifa & BLM are domestic terrorist organizations that need to be STOPPED.” Conservative media outlets and prominent Twitter influencers, including Donald Trump Jr., amplified the theory that antifa was connected to the violence.

By May 29, there were almost 300,000 mentions of antifa on Twitter, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a media insights company. The next day, mentions reached nearly 1.5 million. An analysis of the Twitter accounts followed by the president, via Emerson T. Brooking of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, found that about 10 percent of his feed on May 30 suggested in some fashion or other that antifa is a terrorist organization. That day, Trump first blamed antifa for violence at the protests.

“There was a concerted effort by alt-right activists not just to conflate the protest with antifa, but to get antifa declared a terrorist organization by the president of the United States,” Brooking said. “We see that there was a coordinated, essentially, series of petitions, an online lobbying effort.”

By May 31, mentions on Twitter reached almost 3.9 million, search interest in “antifa” spiked and Trump tweeted that he would declare it a terrorist organization — although he has no authority to do so under the law.

“Search interest in antifa was so great, in fact, that it outweighed search interest in Black Lives Matter during these protests,” Brooking said.

The more antifa was discussed online, the more misinformation spread. Speculation that antifa activists planned to bus into small towns in Idaho and Wisconsin prompted the appearance of counterprotesters and armed militias. Trump tweeted the false conspiracy theory that Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old protester in Buffalo who was shoved by police and suffered serious injuries, was connected to antifa.

When the White House was asked for evidence of any antifa involvement, a senior administration official pointed the Fact Checker to statements by officials such as Barr and national security adviser Robert O’Brien that the administration had evidence. So far, however, the administration has not disclosed any such evidence.


The Pinocchio Test:

It is virtually impossible to account for the beliefs and motives of every person at every protest. And, consequently, virtually impossible to say that no one with antifa beliefs was involved in any violence.


But beliefs and orchestrating organized violence are not the same. There has not yet been a single confirmed case in which someone who self-identifies as antifa led violent acts at any of the protests across the country. The president and his administration have placed an outsize burden of blame on antifa, without waiting for arrest data and completed investigations.


This is not the first time Trump has pointed to antifa as a shadowy nemesis. But the misinformation created by his continued insistence of antifa’s involvement has led to more chaos and violence in an already turbulent moment. As always, the burden of proof rests with the speaker — and the administration has provided no evidence, only assertions that it has evidence.

Trump earns Four Pinocchios.

Today's GIF

Forbes Magazine, David Markowitz:

I’m an academic who cares deeply about how lying affects communication processes and social relationships. One of the most important and consistent truths about deception is that we are all mostly honest. Most people tell one or two small lies per day, on average, and there are only a few prolific liars in our social circles.

Rates of interpersonal deception — the lies I tell you and you tell me — have been remarkably stable in deception research over time. But, as others suggested, something is unusual about President Trump. His rate of deception has increased since taking office.

As of early April, Trump has told 23.3 lies per day in 2020, a 0.5-lie increase since 2019. What’s more, Trump has averaged 23.8 lies per day since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the US — another 0.5-lie increase. Even during a pandemic, when the public needs to trust and rely on him the most, deception remains a core part of the president’s playbook.

The piece goes on to talk about 45*'s patterns of lying, and even though it filters out the "Trump lies all the time about everything" meme, it confirms for me that Cult45 is deeply invested in classic Daddy State gaslighting, in service of an agenda that's anything but "The best for the most".

Money quote:

Trump’s lies are problematic because they force us to question our institutions and the value of information. Their consequences might also bleed into our everyday meaningful relationships. Our trust in government, media, and other institutions remain quite low, but we still tend to trust one another.

What happens when our distrust in government affects our trust in family or friends? When we fail to value truth and instead, prioritize alternative facts or self-serving discourse, the fabric that holds our relationships together begins to fray.

Daddy State Awareness Rules

PREAMBLE:

The Daddy State tells us lies as a means of demonstrating its power.

The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject - or the apparent object - of the lies.

Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want ...

… SO THEY CAN DICTATE REALITY TO US.