The Netherlands’ reclusive version of Trump, Geert Wilders, may not win their election but he’s shoved their political system so far to the right that the Dutch might be screwed no matter what happens.
So after Tom Price got himself sworn in as Secretary of Dismantling Medicare and Medicaid, Also Obamacare, his congressional seat in Georgia came open. Democrats, feeling pissed off and maybe a bit cocky since while Price carried the district comfortably, Donald Trump only won it by a single percentage point, thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat to take that seat and put it in the D column?” And so with some nudging from Daily Kos and social media endorsements from celebrities, Jon Ossoff, a mere lad 30 years of age, has very quickly raised $2 million dollars and is out-polling all other candidates in the “jungle” primary for Price’s seat.
Ah, but Republicans are trying to use Ossoff’s youth against him; the Congressional Leadership Fund, a superPAC friendly to Republican leadership, has launched a million-dollar ad buy for the incredibly cheesy ad below, which uses old YouTube videos of Ossoff to depict him as an unserious neophyte who’s fibbing about his readiness to be in Congress, even hinting that Ossoff is lying when he says he has “five years of experience as a national security staffer.”
How can Ossoff have five years of experience working on national security, the ad suggests, since here are these videos of Ossoff pretending to be Han Solo, from the popular “Star Treks” films, in a video making fun of Georgetown’s alcohol policy? The nerve of that guy! Oh, except he’s not fibbing at all:
He’s a documentary filmmaker who previously worked as a legislative aide on national security issues for Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga. The congressman threw his support behind Ossoff, as did neighboring Democratic Rep. John Lewis.
Is Ossoff just some wild frat boy who’s too unserious to be trusted with national affairs? (Mind you, that accusation is being made by the party of Louis Gohmert.) Rep. Johnson issued a statement saying that despite the nerdy videos (in which Ossoff is also seen singing a parody of “Uptown Girl,” for shame!), the young man actually knows his stuff:
This is absurd. Jon spent five years working on National Security issues for me, and he worked on such sensitive programs that he received a top secret security clearance from the Department of Defense. Washington political operatives are coming into Georgia to spread false personal attacks — it’s what the American people are sick and tired of.
So he identifies with Han Solo and has a security clearance? This is supposed to be a problem?
The video aims at suggesting this Ossoff kid isn’t a serious candidate, so he’s certainly not fit to replace the distinguished Tom Price, who was a real doctor and belonged to a loony-tunes medical association that claimed HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and that Barack Obama won in 2008 by literally hypnotizing voters.
It’s hard to say whether the Republican superPAC’s ad pointing and shouting “NERD!” at Ossoff will give him that much trouble; NPR offers a thinky-piece on how young politicians may have to worry about their social media pasts coming back to bite them, but if the worst the R’s can find on Ossoff is that he once dressed up like the captain of the Millennium Ford Falcon, he’s probably in fairly good shape. As multiple term Texas congresscritter Blake Farenthold learned, you can still be in Congress even if you’re photographed in far sillier costumes.
Of course, it may help if you’re a Republican incumbent. We’re betting this ad will do little to convince voters Ossoff is not the candidate they’re looking for. And considering the tendency of pissed-off Democrats to identify resistance to Trump with the plucky fighters of the Rebel Alliance, if the big-money PACs try to strike Ossoff down, he may become more powerful than they can imagine.
Good morning, Wonketariat! We spent all weekend bugging phones in Florida with Obama and Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi emails; now we’re so informed that you won’t even believe how informed we are (believe me)! Here’s some of the things we may be talking about today.
Here’s SNL’s FUCKING HILARIOUS cold open about Jeff Sessions.
And here’s your morning Nice Time! Fiona the baby hippo chugging some nom-noms! Help us help you by donating/subscribing! We can’t fight the good fight we can’t help pay our bills or feed our puppers! Please, think of the puppers!
And here’s your morning Nice Time! A baby gerenuk! They’re adorable bug-eyed deer/giraffes from Somalia, so they’re clearly not going to clear Customs and Border Patrol.
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Wonktte’s boss lady, her attendant, and candidate Rob Quist
After a campaign that’s seen accusations of the Democratic candidate singing to naked people and the Republican candidate committing an actual assault on a reporter, Montana’s special election to replace Ryan “Master And Commander” Zinke in Congress wraps up when the polls close at 8 p.m., “Mountain Time,” which would be 10:00 Eastern, 7:00 Pacific, and god only knows in Idaho. Democrat Rob Quist hopes to take the state’s single congressional seat away from the Republicans, and has a fair chance of it because nobody likes Republican Greg Gianforte, and that was before Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor assault for wilding on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. When Gianforte ran for governor in the fall, his vote ran well behind Donald Trump’s, and the Democrat, Steve Bullock, won by just under five percent. Still, Republicans have done what they could to help Gianforte, killing off a bill that would have conducted all the balloting by mail, because, as the Republican party chair argued, too many people voting leads to Democrats being elected.
As things stand, about two-thirds of likely voters have already voted absentee, although Montana does allow same-day registration and the prospect of Greg Gianforte literally having a bully pulpit in Congress may pull in some additional voters today. Quist has been campaigning hard against Donald Trump’s agenda, and in Montana, like everywhere else, the Republican effort to kill off Obamacare is Not Loved — Gianforte has gone out of his way to avoid taking a position on the House’s awful bill, and in fact it was a question about the CBO score of the bill that prompted him to deck Jacobs and then release a lying statement accusing the reporter of having grabbed him, possibly because Gianforte assumed his word would be more persuasive than audio recordings and eyewitnesses.
As election day has rolled along, House Speaker Paul Ryan has called on Gianforte to apologize, possibly because Ryan at least wants to appear not to condone candidates roughing up reporters. No apologies yet from Gianforte, who is apparently hoping that online tough guys making hilarious jokes about punching snowflakes will be all the defense he needs. Or maybe he read in the Bible that Noah punched a reporter during the building of the Ark. That is where Gianforte finds his wisdom, like the idea that the earth is 6,000 years old or that people should work until they die.
It’s about four and a half hours to the closing of the polls, and Yr Doktor Zoom will be here to help you watch the returns! Now get to Open Threading!
Update (10:10 EDT): Polls are closed in Montana, so we’re moving this puppy to the top of the page. Updates occasionally as we get ’em!
11:50 More singing by Rob Quist’s hippie daughter. Rebecca says she’s expecting a call for Gianforte shortly, and “If he does win I will start the recall myself on Mon. He was charged w a crime nite b4 election, with a month of early voring in” … “i hate phone typing”
12:55 Gianforte giving a victory speech, blah blah blah, not listening, and Yr Wonkette is going to bed. Yr Editrix says: “Tell them I’m not buying it and to hold tight til morning.” Then she adds, “tell em thats some fucking bullshit dok” and “never gibe up neber surrender. fucking thumbs.” You know, like in Galaxu Qyest.
Ah, Gianforte is sorry for taking an action he should not have, and apologizes without qualification to Ben Jacobs, and to the Fox News team who witnessed it. No apology for issuing a press release that was nothing but LIES!
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With 99% of precincts reporting, Republican millionaire Greg Gianforte has won the special election for Montana’s single congressional seat, beating Democrat Rob Quist with 50.2 percent to Quist’s 44.1 percent of the vote. For whatever consolation value it may hold (very little), the election was closer than many Republicans had expected, and much closer than Donald Trump’s 20-point victory over Hillary Clinton in the state last fall. Yr Wonkette would also note that gerrymandering may have played a role, considering the district is drawn in such a way as to include a large majority of Republican voters:
Shapes like that just ain’t natural. Might be “contiguous,” but it sure as hell isn’t “compact.”
In his victory speech, Gianforte at least apologized for having body-slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, admitting that he had attacked Jacobs and apologizing to both Jacobs and the Fox News crew who witnessed the attack:
The crowd was in a more than forgiving mood; the Washington Post reports that when Gianforte said “I made a mistake,” a supporter in the crowd shouted “Not in our minds!” — it’s not audible in the AP video above, but the laughter following the remark is. Once Gianforte got to saying “I should not have responded in the way that I did, and for that I’m sorry,” a supporter shouted “And you’re forgiven,” which got much more applause than the actual apology.
Completely missing from Gianforte’s apology: any mention or retraction of his campaign’s lying press release, which said Jacobs had grabbed Gianforte by the wrist and pulled him down like a terrible trouble-making liberal.
So now we’ll have a brand-new member of Congress who’ll be sworn in while facing a misdemeanor assault charge. At least he promised not to assault any more reporters; we’re not sure whether his orientation to the House will include explicit warnings that reporters actually do stick microphones and recorders in politicians’ faces. It’s something he may have to get used to. Also, in case you were wondering, New York magazine lawsplains there’s nothing to prevent Gianforte from taking office. He may be morally unfit to serve, but legally, he’s in like anyone other than Flynn:
The Constitution says members of the House and Senate must meet three requirements:
All members of the House must be at least 25 years old, and members of the Senate must be at least 30 years old.
Members of the House must have been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years, and members of the Senate must have been a U.S. citizen for at least nine years.
They have to be an “inhabitant” of the state “when elected.”
Also, the piece continues,
Even if Gianforte receives the maximum penalty for misdemeanor assault in Montana, six months in jail, he could still continue serving in Congress. As factcheck.org explains, the Constitution does not say people convicted of crimes are barred from serving […]
Fun history trivia fact: Back in 1798, Matthew Lyon was actually elected to Congress while serving a four-month term for “libeling” President John Adams. Lyons won, and took his seat at the end of his prison sentence; the House mounted an unsuccessful effort to expel him; President Adams somehow managed not to grab Lyon by the neck, throw him to the ground, and punch him a few times.
Not surprisingly, the election is in some corners being seen as a referendum on the propriety of beating up members of the press, who really are asking for it by being all nosy and asking questions that aren’t polite, and sometimes even rude. Also, a whole bunch of people pointed out that in 2014 Jacobs himself had made a joke about punching an annoying 16-year-old at CPAC:
So clearly, actually assaulting reporters is justified now. They started it, after all. Great Pizzagate Journalist and walking conspiracy-theory factory Mike Cernovich — who has White House press credentials — had this well-thought-out justification of violence against reporters — or at least not condemning it, because the left is full of terrorists:
Then there are the big-league supporters of roughing up journos, like Rush Limbaugh, who on his Thursday show rhapsodized over what a studly manly stud Gianforte was, only he used irony, so it doesn’t count as an endorsement, haw haw:
I must join the chorus of people condemning what happened out there. This manly, obviously studly Republican candidate in Montana took the occasion to beat up a pajama-clad journalist, a Pajama Boy journalist out there … And the manly, studly Republican simply didn’t realize that on the big stage you can’t do this kind of stuff and kicked the guy’s ass to the ground. This cannot be accepted. This must be condemned.
Besides, noted the rape apologist and alleged Dominican rentboy aficionado, Jacobs had it coming, since he was an “average Millennial.” Also, have you noticed how the only people who say “studly” are guys who are not, but admire guys who they think are?
From a Christian perspective, the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios said on her radio show Thursday that the whole thing sounded like mere playground antics, and figures Ben Jacobs instigated the whole thing just to get his name in the paper, since obviously a byline on a story about Gianforte’s thoughts on the AFCA’s CBO score simply wasn’t enough for the simpering publicity-hound:
“I’m sure Ben Jacobs is probably delighted about what he caused to happen,” Rios said, adding that Gianforte’s response was understandable given how “aggressive” and “rude” members of the press are.
“Do you have no rights at all to fight back?” she asked, reminiscing about old movies in which the men would constantly “get in fights with each other.”
“I remember when men used to actually settle things between themselves,” she said, “but now, in this culture, if you respond with any kind of anger, that’s a terrible thing.”
“Has something been lost in us becoming maybe over the line in terms of every touch, every glance, every attempt at settling a circumstance is punishable by law?” she wondered, saying the Gianforte/Jacobs altercation “all sounds very grade school playground-y, the kids that go, ‘He hit me.’ That’s what [Jacobs] sounded like to me.”
Besides, this is Jesus Bible America, and in Jesus Bible America, manly men shouldn’t have to put up with reporters whose newspapers have written unkind things about them. Since when did Jesus Bible America become a place where the police get called when there’s an assault?
“There is a natural anger that comes when someone invades your space and abuses their ability to do what it is they’re doing, they’ve gone across a line,” she continued, again lamenting that “we’ve lost some ability to settle things on our own by having this kind of girly-man response and this litigation and calling the police instead of just settling it.”
Boy, if Rios ever hears about that Jesus guy who didn’t even use a gun to mow down his enemies, she’s gonna be pissed at what a girly-man he was. What a wimp!
As of press time, Yr Wonkette has not yet learned whether Gianforte’s rightwing fans have condemned him for his cowardly apology to the sissy millennial journalist; presumably, once the new Montana representative is sworn in, he’ll be presented with a commemorative print of Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner with a cane:
Or maybe not — Brooks was a Southern Democrat, and we know they’re all pro-slavery terrorists to this day, so the message might be a bit mixed.
But let us not lose hope about the state of the national political discourse, which, as the Brooks/Sumner incident illustrates, has sometimes included hotheaded morons (Brooks received witty gifts of canes for the rest of his life, haw-haw). If you want to feel a little better about things, consider this fine photo essay by Amanda Terkel, catching all sorts of politicians in the act of not assaulting journalists at all.
As for slammy-punchy Greg Gianforte, Rob Quist advisor and Montana Democratic consultant Matt McKenna has some thoughts about 2018:
“This is the first day of the end of Greg Gianforte’s political career,” McKenna said. “It may seem like he got away with this because so many people already voted, but they will deny him the prize he really wants which is the governor’s office. He could go to jail. He still has to be arraigned.”
If you find out Mr. McKenna has been getting death threats, please keep it to yourself.
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Last year, former Playboy Playmate of the Year Dani Mathers caused a stir online after posting a picture on Snapchat of a 70-year-old woman showering at her gym, next to a picture of herself covering her mouth and giggling, along with the caption “If I can’t unsee this then you can’t either.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people didn’t find Mathers’ comment anywhere near as adorable as she thought it was. Especially the woman whose photo she took without permission. The idea of a Playboy Playmate snidely commenting on the body of a 70-year-old woman was particularly galling. As if only Playboy Playmates have the right to use the shower at the gym or something.
Mathers claimed that she didn’t understand how to work the Snapchat and thus didn’t publicly post the photo on purpose, and had meant to only send it to a friend. Which didn’t make things much better, as that’s still a really horrible thing to do.
She later taped a 40 second apology video in which she stated that body shaming is wrong, and explained that she is totally a body positive person who loves to celebrate the female form because she posed naked for a living or something.
As you can see, it was very convincing.
But Mathers didn’t only suffer a backlash online, she also found herself in court. Because surprise! It is actually very illegal to take a photo of someone in the nude without their permission and post it on the internet, no matter how cute you think you are being.
This week, Mathers had her day in court and entered a plea of no contest to a misdemeanor invasion of privacy charge, for which she was sentenced to 30 days of community service and three years probation.
The highlight of this hearing was the fact that Mathers wanted to do her community service by going around to schools and talking about social media — which her attorney suggested was an “upshot” — but the judge was like “Yeah, we don’t actually want her around children.”
“I think the upshot is she wanted to go to schools to talk about the evils of social media and how simple mistakes can be catastrophic, and the judge did not want her in schools.”
She will instead be serving her time cleaning up graffiti. Maybe I’m jaded (I AM VERY JADED) but it sure does seem like going around to schools and talking about herself seems like it would be more of a PR opportunity than a punishment. Generally speaking, most judges do not sentence you to good publicity.
Now, Mathers is currently unemployed but wishes to become a nurse someday — though probably only at hospitals for the really, really, really good-looking so she does not actually have to see anything that might scar her delicate eyes again. Clearly, she’s just very fragile that way. However — given the recent trend of Republicans excitedly voting for the worst possible humans — she might actually want to consider running for office. How’s her left hook?
Another day, another chapter in the misadventures of our MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL president, Donald Trump. What did this day bring? Well, it is a video, that he tweeted, of him wrestling the CNN logo to the ground.
Now, people are doing the whole “Oh, he’s promoting violence against the news media!” thing with this. And sure. Fine. What else is new? But what we really have to consider here is who even made this video? Obviously it was not Donald Trump. Certainly he couldn’t get it together to do that himself. So he had to like, go to someone else and ask them to make this video for him, and then that person was like “Yes, in no way is this a bad idea. I will get right on that!” Which either means that this person really hates him, or is just as ridiculous and exhausting as he is.
It is probably the latter, as according to a report from The Washington Post, everyone else in the White House thinks this war with the media is him doing some form of “winning,” but that they’d prefer he focus said war efforts on his feud with CNN:
Some White House advisers said they were frustrated that the Brzezinski feud — which continued to unfurl throughout the day Friday with accusations and counteraccusations — overtook the president’s fight with CNN, which seemed in their eyes to have clearer villains and heroes.
We’re pretty sure the Mika Brzezinski feud had VERY CLEAR heroes and villains. Just not the ones they wanted.
All theories are welcome, in this, your OPEN THREAD.
‘You’ve seen one pile of snow, you’ve seen them all’ — Ronald Reagan
In an impressive deployment of strategic bafflegab, the Interior Department has the most excellent spin ever for its decision to refuse to let Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg meet with top climate experts when he visited Glacier National Park in Montana last weekend: No meetings with people who could talk about climate change, like the park’s superintendent and top research ecologist, because it wouldn’t be fair to ordinary Americans if the park offered special treatment to some stupid nosy celebrity who’d just make noise about so-called “global warming.” Just listen to the excellent job of press management done by Interior Department press secretary Heather Swift, in an email to the Washington Post:
“The park gets 3 million visitors a year, most of them coming in the summer months,” Swift wrote. “July is peak season. A number of Park rangers were made available for the celebrity’s personal tour but allocating such extensive government resources to a celebrity would have been a waste of money and a disservice to average parkgoers.”
Swift didn’t quite explain why the needs of ordinary parkgoers would have not been met if the delegation that showed Zuckerberg around had included park superintendent Jeff Mow or U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist Daniel Fagre, who told the Post earlier this week that he’d been told not to meet with Zuckerberg. It’s not like they’re usually manning the ticket booth or picking up trash in the parking lots.
Instead, the Interior Department was out to limit too much factual information about this “climate change” nonsense getting into Zuckerberg’s head, according to Interior Department insiders, who would be as interior as you can get. If the goal was economy, it seems maybe that didn’t work so well, since Interior held
days of internal discussions — including conference calls and multiple emails — among top Interior Department and Park Service officials about how much the park should roll out the welcome mat for Zuckerberg[.]
Zuckerberg, after all, is one of several techie billionaires who have been very critical of Donald Trump’s decision to trash the Paris climate agreement and the planet, so it simply wouldn’t do to give Zuckerberg too warm a welcome at Glacier, lest he discover the administration’s secret plan to defeat ices.
Swift made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want Mow meeting with Zuckerberg, and that park staff were to say nothing about the visit on social media, because after all you don’t want the enemy to get a publicity advantage:
[The] Park Service’s public affairs staff was instructed not to post anything about Zuckerberg’s visit on its Facebook or other social media accounts, including sharing a Facebook post he wrote during the visit in which he registered his alarm at the shrinking glaciers at the park, according to someone with knowledge of the directive.
“The fact that you would have been sharing Mark Zuckerberg’s views with 93 million followers is going to give it that much more lift,” said one Park Service employee who was not authorized to discuss the deliberations and requested anonymity.
Here’s that Facebook post, which indicates someone on the tour nevertheless spilled the beans about climate change instead of going with the cover story that the glaciers are receding because they’re shy:
Welcome to the Age of Trump: Meetings about celebrity visits to national parks are treated as if they involved military secrets. Haha, we are of course engaging in hyperbole — if Zuckerberg’s visit were really that big a secret, we’d have only learned about it when Donald Trump told the Russian foreign minister about it.
Glacier Park superintendent Mow, who has no qualms telling ordinary park visitors that the glaciers of Glacier Park are definitely disappearing due to a warming climate, seemed awfully diplomatic in an interview about being shut out of the tour for Zuckerberg; he said he wasn’t involved in any of the planning, and learned he was disinvited when he got an email from other park officials who discussed who should be allowed near the dangerous internet man:
“The way I look at it is whenever you have a new administration, it takes a while for them to get settled,” Mow said. “It’s an issue of people learning their jobs. They’re going to make mistakes along the way.”
“It’s growing pains and learning just how far you are going to get into the day-to-day operational issues at a park,” he said.
The Post didn’t say whether Mow also blinked out in Morse Code, “I W-O-U-L-D L-I-K-E T-O K-E-E-P M-Y J-O-B,” but he made his point clearly enough.
Fagre said he was “puzzled” that he was removed from the group guiding Zuckerberg, and said that he hadn’t been given a reason for the decision. He has published extensively on the connection between global warming and glaciers disappearing, which probably means he would have just wasted a lot of valuable Park Service money telling Zuckerberg about that research when he should be in his lab staying quiet and not rocking the boat.
Ever the purveyors of fake news, the Post seemed skeptical of Swift’s claim that fiscal restraint was the primary motive for keeping Mow and Fagre away from Zuckerberg, noting that
it is common at national parks, particularly premier ones such as Glacier, for the superintendent to greet and give tours to prominent visitors, largely to help promote the Park Service and in some cases to develop relationships that could eventually lead to philanthropic donations. Forbes listed Zuckerberg’s net worth as $63.3 billion Thursday.
Mow said he meets regularly with visitors, from members of Congress to school groups.
“It’s very rare for us to say no to anybody if I’m available and it works for my schedule,” he said.
Shh! Don’t give credence to the fake news, Superintendent! You’re only encouraging the violent left! Next you’ll have radical black-clad antifa activists all over, breaking the glaciers and burning them for kicks, and rampaging through the meadows beating up anyone in a MAGA hat. If that happens, the militias may have to come and restore order in the park, and also maybe do some oil drilling and coal mining.
Not many rules exist on the dumping ground for cute cat videos and short bursts of verbal diarrhea that we call the Internet. There’s Rule 34, the so-called “Streisand effect”, and Ethan Zuckerman’s cute cat theory of digital activism, but there just isn’t much that galvanized humanity to collectively agree on anything. However, in the wake of Charlottesville, much of the Internet was forced to face the reality that it has helped empower the very hate groups responsible for the death of Heather Heyer.
Rather than engage in the usual arguments about what constitutes free speech, the Internet’s hivemind has decided to slap neo-Nazis with comically large banhammers. Over the last week, webhosts joined social media platforms and even e-dating sites in denying service to neo-Nazis.
As the week went on, Daily Stormer kept trying to secure hosting on the open web. After being hilariously denied by Russian servers, they were back online for a second — at least until NameCheap bailed out on hosting hate speech.
In fact, neo-Nazis across the web found themselves the target of rather clever doxxing attacks. Social media users began to ID Nazi protesters from Charlottesville using photos and video from news outlets, causing a number of bigots to be “You’re Fired,” and booted off Facebook and Twitter. Chris Cantwell even found his OKCupid profile perma-banned, with CEO Elie Seidma commenting, “OkCupid has zero tolerance for racism. We make a lot of decisions every day that are tough. Banning Christopher Cantwell was not one of them.”
As white nationalist and other hate groups are kicked off the open web, there is concern from a few legitimate free speech and open Internet advocates. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took issue with Google and GoDaddy’s move in a blog post stating, “the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world,” because the internet is becoming increasingly decentralized as web companies merge and people congregate on large social media sites. Their argument isn’t in defending Nazis as much as it’s a warning of the precedent being set in censoring assholes simply for being festering pus-filled warts spewing bile and shit.
The technical censorship of hate groups is becoming a serious concern for super nerds. Google and Facebook are two of the largest communication platforms in our society, and it should raise serious ethical questions when Steve Bannon proposes regulating them as public utilities, Ted Cruz bitches about LIBERAL political influence, or some talking head screams about anti-trust lawsuits. As the war against fake news continues to be fought primarily by vigilant users who call “bullshit” on Breitbart and other “alt-right” propaganda, it’s worth considering whether a proverbial nuclear option on hate speech is fair when the goal of that speech is literal genocide.
As you may be aware (SIGH), idiots on 4chan have taken to making up fake Twitter profiles for Antifa and Antifa “members.” This is something they do with stunning regularity in order to push their own far Right positions. Often it’s women rejecting feminism, black people rejecting anti-racism, or people embracing those things in the most absurd way they can imagine, in hopes of getting reasonable people to think that they support absurd things.
On Wednesday, trolls on 4chan’s /pol/ board attempted to launch a new #PunchANazi/#PunchNazis campaign on social media in which their fake Antifa profiles would support domestic violence, in hopes of convincing people that the Left LOVES domestic violence and thinks it is super great.
The goal, as usual, was to get actual Antifa and supporters to retweet the memes, which of course did not actually happen.
The memes included clever jargon like “She said she was right-wing, so I gave her a left hook,” and “It’s all right, she’s alt-right,” next to pictures of women with black eyes. There were also several with pictures of abused children with text suggesting they be murdered because they might be the next Hitler.
However, given that they posted their nefarious plans on a public message board, and that this campaign was both incredibly obvious and stupid, said plans were quickly discovered by several people online, including David Futrelle of We Hunted The Mammoth, and British citizen journalist Elliot Higgins, best known for identifying the weapons seen in uploaded videos from the Syrian Civil War. It was then reported on by the BBC.
AND NOW THEY ARE SAD!
Because who would have thought that planning something this ridiculous on a public message board could have gone awry! Weird!
Of course, some were pretty sure that it definitely still worked, because even if they got found out, they totally pointed out… something.
The thing with these message boards — which I maintain are a thousand times more toxic than any alt-right spokesperson could ever dream of being — is that those who use them become so deeply enmeshed in their own views that they actually do legitimately believe they are making sense, and that this is a thing they can “trick” the left into being on board with. They are essentially brainwashed.
Part of their agenda as of late has been to try to drive a wedge between white women and people of color. Not because they particularly like women — they don’t, and many appear to be very upset about the 19th Amendment — but because feel that this is the easiest way to split the Left, and because they have recently decided that in order to achieve their aims, they need white women to join them, for breeding purposes only.
On the bright side, they make themselves remarkably easy to track. Not only can we see what they are plotting on 4chan, but we can look through Twitter and see what accounts posted these memes, and keep track of them that way as well. Whoops!
Over on another thread, several /pol/ denizens were also whining about how they have been infiltrated by outsiders and “normies” posting threads and “making it difficult for /pol/ users who could potentially benefit from knowing certain information, and potentially coherently gather and discuss certain things, from doing so.”
Which I think means they definitely want us to go over there and start posting constantly about flower arranging, right?
Steve Bannon is promising to “never turn” on Trump, however he is threatening to “light up” Mitch McConnell now that he has the “power.” Gee, it’s tough to imagine why anyone would accuse this guy of trying to suck his own dick.
At a time when it seems like America is full of awful people who’d happily welcome a return to a nice state of civil war, when the president is a fatuous idiot who has no idea what he’s doing, and when really pretty much everyone is terrible, let’s take a moment to remember that most of us have some heroism inside us, and a lot of us can be pretty damned impressive when we’re called on to help others. Let’s have some appreciation for all the neighbors helping neighbors in Texas, because that’s just what you do.
The “Cajun Navy,” a loose-knit group of Louisiana volunteers who organized to help out after Katrina in 2005, has headed to Houston with their boats and trailers, where they’re using social media to help supplement the official rescue response. On a Hurricane Harvey Facebook page, Cajun Navy member Gary Davis of Youngsville, Louisiana, said they were on the way, and asked for as much detail as possible to ensure quick help:
People began asking for help, and they got it, too:
Katie Heaslip Pechon, of Madisonville, Louisiana, told NOLA.com Sunday that she and over 100 other Cajun Navy volunteers were working in Houston:
She said volunteers from Bayou Gauche and New Orleans are “headed out” to Texas “right now” to provide aid to residents in need. She stressed that people with boats are coming “out of the woodwork” to lend a hand. The Cajun Navy is also paired up with southeastern Louisiana storm spotters, she added.
Lots of boat heroes all over the area; this rescue was photographed by LA Times photojournalist Robert Gauthier:
LA Times reporter Matt Pearce has the details, which involves rescuers rescuing some guys who went to rescue others:
At the water’s edge, a Houston Police Department high-water rescue boat hauled out a trio of men in their underwear: Alex Domingues, 41, Mitchell Calderon, 19, and Emanuel Calderon, 20, all of them grinning. They had stripped down to their skivvies to swim to the rescue of an elderly man and woman, who by now were also in the boat.
“We seen the lady in her walker trying to walk on the other side of the water,” Emanuel Calderon said. “We took off our clothes — less weight.”
The man they helped rescue was Frank Andrews, 74, who has difficulty walking after four back operations in recent years. One of the Houston officers asked Andrews if there was anyone the authorities could call to notify that he was OK.
“I got nobody to help me, bottom line,” Andrews replied, sitting in a walker that converts to a chair. “It’s just the way it is. I don’t have a wife or a girlfriend.”
Andrews had tried to wait out the storm in his home, but it flooded, and he had no flood insurance: “shame on me,” he said. “It’s a quagmire, man.” While he was waiting at the side of a flooded freeway for help, the three young men swam over to help him, wrapping a sheet of plastic over his shoulders to keep him dry while waiting for a boat to come.
Then there was Daniel Gross, a 15-year-old kid who was helping his dad use a kayak to rescue neighbors who’d been flooded out. At one point, he got separated from his dad and the kayak, and waited on top of a flooded car until a police boat picked him up. Once reunited with his father, he headed right back out to keep helping people.
Or give a listen to this brief NPR story about a hero with no boat, Mashon Hunt, a 17-year-old from Rockport, Texas, who was one of several people who found the doors of a local elementary school open, and with her mom, pitched in to help provide for some 250 locals who made their way to the school:
You really can’t go far on Twitter without finding more evidence that people are, as the little girl said in her diary in 1944, really good at heart:
Were there some people who took the opportunity to be A Idiot? Of course — at least on Twitter, though not, apparently, on the ground or the water in Houston. Some entrepreneurial-success blogger from Godknowswhere dicksplained why red states are better at human decency than stinky leftists:
And A Idiot had Thoughts about how we don’t need Big Government, just neighbors in boats:
Yes, there were jerks. You’ll be delighted to know that while their sentiments got a few “likes,” they mostly elicited replies saying, in essence, either help or shut your piehole. Yr Wonkette doesn’t care who the Boat Heroes voted for — and we know for a fact a lot of them are #MAGA TRUMPs — we’re just glad they were there to help. And that the emergency services and FEMA will be there to help with stuff volunteers can’t do by themselves. It’s this social contract thing that we’re very big on. We really are all just a storm or an earthquake or, on a smaller scale, a car wreck or a job loss from disaster. And we help each other, even the people we yell at online sometimes. (OK, maybe we wouldn’t piss on Sebastian Gorka if he were on fire, but then again, we might.)
If you’re in a mood to help, we have a ton of links in our earlier Texas article. If you’re in an area affected by Hurricane Harvey and you know of someone needing help, the Cajun Navy is urging people to download the Zello Walkie Talkie app (Android link / iPhone link) and type “texas search and rescue” to find the nearest helpers. They really are everywhere.
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Now as long as Barbara Bush doesn’t say they’ve got it pretty good…
Donald Trump has headed to Texas so he can live out another of those Tweets from the past that persist in coming back to dog him:
But we’re not here to talk about that, or Melania’s flood-appropriate stiletto heels, either (Message: I’m Not Even Pretending I Care). No, we’re here to now praise excellent ordinary people who are just out there getting muddy and wet and helping, because that’s what you do, as that puddle-standing guy reminded us yesterday, while also reminding us what a president sounds like:
So let’s salute some folks who are just out there making the wet watery wasteland a little bit better for their neighbors. We honestly don’t care who any of the people in these stories voted for. We only care that they’re helping right now.
You Won’t BELIEVE This Furniture King’s Amazing Deals On Free Shelter!!
Jim McIngvale, owner of Gallery Furniture in Houston, has opened up his two furniture stores to house people seeking shelter from the storm. Again! After Katrina, he took in people who had fled New Orleans, and now he’s letting people from his own city park themselves on his couches, beds, and dinette sets as long as they need some temporary shelter. He told CNN’s Alysin Camerota he’s putting up 360 people in one store, and about 400 in the other, adding, “So we’ve got lots of people displaced from the horrible flooding and we’re thrilled to have them.”
He’s not worried that his inventory will be ruined by all the visitors — but if there are some scuffs and dents, that’s what the scuff and dent sales are for. He’s on the high ground — physically and morally — so inventory is the least of his worries right now:
“Some of them will stay two or three days, some will stay as long as a week until they get back on their feet but you know, these are great people,” he said. “They’re not hard on the inventory, they’re fine. We’ve got nothing but good things to say about all these people that have gone through these incredible tragedies.
“The other morning a young boy came up to me, he was about 7 years old, and he’s carrying, stumbled in here and he was crying and he said his parents, who obviously couldn’t speak English. he said, ‘can we stay here?’ Just breaks your heart.
“We’re thrilled to have these people here and life dealt them a bad hand, trying to help relieve some of the stress and anxiety on them right now and hope to get back to a life of normalcy in the future.”
Both of the stores have on-site restaurants, so he’s able to feed his guests, too. Pets are welcome, too, on-leash or in travel crates. McIngvale is happy just to be in a position to help:
We feed all the folks breakfast, lunch and dinner and try to take care of them like they’d be taken care of at a hotel. If we can make life easier as they try to get something back, we’ve done something right in our life.
In case you were wondering what an actual saint looks like, an actual saint looks like a guy who goes on Twitter dressed in a goofy mattress outfit, and will not be undersold.
A mensch in a goofy costume
Cajun Navy Brings Drowned Woman Back From The Dead, No Big
Three BOAT HEROES with the volunteer “Cajun Navy” from Louisiana found 73-year-old Wilma Ellis floating facedown in Houston’s flood waters Monday morning. She wasn’t breathing, but that’s what your first-aid training is for:
Joshua Lincoln of Madisonville, Ricky Berrigan of Lacombe and Donnie Davenport of Pearl River were motoring their flatboat northeast of Houston when they came across 73-year-old Wilma Ellis, floating face down.
“I thought it was a trash bag,” Lincoln said. “She was wearing a black shirt.
“The lady must have been crossing in some current. She floated right to the boat. We jumped out and got her and gave her compressions right there in the water. We were holding her from behind.”
After about 15 chest compressions, Ellis began to cough and breathe on her own, Lincoln said.
Ms. Ellis was wearing a hospital bracelet at the time the men rescued her, but they weren’t initially able to find anyone she was related to. She was frightened and seemed disoriented; after the rescuers got her to a shelter and posted her picture on Facebook, a network of people asking around found Ellis’s grandson, Jerele, who made arrangements to pick her up. Another happy outcome, oh, and a bit of lifesaving. Mssrs. Lincoln, Berrigan, and Davenport were glad to find out the family had been reunited, then got back to work rescuing people — after urging people to donate what they can spare to help the flood victims. (Here’s that list of charities again!)
At the Philadelphia Inkwire (we’re assured this is local pronunciation), columnist Will Bunch is out to make you cry with a brief overview of any number of human beings who have been dehumanized in one media outlet or another — starting with journalists, who are so very dishonest that the president says they’re enemies of the people — who turn out to be very, very human, and have been doing their part to rescue people. For instance, Ed Lavandera, from lying, failing CNN, who enemied of the people and helped a woman, her two elderly parents, and their little dog into his boat. How big a media monster is Lavandera? When it was time to help the woman’s mom get out of the house, he asked his camera operator to shut off the camera, since the woman had Alzheimer’s and he didn’t want anything that might upset the family to go out on live TV.
Or maybe there’s local reporter Brandi Smith, whose station, KHOU, had to be evacuated when the studio flooded; she was doing a live remote, saw a tractor-trailer rig in water up to the cab’s window, and flagged down a sheriff’s truck with a boat on a trailer to help the driver. The deputies hadn’t yet heard anything about the stranded truck:
Was there a bad reporter? There was. He narced out “looters.” AT A GROCERY STORE. Let’s get back to good people of goodness instead.
For instance, there’s Gloria Quintanilla, 60, whom a New York Times reporter found walking down a flooded street after wading a mile through the flood to get to her $10-an-hour job at a hotel, where she works ironing and folding sheets:
“I worked at the hotel up there,” she said when a reporter approached. As she walked, she explained that she was an immigrant from El Salvador, here since 1982. She makes $10 an hour washing and ironing sheets and towels at the Doubletree.
She had started the journey from home more than an hour before.
“It was my day to work, and I’m a very responsible person,” she said, speaking in Spanish. “I had no idea it was going to be like this.”
We’d say she’s one of our best, and we hope she gets a few days off. With pay.
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The Washington Posthas a SCOOP! and it is that Facebook was the worst during the 2016 election. No, for real! It turns out a Russian “troll farm” in St. Petersburg called the Internet Research Agency spent some money on Facebook political ads MAYBE for Trump, but who could possibly know, during the election, which is still a no-no, for now.
Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.
Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.
A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said, although they declined to say which candidate the ads favored.
Weird! Back in May, Massimo Calabresi published a massive report in Time magazine detailing these exact efforts. He was able to specifically report that Russians were buying Facebook ads, just like the Washington Post says:
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow’s agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. “They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by–they do that just as much as anybody else does,” says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.)
“No evidence”! That sounds just like the “no evidence” the New York Times found of Russia trying to fuck the election for Trump! Had Facebook simply not found evidence several months ago, or were they full of all the shit? Who can say! Should Facebook go to jail? If they did know, then surely they should, since foreigns spending money on elections IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM is very illegal. On the other hand, Clint Watts, a former FBI guy who is an expert in this kind of stuff, says Facebook is very “brave” for fessing up to this and doing everything it can to help. Regardless, if this means Facebook has fully come to the table and is truly willing to help Congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller, instead of being lying dicks about it, then that’s a good thing, since we’re guessing this report is just the $100,000 tip of the iceberg on what Russia did to the 2016 election on social media.
Calabresi described how in May of 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer from the GRU was picked up in surveillance bragging to one of his buddies that Russia was about to fuck Hillary Clinton the fuck up in the election. If you’ll remember, American intelligence has been listening to Russians yammering about Trump people for YEARS, but the specific date of the dude bragging about interfering with Hillary’s election chances is interesting, because during the very next month, June of 16, Donald Trump Jr. met at Trump Tower with a bunch of Russians, including a spy versed in the art of hacking. In the emails leading up to that meeting, Rob Goldstone, the intermediary who set it up, said the Russians were promising dirty dirt on Hillary, as “part of” the rogue nation’s support of Donald Trump. Also that month, we learned the Democratic National Committee had been hacked. That was also the month House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape “joking” that he thinks Russia is paying Trump. (And Dana Rohrabacher.)
As Calabresi noted at the time, the GRU officer bragging about RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE screwing with Hillary was “the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn’t just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote.”
The Washington Post quotes a Facebook official who says some of the ad buys they found (“approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 — associated with roughly 3,000 ads,” perFacebook’s blog post announcing this) were linked to the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm in St. Petersburg. It’s basically a Russian military intelligence operation. Indeed, it was mentioned in the January 2017 U.S. intelligence report on Russian interference in the election:
In its unclassified report in January, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Internet Research Agency’s “likely financier” is a “close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.”
So, of course, the big question here, and what Congress and Mueller are trying to suss out, is whether and how much Trump people helped Russia decide whom to target. The question becomes very important when you consider that WaPo’s reporting says that some of the ads were GEOGRAPHICALLY targeted. We don’t know exactly where “geographically” is, but we do know Donald Trump “won” the election by a tiny 77,000-vote sliver in three Rust Belt states. Makes ya wonder, don’t it!
In July, McClatchy reported that investigators were looking into Jared Kushner’s role as the head of the Trump campaign’s digital operations, as well as the activities of Brad Parscale, the guy Kushner oversaw in doing the Trump campaign’s dirty digital work.
In Calabresi’s May piece, he listed who else Congressional investigators think might have helped the Russians with their digital targeting:
Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump’s top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. “Nobody can prove it yet,” the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
WHOA IF TRUE, or whatever it is Wonkette says all the time.
So! Back to the original question: Should Facebook go to jail for its role in all this? LIKE this post on Facebook if you think “yes,” and SHARE it if you think “no.” Or the reverse of that. Do it whichever way you want, as long as ALL YOUR FUCKING CLICKS ARE BELONG TO US, because we are not Russian fake news.
Natural disasters often bring out the very best in people, like all the Boat Heroes in Texas, many of whom didn’t even need boats to be heroes. But then you get people like Sheriff Grady Judd, of Polk County, who let it be known on Twitter Wednesday that with Hurricane Irma on the way, he would not tolerate any evil-doers in county shelters. First he warned “sex offenders/predators” they wouldn’t be welcome, then anyonewith an outstanding warrant, because if you were a nice law-abiding family headed for a shelter, would you want YOUR children bedded down near someone wanted for failure to appear for a parking lot fender-bender? YOU WOULD NOT!
One good thing about the interwebs: If a public official does or says something suitably stupid, people will often notice. Judd’s tweets went viral, and by Thursday he was getting a bit tetchy about the whole thing:
“Never before did I think that we’d be beat up for giving people a warning and keeping people safe,” he told local television crews. “But hey, that’s okay.”
Look, here is Sheriff Judd casually conflating “everyone with a warrant” with “sexual predators” for Tampa Bay’s Fox affiliate:
We like how he explains that he’s really just all about giving people information, not grandstanding like a Tough Guy Sheriff who hopes maybe he’ll be lauded for Gittin’ Tough On Crime. And he really can’t see the fuss, since he’s only concerned for everyone’s safety — even those scofflaws who might have a warrant out for their serial parking violations. You see, since he warned them Wednesday, crimers had a choice: They could get right with the Law, or go seek shelter somewhere else that doesn’t care if fugitives are among them.
A spokesperson for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, Carrie Horstman, explained to the Orlando Sentinel it’s best for everyone with a warrant of any kind to turn themselves in, just to be on the safe side:
Horstman added officers don’t have a way of seeing what crime the warrant is for, so it’s possible those with non-violent misdemeanor offenses could be arrested.
“Officers are legally obligated to take a person into custody if they have a warrant,” she said.
Judd said in preparation for the hurricane, fugitives should turn themselves into the jail because “it’s a secure location.”
Horstman also emphasized, like her boss, that this is all about making the public feel safe, so they won’t worry about their little kids bedding down in a shelter where someone might be a sexual predator. At least one that’s got a warrant out. And if that means a few people with nonviolent offenses ride out the storm in a jail cell, well, so much the better: “We hope it actually leads to more people turning themselves in,” she said, apparently because she has very limited experience with actual human beings.
Still, there’s a pony of good news buried in all that horseshit: Horstman made it very clear the ID checks are for warrants only, and the deputies at shelters will not be looking at anyone’s immigration status. (Prepare for a tale of some idiot who stayed away from a shelter because they fear illegal immigrants more than a goddamn hurricane.)
The American Civil Liberties Union, always on the side of crimers, haters, sex fiends, and people who didn’t pay their fines for skipping out on a court date for failure to use a turn signal, was not pleased:
That seems awfully irresponsible of them, since anyone knows that most people with warrants out for their arrests are serial murderers and sex offenders, aren’t they? Let’s just say they are, so we can get reelected sheriff.
Sheriff Judd is actually a tad notorious for incidents in which he decided there might not be enough crime in his county, so he went out and created some, like the time in 2013-2014 he planned to arrest the parents of two girls he was sure had cyberbullied a teen girl into killing herself, although eventually all the charges were dropped in the case, and there was virtually no evidence of bullying at all.
A local TV news investigation also noted that Polk County was really doing well with asset forfeiture cases in which the sheriff’s office seized vehicles from men who turned out not actually to be sex offenders, although Sheriff Judd
repeatedly said men seeking children online was a problem in Central Florida, but provided few examples of actual children being approached.
In fact, the Justice Department complained that while Judd’s office received a lot of federal grant money for leading a Central Florida “Internet Crimes Against Children” (ICAC) task force, Polk County routinely took 20 to 30 days to follow up on tips, leading the DOJ to review the grants. The task force did a really crappy job of finding actual predators, although it tried real hard to entrap men who’d placed or responded to “Casual Encounters” personal ads on Craigslist. Here’s a f’rinstance (from another county, but remember, Polk County was the lead agency for the whole task force):
A 19-year-old man in Orange Co. was accused of soliciting the guardian of a 13-year-old decoy to arrange sex with her. But the evidence proved differently, as the man was merely responding to an innocuous ad from a 26-year-old woman, which was posted by law enforcement. The detective later tried to convince the man to have sex with the woman’s “younger sister,” even though he showed little interest.
According to notes from the prosecutor, “this is a tough case” because of “entrapment issues.” The man chatted with what he believed to be a 26-year-old woman for five days and the “Law Enforcement Officer suggest(ed) sex first on 2nd day.” The defendant said several times he wasn’t interested in the 13-year-old, even suggesting he bring a younger teenager boy for the girl when the detective kept bringing the teenager into the discussion. The prosecutor also noted the “law enforcement officer again suggests illegal sex 2 more times” but the defendant was non-committal.
Ultimately, after hundreds of text messages, the man agreed to sex with both females, and was arrested upon arrival. The state declined to prosecute, but the accusations and man’s name remain public record.
So, there’s your wave of sex crimes in Central Florida. While the task force didn’t catch any real sex crimers, it was awfully good at seizing the assets of men it entrapped:
[In] one January 2014 sting where the Clearwater Police Department (CPD) and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) arrested 35 men in a single weekend, CPD seized 19 cars as their own under Florida’s Contraband Forfeiture Act.
So maybe Sheriff Judd has a couple of different motives here: He wants to keep the children of Polk County safe from imaginary sex crimers, and maybe — if one is terribly jaded and cynical — he’s looking to boost some “criminal” property belonging to all those dangerous traffic-ticket thugs. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
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The Sheriff’s office in Chelan County, Washington, is doing an apology tour following someone from their office “accidentally” posting a meme to the official Chelan County Emergency Management page, depicting protesters being run over by a car along with the slogan “All Lives Splatter.” The meme, shared from the page “Libtards: ya gotta love ’em,” was accompanied by a status reading, “I don’t wish harm on anyone … but protesters don’t belong in the road!” With the insinuation being that if protesters are in the road, it is perfectly acceptable to run them over with your car. Because what else are you going to do? Not run over a human being with your car?
This comes on the heels not only of the Charlottesville rally, at which James Alex Fields Jr. ran over and killed 32 year-old Heather Heyer with his car, but another recent incident in Vancouver, Washington. The very same state that Chelan County is in!
This weekend, police in Vancouver arrested a man attending a far-right “Patriot Prayer” rally for attempting to drive his truck into a crowd of protesters. Luckily, no one was hurt, but not for lack of his trying.
At that same protest, a group of “Proud Boys” drove down the street pepper-spraying protesters, and subsequently crashed into a police vehicle. Very “Blue Lives Matter” of them!
It’s beginning to become pretty clear that this is not simply a crude meme or a joke to these people, and that they truly do not understand that it is wrong to try and run people over with your car. The comments on the meme itself make this clear:
This is not a “joke,” it’s a call to violence, and the people sharing this meme clearly seem to believe that not only is it “justifiable” to run over protesters in the street, it is completely legal. Posting something like this on the page of a sheriff’s office is going to solidify that belief.
The Sheriff’s Office of Chelan County is saying that this was done by accident, and that the staffer meant to share the meme to his own page.
“Staff at Chelan County Emergency Management feel terrible that this inappropriate and hurtful post made it onto the Facebook page,” Burnett wrote in the news release. “Changes have already been made in procedure to assure nothing like this will ever occur in the future.”
The thing is, this is not actually something one can easily do by “mistake.” For those of you who have never done the social media management thing, allow me to explain. In order to share something to the Facebook page of a page you manage, you have to go through SEVERAL steps. It’s not like you click share and whoopsie daisy it posts to a page you manage instead of your own account.
First, after you click share, you literally have to scroll down to the thing that says “Share to a page.”
Then, you have to select which page you want to share it to.
There’s a little more to it than just clicking share, and it’s pretty much impossible to do all that by accident. I’ve done social media management for years, and I’ve never posted something to a page I manage by accident. Also, for the record, I have never accidentally liked a porn video on Twitter.
Even if it was a mistake, the fact that someone who believes it is whimsical or cute to run over protesters with cars was working, in any capacity, for the police, is beyond disturbing. Someone at the office should probably inform him that murdering people with your car is illegal, and then fire him.
Tom Price owes taxpayers over a million Ameros now that MORE trips have come to light — he even used MILITARY aircraft to fly to Not America. It really makes you wonder if he’s going to be able to scam his way out of this one.
Nancy Pelosi is telling everyone in Washington to eat a dick after they criticized her for pushing a ban on gun silencers immediately after Rep. Steve Scalise returned to the Hill from his recovery from being almost murdered.
In his neverending quest to appear less like a smarmy corporate shithead who’s been skullfucking the city of Chicago for the last three years, Illinois Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a bill expanding the public funding of abortions.
The Rohingya are struggling to survive while politicians bicker with whether or not they should bother helping some Muslims in Not America. This is bad.
Surely this will bring the lamestream media to its knees
America’s Greatest Journalist, James O’Keefe, and his “Project Veritas” (Latin for “very tight underpants”) are back with another hard-hitting investigation of shocking liberal bias in the lamestream media, in which one of O’Keefe’s hidden-camera operatives catches a low-level twentysomething twit at the New York Times bragging about what an influential, connected guy he is. What! A low-level person in media with an inflated sense of his own importance? Stop the presses!
The typical O’Keefe method involves the undercover asshole manipulating someone into saying or doing something inflammatory, or inventing a wildly implausible scenario to show terrorists could bring Ebola virus into the USA by speedboat. This time out, though, O’Keefe actually does appear to have found a bona fide schmuck who works at the New York Times, one Nick Dudich, an “audience strategy editor” whose job is to place NYT-produced videos on various social media platforms like the Times Facebook page or YouTube channel.
The Project Very Tossed reporter catches Dudich talking trash about Donald Trump, going on a fair bit about his own politics, and outright making up a story about being James Comey’s godson. While Dudich is definitely happy to say he detests Donald Trump and fantasizes about using his position at the Times to somehow bring down the president, it’s worth noting that O’Keefe doesn’t offer a single example of Dudich actually slanting the news. How could he? Despite having a job title with “editor” in it, Dudich isn’t actually producing anything; he’s posting other people’s work to social media, at least until he gets shitcanned thanks to O’Keefe’s exposé.
Here’s the SHOCKING VIDEO that tears the lid off the biased New York Times, or at least finds one millennial dumbass who probably won’t be working there much longer. And yes, the title for the whole stupid project really is “American Pravda,” since obviously the New York Times gets its marching orders from either Moscow or the Deep State. Kind of hard to call it “government-controlled media” when the Republicans are in office.
We learn that before being hired to embed videos on social media, Dudich worked for both the Obama and Clinton campaigns, or at least he volunteered for them in some capacity, he says. He might be embellishing his role there, too, but O’Keefe treats him like he was a key operative — and now here he is, slanting the news!
Just recently out of direct politics, Dudich’s talents are now shaping, maybe even distorting, political coverage at the old Grey Lady.
Dudich mocks the idea of journalistic objectivity, and suggests “That’s why I’m here” — to somehow influence the news by picking videos that will go on Facebook. O’Keefe solemnly quotes the Times ethics handbook here:
Journalists have no place on the playing field of politics. Staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality or that of The Times.
We also get a segment of Dudich talking about how he’d like to bring down Trump; conveniently, O’Keefe has edited out whatever question prompted Dudich to say any of this:
I’d target his businesses, his dumb fuck of a son, Donald Jr., and Eric…
Target that. Get people to boycott going to his hotels. Boycott… So a lot of the Trump brands, if you can ruin the Trump brand and you put pressure on his business and you start investigating his business and you start shutting it down, or they’re hacking or other things. He cares about his business more than he cares about being President. He would resign. Or he’d lash out and do something incredibly illegal, which he would have to.
This looks like one of those trademark O’Keefe selective edits. What was the question? Perhaps “If you were devising a campaign’s media strategy to do the most damage to Donald Trump, what would it look like?” We don’t have any idea what the context for that bit of video is, but O’Keefe is happy to let the viewer assume Dudich’s discussion of what he’d do, or might want to do, is a description of his actual job duties at the Times. O’Keefe long ago stopped releasing the unedited video he works from, so we’ll never know what the “reporter” asked Dudich. Pure speculation: Maybe she pretended to be recruiting him to do media for an anti-Trump PAC.
The Project Verdigris hidden camera also catches Dudich in a great big lie about being James Comey’s godson, after which he spins a tale about having belonged to Antifa at some point in the past, where he punched Nazis and KKK guys in the face for the FBI, at the direction of his godfather James Comey:
The video devotes several dramatic minutes to debunking the Comey story, including a hilarious sequence complete with exciting graphics of maps and an airplane, while O’Keefe intones,
We sent the journalist to scour church records where we believe Dudich had been baptized. We sent undercover journalists to California, New England, Washington DC, and to Dudich’s aunt’s house in North Carolina.
And yes, they even use a hidden camera while interviewing Dudich’s aunt and his father, because — no reason, really, but if you’re going to be undercover, then goddammit, you’re undercover. His dad says he’s never even met Comey and has no idea why Nick would make that up. The unnamed Veritas operative then confronts Dudich with his falsehood, and the lad admits he made that all up because “It’s a good story.”
Shame on him! Why, that’s almost as outrageous as James O’Keefe’s first media stunt, when he went on “Fox & Friends” all dressed up like a pimp from a ’70s blaxploitation movie, even though he wore a plain ol’ suit to his selectively edited meetings with ACORN affiliates.
The video ends with O’Keefe doing his Serious Face and worrying very sincerely about journalistic ethics:
But the fact remains that Nick Dudich lies. And he’s a gatekeeper at the New York Times. And that fact should be worrisome to the bosses at the “paper of record.”
Then — without a single example of Dudich’s politics actually showing up in his work — it’s time to hop on O’Keefe’s Flexible Flyer for a trip down the slippery slope:
If the Times can’t sniff out people like Nick Dudich, journalists with such questionable integrity and character, who else are they letting spread disinformation in their name? Or is this more systemic? Does the Times lack journalistic integrity altogether?
The Usual Suspects in the wingnuttosphere have been going wild about this shocking exposé of the deep anti-Trump bias in everything the New York Times does, and the Times has responded to the kerfuffle, noting Dudich was hired only in the spring of this year, and releasing a statement from spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha:
Based on what we’ve seen in the Project Veritas video, it appears that a recent hire in a junior position violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role. In his role at The Times, he was responsible for posting already published video on other platforms and was never involved in the creation or editing of Times videos. We are reviewing the situation now.
Translation: This guy isn’t a reporter, he’s not making or editing videos, he exaggerated his importance, and has probably already been fired.
Then again, given his demonstrated skills of exaggeration and self-promotion, he might make a dandy addition to the staff of Project Veritas. Or perhaps Dudich will say he smelled a rat and was trolling O’Keefe’s “reporter” the whole time. Anything’s possible in a James O’Keefe joint.
Well OF COURSE he invokes Orwell, that ol’ socialist.
Yesterday, we told you all about the latest “investigation” by America’s Greatest Undercover Journamalist, James O’Keefe, whose “Project Veritas” (Latin for “be outraged at whatever footage we can scrape together”) had proven that a low-level guy who posts New York Times videos to social media has decidedly leftish politics, and really likes to brag about what a big deal he is, and therefore the mainstream media can’t be trusted.
In our story, we noted that while the target of the exposé, one Nick Dudich, definitely said mean things about Donald Trump and made up a dumb story about being James Comey’s godson, Project Vertigo didn’t actually show any evidence that Dudich had managed to actually slant the news through his fairly minor position as a guy pushing other people’s work onto social media platforms. Well! That caught the eye of somebody at Project Vanitas, because they called us out on the Twitter machine:
So we went and looked at their new video and print article, which has the catchy title “American Pravda, NYT Part II: Exploiting Social Media and Manipulating the News.” In it, we see Dudich bragging to Project Verbosity’s never-seen “reporter” about how he can place NYT videos where they’ll either get lots of views or sink into obscurity. The video then moves on to argue that because YouTube’s “news” section highlights videos from major newspapers and news networks, YouTube chooses which voices America gets to hear, and that’s not fair!
As proof that Dudich is doing a bunch of liberally biased exploiting and manipulating, we see him feeding a male “reporter” a load of cowflop about what an influential guy he is:
As an editor, I’m a gatekeeper so I can choose what goes out and what doesn’t go out. And let’s say we wrote something about Facebook negatively… We actually just did a video about Facebook negatively, and I chose to put it in a spot that I knew wouldn’t do well.
O’Keefe says, in a voiceover positively reeking of gravitas, that “Dudich’s biased treatment” of that story portraying Facebook in a negative light “is a clear violation of his company’s ethical handbook,” all for the sake of protecting the many friends Dudich claims he has in Silicon Valley. We then get another clip of Dudich talking to the lady “reporter” who got most of the hidden-cam video in the first video, telling her how he knows all the coolest proprietary stuff about YouTube. Somehow, the guy whose boasts about being James Comey’s godson were proof he’s an unreliable liar is now treated as an absolutely credible source. He says he knows how to game YouTube rankings and has lots of friends on the inside, so obviously that’s proof of liberal bias all over the news. This bastard made a video critical of Facebook vanish, just because he wanted to protect the interests of all his buddies in the tech industry — Outrageous!
Even assuming some spike in views yesterday from people who saw the Project Very Bad video, it looks like this Dudich boy is abysmally bad at burying news. Maybe Dudich was talking about “Keeping Indian Folk Painting Alive,” which only got 566 total views. America will never know the ugly truth about Indian folk painting, for sure.
Dudich does claim he has an advantage in getting good placement for NYT videos, because “my friends curate the front page” of YouTube — another boast Project Vermiform takes at face value. They meet with Earnest Pettie, a guy at YouTube who Dudich knows, and based on a seriously skewed interpretation of what he says, O’Keefe scolds YouTube for putting their finger on the scale and giving NYT videos “preferential treatment.” This is where the evidence of “bias” really starts falling apart, because it turns out Earnest Pettie is far more interested in talking about neato tech than in bragging about what an awesome, powerful guy he is.
Pettie, a “Brand and Diversity Curation Lead” at YouTube, does say a nice thing about Dudich, describing him as “one of the people I think who has more knowledge about YouTube as a platform than probably anyone else that I know,” but that’s a far cry from Project Volatile’s claim that Pettie “helps push Dudich’s videos to the top” — Pettie says nothing of the sort. But Pettie does talk, enthusiastically, about a relatively new feature in YouTube, the “news carousel” that appears at the top of Youtube’s News page:
And what nefarious shenanigans in skewing the news does he confess to on hidden camera? (Also, why a hidden camera? He’s happy to talk about his job.) He says the “news carousel” helps connect viewers with videos from YouTube’s news partners, which include major newspapers and TV news networks. The New York Times is one of those partners, so we guess that’s how Pettie supposedly “[pushes] Dudich’s videos to the top” — along with stuff from ABC, Fox News, Al Jazeera, the Today show, RT UK, and ESPN. The horror.
Here’s what James O’Keefe considers proof that YouTube is a horribly biased unfair slanter of the news, exactly like Pravda. Asked if YouTube’s algorithms can be fiddled with “to say, less of that?” (“That” presumably being content that YouTube wants to suppress.) Pettie explains,
Realistically, that’s what the… that’s what the news carousel kind of does. So like, it’s above the search results so, at the very least, we can say this shelf of videos from news partners is legitimate news because we know that these are legitimate news organizations. And if at that point, somebody decides they’re going to scroll past that and go find Alex Jones, well, they were looking for him to begin with anyway.
OMG they are picking winners and losers and not including Highly Respected Journalist Alex Jones among the legitimate news! This information tyranny, O’Keefe vows, will not stand, man. (Also, it turns out Pettie, interviewed in September, was a bit of an optimist — YouTube’s search algorithm needed tweaking after the site tossed up tons of conspiracy videos when people searched for information on the Las Vegas mass shooting.)
You can almost hear the men of Delta House humming “The Star Spangled Banner” as O’Keefe makes the perfectly reasonable argument that the very best standards for what counts as “news” are no standards at all:
“Illegitimate news,” what does that even mean? [Hey! Pettie never even says anything about “illegitimate” news organizations — Dok] Who decides what is legitimate and what is illegitimate? Why do they have the power to make someone legitimate or illegitimate just because they don’t like them? Is that really the environment, the news environment, that we want to live in?
Then he brings out the Big Intellectual Guns, invoking a dear old lifelong socialist of the last century who would have eaten O’Keefe’s lunch with vigor and spit out a satire on the silly little booger:
You know, George Orwell wrote a book called 1984, and in that book, he said “The Party told everyone to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears” — it was their final, most essential command. We finally have irrefutable proof that this kind of thing is happening. It’s happening on platforms that have almost universal control over the information we have access to, and honestly, it’s worrisome. Stay tuned.
We guess in O’Keefe’s understanding of the media landscape as mapped onto 1984, the Party is anyone who doesn’t recognize that the government is making the frogs gay.
So there’s Project Vespa’s proof that the New York Times is systematically slanting a news. A guy who works (or worked) there bragged about deep-sixing a video that actually got more views than most other recent NYT content, and a guy at YouTube confesses that they give preferential treatment to reality.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a human face looking at cat videos — forever.
