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689 results for “ThomHartmann”
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Is Fox News "The Greatest Cancer on American Democracy"?\
Hello
#SocalledFauxNEWS
¿:https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mediamatters+fox+news+nation# mediamatters # DuckDuckGo
https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-july-11https://www.mediamatters.org/take-action
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/jesse-watters-accuses-democrats-straight-treason
foxnews .com fox-nation…/
Thom Hartmann
https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-fox-news-the-greatest-cancer-on #SlaveholderReligion#mediamatters #DuckDuckGo
#leadsearchreturns -
Is Fox News "The Greatest Cancer on American Democracy"?\
Hello
#SocalledFauxNEWS
¿:https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mediamatters+fox+news+nation# mediamatters # DuckDuckGo
https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-july-11https://www.mediamatters.org/take-action
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/jesse-watters-accuses-democrats-straight-treason
foxnews .com fox-nation…/
Thom Hartmann
https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-fox-news-the-greatest-cancer-on #SlaveholderReligion#mediamatters #DuckDuckGo
#leadsearchreturns -
Rush –The Camera Eye
@ danielmoore550
(1 month ago)_I don't always listen to RUSH
But when I do, so do my neighbors@ marlenelindsey7638
(3 weeks ago)_Your comment wins
I’m listening from the retirement community I live in
At 8 PM it’s quiet time
Thank [spirit] for headphones
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9o4AQe4BJr0Blooms&Greens by Chloe
https://youtube.com/shorts/Fe8xxfswFw0Visual Acuity
https://youtube.com/shorts/4LYlMqBXTJIThom Hartmann –The last hours of ancient sunlight
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z_mTbg1OC0M -
Rush –The Camera Eye
@ danielmoore550
(1 month ago)_I don't always listen to RUSH
But when I do, so do my neighbors@ marlenelindsey7638
(3 weeks ago)_Your comment wins
I’m listening from the retirement community I live in
At 8 PM it’s quiet time
Thank [spirit] for headphones
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9o4AQe4BJr0Blooms&Greens by Chloe
https://youtube.com/shorts/Fe8xxfswFw0Visual Acuity
https://youtube.com/shorts/4LYlMqBXTJIThom Hartmann –The last hours of ancient sunlight
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z_mTbg1OC0M -
"The Putin GOP wants misinformation to reign as we head into the 2024 election. Without lies, they can’t win most competitive elections, and they want to keep those lies safe from fact-checking, regardless of what accurate information the voters need or the damage they inflict on our nation."
~ Thom Hartmann
#Republicans #misinformation #disinformation #WaronTruth #Putin #BigLie
/1https://hartmannreport.com/p/republican-attacks-on-fact-checkers-a98
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🧵
Approaching the end of candidate Kamala Harris #VeepStakes, some other notable reported #TimWalz supporters:Jacobin: "the Progressive’s Moderate, the Obvious VP Choice"
Emma Vigeland
Melanie D'Arrigo
Jordan Uhl
Astra Taylor
Harvey J. Kaye
Jen Perelman
David Sirota
Cenk Uygur (controversially, prefers Josh Shapiro)
Rebekah Jones
Randy Bryce
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Nancy Pelosi
David Rothkopf
Branko Marcetic
John Amato - Crooks & Liars
Annie Leonard
Bhaskar Sunkara
Thom Hartmann
Jessica Burbank -
When I divorced, I was seriously depressed. For a manic depressive, a dangerous place to be. For me, filing to finalizing: 3 months. In Texas there is a movement to extend the period of time to divorce: 6 mos. Thom Hartmann sites the difference in states where no fault divorce is legal vs states where it is illegal. Studies have shown that in no fault states there is a dramatic decrease in rates of female suicide, domestic violence, and spousal homicide of women. #WomensRights #NoFaultDivorce
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CW: Lengthy, right wing intolerance
They get triggered/melt in the face of any diversity--gay, black, transsexual, "woke," not Christian. It really bothers them. Who are the real snowflakes here?
They want the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else. Freedom of religion for me, but not thee!
Opinion | US Supreme Court Wants to Make America More Bigoted Again | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/07/us-supreme-court-wants-make-america-more-bigoted-again
#TheRightHatesDiversity
#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#RightWingSnowflakes
#Freedom4MeNotThee
#ChristianNationalism"Bigots are switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
THOM HARTMANN
December 7, 2022
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.Now they're going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires "creative" effort.
There was a time in America when any retail business could, as the old sign said, "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason." Often such proclamations were just slightly more subtle than the "No Negros," "No Jews," or "No Irishmen" signs they replaced, although they still pepper retail establishments across the nation.
And it's true that if you run a "public accommodation," you're welcome to toss out drunk, belligerent, naked, high, or otherwise offensive customers. Bars and airlines—clearly public accommodations—do it daily.
But, particularly since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there are boundaries around who you can and can't refuse to serve. Under federal law, you can toss out somebody because they're wearing a tee-shirt that has offensive language printed on it, but you can't toss out somebody because they're Black or wearing a yarmulke.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act specifically says a company doing business with the public can't discriminate based on "race, color, religion, or national origin."
And in 23 states plus Washington, DC you can't refuse service to somebody because of sexual orientation. (The Equality Act, which would put that protection into federal law, has passed the House twice, last year and in 2019, but died both times in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.)
Now the Supreme Court has those state laws protecting gay people in its cross-hairs in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case they heard argued yesterday: specifically Colorado's law that bans discrimination based on "disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry."
In a twist, the Republicans on the Court chose not to hear Lorie Smith's original argument that, through her company 303 Creative, she shouldn't have to make a website for a gay wedding because it offends her "deeply held Christian faith."
(Although no gay couple has ever asked her to make a wedding website—in fact, no couple of any sort has ever asked her to make any website for their wedding—she's apparently worried that it may happen and so, with big bucks from rightwingers behind her, took her case to the Supreme Court.)
Instead, Republicans on the Court used their majority status to decide, from among her various arguments, to shift the frame toward "creative expression," choosing to decide:
...
Tearing down Colorado's law in the name of "creative expression" is the new strategy for "Christian" fundamentalists to attack public accommodation laws; this is in large part a repeat of their failed effort to strike down Colorado's public accommodation law in the infamous 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop gay wedding cake case.
...
Bigots using religion as their excuse have chafed at these laws ever since Bobby Kennedy used them to forcefully integrate lunch counters in the South and his federal prosecutors used them to end racial and religious discrimination in hotels, theaters, and bars.Now they're switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
...
Is the guy painting my gay friend's house "creative" because he's helping choose colors and paint the house? How about a barber? Or the chef who owns his own restaurant or lunch counter? A bartender who custom-mixes cocktails?If this decision is handed down in Smith's favor and knocks down the Colorado law (and 22 other states'), expect a whole spectrum of businesses run by bigots and religious freaks to begin discriminating against people not protected by the federal Civil Rights Act, with queer people at the top of that list.
If SCOTUS goes the whole distance and guts the Civil Rights Act—like Republicans on the Court did with the Voting Rights Act in 2013—discrimination against women, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and the disabled will again become part of the American landscape."
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CW: Part 4 The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism?
Part 4
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people.Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism
#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich"By 2020 almost two-thirds of all Americans would be wiped out by a single $400 unexpected expense, and between foreign imports and the gig economy most people entering the job market were looking at a poverty-grounded lifestyle.
Reaganomics succeeded in accomplishing Russell Kirk’s goal. The white middle class has largely become the white working poor, and the sense of safety their parents and grandparents enjoyed had evaporated.
As Alan Greenspan, in 1989, told the Wall Street Journal and I documented in my book Screwed: the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, he believed his main job as Reagan’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve was to maintain a “necessary” minimum level of “worker insecurity.” (Republican former private equity executive and now Fed chair Jerome Powell has revived this ideology.
Meanwhile, for forty years Republicans from Schlafly to Reagan to Trump told white workers that the enemies who’d “stolen” their good union jobs were not the morbidly rich who’d shipped them overseas: the “bad guys” were liberals, women, Blacks, and Hispanics.
There is a debate about whether fascists are primarily motivated by economics, authoritarianism, or just pure racism. The answer is: “all of the above.”
But the Germans didn’t start looking for Jewish “others” until the Treaty of Versailles wrecked that country with its worst depression in its known history. Out of that grew Hitler, as John Kenneth Galbraith had correctly predicted would happen if the Treaty contained extreme economic punishments for Germany.
And out of Reaganism gutting the middle class grew a Trump wannabe dictatorship that lives on in demagogues like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Rick Scott — all backed up by a massive network, often funded by the morbidly rich, of rightwing talk stations, podcasts, and online publications.
This isn’t experienced just at the level of the individual, of course, but far more deeply and powerfully as a corrosive poison that hollows out an entire society from within.
At the same time the white middle class was being gutted, the Black middle class that grew particularly fast after the Great Society reforms of the mid-1960s took a hit, too. Republicans then reached out to African Americans, arguing that their problems were all caused by Mexicans or Asians, while also telling Hispanics (now on hundreds of Spanish-language rightwing radio stations) that Black people are coming for their jobs.
“Divide and conquer” is as old as Julius Caesar.
Today they are funding new networks of Spanish-language “conservative” radio and television programming nationwide, telling mostly-Catholic Hispanics that Democrats are using abortion to produce a Latino genocide and that Democrats want to turn their children into drag queens.
Kirk’s original vision was to produce a more secure and stable America.
Like so many conservatives before him, from Edmund Burke (who opens Kirk’s book) to today’s columnists for major mainstream publications and talking heads on rightwing “News” stations and networks, he argued that when “those people” were simply held down, suppressed, and marginalized — when people knew their place and were kept in it — society would function smoothly.
Oligarchy is a good thing, they said, with white rich people (in constant need of trillions in government subsidies and tax cuts) running the show. They are promoting, essentially, an American version of fascism.
That it would build a middle class here in America instead of an authoritarian police state, as it has throughout history, was a fantasy then and its a fantasy now.
And it’s brought us the dystopian reality of a weakened economy (except for the rich), racial hatred, and now a full-blown fascist anti-democratic anti-republican movement grounded in a bizarre conspiracy cult led by demagogues like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ron DeSantis.
While Black history is under attack in schools across the nation by these same people, white Americans also need to learn their their own history and Reaganism’s role in it."
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CW: Part 3 The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism. Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism?
Part 3
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism
#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich"In the election of 1980 the Democrats were awash in union money, so didn’t much take advantage of Powell’s twin SCOTUS decisions, but the GOP leaped at the opportunity. Millions flowed from rich individuals and huge corporate behemoths — particularly the fossil fuel industry — into Republican coffers, sweeping Reagan into office that year.
Thus, Reagan set out to make sure the dystopia he and other wealthy white men had glimpsed during the “unrest” of the 1965–1979 era was never repeated:
Unions were crushed and formerly unionized jobs were aggressively offshored; individual states started passing “right to work for less” laws that devastated union membership; an entire union-busting industry was birthed that today makes over $2 billion a year terrifying workers.
Voting rights were circumscribed by Karl Rove’s 1980s invention called “caging” where postcards were sent into minority and union neighborhoods and when they weren’t returned the voters were purged from voter registration lists. The US Supreme Court legalized this just a few years ago in a case involving Governor Mike DeWine and Secretary of State John Husted in Ohio who were throwing hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters off the rolls just before elections (as Ken Blackwell had done in Ohio to help Bush win the 2004 election).
Voter ID laws and other criminalizations of normal voting behavior were passed that excluded as many as 20 percent of potential Black and Hispanic voters, as well as college students and elderly Social Security voters, from casting ballots.
Massive antiabortion organizations were funded and mobilized to push back against the women’s rights movement, and white evangelical churches — which had been mostly pro-abortion rights prior to 1980 — cashed in on the movement and further empowered it, leading straight to packing the Supreme Court and the Dobbs decision.
Phyllis Schlafly led a national campaign urging women to stay out of the workplace and be obedient to their husbands, while also working against labor and abortion rights in the media and the courts.
Government programs to provide minorities with “bootstraps” (ranging from civil rights enforcement to affirmative action to basic food, education, and housing subsidies) were gutted. And the cultural demonization of college professors, queer people across the spectrum, and public intellectuals went mainstream.
In 1980 about two-thirds of white workers had either a union job or its equivalent (unions set local wage floors, generally, even in non-union shops) and most of what was consumed in America was manufactured here. Housing, college and healthcare were all affordable.
With just one single wage-earner, about two-thirds of Americans — most of them white— were living the American Dream, buying a home and car, taking an annual vacation, and building up pensions and savings for retirement. In many parts of the country Black Americans were also grabbing a share of the American dream, mostly through government jobs which, since the 60s, had forbidden racial discrimination in hiring.
It was so ubiquitous a lifestyle it was a background story line for shows from The Flintstones (1960–1966) to All In The Family (1971–1979) and The Simpsons (1989-today).
The 1960s show The Jetsons assumed that by the year 2020 a single wage earner just pushing a button a few times a day could support a family including fashion-obsessed teenagers and a charge-card-addicted wife.
Fast forward to the consequence of the first 30 years of Reaganomics: 2010 was the first year in three generations when fewer than 50 percent of Americans could call themselves middle class."
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CW: Part 2 The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism. Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism?
Part 2
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism
#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich"But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.
Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning.
Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargos of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.
The white male power structure freaked out. They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night
Nixon demanded “law and order,” a euphemism for preventing students, women, striking union workers, or people of color from acquiring political and social power and the wealth that usually accompanies it.
He put into place his War on Drugs to, as his right-hand man John Ehrlichman famously noted, overtly criminalize being Black or an anti-war or pro-civil rights hippy.
“You understand what I’m saying?” Ehrlichman told reporter Dan Baum. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
“We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This took us straight to 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo noting that Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson had kicked off consumer and environmental movements that threatened to cost industry lots of money, and that the student, women’s, union, and civil rights movements were disruptive to society and had to be stopped.
The next year Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and, particularly with the Buckley and Belotti decisions of 1976 and 1978 respectively, the Court put Powell’s doctrine into practice by legalizing political bribery by billionaires and corporations alike. (The Belotti decision legalizing corporate campaign contributions and dark-pool third-party bribery of politicians by industry was written by Powell himself!)"
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CW: Part 1 The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism. "Is it useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis?" Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism?
Part 1
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism
#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich"Male white supremacy is real and white suppression of minorities, particularly Black and Brown people along with gender minorities and women, absolutely permeates every aspect of our society, from business to culture to governance.
Without setting aside that reality, it’s useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis.
All over social media people are asking, “Why would anybody embrace fascism? Why would they be willing to overthrow a functioning democratic republic?”
And why now, instead of forty or more years ago?
The answer is simple: their perception of their own safety.
Safety is at the foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. If a person doesn’t feel safe, they’re not able to even think about other dimensions of life.
If you’re crossing a busy street and stuck in the middle as cars are whizzing by on both sides, you’re not thinking of your job opportunities or the next car you want to buy or even what’s for dinner or your love life. You just want to get safe!
And, increasingly, working class white men in America are feeling unsafe as America is conspicuously becoming browner. They’re told daily by an entire movement based in the GOP — which includes over 1500 right wing talk radio stations, rightwing television networks, and hundreds of publications — that straight white men have targets on their backs.
Adult Hispanics in Texas, for example, outnumbered whites for the first time this decade. It’s a new and shocking feeling for a group that’s been in power for over 400 years, and — as we’re seeing with DeSantis and Abbott’s cruel fraud against asylum seekers and all the love it’s getting on Fox “News” — producing a predictable backlash.
Racism, homophobia, and misogyny have gone from the margins, kept to oneself, and blown into the mainstream, being amplified and celebrated daily by Republican politicians busing and flying brown-skinned asylum seekers around the country, to open attacks on teaching Black history in schools, to rants on radio and podcasts.
In 1981 Ronald Reagan and the GOP began a 40-year project to disempower and gut the American middle class wage earners, which was then mostly made up of white men.
He wanted to take away their wealth and their safety.
There was an actual rationale for this, laid out by Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind that I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Kirk argued that without clearly defined classes and power structures — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control — society would devolve into chaos.
He and his followers essentially predicted in 1953 that if college students, women, working people, and people of color ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, all hell would break loose.
(Keep in mind, this was at a time when racial segregation was legal and brutally enforced, the voting age was 21, campuses were almost entirely all-male, and women couldn’t open checking accounts or get credit cards without a husband or father’s signature.)
Throughout the 1950s, Kirk developed a small following; the most prominent of his proponents were William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Most Republicans, though, considered him a crackpot."
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"We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn’t just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line."
~ Thom Hartmann
#SupremeCourt #corruption #ethics #CredibilityLost #JusticeforSale
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-plan-to-break-the-independent
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CW: Lengthy, right wing intolerance
They get triggered/melt in the face of any diversity--gay, black, transsexual, "woke," not Christian. It really bothers them. Who are the real snowflakes here?
They want the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else. Freedom of religion for me, but not thee!
Opinion | US Supreme Court Wants to Make America More Bigoted Again | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/07/us-supreme-court-wants-make-america-more-bigoted-again
#TheRightHatesDiversity
#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#RightWingSnowflakes
#Freedom4MeNotThee
#ChristianNationalism"Bigots are switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
THOM HARTMANN
December 7, 2022
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.Now they're going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires "creative" effort.
There was a time in America when any retail business could, as the old sign said, "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason." Often such proclamations were just slightly more subtle than the "No Negros," "No Jews," or "No Irishmen" signs they replaced, although they still pepper retail establishments across the nation.
And it's true that if you run a "public accommodation," you're welcome to toss out drunk, belligerent, naked, high, or otherwise offensive customers. Bars and airlines—clearly public accommodations—do it daily.
But, particularly since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there are boundaries around who you can and can't refuse to serve. Under federal law, you can toss out somebody because they're wearing a tee-shirt that has offensive language printed on it, but you can't toss out somebody because they're Black or wearing a yarmulke.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act specifically says a company doing business with the public can't discriminate based on "race, color, religion, or national origin."
And in 23 states plus Washington, DC you can't refuse service to somebody because of sexual orientation. (The Equality Act, which would put that protection into federal law, has passed the House twice, last year and in 2019, but died both times in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.)
Now the Supreme Court has those state laws protecting gay people in its cross-hairs in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case they heard argued yesterday: specifically Colorado's law that bans discrimination based on "disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry."
In a twist, the Republicans on the Court chose not to hear Lorie Smith's original argument that, through her company 303 Creative, she shouldn't have to make a website for a gay wedding because it offends her "deeply held Christian faith."
(Although no gay couple has ever asked her to make a wedding website—in fact, no couple of any sort has ever asked her to make any website for their wedding—she's apparently worried that it may happen and so, with big bucks from rightwingers behind her, took her case to the Supreme Court.)
Instead, Republicans on the Court used their majority status to decide, from among her various arguments, to shift the frame toward "creative expression," choosing to decide:
...
Tearing down Colorado's law in the name of "creative expression" is the new strategy for "Christian" fundamentalists to attack public accommodation laws; this is in large part a repeat of their failed effort to strike down Colorado's public accommodation law in the infamous 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop gay wedding cake case.
...
Bigots using religion as their excuse have chafed at these laws ever since Bobby Kennedy used them to forcefully integrate lunch counters in the South and his federal prosecutors used them to end racial and religious discrimination in hotels, theaters, and bars.Now they're switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
...
Is the guy painting my gay friend's house "creative" because he's helping choose colors and paint the house? How about a barber? Or the chef who owns his own restaurant or lunch counter? A bartender who custom-mixes cocktails?If this decision is handed down in Smith's favor and knocks down the Colorado law (and 22 other states'), expect a whole spectrum of businesses run by bigots and religious freaks to begin discriminating against people not protected by the federal Civil Rights Act, with queer people at the top of that list.
If SCOTUS goes the whole distance and guts the Civil Rights Act—like Republicans on the Court did with the Voting Rights Act in 2013—discrimination against women, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and the disabled will again become part of the American landscape."
-
CW: Lengthy, right wing intolerance
They get triggered/melt in the face of any diversity--gay, black, transsexual, "woke," not Christian. It really bothers them. Who are the real snowflakes here?
They want the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else. Freedom of religion for me, but not thee!
Opinion | US Supreme Court Wants to Make America More Bigoted Again | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/07/us-supreme-court-wants-make-america-more-bigoted-again
#TheRightHatesDiversity
#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#RightWingSnowflakes
#Freedom4MeNotThee
#ChristianNationalism"Bigots are switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
THOM HARTMANN
December 7, 2022
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.Now they're going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires "creative" effort.
There was a time in America when any retail business could, as the old sign said, "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason." Often such proclamations were just slightly more subtle than the "No Negros," "No Jews," or "No Irishmen" signs they replaced, although they still pepper retail establishments across the nation.
And it's true that if you run a "public accommodation," you're welcome to toss out drunk, belligerent, naked, high, or otherwise offensive customers. Bars and airlines—clearly public accommodations—do it daily.
But, particularly since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there are boundaries around who you can and can't refuse to serve. Under federal law, you can toss out somebody because they're wearing a tee-shirt that has offensive language printed on it, but you can't toss out somebody because they're Black or wearing a yarmulke.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act specifically says a company doing business with the public can't discriminate based on "race, color, religion, or national origin."
And in 23 states plus Washington, DC you can't refuse service to somebody because of sexual orientation. (The Equality Act, which would put that protection into federal law, has passed the House twice, last year and in 2019, but died both times in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.)
Now the Supreme Court has those state laws protecting gay people in its cross-hairs in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case they heard argued yesterday: specifically Colorado's law that bans discrimination based on "disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry."
In a twist, the Republicans on the Court chose not to hear Lorie Smith's original argument that, through her company 303 Creative, she shouldn't have to make a website for a gay wedding because it offends her "deeply held Christian faith."
(Although no gay couple has ever asked her to make a wedding website—in fact, no couple of any sort has ever asked her to make any website for their wedding—she's apparently worried that it may happen and so, with big bucks from rightwingers behind her, took her case to the Supreme Court.)
Instead, Republicans on the Court used their majority status to decide, from among her various arguments, to shift the frame toward "creative expression," choosing to decide:
...
Tearing down Colorado's law in the name of "creative expression" is the new strategy for "Christian" fundamentalists to attack public accommodation laws; this is in large part a repeat of their failed effort to strike down Colorado's public accommodation law in the infamous 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop gay wedding cake case.
...
Bigots using religion as their excuse have chafed at these laws ever since Bobby Kennedy used them to forcefully integrate lunch counters in the South and his federal prosecutors used them to end racial and religious discrimination in hotels, theaters, and bars.Now they're switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
...
Is the guy painting my gay friend's house "creative" because he's helping choose colors and paint the house? How about a barber? Or the chef who owns his own restaurant or lunch counter? A bartender who custom-mixes cocktails?If this decision is handed down in Smith's favor and knocks down the Colorado law (and 22 other states'), expect a whole spectrum of businesses run by bigots and religious freaks to begin discriminating against people not protected by the federal Civil Rights Act, with queer people at the top of that list.
If SCOTUS goes the whole distance and guts the Civil Rights Act—like Republicans on the Court did with the Voting Rights Act in 2013—discrimination against women, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and the disabled will again become part of the American landscape."
-
CW: Lengthy, right wing intolerance
They get triggered/melt in the face of any diversity--gay, black, transsexual, "woke," not Christian. It really bothers them. Who are the real snowflakes here?
They want the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else. Freedom of religion for me, but not thee!
Opinion | US Supreme Court Wants to Make America More Bigoted Again | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/07/us-supreme-court-wants-make-america-more-bigoted-again
#TheRightHatesDiversity
#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#RightWingSnowflakes
#Freedom4MeNotThee
#ChristianNationalism"Bigots are switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
THOM HARTMANN
December 7, 2022
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.Now they're going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires "creative" effort.
There was a time in America when any retail business could, as the old sign said, "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason." Often such proclamations were just slightly more subtle than the "No Negros," "No Jews," or "No Irishmen" signs they replaced, although they still pepper retail establishments across the nation.
And it's true that if you run a "public accommodation," you're welcome to toss out drunk, belligerent, naked, high, or otherwise offensive customers. Bars and airlines—clearly public accommodations—do it daily.
But, particularly since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there are boundaries around who you can and can't refuse to serve. Under federal law, you can toss out somebody because they're wearing a tee-shirt that has offensive language printed on it, but you can't toss out somebody because they're Black or wearing a yarmulke.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act specifically says a company doing business with the public can't discriminate based on "race, color, religion, or national origin."
And in 23 states plus Washington, DC you can't refuse service to somebody because of sexual orientation. (The Equality Act, which would put that protection into federal law, has passed the House twice, last year and in 2019, but died both times in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.)
Now the Supreme Court has those state laws protecting gay people in its cross-hairs in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case they heard argued yesterday: specifically Colorado's law that bans discrimination based on "disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry."
In a twist, the Republicans on the Court chose not to hear Lorie Smith's original argument that, through her company 303 Creative, she shouldn't have to make a website for a gay wedding because it offends her "deeply held Christian faith."
(Although no gay couple has ever asked her to make a wedding website—in fact, no couple of any sort has ever asked her to make any website for their wedding—she's apparently worried that it may happen and so, with big bucks from rightwingers behind her, took her case to the Supreme Court.)
Instead, Republicans on the Court used their majority status to decide, from among her various arguments, to shift the frame toward "creative expression," choosing to decide:
...
Tearing down Colorado's law in the name of "creative expression" is the new strategy for "Christian" fundamentalists to attack public accommodation laws; this is in large part a repeat of their failed effort to strike down Colorado's public accommodation law in the infamous 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop gay wedding cake case.
...
Bigots using religion as their excuse have chafed at these laws ever since Bobby Kennedy used them to forcefully integrate lunch counters in the South and his federal prosecutors used them to end racial and religious discrimination in hotels, theaters, and bars.Now they're switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
...
Is the guy painting my gay friend's house "creative" because he's helping choose colors and paint the house? How about a barber? Or the chef who owns his own restaurant or lunch counter? A bartender who custom-mixes cocktails?If this decision is handed down in Smith's favor and knocks down the Colorado law (and 22 other states'), expect a whole spectrum of businesses run by bigots and religious freaks to begin discriminating against people not protected by the federal Civil Rights Act, with queer people at the top of that list.
If SCOTUS goes the whole distance and guts the Civil Rights Act—like Republicans on the Court did with the Voting Rights Act in 2013—discrimination against women, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and the disabled will again become part of the American landscape."
-
CW: Lengthy, right wing intolerance
They get triggered/melt in the face of any diversity--gay, black, transsexual, "woke," not Christian. It really bothers them. Who are the real snowflakes here?
They want the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else. Freedom of religion for me, but not thee!
Opinion | US Supreme Court Wants to Make America More Bigoted Again | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/07/us-supreme-court-wants-make-america-more-bigoted-again
#TheRightHatesDiversity
#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#RightWingSnowflakes
#Freedom4MeNotThee
#ChristianNationalism"Bigots are switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
THOM HARTMANN
December 7, 2022
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.Now they're going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires "creative" effort.
There was a time in America when any retail business could, as the old sign said, "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason." Often such proclamations were just slightly more subtle than the "No Negros," "No Jews," or "No Irishmen" signs they replaced, although they still pepper retail establishments across the nation.
And it's true that if you run a "public accommodation," you're welcome to toss out drunk, belligerent, naked, high, or otherwise offensive customers. Bars and airlines—clearly public accommodations—do it daily.
But, particularly since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there are boundaries around who you can and can't refuse to serve. Under federal law, you can toss out somebody because they're wearing a tee-shirt that has offensive language printed on it, but you can't toss out somebody because they're Black or wearing a yarmulke.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act specifically says a company doing business with the public can't discriminate based on "race, color, religion, or national origin."
And in 23 states plus Washington, DC you can't refuse service to somebody because of sexual orientation. (The Equality Act, which would put that protection into federal law, has passed the House twice, last year and in 2019, but died both times in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.)
Now the Supreme Court has those state laws protecting gay people in its cross-hairs in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case they heard argued yesterday: specifically Colorado's law that bans discrimination based on "disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry."
In a twist, the Republicans on the Court chose not to hear Lorie Smith's original argument that, through her company 303 Creative, she shouldn't have to make a website for a gay wedding because it offends her "deeply held Christian faith."
(Although no gay couple has ever asked her to make a wedding website—in fact, no couple of any sort has ever asked her to make any website for their wedding—she's apparently worried that it may happen and so, with big bucks from rightwingers behind her, took her case to the Supreme Court.)
Instead, Republicans on the Court used their majority status to decide, from among her various arguments, to shift the frame toward "creative expression," choosing to decide:
...
Tearing down Colorado's law in the name of "creative expression" is the new strategy for "Christian" fundamentalists to attack public accommodation laws; this is in large part a repeat of their failed effort to strike down Colorado's public accommodation law in the infamous 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop gay wedding cake case.
...
Bigots using religion as their excuse have chafed at these laws ever since Bobby Kennedy used them to forcefully integrate lunch counters in the South and his federal prosecutors used them to end racial and religious discrimination in hotels, theaters, and bars.Now they're switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
...
Is the guy painting my gay friend's house "creative" because he's helping choose colors and paint the house? How about a barber? Or the chef who owns his own restaurant or lunch counter? A bartender who custom-mixes cocktails?If this decision is handed down in Smith's favor and knocks down the Colorado law (and 22 other states'), expect a whole spectrum of businesses run by bigots and religious freaks to begin discriminating against people not protected by the federal Civil Rights Act, with queer people at the top of that list.
If SCOTUS goes the whole distance and guts the Civil Rights Act—like Republicans on the Court did with the Voting Rights Act in 2013—discrimination against women, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and the disabled will again become part of the American landscape."
-
Art | Awe Wonder
http://www.oocities.org/etearthmission/CurrentReality.htm
Hello
‘Trump Breaks America, Voters Yawn? (w/ Anne Applebaum)’ |The Bulwark
https://youtube.com/watch?v=15k3paCFDYg #DoAbles ¿( #DeepTransformation ) #Network //#Bioneers
https://bioneers.org/nina-simons-beyond-binaries-towards-solidarity-video-zstf2404/#BeyondFraming
https://bioneers.org/thom-hartmann-beyond-framing-bioneers/#ObjectLessons ¿( #LargerNows )
https://www.rferl.org/timothy-snyder-russia-ukraine-war-victory/33067942.html #NEWS __
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-riane-eisler/17094666 #TheLargerNow ||
#Possibilities
https://deeptransformation.network/posts/83582143 -
Art | Awe Wonder
http://www.oocities.org/etearthmission/CurrentReality.htm
Hello
‘Trump Breaks America, Voters Yawn? (w/ Anne Applebaum)’ |The Bulwark
https://youtube.com/watch?v=15k3paCFDYg #DoAbles ¿( #DeepTransformation ) #Network //#Bioneers
https://bioneers.org/nina-simons-beyond-binaries-towards-solidarity-video-zstf2404/#BeyondFraming
https://bioneers.org/thom-hartmann-beyond-framing-bioneers/#ObjectLessons ¿( #LargerNows )
https://www.rferl.org/timothy-snyder-russia-ukraine-war-victory/33067942.html #NEWS __
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-riane-eisler/17094666 #TheLargerNow ||
#Possibilities
https://deeptransformation.network/posts/83582143 -
Art | Awe Wonder
http://www.oocities.org/etearthmission/CurrentReality.htm
Hello
‘Trump Breaks America, Voters Yawn? (w/ Anne Applebaum)’ |The Bulwark
https://youtube.com/watch?v=15k3paCFDYg #DoAbles ¿( #DeepTransformation ) #Network //#Bioneers
https://bioneers.org/nina-simons-beyond-binaries-towards-solidarity-video-zstf2404/#BeyondFraming
https://bioneers.org/thom-hartmann-beyond-framing-bioneers/#ObjectLessons ¿( #LargerNows )
https://www.rferl.org/timothy-snyder-russia-ukraine-war-victory/33067942.html #NEWS __
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-riane-eisler/17094666 #TheLargerNow ||
#Possibilities
https://deeptransformation.network/posts/83582143 -
"We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn’t just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line."
~ Thom Hartmann
#SupremeCourt #corruption #ethics #CredibilityLost #JusticeforSale
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-plan-to-break-the-independent
-
"We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn’t just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line."
~ Thom Hartmann
#SupremeCourt #corruption #ethics #CredibilityLost #JusticeforSale
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-plan-to-break-the-independent
-
"We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn’t just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line."
~ Thom Hartmann
#SupremeCourt #corruption #ethics #CredibilityLost #JusticeforSale
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-plan-to-break-the-independent
-
"We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn’t just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line."
~ Thom Hartmann
#SupremeCourt #corruption #ethics #CredibilityLost #JusticeforSale
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-plan-to-break-the-independent
-
ABORTION EVERYDAY ( #HumanOutcry )
Hello
#BodilyAutonomy
‘Republicans Want ….JESSICA VALENTI
(JUN 20, 2025)__
https://jessica.substack.com/p/republicans-want-the-epa-to-test #OnTyranny #ONFREEDOM #Ba #Bak #Bennu #EOm ( #HeAUM #HeAUM #HeAUM ) #WattEngine ¿( # godIsSimple # everythingelse # complicated ) —https://www.rdwolff.com/thom_hartmann_the_economics_of_criminalizing_abortion_exposed#TimothySnyderSpeaks #Americas #America
#USA #USA #USA ¿( #DEMOCRACYINCHAINS #FIFTHRISK ) #ROADTOUNFREEDOM #BlackEarth'lectures
#sound -
ABORTION EVERYDAY ( #HumanOutcry )
Hello
#BodilyAutonomy
‘Republicans Want ….JESSICA VALENTI
(JUN 20, 2025)__
https://jessica.substack.com/p/republicans-want-the-epa-to-test #OnTyranny #ONFREEDOM #Ba #Bak #Bennu #EOm ( #HeAUM #HeAUM #HeAUM ) #WattEngine ¿( # godIsSimple # everythingelse # complicated ) —https://www.rdwolff.com/thom_hartmann_the_economics_of_criminalizing_abortion_exposed#TimothySnyderSpeaks #Americas #America
#USA #USA #USA ¿( #DEMOCRACYINCHAINS #FIFTHRISK ) #ROADTOUNFREEDOM #BlackEarth'lectures
#sound -
ABORTION EVERYDAY ( #HumanOutcry )
Hello
#BodilyAutonomy
‘Republicans Want ….JESSICA VALENTI
(JUN 20, 2025)__
https://jessica.substack.com/p/republicans-want-the-epa-to-test #OnTyranny #ONFREEDOM #Ba #Bak #Bennu #EOm ( #HeAUM #HeAUM #HeAUM ) #WattEngine ¿( # godIsSimple # everythingelse # complicated ) —https://www.rdwolff.com/thom_hartmann_the_economics_of_criminalizing_abortion_exposed#TimothySnyderSpeaks #Americas #America
#USA #USA #USA ¿( #DEMOCRACYINCHAINS #FIFTHRISK ) #ROADTOUNFREEDOM #BlackEarth'lectures
#sound -
Finally Friday Reads: Ain’t that some Shit?
With Trump/Epstein back in the news, here’s a snippet from a cartoon I drew a few days ago. ” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Some of my friends have been blaming the craziness I’ve been feeling lately on the huge Mercury Retrograde that started on the 9th. It’s really unnerving to read the unbelievably scattered graft and madness coming out of Orange Caligula’s regime, which seems like peak madness, too. I’ve spent the last two days trying to talk people down, as well as crying over a friend whose essential surgery just got cancelled because his insurance company refused to pay for it. Then, there are all the Epstein headlines. I’m glad to get glimpses of justice, but it’s also tough to deal with all the stories of abuse and indifference that always come from the way men treat women and children like junk in their toy box.
This story in HuffPo absolutely tore my heart to pieces this morning. It’s reported by Ron Dicker. This may trigger you, so please take this trigger warning seriously. “Epstein Email About Giving Girlfriend To Trump Enrages Model’ Groped’ By Him. The former Sports Illustrated model said Epstein, whom she dated in the early 1990s, “delivered” her to Trump.”
A newly released email in which Jeffrey Epstein bragged about giving a girlfriend to Donald Trump angered a former model who dated Epstein and claimed he once “delivered” her to the future president to be “groped” by him.
The note showed how “deeply misogynistic” the two men were, Stacey Williams told CNN on Thursday. (Watch the video below.)
Williams, who was featured in several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in the ’90s, appeared on “Erin Burnett Outfront” after numerous emails involving the late sexual predator Epstein were shared this week. Congress is poised to vote on the release of files unviewed by the public, but Trump has continued to push back at what he now calls a “hoax.”
Burnett brought up Epstein’s correspondence in which he wrote about a Norwegian businesswoman and heiress: “my 20 year old girlfriend in 1993, , that after two years i gave to donald.”
“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams said. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”
Burnett also mentioned Williams’ previous account claiming Trump molested her as Epstein watched at Trump Tower, and how their smiling at each other revealed the pair’s “weird and twisted game.”
Williams added, “I clearly was delivered there for the groping.” She said that she had a reputation for standing up to inappropriate men, so “when I froze and didn’t respond, you know, I think Jeffrey got very upset about it. He expected a fight.”
Trump was the only male friend Epstein consistently talked about, according to Williams. “It’s just so maddening to me that Donald Trump ran on, you know, cleaning up the swamp,” she continued, “and all this time and energy is being spent on covering up information about the biggest swamp monster who’s ever existed.”
From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the ruins of Ukrainian hospitals, the toxic bond between Trump, Putin, and Epstein may have reshaped the world and cost the lives of countless children…hartmannreport.com/p/did-epstei…
— Thom Hartmann (@hartmannreport.com) 2025-11-14T16:16:52.669Z
Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness, and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from Mother Jones as reported by Julianne McShane. “Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define. When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.
There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”
Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”
“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.
“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In fact, we don’t know.
Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about this on her Substack, Letters from an American.
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, ProPublica. “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts, The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the New York Times. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Wants Federal Inquiry Into Epstein’s Ties to Prominent Democrats.” You’d think this approach would’ve grown old and stale already.
President Trump announced on Friday that he wanted the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman — who he alleged had ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump blasted Democrats for “using the Epstein Hoax” to distract from the recent government shutdown, and said that federal law enforcement would order investigations into members of their party, who he insinuated were involved in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking of girls.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!”
Mr. Trump said that he would be asking Attorney General Pam Bondi, “and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to conduct the investigation into the “involvement and relationship” between Mr. Epstein and the Democrats.
Mr. Trump also wrote that it would also include “J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items, COURIER has a link to the entire, searchable dump provided by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Paul Krugman’s SubStack post today turns its eyes to the Heritage Foundation. It’s an interesting read. “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation. Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable.”
There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.
As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.
So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?
It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”
Yeah, right.
Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.
Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.
Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.
And, just think about this one for a bit.
Further proof of corruption, grift, and just plain autocratic bullshit can be found at these links.
- Brian Slodysko / Associated Press: Top Fannie Mae officials ousted after sounding alarm on sharing confidential housing data
- ProPublica: FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff
- NBC News: GOP senators distance themselves from provision allowing them to sue over phone record searches
- The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Faculty Disturbed by Revelations of Summers’ ‘Cozy Friendship’ With Epstein
There are so many of these things posted as a memeorandum today that I can’t possibly fit them all into one short post. We are seriously and truely fucked if we do not get all these criminals out of government and other pubic institutions.
What’s on your reading, action, and blogging list today?
#corruption #cultureOfMisogyny #EpsteinFiles #LifeLlKillYa #OrangeCaligula
-
Finally Friday Reads: Ain’t that some Shit?
With Trump/Epstein back in the news, here’s a snippet from a cartoon I drew a few days ago. ” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Some of my friends have been blaming the craziness I’ve been feeling lately on the huge Mercury Retrograde that started on the 9th. It’s really unnerving to read the unbelievably scattered graft and madness coming out of Orange Caligula’s regime, which seems like peak madness, too. I’ve spent the last two days trying to talk people down, as well as crying over a friend whose essential surgery just got cancelled because his insurance company refused to pay for it. Then, there are all the Epstein headlines. I’m glad to get glimpses of justice, but it’s also tough to deal with all the stories of abuse and indifference that always come from the way men treat women and children like junk in their toy box.
This story in HuffPo absolutely tore my heart to pieces this morning. It’s reported by Ron Dicker. This may trigger you, so please take this trigger warning seriously. “Epstein Email About Giving Girlfriend To Trump Enrages Model’ Groped’ By Him. The former Sports Illustrated model said Epstein, whom she dated in the early 1990s, “delivered” her to Trump.”
A newly released email in which Jeffrey Epstein bragged about giving a girlfriend to Donald Trump angered a former model who dated Epstein and claimed he once “delivered” her to the future president to be “groped” by him.
The note showed how “deeply misogynistic” the two men were, Stacey Williams told CNN on Thursday. (Watch the video below.)
Williams, who was featured in several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in the ’90s, appeared on “Erin Burnett Outfront” after numerous emails involving the late sexual predator Epstein were shared this week. Congress is poised to vote on the release of files unviewed by the public, but Trump has continued to push back at what he now calls a “hoax.”
Burnett brought up Epstein’s correspondence in which he wrote about a Norwegian businesswoman and heiress: “my 20 year old girlfriend in 1993, , that after two years i gave to donald.”
“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams said. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”
Burnett also mentioned Williams’ previous account claiming Trump molested her as Epstein watched at Trump Tower, and how their smiling at each other revealed the pair’s “weird and twisted game.”
Williams added, “I clearly was delivered there for the groping.” She said that she had a reputation for standing up to inappropriate men, so “when I froze and didn’t respond, you know, I think Jeffrey got very upset about it. He expected a fight.”
Trump was the only male friend Epstein consistently talked about, according to Williams. “It’s just so maddening to me that Donald Trump ran on, you know, cleaning up the swamp,” she continued, “and all this time and energy is being spent on covering up information about the biggest swamp monster who’s ever existed.”
From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the ruins of Ukrainian hospitals, the toxic bond between Trump, Putin, and Epstein may have reshaped the world and cost the lives of countless children…hartmannreport.com/p/did-epstei…
— Thom Hartmann (@hartmannreport.com) 2025-11-14T16:16:52.669Z
Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness, and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from Mother Jones as reported by Julianne McShane. “Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define. When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.
There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”
Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”
“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.
“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In fact, we don’t know.
Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about this on her Substack, Letters from an American.
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, ProPublica. “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts, The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the New York Times. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Wants Federal Inquiry Into Epstein’s Ties to Prominent Democrats.” You’d think this approach would’ve grown old and stale already.
President Trump announced on Friday that he wanted the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman — who he alleged had ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump blasted Democrats for “using the Epstein Hoax” to distract from the recent government shutdown, and said that federal law enforcement would order investigations into members of their party, who he insinuated were involved in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking of girls.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!”
Mr. Trump said that he would be asking Attorney General Pam Bondi, “and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to conduct the investigation into the “involvement and relationship” between Mr. Epstein and the Democrats.
Mr. Trump also wrote that it would also include “J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items, COURIER has a link to the entire, searchable dump provided by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Paul Krugman’s SubStack post today turns its eyes to the Heritage Foundation. It’s an interesting read. “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation. Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable.”
There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.
As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.
So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?
It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”
Yeah, right.
Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.
Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.
Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.
And, just think about this one for a bit.
Further proof of corruption, grift, and just plain autocratic bullshit can be found at these links.
- Brian Slodysko / Associated Press: Top Fannie Mae officials ousted after sounding alarm on sharing confidential housing data
- ProPublica: FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff
- NBC News: GOP senators distance themselves from provision allowing them to sue over phone record searches
- The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Faculty Disturbed by Revelations of Summers’ ‘Cozy Friendship’ With Epstein
There are so many of these things posted as a memeorandum today that I can’t possibly fit them all into one short post. We are seriously and truely fucked if we do not get all these criminals out of government and other pubic institutions.
What’s on your reading, action, and blogging list today?
#corruption #cultureOfMisogyny #EpsteinFiles #LifeLlKillYa #OrangeCaligula