Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

How far will white parents go to fight against educators teaching race and racism in America—or as people of color and anyone with a shred of common sense calls it, American history?  

A Facebook ad paid for by (this is not a joke) the Most Racist Colleges and Universities group—one which claims they work to “stop university support for terrorists”—lashes out at a Black Stanford University professor, Hakeem Jefferson, for “promoting his view in a series of social media posts that ‘Whiteness’ is largely responsible for opposition to school mask mandates.” 

Jefferson, a Stanford assistant professor of political science, is being called a “racist” in the ad, and threatened and harassed by the group, its followers, and other users who encounter the ad. And Facebook, true to form, is doing nothing to stop it.

Jefferson is meeting with his dean Friday and says the meeting was scheduled months ago—after he was harassed last time.

As Bree Newsom Bass—activist, filmmaker, and heroine who bravely removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting in 2015—wisely tweeted in response to the outrage of white parents about CRT: 

Groups such as Moms for Liberty, a group started in that bastion of caucasity, Florida, has grown to 60,000 nationwide, according to CBS News. The group’s mission is “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”

What they’re really doing is showing up at school board meetings with the false pretense of fighting against critical race theory (CRT), which isn’t even taught in K-12 schools. And the end result? A Republican governor in Virginia in Glenn Youngkin, and a disturbing wave of book banning. 

“Grade two, module three, has five or six books. One of them is Martin Luther King and the March on Washington, which of course that should be taught. But how should it be taught? What should we focus on when we teach it?” Robin Steenman, founder of Moms for Liberty asks CBS.

“There’s one specific example in this book … there’s a very famous photograph of firemen spraying children that were engaged in a protest in, I believe it was Birmingham. It’s a terrible photo, they’re doing harm to children, Black children, they’re blasted by fire hoses. And it shows that to these second-grade children,” Steenman continues. “Most kids up to that point have idolized the policemen, the firemen.”

“I don’t want them to see racism yet—to engage, to learn racism. They can teach history, but let’s not teach racism,” Steenman said.

Let’s unpack Steenman’s statement: “They can teach history, but let’s not teach racism.” 

It’s so easy for white people to dismiss teaching racism, but the lessons for children of color come fast and young. Do they get a choice about when they can learn about racism? 

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey recently declared on Twitter that she has “permanently BANNED Critical Race Theory in Alabama.” 

Ivey, like so many in the GOP, has followed in the clumsy and bloodstained footsteps of two-time impeached and one-term former President Donald Trump who weaponized CRT, lumping it ridiculously into diversity and inclusion training, and even excluding federal contracts that offer diversity and inclusion training.

Virginia Beach at-large school board member Victoria Manning—aka book-banning Karen, aka non-reading pro-censorship Karen—is going after American literature she clearly doesn’t understand.

Daily Beast reports that Manning, founder of the “Wokeness Checker” website, along with co-board member Laura Hughes, sent an email to Virginia Beach City Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence to demand that four books be removed from circulation or used in the classroom “due to their pornographic nature.”

“It has been brought to my attention by some parents that there are some disturbing books in our district that are available to students,” Manning wrote on Oct. 5. “I would like to ask that you pull these books from shelves and also block any electronic access by students to getting these books IMMEDIATELY.”

First on Manning’s list is author and Nobel Laureate in Literature Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, alongside Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, and the memoir comic Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe.

Manning has not even read The Bluest Eye—“just reading a few of the pages gives me utter disgust,” she said according to The Virginia-Pilot.

Sharon Roberson, president and CEO of the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, wrote a letter on behalf of the Tennessee Department of Education, decrying a law put into place in July in Tennessee, banning CRT and teaching any “lessons that suggest anyone, based on their race or sex, is ‘inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,’” as well as any curriculum that makes people feel ‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.’”

Robertson understands a key principle in education: If we don’t teach our history, we are destined to repeat it. 

“I was actually born in Germany, from a military family, and very proud of that. In Germany, they teach about Hitler because they want people to understand this was a very difficult aspect, a horrible part of their history, but you need to understand that because if you love your country you want your country to be the best that it could be, so they teach those things. Some people don’t like it, but it doesn’t make Germans not like Germany, It makes them proud that their country has overcome that and become the country it is today,” Robertson tells CBS News.  

This post was originally published on this site

The scumbag crew over at right-wing private dirt machine Project Veritas is in the news again. The New York Times has an explosive report tying the Justice Department’s investigation into a burglary of President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley’s private journal with the muckraking, and frequently muck-fabricating, right-wing website. While not published by Project Veritas, the journal was published on a right-wing blog a couple of weeks before the November election in 2020.

According to the Times, the DOJ searched two locations in New York “at places linked to people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events.” One of the places searched was the New York City apartment of ”longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, Spencer Meads. The Times reports that after Meads did not answer the FBI’s loud knocking for 10 minutes, the door was forced open.

Ashley Biden, who was 39-years-old at the time of the release of her diary, had been able to stay out of the public eye in a way that Biden’s son Hunter had not. While the release of her journal, reportedly begun while she was in a rehabilitation center in Florida, did not make waves in the way that Hunter Biden’s laptop fiasco did, it was a real dirtbag thing to do. Unlike Hunter Biden, where there was at least meaningful mention of his Ukraine employment, Ashley Biden’s journal only seemed to expose the thoughts of a person dealing with issues of addiction and rehabilitation, with the frank—and mostly very private—thoughts, shames, and angers one has when dealing with difficult issues.

Project Veritas has said that while it had received this “whistleblower” diary, they decided “for ethical reasons,” to not publish—as they could not verify the authenticity of the journal at the time of publication. Considering that Project Veritas has yet to show a single ounce of ethics in anything they’ve ever been involved in, this is a hard-to-swallow statement. I wonder what they’re doing with all of their PPP money?

In a video that you can watch below, James O’Keefe does what all right-wing fraudsters do these days—blame the liberal persecution of patriots like James O’Keefe. Saying that he was putting himself at “great risk”* by making this statement: “I awoke to the news that apartments and homes of project veritas journalists or former journalists had been raided by FBI agents.”

“Journalists or former journalists?” Two people were “raided” by the FBI. It’s an either-or thing, James. O’Keefe proceeds to say that the subpoena asked him not to make this big public statement, but he did because he’s such a brave young lad.

O’Keefe goes on to say that after his group decided not to publish the diary, they tried to give it back to “an attorney representing Ms. Biden, but that attorney refused to authenticate it.” It’s interesting. You get a stolen thing and then say you can’t publish it unless you can verify that it was really stolen, and then you go to the people who were robbed and ask them to authenticate the theft so that you can publish it? That’s some super dirtbaggery right there. Of course, O’Keefe says that the federal government is only investigating his group because it’s Joe Biden’s daughter. However, it will be interesting to see if one of these “journalists or former journalists” is guilty of a crime.

As an aside, The New York Times reports that Flyover Media owns the company that owns the website publishing Ms. Biden’s journal pages. Flyover Media is registered to the same Wyoming address as Branch Six Consulting International. Branch Six is owned by Richard Seddon, a former British spy with ties to private security billionaire Erik Prince (Betsy DeVos’ brother). According to the Times:

Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.

Right-wing Patrick Howley, who goes by the moniker of “reporter,” published a few pages of the journal, trying to imply that Joe Biden may have molested Ashley Biden. This is not an assertion that is written in the handful of published journal pages, mind you. Howley’s reporting consists of all the right-wing conspiracy-style partisan hackery you have come to expect from ultra-right-wing media outlets.

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been dealing with the effects of Hurricane Ida, which submerged the group’s Westchester, New York, headquarters in September. But with powerful and wealthy friends like O’Keefe has, I’m sure he isn’t the one facing time. He probably knows where many of the bodies are buried

* Barf.

This post was originally published on this site

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or at my website.

This post was originally published on this site

It’s now standard practice for Donald Trump and his henchmen to declare a “stolen” election in advance of every big contest with national implications. And a recent NBC News poll shows that Trump’s incessant and baseless lying about 2020 has primed Republican voters to believe something is afoul whenever an election doesn’t go their way.

The NBC poll released this week found that Trump eroded Republicans’ faith in the notion that their voted will be counted accurately by more than 40 points from October 2020 to October 2021.

“Last year, 84 percent of Republicans said they were confident in the vote count, about on par with Democrats. But now, 41 percent of Republicans share that view, while 50 percent say they are not confident their vote will be counted accurately,” writes NBC.

That giant drop in confidence is anomalous among Republicans. Confidence among independents that their vote will be counted, for instance, dropped by less than 10 points since last year—from 84% confident last year to 76% confident this year. That’s a notable dent, but it pales in comparison to the rise in distrust among Republicans.

Republican views of whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected also stood apart in the poll, with a meager 22% of them saying Biden’s victory was legitimate, while 71% of independents and 93% of Democrats believe Biden was legitimately elected.

Overall, two-thirds of all Americans said they were confident their vote would be counted fairly compared to 85% who said that last year—a nearly 20-point decrease mainly attributable to Republicans.

Trump’s success in stoking distrust of U.S. elections among his fervent base now poses a domestic terror threat to the country. Earlier this week, a PRRI poll found 30% of Republicans agreed with the idea that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” The sentiment was particularly high among those who said they believed 2020 was “stolen” from Trump, with 39% of that cohort endorsing potential violence.

This post was originally published on this site

The October jobs report was a burst of good economic news. Not only did job creation exceed expectations in October with 531,000 new jobs added, but the previously disappointing jobs reports from August and September were revised upward by a combined 235,000. That adds up to a three-month job creation average of 442,000 a month.

In other good news, women gained 57% of new jobs added, the National Women’s Law Center reports, after a disproportionate number of jobs lost during the pandemic were women’s. The unemployment rate ticked up among women, likely because of women reentering the labor force but not having found jobs yet. 

The recovery is still incomplete and unequal, though. Among women, 292,000 of those reentering the labor force were white and 114,000 were Hispanic—but 52,000 Black women left the labor force. More than 1.7 million women are still out of the labor force as compared with February 2020, as compared with 1.2 million men. 

The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.6%, but continued to highlight racial inequities. The white unemployment rate is 4%, while the Black unemployment rate is nearly twice as high at 7.9%.

“Payroll employment is still down 4.2 million from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould tweeted. “But the real job shortfall is more likely to be in the range of 5.5 to 8.2 million using reasonable counterfactuals to absorb working age population growth or pre-pandemic trends.” 

While overall jobs growth was good in October, the gap in state and local government jobs grew, largely due to seasonally adjusted losses in education jobs. State and local governments “are down 928,000 since Feb ‘20—most of that, 574,000, in education,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz tweeted, calling for the governments to use American Rescue Plan funds to close that gap.

It’s great to have such a solid jobs report showing that recovery is still moving forward despite the delta strain of COVID-19. But as with the pandemic itself, in which more than 1,000 people are still dying every day, the economy is not all better. The uneven recovery shows the deep-seated inequality of the U.S. economy, which is with us through good times and bad.

This post was originally published on this site

No need to go to Facebook this time. 

So the NFL has a mandate for all support staff that come into contact with players, but none for the players themselves because of union concerns. Instead, the union agreed last season to test all players daily. This season, unvaccinated players got tested daily, while vaccinated players got tested weekly. 

The league claims that 94.1% of players are vaccinated, but that number included Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who told the media earlier this season that he was “immunized.” It was a clever turn of phrase, and no one questioned it, because no one thought that he’d be a lying piece of shit. But you can see why he’d want to be a lying piece of shit: 

Unvaccinated players are required to wear face masks at all times while at the team’s facilities and are also required to observe social distancing. The mask usage also applies when in teams’ weight rooms. Unvaccinated players are not allowed to eat meals with teammates and cannot do any media or marketing opportunities when traveling. They also aren’t allowed to use the sauna or steam rooms in the team facilities and are not allowed to leave the team hotel or have any outside interactions with people on the road who are not affiliated with their respective team.

The lockers of unvaccinated players are required to be six feet apart from the ones of other players. Unvaccinated players are also prohibited from traveling on team charters and must make their way to road games separately. Upon landing, they need to show negative COVID-19 tests in order to rejoin the team. Upon arrival, unvaccinated players are not allowed to eat with the rest of their teammates and are not allowed to mingle with other teammates. They also are barred from using a hotel’s common spaces, such as the pool.

They are restricted from attending indoor events — such as bars, nightclubs, concerts or other events — with more than 15 people where masks were not being worn.

Unvaccinated players are also subject to a five-day quarantine period if they are deemed to be close contacts of a person infected with COVID-19.

It’s amazing that the NFL never bothered to actually verify vaccination status claims. I guess they assumed their players wouldn’t be lying pieces of shit. 

Like Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers. He tested positive for COVID-19, and his lies were fully exposed. His response? Whine, whine, whine, deploying every Fox News-tested buzzphrase to build sympathy among the you-know-whos: 

Woke! Mob! Cancel culture! 

Ah yes, he “does his own research,” because, you know, the entire medical and scientific establishment apparently don’t know what they’re talking about. 

He is an anti-vaxxer and flat-Earther. Well, maybe he believes the Earth is round. But he’s in the same bucket as those anti-reality bozos. 

Look at all that research he did. So much research! And weirdly, he somehow missed all the actual research. 

But he has an allergy! To the mRNA vaccines! I call bullshit, but even if true, there happen to be non-mRNA vaccines, including Johnson&Johnson’s. 

The people spreading and dying of COVID are driven by THE UNVACCINATED. Holy shit, this asshole graduated from University of California-Berkeley and he’s this goddamned stupid? Instead, he’s repeating all the insipid Fox News/Facebook talking points. His “research” is genuinely Facebook memes and Tucker Carlson. 

Dr. Aaron Rodgers presented “research” to the NFL lol. 

The NFL thought right. 

Note, Rodgers claims he used the word “immunized” because he was on an alternative medicine regimen to bolster his immune system. You know what that is, right? We’ve seen it in many Anti-vaxx Chronicles throughout the last few months—Vitamins C and D and Zinc. He’ll now argue that the vaccine isn’t 100% effective, which no one claimed it was, but his vitamins concoction gave him “immunity,” which was so patently absurd, it hurts. 

Rodgers is the worst person in the world, at least for today. He was reportedly “furious” that his lies were outed. Note that he never followed the required protocol for unvaccinated players (that long blockquote up top), he did his best to obfuscate his deception. 

Let’s pause for a second to ponder Rodgers’ assertion that it is “woke” to vaccinate. Note that over 80% of American adults have at least one vaccine shot at this point. That’s a lot of “woke” people. 

If Rodgers was so courageous and believed so strongly in his vaccine stance, why not tell the truth? Why not follow the protocols that every other unvaccinated player was following? Is it now “woke” to tell the truth? 

And is it “woke” to take personal responsibility for one’s actions, instead of whining and crying and blaming others for any consequences? 

The sports media has been brutal. 

 And check out this righteous rant on sports radio: 

This isn’t some “woke” progressive activist. This is a white, male, sports bro, talking to other (mostly) white, male, sports bros—a large percentage of the vaccination holdouts. Let’s call this the silver lining of the situation, prominent and influential media personalities standing up for what is right for our country and everyone in it. 

There’s no doubt Rodgers is playing to Fox News, and there’s no doubt he’ll be their new hero. Expect to see Rodgers in memes over the coming months. But the media fury doesn’t look set to abate any time soon. In fact, he’s missing at least one key matchup this weekend against the Kansas City Chiefs, and might even miss next week’s as well, keeping the story alive. If his idiocy costs his contending team those two games, it’ll fuel the story even more so. And his “woke mob” bullshit certainly isn’t helping kill the furor. It’s only fueling it.

This post was originally published on this site

Days after it became clear that President Joe Biden had wiped the floor with Donald Trump in the 2020 elections, the Trump campaign began suing everybody—or at least trying to. With the Trump campaign saying, “The election is not over!” in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, it took only a couple of weeks for federal judge Nicholas Ranjan—appointed by Trump himself—to throw out this anti-democratic and frivolous lawsuit in Pennsylvania. During, and even after, that time, Trump and his minions spewed lie after conspiratorial lie, claiming everything from voting machines were controlled by the ghost of Hugo Chavez to working individuals were secretly complicit in massive voter fraud.

At the end of October, James Savage filed a 60-page lawsuit naming as defendants Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and the Thomas More Society, along with other Trump backers. Savage, the voting machine warehouse custodian in Delaware County, PA, says he suffered permanent damage to his reputation. The stress Savage was under from being accused of “false statements and insinuations” that “have depicted Mr. Savage as a dishonest criminal” led to Savage suffering two heart attacks—while also fearing for his life and the safety of his family.

The Kraken team of suspected criminals targeted Savage. According to Savage’s complaint Giuliani, Powell, Ellis, Trump, and others “falsely accused him of uploading 50,000 votes for Joe Biden.” The focus by Trump and his team on election officials led to people like Savage being attacked as election fraud puppeteers.

But the important thing to remember here, and the reason why this is a lawsuit, is that the allegations made against people like Savage were very obviously false. The insinuations made against them belied the jobs and the protocols and access they had in their positions. And this, according to the complaint, is proof that Trump and his craven cauldron of immoral mushheads knowingly lied.

The lawsuit points directly to the infamous Gettysburg hearing where Giuliani and Ellis made fabricated claims of election fraud in the state of Pennsylvania. So much fraud that Giuliani said it had “several dimensions to it.” It didn’t, and he has never even been able to produce a shred of evidence indicating otherwise. The hearing included the refrain that when people went to bed, Donald Trump was up by a lot of votes, and when they woke up—and the more urban democratic, considerably denser areas of the state had had its votes counted—Donald Trump had lost by about 80,000 votes.

The MAGA crowd’s insinuation is the same one they have made for mask mandates and anti-vaxx hesitancy: one that plays ignorance of how numbers, scale, math, and all things in the world work. To take advantage of this high level of low comprehension, Trump’s election fraud con artists threw out every possible way that 50,000 or so votes could suddenly appear… outside of the usual way in which they appear, which is they are counted, collected, and then officially stated.

One of those ways was to say that people like James Savage were not trained and should not have been allowed to upload votes to the official tabulations records. Like all cons, this is partly true. Savage’s job as warehouse supervisor meant he was not trained or experienced in “uploading votes.” That’s because he doesn’t do that and never has. He’s not allowed to. It isn’t his job. He doesn’t have access to equipment or processes for “uploading votes,” so, even if he ever imagined uploading votes,” he would literally not be able to do so. 

As the suit states: “Every Defendant herein at the Gettysburg public meeting on November 25, 2020, was aware that any suggestion that the Plaintiff could upload votes for influencing tabulation purposes was impossible.” 

In the suit, Savage was also called “a Berbue Sanders delegate,” and the “only voting machine warehouse supervisor in Delaware County.” Strange that Bernie didn’t get even ten percent of the votes Biden got in the Delaware primary. The attorney for Savage told the Washington Post that “his client is seeking a jury trial on charges of defamation, civil conspiracy, and false light invasion of privacy, as well as monetary damages up to $50,000.” For his part, Savage received death threats and was harassed relentlessly.

I’d ask for more.

This post was originally published on this site

After a delay, the opening statements in the murder trial for the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery were heard Friday morning. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was chased, attacked, and killed while on a run in the Satilla Shores neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia. The three white men on trial include Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. In addition to being charged with malice, felony murder and aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit a felony, the three men have been indicted on federal hate crime charges and attempted kidnapping, CNN reported.

All three men pleaded not guilty, with the McMichaels claiming they were conducting a citizen’s arrest and acting in self-defense; Bryan claims he took no part in the killing.

Prior to the trial beginning and the jury being sworn in, Judge Timothy Walmsley ruled that Arbery’s probation status will not be allowed to be heard by the jury. The decision follows a motion filed by attorneys representing Gregory and Travis McMichael to introduce evidence related to Arbery’s probation status. While defense attorneys argued the status was relevant to the murder, the state countered by arguing that Arbery’s “status as a probationer is not relevant, as the defendants did not know Mr. Arbery was on probation. Further, it is not relevant to the defenses of ‘citizen’s arrest’ or self-defense.”

Another important ruling the judge made was that photos of Travis McMichael’s pickup truck—the same truck he driving on the day of the killing—can be shown during trial as evidence. The truck has a license plate depicting the old Georgia flag featuring a Confederate emblem on it. According to defense lawyers, jury members considered the flag as a “symbol of racism” and the court was trying not to discuss race. However, the judge ruled otherwise, siding with state prosecutors who noted that Travis McMichael consciously put the plate on his truck.

“It is not character evidence, it is motive evidence,” lead prosecutor Linda Dunikoski argued to the court on Thursday. “This is something he put on the front of his truck. He wanted the world to know this, he put it out there to see,” she added.  

Dunikoski presented the state’s opening arguments with a statement that began by asking, “Why are we here?” Her opening consisted of three parts: discussing the charges, speaking of the evidence, and then explaining what happened and what led to the murder.

To end the state’s opening argument, Dunikoski played a video from the day of the murder. The short video sparked national outrage after it was released in May 2020, three months after the February day when Arbery was shot and killed while out for a jog. The footage of the incident comes from Bryan’s cellphone. Bryan released it thinking it would help prove his lack of involvement in the incident and bolster the McMichaels’ claims of “self-defense.”

In it, Arbery is seen jogging down the street when a pickup truck stops in the road and a man, identified as Gregory McMichael, is seen standing near the driver’s side door with a shotgun.

According to reporters who were present, when the video was played during the opening arguments, Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr., left the courtroom, saying “I don’t want to see this.“

Watch the opening arguments below:

This post was originally published on this site

It’s always tempting to dismiss the reality-inverting rants of right-wing ideologues like Tucker Carlson—even as they furiously scramble to dismiss culpability for the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol from the right-wing extremists who attempted to prevent the certification of the 2020 Electoral College ballots—as so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. Then when the November 2021 election results end up with eight people who participated in those events elevated to public office as Republicans, the cold reality hits: Disinformation works.

The Jan. 6 gaslighting campaign’s toxic effects extend far beyond their ability to persuade voters that the attempted coup was merely, in Carlson’s words, a political protest that “got out of hand.” Carlson’s latest enterprise—a flashy “documentary” titled Patriot Purge, which posits that the Capitol insurrection actually was a “false flag” operation by the “Deep State” intended to ensnare and imprison American “patriots” simply for “disagreeing with Joe Biden”—is also, as fascism scholar Jason Stanley explained in Rolling Stone, “profoundly dangerous … because it follows a classic template of propaganda that has brought down democracies before.”

Moreover, Carlson is not just a one-man gaslighting brigade: His up-is-down narrative is being avidly adopted both by the average Fox News viewers who watch his program and by the core of right-wing extremists who are ginning themselves up for a civil war with liberal Americans and minorities. It’s also being picked up by other Trump-defending ideologues, as well as by pseudo-progressive “idiosyncratic” pundits like Glenn Greenwald.

Patriot Purge, a three-part propaganda “documentary,” did not air on Fox News and did not involve contributions from any journalists in its newsroom; rather, it is entirely a product of Carlson and the writers and producers of his nightly show. While Fox News did permit him to promote it on his show, it’s only available on the firewalled Fox Nation website, which has some 1 million subscribers.

The film uses so many quick-moving flash cuts, particularly when showing footage of the Jan. 6 siege, that watching it is both disorienting and headache-inducing, which may be the point: The camera only seems to slow down when Carlson or his guests are speaking, making them appear voices of calm and reason amid the videotaped chaos.

Most of all, it is an exercise in naked fearmongering. “The left is hunting the right,” a disembodied voice tells the audience, tracking them and “sticking them in the gulag, sticking them in Guantanamo Bay for American citizens.”

Its centerpiece is Carlson’s previously elucidated conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false flag operation created by the Deep State, part of a long-term project by “global elites” to enslave Americans and crush their freedoms. But in the documentary, he tries to explore these ideas in depth, mainly by interviewing sources whose veracity is dubious at best.

Among these is the primary proponent of the false flag claim, an ex-Army captain named Emily Rainey who was present in the pro-Trump rally that preceded the riot, and who told Carlson that she felt compelled to resign after her involvement came under scrutiny. Rainey, in fact, had already resigned her commission over an unrelated reprimand before she traveled to D.C. for the event.

Rainey touted her background in psychological operations, telling Carlson:

RAINEY: So if that was an insurrection, it was the most poorly conducted insurrection ever.

CARLSON: If it wasn’t an insurrection, then what was it?

RAINEY: Special Operations uses the military deception tactic of a false flag abroad against the enemies of America. A false flag is any time you want to frame another group so that you can then take action against that group. It is my opinion that false flags have happened in this country. One of which may have been January 6.

The claim drew widespread rebukes for Carlson, who nonetheless has continued to double down on his conspiracist narrative. It was even debunked on Fox News: Last Friday, a Special Report With Bret Baier segment reporting on the ongoing congressional investigation into the insurrection featured an interview with Marc Polymeropoulos, a former veteran CIA officer. He was flatly dismissive of the false flag theory.

“One of the things with false flag operations as well, is sometimes it’s used by conspiracy theorists to actually hide the truth,” Polymeropoulos said. “Pretty far-fetched—in no way was January 6 a false flag operation.”

The documentary was an admixture of factually grounded material and baldfaced falsehoods and distortions, as well as carefully omitted information. At one point, Carlson interviewed a couple from Homer, Alaska, whose home was searched by the FBI in a raid after they had returned home from participating in the “Stop the Steal” rally; the woman, Marilyn Hueper, had been wrongly identified as the person who had stolen House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop.

Hueper and her husband Paul told Carlson that they had approached the Capitol as it was under siege, and had been urged to go inside by other rioters—but had chosen not to:

PAUL HUEPER: Sure enough, you could see kind of a line snaking up. There were no police stopping anybody at all. It was like an open invitation just to walk right into the Capitol didn’t feel right. We chose not to.

MARILYN HUEPER: It felt totally like some kind of set up was being made.

CARLSON: Their instincts were right, it was a set up.

As Anne Applebaum explored thoughtfully at The Atlantic, this kind of paranoid fearmongering, particularly when broadcast as propaganda to an audience of millions, has a profoundly pernicious effect:

The point is to describe the events of January 6 as a false-flag operation cooked up inside the deepest layers of the American deep state—and thus to cast doubt on everything that will come out of Congress’s January 6 hearings, everything revealed by every Washington Post or network-television investigation, everything turned up by the FBI. For Fox viewers, this will come as an enormous relief. If all the disturbing facts can be ignored, then no lessons need be learned. Republicans in Congress and the Trump White House need never be blamed for their assault on the Constitution. The people who supported them need never question that support.

Indeed, the whole point of conspiracy theories, particularly those fueled by eliminationist politics, is to create permission for their followers—permission, mainly, to act out violently. As Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, explained, Carlson’s “documentary” follows this classic fascist blueprint:

The message of the series is clear: a great wrong has been done. The government and media have engineered a false narrative directed in the first instance towards discrediting the patriots who seek to address it, and, ultimately, with the goal of hunting down and violently suppressing them. Our media’s complicity is demonstrated by their differential coverages of the BLM protests, which are here portrayed as senseless violent riots, and the events of January 6. The patriots are innocent Americans seeking only to preserve democracy in the face of a fraudulent election. The forces arrayed against them are almost impossibly powerful. It is a repeat of the war on terror, by the same forces who engineered it, but directed against the most representative of our citizens, the “real” Americans.

It is impossible to accept this message in total without taking it to justify violent mass action against the current government, or something like a police and military coup.

In an environment in which the same right-wing “patriots” who attacked the Capitol and condoned it afterwards have been shouting for a “civil war” waged against their political opponents—and in which some of them are now wondering aloud “when do we get to use the guns” so “we can start killing these people”—this kind of propaganda is akin to throwing napalm onto a bonfire.

Carlson has been building this narrative at Fox since shortly after the insurrection itself, during the period when Fox News lost huge chunks of its audience for reporting the November 2020 and its aftermath accurately, at first. Their most popular host played a central role in drawing those viewers back into the fold by embracing the seditionist conspiracism of Trumpian politics, as well as the abandonment of basic journalistic principles (such as factual veracity) in the process.

He started out by attacking the Biden administration for focusing federal law enforcement on white nationalists and other right-wing extremists in the aftermath of the insurrection. Carlson claimed even then that liberals were intent on rounding up not just violent rioters but every conservative who voted for Trump:

Got that? Vote the wrong way and you are a jihadi. You thought you were an American citizen with rights and just a different view. But no, you’re a jihadi. And we’re going to treat you the way we did those radicals after 9/11. The way we treated Bin Laden. Get in line, pal. This is a war on terror.

… Keep in mind, they’re talking about American citizens here. They’re talking about you. But nobody seems to notice or care.

He also claimed that the First Amendment had been “effectively suspended. You can now be arrested for saying the wrong things. … Because we’re clearly living under some form of martial law at the moment.” He went on:

… You may have thought you were a decent American in good standing. Ten years ago, nobody in this country would have called your views extreme. They weren’t extreme then. You don’t think they’re extreme now, you’ve always considered yourself a pretty moderate person—live your life and get along with others. Oh ho, that’s not possible now—because the rules have changed. You are now a dangerous insurgent. You are no different from a bloodthirsty Pashtun in Helmand Province, or an ISIS terrorist in Erbil! You’re part of a guerrilla insurgency.

By late June, this narrative had metastasized into a full-blown Deep State conspiracy theory, straight out of something on Infowars (which in fact is where this particular theory originated). Claiming the National Security Agency was spying on him, he ranted:

The Biden administration is signaling a very real change to actual federal policy. The ‘War on Terror,’ now ongoing for 20 years, has pivoted in its aims. The War on Terror is now being waged against American citizens, opponents of the regime.

We saw this on display on Jan. 6. We told you a couple of weeks ago, based on language in publicly available indictments, that the FBI clearly had foreknowledge of the riot at the Capitol that day. The agents we spoke to this weekend confirmed that is true. Quote: ‘The FBI had sources in that crowd—confidential sources, snitches. That’s 100% certain.’

In reality, as we explored in detail, Carlson’s “report” on the involvement of FBI operatives in the Jan. 6 riot was predicated on a risible and obvious misunderstanding of how the federal government’s informant and cooperating-witness programs function. It also was based on an up-is-down characterization of the relationship of the FBI to those “snitches”: Yes, it’s 100% certain that Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, one of those informants, was in the crowd; it’s also certain that he was informing the FBI directly not about the activities of the Proud Boys, but rather of their leftist nemeses, antifa and BLM.

Carlson’s main source for that piece, white nationalist Darren Beattie, also figures prominently in Patriot Purge. Seizing credulously on a story in the far-right webzine Revolver by Beattie headlined, “Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions of Federal Foreknowledge,” Carlson hosted a long interview with Beattie on Fox, claiming the article demonstrated that “the FBI was organizing the riots of January 6.”

Carlson told his audience:

But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged. Look at the documents; the government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz pointedly observed: “In fact, this theory, which rests on the premise that ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ are by definition ‘FBI operatives,’ collapses with the slightest scrutiny, and suggests that Carlson either a) lacks a basic understanding of federal investigations or b) thinks his viewers are rubes.” Aaron Blake of The Washington Post explained further: “Legal experts say the government literally cannot name an undercover agent as an unindicted co-conspirator.”

Carlson further emphasized his utter incomprehension (though probably deliberate) of the federal legal system when he went on to suggest that one of the unindicted co-conspirators was actually an FBI operative—when in fact that person was the wife of one of the indicted insurrectionists, a woman who had entered a cooperative agreement with the government. But in Carlson’s alternative universe, simple facts simply don’t matter.

As Stanley observes, the larger structure of Carlson’s narrative happens to neatly replicate the basic architecture of fascist propaganda, including his insistence on elevating slain insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt into a patriotic martyr figure—just as Hitler’s Nazi Party did with Horst Wessel in 1920s Germany. It embraces Trump’s Big Lie—the claim that he was cheated out of reelection by massive voter fraud—as an essential truth, and builds its narrative on that foundation: “It is only on this assumption that those who promulgate this lie can be represented as innocent victims,” Stanley notes.

This kind of gaslighting propaganda, as we already have seen, has real-world consequences. Most of all, it is profoundly antidemocratic, polluting the national discourse with deliberate disinformation and making it impossible for the public to tell up from down and right from wrong. It’s a deluge of bullshit intended to so profoundly muddy the discourse that baldfaced liars can readily con their gullible marks, which is why Carlson at one point asserted that “so many people are lying at such high volume about the 2020 election, it’s hard to know exactly what happened.” It is a recipe for authoritarianism.

As Applebaum explains:

Equally important—and with longer-term significance—the documentary is deliberately designed to make viewers question the most important institutions in their society, the very same ones that, until now, inspired faith and belief among American conservatives. FBI agents were once good guys who produced law and order. Now they are a sinister cabal who created a fake demonstration on January 6 (a “honeypot”) with the aim of drawing in and eventually persecuting and repressing patriotic Americans. The U.S. military once consisted of heroes who fought our enemies overseas. Now the armed forces are part of the same conspiracy, as they seek to identify those same American patriots and “purge out of the military every dissenting voice.” This, someone warns, will be the “War on Terror 2.0,” the “same corrupt interests in Washington pushing the lie of domestic white terrorism.”

Republicans have already begun to valorize the Jan. 6 insurrectionists; within the year, as this narrative continues to sink into the public discourse, Carlson and his fellow gaslighters will be celebrating their actions as patriotic defenders of the American republic (which is how most of the indicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists already see themselves). It won’t be shocking to hear “Free the 1/6ers” become a GOP talking point.

This is how the age-old “waving the bloody shirt” trope has always worked: Invert reality on its head, claiming innocence of violent intent, shifting the blame for violence onto the victims, always taking the rhetorical offensive. Thus, the bullies become victims, and the victims bullies. So far, it has worked every time.

As Stanley observes:

In the inverted world of the series, those who support the authoritarian cult of the leader, his base, are the democratic patriots. Those who seek to preserve fair elections are the fascists. Fascist propaganda is relentless projection, justified by lies. Carlson has proven to be a master in its use.

Carlson’s gaslighting narrative is readily spreading. It’s being picked up particularly among ostensibly mainstream conservative pundits who have embraced Trumpism, notably in the orbit of the right-wing Claremont Institute, a think tank that has published screeds embracing neofascist politics in the name of defending the ex-president. A recent piece in Imprimus, the magazine of Hillsdale College (closely associated with Claremont), by Roger Kimball headlined “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax,” agrees with Carlson that it was merely “a political protest that ‘got out of hand.’” Kimball also asserts that the Big Lie is factual, and that “every honest person knows that the 2020 election was tainted.”

Kimball also cites “the liberal commentator” Greenwald, who indeed has been leading the gaslight parade claiming that Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection. Greenwald and others are part of a faction of pseudoprogressives who Carlson likes to invite onto his show to burnish his far-right narratives with their “idiosyncratic” hot takes, which inevitably are just slightly retooled right-wing talking points.

Greenwald’s primary narrative is that the Biden administration is undertaking “a new War on Terror.” In a recent column on Substack, he asserted that “at least some of the 1/6 protesters have been placed on” a federal no-fly list, without providing any evidence that this is the case. At one point, the administration was considering taking such a step, but there is no sign that it has actually done so. The only Jan. 6 protester who has claimed he was placed on a no-fly list is white nationalist “Groyper” leader Nicholas Fuentes, whose claim was demolished when it emerged that he actually had been banned by Southwest Airlines after he had created a scene aboard one of their planes and then suggested on his podcast that he’d like to kill a flight attendant. (If there actually is a no-fly list, it likely is the one shared by airlines naming unruly passengers who cause flight delays and threaten their employees.)

The Biden administration, in fact, has so far not recommended any new legislation to deal with the rising white nationalist threat, and instead is pursuing a strategy emphasizing a serious focus on enforcing laws currently on the books (though the plan does contain some troubling elements). Unlike the post-9/11 Bush administration, Biden has not declared “war on terror” and proffered draconian measures undermining civil rights; nor, unlike the post-9/11 right, have liberals declared all Republicans identical to the far-right extremists who attacked the Capitol; rather, that would be right-wing pundits like Carlson who have done so.

That hasn’t prevented Greenwald from continuing to claim that there’s a new “war on terror” underway. Claiming that “the same repressive climate that arose after 9/11 has prevailed,” he lamely adds: “Even without enactment of a new law, there is no doubt that a second War on Terror, this one domestic, has begun and is growing, all in the name of the 1/6 ‘Insurrection’ and with little dissent or even public debate.”

Gaslighting narratives like this are not merely disinformation or the amalgamations of unmitigated bullshit that typify right-wing discourse now; rather, they are attempts to persuade the public, a la Charles Boyer, that it didn’t see what it watched unfold on Jan. 6 in Washington, or later watched in full and frightening detail in that definitive video investigation by The New York Times; that what it witnessed was just some good patriotic folk who got justly irate at a stolen election, rather than the attempt by a violent, armed mob to lynch members of Congress and prevent the peaceful transfer of power from a defeated president to his successor, one of the hallmarks of the stability of American democratic institutions, that we all saw that day.

The intent is to get people to distrust their senses, to disbelieve factual reality, to turn that reality on its head, thereby driving a wedge between the True Believers and the rest of the world, planted in reality. It is a recipe for cultist authoritarianism—in this case, the Trumpist kind.

As Anne Applebaum sagely concludes:

So consider this a warning, from someone who did watch it: The hatred of America and of American institutions is going to grow. It will become more mainstream and more acceptable—especially among conservatives who once thought of their country with so much faith and pride.