Independent News

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, strolled into Sen. Tina Polsky’s office two weeks ago and refused to wear a mask, who’d have thought that the senator would be the one at the center of hate calls and death threats?

Polsky asked Ladapo to don a mask as she is currently in treatment for breast cancer. 

Although Polsky’s gotten a lot of hate calls lately, the call she got most recently was one of the most vile: antisemitic, crude, profanity-laden, and menacing—in other words, a typical Republican tirade when their beliefs are being challenged.

The call lasted about a minute and the unidentified woman caller ended it with, “F**k off and die.” Nothing but the best from the GOP and its supporters. 

Polsky says the worst part is that since the incident with Ladapo in her office, DeSantis has said nothing. 

“The humanity is gone, the compassion is gone, and unfortunately, our leaders do nothing to stop it,’’ Polsky said Wednesday. “They’re picking it up from our leaders and he [DeSantis] needs to stop it. I work for the State of Florida, just like he works for the State of Florida. He doesn’t care about me at all. He had many opportunities.” 

As Miami Herald reported, DeSantis did appear on Fox News with host Laura Ingraham to say that Polsky’s grievance about his anti-mask, anti-vaxxer surgeon general was “manufactured,” and she was “using it to get political air time on Comcast and AT&T.” Classy, governor. Very classy. 

“He just doesn’t care about anyone or anything but his presidential ambitions,’’ Polsky told the Herald. “The governor, the surgeon general, and certainly not these trolls, don’t get to tell me where I’m comfortable and where I feel safe. That’s up to me to decide.”

Florida Senate Leader Wilton Simpson excoriated Florida’s top doctor for his insensitive and irresponsible behavior in the meeting with Polsky.

“It shouldn’t take a cancer diagnosis for people to respect each other’s level of comfort with social interactions during a pandemic,” he said. “What occurred in Senator Polsky’s office was unprofessional and will not be tolerated in the Senate.”

Ladapo, a cardiovascular specialist and lover of hydroxychloroquine, says he can’t “communicate clearly and effectively” with his mouth covered. So I guess he was mute during all the time he worked at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, supposedly caring for patients.

The last time I checked, you need to wear a mask in a hospital around sick people. Did Ladapo miss that class at Harvard Medical School?

Of course, Ladapo’s statement didn’t provide an apology, just an excuse. Why wear a mask? It’s not as if COVID-19 has killed over 58,000 people in Florida. And, there’s always “thoughts and prayers,” the go-to for the GOP. Here’s Ladapo’s version:

“I am genuinely saddened by Senator Polsky’s recent diagnosis of breast cancer, and I pray for her and her family and wish them God’s blessings and strength,” Ladapo tweeted.

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The House is ready to vote on President Joe Biden’s signature care economy and infrastructure proposals Friday. Maybe. While the first vote of the day (a Republican nuisance motion to adjourn) was ongoing, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was still whipping for conservative Democratic votes from the Sabotage Squad. Now that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is enthusiastically supporting both bills—the Build Back Better (BBB) human infrastructure and climate bill and the bipartisan hard infrastructure (BIF) proposal—the saboteurs are coming up with more and more excuses to delay.

If nothing else, it demonstrates just how clever the progressives were to insist on the two bills being linked. The conservative Democrats and their Senate counterparts and cheerleaders Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have proven untrustworthy. They’ve been trying to renege on the deal for the linked votes for months, with the only aim seeming to be preventing the larger care economy and climate change plan from passing. The moderates have been demanding a thing that leadership says won’t happen for a few weeks—a Congressional Budget Office score. They already have a Joint Committee on Taxation score to work with, and the Senate will make changes, and thus the CBO score on this package won’t be final anyway. It’s all just seeming like the saboteurs are back to making up reasons not to pass this bill.

That the bad faith in these negotiations is centered in that group of conservative Democrats is made even more evident by the concession of a bloc of lawmakers fighting for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that would not be included in this bill.

“This is just the battle. This isn’t the end of the war when it comes to immigration,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, said following Thursday’s meetings with leadership. “There are so many things in this bill that will benefit immigrant families that we just can’t lose it all because of this one issue.”

The bad faith from the so-called moderates looks even worse after they negotiated new language on SALT, the deduction for state and local taxes. The deduction was eliminated in the 2017 tax bill, a pointed punishment for people living in blue states like New York and California, which have the highest state and local taxes, particularly property taxes on ridiculously expensive homes. The moderates got higher SALT cap included in the bill, a condition of New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer, which already mainly benefits the rich. They voted to raise the SALT cap from $10,000 to $ $80,000 per year. By the way, the Democrats pushing for that are also the Democrats who want to see a CBO score right now—but their changes mean the CBO will have to take longer to do its work. Funny how that played out, huh?

Another conservative Democrat who has been fighting against Medicare being able to negotiate drug prices also got a win Thursday. Rep. Scott Peters of California further whittled down the narrow drug price negotiating powers given to Medicare in the bill by delaying the provision by another year for some categories of drugs. The bill previously would only allow Medicare to negotiate prices on 10 select drugs by 2025, and 20 per year by 2028, and only for drugs that are outside the “exclusivity” period—the time in which the Food and Drug Administration allows them a monopoly on the drug.

That means some of the most expensive drugs can’t be negotiated. So-called “orphan drugs,” those generally very expensive drugs used to treat rare illnesses, are also exempted from negotiations, as are drugs from “small biotech” firms, though their exemption expires in 2028. It’s not clear which category Peters and crew got further carved out.

And yet they’re still holding out. Maybe this will help:

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If it seems that things are proceeding slowly when it comes to the House select committee on Jan. 6, that’s because they are. It took until June for the committee to be formed. Document requests went out in August. The first subpoenas were issued a month later. Steve Bannon was held in contempt of Congress a month after that. 

Now it’s November. No one has been indicted. None of the four subpoenaed in September have testified. Rep. Liz Cheney may have revealed that the committee has now interviewed over 150 people, but without knowing who those people are or what they’ve said, it’s hard to estimate how much progress the committee may have made toward holding those responsible for the January insurgency responsible. From the outside, the answer certainly looks like “not much.”  

One of the most frustrating aspects has to be that the committee is still fighting to see the documents it requested back in August. Donald Trump immediately tossed a claim of executive privilege over two large tranches of those documents. Almost as quickly, President Joe Biden removed that barrier, which might make it seem that the documents were then hand-carried to the select committee. Except they weren’t. Because Trump took his executive privilege claims to court, claiming that his former role still carries the right to cover up. 

What Trump is trying to hide includes: the White House visitor logs for the week of Jan. 6, call logs to Trump and Mike Pence on that day, draft public statements created during the assault on the Capitol, and handwritten memos passed around the White House as Trump responded to the scenes of his supporters storming Congress. All of which sound pretty important to the committee’s investigation.

On Thursday, it seemed that Trump had a bad day in court, but that’s a bit deceptive. Any day this matter is still in court is a good day for Trump.

As someone who has been involved in over 3,000 lawsuits, Trump has one area of genuine expertise: using the courts to slow down any process. As Politico noted back in October, Trump sued both the Jan. 6 committee and the National Archives to halt the release of over 700 pages of documents with a claim that the committee’s request was “a vexatious, illegal fishing expedition.” At the core of the suit is a claim that the committee lacks a “legislative purpose” in seeking the documents which, according to the suit, makes the entire request “unconstitutional.”

In Thursday’s testimony, CNN reports that D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan appeared to be “skeptical” of Trump’s claims and pressed his attorneys over why there should be any protection of the requested documents.

“Are you really saying that the President’s notes, talking points, telephone conversations, on January 6, have no relation to the matter on which Congress is considering legislation?” Chutkan asked. “The January 6 riot happened in the Capitol. That is literally Congress’ house.”

That doesn’t mean the day was a complete sweep for Team Congress. Chutkan also acknowledged that some of the documents being requested, like internal polling data from Trump’s campaign, appeared to be “tangential” to the actual investigation and that “there has to be some limit” to what the committee can request. At various points during the day, Chutkan noted that Congress’ requests were “very broad” or even “alarmingly broad.”

All of this could play into a request from Trump’s team that the district court review the documents one at a time, allowing challenges to each—a task that Chutkan noted would take “years.” But with the judge also acknowledging that some of the documents didn’t seem to have direct value for the investigation, there’s a danger that such “this one, but not this one” consideration could begin, turning every page of the documents into its own unique court fight.

Trump’s team understands they don’t have to win. They’re only doing what they did so well during past congressional investigations: stalling. No matter what the district court says, there is always the court of appeals, and no matter what that court says, there’s always the Supreme Court. All of them separated by weeks or months.

Without some kind of expedited consideration, it’s not at all difficult to contemplate these same documents being the subject of a Supreme Court ruling issued well into 2022. It’s also not difficult to contemplate that the court’s Trump-centric majority might discover that most of what the committee requested was out of bounds, or even that Congress can only request documents having to do with some existing piece of legislation—a ruling that would strongly restrict Congress’ ability to check the executive branch going forward. 

How long can this all take? Congressional requests to see Trump’s tax records—an authority explicitly granted under federal tax regulations—is still wading through the courts. These are the documents Congress ordered the IRS to turn over in 2019. Back in July, it seemed that this issue was finally resolved when the Department of Justice reversed course and stopped trying to block the release. Yeah, but … it’s not over. At an August hearing, the Department of Justice argued that the documents should be produced “promptly.” Congress is still waiting.

Trump isn’t trying to win in court. Being in court is the win. If Congress actually hopes to make significant progress on the Jan. 6 investigation before the 2022 elections, it will likely have to come without the documents Trump is protecting. 

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In a shock to absolutely no one, Richard Spencer serving as his own lawyer has proven pretty terrible for, well, Richard Spencer. The glass-jawed Nazi known for barely being able to take a punch (among other undesirable traits) was forced to represent himself in a civil lawsuit after his real lawyer dropped Spencer for failing to pay up and adhere to his legal advice.

Spencer has spent a full week pretending he has any grasp of the law as one of 25 defendants who had a hand in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Surprisingly, he is just one of two overconfident white dudes representing themselves in this case, the other being Christopher “Crying Nazi” Cantwell.

Cantwell’s had his fair share of bafflingly stupid moments, including losing his own witness list and preparing for trial by watching Tucker Carlson, but Spencer’s idiocy outshone him on Thursday. Over the course of a full day in the witness stand, Spencer was endlessly smacked down by his own words as attorney Michael Bloch pulled up transcripts and audio clips pushing back against the many denials Spencer offered for his own behavior.

Unicorn Riot’s live tweets of Thursday’s proceedings provide an incredible account of Spencer getting in his own way. His role as a witness absolutely undermined his own ability to successfully make a case for himself as his own lawyer.

The Sines vs. Kessler civil lawsuit was brought forth on behalf of nine Charlottesville residents who were injured during the “Unite the Right” rally and surrounding events. They’re hoping to receive compensatory and statutory damages from the defendants, whom they allege conspired to incite violence. Spencer certainly helped make the plaintiffs’ case today. Spencer spent hours perjuring himself in an effort to distance himself from his conduct before, during, and after the rally.

Bloch, who represents the plaintiffs, pulled up frequent instances in which Spencer either outright called for violence or agreed with someone else who did. James Kolenich, the white nationalist attorney representing many of the folks named as defendants, later took the time to throw Spencer under the bus on behalf of his clients during cross-examination. The lawyer pushed a theory that Spencer attempted to take over an alt-right organization in the run-up to the rally and played more of an active role in the “Unite the Right” event than he let on. As if that weren’t enough, Kolenich also brought up an instance in which Spencer’s credit card was declined for a $4 purchase.

Proceedings concluded with Cantwell just beginning to cross-examine Spencer, which Cantwell will continue doing on Friday. The trial initially began on Oct. 25 and is calendared for four weeks, according to the civil rights nonprofit Integrity First for America. Spencer likely won’t earn any accolades for being an amateur lawyer, a la Ted Bundy, but he certainly found one hell of a way to become the alt-right’s new favorite scapegoat.

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Imagine for a moment House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy leisurely sipping on his morning coffee when he suddenly sees the news that the select committee investigating Jan. 6 has interviewed more than 150 people already in their probe.

Fun, right? That heart-attack-inducing moment may have actually occurred Thursday when Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming dropped a bomb.

“We’ve had, actually, over 150 interviews with a whole range of people connected to the events, connected to understanding what happens, so that just gives you a sense,” Cheney, the panel’s vice-chair, told Politico. “It is a range of engagements—some formal interviews, some depositions … There really is a huge amount of work underway that is leading to real progress for us.”

In other words, the Jan. 6 panel has been burning through witnesses even as they face reluctance from a handful of holdouts close to Donald Trump. It’s been known that the committee has interviewed some Trump officials, like former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah and former Trump Department of Justice officials like Jeffrey Clark and Richard Donoghue. But by the sounds of it, the committee’s work is proceeding urgently and at a break-neck pace. As the other GOP member of the Jan. 6 panel, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, noted last weekend on ABC’s This Week, Republicans will surely kill the Jan. 6 probe if they retake control of the chamber in next year’s midterms.

The Justice Department has yet to act on a two-week-old criminal referral from the House for Steve Bannon after defying a congressional subpoena. That surely hasn’t helped the committee’s bid to secure testimony from other Trump confidants, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, and former national security and Defense Department aide Kash Patel.

But the committee’s efforts could soon be getting a real boost nonetheless in the form of a treasure trove of information from the National Archives. Trump has sought to block congressional investigators from obtaining key call records, visitor logs, and sensitive files of his inner circle. But the federal judge who heard arguments in Trump’s legal challenge Thursday, Judge Tanya Chutkan, appeared to take a very skeptical view of his executive privilege claim.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly rejected Trump’s assertion of executive privilege. Politico reports that unless the court intervenes, Archivist David Ferriero plans to ship the first batch of information to lawmakers on Nov. 12.

A rejection of Trump’s privilege claim could also light a fire under the Justice Department on the matter of Bannon’s criminal referral. Bannon has also claimed he is shielded from complying with investigators based on executive privilege, but his claim is even weaker than Trump’s is. So an official rejection of Trump’s claim by Judge Chutkan could deal a final blow to Bannon’s already flimsy argument in the eyes of Justice Department officials.