Now that he no longer has a Twitter or Facebook account, failed, one-term former President Donald Trump has been relegated to issuing press releases that feel like something that belongs back in the Nixon administration.
The good news, however, is that even though Donnie has no social media accounts, he still manages to get his rants out for us to laugh at and for others to obliterate online, where the ex-president remains locked out.
One thing hasn’t changed when it comes to Trump’s public pronouncements: They’re half-baked and filled with lies, much like his four years in office were.
Such is the case with an attempted cheap shot at CNN and other media outlets who refuse to bow before the Donald:
“the news is boring now that they don’t have my coup attempt to cover every day” is a take pic.twitter.com/pmWMTmhOKR
Sorry, Don, but the news isn’t “boring” since you left D.C. Instead, it’s sane and doesn’t leave us all terrified of whether or not we’re going to wake up in an American version of Nazi Germany. Excuse the hell out of us for preferring competency and compassion to idiocy and hatred.
But the best part of Trump’s attempt at snark is the response he received from CNN’s Jake Tapper, who posted this:
If I had incited and inspired a deadly insurrection and attempt to undo American democracy I might not be out there bragging about how many viewers it had. On any channel.
Ever since President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, conservative media has been repeating the Big Lie that began with failed, one-term former President Donald Trump and his supporters that there had been massive voter fraud which allowed Biden to win.
However, there is absolutely zero evidence that the 2020 election was anything but the “most secure” in American history, as the agency working for the Trump administration called it, and yet the lies, conspiracy theories, and complete bullshit continue to circulate all over right-wing airwaves.
One America News — aka OAN — (which is slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun politically), has reached a new low among the far right nutbags, with one of their hosts calling for everyone who helped Biden win to be executed en masse.
OAN commentator Pearson Sharp rhetorically asked in his “commentary” on the last presidential race how many people it would take to undermine an election:
“Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency?”
Having laid down that paranoid marker, Sharp continued, getting darker and more sinister by the second:
“And when all the dust settles from the audit in Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who were responsible for overthrowing the election?
“What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them? Well in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors. Execution.”
Even that wasn’t enough for Sharp and OAN, as he rattled on and no doubt delighted all of the Trump faithful in the viewing audience:
“Treason is considered the highest of all crimes and is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution, which states that anyone is guilty of treason if they support America’s enemies.
“So far, there have been numerous indications that foreign governments including China and Pakistan, meddled in our election to install Joe Biden as president. Any Americans involved in these efforts from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government officials — is guilty of treason under US code 2381, which carries with the penalty of death.”
OAN calls for the execution of “tens of thousands” of Americans who “stole” the 2020 election from Trump. pic.twitter.com/N2ylNFK8FH
There isn’t a scintilla of evidence to back what Pearson Sharp is saying, but that’s not the point. The point is that millions of Americans believe each and every syllable of what he said.
This is the kind of dreck that’s being fed to conservatives across the country. It’s insidious, dangerous, and downright evil. And it’s getting louder by the second.
Over the years, there’s been some absolutely moronic, absurd, and misleading shit said on right-wing media, most notably Fox News, which is infamous for trafficking in lies and conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact or grounding in reality.
But in today’s wide-open media bouillabaisse of anything goes inanity — fueled in part by the explosion of social media platforms and ubiquity of the internet everywhere you go — we have even more extreme mutant strains of nutbaggery such as Newsmax, where today’s batshit, head-shaking headline originated with a discussion of “critical race theory” which led to a guest warning that teaching about slavery and how whites have treated blacks in the United States over the centuries will result in “death camps” for white people.
Those words came from right-wing radio host Michael Savage, who told Newsmax hosts Steve Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino that there’s already violence against whites all over the country:
“And now they’re beating up white children in schoolrooms. And I’m not going to mince words. You can cut me off if you have to. I know you probably agree with me. I can’t take this anymore. And there’s only one solution to it—sue the goddamn schools if they do it to your child for child abuse, and you will win.”
Yeah, kids didn’t start beating each other up until racism became a topic of discussion, right, Michael? As for suing for child abuse, can we also sue parents who voted for Trump and believe his bullshit? Seems only fair, don’t you agree?
Rather than provide proof of his specious assertions, Savage went full douche and brought up Nazi Germany and the Holocaust:
“The same kind of thing started in Germany. The Jews were no good. The Jews did this. The Jews did that. The next thing you know they were being excluded from swimming pools. They didn’t put them in concentration camps overnight.
“I studied this intimately. I am Jewish. I know how this starts. Attacks on white people is exactly what was done to the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. Don’t fall for this garbage. This is the road to the death camps. Stand up to these bastards and sue them!”
Newsmax guest says critical race theory is "the road to the death camps," adding "attacks on white people is exactly what was done to the Jews in Germany in the '30s" pic.twitter.com/jus8XSqz2Q
Jewish Americans were once excluded from public swimming pools, clubs, and schools in this country, too. Did it lead to concentration camps? No. It led to reforms, change, and a growth in American consciousness that allowed this country to evolve and realize the ignorance of such discrimination.
We have to understand where we’ve been as a nation in order to make sure we don’t repeat the past endlessly and lose our souls. Learning from history — even the dark and controversial parts — is how we prevent repeating it.
One thing you have to give to Fox News: No one hires more delusional crazies than Rupert Murdoch. From Tucker Carlson to Sean Hannity, the Fox hosts and “reporters” are all cut from the same batshit bonkers bolt of cloth.
One of the Fox conspiracy theorists who sometimes gets lost in the hoopla generated by the network’s primetime stars is Maria Bartiromo, who is normally seen on Fox Business but also has a show that runs on the main Fox network two each weekend.
Bartiromo was in rare form recently, inviting Moscow’s favorite senator, Ron Johnson (R-WI) to join her as they both suggested that the January 6 Capitol insurrection was non-violent because the rioters weren’t carrying guns, with the host telling Johnson:
“Armed insurrection is what Nancy Pelosi keeps calling Jan. 6, Senator. How many guns were actually taken up on that day since she says it was armed?”
Johnson was only too happy to extrapolate on what Bartiromo had just said, adding:
“They always talk about thousands of armed insurrectionists. I asked the FBI witness. Not one gun was recovered either in the Capitol or on the Capitol grounds, according to the FBI witness. So that’s just one of the latest big lies.”
Thing is, PolitiFact says Johnson and Bartiromo’s claims that none of the insurrectionists were armed is a blatant lie and earned the site’s “Pants On Fire Rating.” They noted:
“Police stopped only a fraction of the violent protestors Jan. 6, but we still know of guns and explosives seized in and around the Capitol. And we know rioters brought knives, brass knuckles a stun gun, and other weapons. Just as notable, video plainly shows the mob using all manner of makeshift weapons to attack police and force their way in, including hockey sticks, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and a police shield stolen from an officer.”
All of this led to Bartiromo having an on-air meltdown as she acknowledged that she too has been criticized for things she says about the rioting that led to the deaths of five people, including a police officer. Bartiromo told her viewers:
“I am so incredibly proud of this team on Sunday Morning Futures and of working alongside you. We have been telling every story. We’ve been on the right side of it for seven years going. I’ve been trashed every day along the way.
“Keep trashing me! I’ll keep telling the truth.”
Actually, Maria, no one has to try and trash you. You’re doing a helluva fine job of trashing what’s left of your pathetic career.
It all started, oddly enough, with a reporter for Fox 26, a Houston affiliate station, being introduced so she could report on the upcoming Texas heat wave and possible power outages that could potentially endanger the lives of thousands of Texans.
But by the time reporter Ivory Hecker had finished what she had to say (and it had nothing to do with the weather), Twitter had exploded with comments and hashtags that all had right-wing Fox News heading for some very choppy waters in the days ahead.
According to Hecker, she has damaging recordings of Fox News officials and is about to make them public, Newsweek reports, and she broadcast her intentions on live TV, telling viewers:
“I want to let you, the viewers, know that Fox Corp has been muzzling me to keep certain information from you, the viewers.
“From what I’m gathering I am not the only reporter being subjected to this. I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox because it applies to you, the viewers.
“I found a non-profit journalism group called Project Veritas who’s going to help put that out tomorrow. So, tune into them.”
You’ve probably heard of Project Veritas, and what you’ve heard should indeed make you skeptical of any “news” they disseminate. They’re the clowns who tried to entrap doctors into discussing the sale of “body parts” taken from aborted fetuses, as Think Progress noted in 2017:
“The videos themselves were strongly influenced by conservative activist James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas. That organization has been linked to recent efforts to market a false sexual assault allegation targeting Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, seemingly in an effort to discredit the numerous allegations made by other women. The videos made by CMP have had a long-lasting impact themselves, inspiring a wave of legislative efforts around the country, in addition to a deadly attack on a Planned Parenthood in Colorado.”
Hecker’s remarks and the pending release of tapes from her set tongues wagging among right-wingers and conspiracy theorists on social media:
Ivory Hecker accuses Fox of muzzling her, and says that Project Veritas will tell her story tomorrow.
Is anyone surprised that Fox News has been silencing their own reporters? The station that turned its back on its viewers when it mattered most, when the election was fixed?
Here in Houston a local Fox 26 reporter named @IvoryHecker is going to out her employers to Project Veritas. Ivory deserves our full support. What she’s doing takes guts. pic.twitter.com/GIX3MNKVOQ
So this local reporter and Project Veritas are going to “crush the Murdochs”? As much as many of us would love to see Fox News deposited into the nearest trash receptacle, it seems unlikely that this will be what brings about their demise.