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- Elon Musk on the “woke mob” who booed him at the…Dave Chappelle show
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While any facet of Republican ideology is reactionary and extreme, brace yourselves: The most fringe members of an already-extreme movement have taken the reins.
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Let’s start with disgraced former president Donald Trump and his white-nationalist inner circle. One Trump-aligned group, America First Legal (kill me), which is headed by child-torturer Stephen Miller (who else) has carved out a niche for itself in the world of White grievance lawsuits, or as Miller et al call it “Anti-White racism.” AFL is behind the successful legal challenge to part of President Biden’s pandemic stimulus that was meant to give Black farmers government aid as a corrective measure for decades of discrimination, saying that the measure “racially discriminated against White farmers.” You simply cannot make this shit up.
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America First Legal also backed lawsuits to kill a $29 billion program that prioritized struggling women and minority-owned restaurants last year, along with a council created by the Department of Education that conservative parents groups objected to last week. How do they keep winning? Partly by consistently filing lawsuits in a right-wing Texas judicial district and a federal court system that Trump stuffed with loyalist judges during his single term. Naturally, civil-rights advocates are sounding the alarm, because the string of successes suggest that AFL has figured out how to harness the court system to unravel any government policy meant to right historical wrongs against marginalized communities.
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Miller has always had his ear to the ground of the “White Lives Matter” crowd and has spent his career trying to turn White grievances into law and policy in order to keep the shrinking White American majority in power. AFL is part of a web of groups led by Trump allies which make up a sort of shadow administration just waiting for his potential return to the White House in 2024, and their pockets are deep. Miller’s racism-for-hire legal firm received over $6 million in donations last year, including $1.3 million from the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group whose leadership is made up of various key figures in the right-wing plot to overturn the 2020 election. AFL also bankrolled a multimillion-dollar radio and television ad campaign specifically accusing the Biden White House, corporations, and universities of “anti-White bigotry.” One of AFL’s board members? You better believe it’s none other than former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.
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But there’s more going on in the far-right space than just White guys who make over $200,000 per year arguing that White people are discriminated against.
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bragged over the weekend that if she and Trump advisor Steve Bannon had been at the helm of the January 6 insurrection, they “would have won.” And also, that under their direction, the mob would’ve been (better) armed. Greene has repeatedly argued that January 6 criminals have been “mistreated” and has indicated that she would join the presumptive next House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, in investigating the January 6 commission once Republicans officially take control of the House. Greene insisted that her comments were “sarcasm” but there’s an obvious throughline between them and sincere statements she has regularly made and continues to make. McCarthy has vowed to restore committee assignments to Greene, who was stripped of them in February 2021 for espousing batshit QAnon conspiracy theories, claiming that 9/11 was an inside job, and that a Jewish cabal ignited a deadly wildfire with a “space beam.” Again, I wish we were kidding.
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Speaking of McCarthy, it looks his quest for the speakership proves definitively that election denial has finally come home to roost. The Ultra-MAGA wing of the House GOP hates McCarthy, and many want to deny him the job, or at least extract toxic promises and concessions out of him first. In a true “a broken clock is right twice a day” moment, Fox News contributor and former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy summed it up perfectly, saying “This small band of Republican kamikazes are convinced that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2020 with 47 percent of the vote, yet somehow Kevin McCarthy lost the speaker’s race with 85 percent of the vote. Math never was their strong suit.” Another arm of the far-right machine is Elon Musk, who not only subscribes to reactionary social views about trans people, and has repeatedly expressed his support for the GOP, but is now deploying QAnon tactics, baselessly accusing the former head of Twitter’s trust and safety division of pedophilia. Yoel Roth, who departed from the company last month, has had to vacate his residence because of the deluge of threats he received after Musk took aim at him.
The mainstream media needs to learn how to properly cover the alt-right, often White Nationalist conservatives in our midst (we’re looking at you the New York Times) or Charlottesville and the January 6 insurrection will have just been dress rehearsals for something even more horrific to come.
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Two high-profile deaths have shocked the international community as the World Cup continues in Qatar. Qatari reporter Khalid al-Misslam’s death was announced by the country’s news outlets, but how and when he died remain unclear. The announcement of his death came on the same day that a security guard (who is reportedly a migrant worker) at the games incurred serious injuries after falling at the Lusail Stadium at around 2:00 a.m. on Saturday. That man remains in critical but stable condition. But news of Khalid al-Misslam’s death came just one day after American journalist Grant Wahl died while covering the Argentina vs. Netherlands game. The World Cup’s organizing committee did not disclose Wahl’s cause of death, but he had posted on Twitter on November 21st that he had been refused entry to a game for wearing a rainbow t-shirt in support of the LGBT community, and was ordered to change his shirt. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar.
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of bankrupt cryptocurrency trading firm FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas after federal prosecutors shared his sealed indictment with the Bahamian government.
Iran executed a second prisoner today, hanging a man from a construction crane after he was convicted for “crimes” committed during the nationwide protests.
Chinese hospitals are scrambling to contain emerging COVID-19 outbreaks after the country loosened some of its more overbearing restrictions following weeks of protests.
U.S. authorities have taken a Libyan man into custody suspected of constructing the bomb that destroyed a passenger plane over Scotland in 1988, which killed 270 people.
A Reuters investigation uncovered horrific evidence that the Nigerian army routinely kills children, including infants, they believe to be related to members of African Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
Talking Points Memo acquired thousands of texts from the phone of Mark Meadows recovered by the January 6 Committee, and they depict in excruciating detail, Trump-World’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.
Peru’s new President Dina Boluarte acquiesced to protester demands today, announcing that she would propose to Congress moving up the country’s next elections.
A Minnesota Republican House member-elect said yesterday that slave owners are “morally equivalent” to officials and doctors who support vaccine mandates. Cool guy!
The G-7 said it will work together to bolster Ukrainian military capabilities, especially the country’s air-defense systems, as Russian forces continue to pound the eastern and southern borders of the country.
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A Washington Post investigation found that major strategic mistakes by multiple American administrations allowed fentanyl to flood the U.S. market and exacerbate the worst legal-drug crisis in our nation’s history. In particular, the Drug Enforcement Administration stumbled repeatedly and was far too slow to respond as it confronted the progression of Mexican drug cartels supplanting Chinese fentanyl producers, which has created a massive international pharmaceutical black market producing more of the drug than ever. Not to be outdone, the Department of Homeland Security failed to improve and increase scanning and inspection technology at official border crossings, instead funneling $11 billion toward Donald Trump’s disastrous border wall, which does almost nothing to stop traffickers. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram admits that the U.S. government was too focused on heroin at the beginning of the crisis. According to estimates from the Department of Health and Human Services, more than ninemillion American “misused opioids” in 2020, but the agency has not tracked the rise of fentanyl, and doesn’t know how many Americans are using it. For its part, the CDC is unable to track overdose deaths in real time, as all data is published one year behind. Two-thirds of all overdose deaths are due to fentanyl.
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