Crooked Media - What A Day: Tuck around and find out

If we were a little disappointed by the limited release of the Fulton County grand jury report, the Dominion Voting Systems case against Fox News just gave us amazing goods. 
 

• In seeking a swift, sweeping judgment in its defamation suit against Fox, Dominion Voting Systems filed a motion containing never-before-seen text messages showing that the network’s biggest on-air liars didn’t believe what they were saying on air after the 2020 election. Referring to one of Donald Trump’s lawyers who vociferously claimed she had evidence of election fraud, Tucker Carlson(!) texted a Fox producer “Sidney Powell is lying,” on November 16, 2020. The network’s top-ranking fascist blonde Laura Ingraham texted Carlson that Powell is “a complete nut. No one is working with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].” In a sworn deposition, Sean Hannity said, “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
   

• And this ran all the way to the top. Even Conservative media’s billionaire daddy-in-chief Rupert Murdoch called a November 19, 2020 press conference Giuliani and Powell held “Really crazy stuff.” These private protestations underscore that Fox executives and network hosts were knowingly spreading lies to further a conspiracy theory. They also reveal that Fox works exactly the way they want people to think Twitter, and mainstream news outlets work. In one exchange, Carlson advocates firing a Fox News White House correspondent for fact checking Trump’s election lies, reasoning that Fox viewers would abandon the network (at Trump’s urging) if it put facts on the air, and that would cost Fox lots of money.
   

• By way of background, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox after the network peddled baseless conspiracy theories about the company in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Fox relentlessly spewed bile that Dominion voting machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden, that the company was connected to vote-rigging by late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and that it paid kickbacks. The hits. The classics. These text messages came to light in Dominion’s motion for summary judgment, asking the court to rule against Fox before trial, arguing that no reasonable jury could find Fox News free of liability, and that the evidence is so overwhelming that as a matter of law the court should rule in Dominion’s favor now. 

Releasing the brief was a smart move by Dominion’s attorneys, but naturally in our hellish legal system, preponderance of evidence doesn’t always win the day. 
 

• Fox News, for its part, vigorously denies Dominion’s claims (of course they do), arguing that the lawsuit against them is an “assault on the First Amendment” (their go-to line of defense), and filed their own brief yesterday claiming that the network was engaged in legitimate reporting on newsworthy matters of great public interest. Lol. But as we know, Fox wasn’t adding many, if any, caveats to couch the Big Lie, or sprinkling doubts on the baseless allegations. They perpetuated the Big Lie as true or likely true over and over again for months, despite the fact that “recounts and audits conducted by election officials across the U.S. repeatedly confirmed the election’s outcome, including specifically that Dominion’s machines accurately counted votes.”
   

• Dominion’s legal team has put forth a more complex theory of why Fox went all-in on the Big Lie: damage control. Fox was the first network to project Joe Biden as the winner of Arizona on election night, and their audience was…not happy. Dominion alleges that internal correspondence at Fox proves that the network knowingly spread the falsehoods that its own executives and hosts didn’t believe as a way to reassure viewers of their pro-Trump bona fides. The thinking goes, Fox was afraid that if they didn’t, their hoards of frothing MAGA viewers would be scooped up by an even further right-wing media company like Newsmax. 

Dare We Say merch has entered the chat, and for their first merch drop they wanted to do something that literally everyone needs: a hat that says “Tough Titties”. As that old saying goes “tough titties said the kitty, when the milk went dry”, you know it right? It’s a vibe, it’s a motto and now it’s a hat! They made them just for you and they think you’ll love them. 

The Supreme Court announced that it will not hear arguments in a case about a Trump-era immigration implementation of Title 42, which justified the quick expulsion of migrants on public-health grounds. 

The House GOP has opened another sham investigation, this time into the Biden Administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Amid strident pushback from fellow Republicans, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) changed the language of his “Rescue America Plan” and is now trying to pretend that his scheme to sunset all federal legislation in 5 years “was never intended to apply” to Social Security or Medicare. Sure thing! We definitely believe you!

Five former Memphis police officers pled not guilty in the death of Tyre Nichols. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) demanded that all public universities in Florida hand over medical data on services gender-dysphoria treatments students received, and six of the 12 universities complied. Now college students across the state are planning a walkout to protest the hyper-invasive (and potentially HIPAA violating?) request. 

DeSantis is also threatening to end Advanced Placement classes in Florida due to his ongoing feud with the College Board (which had the audacity to want African American History to be taught accurately), and now thousands of students and parents are justifiably pissed. 

In more Terrible Guy From Florida™ news, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) sent a letter to President Biden urging him to seek Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s resignation over the handling of the East Palestine, OH, train derailment. 

The state of Ohio plans to open a medical clinic in East Palestine to evaluate the symptoms of residents who are worried about chemical exposures after the train derailment and resulting chemical burn-off. 

A Northern Illinois hobby club of balloon makers worries that their latest balloon was shot down by the currently-balloon-obsessed United States Armed Forces.

As COVID-19 cases continue to decline, and the federal government declares that it will end the formal public-health emergency designation on May 11, many Americans believe that the pandemic is “over.” Of course it’s not, really, but the “return to normalcy” has emboldened the anti-vaxx movement, which has exploded since the pandemic began. A leader in the movement, former television producer Del Bigtree (what a name) recently held a two-hour talk at an anti-vaxx conference calling for the imprisonment of pharmaceutical company executives and researchers and public-health officials, and promising fellow anti-vaxxers that he and groups who share his beliefs are now seeking political and legal revenge. The most moneyed group in the anti-vaxx universe is the Children’s Health Defense (lol) headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it’s only grown more powerful in recent years. CHD is always filing kooky ready-to-fail lawsuits, but now the group has launched a new approach: an antitrust lawsuit against major news organizations and social-media platforms, for supposedly conspiring to “collectively censor online news” about the pandemic, a reference to such outlets not airing or publishing conspiratorial disinformation. Apart from the anti-trust lawsuit, CHD is also pledging to lobby the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on behalf of what it calls “vaccine-injured” service members. There’s a lot of money to be made in the anti-vaxx movement, and those leaders need to keep the hope and attention of their audiences with the promise of retribution and the “vindication” of their false beliefs.

Let’s stop cutting down trees to make toilet paper.

It’s true, humans are cutting down tens of thousands everyday just to supply the American need for toilet paper. And the worst part is that when we use trees for toilet paper, it’s just one use and done - it obviously can’t be recycled or reused, so it just goes straight into our water system. Enter: Reel Paper.


Reel is 100% bamboo, so it's made of a plant that grows fast, can be harvested and regenerated (like grass in a lawn), and doesn’t impact entire ecosystems of forests.
 

Reel is now partnered with One Tree Planted and with every box of Reel that you buy, they are funding reforestation efforts across the country. So unlike the other TP that cuts down trees, Reel is helping to actively plant them!

Reel paper is available in easy, hassle-free subscriptions or for one-time purchases on their website. All orders are conveniently delivered to your door with free shipping in 100% recyclable, plastic-free packaging. 


Head on over to reelpaper.com/WORLD and sign up for a subscription using code WORLD at checkout to get 30% off your first order and free shipping!

Let’s make a change for good this year and switch to Reel Paper. Reel is paper for the planet.

An Arizona court of appeals rejected MAGA nutjob Kari Lake’s challenge of her gubernatorial defeat, denying her request to throw out the election results in the state’s most populous county and hold the election again. 

Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) delivered his State of the State address and attacked the “virulent strain of nationalism plaguing our nation” and “demagogues” who attack school board members and library trustees, a pretty overt reference to his fascist counterpart to the south, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

The Department of Labor announced that Packers Sanitation Services, the largest food sanitation service providers have paid $1.5 million in penalties for illegally employing at least 102 children in 13 meatpacking plants. Seems low but it’s a start!