Let me put it this way: The desire for violence came first, the reason offered for it followed
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Hahahahaha! Excellent alternative!
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Yes I agree.
Jade Helm certainly heralded a bunch of wack shit that has resulted in arrests across the board.
I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about these nuts. It seems pretty clear that the FBI has them in their sights.
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I have two nephews in their late 40’s, not quite that bad, but trumpians – why, dunno, because their parents, aunts and uncles are not. So much of it is absorbed from peers with strong personalities.
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I keep thinking about this article
Social Media has dumped gas on an ages old fire.
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I remember the Fairness Doctrine. Also remember Father Coughlin and Paul Harvey, FFS. I remember the networks censoring material that segregationists didn’t like. Hell, I remember when Betty Kern Cummings engaged my father, and Hammerstein’s estate engaged his friend Harriet Pilpel in NYC, to prevent NBC from airing a version of Showboat without the miscegenation scene.
The point is that prior restraint is a no-no. And much of the response to this behavior is a civil matter. And the fairness doctrine only affected broadcasters, and was justified there only because of the limited part of the spectrum available.
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Hmm, long line of irrelevancies and at the end you believe that Reagan didn’t strike down the Fairness Doctrine and his chief communications man immediately leave that administration to found Fox News, font of lies, smears, a million more so-called media figures, and now pushing the nation to civil war?
You don’t deserve a democracy. Father C and the rest were allowed on the air because it was the cold war. Born again lunatics have been ball deep in our government ever since, and will not stop until they turn America into a theocracy. In the interim they will sell out their congregations, openly and publicly flout their political opinions even though that is illegal, and take as much money off the Federal government as they can.
Don’t tell me, show me. Personally, I have the records of a non-profit church set up in the 70s with the specific intent of going in to schools and proselytizing. I worked for that company unwittingly for years. I know what these people are up to, and how milque toast your response.
Nothing sings more clearly in your prose than your self satisfaction. You got the America you allowed. Enjoy it. It was the greatest idea ever conceived of, and you’ve pushed it down the river on a raft of self love.
Fox News would not have been subject to the fairness doctrine, as it is not a broadcaster. So much for that part of my post having been irrelevant. Whatever is in your subsequent paragraphs can wait.
Trump put a leash on the mob and I don’t mean the Mafia.
It is always there for evil people to stir up and lead into violence…
I don’t believe the military will follow tRump. The vast majority of the senior leadership of the Army and Navy hates the POS, and even though he has loyalists in the Air Force, they can’t take and hold territory. Colorado Springs, maybe, but not the rest of the country.
Now if you were to suggest that a lunatic in the AF would bomb the Inauguration, that is more likely, but still a fairly remote possibility.
Oh, and by the way, the Jade Helm exercise was NOT practice for martial law.
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Heck, get one of the graduates of their religious order in Colorado, they’d be all over it.
when federal agents who refused to identify themselves arrested antiracist Portland demonstrators and whisked them away in unmarked vans. The conspiracy-minded shock-jocks who railed against Jade Helm notably did not leap into action against this injustice.
Because they are being disingenuous! They do not care about actual government overreach or violations of rights, they just need to perpetuate the narrative that they are the ‘victim bravely standing up’ to justify the overreach and violation of rights they want to do to others.
I’ve become more and more convinced that over the years what the left looks at as right-wing stupidity is really only “stupid” if you take them as being genuine when they say it. But I no longer believe most of them are. Yes, absolutely there are some crazies who think that Sandy Hook or that the bombs sent to liberal politicians and news orgs were false flag operations, or that there really was wide scale election fraud for Biden. BUT, I think the reality is much worse. That most of the people who are saying this junk don’t really believe that, but they know that what they really do believe is worse to say publicly so it’s better to sound ‘stupid’ than ‘shitty’. So they hide their true beliefs behind dumb conspiracies when the reality is they just don’t care that kids got killed in school, they just don’t care that bombs got sent to liberals, and they just don’t care they lost and election they just don’t think democrats have a right to govern or vote.
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Our host, Mr. Marshall (@josh_m), recently made a point regarding “stupid”/“crazy” statements from the right that should be taken into account. The act of publicly stating extreme, conspiratorial, irrational claims with vehemence and belligerence is less to advertise sincerely held beliefs than it is to make an impact on their intended audiences: solidarity with their political team, opposition and vituperation to anyone not on that team. I argued above that those making “stupid”/“crazy” statements have a range of orientations toward them, from the completely credulous to the ironically appreciative to (as you said) the disingenuous instrumental. But they share a willingness to put those statements to use as weapons, which is how we should regard them.
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This article is silly. One is in no way contextually related to the other. While I get what they are trying to imply, Obama wasn’t taking actions as a fact, Trump is.
I fear for public health, post-pandemic if we ever reach that space. DISINFORMATION that threatens our ‘body politic’ is much less dangerous than disinformation that threatens our literal bodies. Falling into tribal ‘freedom of speech’ warfare clouds the real impending crisis we face with DISINFORMATION that will dog politics forever. Yet, DISINFORMATION can cripple our ability to protect public health. I would love to see those who post here start a discussion about how to handle and contain disinformation so that it does not overwhelm all boundaries established to protect us.
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I can’t speak for the Katie. But I think the idea behind the headline is that most of the news business and most of the country saw stuff like Jade Helm as zany nonsense that was beneath serious attention as political news. This was a mistake because Jade Helm presaged what would happen over the coming years. So I don’t see it as tut-tuting TPM Readers or saying that anyone should have been more anxious or more freaked out. I see it as more that people should be more clear what the Republican party and the right in the US has become. It may all be obvious now. It was pretty obvious to us in 2015 and well before. But to many, certainly most of the national political press, it was not.
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I think the mistake is in the framing. It was not ‘Jade Helm’ that was the issue. It was the rise and entry into the general zeitgeist of the GOP towards conspiratorial nonsense versus fact… I believe lead mostly by magical thinkers, Evangelicals. It makes a sort of sense.
Thanks for the memories. I will share this liberally to my friends in Texas, who are looking to change the Management in TX. Couple this with the Sedition and Treasonous gang that joined Paxton, and perhaps the Dems there will get organized and finally find decent candidates to run for office.
First time I heard about their imagined plot to take away their guns I wondered why none of them thought about just how many thousands of soldiers it would take to kick down doors of thousands of houses to carry off thousands of guns. Such an operation would be Keystone Kops in the extreme.
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Rex Kramer: ‘Our only hope is to build this man up. We gotta give him all the confidence we can’.
