thank you, personnelente!
“Unicorn Puffin”
How Russia secretly paid millions to a bunch of big right-wing podcasters
The DOJ says Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and others were unwitting Russian stooges. A cadre of right-wing online personalities including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern have all allegedly become unwitting agents of Russian information warfare and its activities in the United States, according to an alarming 32-page federal indictment unsealed by the US District Court of the Southern District of New York on Wednesday. The group of far-right and right-leaning
Read in Vox: https://apple.news/ApX28Wc6QQ1-vevG-kqrtyA
Shared from Apple News
Best Wishes and Hugs,Scottie
‘ERASE All Palestinians’ – Popular Israeli Podcasters Claim Most Share Their Genocidal Fantasy
Jimmy makes his return after being away for the summer with his family. He talks about all of the news he missed this summer, the craziness that came out of Trump’s bigly mouth, his comments at “The Moms for Liberty” event over the weekend, new VP picks JD Vance and Tim Walz, the incredible twist that Netflix put on their hot dog eating contest this weekend, and all of our summer guest hosts rate their experience at the show on Yelp.
This blog kills fascists. Eventually. It’s a process I’m working on. Be patient with me.
Since 2016, I’ve felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn’t welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign’s silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird.
I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here–and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling “Liberty” “Freedom” “Heritage” or “Family”-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever.
But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem–people who love the hell out of money and don’t care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox–someone will try it.
Part of the reason why is we have a great big permission-structure to lie on the GOP side of things. We talk about it, but I don’t think we talk about it as much as we need to. The media is in part at fault, but also, money has generated a whole right-wing puke funnel, just feeding viewers like baby birds. And the results of the propaganda: fear and anger–short circuit logical critical thinking pathways. Well-fed ducklings become sitting ducks.
The internet influencer thing though, is even more perverse. There’s no reason to believe these people are anything but cons. I’ve thought of it as the “Triumph of the Swill”, because it’s propaganda without even artistry or competence. It relies on people being poorly educated or getting hopped-up on the idea that contrarianism is “independent thinking”–because you are a super genius of rare qualities, you can see through Big Atmosphere’s lies since Joseph Priestly and reject climate change, or see where that shill Jenner was headed with his vaccination/germ theory nonsense. You have clearly beat the mentality of Darwin and Le Compte de Buffon regarding that evolution jazz, too.
Conspiracy theories proliferate and why not? Anything might be true once anything can be called false.
Why not DARVO Russia and Ukraine? Why not introduce a little Holocaust denial? Why not suggest civil wars are actually good and healthy, or that secession could be beneficial to a large US State?
Harmful, wrongheaded views can be pimped out to attractive or engaging morons, who speak down to controversy-curious people without the tools to resist. They’ll even have you believing education itself is a problem and suggest you do away with it.
I think it’s good it’s being addressed, but the right wing is super-great at trying to say their free speech right are denied whenever they get told to stop being shills for utter bullshit. I get the feeling the pool of people who have been Russian-cash injected and super-bullshit charged will widen. And yes to people maybe being made examples of, because the shit has to stop.
But we clearly have a problem with toxic “elements” in our political environment. Some remediation feels like a good thing. Geting people to realize and care that one side has been enabling foreign propaganda to influence us and to recognize it as a national security threat is very important–that we haven’t been screaming about it enough since 2016 feels like a failure.
Also the Feds need to do Posobiec and Flynn. because I can’t believe those asses aren’t being handled from elsewhere.
Labels: 2016 Presidential election, assholes, GOP, journalism, new media, old media, propaganda, social media, trump
(So glad I wasn’t writing checks yesterday!)
| September 6, 1941 All Jews over the age of six in German-occupied territories were ordered by the Nazi regime to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing.  More about The Yellow Star |
| September 6, 1963 Anti-nuclear marchers who began in Glasgow, Scotland, arrived in London and attempted to present a dummy missile to the British Imperial War Museum. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september6
(Now that things have calmed down media-wise, and there is solid information, here’s a post. I’m glad to see the parent and gun owner held accountable; for this, and always. I am never in favor of charging a minor as an adult, though there should be consequences laced heavily with rehabilitation. But the parent and gun owner should be fully responsible because they’re actual adults, and the parents (some child shooters will not have parents, so this goes to the caregiver.) Gun owners should always know that their guns are secure, and tell law enforcement when they’re not secure. Others’s mileage with these things may vary, and you’re welcome to chime in!)
Colin Gray faces four involuntary manslaughter, two second-degree murder and eight cruelty to children counts
The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.
Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.
He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia bureau of investigations, told reporters on Thursday evening.
“What are we facing? Heartbreak. A young person brought a gun into a school, committed an evil act and took lives, and injured people not just physically but mentally,” said the Barrow county sheriff, Jud Smith, during the news conference.
The teenager has been charged as an adult in the deaths of the school students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and educators Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Hosey said.
At least nine other people – seven students and two teachers – were taken to hospitals with injuries and all are expected to make a full recovery, Smith said.
Colin Gray is being held at the Barrow county detention center.
More than a year ago, the alleged shooter was interviewed by Georgia police after they received tips about online posts threatening a school shooting. Police did not have enough probable cause to arrest him then, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation.
In that 2023 inquiry, the father said he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, and the son denied making the threats online, the FBI said.
Georgia state and Barrow county investigators say the younger Gray used an “AR platform style weapon”, or semiautomatic rifle, to carry out the attack in which two teachers and two 14-year-old students were killed.
It remained unclear how the shooter obtained the weapon.
Investigators have yet to comment on what may have motivated the first US campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.
Jackson county sheriff’s investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account where the threats were made, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday.
“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Janis Mangum, the Jackson county sheriff, said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”
The younger Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting and was being held without bond at the Gainesville regional youth detention center, Glenn Allen, the Georgia department of juvenile justice communications director, said on Thursday.
His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia superior court judge in Barrow county by video camera.
While parents are not usually held criminally liable if their child shoots someone, recent high-profile events are evidence that they could face charges in the future. In November 2023, Deja Taylor of Virginia was sentenced to 21 months on two federal charges after her then six-year-old son shot his teacher in January.
The elder Gray’s arrest also comes months after the unprecedented conviction of the parents of a Michigan high school student who shot and killed four students on 30 November. In February, Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. The next month, her husband, James Crumbley, was convicted on the same charges. The pair was sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison.
“I didn’t really think about what precedent it was setting,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor for Oakland county who brought the case against the Crumbleys, told CNN on Thursday. “If nothing else I would’ve hoped that the highly publicized details of this case would steer parents and make them think twice.”
“It’s enraging that this could still happen when it’s so easily preventable,” she continued.
This article was amended on 6 September 2024. An early version said Deja Taylor was sentenced to 21 years, not 21 months.
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