Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

The GOP is a dangerous cult. Elected GOP officials believe insane conspiracy theories and use those theories to make laws. Vote all these GOP lunatics out of office up and down the ballot in 2022. They are a danger to our lives.

LISTEN: Republican gets confronted for wearing 'Q' button at pro-Trump Michigan rally

Michigan GOP Rep. Daire Rendon attended a rally outside the state Capitol this Tuesday wearing a button featuring the American flag with a gold "Q" over it, The Detroit News reports.

When asked if the button was related to the QAnon conspiracy theory cult, Rendon replied that it's just a "flag with a Q on it."

"The 'Q' is the highest level of security in the federal government. ... That's what it is," she claimed.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, "Q level clearance" is a top-secret clearance level within the U.S. Department of Energy.

Speaking to The Detroit News, State Rep. Mari Manoogian (D) says Rendon has been seen wearing the pin more than once.

"The first time I saw her wearing it on the floor of the House I was shocked," Manoogian tweeted.

During her speech at the rally, which was organized by supporters of another audit of Michigan's 2020 election, Rendon said more people need to pay attention to "evidence" that the 2020 election was stolen.

As The Detroit News points out, Rendon in December was one of two GOP members of the Michigan House who were plaintiffs in an unsuccessful federal lawsuit that aimed to require state legislatures to certify the results of presidential elections.

Listen to The Detroit News' interview with Rendon below:

https://www.rawstory.com/republican-daire-rendon-qanon/

[Rick Plant]

The GOP hates democracy and has embraced authoritarian fascism. The GOP must be defeated in 2022. 

'That's terrifying': Anderson Cooper shaken after hearing Harvard scholars' 'dark' predictions on US democracy

CNN host Anderson Cooper was left shaken on Tuesday after two Harvard scholars explained how the Republican Party has radicalized itself against democracy.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the bestselling book How Democracies Die, appeared on Cooper's program to explain how their studies of democratic failures bode ill tidings for the future of the American republic.

"It is pretty dark," said Levitsky. "When we wrote How Democracies Die four years ago, we were worried about the Republican Party because they allowed Donald Trump to be elected. They sort of dropped the ball and failed to protect our democracy from an authoritarian demagogue. But we did not expect that the entire Republican Party would evolve into an anti-democratic force, and that's where they are today."

Ziblatt, meanwhile, compared past instances in which democracies in European countries survived anti-democratic insurgencies, but he said that stopping those insurgencies depended on members of establishment parties standing firmly against them.

The Harvard scholar did not think that today's Republican Party is currently up to the task.

"Looking where we are compared to other countries, it's not looking very promising," he said.

"That's terrifying," Cooper replied.

Watch the video below:

[Rick Plant]

'We'll never know how close we came': Journalist lays out dark details of Trump's attempted election theft

When reporters for major news organizations covered the aftermath of the United States' 2020 presidential election, they knew they were witnessing something that was unprecedented in U.S. history — and not in a good way. Never before had a lame duck president lost an election by more than 7 million votes only to falsely claim that he really won. Former President Donald Trump was unable to overturn the 2020 election results, but in a Washington Post column published this week, opinion writer Aaron Blake asks, "So, just how close did we come to an actual stolen election — stolen by Trump?"

"The picture of Donald Trump's scheme to get the Justice Department to help him overturn the 2020 election has been significantly filled out in recent weeks," Blake explains. "First came the disclosure that conservative lawyer John Eastman had authored a memo outlining the steps by which this would take place on January 6. Then came a major report from the Senate Judiciary Committee detailing Trump's pressure campaign to get the Justice Department to lay a predicate for that January 6 plot. One thing has become pretty clear in recent weeks: This plot was foiled in large part because the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence opted not to go along with it."

It might've played out differently, Blake noted, if Trump had had more compliant leadership at the Department of Justice (or a more malleable vice president). By Jan. 6, Bill Barr had already resigned as attorney general in part because of his disputes with Trump about the election. It just so happened the Jeffrey Rosen wasn't more willing to go along with the "plot" as acting attorney general.

The United States' systems of checks and balances held up in late 2020 and early 2021 thanks, in part, to Republicans who resisted pressure from Trump and his lawyers to help him overturn the election results. Blake points out that "Eastman's plan relied upon something, come January 6, that the Trump team didn't have: alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in the states at issue."

"Congress overturning an election is one thing; Congress overturning an election in which the given state legislatures hadn't even designated alternate slates of pro-Trump electors or legitimized the controversies in their states would be quite another," Blake notes.

Blake continues, "Eastman, in recent interviews explaining himself, emphasized that the plot would have been 'foolish' without those state legislatures designating alternate electors. That's certainly convenient for him to say now, as he's downplaying just how brazen the plot was. But it does reinforce how many pieces needed to fall into place for the plot to work. We'll never know how close we came to that being truly tested. But as we continue to sort through what became of January 6, it's worth taking stock of what a few more pieces falling into place might have meant — and the pressure points in our democracy they reveal."

https://www.rawstory.com/we-ll-never-know-how-close-we-came-journalist-lays-out-dark-details-of-trump-s-attempted-election-theft/

[Rick Plant]

Judge orders Trump to give a videotaped deposition

One of the many lawsuits that President Donald Trump has faced involves a September 2015 rally outside of Trump Tower in New York City, where a group of Mexican protesters say they were assaulted. And a judge in the Bronx, Doris Gonzalez, has ordered Trump to sit for a videotaped deposition in connection with the lawsuit, according to ABC News.

The lawsuit, which alleges that Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric encouraged violence, names not only Trump, but also, his 2016 presidential campaign and Keith Schiller, who was his head of security in 2015.

Judge Gonzalez declared, "Donald J. Trump shall appear for a deposition October 18, 2021 at 10 a.m.... or, in the event of illness or emergency, on another mutually agreed to date on or before October 31, 2021."

When Trump was running for president in 2016, he drew a great deal of criticism from immigrants' rights groups for describing Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and "criminals." And the lawsuit alleges that such rhetoric encouraged violence like the assault outside Trump Tower.

https://www.rawstory.com/judge-orders-trump-to-give-a-videotaped-deposition/

[Rick Plant]

The GOP is a dangerous conspiracy cult infested with Qanon domestic terrorists.



In the Donald Trump era, GOP politics are mainly about trolling. So it's no surprise that Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel manifested this week as an in-flesh version of an egg avatar tweeting memes about DEMON-crats and the glories of horse paste. The unlucky recipients of Mandel's trolling were members of a school board in a suburb of Cincinnati, where Mandel showed up to grandstand despite not having children in the district. His complaints were incoherent — a muddled mix of whining about mask mandates, screeching that "children should not be forced to learn about to pick a gender," and something about the district's book-keeping practices — but of course, actually making sense was not the point. The point was to get attention by being a jerk.

So Mandel walked himself through the standard troll protocol: Escalate obnoxious behavior until the target is forced to block you, or in this case, kick you out. Then sanctimoniously declare yourself a victim to your own followers, martyred by the censorious liberals who can't handle the truth bombs you were supposedly dropping.

Mandel followed this script faithfully. He declared on Twitter — freely and without a hint of self-awareness — that his "free speech" was being suppressed. He was just there to "defend moms and dads," he sanctimoniously insisted, before accusing the school board of "using kids as pawns in a political game."

As with most accusations leveled by right-wingers, this was really a confession.

The Ohio school board — like every other school board affected by the coordinated assault by unhinged right-wingers screaming about mask mandates and "critical race theory" — is just trying to navigate the difficult problem of educating children during a pandemic. It's Republicans who are using kids as political pawns, staging these increasingly ridiculous confrontations at school boards. It's nothing more than political theater to motivate the GOP base for the 2022 midterms.

They learned these tactics from the QAnon cult.

QAnon is, at its heart, a fascist movement dedicated to ending American democracy and, like many fascist movements, regards their leader, Donald Trump, as a god-like figure. But coming at people straight with that pitch is a tough sell. So, instead, the QAnon pitch is about "the children." They lure people in with lurid conspiracy theories about a worldwide pedophile cult, the sort of thing that, if it were true, really would be a cause to take action. Once in, the lies about "saving the children" serve as a justification, both to outsiders and to silence doubts in the followers. How can you call them fascists when all they want to do is "save the children?"

The beauty of using "the children" as a cover story is that it is blanket permission to be a monster. Any level of harassment or even violence can be justified, as long as protecting the innocence of children is invoked. (See: The attempted overthrow of American democracy by QAnon fanatics.) No wonder Republican operators have been inspired to take a page directly out of the QAnon playbook to manufacture this nationwide assault on school boards. Using imaginary threats to children as a recruitment-and-rationalization strategy works.

Republicans' cleaned up the conspiracy theory a little, as accusing Tom Hanks of pedophilia is a tough one to trick mainstream journalists into repeating. So the mainstream GOP version of the conspiracy theory is now "critical race theory" and something about how mask mandates are a sinister effort to wrest away parental authority, instead of a common sense health regulation. But the basic gist is the same: Pretend to believe that evil liberals want to hurt children, and use that as a permission slip to act on every antisocial impulse.

To be certain, Republican organizers have long understood that their base is composed of wannabe trolls just aching for an excuse to freak out in public. This understanding was harnessed in the early years of Barack Obama's presidency to protest his economic stimulus and in the GOP effort to prevent the Affordable Care Act from passing. The "Tea Party" started off as a total Astroturf affair, funded by the Koch brothers and organized by GOP operatives, built to look like a "grassroots" uprising of conservatives supposedly irate at social spending programs. But it tapped into a very real longing among everyday Republican voters to have racist temper tantrums in public. They just needed a cover story, and the Koch brothers gave it to them. Pop on a tricorner hat, drop the "without representation" part of the American revolutionary complaint about taxation, and now it's "patriotic" to scream barely coded racist vitriol at the local town hall meeting. The current assault on school boards follows the same formula.

"The sudden interest in school boards is not an organic grassroots movement of angry parents," but "an effort orchestrated by seasoned right-wing political operatives," Judd Legum at Popular Info writes, in a piece that identifies both the organizers, drawn heavily from the GOP consultant class and their GOP-linked funders. These people are then laundered into "concerned parents" — with no mention of their political affiliations — on Fox News. The organizing is deliberately constructed to look amateurish, as if this were just local parents having authentic reactions to local politics, instead of a well-financed national movement to construct a mass hysteria, aimed solely at the goal of electing Republicans.

The strategy works very well, because, as GOP operatives understand the scream-at-waiters-and-flight-attendant energy of America's Kens and Karens. Add to the mix the QAnon-esque fake concern for "the children," and that anti-social energy becomes explosive, as school board members across the country are finding out to their dismay.

No one should be fooled. Neither the organizers behind this Astroturf effort nor the ordinary Republican voters caught up in the excitement care one whit about American children. If they did, they sure wouldn't want them spreading COVID-19 in schools. In a broader sense, people who actually care about children want to fight climate change, want families to have access to affordable and quality child care, and want children born into homes where they are wanted and welcome — all values Democrats stand for (well, mostly) and Republicans universally oppose. Children are not harmed by learning racism is bad or by being protected from the novel coronavirus. But if these QAnon-style tactics work to elect Republicans in 2022, American children's futures are in very real peril indeed.

https://www.rawstory.com/critical-race-theory-schools/

[Rick Plant]

Bunch of MAGA scumbags screaming profanities in front of children all because President Biden is trying to save lives and end this pandemic.

Trump supporters hurl profanities at Joe Biden as he greets children at a daycare center



President Joe Biden was greeted with profane taunts from Trump supporters on Friday despite the fact that he was in the presence of children.

According to NPR White House correspondent Scott Detrow, Biden on Friday travelled to a daycare center in Hartford, Connecticut to promote childcare plans that are part of his "Build Back Better" agenda.

While there, he greeted several children at a playground, only to be interrupted at one point by Trump supporters who were yelling at him from across the street.

As recounted by Voice of America News reporter Patsy Widakuswara, "at one point Biden put a twisty blue tube toy on his head" while meeting with the children and "as this happened you could clearly hear Trump supporters across the street yelling 'traitor' and "f**k Joe Biden."

Despite this, Biden continued into the daycare center and delivered a speech talking about Democratic policies such as the expanded child tax credit and universal pre-K.

https://www.rawstory.com/biden-in-hartford/

[Rick Plant]

President Biden is working hard to clean up the economic disaster left by Criminal Donald. More good news coming on the economic front.

US consumers stepped up spending in September and retail sales posted a surprise 0.7 percent increase, pushed by broad gains that extended beyond gasoline and autos, the government reported Friday.

The increase, which sent the monthly sales total to $625.4 billion, defied economists' expectation for a slight decline -- for the second month in a row. And the Commerce Department revised the August gain higher than initially reported, to 0.9 percent.

Demand for goods has surged as widespread vaccinations have allowed businesses to reopen from the Covid-19 shutdowns, and total sales jumped 13.9 percent compared to September 2020, according to the report.