After 9 years of incendiary rhetoric, inciting actual violence, and personally threatening dozens of perceived enemies, TFG has certainly demonstrated that he can dish it out, but sure can’t take it.  He has spent years vilifiying everyone from Haitian immigrants to Dems to Taylor Swift, but when someone starts shooting at him, he’s shocked and appalled when the tables are turned.

Let’s be clear – violence is NEVER appropriate in any instance, political or otherwise.  But this monster of escalating violence has been wholy created by TFG and his sycophants repeating his vicious lies about everything from “the deep state”, to immigrants, and to anyone who happens to disagree with him.  He’s even inciting violence against schoolkids in Springfield, Ohio, FFS.  His social media accounts drip with hate, authoritarian declarations, threats, and lies against millions of people and entire classes of society, fabricated from whole cloth.  He even incited thousands of knuckleheads to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

I find it pretty rich that TFG and Vance are now denouncing the very violence they’ve been inciting, but only because that violence has been turned on him.  If they want a reduction in violence they need to start that at home and turn down the heat, but I’m not expecting any of that.  A little self-awareness would be useful right now.

NBC pulled a fast one this weekend, hiring Trumpist liar Ronna McDaniel, former RNC chair liar and insurrectionist, as a paid political “analyst”.  She debuted on Meet the Press yesterday and it was a Shit Show with McDaniel lying while tripping over her lies while Kristen Welker did her best to hold her feet to the fire.  McDaniel’s performance was typical just repeating herself while pretending to be the slightest bit credible.  The real star of the show, though, as Chuck Todd took a flamethrower to not just McDaniel, but NBC itself.  He told Welker that the bosses of NBC owed her an apology for making her interview such a prolific liar.  Have a look:

It gets better, though.  Joe Scarborough launched this morning condemning NBC and Nicole Wallace followed suit.  The blowback is so bad the MSNBC has told parent company NBC that they won’t give McDaniel airtime on any show.  Boom.

Keep in mind that McDaniel chaired the RNC up until TFG’s daughter in law took over 2 weeks ago.  She led the way on The Big Lie, played a key role in the fake elector scam and tried to get Michigan to not certify the 2020 election.  She’s essentially an unindicted co-conspirator in the insurrection; rather than being on NBC, she should be on bail for federal felony charges.  She’s the worst of the worst, and Todd was right – you can’t trust a word out of her mouth.  NBC has made a huge mistake and I predict a short tenure for Ms. McDaniel at the network.

I’ve never been much of a Twitter user, primarily finding it occasionally useful to follow breaking stories.  When Elon took over the platform, though, I decided to follow him and others to see the effects on the platform itself as he consolidated power in the company.  My conclusions, as you can imagine, are not good.  First, just an observation, and it’s no secret – Twitter is already an open sewer of nonsense, misinformation, and dumbasses who don’t know how many hours are in a day, those who can’t do simple arithmetic, and those who have very low reading comprehension.

Then Elon took over, and it’s gotten worse.  A lot worse.  First, Musk is as impulsive and immature as a high school freshman complete with erratic behavior and childish judgment.  Add that to the fact that he has no guardrails to guide him, and being the richest man in the world there’s no one around him to keep him from acting out his worst tendencies.  After the takeover on Thursday, he fired the senior management team including those in charge of moderation of the platform, and has been hinting at massive layoffs of other employees.  He’s also on record of being opposed to blocking racists, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, anti-semites, and outright weirdos.  He’s more than hinted that he’ll let TFG and Kanye West back on the platform.  Use of the N-word on Twitter  is up over 500% since he took over.  Worse, he’s participating in misinformation himself retweeting, then later deleting an idiotic homophobic conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was actually a male prostitute that Pelosi had brought to the house. His deleted retweet was directed at…wait for it…Hillary Clinton.  That’s right, the “Chief Twit” showed such poor judgment that he amplified this idiocy to his 112 MILLION followers.

Elon’s control of Twitter has a LOT more downside than upside for not only him financially, but for simple common decency.  Twitter is highly influential over global society and it’s critical that it gets it right between balancing free speech principles against threatening language and intentional disinformation.  He’s demonstrated that he has no qualifications to not just manage this issue, but even to recognize it exists.

I am not hopeful for any good coming from this takeover, and can only hope that twitter goes the way of MySpace and Lotus 123.

This is how you do it.  Katie Hopkins, sort of the UK’s version of Tucker Carlson, is very much a controversial personality, first gaining attention as a contestant on the UK version of The Apprentice about 14 years ago.  Since then, she’s been carrying the water for the extreme right in Europe writing columns and talking on radio and television.

As part of a new program to improve the economy by allowing television and movie crews into the country, Hopkins was granted a special visa into Australia to participate in the Australian version of the television show, Big Brother.  Under Australian quarantine rules, she was required to quarantine in a hotel for 14 days.  Under these rules she was to stay in her room and food would be brought to her.  Also under those rules, she was to wait 30 seconds after a door knock and then answer the door wearing a mask to retrieve the food brought to her.  She thought it would be really funny to not do that, but to immediately answer the door sans not only a mask, but also clothing.  AND she videoed herself doing that and then posted the video on social media.  She was trying to attract attention and draw a reprimand so she could then publicize government tyranny.

Well, she drew more than attention and a reprimand.  Officials from New South Wales arrested her, fined her $1,000 Australian dollars, and promptly put her on a plane back to the UK.  Australia is having none of the anti-science, anti-vax nonsense, and is actively working to protect its citizens, especially from idiots like Hopkins.  Oh, and here’s the best part – Big Brother Australia fired her from the show.

Boom.

RBG has died.  Our worst case scenario is now reality.  Cue the GOP crying for an IMMEDIATE appointment to replace her, disregarding the “Biden Rule” repeated 1,000 times in 2016.

Trump tweeted this morning that we should delay to November elections until people “can properly, securely and safely vote??”  Here’s the offending tweet:

Let’s make sure we’ve got this right – it’s safe to open schools, safe to go back to work, but now it’s not safe enough to vote?  Yeah, that will make you dizzy.  The one thing that doesn’t make you dizzy, though?  Trump and his goons have intentionally made the pandemic more severe and longer so he could have an excuse to shut down the election.  If he had responded as a competent president or even a normal human being, we would have been on the other side of the pandemic like most other developed countries rather than being consumed by exploding cases and deaths.

Yes, I just said it…Trump has caused tens of thousands of deaths, cost Americans trillions of dollars in losses, and prolonged the suffering of millions of people just so he can try staying president.  He doesn’t care if you live or die.  Well, Fuck Him.  If he thinks he’s seeing unrest in the streets now, he hasn’t seen anything yet.