Here is Moe’s bit by request, I don’t think I can share much more of this episode than I have already (which is almost half song) but it’s funny there were people on twitter complaining that it “beats a dead horse” or “preaches to the choir,” because I really don’t think a mainstream TV show has ever done an episode that’s just a complete chronological lecture on the rise and deterioration of America’s middle class. I also think those reviewers only believe it’s all common knowledge because of the social media circles they’re immersed in, most Gen Xers and older still just plain don’t even know how high student loans have gotten.
Rutger Bregman is the Dutch historian who became a global sensation after an appearance at this year’s Davos summit, where he accused attending billionaires of ignoring taxation. Now he has created another viral moment in an extremely uncomfortable interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.
Bregman so riled Carson with his accusations of hypocrisy, critiques of Fox’s conservative agenda, and attacks on Donald Trump that the TV host called him a “moron” and angrily told him: “Go fuck yourself.”
We’re watching the Return of the King right now, and got to the part where Denethor is introduced. My husband asks me for the context of why Denethor is Like That, since I just finished reading the book. So I explained how Denethor has been using a Palantir for years to get information, and how Sauron has been manipulating him by only letting him see events that give him a worst possible impression of reality.
So my husband replies “Oh! So Denethor is basically just like your grandpa after he starts getting all his news from Fox.” And honestly, yeah pretty much.
Warn people before you make statements like that. I was not ready.
Rupert Murdoch is like Ebenezer Scrooge, if Scrooge had just decided to ignore the life lessons learned from his ethereal travels with the Christmas spirits, and instead continue plundering and hoarding his way through life, waging war on happiness until his dying day.
Carlson opened his program Monday by addressing the spate of mass shootings across America in recent days, including the Buffalo attack and a shooting at a church in California that left one dead and five others injured. In Buffalo, Payton Gendron is accused of targeting a store in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He is believed to have posted a 180-page screed full of racist, white supremacist tropes that referenced extreme versions of replacement theory, a baseless claim that Democrats are plotting to “replace” white Americans with people of color through immigration and other policies.
Almost all of the victims in the shooting, which killed 10 people, were Black.
“The document is not recognizably left-wing or right-wing,” Carlson said Monday. “It’s not really political at all. The document is crazy. It’s the product of a diseased and unorganized mind. … It’s definitely racist, bitterly so … but what he wrote does not add up to a manifesto. It is not a blueprint for a new political movement.”
Carlson is a racist who compounds his sin through lies and obfuscation.
Okay, as a journalism student I have a few things to say about Tucker Carlson.
Recently he made an editorial about how the New York Times were planning to publish his home address. They made a response to it today. In this article they basically frowned upon Carlson for even suggesting it, while simultaneously posting at the end of their article the general areas in which reports are that he lives.
No matter how much you hate the guy, you cannot deny that this NY Times article is intentionally leading people to finding out where Carlson lives by indirect means. I’m doing a media law class this semester, and this absolutely falls under what you SHOULDN’T do.
A couple years ago, antifa protestors showed up at Carlson’s house and terrorised his wife while he was at work and their four children were not at home. The protestors were heard on video threatening to throw Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs at the house. They also spray painted insults and the anarchy symbol on his house and driveway. Since then he had received death threats practically daily. It eventually got so bad they moved. Lately, people have tried to get Carlson taken off the air. He had one of the highest, if not the highest, rated news programs in America and many people in other countries watch him as well.
The officer we are honoring today was killed because Donald Trump refused to concede, spread lies about our election, and called for an insurrection on Jan. 6th, aided and abetted by right wing media and mainstream republicans.
“Don’t call Trump supporters nazis, it hurts their feelings.”
Yes, this is real (link to tweet). Yes, Tucker Carlson is literally repeating Nazi propaganda that aided the genocide of the Romani during the Holocaust. Yes, I am furious.
(Also, although there is a large population of Romani in Romania, they aren’t indigenous to Romania. They’re a diasporic group originally from northern India.)
Romani and Jewish have been screaming at the top of their lungs for years about neo-fascism in Europe, and Americans were totally aloof.
Then neo-fascism reared its head in America, but Roma and Jews were left out of the conversation in terms of people being impacted, because our oppression was “over.”
Now Tucker Carlson is on live TV using slurs and Nazi propaganda about Romani people, and I’m 90% most people on the left are just going to ignore it.
Today we are mourning the victims of the two mass shootings in El Paso, TX, and Dayton, OH that happened this past weekend.
The El Paso shooter posted a screed to a far right forum shortly before the attack. As The New York Times reported, “It spoke of a ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas.’ It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners.”
In fact, during this week’s debate, CNN moderators failed to ask a single question about abortion, even though a Morning Consult/Politico poll found that abortion legislation was one of the top three issues that Democratic voters wanted to hear about during the debates.
If moderators don’t take the time to ask abortion-related questions, right-wing media will continue dominating the discussion and will keep spreading anti-choice misinformation unabated on their own platforms.
This trend is in stark contrast to data showing that the Republican Party is further away from the political center than the Democratic Party, leaving viewers misinformed about each party’s position by lending undue credibility to the right-wing talking point that Democrats are extreme.
At a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, Trump lashed out at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), doubling down on the racist tweets he sent earlier this week, and the crowd began chanting “Send her back!”
The Trump administration and Fox News repeatedly misinformed the public about the Mueller report’s conclusions, and many mainstream journalists bought into that dishonest spin. This misinformation campaign is what seemed to inspire Mueller to speak publicly about the report.
The Fox narratives Trump is pushing diverge substantially from the facts Mueller laid out in his report, but according to a recent HuffPost-YouGov poll, the network’s viewers believe the story Fox has been telling them. It’s in Trump’s interest to ensure that his supporters get caught in the Fox News bubble, so he’s using his tweets to drive them there.
In the very first scene of Bombshell, the audience is walked through the layout of the Fox News Building. We are shown where the studios are in relation to the writer’s room. We get to see the decor of the executive offices and the elevators that lead to them. We are shown such things to establish one very important fact: this script was written with intimate knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes at Fox News.
And it’s not pretty.
However, as someone who is STILL getting in intense online arguments defending the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, there was very little chance I was going to dislike a movie about rising up against a system that seeks to objectify women. But what I didn’t expect was how much this movie made me empathize with people on the far right.
It doesn’t need to be said that this is one of the most polarizing time in our nation’s recent history. But after seeing Bombshell, I am reminded that after Trump eventually leaves office, we will still need to find a way to coexist with the 40% of the country that still loves him. And those people are not Stormtroopers or Nazis or video game villains (despite how they behave at rallies). They are people. People who have DRASTICALLY different values than me, but people who have ups and down, triumphs and tears.
Early in the movie, Margot Robbie’s fictional news writer Kayla Pospisil defends Fox New’s zealous pandering to the far right as “balancing the national conversation.” That was the first time in my life I ever heard a defense of Fox News that I could actually understand philosophically, even if I didn’t agree with it. Charlize Theron’s surreally accurate portrayal of Megyn Kelly (a woman I grew up hating) made me see her as someone who was intelligent, strong, and willing to fight for her beliefs and her fellow woman. I was even moved by John Lithgow’s revolting performance as sexual abuser Roger Ailes, for while I despised his actions, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy every time he derided his own slovenly, half-crippled appearance.
It’s very easy to make an argument against the far right, but it’s tricky to do so without abandoning empathy for them. And that’s why Bombshell is more than one of the best movies I’ve ever seen; it’s also one of the most important.
![dreaminginthedeepsouth: Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution[h/t Scott Horton]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5921212e584061254966373b7347ad23/679f9a69085477ef-eb/s1280x1920/b48bb6ecf144ddb05ba739351a4793d7056afc10.jpg "dreaminginthedeepsouth: Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution[h/t Scott Horton]")
