The Right-Wing Disinformation Machine

The Kremlin talking points embedded in Republican politics has been pretty obvious since 2016.

But I'm sure it's just a really, really weird coincidence that Kremlin agents, neo-nazis, Qanon conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones truthers and former Fox News hosts that are on Russia Today all support one candidate. 

 
Isn't this exactly what the Hunter Biden nonsense has been about this whole time? Allegations of foreign governments buying influence in American politics, right?

Anyone want to bet whether our very serious Republican House is going to investigate these allegations against Russia the same way they've blown millions on investigating Hunter?

Also, remember that every Republican accusation is a confession. Still true.

 
https://www.ft.com/content/0b38aaed-ec58-40cd-9047-0c7b7b83164a


 


Conservative activist launches $1bn crusade to ‘crush’ liberal America


Leonard Leo was architect of effort to secure conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court
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The conservative activist who led the crusade to overhaul the US legal system is making a $1bn push to “crush liberal dominance” across corporate America and in the country’s news and entertainment sectors. In a rare interview, Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightward shift on the Supreme Court under Donald Trump, said his non-profit advocacy group, the Marble Freedom Trust, was ready to confront the private sector in addition to the government. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the Financial Times. “Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers,” he said. Leo has spent more than two decades at the influential Federalist Society, guiding conservative judges into the federal courts and the Supreme Court itself. In 2018, conservative justice Clarence Thomas joked that Leo was the third most important person in the world. Leo’s efforts culminated under Trump’s presidency, when three Federalist Society-backed judges were appointed to give conservatives on the Supreme Court a 6-3 supermajority, and profound influence over US law. The court has since then ruled to overturn the right to an abortion, among other long-sought rightwing causes. In 2020, after Trump lost the election, Leo stepped back from running the daily operations of the Federalist Society, while remaining its co-chair. The following year, Leo founded Marble, with a $1.6bn donation from electronic device manufacturing mogul Barre Seid, to be a counterweight to what he said was “dark money” of the left. He spent about $600mn in its first three years, according to public financial disclosures. Leo said his goal was to find “very leveraged, impactful ways of reintroducing limited constitutional government and a civil society premised on freedom and personal responsibility and the virtues of western civilisation”. The $1bn money machine is now funding the conservative mission against private institutions, opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies, climate and social concerns in investing and the “debanking” of politically conservative customers, in addition to taking on the public sector. The non-profit is increasingly interested in launching campaigns against “woke” banks and China-friendly companies involved in everything from food production to autonomous vehicles in the US and potentially Europe. Leo also intends to invest in a US local media company in the next 12 months, although he has not decided which, and is building conservative coalitions through groups such as Teneo Network, a club with chapters across the country. He also confirmed that Marble had since 2021 helped fund organisations that launched campaigns against companies with DEI, ESG and other initiatives, including BlackRock, Vanguard, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, State Farm, Major League Baseball and Ticketmaster. This year, Marble aided a variety of conservative groups in their campaigns against TikTok on the grounds that it was a threat to children and US national security. President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest from the video-sharing platform.   Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/0b38aaed-ec58-40cd-9047-0c7b7b83164a

Leo’s rise to be among the US’s most powerful conservatives has drawn scrutiny from liberal attorneys and Democratic politicians. Earlier this year, he refused to comply with a subpoena from Senate Democrats investigating undisclosed gifts to Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito revealed by ProPublica. In 2020, Leo joined the for-profit public advocacy firm CRC Advisors. Bloomberg has reported that an array of non-profits have paid CRC at least $69mn since Leo became its co-owner and chair. While Marble funds Trump-aligned advocacy groups, it is not donating money to sway the 2024 presidential election, Leo said. The non-profit is instead helping the Republican effort to end the Democratic majority in the Senate, which confirms judges and justices. “The political environment is more topsy-turvy and more uncertain than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” said Leo. “Political investing is not as good a bet as it used to be.”
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Lorewarn said:
Conservatives love the free market of commerce and ideas until they suck at it.
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What specific parts of that article make you come to that conclusion? 
 

On a side nite as an example, a totally free market of commerce isn’t a great thing in my opinion.  If one country cheats at production in order to make a better price point, there should be some regulation on that countries products being sold in order to level the playing field.   Free and fair would be a better suggestion.  
 

Free market of ideas also doesn’t have to mean you like the ideas you disagree with but I would not want those ideas to be withheld from the political or economic marketplace.  

 
So tell me why the alt right, including Tucker Carlson and apparently Elon Musk (who appears to have gone looney tunes :blink:  with his recent political comments) want to brand Churchill as the WW 2 villain and not Hitler??   See 3 and 4 quote box below.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/extraordinary-attempt-paint-churchill-real-190000887.html

Saviour of Western democracy or racist imperialist? Greatest Briton of all time or villain of the Bengal famine, the Tonypandy Riots and independence movements from India to Iraq to Ireland? While enthusiasm for dissecting Winston Churchill’s legacy remains a popular litmus test in the left-right cultural war, we have grown used to the flak for the wartime Prime Minister coming exclusively from the Left. No one breaks away from a pro-capitalist march in Parliament Square to climb Churchill’s statue with a pot of blue paint and write: “The price of Churchill’s wartime alliance was the much-lamented end of the British Empire and the beginning of Attlee’s disastrous experiment in state-sponsored socialism.”

Cue outraged surprise, therefore, when a Right-wing American historian, Darryl Cooper, sat down last week with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter and prominent Donald Trump cheerleader, for an interview and called Churchill the “chief villain of the Second World War”. Among other ludicrous claims – including the egregious thesis that the murder of millions in concentration camps owed more to weak logistics than methodical genocide – Churchill was lambasted as a “warmonger” and a “terrorist” for allowing the war to spread beyond Poland in 1939, refusing to negotiate with Hitler in 1940 and bombing German cities from 1942.

Needless to say, this wasn’t what Churchill meant when he wrote: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”


 


“Darryl Cooper, I am afraid, is a know-nothing about Churchill or World War II,” says Sir Max Hastings, one of Churchill’s biographers. “He and podcasters like him are sensation-seekers, no more and no less, and the best response to them is to ignore them.”
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If only that were the case. By the weekend, a White House spokesman had condemned the interview as “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans”, Elon Musk had posted – and subsequently deleted – a post calling it “very interesting, worth watching” and a show normally watched by around 800,000 people had racked up over 33 million views on X.

Meanwhile, two of Churchill’s garlanded biographers took the opposite approach to Hastings and decided to remind readers that Hitler, not Churchill, is still widely viewed as the “chief villain” of the Second World War. “This is not revisionist history,” wrote Sir Niall Ferguson in The Free Press on Thursday. “It is a pack of lies.” In The Washington Free Beacon the next day, Andrew Roberts argued that the Prime Minister spent half a century combatting the triple threats of Wilhelminism, Nazism and Communism, thereby saving freedom of speech “that has been so squalidly abused” by this “intellectually vacant” interview.

Victor Davis Hanson in The Free Press, a distinguished military historian, wrote: “Britain was the only one of the six major belligerents in World War II that went to war on the principle of a third-party nation’s territorial integrity.” What’s more, any peace terms would have been at best a “David Lloyd George Pétain-like collaborationist government”; at worst a “Nazi-imposed Oswald Mosley Quisling dictatorship”.

“In sum,” Hanson argued, “Germany and its fascist allies started World War II, initiated the mass warring on civilians, and institutionalised genocide. And they felt empowered to do so not because of Allied aggression or terrorism, but because of initial Western European appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration.”
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This is why: 

So why is this unpleasant sub-culture enjoying a right-wing renaissance in America now?

“If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans,” writes Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

“It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that Western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism,” writes Marc Johnson in Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune, on the notion that the West didn’t need to fight Hitler.

Frank Luntz, a veteran American pollster and political consultant, discounts such apocalyptic theories. “I don’t think this is a meaningful, measurable trend,” he says. “Cooper is simply wrong.”

But while the story of a podcaster who riled the White House and half the academic establishment might not represent a conspiracy of widespread authoritarian acceptance, many point to a looser, if no less damaging, ecosystem of Trumpism, contrarianism and egotism.

Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative columnist, has written compellingly about what he calls “the Barbarian Right”, a group of “pseudo-scholars” eager to “overthrow egalitarian – and essentially feminine – structures”, while attempting to revive some of the “darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly ‘natural’ hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and anti-Semitism”.

Their denizens have, he argues, “got what they wished for” out of Cooper’s interview, praising it widely online and adding their own racist and anti-Semitic tropes.

Carlson, a Trump confidant and notorious cable news host who has entertained conspiracy theories, was finally sacked by Fox last April. Undeterred by losing his $20 million salary, he has taken his contentious views and some of his audience to YouTube and X, where his nearly 14 million followers were treated to his soft-soap interview with Cooper last week.

Their cosy, two-hour chat rounded off a busy – and, presumably, lucrative – period for Carlson. Not only did he famously interview Vladimir Putin in February (the Russian President lectured him, almost uninterrupted, on his unique version of Ukrainian history), but he is widely viewed to be responsible for Trump choosing JD Vance as his running mate, having repeatedly interviewed the would-be vice president at Fox and afterwards.
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“The true villains of [Cooper’s] story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic, where she accuses Cooper of creating “straw men”.“Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class – the people who will be offended by claims such as ‘Winston Churchill Ruined Europe’.”

Ferguson added his own villain to this list last week, blaming podcasts for “drowning history in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious”.
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So….we had:

1). Venezuelan hands over taking an apartment complex in Colorado. 
 

2). Haitian immigrants eating our pets in Ohio. 
 

3). Now….


Question….if Trump has such great immigration policy that he’s spelled out in such great detail, why do republicans need to keep making up pathetic s#!t like this?…..amplified by their hero of free speech. 
 

Next, Trump is going to claim those dirty brown people are Hannibal Lector coming to eat you. 

 
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BigRedBuster said:
Question….if Trump has such great immigration policy that he’s spelled out in such great detail, why do republicans need to keep making up pathetic s#!t like this?…..amplified by their hero of free speech. 
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I don’t know the answer to that question.  Counter question…..if Biden/Harris kept saying the border was so secure (as they have done so many times), why is Harris campaigning on border security? 
 

Another question, I have a daughter mid 20’s and still apartment living…I would not feel comfortable if over a short period of time, 20% of her complex was filled with Venezuelan illegals.   How would you feel about that scenario?  Happy for them, Sad and a bit worried for your daughter if you have one, or just indifferent?  

 
BigRedBuster said:
And…..let’s not act like these are just coming from the fringe right. 
 
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Cat eating not withstanding, how do you think the people of Grand Island, NE would feel if 15,000 Haitians were dumped in their backyard over a few years? 
 

not sure of your population hometown but would you be good with 15,000 more people without the added and need infrastructure or assimilation? 

 
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