The stunning and complete reversal of the OAS-engineered coup in Bolivia at the end of 2019, and the full-scale reinstatement of Bolivian sovereignty by the democratically elected successor to Evo Morales, is a story of great consequence and inspiration.
The OAS is currently trying the same coup in Ecuador. They want to ensure a clone of Lenin Moreno -- the neoliberal puppet who they bullied into turning over Assange -- wins, even though the ally of Correa, who protected Assange, has far more support.
I know it's not obvious why the election in Ecuador matters but it does. The US, using its OAS facade, is eager to install a neoliberal masquerading as a leftist to do its bidding, preventing the popular leader from winning.
*This* is called "interfering in other countries."
One of the many things I loathed about the four-year Russiagate melodrama was many who claimed to be so offended by Russia's "interference in our sacred democracy" -- via Twitter bots and FB memes -- have nothing to say when the CIA does it far more brutally & fully to others.
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One of Bolsonaro's most loyal supporters in Congress, ex-military police officer @danielPMERJ, was arrested last night on orders of the Supreme Court after he posted a video threatening Court justices & praising dictatorship-era repression. Big free speech & due process debate.
It seems quite clear watching the video that he knew the Supreme Court might arrest him and basically dared them to. They did. This is the most extreme Bolsonarista wing. They explicitly crave a final clash with the Court & Congress to re-instate military dictatorship measures.
The pro-Bolsonaro Congressman arrested Tuesday on orders of a Supreme Court justice for a YouTube video threatening the court and advocating dictatorship-era repression had his arrest upheld yesterday -- unanimously -- by the full Court 11-0. See above.
Insisting on factual accuracy does not make one an apologist for the protesters. False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels.
The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are.
After these two NYT articles, this horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher was repeated over and over, by journalists on television, in print, and on social media.
The problem with this story: it is false in all respects.
Somehow, it turns out that @ProjectLincoln was even scummier, most dishonest, and more of a fraudulent scam than those of us most loudly warning about it for two years could possibly have imagined.
How is it possible that so many #Resistance liberals were persuaded to transfer their cash in the middle of a pandemic to a group of life-long GOP operatives who were known to everyone in politics and media as relentlessly sleazy and dishonest? @tooningout provided a hint:
In case there's anyone buying the utter bullshit that people didn't realize until the last few weeks that the Lincoln Project was one of the sleaziest and most dishonest scams, look at what @tooningout did to @TheRickWilson when they interviewed him last June.
There are increasing bipartisan demands that the Department of Homeland Security - controversially created after 9/11 and that has been the source of many civil liberties assaults - now be directed primarily to domestic threats.
Tom Ridge, the first Bush/Cheney DHS Secretary, makes a cameo appearance urging that it be unleashed domestically. Also, his notorious color codes have been re-activated in a slightly less adolescent form and are now being used to flag domestic threats.
Leftist activist who dislikes Trump and Biden was arrested by the FBI after they decided that his social media posts show he was on a “path toward radicalization.” The magistrate agreed, ordering him held without bail.
So many of these types of dramas are driven overwhelmingly by dynamics of class, yet those are rarely highlighted because it's not in the interests of those who control the discourse to highlight them.
People who went to $60k/year prep schools so often play a starring role:
And by "falsely," @lhfang obviously wasn't suggesting that the extremely rich teenager who was McNeil's primary accuser conveyed his statements inaccurately -- although McNeil suggests that -- but he was expressing his view that these statements don't make McNeil a racist.
The interaction between class, newsrooms and journalist unions was discussed last week by @aaronsibarium. Beyond the data he cites, this absolutely tracks my own knowledge of who is in these newsrooms as well as how The Intercept's Union functioned.
The description by @benyt of the NYT’s current model & future trajectory — “beholden to the views of left-leaning subscribers” that “may yet push it into a narrower and more left-wing political lane”: a US version of the Guardian — seems true & important.
Most corporate media — for both ideological and financial reasons — has become an indistinguishable mass of liberal orthodoxies, incapable and unwilling to publish much that challenges let alone offends standard establishment liberal sensibilities.
I don't understand the controversy around @Benyt's observation that the NYT is "more beholden to the views of left-leaning subscribers" & that will worsen.
The NYT is overwhelmingly read by Dems. That's who pays the subscriptions. People at the paper know this & hire accordingly