Federal officials leak that Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and Ali Alexander are being criminally investigated for the "influence" they "may have" exerted on the Capitol mob. Looks like prosecutors are toying with how far they can go with "sedition" charges washingtonpost.com/local/legal-is…
"Creative" would be one word for it
Again -- the reason the term "insurrection" has been pushed so relentlessly is that it connotes temporal continuity of the alleged "threat," justifying everything under the sun in perpetuity, including constitutionally-dubious federal sedition investigations
Rush Limbaugh was a pioneer in that he correctly identified a vast untapped audience for news analysis that ran counter to hegemonic liberal consensus: but instead of using that as leverage to challenge the system, he became a prong of one political party
One working thesis: the Limbaugh model is gradually becoming obsolete, in the sense that funneling cultural discontent strictly into the power centers of one political party is becoming less and less viable
Of course you'll still have podcast bros and such who are proudly arch-partisans -- but none of them are going to ever have the kind of medium-specific dominance that Limbaugh had
Bill Clinton once famously exhorted, "I feel your pain." The rising breed of politician increasingly exhorts to the public to instead feel THEIR pain, and if you don't, you are maliciously victimizing THEM
Because the "emoting" is always ultimately a power play, even if unconsciously. It's intended to place primacy on their "experience" for the purpose of demanding compensation, whether it be via cultural cache or various political outcomes
It's thus appropriate that the impeachment trial currently underway is mainly predicated on the "lived experience" of members of Congress who claim they were so profoundly victimized by the MAGA goofball riot
Congress has turned into some kind of bizarre public psychotherapy session where elected officials compete amongst one another for who can exhibit the most overbearing narcissistic personality disorder nypost.com/2021/02/04/how…
AOC is on the floor of the House saying that anyone who questions the claims of "survivors" -- because everyone in Congress is apparently a "survivor" now -- is guilty of exacerbating the "trauma" of ALL "survivors" everywhere in the country. Again, this is insanely manipulative
Pelosi gave AOC a special 60-minute order to allow "space" for members of Congress to publicly express their emotions and "lived experience" on the floor of the House. That is what's occurring right now
Democrats have only controlled the government for a week and pro-Trump online trolls are already being indicted for criminal "conspiracies" involving the posting of memes on Twitter in 2016
Although it's pretty funny that records from a Group DM entitled "Fed Free Hatechat" ended up being used to form the basis of a federal criminal indictment
Pretty sure part of the vast criminal "conspiracy" entailed tweeting fake images of Taylor Swift wearing a MAGA hat
Does anyone else find it interesting that the left-liberal establishment completed its alleged defeat of “fascism” with a military occupation of the capital city unherd.com/2021/01/the-ca…
If nothing else this episode perfectly illustrates that 9 times out of 10, people who complain about the deployment of coercive state force don’t care about the principle of the matter, but rather about whether the force is being deployed against their perceived political enemies
“Defensive” against what threat exactly? No threat has been established to have existed, except hysterical rumors that predictably collapsed. The goofball MAGA mob was not an enduring threat beyond the several hours of embarrassing clown-show antics on Jan 6
From an unprecedented corporate censorship purge, to a "snap" impeachment that effectively criminalizes ordinary political speech, this past week has been a 9/11-style frenzy. And if you raise any objections, you are denounced as "with the terrorists"
One theme of the past week. Trump is obviously neutered, defeated, humiliated. His enemies are still determined to hold him up as an "imminent threat," however, to inure the public to the civil liberties-undermining radicalism of what they are doing