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A No to Nato rally at Conway Hall on 25 February, at which I was due to speak, has been cancelled after the venue received threats and abuse online that made them concerned both for staff safety and for funding. This is just another symptom of the serious threat to free speech in modern society. […]

The post Intolerance appeared first on Craig Murray.

Your evil government, the lizard people’s evil government A report issued Wednesday by the Secret Service finds that one-quarter of mass shootings in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020 were motivated by ” a belief system involving conspiracies or hateful ideologies involving anti-government, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic views.” Lina Alathari, the chief of the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, told reporters the conspiracies included beliefs such as 9/11 never happened, or that the United Nations was coming to take their guns, or that aliens or lizard people were preparing to take over the world. “Mental illness is not a barometer for dangerousness and it is not a correlation for mass attacks. The vast majority of individuals with mental illnesses in this country will never be violent. In fact, often, they are the victims of violence,” Alathari said. At least six were radicalized online. “One attacker had started subscribing to an online message board about 18 months prior to his attack,” she said.

Let people know whom to blame when the GOP strangles the recovery Democrats should promote the hell out of the Biden recovery (Washington Post): The U.S. economy grew by 2.1 percent in 2022, notching six months of solid growth despite widespread concern that the country might be on the brink of a recession. Those fears have been assuaged — at least for now. The economy posted another consecutive quarter of steady expansion between October and December, with economic activity increasing at a 2.9 percent annual rate. Consumer spending contributed to the strong fourth-quarter showing, especially given the slumps in large parts of the economy, including housing and manufacturing. Admit weak spots where they exist (inflation is coming down, but is still too high), but trumpet the upsides. The GOP would even in a downturn. “You may see [growth] and think the economy is out of the woods, but that would be entirely the wrong read,” said Joseph LaVorgna, chief economist at SMBC Nikko Securities America who expects a recession midyear. “There are a lot of variables that are all pointing in the same direction: There’s a housing recession.

What else is new? Charles W. Cooke at National Review skewers Trump, saying he “has completely lost his grip on reality.” (Did he ever have it?) Needless to say the MAGA cult could not care less what National Review says about their hero. There was a point in time at which Trump’s unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he’s morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump’s account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit. Here in the real world, the border is a catastrophe, inflation is as bad as it’s been in four decades, interest rates have risen to their highest level in 15 years, crime is on the up, and the debt continues to mushroom. And yet, safely ensconced within his own macrocosm, Trump is busy mainlining Edward Lear.

I understand that change is hard and that for many people transgender issues are confusing. (I’m not sure why, exactly, it’s not like it’s new. I knew transgender people back in the 70s…) The apparently desire among the right wing to cause harm to transgender people, ostracize them, discriminate against them — especially those who have turned it into a culture war crusade for cynical political purposes — is making me sick. And the fact that they feel the need to lie about constantly tells you everything you need to know: On Jan. 11, 17-year-old Rebecca Phillips approached the lectern at a sparsely attended city council meeting in Santee, a suburb of San Diego, California. No item on the agenda brought her to city hall that night. Instead, she tearfully recounted how a local YMCA had followed state law and company policy by allowing a transgender woman to use the same locker room that she did. She had no contact with the woman and claimed only to have seen her, but the experience left her “terrified,” she said.

This is what the MAGA cult worships. And it’s pathetic. He just can’t stop lying: Donald Trump has declared himself a winner … again. Trump announced on his social media platform on Tuesday that he won the Senior Club Championship at Trump International Golf Club in unincorporated West Palm Beach last weekend, despite not playing the first round of the tournament. Members arrived the second day surprised to see Trump with a five-point lead, according to the Daily Mail. But Trump never played the first round as he was attending a funeral in North Carolina of ardent supporter Lynette Hardaway, known by the moniker “Diamond” of the conservative political commentary duo Diamond and Silk. Trump told tournament organizers he played a strong round on the course Thursday, two days before the tournament started, and decided that would count as his Saturday score for the club championship. That score was five points better than any competitor posted during Saturday’s first round. Trump called it a “great honor” to have won “on of the best courses in the Country, in Palm Beach County,” in his post on Truth Social.

This should be interesting. Semafor reports that they are in talks to put together the GOP primary debates. It sounds as though they are going to try to ferret out the super extremists and trip up Trump. Hookay…. The RNC wants Republican candidates to be put to the test during primary debates — even if that means having networks that conservatives normally shy away from host the events. The debate committee is meeting to discuss the criteria for the first gathering of the 2024 presidential field on Wednesday. They have a request for proposal out to news outlets, the first of its kind, that’s due back by February 15. “I don’t think we can isolate ourselves to just conservative news media,” Jonathan Barnett, an Arkansas committee member, told Semafor. A Republican familiar with the conversations said the RNC is considering pairing mainstream outlets with conservative outlets as co-moderators, a regular feature of 2016 debates as well, to address member concerns about bias. The RNC’s proposal request includes a section for networks to fill out that dives into whether they’d be open to partnerships.

The post Video of the Day – Doom Patrol Season 3: Madame Rouge Featurette, 2021 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

“If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t have [Eric] Swalwell on any committee. … Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.” — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), remarks to reporters, Jan. 12 Glenn Kessler fact checks the charges against Swalwell and Schiff. Guess what? Kevin McCarthy is full of shit: Two years ago, when House Democrats removed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from all House committees after she espoused extremist beliefs and approved of violence against prominent Democratic politicians, McCarthy and other Republicans warned that the precedent-shattering move would come back to haunt them. Traditionally, each party had selected its own committee members and meted its own punishment. Late in 2021, the Democratic-controlled House also removed Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) from all committees after he used official resources to create and post an animated video depicting the killing of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and violence against President Biden. It’s apparently payback time.

Tucker Carlson has been busily rehabbing (checks notes) …. Richard Nixon these days, saying that he took on the Deep State and they chased him out of office. Seriously. I guess this is what he meant by “taking on the Deep State”. This is the transcript that proved President Richard M. Nixon guilty of obstruction of justice. For more than a year the President had told the American people that he had done nothing to interfere with the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in. But the release of this transcript by the White House in August 1974 prompted large numbers of congressional Republicans to switch from defending the President to calling on him to step down or face impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. Less than a week after the break-in, the FBI would discover that a check in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars had been written to Nixon’s Midwest finance chairman. It was evidence that the burglars had been paid from Nixon campaign contributions—a potentially explosive revelation. “[T]he FBI is not under control.” H. R. Haldeman White House chief of staff H. R.