Uncategorized

“Navalny” is a slick production full of highly dubious claims, misinformation, and enough new Cold War propaganda impact to win an Oscar for best documentary. A version of this piece was originally published at The Komisar Scoop. Editor’s note: The Grayzone has amended this article, removing two claims that were not properly sourced in the article originally published by The Komisar Scoop, and replacing one regarding Navalny’s health condition with articles sourced to Intellinews and the Western-backed Russian opposition outlet, […]

The post Oscar-winning ‘Navalny’ documentary is packed with misinformation appeared first on The Grayzone.

Probably not It was reported on Friday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, will be testifying before a grand jury today. This is widely considered to be leading to a probable indictment of Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case after the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, invited the former president to testify last week. Apparently, prosecutors routinely give that option to targets they are about to charge with a crime. You’ll recall that the case pertains to the hush money scheme cooked by Trump and the National Inquirer back in 2016 to pay off women who slept with Donald Trump. The Daniels case ended up being a criminal investigation when it was revealed that Cohen bought her story through a shell company and was later reimbursed by Trump personally. Cohen went to jail for his part in this and his indictment left no doubt that he was doing the bidding of Trump who was nonetheless not charged. It appears that Bragg may have decided to rectify that. Meanwhile, the case in Georgia seems to be getting close to some kind of conclusion. The New York Attorney General’s civil case against Trump and the Trump Org. is still in play. And the E.

More bans! As the poster writes: “any major or minor that… utilizes pedagogical methodology associated with Critical Theory” This would theoretically include: — Gender and African-American and other “studies” disciplines — Literature — Sociology — History — Anthropolgy — Political science And other majors. The comments are interesting. Most of them are in favor and excuse the authoritarian overreach by saying that it’s all fine because it doesn’t ban private colleges from doing it. Others point out that professors would still be allowed to apply this sort of critical analysis in their teaching but the colleges could not offer majors in anything that uses it. (I don’t think that solves the problem.) Mostly, though people on that twitter thread really seem to love this solution because: CRT, etc., are founded on logical fallacies, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in particular, and taxpayers ought not be compelled to pay for teaching of ways of thinking that can only lead kids astray. Lol.

It’s happening A man is suing a woman’s friends for helping her obtain abortion pills: A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer. Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives. Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy. The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem to show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.

Republican politics in a nutshell I’ve written this in various forms over the years, but I think JV Last distills it perfectly: Last week Amanda Carpenter made the point to me (on TNL) that Republican voters have simply decided that they like DeSantis. Period. And once voters decide they like a candidate, then all of the logic flows from there. In politics, Amanda argued, voters make their decisions first and then rationalize backwards. And that theory was on full display in The Focus Group podcast this weekend (listen to the show here) where Sarah talked with groups of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. If you go by the numbers, then for these voters, Mike Pence should be The Guy. But to a man, they were all anti-Pence. Why? Their rationalizations were ridiculous: At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, there are only two possible explanations for such statements: -These people are dumb as a bag of hammers; or -After January 6th they decided that they no longer liked Pence. So they have now invented reasons to be against him. Option (2) seems more likely to me. Your mileage may vary.

I’m just going to put this here for you to ponder this evening as you pound several shots of tequila: Cheers.

Time to restore U.S. shipbuilding? The Taxes-are-Theft crowd are the Makers-and-Takers crowd are Entitlement-Reform crowd are the Government-Never-Created-a-Job crowd. Somehow, 25 percent of U.S. food grown on an inland desert just gets watered and manifests in the local supermarket (along with foreign produce; we’ll get to that). Somehow, the national system of interstate highways over which they travel just appeared overnight. Somehow, water appears out of their taps and what they shit disappears just as magically. Entitlement? There’s a whole lot goin’ ’round. We used to call it taking things for granted. Like bank deposits being safe. Sen. Elizabeth Warren Monday night reminded Rachel Maddow’s viewers how banking should work. It should be boring. Something that, like those other things, we hardly notice. That was the point of Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” When government works as it should, it’s almost unnoticeable. We take it for granted. We don’t know a fraction of what it does. On that, retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix reminds The Atlantic readers how much of global trade depends on freedom of the seas.

Short-term anxiety Watch this clip of Guy Cecil, the departing chair of Priorities USA PAC. He provides a pretty concise breakdown of where Democrats go wrong. The right takes a long view of politics, Cecil argues. They invest in long-term ideological change. It took the conservative movement 50 years to repeal Roe, but they retained that focus and worked at it until they did. Democrats’ think in election cycles. They need a broader, longer approach to building their coalition and infrastructure. “One of my concerns is that we have fetishized the use of data and analytics,” Cecil tells MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. In so doing, Democrats reduce their electoral coalition to “a confederacy of caricatures.” This groups cares about this issue, and that group cares about another. In fact, people are people, and they care about many things. I wrote recently about the fixation on data: Young, presidential-campaign staffers fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m.

Jennifer Rubin on the latest Hunter Biden harassment: Right-wing House Republicans have left little doubt that they want to spend the bulk of their time and energy investigating phony conspiracies and made-up scandals. Their main obsession appears to be Hunter Biden, whose very name has become a buzzword in right-wing media. The contents of one of his laptops, revealed in 2020, have inspired a fantastical conspiracy theory that has been comprehensively debunked by, among others, Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and former FBI agent. She persuasively applies a “a basic three-part formula” employed by psychologists who study conspiracy theories “for disentangling truth from fiction, one that activates the rational, analytical side, rather than the lizard, fight-or-flight side, of the brain.” Her takeaway: The conspiracy theorists have reached the “temper tantrum” stage of the Hunter Biden “scandal.” […] Obviously, there is no legitimate basis for congressional “oversight” of the matter.