Gretchen carlson fakes

Twitter post by Caitlin Johnstone
https://x.com/caitoz/status/1799411441193435525
"Everything about Israel is fake. It’s a completely synthetic nation created without any regard for the organic sociopolitical movements of the land and its people, slapped rootless atop an ancient pre-existing civilization with deep roots. That’s why it cannot exist without being artificially propped up by nonstop propaganda, lobbying, online influence operations, and mass military violence.
Israel is so fake that its far right minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir has been stoking religious tensions by encouraging militant Zionists to pray on the Temple Mount — known to Muslims as Al-Aqsa. This is an illustration of how phony Israel and its political ideology are because Jews were historically prohibited from praying at the Temple Mount under Jewish law; a sign placed there in 1967 and still upheld by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate reads, “According to Torah Law, entering the Temple Mount area is strictly forbidden due to the holiness of the site.” It’s just this weird, evangelical Christian-like thing that Zionists have started doing in contravention of their own traditions and religious texts to advance their nationalist agendas.
Journalist Dan Cohen explains on Twitter:
“ ‘Prayer’ on the Temple Mount is 100% a Zionist invention in total contravention of Jewish law. Jews don’t step foot onto the Temple Mount, let alone 'pray' there. That’s why the sign below is posted at the entrance non-Muslims use.
“Ben Gvir publicly announced this in order to provoke a reaction to use as a pretext to restrict and expel Muslims from the site, explode Jerusalem and the West Bank, and expand the regional war.
“Ben Gvir holds Netanyahu hostage. Together, they’re leading Israel to self-destruction.”
There’s no authentic spirituality in such behavior. It has no roots. No depth. No connection. It’s the product of busy minds with modern agendas, with nothing more to it than that.
Israel is so fake that Zionists artificially resurrected a dead language in order for its people to have a common “native” tongue for them to speak, so that they could all LARP as indigenous middle easterners together in their phony, synthetic country.
Israel has no real culture of its own; it’s all a mixture of organic Jewish culture brought in from other parts of the world by the Jewish diaspora, culture that was stolen from Palestinians (see “Israeli food”), and the culture of indoctrinated genocidal hatred that is interwoven with the fabric of modern Zionism. The way Israel has become a Mecca of electronic dance music points clearly to an aching cultural void that its people are trying desperately to fill with empty synthetic pop fluff.
Even international support for Israel is fake, manufactured astroturf that has to be enforced from the top down, because it would never organically occur to anyone that Israel is something that should be supported.
The phenomenally influential Israel lobby is used to push pro-Israel foreign policy in powerful western governments like Washington and London. Just yesterday US Representative Thomas Massie told Tucker Carlson that every Republican in Congress besides himself “has an AIPAC person” assigned to them with whom they are in constant communication, who he describes as functioning “like your babysitter” with regard to lawmaking on the subject of Israel.
The Israel lobby exists with the full consent of the western imperial war machine and its secretive intelligence cartel, because western military support for Israel is also phony and fraudulent. The western empire whose strategic interests directly benefit from violence and radicalism in the middle east pretends it’s constantly expanding its military presence in the region in order to promote stability and protect an important ally, but in reality this military presence simply allows for greater control over crucial resource-rich territories whose populations would otherwise unite to form a powerful bloc acting in their own interests. The Israel lobby is a self-funding consent manufacturer which helps the empire do what it already wants to do.
Support for Israel in the media is also phony and imposed from the top down. Since October outlets like The New York Times, CNN and CBC have been finding themselves fighting off scandals due to staff leaks about demands from their executives that they slant their Gaza coverage to benefit the information interests of Israel. Briahna Joy Gray was just fired by The Hill for being critical of Israel as co-host of the show “Rising”, a fate that all mass media employees understand they will share if they are insufficiently supportive of the empire’s favorite ethnostate.
Israel’s support from celebrities is similarly forced. A newly leaked email from influential Hollywood marketing and branding guru Ashlee Margolis instructs her firm’s employees to “pause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.” As we discussed recently, celebrities are also naturally disincentivized from criticizing any aspect of the western empire by the fact that their status is dependent on wealthy people whose wealth is premised upon the imperial status quo.
Support for Israel on social media is likewise notoriously phony. For years Israel has been pioneering the use of social media trolls to swarm Israel’s critics and promote agendas like undermining the BDS movement. After the beginning of the Gaza onslaught Israel spent millions on PR spin via advertising on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and The New York Times has just confirmed earlier reports that Israel has been targeting US lawmakers with fake social media accounts to influence their policymaking on Israel.
In truth, nobody really organically supports Israel. If they’re not supporting it because their lobbyists and employers told them to, they’re supporting it because that’s what they were told to support by the leaders of their dopey political ideologies like Zionism, liberalism and conservatism, or by the leaders of their dopey religions like Christian fundamentalism. It’s always something that’s pushed on people from the top down, rather than arising from within themselves due to their own natural interests and ideals.
Israel is not a country, it’s like a fake movie set version of a country. A movie set where the set pieces won’t even stand up on their own, so people are always running around in a constant state of construction trying to prop things up and nail things down, and scrambling to pick up things that are falling over, and rotating the set pieces so that they look like real buildings in front of the camera. Without this constant hustle and bustle of propagandizing, lobbying, online influence ops, and nonstop mass military violence, the whole movie set would fall over, and people would see all the film crew members and actors and cameras for what they are.
Clearly, no part of this is sustainable. Clearly, something’s going to have to give. Those set pieces are going to come toppling down sooner or later; it’s just a question of when, and of how high the pile of human corpses needs to be before it happens."

I think a lot of the comedy is really smart/ funny but the two I can think off the top of my head that make me lol is:
— in the episode where Tina and Darryl fake-date and Tina’s worried about being bad at math, she’s like “what will I tell my grandkids?” And then it cuts to an old Tina with several Tina-looking children and Old Tina is like “I was bad at math” and the kid sitting on her knee is like awkwardly, “oh grandma”
— the second is the episode where Linda and Bob go to Teddy’s dress up party for Halloween and Teddy’s hamster Francis is killed. When Gretchen is trying to revive Francis she tells the others, “Stand back, I have good lungs” and then proceeds to cough like three times.
Just thinking about these makes me smile and every time the joke comes up I’m happy and ready for it.
A close third that always make me smile and almost laugh is in the episode where the turkeys are let loose on Wonder Wharf and Bob is drunk at home. He falls down at one point on the kitchen floor and this really dramatic music plays as he tries to get up, “no — I — I can’t get up” and it’s this whole big thing. How serious the very unserious situation is makes it so funny to me ahaha
So what are the moments that always make you chuckle or laugh?
Edit: Also forgot to add I always love/ find the Louise sweet talking and then yelling at people really fun. I can think of maybe three times she does this and it’s all in earlier seasons. One was when she was teaching/ helping Tina get prepared to kiss a boy, another was I think the art crawl episode where she made Andy and Olly paint for her.
Oh, and Jen. I love her character
Edit again: god damn I keep thinking of more! In the barge episode/ when the Belchers have the float and are up against the Pestos, I think Jimmy Pesto asks Jimmy Jr to pick up a t-shirt gun and fight, and this is after Tina asked Jimmy J to promise that they wouldn’t get involved in the fight. Here Jimmy J picks up the gun after his dad tells him and is like “what, this?” and Tina’s like “I’ll kill uou” and then shoots him. And then Tina’s like “what have we become?”

Hey guys, I've been a SOC analyst at a small MSSP for about three months now. Overall, the environment here seems fairly toxic with a lot of politics, shit talking, general lack of empathy for others, etc. I work overnights so I share an overlap with the morning shift (0500-1300) and mids (1500 - 2300). These two shifts have been at each other's throats over the most mundane shit. The morning shift person will come in and start trashing the mid shift's tickets for minor mistakes and complain to me about them.
She obviously does not like these two guys, but I have to hear this constant venting over what I consider to be the most minimal mistakes that could easily be corrected with a brief talk. It just feels immature to criticize people like that for their mistakes (like to the point where you're calling them stupid losers for it, grow the fuck up). One time the days person logged into slack at like 1 AM just to look through all of the tickets (she's a tier one who's been here for 6 months longer than I have btw, not any kind of management role) and found mistakes in one of the mids guys tickets and asked me to correct it for them, and then proceeded to bitch at the guy for the mistake he made. In this case the mistake was not great, he logged a ticket action instead of sending an email to the customer... but like the entire thing seemed like she was just taking out frustration on someone she disliked rather than some genuine good-faith attempt at correcting a mistake.
They also talk about politics (everyone here except me is a conservative it seems) and they'll just say some crazy ass bigoted shit to eachother, like how my manager said Kanye ended up being right about Jews because of what's going on in Israel. During training he worked with me on overnights to provide support and every day he would be playing podcasts featuring Tucker Carlson. Regardless of how you feel about politics; I don't see why you have to force them onto somebody that hasn't talked about politics at all with you. Just put on some normal ass Chris Williamson shit or an infosec podcast and be done with it. Also, during training he talked about some kid at his daughters' school killing themselves because of bullying and followed it up with "Kids these days are fucking pussies." This really bothered me b/c of my mental health past. I can tell you for a fact people who kill themselves are experiencing an overwhelming amount of suffering and fight against their every survival instinct to carry out the act. They are not "fucking pussies"
The mid shift is fine. But they always tell me about the changes that the company is going to make like how they're going to start installing cameras in the SOC, how the manager is going to start making fake SIEM events that we're expected to find and investigate to prove that we're going into the SIEM at all ( which is another can of worms. I have yet to find a single potential true-positive, all of the alerts are repeated false-positives that just haven't been tuned at all. How am I supposed to comb through the 1200 incidents that popped up over the past two hours when a quick cursory look at the investigation shows me that all traffic was dropped or it was just the customer's domain controller doing domain controller shit?)
My daily work consists of waiting for network devices to experience outages, acknowledge the alerts for them, contacting the customer... and that's the meat of it. I'll also go through the EDR and handle the alerts for a few customers we have per night, only for those same false-positives to show up for other customers. Like why is AdobeCC constantly showing up in our EDR dashboard? It comes back as inconclusive each time, and usually the behavior that it's tying it to is like, a file write attempt or something (I honestly have no idea how to even really analyze the events. It seems like I'm expected to do a quick analysis, handle the event and move on. We never really went super in-depth into our tools during our training, but certain tools like FortiEDR just seem like they lack any sort of depth.)
I do have bad habits, like I'll put off the EDR events till the end of the day and do other shift during the night shift. I didn't used to do that, but at this point I just feel this black-hole in my stomach that sucks out all meaning from my life when I look at the EDR dashboard. I'm so sick of flagging OneLaunch.exe as malicious and deleting it from a device, I'm so sick of the same four applications populating our dashboard. I feel like I'm not really learning anything here either, because I'm the only one on the night shift and don't get to interact with the T2s and management (although from what mid-shift tells me it's not like they learn much from them anymway, the T2 we have is stand-offish because he got upset that the newbies had to share his desk and like, moved some shit on it or something.) I also hate touching the SIEM because I feel like I don't know how to do any meaningful work in there and I'm kind of just expected to figure it out. I don't think that's a huuuge issue in and of itself, but the SIEM configuration just seems so shitty. I wish I could show somebody, I will also admit that this is also a skill issue though.
This whole thing feels like a dog-and-pony show with a collection of fake ass people that never matured past high-school. I kind of hate it here. I don't know what to do though, SOC positions in my area are dry and there isn't very many of them. This was the first and only infosec job I could find since I had to quit my last one. I feel like I can't really find a new job right now. What should I do? Stick it out for ~ a year and jump ship to a better opportunity?
Sorry for this massive dump. I just don't know man, like this shit is exhausting. This company seems to keep giving me active reasons to dislike them, or maybe I'm just overreacting.

This whole Gretchen this is stupid and the reason why she is still here is because it’s staged like she is ACTING baddies would have been lost their revenue if not for their acting and fake personalities and fighting and I hate the fact that some white members that were in the show and still now say the n word and if she is not lying isn’t it confirmed she has black decent? I’m not saying it okay for non black people because I feel no one should say it at all but it’s a constant thing
And another thing Aubrey ain’t here for shit like all she does is talk shit in confessionals and act all shy shy like Natalie does at times I feel like the reunion ain’t finna be pretty

Edward Snowden has been blasted at us by the Media, News, TV, Movies, and probably over 100 interviews. But when was the last time you saw him photographed in Russian media? Well, I can tell you, 2014.
Since the end of the failed Russian Reset, and after invading Ukraine in 2014, Edward Snowden has NEVER been seen inside Russia.
You’ll hear about some stories you are fed to believe. The John Oliver interview is convincing, but you never see him outside. What you also likely didn’t know is HBO and nearly his entire crew (if not all) knew NOTHING about the Edward Snowden interview until John Oliver came back with the recordings. Souce
Tucker Carlson is the newest shill in the Edward Snowden coverup. He swears that he met with Edward Snowden, in a Moscow hotel, in 2024. But Edward Snowden was so shy, he didn’t want his picture taken. And wants privacy… But he has 0 issues doing talk shows every week. CIA probably gave him this so Tuck could crap on the deep state a little bit. Source: https://x.com/SputnikInt/status/1762608512096403615 (Their mutual friend is the CIA)
Here’s a quote Edward Snowden wrote before becoming a “whistleblower”.
“Years later, when characterizing his experience as a CIA TISO, Snowden would write that he was ‘specially selected by [CIA’s] Executive Leadership Team for [a] high-visibility assignment’ that ‘required exceptionally wide responsibility.’ Souce

• Edward Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His family moved to Maryland, near the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade.
• Geneva Assignment: Snowden was posted to Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007 under diplomatic cover as a systems administrator at the U.S. Mission. Here, he gained insight into the inner workings of the CIA and U.S. intelligence operations.
• The Media, including television and film, have had a very heavy influence in the perception about Edward Snowden.
• He would claim he looked for Aliens in his book, but i believe that is just misdirection.
• The Guardian reporter, Glenn Greenwald, was the “Snowden leaker” but didn’t reveal any facts that resulted in any substantial change at the NSA or with American civil rights. Look into his resume, and tell me he doesn’t seem like a CIA asset. Souce Source Source

This started with Obama and the Russian Reset. In 2013, Russian and USA relations were not as strained as they are today. During that time, Russian media frequently posted pictures of Edward Snowden, like this one: . However, since 2014, these sightings have disappeared. It’s been a decade since Edward Snowden was seen outside in Russia.
Have you ever wondered how Edward Snowden is paying for living in Russia? Do you really think Russia would pay for some helpdesk employee to tweet for a decade and not be used by Russian Propaganda? He supposedly have to give back his $4m book advance, but we know that’s theater.
It has come to light recently that the CIA withheld information from Trump. Here is a recent quote from a tweet from a undercover reporter: Source
Amjad Fseisi, is caught on undercover cameras implicating the highest levels of the intelligence agencies, including “The executive staff. We’re talking about the director and his subordinates,” former CIA Directors “Gina Haspel….And I believe Mike Pompeo did the same thing too,” “kept information from him [Trump] because we knew he’d fucking disclose it.” Amjad reasons “There are certain people that would…give him a high-level overview but never give him any details. You know why? Because he’ll leak those details…He’s a Russian asset. He’s owned by the fucking Russians.”
If the CIA is willing to lie about Edward Snowden, they likely provided Trump with fake intelligence that they know he would leak. I bet you the low detail intel briefs with lots of pictures and graphs was just a psyop against Trump to avoid him leaking material. And the stuff he did leak I bet was manipulated by our own government against a sitting president. But at least the CIA hasn't assassinated any more US presidents recently.
Have you ever seen a “whistleblower” do more talk shows than Edward Snowden? They even made a movie about him in a few years. The media is treating Edward Snowden very differently than any other whistleblower in the intelligence community.
I don’t believe we’ve had a real intelligence whistleblower in a long time. Edward Snowden is just trying to misdirect us. There might be aliens, but i would not take the word of an ex CIA agent about that.\
CIA did not expect Russia to go so off the rails so quickly, so you won’t see him in Russian media ever again until he decides he wants to answer questions in USA, like a real whistleblower would do like that hero in Australia exposing war crimes.
What are the true motives behind his tweets and interviews? Does the CIA want to secretly help make our private data more secure? /s
Edit: check out this old Joe Rogan episode with Snowden and notice how there’s no delay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efs3QRr8LWw

This happened in middle school, so my memory is a little rusty, but I needed to share this story. Background: I had two best friends in elementary school and we stayed friends the first year of middle school. One was always kinda mean so I(11F at the time) only hung out with her(Regina (fake name) 12F) cause of my actual best friend (Gretchen 11F).
The first time this happened we were talking during PE and Gretchen said something along the lines of “I’m so jealous of you. You don’t have any mental health issues.” Weird thing to say, I know. The rest of the conversation went something like this:
Me: I have depression. G: You’re like, the happiest person I know, you can’t have depression. Me: Okay… I have really bad anxiety. G: So does, like, every kid in our grade, that doesn’t count.
I was about to say something when the coach blew the whistle, signaling the end of PE.
The only other time this happened was when we were at lunch on the last or second to last day of school. We were joking about ways to sue the school, as we often did. (We hated it there.) This was our conversation: G: I could sue for mental distress. R: Yeah, but the school didn’t give you any new mental illnesses. Me: They gave me anxiety. R: If we went off anxiety, 85% of our school could sue. Anxiety barely even counts as a mental illness anyway.
I know this is short and it probably isn’t that big a deal, since it only happened twice, but I thought it was weird it happened multiple times.

what ever happened to arlin? or gretchen? or kaleigh? or kenzie? or or or, etc, etc, etc. i used to somewhat enjoy their content during the time they were friends with these people, but now they just come off as try hards who want to flaunt this fake, unattainable lifestyle who are “obsessssssed” with products and clothes and trips they know their average audience can’t attain. it seems their always moving on to the next for their own personal gain and can’t keep a single friendship. it’s so obvious and insincere. just felt like venting, i miss when they seemed “real” and not as self-absorbed and talked in that irritating, monotone, cringy ass influencer voice. Ella and is the only real person that went on Emma’s “bachelorette”, i can’t even imagine what she must have thought being surrounded by people like Hallie 💀

It’s my first time posting here and ohmygod. I just wanna say that I love this show so much. I started watching during its peak back in covid season, I think at around 2020-2021 I guess, then only stopped mid-season 4 bc I was getting so bored when the plot took a turn and suddenly they were all “working for the company” and tbh the whole Scylla plotline is just meh. Then I only picked up right where I left off JUST THIS YEAR, exactly this month, and I have never been so happy coming back to a show I’ve abandoned. The love I have for the show, the characters, the plot, the actors and everything else was relived. It was SOOO good. I miss(ed) having a 10/10 show to look forward to 🥲
Anyway, this is just the list of thoughts and questions I have bc I personally think there are some stuff that went unanswered and/or was never given a proper ending to (?). So here goes:

1. Whatever happened to the recurrence of Michael’s “being sick” plot and the return of his nosebleeds in the season finale of s04? I feel like that subplot just suddenly disappeared with no explanation cause suddenly he was battling it out in Yemen. YEMEN ffs 💀 one day he was having symptoms again and then poof! Suddenly he’s alive and stronger than he’s ever been. I wanted answers cause that was such a huge factor !!
   
2. What happened with Gretchen? Lol I get that she stayed in prison but is that really it? I was also hoping Sara would somehow have a scene wherein she took the wood keychain to Emily.
   
3. The Ending aka the very last episode. Omg. Had such HUGE potential. It was lacking. Where is LJ in the ending? And really? I don’t like that they wrote off Lincoln’s old girlfriend (forgot her name but she was Whistler’s gf) JUST LIKE THAT. They even had a scene in the surf shop. They seemed like a good team. She was there with him post-Michael’s death. The sheba-lincoln loveteam feels forced. And what even were they looking at in the park?!?? Honestly, it feels like it’s just another episode mid-season. PB fans and the characters deserved a better ending. The montage of the s04 finale, for example. That’s the standard. Made me cry and gave me chills.
   
4. T-Bag deserved a better ending. Not having his son killed and him ending up in Fox River. AGAIN.
   
5. Speaking of t-bag, I wanna know what was the reasoning behind the subplot of him getting his prosthetic hand fixed??? Like I was expecting to get answers at the end but was it really necessary??? It feels disconnected tbh. When the prosthetics came to light I even thought that it was a hint to michael faking his own death. But I got zero. Nada 💀 it was so unnecessary.
   
6. Michael’s picture in Sanaa. Who took the damn picture and how??? Just another case of Left Unexplained 😭 I wanted to know the story behind it so bad. All of it.
   
7. I don’t like the subplot that Sara remarried. Lol. So off-brand. That was the love of her life! The way I knew her the entire series, that’s something that she wouldn’t do idk. Feels forced.
   
8. Speaking of, I had a bad gut feeling abt sara’s husband all along 😂💀
   
9. The acting was lacking. I am speaking only in terms of the scenes wherein Sara was told that Michael might be alive, to the scene where it’s finally confirmed. I don’t know. I expected there to be heavy-drama, I wanted her to wail, to really go all out. I wanted her to be humanized for god’s sake! 7 years later u find out the dead love of your life whom you’ve never gotten to spend a lot of time with even before, COULD BE ALIVE??? Idk I wanted her to go nuts! I ROOTED for her to go crazy! As one should. Both of them actually, esp. when they finally reunited. Cry us a river! This feels like a dream but it isn’t! Where’s the tears of joy and confusion and also anger (esp. for Sara’s part)???
   
10. The Explanation. I wanted the whole explanation to the whole faking the death and Kaniel Outis thing to be told at the end of the ep. Idk it’s just a huge bomb to be dropped on such a mid scene. But I do get lincoln’s sense of urgency though.
    

Might add more to the list when I remember it 😭 want answers to these sooo bad. But hey. PB still one of my fave tv shows of all time. GOATED 🤝🔥💯 pls suggest a tv show like this so I could cure my hangover 🥺

Did anyone else think the Gretchen who answered the “one note” radio sounded like a text to speech robot? I know their callers are for the most part fake, but to this level?

Last night, 163 Democratic representatives joined 196 Republicans to stop far-right Republicans from removing House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene led the effort to remove Johnson, but her motion received only 43 votes: 32 Democrats and 11 Republicans. Twenty-eight representatives either did not vote or voted present.
Greene promptly excoriated the “uniparty,” saying that “the Democrats now control Speaker Johnson. That was something that everybody’s suspected all along. They just voted to save him.”
But the majority of the House Republican conference appears to be tired of the chaos in their ranks that has made this Congress one of the least productive in American history. Jordain Carney and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported today that House Republicans who are not aligned with Greene and her cohort want to change House rules to create punishments for the extremists who keep stopping House business by, for example, voting against letting bills come to the floor of the House.
Greene and Thomas Massie (R-KY), her main ally in trying to oust Johnson, urged their colleagues to bring it on. Massie said that anyone trying to stop them was going to “take an ass-whooping from their base.”
Since the 1990s, right-wing media hosts have directed the Republican base, telling them what to think and urging them to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to do what the media hosts wanted. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was so influential in the 1990s that when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1995 for the first time since 1954, they made him an honorary member of their incoming congressional freshman class. And what Limbaugh did for radio, Fox News Channel hosts like Bill O’Reilly did for television.
But Limbaugh died in February 2021, and after the Fox News Channel (FNC) had to pay a $787 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for the lies the network’s hosts told about the company’s voting machines in the 2020 election, it let go of main host Tucker Carlson. There are indications that FNC founder and former chair Rupert Murdoch hoped to center Republican messaging around young activist Charlie Kirk, but Kirk has slid into MAGA extremism, too.
The Republican extremists no longer have a centralized messaging center. Instead, as CNN’s Oliver Darcy noted today, Murdoch’s outlets themselves—the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post—stood behind Johnson.
Yesterday, FreedomWorks, the right-wing organization that was backed by the Koch family at its start in 2004 and that was behind the Tea Party movement, abruptly shut down. FreedomWorks attacked Democratic measures for business regulation and social welfare because it embraced libertarian principles. Its revenue had dropped by half since 2022, its president, Adam Brandon, told Luke Mullins of Politico. But in the end, what did the organization in was the party’s split over Trump.
That split was crystal clear in Tuesday’s Republican primary election in Indiana. Trump won that election, but with only 78.3% of the vote. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who suspended her campaign in early March and has not campaigned since, won 21.7%.
Before the Indiana primary, on May 2 political statistician Tom Bonier debunked the idea that Haley’s support came from Democratic-leaning voters flooding the primary vote to hurt Trump. Crunching the numbers in North Carolina showed that Haley voters there “were not substantially younger than the GOP voters (41% over 65 vs 45% among reg[istered Republicans]). They were overwhelmingly white (94% of Ind[ependent]s vs 97% of [Republicans]), and were actually more likely to be men (51% of Ind[ependent Republican] primary voters vs 50% of [Republicans]).” In short, he wrote, “[e]very indicator suggests these Independents voting in [Republican] primaries are more likely [Republican] voters. They just don't like Trump.”
Political commentator Chris Cillizza today called attention to the numbers that landed before Tuesday. On March 12, Haley won 13.2% of the vote in Georgia (or 78,000 votes). On March 19 she won 17.8% of the vote in Arizona (111,000 votes), 13.9%* of the vote in Florida (155,000 votes), and 14.4% of the vote in Ohio (161,000 votes). On April 2 she won 12.8% of the votes in Wisconsin (77,000 votes). And on April 23, Haley won 16.6% of the votes in Pennsylvania (158,000 votes).
If Biden picks up even one in five of these votes, Cillizza noted, “it matters bigly.”
Three high-level Republicans this week told media they would not vote for Trump, helping to pave an off-ramp for other Republicans. Former House speaker Paul Ryan told Yahoo Finance that he would write in another Republican rather than vote for Trump. “Character is too important to me,” he said.
Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also cited character when she said she would not vote for Trump. “I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I would absolutely consider voting for Joe Biden this upcoming November because he will not seek to destroy our nation [or] our Constitution, and he has the statesman character that we need in an elected official.”
Georgia’s former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan went further on Monday night, endorsing Biden, whom he had called in an op-ed a “decent person I disagree with on policy,” over Trump, whom he described as “a criminal defendant without a moral compass.” “Sometimes the best way to learn your lesson is to get beat, and Donald Trump needs to get beat. We need to move on as a party. We need to move on as a country,” he said.
Meanwhile, as Khaya Himmelman noted in Talking Points Memo, MAGA Republicans are already blaming a potential loss in 2024 on illegal voters. On Wednesday, Speaker Johnson and other Trump Republicans held a press conference to promote their new bill to make it illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.
This is a political stunt: It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence that this is happening. In 2017, Trump created a commission to root out the illegal voting he claimed had affected the 2016 election; less than a year later, he disbanded it when it could find no evidence of his claims. Johnson admitted there was no evidence of voting by undocumented immigrants when he told reporters: "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it's not been something that is easily provable. We don't have that number."
Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles retorted: “People terrified of contact with government because they don’t want their lives destroyed by deportation don’t register to vote illegally and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes.”
For his part, Trump appears to have tried a more direct approach to reelection. According to Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post, last month at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told about two dozen top oil executives that if they gave him $1 billion to get reelected, he would immediately reverse the environmental regulations the Biden-Harris administration has put into place and stop any new ones. A $1 billion gift would be a “deal,” according to Trump, because the tax cuts he plans to enact and the regulatory cuts would be worth far more than that. Since then, Ben Lefebvre wrote yesterday in Politico, oil executives have been drawing up executive orders that Trump can sign as soon as he takes office.
Yesterday, in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, President Biden said the U.S. would continue to supply defensive weapons to support the Iron Dome over Israel, but it would not send offensive weapons to Israel if it went forward with its controversial invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter from Israeli strikes. The administration has publicly opposed that invasion since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced it. “If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah,” Biden said. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.”
Trump and other Republicans promptly accused President Joe Biden of “taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses.”
“We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” Biden told Burnett. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”
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*EDITED AT 9:30 AM EASTERN, MAY 10, 2024: A typo had this number as 3.9%. It is now correct.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2024/05/08/house-speaker-vote-mike-johnson-motion-to-vacate/
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/05/09/congress/consequences-on-the-table-00157040
https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-flips-martin-luther-king-jr-attacks-growing-myth-1860839
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/09/media/rupert-murdoch-mike-johnson-marjorie-taylor-greene/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/08/freedomworks-is-closing-and-blaming-trump-00156784
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4650934-paul-ryan-donald-trump-2024-election-voting/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gopers-desperate-to-pin-blame-for-potential-trump-2024-loss-on-non-citizen-voters-wherever-they-are
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/rupert-murdoch-charlie-kirk-and-future-right-wing-media-extremism
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/09/trump-gop-weapons-israel-biden-rafah/73625195007/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/background-trumps-voter-fraud-commission
https://apnews.com/article/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/08/politics/joe-biden-interview-cnntv/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/us/politics/trump-voter-fraud-commission.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/08/oil-industry-orders-trump-day-one-00156705
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/06/geoff-duncan-endorses-biden-trump-2024
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-georgia-lt-gov-geoff-duncan-on-backing-biden-trump-is-a-fake-republican
Twitter (X):
tboniestatus/1786049906332823636
ChrisCillizza/status/1788574868474073401
BidenHQ/status/1788654963452776882
atrupastatus/1788231185174311165
tjstiles_authostatus/1788235180655911121
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-9-2024

https://www.thedailybeast.com/squad-rep-jamaal-bowmans-youtube-page-is-a-bonkers-conspiracy-filled-trip
Squad Rep’s YouTube Page Is a Conspiracy Theorist’s Dream RUBE TUBE
Jamaal Bowman has insisted his days of engaging with fringe content are behind him. His active YouTube account shows otherwise.
William Bredderman Senior Researcher Published May 08, 2024 4:31AM EDT
Old (internet) habits die hard.
When The Daily Beast revealed in January that Rep. Jamaal Bowman had promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on his blog while working as a public school principal, the New York Democrat maintained it was just a bygone phase, and that his days of marinating in the nether-swamps of online paranoia were long over. But his personal YouTube account, where he continued to follow new channels and create playlists as recently as last month, indicates his taste for fringe content has endured into his tenure on Capitol Hill.
Bowman’s page, which uses his longtime screen name “Inner Peace” and features his image and videos from the middle school he once led, subscribes to dozens of bewildering and bizarre accounts—including known Russian and Chinese disinfo peddlers, flat earthers, musings about UFOs and “signs you’re being prepared to cross to the new earth,” a U.S.-born Muslim influencer who killed a German citizen and provoked attacks on American businesses in Egypt, and many arcane online realms in between.
“This CIA Document Literally Explains Time Travel (practical steps included)," crows the title of one post on an account the congressman follows called Video Advice, which also frequently shares conspiracy content about the Illuminati and the Catholic Church. Another recording on the same page blares: “Kanye Exposes the Truth: ‘The Secret Codes They Don't Want You to Know.’”
“‘We use the RIGHT FREQUENCIES’ (hidden numerology used by the elite),” is the name of a video on another account called Be Inspired, which Bowman also follows.
“‘100% Alien Technology’ - Something Big Being Hidden From Us,” alleges a video on a page called Anonymous Official, another Bowman subscription, which frequently also pushes content by serial sex offender and Vladimir Putin-booster Scott Ritter, such as “What’s Coming is WORSE Than a WW3, Iran is Ready.”
These follows might seem unusual for a member of Congress—but less so for a man who published poetry The Daily Beast uncovered that promoted debunked conspiracies about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Bowman’s verse, first published on his blog Relentless-Strongback.blogspot.com in 2011 when he was 35, also urged readers to watch the pseudo-documentaries ‘Loose Change’ and ‘Zeitgeist,’ both of which earned the endorsement of arch-paranoia-pusher Alex Jones. Bowman’s poem also included an explicit shout-out to William Cooper, an Arizona broadcaster whose anti-government rants made him a pivotal figure in the American militia movement.
Although the congressman has since disowned his old heroes as “cranks,” his YouTube subscriptions reflect a similar blending of right and left. Anonymous Official, for instance, uses the name and symbols of the anarchist hacker collective—but shares clips of conservative populist figures such as Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. Bowman also follows Stephen Gardner, a pro-Trump YouTube influencer who also promotes the idea that the federal government is hiding evidence of aliens, while critiquing U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine and the Middle East.
In fact, Ritter, Rogan, and Carlson recur across multiple channels Bowman subscribes to, as does former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as claims about alleged government plots to conceal extraterrestrials, an imminent third world war emerging from American support of Ukraine and Israel, and content about inventor Nikola Tesla and his supposed knowledge of mysterious vibrations that pervade the universe and various parallel dimensions. Bowman also follows mainstream and apolitical accounts, such as National Geographic and ESPN, and musical artists like Busta Rhymes and Eminem.
Bowman’s campaign did not deny the Inner Peace account belonged to him, but supplied a statement from the lawmaker disclaiming even the faintest familiarity with the extreme and outlandish content he subscribed to. Bowman also downplayed the importance of his social media exposures in the face of what he characterized as domestic and international crises.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know these accounts, and I haven’t watched any of these videos. There is a war going on that has killed tens of thousands of innocents and people here can’t afford rent and groceries, I think people care more about that than some convoluted story about videos that I haven’t even watched.”
Further, Bowman has publicly identified himself in the past as a frequent YouTube user. At a panel discussion held at an Islamic center in the city of Yonkers in January, the Democrat described himself as “starstruck” to introduce the incendiary academic Norman Finkelstein, whom he said he knew from online videos.
“I watch them all the time on YouTube,” said Bowman, who subsequently had to denounce Finkelstein’s praise of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israeli territory on Oct. 7.
Sure enough, several of the pages Inner Peace follows—including DiEM25, Real News Network, Free Will, PoliticsJOE, TRT World—feature interviews with Finkelstein.
Moreover, a number of the accounts Bowman has subscribed to are of recent vintage: more recent, even, than his own ascent to power in 2020. For instance, one called Afripost—where recent video titles announce “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS” (capitalization original)—was created in April of last year, just a few months after Bowman started his second term.
Afripost also frequently shares speeches by controversial Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, known for his antisemitic rhetoric. The most recent such video asserts, falsely, “BLACKS ARE THE TRUE J£WS [sic].”
Bowman also subscribes to an account called Thinkers Forum, created in late 2021, toward the end of his first year representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County in the House. Thinkers Forum is a project of The China Academy, which bills itself as “one of China’s most influential current affairs and intellectual content outlet [sic],” and boasts ties to an array of Chinese state-backed institutions. Recent videos posted to the Thinkers Forum channel include “Why the West ‘takes pleasure’ in seeing the genocide in Palestine?” “Why NATO is collapsing like the Soviet Union, by the same mistake,” and “How the US Keeps Fighting China, Knowing It Won’t Win?”
Thinkers Forum also recently posted a translation of a Chinese state university professor’s evidence-free speculation that the terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall was the work of Ukraine and Western intelligence services—even though a faction of the Islamic State took responsibility for the assault.
A few months earlier, in July 2021—six months into Bowman’s stint on the Hill—another channel was born called Middle Nation, which the congressman at some indeterminate point followed. Middle Nation belongs to Shahid Bolsen, a Colorado-born Muslim convert who used his prior social media accounts to urge Islamist militants to attack so-called “corporate crusaders” that had set up shop in Egypt. Bolsen, previously imprisoned on a manslaughter conviction in the United Arab Emirates for killing a German engineer, uses his new channel to rail against “The Loud, Hollow American Empire,” “The Prison of American Hegemony,” Western “materialism,” the U.S.’s supposedly “fake ceasefire” proposals to end the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
One of the loopiest pages Bowman follows also came into being that same year: Wired Mind, which exclusively promotes the ideas of late New Age icon Dolores Cannon, known for her advocacy of conspiracies about aliens, reincarnation, and the lost island of Atlantis. Wired Mind urges its viewers to prepare for an impending “shift” to a higher reality, and offers advice on such dilemmas as "Are You an Alien Among Us? Signs You Might Not Be from This World” and “Think You're Going Crazy? Surprise! You're Actually Awakening Your Spirit!"
Finally, Bowman also follows BreakThrough News, which established its YouTube presence in early 2020, while the Democrat was on the campaign warpath against then-incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel. As The Daily Beast reported last spring, BreakThrough News draws its staff from Russian state-owned media and cash from Neville “Roy” Singham, a U.S. tech mogul ensconced in Shanghai—and pushes the favorite propaganda narratives of Moscow and Beijing.

I have seen so little chatter about this brand-new release, and I can't believe it because it is absolutely amazing! I had never read Sarah Adler before (this is her second book, her first was Mrs. Nash's Ashes) but was so intrigued by this book because of the wacky, fun, out-of-the-box concept.
Gretchen is a fake spirit medium, taking peoples' money and pretending to talk to ghosts. When a wealthy, older client pays her an exorbitant amount of money to exorcise her dear friend's farm of its ghost so he can sell, she thinks the job will be easy. But when she turns out, not only is Charlie a hot young farmer, but the ghost is real and tells Gretchen that if Charlie sells the property, he'll die a horrible death. Now she has to convince Charlie to stay on the farm and try not to fall in love.
Sarah Adler's writing is so funny and sweet and kept me turning the pages way later than it should have. The characters feel so real (including Everett, the ghost). I really didn't know until the end what was gonna happen to those crazy kids. I hope this post convinces you to give it a try!!