Rightwing extremists fare poorly in school board elections

Rightwingers in the US have made schools and libraries the focus of their culture wars, seeing those venerable institutions as somehow indoctrinating children with liberal values, when in reality they are largely providing fairly ideologically neutral services. What has happened is that rightwingers have lost the culture wars as the zeitgeist has shifted under their feet, resulting in the public at large more accepting of those groups that were formerly invisible or marginalized because of their gender identity or sexual orientation or ethnicity. As a result, the rightwingers have become the fringe but still see themselves as upholding mainstream values, and have launched an assault on schools and libraries in their effort to take control of what they think they have lost.

But it looks like becoming ever more extreme, as often happens with groups fighting culture wars, may be a losing political strategy because it makes their toxic views more public and alarms those do not agree with them. Those who may formerly have been somewhat passive politically have now become more active in trying to stop the extremists and we are seeing some evidence of that as rightwingers have recently lost in many school board elections.
[Read more…]

Lindell has to pay $5 million over false election claims

There are so many lawsuits going around over the lies told about the 2020 election that this one went under my radar. It was not a lawsuit exactly, but something that was referred to an arbitration panel that ruled that Mike Lindell, the founder of the My Pillow company and ardent advocate of Trump and the Big Lie, has to pay $5 million to someone who took up his challenge to prove that Lindell’s data claiming to support the Big Lie was wrong.

He announced his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he would give $5m to anyone who could disprove what he claimed was genuine election data he had obtained.

The arbitration panel said that the challenge had been successfully met.

Mike Lindell must make good on a promise and pay $5m to a software expert who debunked data the conspiracy theorist touted in advancing Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 presidential election defeat was the result of voting fraud, an arbitration panel decided.

In its decision, the panel said: “The data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”
…

On Wednesday, a panel of the American Arbitration Association ruled in a dispute between Lindell and Robert Zeidman, an expert who took up the challenge.

Based on its analysis, the panel said, “Mr Zeidman performed under the contract … Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”

Lindell has vowed to take this matter to court. Of course he will. That is what he does.

There was a parenthetical comment in this news report that said that Lindell “is recovering from substance use disorder”. I wondered why he always seemed to be hyper-energetic in his public appearances, talking non-stop and at a high volume. This may be the explanation.

How Harry and Meghan’s child became part of the Disney-DeSantis feud.

The governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is a prime example, if you needed one, that having elite educational credentials (he attended Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School) does not mean that you are smart. I wrote before that I thought his decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 (while he has not yet made a formal announcement, he has done pretty much everything that a prospective candidate does) was not a good idea, that he would suffer because of it, and that he would have been in a far better position in 2028.

Further evidence that his political skills are sub-par comes from the fight he picked with the Disney corporation, escalating it to such ridiculous levels that it risks backfiring on him. DeSantis seems to think that running on an ‘anti-woke’ platform will be his key to success in outflanking Trump on the culture war grievance issues. He has bragged that ‘Florida is where woke goes to die’. The word ‘woke’ is conveniently undefined, meaning that one can claim to be anti-woke by seizing on any aspect of the culture wars and opposing any moves that seek to make society more egalitarian by promoting acceptance of marginalized groups. In particular, ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric has been used to attack equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community.
[Read more…]

P. G. Wodehouse books changed to remove offensive language

When the publishers of Roald Dahl’s books announced their decision to change some of the language that was seen as offensive, my thoughts immediately went to my favorite author and his very funny book Thank You, Jeeves. In that book, the hapless Bertie Wooster, in an attempt to escape from the yacht where he was being held captive by an angry prospective father-in-law, uses shoe polish to darken his skin in order to blend in with a troupe of blackface minstrels who had been invited to perform on the yacht, hoping to slip off with them after the show.

Nowadays, white people performing in blackface is severely frowned upon but in those times it was not uncommon, with people like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple being among those who did so. In this book, however, it is even worse because the narrator Bertie casually calls the performers ‘n-word minstrels’, again something that was apparently a fairly common description at that time. But reading that was really jarring, however much one might believe that there was no bad intent on the part of the author and that he was merely using the accepted language of his time.

So I welcomed the decision by the publishers to revise Wodehouse’s books to eliminate this and any other language that are no longer appropriate. In my view, doing so does not detract from the books. There are some books, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where retaining the original language is defensible because Twain was making social commentary and the language played an important part of his message. But while one might argue that Wodehouse’s use of those words tells us something about attitudes in those days and thus should be retained, his books were meant as light entertainment and those words were incidental to the book, so eliminating them should be uncontroversial.

But is anything involving race and gender uncontroversial these days?

The aftermath of the Fox-Dominion settlement

As far as a I can tell of the settlement of the case, Fox News personalities who told all those lies about Dominion and the elections will not have to make on-air apologies.

It looks like Dominion wanted a large financial settlement more than they wanted on-air apologies from Fox, and Fox wanted to avoid giving on-air apologies and was willing to pay almost $800 million to avoid doing that. Dominion likely used the demand for apologies as leverage to get Fox to pay up. While this is a large amount, Murdoch media is used to seeing fines for wrongdoing as just the cost of doing business. While many of us would have liked to see all the Fox people squirm on the witness stand and show public contrition for their irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric, ultimately Dominion is a business, not a pro-democracy or media watchdog organization, and it made a business decision.

But there are other cases that in the works and it will be interesting to see what impact this result will have on those cases.
[Read more…]

Last minute delay in Fox-Dominion defamation trial

[UPDATE: The two parties have reached a settlement in which Fox will pay Dominion $785.5 million.

This settlement is not the end of the legal woes for Fox.

Fox still faces several legal battles related to its decision to broadcast false claims. Smartmatic, another voting equipment company, is suing the company for $2.7bn. Abby Grossberg, a former Fox employee who worked for Bartiromo and Carlson, is also suing the company, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony.

The network also faces a separate lawsuit from a shareholder who is seeking damages and argues that executives breached their fiduciary duty to the company by causing false claims about the election to be broadcast.

Fox has also admitted that it told lies about the election. It is not yet clear what public apologies Fox will give on the air, if any. The details of the settlement once released may clarify that point.]

The defamation trial of Dominion against Fox News was supposed to get underway yesterday but on Sunday the judge in the case postponed it until today. No reasons were given for the delay, leading to speculation that lawyers for both sides were trying to negotiate a deal. It is not unusual for deals to be struck on the eve of a trial as both sides play a game of chicken to see whether the other will make the first move, signaling weakness. Although the judge on Monday said that the trial would start today, it may be that a deal has been reached by the time people read this post.

It seems likely that if the idea of a deal was broached, it was by Fox since the amount of pre-trial information released has been pretty damning to them. But what might have pushed them over the edge is the fact that the judge ruled that Rupert Murdoch could be forced by Dominion to testify. This came in the wake of Fox admitting that it had misled the judge by downplaying Murdoch’s role in the company , by claiming that he was not an officer but had mostly an honorary role, which seemed to tick off the judge.
[Read more…]

Attack ad against DeSantis

It looks like the gloves are off as this ad by a seemingly pro-Trump group demonstrates. However, in these days of front groups and hoaxes, it is hard to know who is behind any internet ads. It may be by a group that is trying to stir up a fight between the two.

The ad uses as its framework the story that DeSantis had been seen using his fingers to eat pudding but the message is something that Democrats might have put out since it uses his support for cutting social security, Medicare, and raising the retirement age against him.

The Tennessee state legislature goes off the rails

The old saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was provided another example in the Tennessee state legislature where Republicans have a supermajority that enables them to do pretty much anything they want. Recently they used that power to vote to expel two young black members of the legislature because of their calls for gun reforms following yet another mass shooting in the US, this one resulting in the deaths of three students and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville. This expulsion has made national news and the two expelled members have become national figures.

Sue Halpern gave the background to this action.

On March 30th, three Democratic members—Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson—now known as the Tennessee Three, stepped into the well of the chamber without being formally recognized and led the student protesters sitting in the gallery in the chant “No action, no peace,” demanding that lawmakers pass gun-reform legislation. Jones and Pearson used a megaphone. On April 6th, their Republican colleagues voted to expel both members for having violated the decorum of the chamber. When Johnson was asked why they, and not she, had been kicked out, she was blunt, saying, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.”

This article reports on the backlash to the expulsions, including the fact that the constituencies represented by the expelled members acted quickly to send them back into the legislature as interim members until elections are held in their districts.
[Read more…]

The latest classified information leak

As soon as I read that the person alleged to have leaked classified information on the internet was a young, white, gun-loving religious person who had exchanged racist memes with his friends on a chat group, I felt that the Republican nutters would see him as one of their own and immediately come to his defense. These are, after all, the same people who treated Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of hero after he traveled to another state with an AR-15 weapon and killed two demonstrators protesting police violence. And sure enough, that is what has happened.

People have expressed surprise that a mere 21-year old member of the National Guard could have access to this kind of information.

The FBI has arrested a 21-year-old air national guardsman in Massachusetts suspected of being responsible for the leak of US classified defence documents that laid bare military secrets and upset Washington’s relations with key allies.
…

Airman first class Teixeira was in the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard under the duty title of “cyber transport systems journeyman”, responsible for keeping the internet working at airbases. He joined the guard in 2019.

Teixeira is believed to have been the leader of an online chat group where hundreds of photographs of secret and top-secret documents were first uploaded, from late last year to March. The online group called itself Thug Shaker Central, made up of 20 to 30 young men and teenagers brought together by an enthusiasm for guns, military gear and video games. Racist language was a common feature of the group.

[Read more…]