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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

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28 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Shit, they have evidence on us!

 

You know, he keeps saying he has all this evidence, but then never produces it.  It is kind of like when Trump kept saying that they had all this proof about Hilary's e-mails and never produced anything.  These people are so fucking full of shit, it is unreal.  The sad part is that people fucking believe them.  Or perhaps it is just confirmation bias.  They want there to have been fraud, so, there you go!

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29 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Shit, they have evidence on us!

 

Wait.....I just did the math.

1 -- Mike Lindell says he has evidence to convict everyone in the country.

2 -- Mike Lindell is presently in the country.

Did Mike Lindell just confess to election crimes on national TV?

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39 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Wait.....I just did the math.

1 -- Mike Lindell says he has evidence to convict everyone in the country.

2 -- Mike Lindell is presently in the country.

Did Mike Lindell just confess to election crimes on national TV?

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54 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

You know, he keeps saying he has all this evidence, but then never produces it.  

You're fucked, missy!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/10/con-is-winding-down

Quote

Allow me to present to you the evidence that China stole the 2020 election. Please sit down; I don’t want you to be injured when you faint.

So: voilà.

CDH6LOTKVRHKXHPSXAY2CONR5Q.png&w=916
Yes, you’re reading that right. Looks like you owe MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell an apology.

Hm? You say you can’t figure out what you’re supposed to be looking at? Well, that’s just because you [mumbles] and you know what, I really have to get going to this dentist’s appointment.

Let’s change gears for a second.

Imagine that someone handed you an envelope containing a lengthy document written in Portuguese. You have it translated and you learn that it’s a written confession from a criminal who is currently siphoning billions of dollars a day from millions of individual checking accounts. What do you do next?

Presumably, you call the local police or the FBI. You present them with the original document and the translation and let them take it from there. What you presumably do not do is promise for weeks on end that you have definitive proof that someone is stealing millions of dollars from bank accounts and that people need to fly to some remote location so that you can unveil that proof over the course of three days.

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The gibberish above is one result of the latter process. Lindell, who has claimed for months and months that he had definitive proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by China, pledged to release that information at a “cyber symposium” that is underway in South Dakota. According to Lindell, someone captured Internet traffic in the days after the election that shows how votes were shifted away from Donald Trump and to President Biden. Instead of simply presenting this evidence to the public, he withheld it, offering $5 million to anyone who can prove that the information isn’t legitimate.

Rob Graham, a technologist and author, went to the summit to evaluate what Lindell claims to have. During a “breakout session,” he and others were provided with access to what Lindell’s team claims to have obtained. Graham shared what they were given — a collection of files that consists of 1) a list of computer Internet protocol addresses and 2) gibberish like that above. Well, technically they were given rich-text format files, some of which were inexplicably converted to hexadecimal encoding. Graham, an expert on Internet data, described the provided material as “a bunch of confusing stuff they can’t explain,” and said that those running the symposium pledged to hand over the “real” information Tuesday night or Wednesday. Meanwhile, Lindell’s live stream of the symposium — being watched by hundreds of thousands of people on one streaming feed — presses on, with the CEO mostly riffing on how toxic the media is. Promotions offer viewers codes for discounts at MyPillow, a useful bit of advertising given that Lindell’s conspiracy theories have cost his company placement in a number of retailers’ inventories.

Again, it’s been the case for months that Lindell has said his “cyber experts” saw proof of vote hacking in the captured packets of data. It would, presumably, be very easy for those experts to then stand up and quickly walk through what they found and what it means. But this has never happened. It’s never even been explained what such evidence would look like. Instead, Lindell’s relied on lengthy statistical presentations from a guy named Douglas Frank, presentations that are the functional equivalent of a kid reviewing a Jackson Pollock painting: They’re looking at something, to be sure, and picking out patterns and meaning where they can.


Of course, it would also be easy for Lindell’s team to present the raw data in a format that people at the symposium could examine. Graham says they were told it was in a “proprietary BLX/PLX format,” maybe. So the gibberish above might be some kind of encoding, like some sort of compression. But then, you don’t convert that to rich-text format or identify it as an .RTF file. You share the compressed file and say it’s a compressed file. (Converting the text above to a compressed file did not make it accessible, by the way. Nor did converting it to a PDF, a JPEG or a PNG.) If you are trying to prove something, you prove it.

But what if you’re not trying to prove it? What if you’re trying to make some cash and you stumbled onto a big, juicy mark? What if there were a millionaire desperate to prove something, a millionaire who’s not exactly an Internet savant but one willing to hand over loads of cash for data you made up — as some of the data previously released by Lindell pretty obviously was? For a while, you’re skating, cashing checks and sending along reports on occasion. Eventually, though, you get closer and closer to the point at which you need to actually turn over your work.

This is how all cons end. Things stretch and stretch and stretch until: snap. So instead of presenting your data, you encode it and obfuscate it and promise that there’s actually something there, but wait, hmm, that is weird, let me see what’s happening. Instead you say things like that there was a medical emergency that slowed things down and just ask everyone to stick with you for a moment. It’s just buying time — like Trump calling senators on Jan. 6 — hoping that if another hour or so passes, you can somehow regain control.

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why Lindell was stretching things out the way he is. I believe that he’s being taken for a ride, though perhaps unintentionally. (I think Douglas Frank believes he’s stumbled onto a secret conspiracy, for example, though he obviously hasn’t.) But why is he letting the fraud keep going? Why’s he participating in stretching it out?

Watching the symposium live stream Tuesday morning, I think I figured it out. The start of the event was delayed by technological problems, problems Lindell claimed were a function of his bespoke social media site being “hacked.” This was the refrain: He’d done everything right but hackers kept picking apart his site’s defenses. He said the same thing when his site first launched and quickly got flooded. He also said Tuesday morning that his plane had trouble landing Monday night, hinting at a conspiracy aimed at silencing him.

In other words, this seems very much like a guy who’s primed to believe fairly far-flung excuses for why bad things happen. The kind of guy who, when told that the data will be ready in a month, waits patiently for the month to pass. Maybe he’s something more sinister, engaged in an effort to willfully delude America, but observing him over time makes it seem more like he’s the mark than the hustler.

On Monday, Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Sanchez offered an insightful chain of thoughts about the overlap between those who believe false claims about the election being stolen and those who reject the coronavirus vaccine as dangerous.

In both cases, Sanchez wrote, the conspiracy theories “have the superficial trappings of real science. Links to journal articles on the one hand, or on the other, impressively hackery looking hex dumps & spreadsheets full of IP addresses” — a reference to Lindell’s information.

“[I]n both cases, this evidence is absolutely useless to the target audience,” he continued. “They have neither the training nor the context to evaluate the quality or relevance of technical articles in medical journals — or even to understand what the article is claiming in many cases. … They are, however, being flattered by the INVITATION to assess the evidence for themselves — do your own research, make up your own mind!”


Instead of offering their trust on experts in their fields to explain complicated subjects, the audience is convinced that it needs only to trust itself — though, of course, they’re actually simply trusting the hustlers presenting incomplete or misleading information. What the hustlers offer the audience, Sanchez says, “is the illusion of not trusting an authority — unlike all those sheep who trust the mainstream authorities.”

Data from YouGov shows that the overlap of those who don’t want to get the vaccine and those who think that Biden is an illegitimate president is nearly complete. About three-quarters of Republicans hold the latter position and 3 in 10 the former, but a quarter both reject the vaccine and Biden’s election.

5RGDNAQHZZCM3OEHA63GFRKFYI.png&w=916
Many in this group clearly fit the profile Sanchez describes.

It seems pretty clear that Lindell does, too. It seems clear that he was told something about packets and China and data and hex codes and, dang, if that isn’t exactly what he assumed had happened. He did his own research and found a guy who’s offering him something he doesn’t entirely understand, something the mainstream media is desperate to undercut. Lindell found something in which he has complete, unfailing confidence.

And that’s all it takes.

 

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Let’s state this up front: GOP governors are not required by some higher Trumpian law to use official powers to actively thwart efforts to fight the spread of the coronavirus. Some are choosing not to do that: In South Dakota, the governor left decisions about mask mandates to local officials, and in Arkansas the governor admitted that an earlier ban on them was an “error.”

But the Republican governors of Texas and Florida — Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis — are in a class by themselves. Their states are seeing some of the worst surges of covid in the nation, yet they are continuing to hamstring local officials from acting to protect their constituents.

Which is why these governors are facing a rebellion of sorts. In both states, ABC News reports, officials are defying limits on mask mandates, setting up direct conflicts with those governors.

This will flush out into the open the truly twisted nature of what DeSantis and Abbott are doing. They piously claim to be defending their constituents’ freedom from government mandates. But they are using their power to prevent local officials from implementing basic public health measures in a highly selective way that is plainly molded around the obsessions of former president Donald Trump and his movement, not anchored in any genuine public interest rationale.

Local officials are rebelling
The derangement of this position is particularly clear in Texas. On Monday, Abbott announced that he is seeking the help of outside medical professionals to deal with the state’s covid surge. He is also asking hospitals to postpone all elective medical procedures as hospitals fill up.

Amid all this, the Dallas schools superintendent has reasonably announced that students, visitors and staff will have to wear masks in schools. He noted that the decision is an “urgent” matter of “protecting” children, teachers and workers.

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Yet this directive required him to defy Abbott’s executive order barring mask mandates by government entities. To be clear, Abbott’s own actions amount to a stark admission that the state is in serious trouble — yet he continues to ban localities from taking measures to protect public health.

The absurd result, as the New York Times reports, is that local officials are scouring legal codes to find ways to get around Abbott’s blockade on implementing public health measures. This isn’t how officials should have to spend time and resources during a public health emergency.

In Austin, where cases are surging, local officials have recommended masking, but cannot require it, which has led the mayor of Austin to declare the situation “dire.” The Austin school district just announced a mask requirement, defying Abbott.


Meanwhile, in Florida, the superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools is moving ahead with mandatory masking. This is in defiance of DeSantis’s recent executive order empowering the state to withhold funds to punish school boards who implement mask mandates.

Incredibly, it appears DeSantis may make good on this threat. The superintendent, Carlee Simon, told “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that she’s received a letter from the state demanding justification for her move and essentially indicating that funding is at risk if she continues.

A handful of Florida parents are now suing DeSantis. One mom told CNN that she “never envisioned” that the governor “would actively be trying to harm my child,” and lamented correctly that limits on mask mandates are interfering with her son’s ability to get educated safely.


Anyone who has taken a young child to a camp or gathering this summer has witnessed how children playing together continue to drift inevitably into very close contact. It’s particularly ludicrous and venal to bar local officials from acting to defend these children from spread.

Abbott and DeSantis love to proclaim that they are defending the liberty of their states’ residents to proceed free of public health mandates, and that they should merely exercise “personal responsibility” in dealing with covid. But it’s hard to discern any genuine ideological vision here, since they have no apparent objection to all manner of other public health mandates.

“We have plenty of mandates,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “We require elementary school students to get various vaccinations. We require drivers to wear seat belts. We require adults to wear clothes.”


“There are any number of ways in which the laws of every state, including Florida and Texas, impose mandates that are designed to protect individuals,” Vladeck continued.

‘Covid exceptionalism’
All of which suggests that the real working ideology here is something you might call “covid exceptionalism.”

Obviously it would theoretically be possible for DeSantis and Abbott to believe, in good faith, that mandates against covid represent unacceptable incursions on liberty while other mandates do not.

But everyone knows the real reason DeSantis and Abbott are suddenly concerned with protecting people from public health mandates on covid in particular is that government officials eager to battle covid this way have become associated with assorted enemies of Trump and his following.

Because Trump and his movement have required this adherence to covid exceptionalism, local officials are being hamstrung from carrying out their own official responsibilities to act in defense of public health. It’s hard to find the right language to describe the seething contempt for public service and the public good that’s truly on display here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/10/rebellion-against-desantis-abbott-masks

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30 minutes ago, Post Oak said:

Paywalled.  Can you C&P?

Quote

Let’s state this up front: GOP governors are not required by some higher Trumpian law to use official powers to actively thwart efforts to fight the spread of the coronavirus. Some are choosing not to do that: In South Dakota, the governor left decisions about mask mandates to local officials, and in Arkansas the governor admitted that an earlier ban on them was an “error.”

But the Republican governors of Texas and Florida — Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis — are in a class by themselves. Their states are seeing some of the worst surges of covid in the nation, yet they are continuing to hamstring local officials from acting to protect their constituents.

Which is why these governors are facing a rebellion of sorts. In both states, ABC News reports, officials are defying limits on mask mandates, setting up direct conflicts with those governors.

ADVERTISING


This will flush out into the open the truly twisted nature of what DeSantis and Abbott are doing. They piously claim to be defending their constituents’ freedom from government mandates. But they are using their power to prevent local officials from implementing basic public health measures in a highly selective way that is plainly molded around the obsessions of former president Donald Trump and his movement, not anchored in any genuine public interest rationale.

Local officials are rebelling
The derangement of this position is particularly clear in Texas. On Monday, Abbott announced that he is seeking the help of outside medical professionals to deal with the state’s covid surge. He is also asking hospitals to postpone all elective medical procedures as hospitals fill up.

Amid all this, the Dallas schools superintendent has reasonably announced that students, visitors and staff will have to wear masks in schools. He noted that the decision is an “urgent” matter of “protecting” children, teachers and workers.


Yet this directive required him to defy Abbott’s executive order barring mask mandates by government entities. To be clear, Abbott’s own actions amount to a stark admission that the state is in serious trouble — yet he continues to ban localities from taking measures to protect public health.

The absurd result, as the New York Times reports, is that local officials are scouring legal codes to find ways to get around Abbott’s blockade on implementing public health measures. This isn’t how officials should have to spend time and resources during a public health emergency.

In Austin, where cases are surging, local officials have recommended masking, but cannot require it, which has led the mayor of Austin to declare the situation “dire.” The Austin school district just announced a mask requirement, defying Abbott.


Meanwhile, in Florida, the superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools is moving ahead with mandatory masking. This is in defiance of DeSantis’s recent executive order empowering the state to withhold funds to punish school boards who implement mask mandates.

Incredibly, it appears DeSantis may make good on this threat. The superintendent, Carlee Simon, told “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that she’s received a letter from the state demanding justification for her move and essentially indicating that funding is at risk if she continues.

A handful of Florida parents are now suing DeSantis. One mom told CNN that she “never envisioned” that the governor “would actively be trying to harm my child,” and lamented correctly that limits on mask mandates are interfering with her son’s ability to get educated safely.


Anyone who has taken a young child to a camp or gathering this summer has witnessed how children playing together continue to drift inevitably into very close contact. It’s particularly ludicrous and venal to bar local officials from acting to defend these children from spread.

Abbott and DeSantis love to proclaim that they are defending the liberty of their states’ residents to proceed free of public health mandates, and that they should merely exercise “personal responsibility” in dealing with covid. But it’s hard to discern any genuine ideological vision here, since they have no apparent objection to all manner of other public health mandates.

“We have plenty of mandates,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “We require elementary school students to get various vaccinations. We require drivers to wear seat belts. We require adults to wear clothes.”


“There are any number of ways in which the laws of every state, including Florida and Texas, impose mandates that are designed to protect individuals,” Vladeck continued.

‘Covid exceptionalism’
All of which suggests that the real working ideology here is something you might call “covid exceptionalism.”

Obviously it would theoretically be possible for DeSantis and Abbott to believe, in good faith, that mandates against covid represent unacceptable incursions on liberty while other mandates do not.

But everyone knows the real reason DeSantis and Abbott are suddenly concerned with protecting people from public health mandates on covid in particular is that government officials eager to battle covid this way have become associated with assorted enemies of Trump and his following.

Because Trump and his movement have required this adherence to covid exceptionalism, local officials are being hamstrung from carrying out their own official responsibilities to act in defense of public health. It’s hard to find the right language to describe the seething contempt for public service and the public good that’s truly on display here.

 

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2 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

He’s high AF. Going to be up 72 hours either way, might as well do it on camera 

Trump America neatly summed up in one minute.

High as fuck. Making absolutely no sense. And just spewing out total nonsense to a bunch of rubes who are paying to hear it. 

These people are totally lost. 

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I've used my main email address since 2004-ish, so there's overlap with my old GOP and NRA days.  My email address has been around.

My spam folder is going through the roof - 100+ a day from the major campaigns/Republicans.  Trump, Abbott, Cruz, DeSantis, etc., plus a shit-ton of Republican Representatives, plus a shit-ton of down-ballot Republicans here in Texas.

I'm very familiar with how email campaigns work, but this seems odd, unless it's one or two outfits (or the RNC) that is driving all of this (I have not looked deeply into it).  I'm leaning towards one or two outfits, or the RNC, driving all of this, but this shit has just ramped up in the past few days.  I expect this more heading into next February/March, not August of a non-election year.

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Nightmare fuel.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/12/us/father-kills-children-qanon-california-mexico/index.html

Quote

NN)A California man confessed to killing his two young children, allegedly telling an FBI investigator he thought they were "going to grow into monsters so he had to kill them," according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.

Matthew Taylor Coleman, a 40-year-old Santa Barbara surfing school instructor, has been charged with foreign murder of US nationals after allegedly taking his 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter into Mexico and killing them, according to an affidavit filed as part of a federal criminal complaint and a statement from the US Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.

Stopped for questioning at the US-Mexico border, Coleman allegedly told investigators he shot the children with a spear fishing gun, then hid their bodies, the affidavit said.

Homeland Security warns of potential conspiracy theory-fueled violence in August

Coleman spoke to authorities about being "enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories," including that he had visions that his wife "possessed serpent DNA and had passed it onto his children," according to the affidavit.

Coleman was detained at the border and transported to a local jail by authorities.

CNN is working to determine whether Coleman has legal representation. He was scheduled for an initial court appearance Wednesday in US District Court in Los Angeles, the US Attorney's Office said.

Mexican police found the bodies Monday

Police in Santa Barbara were initially alerted on Saturday by Coleman's wife, who said he had taken the children, hadn't told her their destination and wouldn't respond to text messages, according to the affidavit. She told police she did not feel the lives of the children were in danger and asked for police to speak with Coleman, who did not respond to police calls.

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The next day, according to the affidavit, Coleman's wife and a police officer used the 'Find My Phone' application on her laptop to determine that Coleman's phone had been last tracked in Rosarito, Mexico, just south of Tijuana in Baja California along the US-Mexico border.

Federal agencies were made aware to be on the watch for Coleman's return, which occurred around 1 p.m. Monday, according to the affidavit. When the vehicle was stopped at the border, Coleman was the lone occupant, the affidavit said.

He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here's how he got out

Mexican law enforcement was notified about the missing children and, according to the affidavit, police in Rosarito confirmed that two children matching the description of Coleman's were found dead that morning.

During his interview with the FBI, Coleman said he had killed his children in Rosarito, the affidavit said.

He told authorities "he believed his children were going to grow into monsters so he had to kill them," the affidavit said, speaking about QAnon conspiracy theories and the belief that his wife passed along "serpent DNA."

Coleman said of the killings that "he knew it was wrong, but it was the only course of action that would save the world," according to the affidavit.

QAnon is a sprawling far-right conspiracy theory that promotes the absurd and false claim that former President Donald Trump has been locked in a battle against a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles made up of prominent Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities. The FBI has previously warned of the potential danger posed by followers of the conspiracy theory movement.

The Illuminati is a conspiracy theory that a secret society controls the world, while "serpent DNA" is possibly a reference to a long-running theory that the world is secretly run by a cabal of reptilian humanoids.

CNN's Dave Alsup and Jessica Flynn contributed to this report.

 

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WTF. Gif.

I don't know where to start. I'm not sure I could bend my mind to follow along. wouldn't reptilian humanoids be cold blooded and suspect to an easily confirmed temperature check. If not what makes them reptilian? Were his kids hatched from eggs. Does his wife molt her skin?

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14 minutes ago, OneOfTheOutOfFocusGuys said:

that sounds like special k as much as q.  q pushed him over the edge, i'm sure, but i bet it got a LOT of chemical help.

Yeah, crazy is crazy -- and that dude was crazy, schizo, whatever. The Watkins turds shouldn't be allowed to get away with this shit.

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"According to an online log for the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office in Florida's Panhandle, Medina was arrested early Thursday evening in Fort Walton Beach on a charge of being a fugitive from justice. Her last known address was listed on Cretin Avenue in St. Paul, where St. Thomas is located.

 

A separate court filing in July revealed a far more extensive list of possessions seized from Lazzaro on Dec. 15, including hundreds of gold bars of various weights and dozens more silver bars, also of various weights. Precious coins and currency from around the globe also were seized, according to the filing."

Well that's different.

 

 
Edited by RDCanecutter
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7 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

 

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“South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.” - James Louis Petigru of Charleston, South Carolina expressed this unpopular opinion as his native state made the radical decision to secede from the Union in December 1860. Famously the last prominent Unionist in Charleston as the populace embraced secession, Petigru expressed remorse for the death of the Constitution and predicted defeat in the resulting civil war.

 

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