This history of Clarence Thomas reveals why Koch funds
@TheFIREorg
and pays the Atlantic to cover speech.
"The most sacred provision of the Constitution was freedom of speech...
Thomas realized that the activity of the businessman and the banker could be redescribed as speech"
We are in serious trouble and this is why it matters who owns our media and communications structures. This “fact-check” is meaningless; its purpose appears to be to smear negativity on Biden.
Hey
@WHCOS
- you’ve got a bunch of agencies that could have affected this deal.
Why is it ok for Brazil to ban Bolsonaro from running, but American media and political leaders are full of hand-wringing about banning Trump?
It’s a standard thing in a democracy: Do a coup attempt, face consequences.
I don't know much about South American politics but I don't see Brazil collapsing because Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until 2030 for his role in fomenting an insurrection.
Why can Brazil handle this and not America?
I also have a limited salary and would appreciate a subsidy from a helpful billionaire - also does
@YaleLawSch
have any ethics policies about faculty taking expensive gifts from donors?
“Ten millon dollars came from the Charles Koch Foundation.” Used to pay for luxury travel for Gorsuch and his “friends and colleagues.”
This is bribery by billionaires.
Senate hearings now, on Koch and Crow and the corrupt courts.
Hey everyone, remember when
@BarackObama
said that the Cit U SCOTUS decision would allow billionaires and agents of foreign governments to buy our elections?
And Sam Alito said no.
Today we know Alito was corruptly taking bribes from a billionaire.
And Obama was right.
I didn’t intend for a private phone call to turn public. But now that it has, here’s the truth.
One of AIPAC’s biggest donors offered $20m if I dropped out of the U.S. Senate race to run against
@RashidaTlaib
.
I said no. I won’t be bossed, bullied, or bought.
This is just pure normalization of authoritarian fascism.
NYT readers read this and are asked to wonder: what if Christian fascist theocracy isn’t so bad after all!?
That’s the role Douthat plays at NYT: making extremism seem not so scary. It’s the right’s main move now.
Worth saying again that Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996 after encouraging the assassination of liberal Yitzhak Rabin.
That was, in effect, a rightwing coup.
Netanyahu is a modern fascist and working with him isn’t in American interests.
Look I’m a broken record — a broken record store on this — but
ANTONIN SCALIA MADE UP A NEW 2ND AMENDMENT IN 2008 while TAKING BRIBES FROM PRO-GUN BILLIONAIRES.
And the fake Scalia 2nd Amendment deceives hundreds of millions of Americans. Scalia has kids’ blood on his hands.
"Scalia should not be held up as the kind of judge one should emulate. His hypocrisy over originalism, his votes against disadvantaged groups, and his over-the-top rhetoric all suggest a failed, angry jurist with a decidedly non-judicial demeanor."
Apparently disinformation is what we are going to get from Twitter under Space Karen.
The note is wrong. The Saudi billionaire is part of the Saudi royal family and thus connected to the Saudis- the government. And, he had to kick in money to help Musk.
@joshtpm
@ChrisMurphyCT
AOC is an amazing communicator, a gift to the party. If Schumer and Pelosi cared first about fighting fascism they’d elevate and promote her.
But they are so afraid of the left and afraid of change that they marginalize her.
AOC: Not only do they want to go after reproductive freedom, they are going after ivf and contraception. They also want to control what they call recreational sex. This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy that has embodied itself in the DNA of an entire political party
Let me correct John Roberts and the Supreme Court. What they call “misunderstandings” are, in reality, the
🔥biggest corruption scandal in American history🔥.
Bigger than Watergate. Bigger than Teapot Dome.
Billionaires bought a whole branch of government. We have to fix it.
@curious_founder
The big difference between Droz and left/liberal activists?
A huge dark money machine funded Droz. There are few to no equivalent institutions on the left “bringing on” activists and paying them to work full time on PR and organizing.
The Sinclair TV owner bought the Baltimore Sun for the same reason Elon Musk bought Twitter and Phil Anschutz bought DC Examiner and Paul Singer created DC Free Beacon and Adelson bought the Vegas R-J and Murdoch bought WSJ and NY Post…
Power.
Message control gives them power.
Well, looks like the news is out: This is my last week at
@washingtonpost
. I was offered a voluntary buyout and I accepted it. My deepest thanks to all the great people at
@PostOpinions
and the rest of the paper -- it was a privilege and an inspiration to work with all of you.
Terrible piece in the NYT today. It is carefully calibrated propaganda to divide the Democratic coalition on Israel.
Your older relatives will read this and be swayed. Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works: 🧵
In 1968, an FCC commissioner wrote a long piece in The Atlantic Monthly warning about media ownership affecting American politics…
It’s linked in my bio.
Broken record, but media ownership matters.
@whstancil
Mickey Kaus was an earlier generation of this.
My take: contrarianism, when unmoored from strong values, always leads to the far right.
You contrarian a little, get some things right, then have to contrarian more and more to stay relevant—suddenly liberals are oppressing you.
On No Labels, the 2021 leaked audio with Joe Manchin gives their game away.
No Labels is a grift run by two people: Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson.
They take money from rightwing billionaires who want to divide Dems. There's no principles here; it's just 2 ppl selling their souls.
New --> No Labels floats the possibility of a coalition gov't through the Electoral College vote or the U.S. House selecting president in 2024
"It could be Cabinet posts. It could be a policy concession...It could be a swinging VP."
W/
@dangallo
:
Jack Dorsey, in these leaked texts, says Twitter should be a public/non-profit communications platform.
He says advertising and chasing corporate profit is breaking Twitter.
He's right on this. Twitter should be a public utility.
From
@TechEmails
. (Mar 26, 2022 text)
@kenklippenstein
You know, just Donald Trump making the guy secretary of labor who gave Epstein a sweet deal.
Probably entirely coincidental that a Republican prosecutor gave a $1B sex trafficker a non-prosecution agreement!
@mehdirhasan
The most significant actor here is Rupert Murdoch, because if not for Fox, so many Georgians wouldn’t hate Dems for false reasons and Walker would have absolutely no shot
Fox Fox Fox Fox Fox Fox, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and rightwing talk radio.
Those are big reasons for rural support for Trump.
I don’t understand why political scientists are so damn allergic to saying media is a cause!
Data shows it is.
@piper4missouri
All true.
And yet: the courts. Corrupted and packed with rightwing MAGA judges.
We must reform the courts, or they will impose the rightwing unpopular agenda. Senate hearings now!
Oh look, Musk has a bunch of Republicans like Larry Ellison, Qatar, and Saudi investors.
Kill this deal. It’s not about business— it’s about media and messaging monopolization.
It’s oligarchs attacking US democracy by influencing debate.
for people who are not software developers:
Every word of this is gobbledygook. It's just justification for "we fired most of our employees and our algorithms suck because our main goal is to addict users for profit and users don't like that."
That said, /1
@_Eric_Reinhart
Counterpoint:
It’s so damning for David Leonhardt, Mikie Barbaro, and their editors at the NY Times, who almost single-handedly convinced 2/3rds of the country to ignore COVID.
Fox and rightwing radio did a lot too (see below.) But it was the NYT that forced Biden’s hand.
/1
@stealthygeek
@Tesla
Nice thread.
It’s great the Biden WH is going for universal charging standards. (Like the standardized plugs in our walls.)
And he could be doing even more— using federal agencies to require standardization. It’s clearly pro-consumer.
@HeidiReports
@SpeakerBoehner
Yeah… except Lewis Powell wrote a memo about this strategy in the 1970s and the Heritage Foundation handed the Reagan admin a set of thick binders with plans to do it in 1980.
It’s not new, it’s just less constrained by politesse today.
@AshaRangappa_
That OLC memo that said Trump can’t be indicted in office was written by Nixon’s OLC when Nixon was named as a co-conspirator. Coincidentally Nixon’s OLC also said Agnew *could* be indicted.
The memo is not on the up and up and should be shredded.
Call me old-fashioned, but if a car kills people at ten times the rate of other cars, the company covers up the data, and the CEO lies to the public and says the cars are safer…
I think that CEO should go to jail on fraud charges.
Comparing crash rates of Musk's "Full Self-Driving" Teslas to human driven cars,
@ryanlcooper
finds Tesla's FSDs are likely ten times more dangerous. He wonders why these and other self-driving cars were allowed on our roads in the first place.
YOU ARE LITERALLY THE CHAIR OF THE SOLE BODY POSITIONED TO INVESTIGATE THOMAS THAT ISN’T IDEOLOGICALLY ALIGNED WITH HIM
WHY IN GOD’S NAME ARE YOU TRYING TO PASS THIS OFF TO REPUBLICANS
LOLOLOLOLOL
The Washington Post Opinion section has two Republican political strategists writing for them (Thiessen, Willick) and at least SIX rightwing media apparatchiks paid now or in the past by GOP donors: Hewitt, McArdle, Olson, Ponnuru, Geraghty, and McCullough.
New Washington Post CEO:
"We are the most objective news organization in America and we have the most balanced, diverse opinion section where we have opinions from all sorts of people. It’s like an oasis of calm and considered thought."
@TimothyDSnyder
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch still need to be addressed. There are fights left to win. And if we don't deal with media oligarchs (see also Koch, Daily Caller; Uihlein, the Federalist; Anschutz, DC Examiner, etc) there will be a next Trump and he will be stronger.
I don’t want to scare anyone, but the new CEO of the Washington Post was CEO of WSJ when editor Gerry Baker tilted WSJ news towards Trump to help Trump get elected.
Same setup here.
Will Lewis worked for Murdoch then, and Bezos now.
And a Saudi fund, Kingdom Holdings, also owns a big share of Twitter. The Saudi prince had to put in money at a pretty high valuation to make this deal work.
So yes. The Saudis did partner with Musk to buy Twitter. They are the second largest shareholder.
“Trump’s run-out-the clock legal strategy worked.”
Blame the Fed Soc and our captured courts.
Trump packed the courts with extremist political actors like Aileen Cannon and the Fed Soc SCOTUS. And they are protecting him.
This isn’t organic. Charles Gasparino and the WSJ Ed board are paid by Rupert Murdoch to smear Democrats in any way possible — to help Murdoch’s pro-billionaire agenda.
Corrupt Murdoch trifecta here: paid by Fox, by NY Post, and by WSJ. (Break up Murdoch media.)
More than this,
@NormOrnstein
.
The Thomas bribery scandal is the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the United States.
Bigger than Teapot Dome, bigger than Watergate. It is huge because Thomas has legalized bribery while taking bribes.
There is one certainty in all of this: there are more lavish gifts, more lavish trips that he continues to hide, knowing that it is illegal to do so. Clarence Thomas has competition, but is the clear gold medal winner as the most corrupt justice ever
Ok. There has been a fight about politics happening in private in the Democratic party for at least two years. It's now leaking out into the public.
And it says something about Biden -- and about lessons Harris should learn from his admin. THREAD: 1/
Is there a better illustration of vibes ruling our politics than But Her Emails?
Content-free issue, Republicans pretended to care, media pretended to believe them, strong vibes were created—and voters reacted to the vibes.
America is a country where the majority of people said, “I don’t particularly like this brilliant woman, and I don’t understand email at all, so instead let’s turn the nation over to the most corrupt man who’s ever lived— a narcissistic sociopath with the IQ of a speed bump.”
COME ON SENATORS.
Call for Thomas’ resignation now. All of you.
Then, move to hearings.
Really, what is the reason they are not calling for his resignation??
Here's another deceptive note added to
@ChrisMurphyCT
's tweet yesterday.
If you're upset about all this, please act. Act locally. Join
@FixMediaNow
@MAD_Democracy
. Think about how you can get friends and family to care about media and media ownership.
Apparently disinformation is what we are going to get from Twitter under Space Karen.
The note is wrong. The Saudi billionaire is part of the Saudi royal family and thus connected to the Saudis- the government. And, he had to kick in money to help Musk.
@joshtpm
@ChrisMurphyCT
@whstancil
Emily Oster is another good example. (Contrarian job market paper got attention but was very wrong, now contrarian about pregnancy, COVID..) Nate Silver too— contrarian to traditional baseball people with PECOTA, now contrarian about COVID and rise of fascism.
@chriswalsh1754
Biden ahould make it a top priority to unbreak the FEC. He should have done this two years ago (along with FCC nominations. )
These things don’t get enforced because the FEC is nonfunctional and DOJ takes years to prosecute the few cases they take up sua sponte.
@washingtonpost
Cannon has blocked this investigation on flimsy at best legal grounds. She’s a FedSoc judge that Trump nominated after he lost.
She’s helping Trump and harming America. We need the House to hold hearings about the FedSoc/Trump judges and their corruption.
This blowout is substantially due to Fox and rightwing media.
Pollsters will scoff, Democrats in blue areas will dismiss that.
But people who live in red areas know: rightwing media is a cause of radicalization. We need a strategy to take on Fox; we cannot ignore it.
Dem candidates were competing in five statewide elections in Louisiana. Their combined totals:
for Gov: 29%
for LG: 20.5%
for SoS: 30%
for AG: 31%
for Tresurer: 32%
... oof.
@AWeissmann_
5: House files articles of impeachment against Cannon, and/or holds hearings on the Fed Soc and her appointment process.
Just as the Jan 6 hearings did, this would raise public awareness of what is happening to our courts. Use the power we have to make change.
The Bible says that life begins at first breath.
Evangelicals and Protestants believed that until around the 70s, when rightwing billionaires started using this issue to fool voters into voting for tax cuts for billionaires.
Oh look, Musk has a bunch of Republicans like Larry Ellison, Qatar, and Saudi investors.
Kill this deal. It’s not about business— it’s about media and messaging monopolization.
It’s oligarchs attacking US democracy by influencing debate.
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, and the New York Times Opinion section will say we are all overreacting.”
@davidfolkenflik
This will likely make it hard for Carlson to run for president. My guess is he tries to launch his own Daily Wire — maybe Daily Caller Live! with Tucker or something similar.
But he is diminished now without the false legitimacy of Fox “News” behind him.
It’s like people are taking crazy pills saying the Saudis didn’t put in money.
It just betrays a lack of financing knowledge.
The Saudi prince knew Musk was going to be forced to close at $44B. His shares went up astronomically in price.
@chrislhayes
The current version of Fox is incompatible with democracy. It is designed to divide us and stir up hate.
In Australia, the left/liberal party has fought back by talking about Rupert Murdoch very often. We should say “Fox is biased because Murdoch wants votes for tax cuts.”
I’m now a broken record on this, but:
The reason this interviewing style works is NOT because of the words.
It’s because the interviewer asserts dominance. He says Bannon is lying and then he walks away.
@NancyMacLean5
@nhannahjones
@anatosaurus
/1
I don’t say this lightly:
There are few greater threats to American democracy than this, our centrist for-profit media performing neutrality.
The execs and owners at CBS air fascists for money, and establishment journalists like Stahl go along.
Marjorie Taylor Greene joined traditionally staid ‘60 Minutes’ this week for a segment, where the Republican firebrand’s insistence that Democrats are a “party of pedophiles” was interspersed with footage of her working out.
@ddale8
Our media environment allows conservatives to lie without consequences.
We should look to media policy, especially media ownership policy, to fix this.
Netanyahu just got a platform from Murdoch to attack Biden.
It’s not unprecedented for foreign leaders to write op-eds in US papers. But the level of engagement from Netanyahu w/ US press has no equal. MSNBC had him on a year ago to defend Trump. Now he’s fighting Dems via WSJ.
@adamdavidson
It’s not that Mueller declined. Instead, Republican leadership at DOJ barred his team from following money trails. Sessions and Barr and Rosenstein. Let me find the link.
@BulwarkOnline
@monacharen
Mona Charen is paid by rightwing billionaires through EPPC, and if she started calling for Trump to be prosecuted, all that money would dry up.
Articles like this should have donor names on them: “Charles Koch likes autocracy, and he pays the author.”
This page got Trump in the White House.
Whatever you think of journalistic choices here, or what you think of Patrick Healy hating Clinton or Maggie Haberman having mostly Repub sources, this was enough.
It was a close race. If NYT doesn’t run this page, Hillary is president.
The conservative “movement” is a fraud, a Wizard of Oz-like Trojan horse, filled and sustained by billionaires’ money.
If not for Harlan Crow and his 40 closest billionaire friends, modern conservatism would collapse.
In my view, this revolving door blocked SCOTUS reform. The strategy/PR firms have corp clients and friends that liked the Fed Soc SCOTUS.
Let's push our consultants and strategists to not be the people who also work w/ big corporations. /end
If this kind of deceptive BS is going to be attached to Dem Senators’ tweets, Twitter is going to be killed by Musk faster than he, Republican Larry Ellison (whose foundation is also a minority owner), and the Saudis can use it spread deception.
@harrylitman
Thanks for the details. Good appellate lawyering is still needed.
But it is no longer enough. The Trump/FedSoc judges on the district, circuit, and supreme courts care more about power than law.
You could do a lot of good if you’d say that. Cheers.
Ah, what an ignominious and yet fitting end for Fred Ryan as CEO of the Washington Post:
Bemoaning “incivility” while moving to a new gig at the Ronald Reagan Foundation.
Just perfect. No notes. /1
And second, beyond Dunn, the Democratic party has GOT to break the hold of these joint corporate PR-slash-political strategy firms.
Many D political strategy firms also take corp clients esp between elections.
But they help pull the Dem party to be more pro-corporate.
It’s by James Kirchick, neocon and rightwinger, former writer for DC Examiner and the Spectator.
Yet NYT Opinion — so broken! — lists only his book on gay DC.
Most NYT readers won’t know his history and will code his bio as “liberal.” That’s BS and it’s bad and it’s on NYT. /2
Mark Kelly helped Sinclair take over more stations by squashing the reformist nominee for the FCC: Gigi Sohn.
Also Josh Shapiro loves charter schools, a vehicle for GOP billionaires’ money into politics.
Walz is BY FAR the best potential VP.
Gigi Sohn's nomination reportedly blocked by Sens. Cortez Masto, Kelly, and Manchin, with assists from Rosen, Sinema, and Tester.
Were any telecom execs among the donors of the $73 million in dark money sent to Dem-aligned super PAC?
No way of knowing.
@FrancesSSellers
Samuel Alito did this.
The Fed Soc did this.
They did it because they’re religious extremists, but also because abortion gets votes for the billionaires that run the Republican Party.
This is framed as a joke, yet it also illustrates how the right seeeks to advantage rightwing speech by conflating speech with platform.
Hotez has a platform because he’s built respect as a doctor.
Rogan and Musk want to make his earned respect the same as their ignorance./1
Imagine living in a world where you could just go around insisting people debate you. No matter the topic or who you are. And they have to agree to it.
Where would it end?
Ok, I’ll start. I demand *Martin Scorsese* debate me on Marvel movies: good or bad?
‘Debate me, coward!’
Why is the Deputy Treasury saying this?!?! Aaaaaaaaaah!
This is a constitutional and legal interpretation responsibility that Biden should be taking for _himself_. With advice from OLC, the AG, and WH Counsel — But BIDEN should be telling the exec branch what HE decides.
Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are openly opposed to American Democrats.
Why are American Democrats not openly opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu?
(This is a serious—a deadly serious—question.)
Here’s another action to rein in the corrupt court and the conservative donor machine behind it:
Investigate the 303 Creative case.
The Senate could do this right now.
Congress should investigate the 303 Creative case, which appears to have been fabricated from whole cloth. Who falsified the website request to plaintiff Smith?
The main plausible reason: the Saudi prince overpaid to manipulate the public and use Twitter to achieve rightwing ends.
Because there is no way Twitter as a profit making business is worth $44B.
@piper4missouri
Excellent. And if three more people have this conversation with him, and he listens to even one media outlet that talks about this, he may stop voting GOP. Persuasion is a process and you did the key thing - made a start.
@chrislhayes
Here’s one Australian ex-Prime Minister.
Note he says “they think they’re watching the news” -> if you watch Murdoch media you’re not getting news you’re getting lied to.
Why do no US Dems say this?!
@RepDylan
Texas MAGA Republicans took immigrants like this and dropped them in DC. And DC said "great! We love immigrants and they will work hard and contribute to our economy." And handled it.
So Texas next picked a small island with fewer social services to help the immigrants.
They did it. Looks like a Republican judge on the DC Circuit has done what benefits the Republican party — slow down Trump's prosecution.
Based on a stupid, obviously invalid argument from Trump.
Our legal system is corrupt. Fix the courts or we end up an autocracy.
@noUpside
And even more hilarious, the Daily Caller News Foundation, this partisan hack shop, is a tax writeoff “charity” for Charles Koch’s donations.
Reform dark money, wealth tax on billionaires.
Dick Durbin should issue subpoenas for Roberts, Alito, and Barrett today.
Roberts lauded this ethics policy. And here, these three rightwing justices are flagrantly violating the policy.
Haul them in to the Senate and make them explain.
Drive media coverage, Senators!!
Five justices recused from cases in today's orders list: Roberts, Alito, Barrett, Kagan, and Jackson.
Kagan and Jackson followed the court's new ethics "guidelines" and provided a reason for their recusal.
Roberts, Alito, and Barrett did not.
"What went unsaid on Wed is what a post-Chevron world would look like.
With a handicapped Congress and handcuffed agencies, the remaining branch—the judiciary—would itself be the arbiter of what agencies can do."
Get ready for Kings Thomas and Gorsuch.
It’s absolutely essential to realize that top Democratic leadership **does not believe rightwing media is the main problem**.
David Shor used to argue media wasn’t the major problem. That’s what Dems will say when you press them. Few will volunteer it.
The reason rural & exurban America have become a fact-free hellscape of reactionary rage is not globalization or opioids or whatever. They have been completely captured by a right-wing propaganda machine. It's right there in plain sight.
CNN's shift is of a piece with corporate donation on insurrectionist Republicans: it's a sign big business has decided authoritarian GOP is wave of future and they've made pre-emptive peace with it.
The issue is, to be very direct:
The New York Times Politics desk lies to America.
NYT Politics lies to America in service of narrative, and to maximize audience via false balance.
This is a policy of falsehoods directed by the publisher, AG “Dash” Sulzberger.
Here is the passage where President Biden talks about the death of his son Beau -- and names the exact day that he dies as others jump in to add that it happened in 2015.
Article after article about how conservatives invest resources into media, and media manipulation, and media policy, and also talk about media to work the refs. It works. WaPo just hired two Nationalist Review guys and another AEI guy.
Liberal leaders on media: crickets.
Scoop — A look at the Ron DeSantis digital strategy and his A-team of influencers.
Top flak Christina Pushaw has been recruiting conservative content creators/media types and making a pitch (which she denies) either IRL or through intermediaries.
I want to say it again: The corrupt courts are the architect of our gun massacre problem.
This is absolutely horrific stuff and Scalia and Clarence Thomas loosened our 2nd Amendment _while they were taking bribes from pro-gun billionaires_.
Senate hearings now!
It’s just like money laundering via real estate. If someone buys a condo at $44M and it’s worth $12M, that’s not making a real estate investment; that’s money laundering
The Fed Soc strategy here is important and affects all of us.
Trump installed Fed Soc judges at district level.
Those judges issue nationwide injections.
Then, 5th Circuit and SCOTUS, also Fed Soc-packed, slow-walk—letting Kacsmaryk’s action stand.
It’s rule by judge. /1
As predicted, the news out of Amarillo today is not good at all. Looks like Kacsmaryk is trying to figure out exactly how to write an order that pulls mifepristone from the market—or, at a minimum, imposes major new burdens on patients' ability to access it. Exceedingly grim.
Met with
@IsraeliPM
and reaffirmed our support for Israel’s right to prevent another October 7 from occurring.
I also stressed the importance of avoiding civilian harm, protecting civilian infrastructure, and ensuring the distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.
@dnlbrns
Yep.
Jud Watch (budget ~$50M per year, mostly from Koch-network billionaires) has spent over a billion dollars over two decades, much of that dedicated to spreading hate and division about Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Without Jud Watch, Hillary is probably president right now.