Republican Lies category archive

David debunks de bunk.

Falsified frolics.

One more time, “social” media isn’t.

Methinks Werner Herzog’s Bear makes a valid point. For those of us who believe in facts and truth, it’s satisfying that Tucker Carlson got his walking papers, but it doesn’t mean that Fox News and its dupes, symps, and fellow travelers are considering mending their ways or that they will stop spreading lies and twisting facts.

Here’s bit of Mr. Bear’s article (emphasis added):

Yesterday’s news that Fox let go of Tucker Carlson was met with some rejoicing in liberal circles, but the wise heads were not moved. In the first place, this fits a larger pattern. Fox has dumped Beck, O’Reilly, and Dobbs, and their message has not moderated a wit. A new demagogue will surely take Carlson’s place. Liberals also fail to understand that the audience has the agency here.

People like Tucker aren’t just radicalizing their audience, they are also responding to their audience’s radical demands.

Brian Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, is not surprised that Fox News reached a last-minute settlement in the Dominion law suit. Here’s a tiny bit from his article:

If Fox admitted to its bald-faced lies, even the rubes who have been sucked in all these years by an agenda designed by Fox owners to fool all of its viewers all of the time would have to admit they were duped. And if Fox and its friends would lie about something so monumental as a presidential election, what wouldn’t they do to keep their MAGA millions in check?

So it was no surprise — especially given the mountains of evidence of reckless disregard and knowing falsity that crammed the record in the case against Murdoch et al. — that there was a last-minute settlement.

David outlines the right-wing strategy for propagating propaganda to poison the polity.

At the Kansas City Star, Melinda Henneberger takes a long look at the damage that those who peddles lies as “news” do to our polity. She starts with the story of Andrew D. Lester, the man who shot a young black man who was sent to pick up his little brothers, went to the wrong address through a quite understandable mistake, and was shot for knocking on a door.

A snippet; follow the link for the rest.

. . . according to his grandson, Lester had in recent years been “radicalized” by the highly profitable and paranoid fantasies spread by Fox News and its equally imbalanced imitators.

That, Lester’s 28-year-old grandson Klint Ludwig told The Star, is how the retired airplane mechanic fell “further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line” while immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”

Melinda Henneberger isn’t alone in her concerns. Retired Navy Captain Larry Gebhardt, writing at the Idaho State Journal, is concerned that we are becoming (being turned into?) a nation of scaredy cats afeared of each others’ shadows.

Image via Job’s Anger.

Via C&L.

He couldn’t shut up.

Now he’s been ordered to pay up.

(And, natch, he says he’s going to fight it.)

When the judge says something like this, it would seem to indicate that the portents are not propitious.

“You have a credibility problem,” Judge Eric Davis told Fox’s lawyers at yesterday’s (Dominion trial–ed.) hearing, according to CNN, adding, “I need to feel comfortable that when you represent something with me that it’s the truth — and that was not true.”

Follow the link for context.

(Broken link fixed.)

The stupid.

It burns.

Dick Polman looks at the revelations about Fox News’s fibs relating to the Dominion law suit and at those who cling to tham and asks,

How have we devolved to the point where so many people believe that the sky is green and the Earth is flat?

Follow the link for his thoughts as to the answer.