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laura ingraham
The Mugshot Worth A Thousand Words?
A defiant photograph isn’t “news.” It’s a symbol, an image. Which is exactly what Donald Trump is.
Aug 25, 2023
I want to talk about symbols, images, and fascism.
Here is Trump’s mugshot from his arraignment yesterday in Georgia. It’s a look of defiance—which I’m sure he practiced repeatedly beforehand—intended for his supporters and his Republican base to feel defiant, too.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is Trump’s thousand-word response to Wednesday night’s Republican debate that he declined to attend.
He is as close to America has come to a fascist leader, who doesn’t want his followers to think or analyze. He wants them only to feel.
He timed his arraignment in Georgia for yesterday so that it—and this photo—would dominate Thursday’s and Friday’s news, rather than anything or anyone emerging from the debate.
But a defiant photograph isn’t “news.” It’s a symbol, an image. Which is exactly what Donald Trump is. He has no political platform, no specific policy agenda, no new ideas, and no plan for what he’ll do if he gets a second term.
He exists as a symbol for the anger, discontent, bigotry, and vindictiveness he has unleashed in America.
He is as close to America has come to a fascist leader, who doesn’t want his followers to think or analyze. He wants them only to feel.
Trump’s lackeys fell in line, expressing the defiance Trump projected in his mug shot.
On Newsmax, Sarah Palin called for civil war.
Fox’s Laura Ingraham told viewers that Trump’s arrest was proof that government officials are trying to “take them out.”
Fox’s Sean Hannity said the Department of Justice will target Republicans “until there’s nothing left of the party.”
All brainless bile.
Last Thursday, Trump complained that Fox News “purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not. Just like 2016 all over again… And then they want me to debate!”
Of course he’s angry. For the man who’s all symbol and image and without substance, a photo like the following conveys a brainless buffoon. It must drive him crazy.
But Trump is not a brainless buffoon. He’s a cunning marketer, a diabolic manipulator of the public, a sly producer of his own daily reality show. His lead in the GOP’s presidential sweepstakes has grown. He will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for president next year—even if he’s in jail.
How to debate a symbol? How to take on an image? How should Biden and the Democrats, and everyone who cares deeply about this country, respond to a demagogue who obsesses over what he projects rather than what he stands for? How to deal with a fascist who doesn’t want followers to think but only to feel rage?
Expose him for who he is.
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Big Oil Shill Tells Fox Viewers There Is 'No Health Risk' From Inhaling Toxic Smoke
Fox News brought on a contributor with a history of downplaying the dangers of secondhand smoke and dismissing climate science to tell viewers that particulate matter is "innocuous."
Jun 08, 2023
As smoke from massive wildfires in Quebec blanketed much of the eastern U.S., forcing millions to stay indoors as state governments issued code-red air quality alerts, a longtime shill for the fossil fuel and tobacco industries falsely told Fox News viewers late Wednesday that there is actually "no health risk" associated with inhaling such polluted air.
"Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they get anxiety over it. But the reality is there's no health risk," Steve Milloy, a senior policy fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told Fox's Laura Ingraham. "We have this kind of air in India and China all the time—no public health emergency."
Milloy, who has long worked to spread disinformation about climate science and the health risks of secondhand smoke, neglected to mention research showing that air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths per year in China, India, and worldwide.
Watch Milloy's remarks:
A 2021 study by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London directly attributed more than 8 million deaths in 2018 to fine particulate pollution (PM2.5).
But Milloy insisted Wednesday that "this doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event."
"Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles—they're innocuous," Milloy said, pointing to unspecified EPA research. "There's nothing in them. They have no effect."
The EPA website says, to the contrary, that "particulate matter contains microscopic solids or liquid droplets that are so small that they can be inhaled and cause serious health problems."
"Some particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter can get deep into your lungs and some may even get into your bloodstream," the EPA notes. "Of these, particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, also known as fine particles or PM2.5, pose the greatest risk to health."
Investigative journalist Amy Westervelt observed in response to Milloy's Fox appearance that he "has been trying to recast air pollution—particularly PM2.5—as innocuous for decades, since he was working for Big Tobacco."
"Why is particulate matter such a big deal for his coal and fossil fuel clients? Because regulating it means regulating fossil fuel combustion," Westervelt added.
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus added that "air pollution is literally the 4th highest cause of death globally."
"Every year 9 million people die due to air pollution made worse by fossil fuels," Holthaus tweeted. "The fossil fuel industry knows this AND they lie about it so they can keep making money off of our suffering."
In a deep dive on Milloy's history last year, Westervelt noted that "one of his earliest jobs was running The Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC), which was created by Philip Morris and their PR firm APCO in the 1990s to deal with the mounting evidence that linked secondhand smoke and, more broadly, indoor air pollution, to cancer."
"The secondhand smoke issue brought the tobacco industry together with lots of other industries that were worried about air pollution regulation—automotive, manufacturing, and, of course, fossil fuels," Westervelt wrote. "Which is how Milloy, working for the tobacco industry, became one of the first leaders of the climate countermovement."
Tens of millions of people on the East Coast of the U.S. are currently under air quality alerts, with some major cities classifying the conditions as "hazardous."
"Current NYC smoke levels pose a health risk for anyone outside," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter Thursday morning.
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Shut Up and Drivel
Once a target of conservative scorn, Kyrie Irving is now a hero to those who want to remain unvaccinated.
Oct 16, 2021
A quote often attributed to Groucho Marx before he was born and after he died goes like this: "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
Whether the famed comedian really said it or not, it feels vaguely "Marxist"--as in the Groucho variety. Principles, like sponges, can be fungible in the wrong hands.
A laissez-faire attitude toward vaccination during a pandemic that has killed 700,000 Americans is not admirable.
But that's life, isn't it? One day, you're Kyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics defending his right to protest police brutality; the next, you're Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets refusing to obey New York's mandate to get vaccinated to keep your multimillion-dollar annual salary.
Same guy, different days generating furious push back and praise. It reminds you of what Groucho Marx probably didn't say: "These are my principles..."
Fox News' Laura Ingraham famously scolded LeBron James for daring to express political opinions--especially those that were contrary to her own. "Shut up and dribble," she screeched at James, who was then with the Cleveland Cavaliers. It was an update of her acidic comment "shut up and sing" aimed at the Dixie Chicks years earlier after they criticized then-President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
She singled out James for being "barely intelligible" and "ungrammatical" because he insisted on being outspoken about Colin Kaepernick while also criticizing Donald Trump.
"It's always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball," Ingraham said, sneering at the notion an athlete's opinion was worth anything.
Irving called Ingraham out for attempting to marginalize his colleagues for expressing opinions that she felt Americans weren't obligated to respect.
The more Irving and his colleagues insisted that professional athletes had the right to be heard on the most important issues of the day because they were citizens, too, the more they were mocked on social media as "semi-literate millionaires."
It was also around that same time that Kyrie Irving took a detour from defending every athlete's First Amendment rights to testing it in the most absurd way imaginable: questioning whether the Earth was round.
"This is not even a conspiracy theory," Irving said on a podcast. "The Earth is flat. ... It's right in front of our faces. I'm telling you, it's right in front of our faces. They lie to us."
Presumably, Irving has flown on enough luxury planes and commercial airliners to know better than to take Flat Earth Society notions seriously, but there he was, a Duke University alum, espousing pre-scientific gibberish because he'd fallen down some rabbit hole on YouTube.
This time, the ridicule he got was bipartisan, even though he said his comments were only meant to generate discussion. In June 2018, he backed away from his flat Earth fundamentalism a bit to say he wasn't entirely sure whether the Earth was flat or round. He was round Earth agnostic.
"I do research on both sides," Irving said, resorting to the strained tautology that he would fall back on during his vaccination folly a few years later. "I'm not against anyone that thinks the Earth is round. I'm not against anyone that thinks it's flat. I just love hearing the debate."
Just to be clear--there has been no serious debate about whether the Earth is round since the Greek mathematician Pythagorus settled the matter over 2,000 years ago. Irving had simply fallen under the influence of a persistent conspiracy theory that has continued to flourish wherever "open minds" unbothered by thousands of years of science congregate.
Though millions continue to believe it, it's a dumb American myth that Christopher Columbus and his crew ever believed there was a possibility the world was flat when they set sail in search of new maritime trade routes to Asia.
Acknowledging the fact that he's a role model to minority kids already at an academic disadvantage in this country, Irving apologized eventually for entertaining flat Earth theories, but the jocular way in which he did it made people think his heart wasn't in it.
"To all the science teachers, everybody coming up to me like, 'You know, I've got to reteach my whole curriculum?' I'm sorry," he said in a press session intended to clear the air. "I apologize. I apologize."
Suspicion of Irving's sincerity is reinforced by something he said during the height of the controversy when he was trying to deflect from his lack of intellectual seriousness:
"Even if you believe in that [Earth is flat], don't come out and say that stuff," he said. "That's for intimate conversations, because perception and how you're received, it changes."
Fast forward to these sad, pathetic pandemic times, when more than 3 billion people worldwide have gotten at least one COVID-19 vaccination and billions more are clamoring for it. Here in America, where it is most accessible, COVID-19 vaccination has become a political litmus test.
There are a variety of reasons for this obstructionism, ranging from fear of being injected with a "tracker" by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates to the belief that COVID-19's deadliness is being exaggerated for political reasons. Before YouTube cracked down on anti-vax videos, it was full of "testimonies" that the shots "magnetize" recipients and "change" their DNA.
Another persistent conspiracy theory that many of the refusenik NBA players who are following Irving's lead may have bought into is that vaccines are part of an elaborate plot to sterilize and kill Black people who have allegedly failed to learn from the lessons of the Tuskegee Experiment.
LeBron is vaccinated but refuses to use the same leadership capital he expended on supporting Kaepernick and protesting police brutality to influence his fellow players or the millions of vulnerable, gullible Black Americans who believe the conspiracy theories.
James says that getting vaccinated is "a personal decision" best left to the individual. There's no hint of any understanding that there is a larger social dimension to the decision.
By refusing the vaccine, Irving is forgoing as much as $15 million in salary this year now that he has been cut from practicing or playing with the Brooklyn Nets.
For separating himself from his team and his livelihood, Irving has been applauded by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter, and Tucker Carlson and Brian Kilmeade on Fox.
Irving is now beloved in conservative places where he was once scorned because he refuses to do something that would potentially spare him from a horrible death if he were to contract the coronavirus.
After surrogates insisted that Irving wasn't an anti-vaxxer, despite refusing to get a shot that would make it possible for him to continue making millions, he spoke for himself this week.
"Do what's best for you, but I am not an advocate for either side," Irving said in a statement. "I am doing what's best for me. I know the consequences here, and if it means that I'm judged and demonized for that, that's just what it is. That's the role I play."
Irving told skeptics and admirers that he wants to be a "voice for the voiceless." The voiceless are apparently those who will lose their jobs because they refuse to follow either government or private sector mandates to get vaccinated. He insists he's neither for or against vaccines and that he's only "pro-freedom."
A laissez-faire attitude toward vaccination during a pandemic that has killed 700,000 Americans is not admirable. It is morally incoherent, especially when Black people are disproportionately victims of this kind of selfishness and irrationality.
Irving once "researched" whether the Earth was flat and remained skeptical of its roundness as recently as 2018. That is not an impressive track record--even if Laura Ingraham finally approves.
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'Dark Shadows' and 'Air Force One' Trend After Trump Floats Conspiracy Theories About Biden and Plane 'Full of Thugs' in Bizarre Fox Interview
The president also compared police shootings of Black people to golfers who "choke" under pressure.
Sep 01, 2020
The phrases "dark shadows" and "Air Force One" began trending on social media Tuesday after President Donald Trump posited a baseless conspiracy theory that people in "dark shadows" are controlling his Democratic rival Joe Biden, and that his administration was investigating a plane "almost completely loaded with thugs," without specifiying their identities or origin.
"What does that mean, 'dark shadows'? That sounds like a conspiracy theory."
--Laura Ingraham to President Trump
The president's bizarre comments came during a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham in which he accused Biden of being "weak" and "controlled like a puppet."
When Ingraham asked who he thought was "pulling Biden's strings," Trump said, "people that you've never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows."
The comment was apparently too much for even a staunch Trump supporter like Ingraham. "What does that mean? That sounds like a conspiracy theory," she asked. "Dark shadows. What is that?"
"There are people that are on the streets, there are people that are controlling the streets," Trump insisted. "We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that."
The president offered absolutely no evidence to support his claim. Seeing Ingraham's puzzled expression, he said he would tell her "sometime," and that "it's under investigation right now."
Twitter erupted in ridicule following Trump's groundless allegations, with some users questioning the president's mental state, and others calling Air Force One the "plane loaded with thugs."
Others noted the nearly identical nature of the president's claim with a debunked viral rumor from June claiming a "plane load" of "Antifa agitators" would be storming Idaho, which led to heavily armed white residents taking to the streets of some of the state's cities and towns.
Trump also used the Ingraham interview to disparage the Black Lives Matter movement, which he falsely called a "Marxist organization."
"The first time I ever heard of Black Lives Matter, I said, 'That's a terrible name. It's so discriminatory,'" he said. "It's bad for Black people. It's bad for everybody."
Sticking to his tough "law and order" message, Trump defended police, telling Ingraham that they are "under siege," before comparing officers who shoot Black people to golfers stricken with the yips.
"They can do 10,000 great acts, which is what they do, and one bad apple, or a choker... they choke... shooting the guy in the back many times," the president said in an apparent reference to Jacob Blake, the Black man who was paralyzed after being shot multiple times in the back by a Kenosha, Wisconsin officer on August 23.
"I mean, couldn't you have done something different, couldn't you have wrestled him?" Trump asked. "[Blake] might've been going for a weapon, but they choke, just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt," Trump said. His comments drew stinging criticism from observers who noted the murder by asphyxiation of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and other victims by the hands of police.
Trump is correct, sometimes police officers do choke, right George Floyd?
-- Name is Bishop(@BishesBrew) September 1, 2020
Ultimately, Ingraham cut Trump off.
This drew a swift rebuke from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who tweeted that "you know things are bad when Laura Ingraham has to save President Trump from saying stupid things."
The president wasn't finished. He also lied about the state of affairs in Portland, Oregon, claiming that the city has "been burning for many years, for decades" before he took office.
This wasn't Trump's first foray into the realm of conspiracy theories. His political rise can be traced to his propagation of racist "birther" theories regarding former President Barack Obama's citizenship, and before and during his presidency he has helped spread false theories about everything from the origins of the coronavirus pandemic to QAnon and Pizzagate. Trump's willingness to embrace baseless rumors has earned him the moniker among some pundits of "conspiracy theorist-in-chief."
Trump's comments came as he prepared to travel to Wisconsin in the wake of the Blake shooting and the killing of two Black Lives Matter protesters, allegedly by teen gunman Kyle Rittenhouse, last week. The president headed to Kenosha despite pleas by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian, and others for him to stay away, and warnings that his presence could further inflame violence.
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Analysis Finds Fox News Covid-19 Coverage Featured Misinformation 253 Times in Just Five Days
The network, said an MMFA researcher, "downplays the threat of the virus, dismisses the recommendations of public health officials, and misrepresents the scientific consensus on the disease."
Jul 16, 2020
Fox News hit viewers with an "avalanche of misinformation" in its weekday coverage of the coronavirus crisis from July 6 through 10, according to a national media watchdog group that documented at least 253 instances of the network's coverage undermining science, politicizing the pandemic, emphasizing economic issues, and promoting other lies or problematic positions in those five days alone.
Media Matters for America (MMFA) noted in a statement that its new analysis released Thursday follows Yahoo News reporting from earlier this month which claims that Fox News' messaging on Covid-19 was undergoing a "remarkable turn" from its earlier coverage to "acknowledge ... that the coronavirus is a far graver threat."
In contrast with the kind of shift reported by Yahoo, MMFA revealed that:
- Nearly half of Fox's coronavirus misinformation was about the science of coronavirus and health recommendations from experts (115 instances).
- Fox politicized recommended public health measures, such as face masks usage and business closures, 63 times.
- Fox emphasized the economy and reopening schools 46 times despite public health concerns.
- Fox's "The Ingraham Angle" was responsible for a quarter of all coronavirus misinformation on the network.
- Fox's "straight news" shows accounted for more than one-third of all coronavirus misinformation.
"Fox host Laura Ingraham and her prime-time show 'The Ingraham Angle' traded in coronavirus misinformation far more often than other Fox personalities and shows during the week of July 6," MMFA research analyst Rob Savillo explains in the report.
"Ingraham herself pushed coronavirus misinformation 38 times, which included 21 instances of undermining and misrepresenting the science on the coronavirus and 13 instances of politicizing the response to the pandemic," he continues. "Fox personalities and guests on 'The Ingraham Angle' were responsible for an astonishing 63 instances of misinformation."
The MMFA report features multiple videos of the network's Covid-19 coverage, including this July 8 clip from "Fox & Friends," which ranked second after Igraham's show in terms of misinformation during the analyzed period.
"Fox has argued against stay-at-home orders and business closures even though evidence shows that shutdowns likely averted up to 60 million infections in the U.S.," Savillo points out. "The network at times even continues to argue against the efficacy of wearing masks, with host Tucker Carlson claiming 'there is no evidence' that masks help stop the spread of the coronavirus. This explicitly goes against the World Health Organization's and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendations of mask use for the general public to prevent the spread of the coronavirus."
Citing six polls that have shown Fox viewers "are woefully --and dangerously--misinformed regarding the coronavirus," Savillio says that "these recent events illustrate the real-world consequences of Fox's continued broadcasting of coronavirus misinformation that downplays the threat of the virus, dismisses the recommendations of public health officials, and misrepresents the scientific consensus on the disease."
Major corporations including Amazon, Kraft Heinz, Pzifer, and Verizon are leading sponsors of the network's shows, "and as a result helped fund Fox News' disinformation effort to undermine public health and help President Trump's reelection chances," according to MMFA's statement announcing the report. "They all advertised on the network multiple times in July."
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