18 November 21
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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Rupert Murdoch Tells Trump to STFU About 2020
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "If you've had the unfortunate opportunity to turn on a TV, log onto the internet, or open up a newspaper in the last 10 months, you're more than likely aware that Donald Trump is pathologically incapable of admitting that he lost the election to Joe Biden and moving on from the events of November 2020."
The Fox News owner said Wednesday that the ex-president is an embarrassment to his party and should stop living in the past.
If you’ve had the unfortunate opportunity to turn on a TV, log onto the internet, or open up a newspaper in the last 10 months, you’re more than likely aware that Donald Trump is pathologically incapable of admitting that he lost the election to Joe Biden and moving on from the events of November 2020. “This is only the beginning of the irregularities,” he claimed at a rally in July during which he insisted a sham audit would prove he’d actually won. “We’re not talking about Arizona any more. We’re talking about the United States of America.” “Enclosed is a report of 43,000 Absentee Ballot Votes Counted in DeKalb County that violated the Chain of Custody rules, making them invalid,” he wrote in a letter to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in September, encouraging him to “start the process of decertifying the Election.” The whole thing is obviously ridiculous and absurd and apparently it’s not just Democrats and lucid individuals who would like him to shut up about the whole thing, it’s formerly good pals too.
For instance, one Rupert Murdoch. Per Insider:
In rare public comments, News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch told shareholders on Wednesday that former President Donald Trump is not helping further conservatism in public debate.
Murdoch, who was the chairman and CEO of News Corp. from 1980 until 2013, name dropped Trump during his comments during the company’s annual meeting. “The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity,” Murdoch said, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past,” he continued. “The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future.”
While Fox News effectively served as state TV during Trump’s time in office, Murdoch and the ex-president had a falling out after the nonagenarian billionaire reportedly gave the network the greenlight to call Arizona for Biden on election night, apparently telling his son, of Trump, “F--k him.”
Of course, it‘s a little rich for Murdoch to be criticizing someone else for trafficking in lies and bullshit. While Fox has recently mostly steered clear of Trump’s election-fraud claims, and ran an entire segment in February debunking said claims that had been uttered on air, that probably has more to do with the “blistering legal threat” from voting technology company Smartmatic, which later sued the network for $2.7 billion, than suddenly gaining a conscience. (Dominion Voting Systems has also sued Fox News in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit over voting machine election-fraud claims.) Meanwhile, its prime-time star Tucker Carlson spent the earlier part of this month promoting a fact-free “documentary,” which aired on Fox Nation, in which it is posited that the January 6 attack on the Capitol, incited by Trump and undertaken by his election-truther supporters, was a “false flag“ operation orchestrated by federal officials.
House votes to censure Paul Gosar, strip him of committee assignments
Normal people would view this as a reasonable, if light, outcome for creating and tweeting an animated video in which he slashed the neck of a colleague. Per The Washington Post:
The 223-to-207 vote, with one member voting present, marks the first time in more than a decade that the House has censured one of its members.... A censure is less severe than expulsion from the House but more severe than a reprimand. Shortly after Wednesday’s vote, Gosar stood in the “well” of the House chamber as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) read aloud the censure resolution and a verbal rebuke.
Wednesday’s House vote comes a little over a week after Gosar shared a 90-second clip that appears to be an altered version of the opening credits of the Japanese animated series Attack on Titan. The show revolves around a hero who sets out to destroy the Titans, giant creatures that have devoured nearly all of human civilization. “Any anime fans out there?” Gosar said in the tweet in which he shared a link to the altered video. In one scene of the video, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s face is edited over one of the Titans’ faces. Gosar flies into the air and slashes the Titan in the back of the neck, killing it. In another scene, Gosar swings two swords at a foe whose face has been replaced by that of Biden.
In the week-plus since the video was first posted, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has refused to condemn Gosar’s behavior. On the House floor on Wednesday, he pathetically accused Democrats of making “rules for thee, but not for me,” after having previously likened Gosar’s actions to those of Rep. Maxine Waters, who earlier this year told supporters to “get more confrontational“ about police brutality. Meanwhile, the GOP trotted out its most shameless members to defend...one of its most shameless members. Really, the gang was all there:
For his part, Gosar rejected calls to apologize, denouncing what he unconvincingly claimed was a “false narrative” regarding the legitimately violent video being “dangerous or threatening.” “It was not,” Gosar said. He then compared himself to Alexander Hamilton, who was “the first person attempted to be censored by this House.”
Partygoers wonder why Jeff Bezos is such a cheapskate
To be fair, it’s a reasonable question. Per the New York Post:
The Amazon and Blue Origin boss and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, went to the A-lister-studded Baby2Baby event at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood on Saturday night—and his presence, or at least the presence of his wallet, was very much felt. But we’re told he wasn’t warmly welcomed by the glittering crowd. “Everyone was waiting for him to donate something, but he didn’t,” an insider said of the world’s second-richest man. “And then a little later, [Bezos] donated $500,000. There was an audible groan from the room.”
It may seem an ungracious reaction, considering he did drop half a million—until you consider that Bezos is estimated to make around $142,667 per minute. So he in theory made more in the five minutes he spent pretending to eat the chicken than he donated the whole night.
According to a March report from the Bezos-owned Washington Post, the second-richest man in the world added $58 billion to his net worth during the pandemic but donated just 0.26% of it to COVID-related issues, “while...having his workers work in Dickensian conditions.” So this is kind of his thing.
Q: Is Trump still trying to get Mike Pence killed? A: Pretty much, yeah
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