I was foolish enough to think I’d wake up Tuesday ready to resume my swimming routine, but at 2 a.m., once again, it was cough-cough-cough-cough for a couple hours. At 5 I gave up and thought maybe something bland and soft on my stomach might help me drop off, and began the day with Raisin Bran.
It didn’t really improve from there, but I went out in the driving rain to buy some OTC cold remedies. I’m going to nuke my body with Nyquil tonight and get seven hours come hell or high water.
And I actually feel fairly OK. Except for the lack of sleep.
But never mind. Confined to soft chairs as I was today, I read this thing in Politico, exploring why the MAGA right is so obsessed with sex trafficking.
Well before MAGA, I’d noticed how these lurid sex-trafficking (but never labor trafficking) stories flowered among the Karens and Kens of America, who may or may not be MAGA but were MAGA-adjacent, shall we say. The stories about girls being abducted from malls, and their mothers from mall parking lots. The “Taken” films. This idea that women, anywhere, and sometimes children, can be snatched off the street or some other public place, never to be seen again. When anyone who’s even noddingly familiar with the issue knows the trafficker is almost always someone known to the victim, and isn’t likely to end up on a sheikh’s (or Jeffrey Epstein’s) jet, bound for a Qatari nest of prostitution. But you all know this.
The Politico piece is a Q&A with Mike Rothschild, who wrote “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything” and (this is my fave title) “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.”
As is usually the case, the Clintons live rent-free in these dolts’ heads:
What is it about the Clintons that captivates far-right conspiracy theorists like this?
Part of it is that it’s already been three decades of this: The Clinton conspiracy industry started in the early 90s. It started with stuff like Whitewater, Travelgate, stuff that is ancient history now. But there was a really well-funded, very organized and popular effort to bring the Clintons down. And then of course, it resulted in the impeachment, it resulted in the dump truck full of conspiracies about Hillary Clinton when she ran for president. And even though they’re not really in the public eye much anymore, it’s so prolific that conspiracy theorists have stuck with them because they know what works. They’re just like a classic rock band playing the hits.
Which reminded me of a photo I took in a Detroit used bookstore a while back:
My brother had asked for a loathsome Clinton book for Christmas, and I was determined to look for a used copy before I paid the writer for one. Check out that chunk of reprinted Wall Street Journal reporting on Whitewater — remember that? And that was only one shelf. There were at least 20 different books on the Clintons, nearly all of them cut from the same cloth. As Rothschild says, the hits.
But it’s the salaciousness of the pedophilia accusations that always squicked me out, and I think Rothschild is right again here:
There’s always been a certain amount of salaciousness in these conspiracy theories, and there are theories going back about the awful sexual depravity of the Catholics or later on of the Jews. So you’re always going to find a certain amount of attention paid to any kind of conspiracy theory involving sexual proclivity of trafficking. And if it involves children, people immediately just lose their mind — even if these children don’t exist. There are no children who have been trafficked because of Pizzagate because Pizzgate isn’t real.
But if you just put out the suggestion there, it grabs ahold in a way that is difficult to dislodge. I think a lot of it has to do with antisemitism. I think a lot of it has to do with fear of the occult and Satanic panic. So you get all of these things that are mixed together: the anti-Jewish sentiment, the fear of Satanism. And, of course, now it extends to social media. So you have these powerful figures, in media, in politics, in culture, academia. It’s very easy to kind of put these people together as part of this vast conspiracy. And if there’s a conspiracy of them, well, they’re probably doing horrible things to children, too, because that’s what evil people do.
I hadn’t considered the ancient roots of antisemitism being the universal solvent here, but he’s right. One of the oldest hatreds, still a classic.
But this is the most important part, and why it’s pointless to try to change their minds:
Disinformation and conspiracy theories spread so quickly and so readily on social media, while the rest of us are doing our research and writing our articles and doing our interviews, trying to figure out what this actually means. The people who believe this stuff have already decided what it means. And they don’t want to be told differently.
Twitter and people like Alex Jones and people like Steve Bannon, they have an alternative media ecosystem. These are not fringe people anymore. This is not the guy standing outside the football stadium waving a sign about the end is coming. This is a massive industry. You’ve got billions of dollars being pumped into misinformation, into these products, into these podcasts, into these books. It’s a job for a lot of these people, and they’re very good at it. They spread this stuff very quickly. They know it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not, their audience doesn’t care.
So, good news: You can give up trying. And enjoy the midpoint of this miserably gloomy week.
Dorothy said on January 10, 2024 at 4:50 am
I’m sorry you are sick. My husband’s been coughing for a week now, stayed home from work last Friday. Now he’s wheezing so he’s staying home again today and booked an appointment with our PCP at 7:45 this morning. His last few weeks to work before retirement and he gets sick like this. Ugh.
I’m kind of amazed I haven’t caught whatever he has. Maybe once he’s not around other people at the office he’ll not catch this crud anymore.
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FDChief said on January 10, 2024 at 9:52 am
These deplorable QANuts are why I keep beating the civil war drum.
They’re not “our fellow Americans”. In their addled heads they’re already at war with us depraved pedophile abortionist Satan-worshippers. They have no interest in sharing the public square with us; it’s rule or ruin.
Obviously if it comes down to force that’s one thing, and all we can do is not overlook the possibility. But short of that, we cannot give them ANYthing. Not one inch. No “compromise” because they don’t compromise with Evil – any ground we give up, whether on sex or gender or religion or guns or whatever other cultural lunacy they’re wired about they see as a successful attack in their long campaign to exterminate liberals, gays, non-cis/het people, atheists or agnostics…that ground becomes the launching point for their NEXT attack on whatever lives we have left.
They’ve become predators. And, like coyotes, while we can’t wipe them out, we can’t pretend they’re house pets, either. We HAVE to treat them as the constant danger they are.
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Jeff Borden said on January 10, 2024 at 10:11 am
Hillary Clinton’s description of the MAGAts as “deplorable” was an extreme understatement. They are awful people and they demonstrate their hideous nature every fucking day. Whether it’s watching a bunch of rural white Iowans hooting and cheering while the fat orange fuckface regurgitates old Nazi rhetoric about immigrants or so-called christian leaders ignoring all seven of the deadly sins to embrace his cancer, they remind us of the Maya Angelou statement: When someone shows you who they are, believe the them the first time.
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Jeff Gill said on January 10, 2024 at 10:52 am
An online acquaintance who is actually a Biblical scholar has found herself in an ongoing series of disputes around the prevalence of sex trafficking in general and kids in particular, starting with her questioning of the core narrative in “Sound of Freedom.” This movie came out in the summer, grew quite a bit in exposure and screenings this past fall, and then blew up as the putative hero of the story was revealed to have an assortment of issues.
What Laura couldn’t get over was how many people still held onto the narrative of “there’s so much of it out there” even as Ballard and his organization’s story came apart. You can see one of her threads at Xwitter here: https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1741886292592296012
I got a number of messages, private & public, in the fall asking me to promote “Sound of Freedom” and criticizing my refusal to pick up that banner and carry it. After the story was largely refuted (easy enough to hunt up links if you want them), my local MAGA/trafficking folks simply replied to my queries “look at who is challenging this.” It’s all about sides & teams, right down to epistemology. Meanwhile, Laura, God bless her, keeps on pushing back on it.
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nancy said on January 10, 2024 at 11:13 am
I believe I’ve told the story before, but: There’s a woman who lives in suburban Columbus, T**r*sa Fl**es, who has made a living as an “anti-trafficking activist” for years now. Here’s her bio. I read her book and knew immediately that it was bullshit, part fantasy and part red meat for Christian idiots. She’s been telling her story for years now, and the same lies keep getting repeated, which fuels the mostly untrue mythology around HT. A real trafficking expert and I had a laugh over it back when I was working, but she says the No. 1 question she’s asked by regular folks when she speaks on the topic is, “Will my daughter be safe over spring break?”
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FDChief said on January 10, 2024 at 11:17 am
Re: the creepy enthusiasm of the wingnuts – especially the Bible-banging flavor – to believe these Satanist/white-slavery/pedophilia hysterias I refer you to Fred Clarke at Slacktivist. As a recovering fundamentalist he knows these people, and his contention is that they need these things to be true so their own unChristlike behavior can still be godly and heroic. So long as your enemies are The Worst Evil Imaginable then your own petty failings can be excused. If that mote in their eye is really Satan’s Mark then the beam in yours isn’t really so big, now, is it..?
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Heather said on January 10, 2024 at 11:32 am
I see the occasional TikTok with some white woman recounting the story of how she noticed a suspicious car in a parking lot or there was a marker of some type placed on her car that suggested she was being targeted for human trafficking. People are convinced they’re going to be abducted in broad daylight when in fact we are safer than ever in this country.
This reminded me that a veteran Chicago TV news reporter, Andy Shaw, wrote an op-ed in the Sun-Times about how he doesn’t feel safe in the city anymore. Why? Apparently because he’s seen some viral videos of street crime. Leaving aside the fact that people in certain non-white neighborhoods have been subject to high crime rates for decades, the crime rate is down overall compared to 10 years ago, although it’s true that there has been a spike in violent crime.
To be fair, I can understand getting older and feeling more vulnerable, as criminals do tend to pick out people they think look weaker. But these videos and apps like Citizen are making even people who live here think you’re taking your life in your hands when you walk alone on the street, and as someone (a woman!) who walks and bikes around alone at night a fair amount, it’s just not true.
Here’s the op-ed: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2024/1/8/24024432/crime-chicago-public-safety-armed-robberies-worries-neighborhoods-journalist-andy-shaw
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Jeff Borden said on January 10, 2024 at 12:32 pm
I was hugely disappointed in Andy Shaw, who ought to know better. He was a reporter at WLS-TV in the early 90s, when the crack cocaine wars were producing enormous body counts as gangs fought for territory and dominance. It was far worse than the violence of today, which is still awful and must be addressed.
Eric Zorn, a former Chicago Tribune columnist who now writes on Substack, has theorized we are more attuned to violence because of all the surveillance gear, both public and private, capturing so many acts of aggression. Seeing a guy carrying a pizza box jumped by two goons in an alleyway –an oft-repeated image of Chicago the right-wingers love– packs a visceral punch that a simple crime blurb in the newspaper cannot.
I’m greatly worried about the next few years. My confidence in our new mayor is slightly above zero. And we can count on performative political assholes like Greg Abbott in Texas to flood our poor city with ever growing numbers of asylum seekers. His cruelty knows no bounds. These folks have endured a perilous journey of thousands of miles through hostile territory bringing only what they can carry on their backs, but Abbott thinks nothing of shipping them to a Midwestern city in winter when they often are wearing T-shirts and sandals. Abbott uses a wheelchair, but I’d still like to sock him in the nose. He’s a bastard of the highest rank.
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Jakash said on January 10, 2024 at 12:41 pm
Heather, I read that piece by Andy Shaw and was disappointed also. To me it contrasted sharply with Neil Steinberg’s attitude, expressed in a withering Jan. 2 column about former Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey after that guy posted a photo of himself doing a jigsaw puzzle in a cozy room at home, “at a table strewn with high-powered weaponry.”
Steinberg seems to be on the same page as you and Jeff B. are, as he wrote: “Last Wednesday I walked around Kenwood — near 47th and Woodlawn — after dark. Of course I wasn’t armed. Strolled around the neighborhood for maybe half an hour, ogling the nice houses. So Darren Bailey can’t do a jigsaw puzzle at his dining room table in his own home in Soybean, Illinois, without … let’s see … one, two, three, four guns within reach. While I can wander a community which, by some metrics, is considered less than safe. Unafraid, knowing that I’m probably going to be OK and was, in fact, OK.”
So, another Sun-Times link. There’s no paywall there, but if you’re not known to them, they’ll ask you for an email address if you want to read either Heather’s or this one or both: https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2024/1/2/24022287/new-years-resolutions-2024-election-democracy-gun-laws-darren-bailey-jb-pritzker
Which brings me to what I was going to say before I read Heather’s comment. Jeff G., thanks to Elon’s charming and effective management choices at Twitter, regular folks (defined as people not registered at the site) can no longer read threads. (I may call it X when he becomes King, but not before that.) You can see the one tweet, but that’s it. So, it’s handy if the threads are on the Thread Reader app, which the one you posted doesn’t seem to be. But there are others by the woman you referred to: https://threadreaderapp.com/user/LauraRbnsn
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Jason T. said on January 10, 2024 at 12:45 pm
I worked for Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review during the Clinton years, and it was bonkers.
On any given day from about 1996 to 2001, the bottom half of the front page would be filled with normal news stories about city council meetings and house fires; but the banner story at the top would be a Christopher Ruddy exclusive about how the Clintons murdered Ron Brown, or “new revelations” about Vince Foster’s death. I remember the morning we broke the story about how U.S. Rep. Dan Burton had shot a watermelon (maybe it was a cantaloupe?) in his backyard to “prove” that Foster was murdered.
Ruddy (or one of a few other hand-picked “special correspondents”) would get some off-the-wall tip — hey, for all I know, they made them up — and then write thousands and thousands of words speculating on what it really meant.
It was all innuendo, insinuation, and adding 2+2 to equal 5.
It was hard to go out to cover, say, a zoning hearing, tell people you were from the Tribune-Review, and have them roll their eyes like you said you were with the Weekly World News. (Somehow, it felt even worse when they told me they loved the paper. “You’re the only paper that really tells the truth about the Clinton Crime Family,” they’d say, conspiratorially, and you knew then you were talking to a swivel-eyed lunatic.)
Ruddy, of course, went onto found NewsMax and is one of ex-President Trump’s closest confidants. Scaife was an early investor in NewsMax and his company still held a stake in it until recently, as far as I know.
Years later, the Tribune-Review would hire another special national correspondent. You may have heard of her, too: Salena Zito.
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FDChief said on January 10, 2024 at 12:50 pm
Paul Campos has a good piece at the Lawyers Guns and Money site (I won’t link because the site kills my comments if there’s a link in it, but Google “LGM The politics of resentment” or just go to the site; it’s the top piece) that pretty much spells out why our particular system makes these people so dangerous:
“But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.
It’s an oversimplification to say…that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.
Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.
It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.”
In a more flexible system such as a parliamentary legislative one the whackos would be firewalled into a Monster Raving Looney Party.
(Which, as Israel is showing us, is NOT a vaccine against these political pathogens – get enough of them who are willing to cooperate and you still get Hitler! – so a lot depends on the sociopolitical bedrock beneath the system…)
But here? They’ve taken over one of the two parties we’re limited to by the Constitution and FPTP voting.
Guess what? Turns out that maybe the Constitution IS a suicide pact! Whoodathunkit?
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Dexter Friend said on January 10, 2024 at 2:32 pm
My staccato cough left 10 days ago but I still am not even 80% strong again.
My whole family “got it”, plus most all of my online community web.
I thought of how the government air-sprayed Fort Wayne and selected other areas with radiation as a test way back when and wondered if some evil-doers spread this new virus all over the Midwest. Nobody I know is testing or has tested positive for Covid19, either, here anyway.
The shitshow today during the Hunter Biden inquiry was pitiful. James Comer presided. Hunter showed up unexpectedly and was attacked by Mace, who called for his immediate arrest. Jamie Ruskin then was interrupted, then Greene began mouthing off, then Hunter and entourage abruptly exited, as Greene mocked them . Mace said Hunter has no balls. Literally. She said that.
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Julie Robinson said on January 10, 2024 at 4:43 pm
Knock wood, it hasn’t hit us yet. We did get all our vaxxes so here’s hoping if it does come it’ll be mild. I’m also hearing about sinus infections being bad right now. Although, when are they good?
A cousin sent me a WaPo story about American reading habits; 46% of responsdents didn’t read any books last year and 5% read only one. To be in the top half of U.S. adults you only had to read two books.
“Reading five books put you in the top 33 percent, while reading 10 books put you in the top 21 percent. Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.”
Gosh, do you think this has anything to do with the state of our country?
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David C said on January 10, 2024 at 6:25 pm
With my tired old eyes, I can’t read more than 20 minutes at a time without falling asleep. I went to the eye doctor last week and she said it might be cataracts. They aren’t bad enough for surgery yet though. She suggested reading glasses in addition to my progressive lenses, plus a lot more light. I hope it works. I bet I got through only 8-10 books last year where I had been reading more like 20-25.
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Julie Robinson said on January 10, 2024 at 7:20 pm
Audio books and ebooks are my savior, David. Large print occasionally, but increasingly they are only available in paperback. Those are more than a little unwieldy.
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David C said on January 10, 2024 at 8:22 pm
I’ll have to try ebooks again. I had a 1st or 2nd generation Kindle and I didn’t like it. I hope the ereaders are better now. I like nerdy science books and not too many of them come in large print or audio books.
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Julie Robinson said on January 10, 2024 at 9:36 pm
David, no need to buy a Kindle, you just use the app on your tablet. Library has tons of ebooks.
Count me also underwhelmed by Maestro. The emotions seemed ginned up and inauthentic. Everybody was trying really hard, and that’s what came across on the screen. Music was predictably glorious.
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Gretchen said on January 11, 2024 at 2:31 am
David, the Kindle app gives choices for different fonts and backgrounds. I read that there’s a font that makes it easier for dyslexics to read. Maybe there’s one that would make it easier for you. I’m finding it pretty unusual for a book not to have an ebook edition these days.
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Suzanne said on January 11, 2024 at 8:53 am
I read ebooks on my iPad that I borrow through the library, which uses the Libby or Hoopla apps. You can also download a Kindle app. I do prefer paper books but the ebooks are handy and the font size can be changed for those of us with [throat clears] older eyes.
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LAMary said on January 11, 2024 at 9:34 am
Off topic but worth listening to:
https://www.themusicman.uk/alison-krauss-shawn-colvin/?fbclid=IwAR0E68TLdcYlAgp6v39Dwqn8zj0epUwylnmfk9S3SyTrlm8IhOj3EeYVJ0U
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Jeff Borden said on January 11, 2024 at 9:59 am
I’m reading about the final QOP debate before the Iowa caucuses. It was quite dispiriting. Haley and DeathSantis spent the evening ripping on each other instead of addressing the 300-pound orange elephant in the room. tRump is so very easily mocked. . .he’s an idiot on so many levels. . .that it astounds me when no one takes the easy dunk on him.
That said, I’m starting to feel just the slightest bit more optimistic that justice will eventually come for whiny-assed baby man. The court proceedings are NOT going his way, regardless of what his flying monkeys claim, and some of the small leaks coming from Jack Smith’s investigation suggest the special prosecutor has a couple of nukes in his arsenal. And what’s so delicious about those nukes is they’re from his sycophants like Dan Scavino, who testified alleged billionaire replied “so what” when told the life of Mike Pence was in danger.
Will the wheels of justice turn in time? That’s the question. But if they do, they will grind up this pompous buffoon into sausage.
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Jenine said on January 11, 2024 at 10:16 am
@LAMary, thanks for sharing that. I love those 2 musicians
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Wesley Sandel said on January 11, 2024 at 12:20 pm
Marijuana edibles. You’ll still be sick but you’ll feel much better.
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