Today in fake news: Edgy Day

By Mark | February 11, 2019

Over the past several years, we’ve seen a number of instances in which fake news stories, having been seeded through bots by entities that want to stoke the fires of racial animus and political tribalism in the United States, have spread like wildfire across the internet thanks to real people, who, it would seem, care more about the “emotional truth” of what they share on social media than its actual legitimacy. It happens across the entire political spectrum. Some of us on the left, who believe Trump to be a giant, television-obsessed baby-man, actually believed it when fake news broke about how he wanted to have access to a 24-hour “gorilla network”. And, on the right, we had people actually believing that Hillary Clinton had murdered a young man by the name of Seth Rich in order to keep him quiet about a Democratic plot to illegally influence the outcome of the 2016 election and frame the Russians. We live in truly crazy times, and it’s only going to get worse, as our adversaries around the globe now know just how easy it is, through the careful placement of false news items across social media, to get us at one another’s throats, to the point where we’re shutting down the federal government, talking about disbanding NATO, etc… Why build missiles and put them off our coast, when, through the placement of several stories about how Barack Obama is a closet Muslim who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and Hillary Clinton is a cult leader who feeds on the blood of infants, you can create just as much chaos, and do the same amount of damage to the underpinnings of our democracy?

Thankfully, it never really caught fire, but those of us who live in Ypsilanti were almost caught up in one of these ridiculous and divisive non-stories just a few days ago, when someone got it in their head to misrepresent an awesome community-building program at the Washtenaw International High School and Washtenaw International Middle Academy — a program intended to increase empathy, and decrease instances of intolerance and racism on the shared Ypsilanti campus of the two schools. [As you my recall, it was almost exactly one year ago when a racially charged email was sent anonymously to students of the middle school, and administrators have done a number of things to ensure that it never happens again, and that all students feel both safe and respected.]

Well, here’s how it went down…

I got a text message Friday afternoon alerting me to the fact that Ypsilanti Community Schools had put out a statement saying that it had been brought to the attention of school administrators that “a YCS school or classroom” had potentially been participating in something called “Edgy Day,” a reoccurring event during which “white students (have to say that they are) sorry for their privilege.” The note went on to say that YCS does not condone this practice, and, having been made aware of it, would investigate, stop it from happening, etc.

Having two children in YCS schools who have never been forced to apologize for half-whiteness, and knowing a thing or two about how conservative conspiracy theories spread across the internet, I responded to this post, encouraging the folks at YCS to take it down, and not just assume that, because they received an email stating that a YCS student had been forced to apologize for their white privilege, they should believe it. And, with that, myself and others began looking into the propagation of “Edgy Day” stories on social media.

Well, guess what? There were only four instances of the phrase having been used on Facebook, and all four had put out the evening before. And, most notably, all four were identical, and put out by accounts which appear to be bots… Here they are… As you’ll notice, some, by the time I took these screen shots, had already been shared multiple times.

And all four of these, it would seem, were put out shortly after the following Twitter post from a pro-Trump account known for sharing conspiracy theories, especially as they related to Muslims, and other non-white Americans, attempting to take over the country.

The above post contains the following screen capture, which appears to come from Facebook. And, that, it would seem, appears to be how all of this started. I’ve been looking for a while, but I’ve yet to find the “Refuse Common Core” account which is said to have authored it. As you’ll note, nowhere in it does it say that this happened at YCS. The only person to make that connection was the person above, who shared the post on Twitter, linking back to several rightwing commentators and politicians, in hopes, no doubt, that it would be picked up nationally.

As with most good conspiracy theories, there is a little truth in it. Washtenaw International High School and Washtenaw International Middle Academy, as I alluded to above, did have an event on Friday called Equity, Diversity, Justice, and Inclusion (EJDI) Day. But white students were neither “made to feel like crap,” nor instructed to bring an item of value from home to “give to a minority.” Here, with more on what actually happened, is a letter to parents from Nhu Do, the principal of both schools.

Dear WIHI and WIMA students and families,

We are writing to thank all students and staff for participating in our Equity, Diversity, Justice, and Inclusion (EDJI) Day activities today. The purpose of this event is to promote empathy, equity, and inclusion for all students. Student leaders in partnership with teachers planned and participated in an activity and discussion examining our different social identities and discussed how we can develop empathy and understandings for others.

We were made aware of an inaccurate account of what happened in school today: At no time were students required to apologize for their privilege. This is misinformation that unfortunately negates the dedicated and meaningful work our staff and students do to make our world a safer, more inclusive place for all. We are committed to promoting peace and empathy through education.

Overwhelmingly, students and staff shared their positive feedback on the value of engaging in discussion about inclusion for all and we are grateful for your support, engagement, and open-mind. Please contact me if you have any questions about our commitment to promoting cultural proficiency and equity.

Sincerely,
Ms. Do

So, now we have people on the internet sharing misinformation on “Edgy Day,” and chalking it up as yet one more instance of white people being cruelly pushed from their rightful place in society. Given what we’ve seen on the internet over the course of the past few years, I’m inclined to think the whole thing was a fraud from the beginning, but I suppose it’s possible that a YCS parent really did misunderstand what his or her children told them about “EDJI Day,” and then went right to Facebook to vent in their anti-common core group. As I don’t think there are a lot of “anti-common core” crusaders sending their kids to International Baccalaureate schools like WIMA and WIHI, however, I think it’s safe to at least consider the possibility that someone, having read about the schools’ Equity, Diversity, Justice, and Inclusion Day events, decided to create a fictional post about how white children in Ypsilanti were being made to given their possessions to classmates of color, in hopes of drawing the outrage of Donald Trump’s aggrieved white supporters, who honestly believe that anti-white racism is the most significant problem we face as a nation. Fortunately, in this instance, it seems as though the story withered. Someone made the decision to push the story, and others amplified it, but, thankfully, it never broke though to a wider audience because people were vigilant and they shut it down fast. Good work, Ypsilanti.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Uncategorized, Ypsilanti | Tagged , , , , , , | 127 Comments

Blackmailed by Pecker… The Bezos dick pic, the role of the Saudis, and possibility that Kushner may have been involved

By Mark | February 7, 2019

If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to read the article that Jeff Bezos posted to Medium today about a blackmail attempt against him on the part of AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer. It would appear, from letters that Bezos has made public this afternoon, that AMI, led by Trump associate David Pecker, threatened to publish intimate photos of the Amazon CEO if he didn’t agree to immediately stop his investigation into how the National Enquirer had come to be in possession of private text messages and photos sent between him and his and his mistress, Lauren Sanchez.

I’m no expert on extortion, but, having just read through the documents, I think it’s pretty likely that the folks at AMI have committed a crime of some kind here, as they instruct Bezos in writing that they will publish revealing photos of both him and Sanchez, unless he issues a false statement saying that he and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage [of the affair] was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

As for what actually motivated AMI to go after Bezos in this way in the first place, if I had to guess, I’d say it was probably done to curry favor with Donald Trump, who has been relentless in his attacks against Bezos, who, as I suspect most of you already know, also owns the Washington Post. Bezos, however, offers another interesting possibility in his post. According to him, all of this could have something to do with a deal between Pecker and the Saudis, who, very likely, were not pleased at the coverage in the Washington Post after their columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered by a Saudi assassination squad.

With more on this angle, here’s a little something just posted by conservative columnist Bill Kristol.

Could it be that AMI and Kushner had brought Saudi intelligence into a plot to collude against Bezos, and Pecker freaked out when he learned that Gavin de Becker had figured it out? Could it be that this extortion plot against Bezos was just a desperate attempt to stop the Amazon CEO from taking what he’d found to federal prosecutors, who were already all over AMI for the company’s role in paying-off and silencing Donald Trump’s lovers during the 2016 presidential campaign?

I don’t really understand what’s going on here, and I’ll confess to having mixed feelings about Bezos, but I really like it when people publicly stand up to blackmailers, like David Letterman did so memorably a decade ago, and I think it’s commendable that Bezos essentially dared them to release his dick pic, saying the integrity of the Washington Post means more to him…

Maybe, though, on second thought, he just really wants this particular dick pic in the public realm, where people, awestricken, can behold it with admiration.

Posted in Corporate Crime, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Matt Gaetz says we need a border wall, not universal background checks, to stop gun violence in America

By Mark | February 6, 2019

When the Democrats took back the House of Representatives during this last election, it gave them the ability to once again set the legislative agenda. And, today, we saw how important that was. For the first time since the Republicans took control of the House during the 2010 midterms, there was a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on the subject of gun violence in America.

Democrats, of course, had wanted to hold hearings over the past eight years, during which time we saw increasingly deadly mass shootings in places like Orlando, Las Vegas and Parkland, but they were blocked at every turn by Republicans, who chose instead to focus their attention on made-up scandals involving Hillary Clinton’s email server, the Benghazi attack, and the private lives of FBI agents investigating the Trump administration.

Well, today, all of that came to an end, and, after eight long years, the House Judiciary Committee began public discussions on House Resolution 8 (HR8), the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019. And, as you might imagine, the Republicans on the Committee did not like it one bit. [Some 90% of Americans agree that there should be background checks for gun purchases, but that apparently doesn’t matter to those elected officials who are bought and paid for by the gun lobby (NRA).]

Here, if you haven’t seen it yet, is footage of Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz toeing the party line, claiming, without citing any evidence, that gun violence in America would be solved not by common sense laws, but by a wall along our southern border.

“I hope we do not forget the pain, and anguish, and sense of loss felt by those all over the country who have been the victims of violence at the hands of illegal aliens,” Gaetz said. “[Background checks] would not have stopped many of the circumstances I raised, but a wall, a barrier on the southern border may have, and that’s what we’re fighting for.”

This, as you might imagine, led to shouts from members of the audience, which included Manuel Oliver and Fred Guttenberg, the fathers of two students murdered during the mass shooting at Parkland High School. Oliver yelled out that Gaetz was lying, and Guttenberg said, “Our loved ones were killed by an American male.” The best response to Gaetz, however, came from Representative David Cicilline, who asked the committee’s chairman if there were rules against making false statements. “Are members in Congress entitled to just make things up?,” he asked, as applause broke out in the room… Gaetz responded by asking that the victims of immigrant violence be shown respect, and requesting that Oliver and Guttenberg be removed from the room. [Gaetz, I should add, represents a district in Florida, the state where the Parkland murders took place.]

There was a lot of other stuff that I wanted to dig into tonight, but I couldn’t not share this exchange, as it truly gets to the heart of what we’re dealing with in Donald Trump’s post-truth America… I mean, we know, for a fact, that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, commit far fewer crimes than native-born Americans. It’s a proven fact, and we have data to back it up, just like we know, for a certainty, that building a wall across our southern border would do nothing to stop the flow of drugs, weapons and criminals into our country. But we allow the conversation to continue, the same way we allow people to claim, falsely, that the scientific consensus on global climate change is still out. And, just like we know that a wall would not protect us from mass shootings, we know that universal background checks, and other common sense reforms, would. We know this because we’ve seen such things work elsewhere. And yet the NRA continues to lie, and tell us that laws like HR8 would “only make law-abiding citizens more vulnerable.” It’s simply not true. And, thank god, we now have a party in control of the House that will at lease allow a fact-based conversation to take place in front of the public.

[Gaetz, by they way, is a convicted drunk driver, who, last year, invited a Holocaust denier to be his guest at Trump’s first State of the Union address. Furthermore, he’s a friend of Roger Stone’s, and a confidant of Donald Trump’s. And he’s worked alongside Devin Nunes to subvert the Mueller investigation. And we need to find someone to take his seat in Florida.]

Posted in Civil Liberties, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 138 Comments

The Warren Wealth Tax

By Mark | February 5, 2019

I was tempted to tune in to tonight’s State of the Union address, if only to see all of the distinguished Republican guests in the audience, like Diamond, of hard-hitting investigative news team of Diamond and Silk, and the little boy who claims to have experienced mockery for sharing the same last name with the most corrupt and dimwitted president in American history, but I’ve decided that my time is better spent elsewhere. So I’m spending my time this evening looking into some of the more ambitious policy initiatives that we’re told Democratic members of Congress are presently crafting, from the Green New Deal being touted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the so-called “baby bonds” that folks like Cory Booker have recently been talking about.

While Donald Trump has been spending an astounding 60% of his time not thinking at all about legislation, but live-tweeting Fox News, the Democrats, like the ones noted in the last paragraph, have been fucking busy, busting their asses to craft new laws that would not only get us Trump’s tax returns, but maybe start to undo some of the damage that’s been done over the past several decades of Republican excess, as wealth inequality has skyrocketed, and spending on things like public education have slowed considerably. Well, this evening, I’d like to share a little background on one of those ambitious plans – the “wealth tax” we’ve been told to expect from the recently launched presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren.

While the specifics about Warren’s plan have yet to be announced, here, from the Washington Post, is the gist of what we’ve been told to expect.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will propose a new annual “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, according to an economist advising her on the plan, as Democratic leaders vie for increasingly aggressive solutions to the nation’s soaring wealth inequality.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two left-leaning economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been advising Warren on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion, according to Saez.

The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a 10-year period from about 75,000 families, or less than 0.1 percent of U.S. households, Saez said…

Warren’s proposal includes at least three new mechanisms to combat tax evasion, according to a person familiar with the plan. Those are a significant increase in funding for the Internal Revenue Service; a mandatory audit rate requiring a certain number of people who pay the wealth tax to be subject to an audit every year; and a one-time tax penalty for those who have more than $50 million and try to renounce their U.S. citizenship…

It should be noted that there are alternative ideas being floated as to how we might address the growing, and dangerous, wealth inequality we’re seeing right now in America. Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, has talked publicly about raising the income tax rate to 70% for America’s top earners. According to the analysis that I’ve read, however, Warren’s plan, as outlined above, would bring in $2.75 trillion over a ten year period, whereas the plan touted by Ocasio-Cortez would bring in only $720 billion over the same period. [And the plan being pushed by Bernie Sanders would bring in only $315 billion.] If you’re wondering why this is, the answer is pretty simple. America’s super-wealthy, for the most part, don’t work. And, as such, they don’t earn wages that can be taxed. No, most of the wealth we’re seeing today is accumulated, multi-generational familial wealth, as you can see in this graphic.

But here’s the good news. According to polling, the American people, in the wake of the last Republican tax cut for the wealthy, which, despite the promises, did absolutely nothing for the American middle class, seem ready to make a change. According to today’s Washington Post, “Sixty-one percent of voters in a new Politico/Morning Consult poll say they support a tax on high levels of wealth such as the one proposed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.” In fact, according to the same poll, just 20 percent said they would not support such a tax on wealth.

For what it’s worth, the folks at Fox News were have not been as enthusiastic. In fact, they said yesterday that Warren’s program would be akin to Venezuelan socialism.

We have no way of knowing, of course, whose initiative will move forward to a vote, or whether or not it’ll attract the votes necessary to pass, but it’s exciting, after two years of living under Trump, to see Democratic legislators hard at work, gearing up for the possibility that, in 2020, we may actually have a shot to see real, significant progress made on hugely important issues like climate change and wealth inequality. I know these are difficult times, but, at the same time, there’s also a sense that, working together, we can actually make a difference, and that’s incredibly exciting.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

No vanity campaigns in 2020

By Mark | February 3, 2019

It’s about a week late, but, lest anyone be wondering, I too hate Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, and don’t believe that he should run as an independent for the presidency in 2020. Schultz, for those of you who might not have heard, apparently feels uniquely qualified, in spite of his lack of experience, to save our country from the disaster that is Donald Trump, another egotistical businessman who laughed in the face of those who suggested that leading the world’s most powerful country may require something in the way of experience. Personally, I’m fine with our having an enormous Democratic field to choose from during the primary season – the more voices the better – but Schultz, from what has been reported, doesn’t want to go that route. No, it would appear that Schultz, being pushed forward by the likes of Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, feels as though his wealth entitles him to forgo the primary, and just run in the general election, as an independent.

As you can imagine, this didn’t exactly sit well with Democrats, who remember that third-party candidate Jill Stein essentially handed the White House to Donald Trump in 2016 by acting as a spoiler, pealing away progressive votes [with the help of Russian support, it’s worth noting] that would otherwise likely have gone to Hillary Clinton. [Stein only got 1.07% of the popular vote in Michigan, but her 51,463 were more than enough to change the outcome of the election, as Trump had only received 10,704 more than Clinton.] personally, I don’t think Schultz would find much of a constituency for this platform, which involves cutting entitlement programs without raising taxes on the wealthy in order to curb the federal debt, but, like I said, I think he should be given the opportunity to compete alongside everyone else.

So, yeah, you could say there was an enormous negative backlash to the news that Schultz, a self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat, had announced the he was considering an independent bid. Schultz, who Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown today called “a total idiot,” apparently thinks this response from the Democratic base is because he is “successful”… an argument, which, by way, was taken up later by conservative provocateur Ben Shapiro, who said the response to Schultz “demonstrates the communistic hatred on the left for anyone who makes it big.” [It should say something to Schultz that his biggest proponents thus far have been Ben Shapiro, Kellyanne Conway, and Jill Stein, don’t you think?]

Again, I’d love for him to join the Democratic field, but running as an undefended will do absolutely nothing but help put Trump back in the White House, where he can further evade justice and lead the nation further to the far right. No, this has to be all about Schultz’s ego, and his belief that, as a billionaire, he has a right to cut in line… To reiterate, Schultz has no path to victory as an independent candidate with a 4% favorability rating. He can never win. All he can do is help Donald Trump, and hurt the eventual Democratic candidate.

I could go on and theorize about Steve Schmidt’s motivation in pushing Schultz down this path, but they don’t matter. What matters is that Democratic Party hold together and stay unified around the message that no third-party candidates will be welcome in 2020, as there’s just too much hanging in the balance.

Here, with more on Schultz’s chances, is fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 34 Comments

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