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You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Late Night Open Thread: The Courage of His (Terrible) Convictions

Late Night Open Thread: The Courage of His (Terrible) Convictions

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Per Tucson.com, “Charlottesville marcher dies while facing fentanyl charges in Tucson”:

A man identified in 2017 viral photos as one of the white supremacists and alt-right protesters at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally died on Jan. 30, the same day he was set to go to trial in Arizona District Court in Tucson for allegedly smuggling fentanyl across the border south of Ajo.

Teddy Joseph Von Nukem, whose face is shown prominently in viral photos of men holding tiki torches in the alt right rally on Aug. 11, 2017, died at age 35, while a judge and jury waited for him in federal court in Tucson…

Originally from Phoenix and most recently living in Missouri, Von Nukem was stopped entering Arizona from Mexico at the Lukeville port of entry, driving a 2019 Nissan Pathfinder, on March 17, 2021, court records say.

Customs officers asked him to go to secondary inspection, where a canine alerted to an odor, and officers found 14 packages, weighing 15.08 kilograms, with a white powdery substance that tested positive for “properties consistent with fentanyl” under the third-row seat and cargo floor compartments, the records say.

Von Nukem told officers he agreed to smuggle contraband into the U.S. and was paid about 4,000 pesos, the current equivalent of about $215, though he denied knowing he was smuggling fentanyl, according to a record in the case…

Renowned Nazi / amphetamine enthusiast Adolph Hitler also killed himself rather than face justice. Give Von Nukem this credit: He didn’t murder his wife and children before following Der Leader’s example.

From the Daily Beast:

… Von Nukem gained notoriety for attending the Aug. 12, 2017 hate speech rally that aggressively revived a nativist movement in the United States. He glorified the violence, and researchers of domestic extremism suspect he was a key figure in a brutal beating of a black man that day.

Von Nukem’s sudden death was initially reported by Molly Conger, an independent journalist in Charlottesville who has become a key anti-fascism researcher in the years since the rally shook the city. An obituary said Von Nukem left behind a wife and five children aged under nine. “Some people knew Ted and understood he was a different type of fellow and had different views of things,” it noted.

Conger’s research identified Von Nukem as one of the men who attacked Deandre Harris in a parking garage. She also connected the dots to show how Von Nukem gloated about the attack in text messages to another white supremacist rally organizer, who was later prosecuted in a separate case…

At the time, Von Nukem told the [Springfield News-Leader] he supported Donald Trump and had adopted the white supremacist worldview that whites are now “disadvantaged.”

“I don’t mind showing solidarity with them,” he told the newspaper then. “You have to pick your side. You have to throw your support behind the army that is fighting for you.”

Von Nukem, who was born as Teddy Landrum, told the outlet he changed his name in 2012 in a nod to his German heritage and the video-game character Duke Nukem.

At the rally, Neo-Nazis raged against minorities and immigrants—whom racists accuse of harming the country. That made it all the more ironic that Von Nukem was arrested on March 17, 2021 while entering the United States from Mexico. On his way into Arizona, Customs and Border Protection agents discovered 15 kilograms of fentanyl pills hidden behind the seats and floor compartment of his 2019 Nissan Pathfinder…

From a longer thread:

That obituary, TBH, is an example of why I’m hoping not to have one:

Teddy Joseph Von Nukem, the son of Teresa Minker, was born November 23, 1987 in Phoenix, Arizona and left what always referred to as his “meat suit” on January 30, 2023 in Hartshorn, Missouri at the age of 35…

Teddy enjoyed visiting with people, talking to strangers, meditating, video games and board games, but most of all he loved dancing with each of his daughters every evening when he came home from work. Some people knew Ted and understood he was a different type of fellow and had different views of things, but he would give the shirt off his back if you asked or needed it…

Reader Interactions

169Comments

  1. 1.

    coin operated

    Some people knew Ted and understood he was a different type of fellow and had different views of things, but he would give the shirt off his back if you asked or needed it…

    JFC…just phoning it in at this point…

  4. 4.

    Suzanne

    he was a different type of fellow and had different views of things

    Such a polite way to refer to a racist piece of shit.

  7. 7.

    Ken

    Chalk up another for “every accusation is a confession”. All that pre-election panic over fentanyl being smuggled across the border, and guess who’s doing the smuggling?

    And so cheaply, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $215 left him out-of-pocket, once you add up gas, food, and other travel expenses, especially if he started from Missouri.

  10. 10.

    Anotherlurker

    Oh dear, what a loss of such a promising…. Oh shit! I can’t even snark about this. Good riddance.

  11. 11.

    dmsilev

    but he would give the shirt off his back if you asked or needed it…(*)

    * Offer not applicable to Jews, Black people, gays, women, anyone of vaguely liberal opinions, etc.

  16. 16.

    West of the Rockies

    Is he one of the “very fine people (on both sides)” Trump was referring to?

    Bye, loser.

  19. 19.

    kalakal

    every evening when he came home from work smuggling drugs

    A regular piller  pillar of the community

  20. 20.

    West of the Rockies

     

    @TaMara:   An online guest book for funeral homes is common now.  Yeah, I can see how someone could write some weird stuff.

  23. 23.

    Feathers

    It always makes me furious how so many people refuse to see these neoNazi types for who they really are. And of course this helps them in recruiting, as they reach out to people, especially young men, who feel cut off from what they feel they deserve. It’s grift all the way down, in a way the profiles of these guys never seem willing to admit.

    Will all his compatriots now be mentioned as a known associate of indicted meth dealer Von Nukem? I doubt it. The women are just as deep into as the men, but the youngest child is six months old. What a coward.

  28. 28.

    CaseyL

    A loser in life who thought he found an identity.  These guys are less than a dime a dozen.

    Tom Nichols keeps calling these wastes of skin “lost boys.”  But they’re deliberately lost: there are so many things they could do and be other than what they are.   They choose to be hateful cretins.

    I keep thinking about POC, especially in the pre-Civil Rights era, who grew up under constant blatant, cruel oppression, threats and acts of rape and violence for which there was no legal recourse, and how so few of them opted to be hateful, ignorant losers.

  33. 33.

    Uncle Jeffy

    JFC – white people are “disadvantaged”? And he leaves behind a wife and four kids younger than nine?

  34. 34.

    NotMax

    Surprised no front paging of this.

    A Georgia grand jury looking into possible election meddling by former President Donald Trump said “one or more witnesses” may have lied under oath and urged prosecutors to pursue criminal indictments in those cases.

    The special grand jury also found no significant fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election won by President Joe Biden, according to portions of the final report on its monthslong investigation unsealed Thursday.
    [snip]
    “A majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” the report said. “The Grand Jury recommends that the District Attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling.” Source

  35. 35.

    kalakal

    @Steeplejack: What makes it even more pathetic is that he made his name change in 2012 just after the franchise cratered. It has been really successful then became a joke for vaporware as the last episode got stuck in development for 14 years before being released in 2011 and totally flopping. He named himself after a huge failure

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    @dmsilev: I’m translating “give the shirt off his back” to “empty a full clip of his bitchin’ AR-15 into” in this instance.

  42. 42.

    opiejeanne

    @trollhattan: We have a RW nutcase next door who will do anything for you, but he’s a racist who swallows everything Fox News serves up. We haven’t spoken to him in over 3 years now.

  43. 43.

    tECHIDNA

    After that failboat got caught driving maximum dirty for the regal sum of $215 – which, let’s face it, went mostly to that big-ass Pathfinder and to Taco Bell – in the end, he got r/HermanCainAward(ee) copypasta for an obituary, all the way with using two of the most famous phrases on the board.

    I have a fucking Cheshire Cat smile right now. 😁
    Even more so to see my fellow r/HermanCainAward lurkers are out here in force!

    And yeah, I’m with @The Moar You Know on smelling some 🐄💩 with this smuggling op story.

  44. 44.

    Aussie Sheila

    He’s a coward and a loser. Tom Nichols’ thesis is the classic ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. Plenty of people feel depressed or lonely. Those that embrace violent fantasies that dehumanise and terrorise other people are borderline criminals, and often actual criminals.

    I. Simply. Don’t. Care. That. He. Took. His. Own. Life.

    It might have saved another, innocent life his actions and views endangered.

    And he is more proof of my thesis that racism and bigotry stands very close to actual criminality.

  45. 45.

    Kathleen

    @CaseyL:  I’m with you. Too many of us don’t realize how fascism and domestic terrorism have ruled the lives of Black people for centuries in this country. It is not new.

  46. 46.

    Tony Jay

    The Unhinged Right are at it everywhere, and they’re just as maladjusted and hypocritical as this bozo.

    After last week’s racist hate rally outside a local hotel where our Government is interning asylum seekers turned into a riot, with police vans wrecked and officers of the paramilitary wing of militant freemasonry injured by coked-up hoodies, you’d have thought that the Po-Po would have been on the lookout for any second act and the Press would have been salivating at the opportunity to run stories about Violent Britain!

    But there’s another Shithead Fest advertised for tonight (taglines: KEEP OUR KIDS SAFE – by staging riots – JUSTICE FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN – because appropriating the ‘Justice for the 97’ motto of the Hillsborough campaign isn’t at all scummy – NO TO FIGHTING AGED MEN IN HOTELS – which is a) multiple dog-whistles at once, or b) an out of place rejection of Gen X Fight Club revivals – HOMES FOR OUR OWN – because don’t you know these interned brown people, rather than greedy landlords, are responsible for the lack of affordable housing – NO PAEDOPHILIA – projection doesn’t come much brighter than this.

    And yet I haven’t heard a peep out of the Press. It’s almost as if they don’t really give a shit what the Far Right gets up to as long as they get to run lurid headlines about it the next day.

    The next day, BTW, there’s a fascist rally on the steps of Lime St Station here in Liverpool to coincide with the arrival of football fans for the Everton-Leeds game that day, and to drag focus from the much larger Fuck You You Racist Melts rally planned for the Town centre where speakers include the last human being to lead the Labour Party, so I’m sure the stalwart legions of Nu-Lab will be there joining in the opposition to racist hatred trying to get pictures of local Labour members applauding Corbyn so they can justify kicking them out of the Party.

    This country is soooooo fucking fucked.

  47. 47.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: I feel for you, I really do. It is astounding to me how far theUK has devolved into embracing the worst of the ‘out loud and proud’ fascist bigotry of the US South in the previous decades.

    I can’t help but think that the concentrated print media of the UK and its wide circulation and right wing bias has contributed to the truly terrible situation there, and that a limp and lack lustre centre left response from the only real alternative government party has also contributed to this disgraceful situation.

  48. 48.

    Tony Jay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    Yup. We have Murdoch Media that’s actually to the sort-of Left of the Daily Mail and Daily Express, and literally no ‘centre-left’ Media that doesn’t define itself in opposition to Those Smelly Trots and their naive fantasies about rolling back Thatcher’s destructive legacy.

    So racism, homophobia, misogyny, screaming hypocrisy and overt projection, it’s what’s for breakfast, dinner and tea and has been for decades.

    But don’t you dare complain about it, because that’s attacking ‘Press Freedom’. #ohgofuckyourselfyoushamefulblert

  49. 49.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: Yes I know the feeling about a concentrated right wing press. Here in Oz Murdoch owns 75% of the print media (thanks Paul Keating), and limp wristed centre right papers the rest. Our Australian Broadcasting Commission (bbc downunder) proved itself useless during the last longue duree of conservative government, even using Murdoch outlets as their lead headliners every morning.

    I don’t know what to say except that you simply must get rid of FPTP voting and move to the Australian system of compulsory preferential voting. It’s not hard. All you have to do is to number your ballot 1..n from your most preferred to least preferred. From what I have seen and read about the UK in the last three years, it would increase the number of UK greens and might even elect a socialist MP or two!

    BTW, what’s with MPs being allowed to be media presenters. I saw a David Lammy the other day on yt, and I found out he is a Labour MP. WTF!

  50. 50.

    ColoradoGuy

    15 keys of Fentanyl! It doesn’t matter if it’s 95% heroin and 5% Fentanyl, or 100% Fentanyl, that’s a *shitload* of hard drugs. Thousands of doses, many of them lethal with an unknown ratio of Fentanyl. That one shipment could have resulted in tens to hundreds of deaths.

    No way he was a dumb mule paid $215. Nope.

  53. 53.

    kalakal

    @Aussie Sheila:

    I can’t help but think that the concentrated print media of the UK and its wide circulation and right wing bias has contributed to the truly terrible situation there, and that a limp and lack lustre centre left response from the only real alternative government party has also contributed to this disgraceful situation.

    And you’d be absolutely right. From the 70s onwards led by The Sun (R. Murdoch prop) the UK press has been incredibly effective in spreading right wing propaganda. Try googling ‘Kinnock Sun headlines’ and select images to get a flavour. The Sun is the biggest circulation newspaper in England ( unlike the US English newspapers are national) and drives the bottom end of the market. The middle of the market is led by the foul Daily Mail* which is as bad or worse. At the top end the only ones which aren’t blatantly  right wing are the Guardian and the Independant. The BBC has been mostly silenced by Tory appointed governers and chairman and having its funding threatened. Added to which the Tories have forced it to outsource a lot of its programming.

    It started a long time ago but has really accelerated since the 70s. One reason Labour leaders seem so feeble is that they’ve seen what happened to any predecessor that stood up. Wilson, Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock, Brown & Miliband all got monstered for the most trivial of reasons. Miliband was made into a figure of ridicule by using a really dorky picture of him eating a bacon sandwich**) and Kinnock got the most savage treatment of all. The only ones that managed to survive it were John Smith*** who was so patently decent and respectable they hadn’t anything to go on and Blair who was the smoothies smoothie.

    Sorry about length of rant but I’m truly shocked and saddened at how far England has dripped in the last 15 years

    * I Really, really hate the Mail. The Sun at least doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a rag, the Mail disguises it self as a ‘serious, real’ newspaper. It’s a latrine.

     

    **It was also a vicious anti semitic slur. Miliband is a Jewish atheist. They really emphasised the bacon bit

    *** Sadly died suddenly of a heart attack

  54. 54.

    mrmoshpotato

    he agreed to smuggle contraband into the U.S. and was paid about 4,000 pesos, the current equivalent of about $215

    Smuggling charges for $215?  Really?

    You stupid, shitstain, dead, Nazi, shit**nt!  Burn in Hell!

  55. 55.

    Aussie Sheila

    @kalakal: Yes the UK media is terrible. But I think it replicates or mirrors the peculiarly concentrated governmental structures of the UK itself. While I have often railed at home about the nature of some of our State governments, I really believe now that decentralising certain powers is important to preserving democracy. During the Covid emergency, we would have been fucked if it wasn’t for the fact that State governments here hold the powers over the health and safety of their citizens.
    Given the terrible nature of our conservative government during that time, the powers of state governments saved thousands of lives, imo.

    UK government and media needs to be ripped apart and decentralised. Not to the extent of the US, where such arrangements make useful government next to impossible , but enough to allow sensible and appropriate arrangements to be made.

  57. 57.

    kalakal

    @Aussie Sheila: Partly it’s a consequence of geography, the UK is very small compared to Oz or US.

    Yes, it’s far too centralised. Who has the budget has the power. Nearly all taxation in the UK goes to the central government, city, town, county councils raise only about 5% of their revenue so have very little discretion on their spending, they do what they’re told or they don’t get the money. The only real exception is London, Mayors of London do have power, nearly all the others are ceremonial. The Tories have gamed central funding outrageously, defund Labour councils, fund Tory ones. They’ve fucked up so badly even that isn’t working

  58. 58.

    mrmoshpotato

    Von Nukem, who was born as Teddy Landrum, told the outlet he changed his name in 2012 in a nod to his German heritage and the video-game character Duke Nukem.

    This is fucking pathetic.  This dead fucking trash can go fuck off more to Hell.

  60. 60.

    Aussie Sheila

    @kalakal: So in my view, limited as it is from this far away-press the Labour Party hard on real structural reforms to UK governance, even more than on other policy issues. I have come around to the belief that better governance closer to the people governed is the best bulwark against fascism.

    That is belied of course by the US experience, but we are in a different century now, and I really believe that UK governmental and media structures are leading the UK to a truly terrible place.

    Starmer is hopeless imo, but if he can be pushed to reform those structures he will do a lot to cement real reform in a way the lightweight Blair government never did.

  63. 63.

    Tony Jay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    Yeah, PR would help a lot, which is why the major Parties will never let it happen. Right now they’ve got a lock on undemocratic power, and they like it that way.

    As to full-time politicians being given media jobs, they claim it’s about ‘visibility’ and ‘making themselves open to the public’, but that’s a load of shit. It’s about publicity, money and fame in the Flobalob mould. It used to be that many politicians saw a stint as an MP as a tick in the CV box where they could network and provide the financially beneficial favours that would ensure their post-political careers, but now it seems that a good chunk of the current House of Commons are only in it to get on camera and lay the groundwork for a move into TV punditry.

  64. 64.

    kalakal

    @Aussie Sheila: Everytime Labour have had a chance to reform FPTP and bring in PR they’ve found a reason not to. They know that it would mean the end of single party majority govt and don’t want to give up their turn in the sun. The Tories likewise. Ditto decentralisation which also involves a real rats nest legally with the devolved/independent status of Scotland, Wales, and NI. It would mean parliament giving up power and turkeys don’t vote for christmas.

    It really needs to happen but I’m not holding my breath. You have to go back to Robert Peel and the repeal of the Corn Laws to find a PM who put country before party and that was in 1846

  65. 65.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: It is a really bad development. Here, being an MP is considered a full time job. Which it is, if you are doing your job properly. Allowing elected MPs to do side gigs demeans both the position of MP and the actual fucknuckle doing it. Honestly if an MP here did that, he/she would lose his/her seat faster than you could say ‘rats in the ranks’.
    I can’t believe how low UK standards of governance have drifted.

  66. 66.

    Tony Jay

    @kalakal:

    I think you might have missed one major character off your list of Labour leaders the UK Media monstered. The others got dirtied up and undermined, but the one I’m thinking of was systematically cut out of the national conversation and replaced with an entirely fictional construction based entirely on Rightwing projection.

    Also, lets not forget that alongside the anti-Semitic trolling of Miliband, he was also smeared as an anti-Semite by the same Hard Right Zionist individuals and group who would later be elevated to The Only Good Jews status by the UK Media. That lunatic Maureen Lipman left the Labour Party the first time because Miliband had the temerity to issue a milquetoast condemnation of Israel murdering Palestinians. The difference back then was that the UK Media didn’t need to ally with the Friends of Likud to undermine Miliband, so they were mostly treated as the frothing extremists they are.

    After 2016, that changed very, very quickly.

  67. 67.

    Aussie Sheila

    @kalakal: In that case I would lobby the Lib Dems. I know, I know, however, unless real structural reform occurs, the UK risks being an elected dictatorship, much more even than than the US funnily enough.

  68. 68.

    Tony Jay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    The lower they are the easier it is to report on it as a celebrity grudge match with no real consequences.

    Government? Interests of the country? Wat dat?

  69. 69.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: I always had the feeling that the Israeli government and Mossad had a hand in bringing Corbyn down. Not that I think he was blameless. I think he was not a very good leader, although his ideas and his direction was quite good imo. But he was not smart enough to avoid the obvious pitfalls of the UK media and Party structures. Albeit, probably no one on earth could avoid those successfullly.

  70. 70.

    kalakal

    @Tony Jay: Yeah I did, should have mentioned Corbyn. Foot was turned into a figment of the Daily Heils fevered imagination as well.

    The most disgusting part of the attacks on Miliband was when they went after his parents, European Jews who were refugees from the Holocaust. Dacre, whose father dodged serving in WW2, attacking Miliband’s  father who fought in the Royal Navy  as a subversive traitor to good old Blighty.  Miliband had kicked Murdoch & the press good and hard over phone tapping & blocked Uncle Rupe from taking over BSKYB so they really hated him.

  71. 71.

    Aussie Sheila

    @kalakal: The anti semitic nature of the UK press can be seen from here, half a world away. The attacks on Corbyn on those grounds always struck me as projection of the most obvious nature. But I have to say, the stuff coming out of the Guardian etc was not much better. UK liberals are actually worse than their US counterparts. At least US liberals have to show their skirts when it comes to fascism and racism.  In the UK they can pretend it doesn’t exist, and proceed accordingly.

  72. 72.

    NobodySpecial

    It doesn’t surprise me he got underpaid in his drug mule position: He clearly lacked the calves for it.

    Hope his kids manage to move on to a more normal life and outlook, they don’t need to follow his road.

  73. 73.

    lowtechcyclist

    There was a new filing yesterday in Dominion’s suit against Fox News.  In this Twitter thread, Will Sommer shares some interesting details.  At one point, Tucker texted that Trump was “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Plenty of stuff that they weren’t going to share with their viewers, and apparently in the wake of the 2016 election, they were seriously afraid of being outflanked on the right by Newsmax, so telling the truth was right out.

    The actual filing is here.

  74. 74.

    Aussie Sheila

    @lowtechcyclist: Yes I read quite a bit of it while cooking my dinner!
    I am hoping the US Dems can shape this up to a scandal du jour both inside and outside Congress. Murdoch and his awful son Lachlan need to be pilloried everywhere English is spoken. From memory, I believe that New Zealand is the only English speaking country that didn’t allow the Murdoch press to take a place in its landscape. While NZ certainly has its share of nutters, at least they have been spared that particular brand of right wing misdirection. I live for the day the old effer dies, and I hope that his awful son Lachlan receives the odium he deserves once the full story prised forth by Dominion comes out. BTW, isn’t there another voting machine company that is after them?

    Also too, that effer Murdoch renounced his Australian citizenship to take up US citizenship. I have already pressed my MP to push for a change to Ox media law that would make a non citizen ineligible to run Oz media outlets. I am not hopeful, because now they can use the excuse that ‘traditional media’  is less influential than it used to be.

  75. 75.

    hueyplong

    This von Nukem death is an example of where the predominant belief system in the US confuses me a little bit, because right about now Satan is likely “doing the Lord’s work” to our $215 fentanyl mule.

    Guess each of us has a lane.

  77. 77.

    Aussie Sheila

    @hueyplong: Yes. Thank you. I hope and trust Dominion wins its suit  such that Smartmatic can come in and double the damage. Fuck Murdoch to hell, and eff the system that permits such A holes to change their patronymy so easily for money, when genuine refugees and migrants are being kicked from pillar to post by every right wing, and sometimes, not so right wing governments everywhere. It makes me sick.

  79. 79.

    Kay

    @lowtechcyclist:

    “Tucker Carlson repeatedly frets in text messages to his producer that Trump is a “demonic force” who could “destroy” him if Carlson missteps: “He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

    Interesting. I’ve believed for a long time that one of the holds Trump has on all of them is information- he knows them and knows about them and will reveal it all if they cross him or go against him in any way.
    What a miserable, fear-filled person Tucker Carlson is- he must have made enough by now to walk away- they pay these people truckloads. How much money could he possibly need and it is worth it?

    The Dominion lawsuit is a really good example of a private lawsuit that acts in the public interest. When the justice system fails or is non responsive, the civil system can sometimes act in its place. Just a great thing that they sued and a great thing that these multimillionaire liars are running scared.

  80. 80.

    MomSense

    @kalakal:

    I got curious (it’s a problem) about the radicalization of middle aged white women and it’s crazy how starting at daily fail can lead people down a horrifically dark path with influencers and body language experts leading eventually to insane Q anon and similar places.
    I’ve totally fucked myself because now my YouTube algorithm is vile, but I’ve learned a lot.  It’s insidious and people are making a ton of money and know damned well what they are doing.  It’s destroying families. It’s a threat to democracies.  It seems silly and most people I’ve talked to about it don’t believe it’s a legit threat.  Seriously a person can start with royal family gossip and end up in a Q cult.

  81. 81.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Gvg: They should be. Right wing nutters are everywhere of course, but my god, Murdoch concentrates and organises them to a degree that he has endangered democracy in both the UK and the US. We are not spared his media malevolence of course, but our voting system, and non partisan electoral commission means that once people stop listening to him and his rancid scribblers, he is done like a dinner. In this country his flagship rag, The Australian, the only national newspaper in the country, is a loss leader. It hasn’t turned a profit in the last decade at least. Murdoch doesn’t care. It is the power he is after. That is why he backed Brexit imo. He knows he can’t push the EU around the way he pushes the UK governing class around as well as the Oz equivalent. Although I detect a lessening of the old fear around the effer lately. No doubt new media outlets and  the fact that younger people don’t buy traditional media as much any more are also contributing to that effect.

    I really hope the Dem on line infrastructure as well as Dems in Congress goes after him hard.

  82. 82.

    Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride

    Since people have brought up British politics in this thread and it doesn’t appear to have quite died yet, I wanted to post some thoughts I’ve had before on the subject where I was too late to comment.

    At present, Labour is polling something like 30 points ahead of the Tories, which is a bigger margin than they ever had under Corbyn.  I can see two facially plausible explanations.  One is that Labour now has a huge advantage it didn’t have in 2019:  the country has had four more years to watch the Tories make a shitshow of everything.  (In 2019, Johnson could come before the people as The Man who Got Brexit Done, which only the remainers knew would be a disaster, and Covid hadn’t happened yet — not to mention the Truss fiasco.  But now, any opposition party ought to be polling as well as Labour is, no matter who or what they have on offer.)  The other facially plausible explanation is that a significant plurality of the left-leaning British electorate prefers Starmer’s brand of Labour to Corbyn’s.  Disagreeable as that may be, are there any facts that prove it wrong?

    I know something of what it feels like to be in Tony Jay’s position.  It’s how I felt as a lefty Democrat in 1972 after McGovern’s wipeout, or how everybody in the party left of the DLC felt in 1984 after Mondale’s wipeout.   You just don’t want to believe that your views are really that unpopular.  It’s always tempting to assume that the result is solely due to an evil conspiracy between the opposition and the media (and yes, I know how much worse the media is in Britain).  But what if your views, for the time being, really are that unpopular?  What if Labour run by Starmer and the party’s right is the best you can get for now?  I have no answers,  just a lot of glum questions.

  84. 84.

    different-church-lady

    It really is a strange coincidence how all these self-avowed white nationalists turn out to be Trump supporters. There’s no understanding that particular statistical anomaly….​
    ​
    ​

  85. 85.

    Aussie Sheila

    @MomSense: I am a middle to older white woman, and I have never even seen Q stuff let alone anything like it online. Are there particular rabbit holes that pique the algo? Don’t tell me here what they are. I wouldn’t want anyone to follow them. I am just curious that’s all. I have never come across that stuff, although I am fairly rigid in the stuff I follow and am curious about and maybe that is why my feed is perfectly ok from my point of view.

  86. 86.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    That’s why the right is going after “trial attorneys” the same way they’re going after bureaucrats and unionsn and voting. Anything that holds the powerful accountable.

  87. 87.

    MomSense

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:

    Sometimes I feel like the road to hell is paved with the best you can get for now. Then again, it’s a paved road and the other road is dirt and mud and car destroying pot holes with bad people hiding behind the bushes.  The other road is a totally impassable road.

  88. 88.

    Soprano2

    I didn’t remember he was from Lebanon, but I’m not surprised. He’s far from the only Nazi in this neck of the woods.

  89. 89.

    Baud

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:

    But what if your views, for the time being, really are that unpopular?

     

    Here, we have people who simultaneously want to push the envelope and believe that their views are popular. The fact is, even putting them bigotry aside, people hate change.

  90. 90.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: I will let Tony Jay reply re Corbyn, but I am an ALP member here in Oz, and the bs that was heaped on Corbyn was simply terrible. Again, I don’t think he was a very good leader of a PLP as such, ( others may disagree) but it seemed to me that he was being smeared by an operation that had the hallmarks of a state actor. I believe to this day that Mossad had something to do with it. I have never believed him to be anti Semitic. Indeed, a lot of the UK labour right could better be described as such in my experience.

  91. 91.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    That’s been true forever though.

    In Obama ’08 we had a really well respected and financially successful Toledo trial attorney running the volunteer voter protection effort. He did a great job, although there was a lot of grumbling because he’s a control freak and workaholic and he would do things like hold meetings at 8 AM Saturday morning, but I’m acquainted with him and I don’t think he’s a “liberal” or even really “political”. I think he knows conservatives would completely exclude ordinary people from the civil system- bar the courthouse door to anyone other than business interests with contract disputes-  if they held complete power.

  92. 92.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Kay: Warnock’s victory this year was the sweetest of them all for me. What a calculated insult to run a man like Walker against him. Just disgusting.

  93. 93.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Yes, not new.  But I think people don’t appreciate the extent to which the right is imposing forced rugged individualism on them.

  95. 95.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Baud: That is not true. People often embrace change. Look at the triumph of maga over the traditional republicans. Change in Australia was definitely on the ballot last year and it was embraced, such that our Conservative party here dropped to its lowest % of the vote since it’s formation in 1946.

    It’s self defeating to accept that people hate change all the time. It’s just that change needs to be presented in a way which goes with the warp and weft of people’s lived experience and desire for better things.

  96. 96.

    Kay

    The fentanyl smugglers here are all addicts. It’s kind of a tv/movie myth that dealers don’t use the product, or are somehow seasoned professionals. They’re all addicts and they get caught for dumb blatant shit like he did- sticking huge packages of drugs under the 3rd seat.

  97. 97.

    Kay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    I objected a little to the idea that he should have beat Walker easily or “how was this even close?”

    It’s close because the Right has a huge media influence operation and they automatically get 48%

    Warnock is a really talented pol. People like him are rare. He didn’t just beat Walker. He beat a huge media machine, twice.

  98. 98.

    Baud

    @Aussie Sheila:

    The MAGA republicans don’t represent change to their supporters. They (falsely) represent a nostalgic return to a bygone era.

    Yes, people can accept change, but it’s really hard to do, especially when you’re asking people to change a lot of different things at once.

  99. 99.

    lowtechcyclist

    We’re headed to Florida for the weekend.  My wife just printed out our boarding passes, and I think I’m going to be sending a nice letter to Southwest explaining the significance of a certain number.

    We’re on flight # 1488.

  100. 100.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Kay: Yes. He is a star imo. He deserves a lot of attention and support from Dem media etc. I also believe that Stacy Abrams’ excellent organising work probably helped him as well. The Georgia turnout and organising effort deserves to be studied everywhere.

  103. 103.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Baud: Sure. But you can’t present change as ‘do all these things at once.’ Real cultural change within organisations takes at least 5-7 years. I speak from experience.

  104. 104.

    Kay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    I think we have to get over the idea that we “should” beat them. Our candidates are up against a lot. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016 she would have not just beaten Donald Trump, she would have beaten the whole conservative media apparatus, the NYTImes (and all the media outlets who followed the NYTimes like lemmings) and an organized Russian influence operation.

  105. 105.

    Baud

    @Aussie Sheila:

    The Dems are a coalition party.  That makes it hard to do things seriatum.  No one likes to take a back seat.

    ETA: people haven’t been willing to give us 5-7 years.

  108. 108.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Kay: Yes I am aware of the hurdles. I am not suggesting that Warnock’s victory was anything less than heroic in the circumstances. I just think that he is very very good, as his victory over those hurdles shows, and that the organising effort by Stacy Abrams as well as the Warnock supporters on the day are worth studying.

    That is all. I would never expect a candidate like Warnock to ‘sweep the field’ in a state like Georgia.

  109. 109.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    And another.

    “As a young boy, I didn’t know a Republican from a Democrat, only in one way: If some man or bunch of men rode up to the ranch to sit or stay all night, and my Father set me to watching ’em all the time they was there — what they did and what they carried off — I learned they were Republicans.”
    – Will Rogers
    .

  110. 110.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    hahaaha A Neo Nazi dies of a drug overdoes.  Perhaps there is something good about fentanyl after all.

  113. 113.

    Princess

    Maybe someone has mentioned this but evidently the guy in the white shirt standing beside him has renounced white supremacy and spends his days teaching people why it is wrong.

  114. 114.

    Aussie Sheila

    @NotMax: I think that old saw is a bit old. Compared to the experience of Obama’s administration, the Dems appear to me at least, to be a lot more disciplined and organised this time around. Cinemanchin aside, the Congress people appear to be better and the Senators might be better now and in the future if the Dems can hold on to it in 2024. Pelosi was masterful in the last two years, and I truly believe that a younger, more vigorous Senate delegation could accomplish great things.

    I am more optimistic about the medium term prospects of the US Dems than I am about the UK funnily enough.

    I never used to think that. But I really think US liberals have had their eyes opened after the trump years and the real attempt of the right wing to stage a coup, in a way that UK liberals still don’t quite ‘get’, despite the obvious meddling of Russian oligarchs in their electoral politics over the last decade.

  116. 116.

    NotMax

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Nazi Germany was no stranger to heavy drug usage.

    Link barely touches on the massive use of Pervitin, an amphetamine even adulterating the chocolate bars given the troops. Blitzed: Nazis on Drugs an informative documentary, currently streaming on Freevee via Prime and on Tubi.

  118. 118.

    Aussie Sheila

    @different-church-lady: Yes I can imagine. She is truly a treasure. I really hope the Dems embrace whatever she can teach, and that she can do full time for the Dems nationally what she accomplished in Georgia. I was moderately optimistic about Warnock’s chances this year, and I was ecstatic that he won. I can’t believe there aren’t lessons there for everyone. He is also a treasure.

    I am still gobsmacked at the insult offered up to Black voters by the candidature of a scofflaw like Walker. The man was barely able to string two words together.

  119. 119.

    Princess

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: Starmer more popular than Corbyn? That’s nonsense. Corbyn can’t fail; he can only be failed.

    /s ( if it weren’t obvious)

    Anyway, dealing with crap piled on you is part of the job of being a politician. If Corbyn couldn’t handle it, he wasn’t the right guy for the job. And yes, anyone on the left with have much more piled on them. The response can’t be to say boo hoo that’s not fair.

  120. 120.

    Kay

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    And some still-to-be-determined section of the FBI. Although it might end up hard to determine whether they were working for the Russians and so were working against Clinton only as corrupt police, or whether they actually objected to Clinton and were working against her on their own.

    But we know they were planting explosive lies in the NYTimes right up until the day of the election., probably “The NY Field Office”. She had a lot to deal with.

  121. 121.

    Momentary

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:  I’m a very lefty Welsh nationalist who votes Plaid Cymru, but I think Keir Starmer is doing a very good job and will be a very good PM.  And I was originally a huge Corbyn fan, but not anymore.  I think Starmer is above all practical minded and is laser focused on getting into power, because it is in reach and without that he can’t do much.  When he gets it, I think he will do good stuff.  Like Biden, but more boring.  The antisemitism issue was absolutely a real and poisonous thing that needed to be dealt with decisively, and Corbyn lost the plot when he downplayed it to the media.  He might be basically a good man but whether he was treated fairly (of course he wasn’t) and whether the antisemitism problem was somewhat exaggerated (of course it was) Are Not The Important Things Right Now in the face of the massive crisis the UK is in.  It was time for him to sit down and shut up and he did not do that.

  122. 122.

    Princess

    @Aussie Sheila: it just can’t possibly have been ordinary British Jews listening to the words that came out of his mouth and coming to their own conclusions. It had to have been Mossad.

    Have you ever asked a British Jew why they felt Corbyn is an antisemite and just listened? Not tried to argue or insult them or change their mind, but just listened? Or asked them what they learned when Corbynites, rather than listening constantly told them and tell them they’re manipulated fools? (And yes, I agree the right as a whole is surely far worse. Basically the whole of the UK has an antisemitism problem it never has acknowledged or dealt with.)

  124. 124.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Momentary: Ok. I grok that Corbyn didn’t do a very good job as leader. And of course, that was his job. However, unless UK Labour embraces real structural constitutional change, Starmer won’t be able to do much. The state of the UK is bad, made much worse by a highly concentrated media and government apparatus, and an Opposition Party where the leader is allowing himself to be dragged into factional games. That is not good. I know from intra party factionalism, and a good leader never, ever allows him or herself to be seen to be part of that sort of thing. It is a very bad look, and can be seen from here.

  126. 126.

    Kay

    Lol. The anti wokesters:

    Jacob Bacharach
    @jakebackpack
    ·40m
    New York’s middlebrow liberal intelligentsia is quite literally a clutch of medieval-peasant Midwestern suburban stay-at-home McCain moms who ardently believe that their daughters are doing rainbow parties.

    Guffaw. I recognize this because I am a midwestern mom and also a conventional person.
    I keep telling you guys media and pundits are not “Right wing”. What they are is CONVENTIONAL. They are deeply, deeply uncomfortable with change of any kind, partly because “change of any kind” threatens their careers, or they are afraid it does – it probably doesn’t because they’re burrowed in there deep and also half of them are nepotsim hires so protected – but they’re afraid.

    They are stodgier and more brittle than the members of the local Rotary Club where I live.

  127. 127.

    Momentary

    @Princess:  just commenting to back you up on this.  I grew up in the USA and immigrated to the UK and I have had otherwise nice English people on both sides of the political spectrum (including Quakers!) say appallingly antisemetic things to me in conversation which was really shocking to me having never had that happen in the USA.  So far it’s always been English people not Welsh or Scottish FWIW.  So I trust people like Jay Rayner on what was going on and how important Starmer’s actions have been.

  128. 128.

    Chris T.

    @NotMax:

    Nazi Germany was no stranger to heavy drug usage.

    Yes. Hitler and/or his underlings seemed to lean towards the “drugs = übermench” theory, that somehow human output could be usefully increased long-term without damage (which simply is not true, the point of rest / sleep is quite clearly to repair damage—we don’t know the details but the overall effect is obvious).

  129. 129.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Princess: I don’t doubt that the anti semitism seen and experienced by Jewish people in the UK Labour Party was real.

    I also don’t think for a minute that it was a function of Corbyn being the leader. In my experience, UK anti semitism is real and noxious. Far worse than in US political and industrial circles. Your right wing press is a disgrace, and it seems a bit strange that the UK Labour Party appears to be silent on the internal investigation that was undertaken about that time, that appears to show that the UK Labour right played a lot of games in order to sink his leadership.
    I maintain that the Israeli government had a hand in the avalanche of calumny levelled at a not very adept leader, mainly because they saw his support of Palestinians as a threat to the unyielding, Israel is always right lobby in the UK.

    Again, I don’t doubt the anti semitism, but I am also alert to charges of anti semitism being levelled at anyone who criticises Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

    I am right over that nonsense.

  130. 130.

    Momentary

    @Aussie Sheila:  If Starmer has a clear majority, which he is currently heading for and is being extremely tactical and focused on getting to, then he’ll be able to do a lot, subject to economic realities.  And Plaid/Greens/SNP will back him, they might make him work for it a bit but they’re not going to side with the Tories.

    As for factional games, they’ve steadily decreased while Starmer has been in power.  Labour was an absolute hot mess in that regard when he took over, and now it is much less so.  He’s got a good partnership with Angela Rayner now, the unions are all on side, there’s still some sniping from Momentum etc but he’s done an impressive job of getting the party disciplined and focused IMHO, and that is very promising for what he’s likely to be able to accomplish as PM.

  131. 131.

    kalakal

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: I think you’re right on both counts.

    vis-a-vis Corbyn’s actually policies I think it’s rather like the democrats here.

    If you poll the policies they’re often actually pretty popular, far more than the party and its politicians.

    Corbyn was viciously attacked by the British media, even more than Clinton was here

    Corbyn himself is a pretty decent chap but he’s not a good political operator. He ran an awful election campaign, considerably hampered by the fact that he’s been anti European for years*.

    Labour should have walked the last election.

    Labour has had savage Left/ Right wing infighting for decades and both wings have at times cheerfully undercut the other – eg in 1990 4 of its most senior members on the right formed a splinter party which eventually merged with the Liberals ( the Dem part of the LibDems) – and Corbyn represented a temporary triumph of the left wing. Part of his difficulty in insisting all followed the party line was that historically he’d very often voted against the party whip himself, when the right wing had power. He’s always struck me as channeling a fair amount of Tony Benn, except Benn was a far smarter politician.

    I think/hope Labour win the next election but if they do its because the Tories lose it rather than Labour winning it. In this sense Starmer’s strategy makes sense, no hostages to fortune, give the media no ammunition and let the Tories self-immolate. On the other hand it’s  uninspiring, what is not needed is Tory-lite, but a genuinely reforming govt. Whether he’ll deliver that in power I don’t know but its a smart policy and dog knows we need someone pragmatically focusing on winning an election. It’s difficult to see the Tories winning, the next couple of years are going to be absolutely brutal in the UK.

    * He’s a Lexiteer. Brexiteers wanted out so that free of the chains of EU regulation they could create a free market capitalist paradise – ‘ Singapore on the Thames’. Lexiteers wanted out so that free of the chains of EU regulation they could create a Socialist Paradise, a new Jerusalem.

    Both are delusional but there is at least a nobility of purpose to the Lexiteers, Brexiteers are greed and xenophobia

  132. 132.

    Aussie Sheila

    @kalakal: Totally agree re Corbin’s ‘lexit lite’ stance as well as some of the UK Labour left. The idea that Brexit would mean ‘socialism in one country’ unmolested by the big bad EU is and was, delusion on a grand scale. Unbelievable twaddle.

    I hope and trust Starmer wins, but I am worried about UK Labour’s commitment to real electoral reform. It simply has to happen. Apart from anything else, if you support the ‘union’ of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, (which I don’t  btw) , you should support electoral reform.

    I am hoping to live long enough to see a united Ireland, but I assume most pommies don’t. If not, they better support real reform in that regard.

  133. 133.

    Momentary

    @kalakal:  I am pretty sure that Starmer, like Biden, is aiming to get the electorate to lead him where he wants to go.  The best way to start unpicking Brexit is not to campaign on unpicking Brexit, but to focus on fixing the giant dumpster fires and let that lead to the obvious solutions.  Same with (re)nationalising rail and energy, most politically apt way to get there is to let the road lead there rather than wave the banner for it.

  134. 134.

    Tony Jay

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:

    Occam’s Razor.

    In 2017, despite a two year internal revolt by the Labour Right and its MPs that included synchronised resignations by Shadow Cabinet ministers he’d given jobs to, a forced leadership challenge and constant sneering briefings megaphoned through the Media, despite Brexit and the cynical decision to let Cameron and Osborne escape responsibility so that Corbyn could shoulder all the blame, despite deliberate sabotage by Blairite MPs and bureaucrats who openly wanted a Tory victory, Corbyn’s Labour sucked up more votes than any Labour Party in decades, reversing at a stroke the precipitous vote decline that kicked in after Blair’s first win, in the face of a pretty centre-right Tory Party that had 100% media backing and, we were being told by the ‘experts’, was likely to pick up 100 Labour seats.

    In 2019, after a campaign of character assassination and media misinformation that probably only Hillary and Richard III could fully empathise with, after a full-bore, co-ordinated, top to bottom, extremely well-funded hatchet-job carried out by every single major newspaper, news outlet, political comedy show and pundit in the country, after any discussion of actual policy was drowned out by a co-ordinated conspiracy of Blairite MPs who were pretty much regurgitating whole chunks of Jonah Goldberg’s ‘Liberal Fascism’, after the Hard Right Likudnik lobby groups who had once been derided as frothing nutters were made sole and unquestioned arbiters of what constituted (Left wing) anti-Semitism, after any and every attempt to find a compromise position on Brexit that would keep the Party together long enough to win an election was deliberately shredded in favour of endless, contradictory accusations that Corbyn was a secret Brexiteer/would steal Brexit away, Corbyn’s Labour shed a couple of million votes and lots of seats while up against a criminally extremist Tory Party that, nevertheless, enjoyed the open adoration of most of the media and barely excited any opposition in the ‘centre-left’ organs that were far too busy telling people the only alternative was a terrorist-loving, tax-raising, incompetent bullying Hitler-clone who planned to put Venezuelan tanks on the streets and march the population of Golder’s Green into gas chambers.

    In 2023, with the threat of actual centre-left policies being enacted removed and a new flag-shagging, racist-appeasing, immigrant-bashing, trans-tutting, Left-hating leadership installed on the Opposition benches, the Media has retreated from all-our war on the Labour brand in favour of joining in the Tory civil-war. Brexit is ‘done’ and hurting, Covid was a disaster, corruption and incompetence and arrogance in the Johnson, Truss and Sunak Governments are out in the open and every democratic vote where the public have a voice has seen them express their fury and disgust with Toryism.

    If Labour wasn’t miles ahead given this climate it would be astonishing, but when you take a look at the approval rating for Sir Plastic himself, it’s not him or his wishy-washy Party that’s driving the opinion polls, its purely an anti-Tory effect. The main Opposition Party gets the benefit of that, but confusing it for approval of its virtually non-existent policy offering is a huge mistake.

    The likeliest conclusion is that the British electorate is just fine with voting for centre-left policies, they’re just not fine with voting for blood-drenched maniacs who want to turn the country into a giant gulag and ritually sacrifice children on the steps of St Pauls. And when the Media eases off their 100-rank deep defence of the Tory Party and allows even a little light to creep in, people don’t like what they see and vote accordingly.

    Shorter me – The electorate only knows what they’re told. They were told Corbyn was a monster and the Tories were funny, now they’re told Starmer is a ‘bit dull’ and the Tories are insane. Those storylines reflect in the opinion polls.

  135. 135.

    Momentary

    @Aussie Sheila:  It’s hard to predict how Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation will affect the calculus, but Starmer has worked very well with Mark Drakeford in Wales and has said good things about strengthening devolution and moving toward a more federated model including not just for Scotland/Wales/NI but also regions of England.  And he has floated turning the House of Lords into a Senate with regional representation, quite recently, playing off all the Tory corruption handing out Lordships.  So it remains to be seen what is delivered but he has been engaged with those questions.

  136. 136.

    Ken

    @Amir Khalid: What made this seriously fucked-up guy think Von Nukem was a plausible German surname?

    I’m way late to a dead thread, but… Back when “von” actually meant something, any of the nobles actually having that title would have taken one look at this loser falsely claiming it, and had their servants horsewhip him to death and throw the corpse in the hog pen.

  138. 138.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: This is true, Democrats don’t have any media organization that pushes their point of view and candidates like Fox News and Newsmax and whatever other small outlets there are out there on the conservative side.

    NPR covered the revelations in the Dominion lawsuit this morning, they talked pretty extensively about how the employees were saying one thing to each other and something completely different on-air. Evidently Tucker tried to get a woman who was telling the truth about the election on-air fired. The story said they were doing it because they knew what their audience wanted to hear. That’s not a news organization, that’s a propaganda outlet. If all the other “regular” press were responsible, after these revelations they would quit treating Fox News like a news outlet and start treating it like a Republican propaganda shop, because that’s what it actually is. We have proof now!

  139. 139.

    kalakal

    @MomSense: I can well believe it. The Daily Fail ( and The Daily Express ) for many years were the middle class papers. They weren’t rags like the Sun* or for the toffs and artsy fartsy types like The Times and The Guardian. I think it’s like the boiling frog thing, over the years ( like the Tories themselves) the Fail has become more and more right wing but has managed to do it in the demeanour of a middle of the road publication. The editor for years, Paul Dacre is a truly evil man and has an incredible insight to the mind of the conservative with a small c English middle class.

    I don’t know womens social media personally but friends who do tell me that things like moms groups, knitting clubs etc have become minefields

  141. 141.

    Kathleen

    @Kay: Also “The Left”, which I would lump in with Russian propaganda. You’re absolutely right. Yet she still managed to win the popular vote.

  142. 142.

    NotMax

    @Soprano2

    Tuckums’ messages showed greater concern over a drop in the company’s stock price when they temporarily stepped back from mendacious agitprop than over piddly things like facts.

  143. 143.

    Tony Jay

    And anyone who, in the wake of the leaked report into Labour Right sabotage of the Party’s disciplinary proceedings, in the wake of the million-pound Forde Report that Starmer himself commissioned, in the wake of the Al Jazeera exposes, in the wake of Sir Plastic’s open-season on left-wing Jews in the Labour Party, who still – still – can’t admit that the entire confected ‘scandal’ was a cynical hatchet-job by people with nothing to offer but hatred of Labour’s core values, there’s nothing I can say. Just trot off and go investigate paedophile rings hidden under pizza stores while wearing your ‘Benghazi = Betrayal” t-shirts, because that’s the level of no-hope gullible you’re at.

  144. 144.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Momentary: Again, I understand his plans re devolution and HoL reform. With respect, it is not enough. Unless you ditch FPTP voting, and permit a wider expression of political views to be represented in your Parliament, you will always be hostage to the vicious factional fights exhibited in UK Labour when Corbyn was leader. That was a disgrace. Particularly when it was obvious from here that his own Party apparatus was briefing against him to the worst press in the world.

    I am sorry, I think Starmer is undercooked as a Leader, and he is lucky he is facing the worse government in an English speaking democracy in my lifetime ( with the exception of the trump admin, of course).

    Starmer looks and sounds, frightened of his own shadow, and I worry that come the election a larger number of young people won’t make it to the polls, especially in the light of the photo id recently adopted. BTW, has the UK Labour Party objected to that democratic outrage? If not, why not?
    What has Starmer said about making voting easier for the young, the poor and the old?
    From here, I hear nothing. The US at least has the excuse of a ludicrously decentralised voting system and the lessor excuse of a pattern of voter suppression, everywhere. The UK has no such tradition, at least not since WW2. Yet here you are.

    Aping the worst of Republican fuckery, and nary a word that I can hear.

  145. 145.

    Momentary

    @Tony Jay: Seriously?  I hope you just need to sit down and take a deep breath, because if you are equating every Jewish Brit who says it was a real and serious problem with pizza pedophila conspiracists, then you’ve lost any respect I’ve had for you.

  147. 147.

    MomSense

    @kalakal:

    It was UK knitting accounts on Instagram that first caused me to want to explore this phenomenon.  The fiber community has gone through a 5+ years process of dealing with racism in our community which has been of mixed success.  What interested me were the women (some men) who dug in on their racism and the people who were pulled into it and what got them there.

    I had no idea what a racket the whole “body language expert” is.

  148. 148.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Momentary: Oh, and real leaders don’t ‘let the electorate tell them where they want to go’. A real leader articulates real grievances and wrongs and spells out what he/she will do to lead people to a better place. Obviously the pledge has to reflect where people are, but you never, ever, let ‘people’ tell you where you want to go. That’s not leadership. That’s pandering. That’s Starmer.

  149. 149.

    Tony Jay

    @Momentary:

    I’m saying that the accusation that Corbyn imported anti-Semitism into the Labour Party, protected it, fostered it, and prevented efforts to root it out is a cynical lie.

    I’m saying that the people within the Party who screamed about it loudest and fed the willing media scandal after scandal were themselves the people responsible for gumming up the works and keeping cases from being dealt with, and they did it specifically so an ‘anti-Semitism problem’ could be confected and reported on.

    I’m saying that actual anti-Semitism within the Labour Party was far less prevalent than in most British organisations, because the vast majority of the Left abhors it, and the vast majority of fake scandals during the Corbyn era were the result of the Media and its allies cynically adopting the frame promoted by the most extreme Likudnik groups who equate any pro-Palestinian/anti-Occupation statements with ‘Jew Hate’.

    I’m saying that report after report has laid this out in detail, and there’s simply no excuse left for continuing to promote the lie that somehow ‘the Left’ just can’t accept that Corbyn was to blame.

    I’ve said this a lot, every time its come up. There’s no more ‘there there’ with the case for Corbyn being an anti-Semite than there is for Hillary being the mastermind of a mozzarella-themed paedo ring. The fact that a lot of British Jews were subjected to a years long propaganda campaign to make them distrust Corbyn’s Labour might be the reason some of them still believe the bullshit, but it’s not an excuse to keep on believing the propaganda after its been so thoroughly discredited, and I’m under no obligation to pretend any different.

  150. 150.

    Paul in KY

    @Ken: WTF! $215 dollars for doing that! Maybe they jaked him and had him thinking it was $2000 and then when it comes time to pay, they say ‘Oh no senor, I meant pesos.’

  151. 151.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: That’s my take as well. But the fuckery had some real, professional backing imo. I maintain the Israeli government played a large part in it.

  154. 154.

    Momentary

    @Tony Jay:  I even agree with about 80% of that.  Where I diverge is that I think pre-existing antisemites in the party were emboldened under Corbyn, and that he was not able to deal with that effectively for a variety of reasons.  I have a lot of time for Shami Chakrabarti, who I have interacted with professionally in the past, and I think her work was a good faith effort, but it was not enough.

  155. 155.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Paul in KY: Men like that often have a history and pattern of domestic abuse. He was a crim on all counts. His fascism is proof of that. One down, a lot to go.

  156. 156.

    kalakal

    @Aussie Sheila:

    the vicious factional fights exhibited in UK Labour when Corbyn was leader

    All UK Labour leaders have had that problem, some handled it a lot better than others, compared to Foot he did well, compared to Blair badly.

    One problem for Labour is they wash their dirty linen in public, Labour Party Conferences were bloodbaths in the 70s & 80s while the Tories are usually better at presenting a united front. *

    Add in a very pro Tory media and every disagreement no matter how trivial in the Labour party is presented to the public as Defcon 2.

     

    *The Tories by the 90s and onwards were more and more publically tearing themselves apart over Europe. A major reason for Brexit was to settle a Tory Civil War and to prevent them being outflanked to the right by UKIP

  157. 157.

    kalakal

    @Tony Jay:

    the vast majority of fake scandals during the Corbyn era were the result of the Media and its allies cynically adopting the frame promoted by the most extreme Likudnik groups who equate any pro-Palestinian/anti-Occupation statements with ‘Jew Hate’.

     

    There is a lot of truth in this.

  158. 158.

    Paul in KY

    @Aussie Sheila: Maga was/is ‘real’ Republicanism.  The way most of their voters thought. The publically ‘non-maga’ were only trying to ride herd on their whackjobs and (IMO) were trying to put out a false image of what Republicanism really is.

  160. 160.

    Miss Bianca

    @Betsy: I ain’t interested in getting the brown shirt off an asshole’s back.

    Good riddance to bad rubbish, as the old folks used to say.

  161. 161.

    Tony Jay

    @Momentary:

    See, that’s the nub of it. ‘Emboldened under Corbyn’.

    He’s a lifelong anti-racism campaigner. He has no more time for anti-Semites than he has for Islamophobes or Klansmen. What he won’t countenance is people being hung, drawn and quartered for saying things that are perfectly acceptable commentary and in line with international law.

    There was no ‘emboldening’. There was a deliberate campaign to stop the disciplinary process dead and demand the leadership took personal charge of it, while simultaneously blaming the leadership for the disciplinary process stopping and screaming that the leadership was interfering in it to protect anti-Semites. The UK Media took that, stuck cameras in front of the likes of Hodge, Streeting, Berger, et al, quoted the nutters running JLM, BOJD and so on like they were gospels of non-partisan fact and printed the myth. It was and remains a disgusting act of self-harm that has destroyed the lives of thousands.

    As for Chakrabarti, she produced an honest and detailed report that told the truth. So what did the Media and the Labour Right do? Conferred a scandal out of a Hard Right Labour MP being called out by a black, Jewish activist for colluding with the Daily Telegraph to promote anti-Corbyn propaganda, called it anti-Semitism (because Jewish MP + Newspaper = All Jews control the Press blood libel, natch) and we were off to the races.

    Chakrabarti was denounced as a stooge who had been bought off with a peerage. Shami fucking Chakrabarti, longtime respected head of Liberty, crushed in seconds because she told the truth. THAT’S  how dedicated the UK Media we’re to lying about Corbyn and anti-Semitism and protecting the people, like Ruth Smeeth, who were spreading the smear.

    You’ll forgive me if I still find the matter infuriating and have yet to forgive anyone involved. It was a crime, and they are still in the process of awarding themselves medals for getting away with it.

  164. 164.

    Tony Jay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    Israel’s intelligence services are on camera infiltrating the Labour conference, buying up MPs and staffers (many of whom would later feature as ‘heroes’ of the anti-Semitism smear) and talking about confecting cases against anyone, including Tory MPs, who won’t follow the approved narrative. Al Jazeera did a documentary on it ‘The Lobby’. Questions were asked in Parliament. Israeli Embassy staff left the country. A certain mottled-white Tory Foreign Secretary hushed it all up, rhymes with Doris Bonson.

    I’m sure Israel helped, as did Russia. Corbyn was, after all, the guy calling on the UK to kick Russian money out of Londongrad and clean up the City. There’s plenty of American names floating around as well, usually members of the Atlantic Bridge group that Starmer often quietly genuflects at.

    Someone should ask Mike Pompeo about it. He did boast that steps were being taken to keep Corbyn out of power, but the UK Media, knowing full well what he meant, just sniggered and went back to writing hit-pieces about how you ‘could’ see anti-Semitism in the wearing of brogues, and wasn’t that enough?

  165. 165.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: God I didn’t know all those details. Well I maintain the best that can be done is to agitate for preferential/proportional voting. And if Starmer doesn’t want to play ball, deal with the Lib Dems. I’m sure they would delighted and it would assist in staving off another Party split, while helping democratise UK politics more generally.

  166. 166.

    StringOnAStick

    @Aussie Sheila: Given Adam Silverman has noted how deeply penetrated Israel is by Russian organized crime, it makes perfect sense to me that the same Israeli bunch are tied into the Russian money in the UK.  Perhaps not at a planning level but definitely on mutual goals aligning level, perhaps deeper.

    As for our dead Nazi drug smuggler, he obviously told the cops he was paid such a paltry sum to smuggle those drugs so he could claim to be an innocent mile tricked into doing something bad, which is of course complete BS.

  168. 168.

    Chris Johnson

    @lowtechcyclist: Nowhere does that say Tucker doesn’t LIKE Trump, or that he is in any way on another side. What I see there is Tucker Carlson is actively promoting the myth of a super-Trump who can do or destroy anything. I see that as the script of a secret or overt Trump collaborator. I think they’re in it together.

    “He’s super powerful, he is a destroyer” from a Tucker Carlson into the guts of his own ‘news’ agency does not mean the same thing as that, from one of us. From us it means ‘he is a bad person’. I think from Tucker it means ‘you have to obey him’, and that’s not an accident.

  169. 169.

    Chris Johnson

    @MomSense: Just so you know, the YouTube algorithm cannot behave itself on its own. You have to consistently spank it in the form of finding toxic crap on the sidebar and clicking the three dots, and selecting ‘not interested’. In some cases ‘don’t show me anything from this channel’ if you can identify the channel as purely toxic. The AI will then try to comply with what you told it, at least for a while.

    For me I regularly get it to never suggest anything but other stuff from the channels I already like, or have already watched. Periodically I’ll watch something and then have the feed turn sneaky on me, and I have to spank it more, and then it straightens out.

    Crass way to put it, but it’s a toxic and nefarious AI that sometimes is intentionally trying to turn me alt-right or QAnon, so I think it deserves it. If I could attack it worse, I would. I’m not allowed to make it go away, so it gets spankings every time it tries to sell me Nazis, and I consider that appropriate.

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