BuzzFlash

17/07/2024

Progressives Must Stop Getting Queasy Over Comparing Trumpism to Na**sm (2021 BuzzFlash reprint)

Just a few days ago, Donald Trump made his first media appearance since becoming a former president. It was a call in to Fox, ostensibly to eulogize the passing of the incendiary racist and white grievance arsonist Rush Limbaugh. However, Trump barely paid homage to the insidious bigot, just enough to segue into his big lie claim that the election was stolen from him..

Trump, in deep umbrage, stated that Limbaugh thought "we won and so do I. By the way, I think we won by a substantially... I don't think that could have happened to a Democrat. You would have had riots going all over the place if that happened to a Democrat.”

Trump told Newsmax, "we did win the election, as far as I’m concerned. It was disgraceful what happened, totally disgraceful."

It was once again a reminder that the big lie was going to long outlast Joe Biden’s inauguration, continuing to stoke Trump’s cult followers. It was once again a reminder that the coup attempt is not over in Trump’s mind. In Thursday Congressional hearings on security, the acting Capitol Chief of Police warned that there was intelligence information that rabid Trump followers planned to blow up the Capitol when Biden gives his State of the Union address (which is not yet scheduled). There is also law enforcement chatter that there might be Trump paramilitary troop activity on March 4, which was the date of the inauguration until FDR was sworn in in 1933. Qanon followers think that this could lead to Trump assuming his “rightful” presidency then.

News networks are continuing to help amplify the big lie by booking election deniers to goose viewership. Indeed, MSNBC’s Brian Williams scathingly criticized the lame Chuck Todd for booking Ron “Smirk and Jive” Jonhson (D-WI) on Sunday’s Meet the Press and allowing him to spread Trump big lie conspiracy theories.

And Republicans aspiring to fill up their campaign and PAC coffers are raising scads of money off of the big lie that Trump won the election by a landslide, the champion being Trump who has raised millions.

In a February 22 BuzzFlash Editor’s Commentary entitled, “Progressives Must Stop Getting Queasy Over Comparing Trumpism to Na**sm,” I detailed how Trump, while obviously not being an exact replica of Hi**er, is utilizing many of his propaganda techniques (including those created by Goebbels) to still try and achieve dictatorial power.

A key strategy of Hi**er’s was to normalize the transformation of German society into a nation weaponized, with scapegoating as the justification, over a period of many years, until the horrifying became acceptable “patriotism.” What is happening in the post-inauguration stage of Trump’s American version of “Mein Kampf” (as dramatized, metaphorically, in Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” on HBO Max) is a continuing normalization of sedition, insurrection, violence and hate galvanized by a continued big lie that “enemies of the people” stole the election from Trump. Indeed, the Insurrection is being sanitized by Congressional Republicans so as not to “taint” the big lie with the truth.

According to a February 21 Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll: “Three of four, 73%, [of Republicans] say Biden wasn't legitimately elected. Most don't want their representatives to cooperate with him, even if that means gridlock in Washington.”

Even out of office, Trump continues the normalization of a seditionist authoritarian government, built upon a foundation of lies, even as most advocates of democracy believe the peril to the Union is past. It’s not.

Trump will be ramping up the big lie, test marketing how far he can push, as his worshiping cult and elected GOP acolytes promote the idea that the White House is temporarily occupied by a usurper.

As a February 15 article in the London Review of Books clarifies how dependent this process is on Trump as a quasi-religious figure who has taken upon himself the victimhoods of a populist, white grievance-driven mob who are in a dependency relationship with him:

The demagogue, Freud argues, turning to the second component of our template, does not command loyalty on the basis of shared ideals or values. Rather, the demagogue is like a hypnotist who says to his followers: pay attention only to me; nothing else matters; concentrate entirely on me. This accomplishes three things. First, it shunts the ego aside; it replaces reason with loyalty. Second, it resolves conflicts arising from frustrated and unfulfilled narcissism, by fostering identification with a leader who has demonstrated his mastery by a willingness to deploy sa**sm by bullying and humiliating others. In this regard, Freud points out, the successful demagogue need possess only the typical qualities of his followers, but in a ‘clearly marked and pure form’ that gives the impression ‘of greater force and of more freedom of libido’. Third, because Trump established the same identification with every one of his millions of followers, he fostered an experience of shared equality among them. In Freud’s words, ‘the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he must be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent.’

As a result, about 40% of Americans angrily believe that Democrats, Blacks, Browns, LGBTQ and Indigenous Americans and the media are betraying the Constitution.

Read this CNN account of one protester closely, and notice how Trump has made a huge swath of Americans believe that only loyalty to him and the big lie supports the Constitution.

In a February 21 CNN article entitled, “Oath Keeper claims she was VIP security at Trump rally before riot and says she met with Secret Service agents,” the lawyer for Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins made an extraordinary claim that reveals the toxic contortions of the big lie:

Watkins' defense attorney, Michelle Peterson, wrote on Saturday that her client and other supporters of Trump had believed the then-President would invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to overturn what he falsely said was the fraudulent election of Joe Biden. And Watkins and others believed "they would have a role if this were to happen," the filing said.

"However misguided, her intentions were not in any way related to an intention to overthrow the government, but to support what she believed to be the lawful government. She took an oath to support the Constitution and had no intention of violating that oath or of committing any violent acts."

This insurrectionist believed that the only way to save the Constitution was by backing Trump’s big lie because he had told his followers he was the lawfully-elected president. To Watkins, Congressional Senators and Representatives who would vote to uphold Biden’s 7-million-vote election victory were betraying the Constitution because Trump was the real victor, and everything he said was to be believed because of a psychotic symbiosis. This is about a smoldering cauldron of vengeful id. Many Democrats believe that Trumpism can be defeated by reason. This is a big mistake.

The big lie can be radioactive in its power, according to the London Review of Books:

This brings us to the big lie, our fifth component. A big lie is not a claim subject to contradiction, or a statement of fact that can be disputed. The concept was first put forth in Mein Kampf, where Hi**er defined it as an untruth so colossal that people ‘would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously’. Trump’s claim that he had won the election ‘in a landslide’ and victory was stolen from him by a corrupt establishment is a lie of this sort.

It is the psychological work that the big lie performs that makes it so important. Its essence is that something terrible has been done to an innocent individual or group.

Trump has assiduously cultivated Red State GOP parties to be loyal to him alone, to the point that the 2020 GOP Convention had no platform other than whatever Trump wanted it to be. He has also cultivated Red State legislatures, and we are seeing the payoff now in the countless voter suppression laws being passed and censures issued. Trump has indicated that he will only support Republicans in 2022 who voted against Biden’s decisive win at the ballot box on January 6.

According to Jedd Legum’s blog entry, entitled “A Festival of Lies,” about the CPAC conference now underway that Trump will speak at this weekend :

There are seven panels devoted to perpetuating lies about election fraud, including:

Other Culprits: Why Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence

The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It

Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)

The "Other Culprits" panel features Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL), who appeared at the January 6 rally that occurred just before the riot. Brooks told the crowd that it was time to start "taking down names and kicking ass." He refused to apologize.

Trump will undoubtably include his false claims of election fraud in his keynote address on Sunday. In a statement this week, Trump claimed that "experts" believed he "won" the election and bemoaned the "election crimes that were committed against me."

Donald Trump, like Hi**er, Peron and Mussolini, will never yield the power over his cult voluntarily. As for the Republicans in Congress, please stop thinking most of them detest Trump. He stands for a Republican authoritarian rule that would create a one-party government that would rule for years. This is a goal shared by far too many of them. To those Senators and Representatives, democracy is an inconvenience and usurpation of white power, and Trump is still normalizing that malignant possibility that inclusive democracy will be jettisoned into the dust bin of history.
https://images.squarespacecdn.com/content/v1/5c9d724b16b64024a8eaf782/1613961516359-5EW0UMLZ8O68RPBILWAG/25816299672_3ddd153346_o.jpg?format=1500w

17/07/2024

Trump's stochastic terrorism and call to violence. Donald Trump needs to be held accountable as an accessory to murder

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Reprinted from August 2019

Prayers won’t end massacres like the one in El Paso.

The shooter who slaughtered at least 20 people and wounded more than 25 was apparently a Trump-loving anti-immigrant white nationalist. Patrick Crusius posted on 8Chan, a ghoulish message board on the Internet where the debris of troubled men in hate groups lurk and reinforce their vitriol toward non-whites, Jews and women. Crusius had allegedly written a virulent manifesto that expounded on the themes that Trump brings to a full boil in his followers.

The Republican governor of Texas tweeted the perfunctory cowardly and evasive “call for prayers” in response to a toxic cocktail of deadly firepower and white nationalism, as Trump cynically tweeted “God be with you all!” and “sent” his prayers. Meanwhile, another mass gun shooting occurred in Dayton, Ohio, within 24 hours.

Pete Buttigieg addressed the deadly threat of “grevance” hate killings in the age of Trump: “America is under attack from homegrown white nationalist terrorism,” he said at a labor-union forum on Saturday. “White nationalism is evil. And it is inspiring people to commit murder, and it is being condoned at the highest levels of the American government, and that has to end.”

Beto O’Rourke also targeted the heart of the nightmare plaguing us:

There was a link between Trump’s hostile comments about Muslims, migrants and people of color to a rise in hate crimes, O’Rourke told CNN after cutting short campaigning in Nevada to return to El Paso, his hometown and a city he represented for six years in Congress.

Asked if the shooting was Trump’s fault for inflaming hatred, he said “yes”.

“We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years during an administration where you have a president who has called Mexicans rapists and criminals, though Mexican immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than people born in this country.

Called “An Inconvenient Truth,” the alleged Patrick Crusius manifesto begins:

In general, I support the Christchurch [New Zealand] shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion. Some people will think this statement is hypocritical because of the nearly complete ethnic and cultural destruction brought to the Native Americans by our European ancestors, but this just reinforces my point. The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was. My motives for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement. This manifesto will cover the political and economic reasons behind the attack, my gear, my expectations of what response this will generate and my personal motivations and thoughts.

Donald Trump with his appalling treatment of migrants in dire need of safety and employment, his references to the immigrants as an “infestation,” his early campaign incendiary allegation that many of those crossing the border are rapists, his indirect and direct appeal to white nationalism, his support of the alt-right even after one of them killed a young woman in Charlottesville, his racist and xenophobic attack on Ilhan Omar, on “The Squad” and Elijah Cummings as people who are unworthy of being considered “American” his sneering and smirking at people of color, his outright racist remarks, his assertion that the US is being overrun by brown people who are filthy and detestable, his use of language that implies non-whites are of an inferior race and are “vermin” — all this and more are incitements to the Patrick Casisus’s of the US, men caught in there own dark world of grievance and hate. This is what weaponized the mass shooting in El Paso.

It is what also weaponized the shooter just a few days ago in Gilroy, California. Santino Williams Legan, who was shot dead by police, had a stash of white supremacist material in his home. According to SFGate,

An Instagram account purportedly belonging to the shooter also referenced white supremacist ideology, recommending "Might is Right" by Ragnar Redbeard.

Written under a pseudonym in the late 1800s, the book is a defense of Anglo-Saxon and male supremacy, and argues that weakness shows moral inferiority. It is also full of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

"It's widely popular and present among ethnocentric white nationalists of all levels, from suit-and-tie white supremacists to neo-Nazis," Keegan Hankes, a senior analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence project, told Rolling Stone.

It is difficult to recall all the violence and attacks on non-whites that have occurred as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric to full blown evocation of a white Christian "race” under siege.

The New York Times reported in November of 2018:

Hate crime reports increased 17 percent last year from 2016, the F.B.I. said on Tuesday, rising for the third consecutive year as heated racial rhetoric and actions have come to dominate the news.

Of the more than 7,100 hate crimes reported last year, nearly three out of five were motivated by race and ethnicity, according to the annual report. Religion and sexual orientation were the other two primary motivators.

No one for a moment should believe this is a coincidence.

In July 23 testimony to Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that domestic violence had increased in the first six months of this year:

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy….

Wray pointed to several recent high-profile arrests, including that of Coast Guard Lt. Christopher P. Hasson, who prosecutors have alleged is a white nationalist who stockpiled weapons in a plot to target journalists and politicians, and the men accused in mass shootings at synagogues in California and Pennsylvania.

Wray could have added to that list Cesar Sayoc, who was convicted in April of sending pipe bombs to Democratic officials, the media (“the enemy of the people,” Trump exhorts his followers) and Dem donors.

According to CNN (a target of Sayoc’s pipe bombs), Sayoc pleaded guilty but, “In the handwritten letter filed Tuesday [in April] in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, he told a judge that ‘the first thing you here [sic] entering [a] Trump rally is we are not going to take it anymore, the forgotten ones, etc.’”

The headline of the CNN article reads: “Pipe bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc describes Trump rallies as 'new found drug'".”

So damn the politicians who are now calling for prayers and a media that will go through its normal cycle of covering mass shootings and then forgetting about them as soon as Trump distracts them with another outrageous tweet or incendiary statement.

The guns aren’t weaponizing the likes of Patrick Crusius, Donald J. Trump is. Yes, it’s long past the time that aggrieved white males got over their fixation with guns.and rage. What is happening in the US today is that those white males stewing in a broth of virulent hate feel enabled to lash out with lethal consequences by the president of the United States.

It is fitting that Crusius allegedly had this photo posted on his now deleted Twitter account:

Yes, let’s definitely ban assault weapons, if you can pry them away from “the cold dead hands” of the gun lobby. However, to eliminate the enabling force behind blood baths such as the one at an El Paso Walmart, Donald J. Trump needs to be held accountable as an accessory to murder.

BuzzFlash

10/07/2024

Mark Twain got it right:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Mark Twain quotes: 1. “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” 2. “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” 3. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

05/07/2024

Biden for President, Trump for Jail. They both should serve out their terms.

High-Quality outdoor matte vinyl that is waterproof and weatherproof. Peel and stick.

02/07/2024

With all the clamoring that Biden should drop out, which he won't unless his poll numbers dip from low to lowest in his favorability rating, it's also time for papers around the nation to call for Trump to withdraw.

For years, US newspapers have treated Trump with deference, as if he were actually qualified to be president. Trump has violated so many norms that he has normalized the rants of a madmand. He also has openly called for harsh violence against his "enemies in the deep state" in a second term.

Yesterday, his puppets on SCOTUS gave him the right that Trump has voiced at least twice to kill political opponents by granting him immunity for acts he commits while president. And that doesn't include his statement that the former head of the Joints of Staff General Millie should be executed. The SCOTUS decision was like allowing a rabid pack of dogs attack a Black Lives Matter protest.
Not to mention that Trump is the one who is clealry deranged. Just recall his recent riff about sharks and an electric boat. Well here it goes. If you already have read it, read it again to fully savor the unhinged lunacy of it:

“We can’t get the boat to float. The battery is so heavy. So then I start talking about asking questions. You know, I have an, I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, long, I think the longest tenure ever. Very smart, had three different degrees and, you know, so I have an aptitude for things. You know, there is such a thing as an aptitude.“I said, ‘Well, what would happen if this boat is so heavy and started to sink and you’re on the top of the boat. Do you get electrocuted or not?’ In other words, the boat is going down and you’re on the top, will the electric currents flow through the water and wipe you out?“And let’s say there’s a shark about 10 yards over there. Would I have to immediately abandon, or could I ride the electric down? And he said, ‘Sir, nobody’s ever asked us that question. But sir, I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, I want to know, because I guarantee you one thing, I don’t care what happens. I’m staying with the electric, I’m not getting over with it.’“So I tell that story. And the fake news they go, ‘he told this crazy story with electric.’ It’s actually not crazy. It’s sort of a smart story, right? Sort of like, you know, it’s like the snake, it’s a smart when you, you figure what you’re leaving in, right? You’re bringing it in the, you know, the snake, right? The snake and the snake. I tell that and they do the same thing.”

Oh, damn it, let Trump take his chances with the shark!

I still find it dismaying that the well-paid corporate press treated Trump as if he were sane during his "news conferences" on Covid. Swallow Clorox bleach, stick a flourescent tube down your throat, swallow some Hydroxychloroquine. And the press treated him as if this were credible.

It's extremely rare for Trump to utter any words that do not represent his mental derangement.

No, Trump won't drop out, and the RNC isn't about to push him. The cult leader has nearly total control over the Republican party, which has become the party of craven zealots.

However, the media of America can make amends by calling for him to drop out. It is the right thin to do and provide moral clarity that needs to be shed upon a second Trump term that will shatter our democracy.

With a scathing front-page editorial, the Trump-friendly tabloid joined another of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, The Wall Street Journal, in attacking the president’s attempts to undo the election result.

29/06/2024

After Tuesday's mendacious spectacle of Trump piling lie on lie, it is clear that Trump is giving used car salesmen (or women) a bad name.

After all, there are some honest used car salesmen. But Trump is a mendacious Mussolini. No used car salesman goes full-blown violent on his customers.

Deploying a technique call the Gish gallop, "a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments."

To those who complain that the CNN moderators should have fact-checked Trump in real time, it would have meant that they probably couldn't get past Trump's first response before the debate would be over.

"To counter a Gish gallop, the best course of action is usually to call out the Gish gallop explicitly, and then respond using a thematic or grouped-point rebuttal, rather than addressing each opposing argument individually, unless refuting a few key points can refute the overall line of argumentation."

Biden, taking a stroll through La La Land, didn't have the wherewithal to employ this strategy and the rest of going to live in infamous history.

Trump tromped on facts, like an elephant in heat. Meanwhile, Biden stumbled trying to end the same sentences he entered.

Is it time to get your passport ready for moving to Canada. Now is the time to make you sure yours is not going to expire soon.
So, whatever is your take on the squalor of being Donald J. Trump, please don't defame used car salesmen by calling him one.

Mark Karlin

28/06/2024

If Jill Biden really wants to save her husband from losing to Trump and thus making America into a hellscape, she needs to persuade him that to save America he must yield to a younger candidate.

His performance lat the first debate was heartbreaking and evokes empathy. He is right about democracy and the rule of the law.

That is why he must withdraw his name from the nomination. He had a great first term, but after last night he is probably not electable. And if he is running to protect democracy, he should step aside and let one of the Democratic rising stars take on the execrable orange man.

Key to persuading him that it's not all about him, that if stays in Trump is likely to win, is to point our that democracy will not be saved if he is the Democratic candidate in 2024.

I like everyone reading this, will vote for him no matter what, but my vote and those of the people who read BuzzFlash Nation, are not the votes he needs to win.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/04/politics/biden-conversation-gaza-conflict-concerns/index.html
Trump pulled it together to engage in blustery, lying, bombastic bragging that was mostly swirling lies, but his energy was a dangerous contrast the frail, bewildered Biden. I think we are way beyond the "it was just a bad night" excuse.

It is hubris for him to run again. He is leaving our democracy in peril by likely losing to Trump, who appeared energetic and commanding

Many political consultants advise viewers, to evaluate the two candidates, to turn off the sound for a while during a debate to evaluate the them. With Biden looking weak and often losing his train of thought, Trump stared defianty into the camera. Visually, Trump won by light years.

As a columnist for the Boston Globe wrote this morning:

"There is no shame in getting old. Age comes for everyone fortunate enough to achieve it, often in different ways.
And it’s been said countless times since the merciful end of last night’s debate that Biden is a good man, even a good president, who deserves credit for navigating this country through a uniquely tumultuous time with a uniquely old-world sense of empathy."

Dr. Jill Biden, if you care about your husband's admirable legacy, persuade him to leave his pursuit of a second term with dignity.
A loss to Trump would turn his sterling record into infamy and leave America in grave peril under Trump.

When President Joe Biden met with a group of Muslim community leaders this week, he recounted a recent conversation he had with first lady Jill Biden relating to the conflict in Gaza.

22/06/2024

Once again, Claribel Clarence Thomas, the man of unlimited corruption, put the residents of America at personal risk for their lives, in this case women.
It's almost inconcievable to imagine anyone who cares about protecting our society could muster up a grotesque defense of allowing domestic violence abusers under restraining orders, and with a past history of criminal behavoie, to keep their guns.
As the sole dissenter in the just-decided case by SCOTUS, Clarabel claimed that there was an "originalist" right for domestic abusers to keep packing heat, even though many women are killed by their abusers. The notion is so dangerous that even Sam "upside down
But Clarabel Thomas marches to the beat of a different and life-threatening drummer. Chanelling the original originalist, Antonin Scalia (who stole the 2000 election from Al Gore). Thomas arrogantly claims that he can read the minds of the foundiing fathers.
That's quite haughty for a guy who dirty-talked Anita Hill about a publc hair on the metallic top of a can of soda.
Common Dream lacerated Thomas in an acidic commentary on his lone dissenting vote in the Rahimi case:\
Critics across the political spectrum called Thomas' lone dissent in the case "insane" and blasted the right-wing justice as "a "corrupt lunatic," and a "contemptible POS" who "continues to undermine the safety of women and disgrace the court."
"C.M. [the abused woman] attempted to leave, but Rahimi grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her back to his car, and shoved her in, causing her to strike her head against the dashboard," Roberts wrote. "When he realized that a bystander was watching the altercation, Rahimi paused to retrieve a gun from under the passenger seat. C. M. took advantage of the opportunity to escape. Rahimi fired as she fled, although it is unclear whether he was aiming at C. M. or the witness."
How perfidious can one married to an election-denialist wife be?
The answer is an unbounded ignorance that borders on the criminality.

Join Retroland as we take a fond look back at the beloved clown from The Howdy Doody Show, Clarabell.

17/06/2024

Mark Karlin

Can America survive a return-four years of an ignorant, megalomanic, narcissistic, pathological Donald Trump

If ever there was someone who needed a mental health intervention, it's Donald J. Trump. Lord knows, he needs it immediately. That he is in severe cognitive decline might merit compassion, if he were not a sinister threat to the Republic.

Paul Krugman, who was one of BuzzFlash's first interviewees in the early '2000s says the warning signs have been their for years, but the mainstream press is covering the 2024 presidential contest like a horse race, instead of saying the strark truthout outloud: Trump needs comprehensive psychiatice help. He gives a bad name to people who are mentally ill.

The New Republic recently interviewed Krugman and provided this preface:

"This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s new book comes out, and it contains a disturbing chapter about Donald Trump’s ignorance, explosive rage, and megalomania during the coronavirus pandemic. We think this should be covered as a loud, clanging alarm bell about the dangers of a second Trump term. So we talked to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has written a series of recent columns on voter amnesia about Trump’s 2020 performance, about the horrors unleashed on the country by his unfitness for the presidency—and why recent events suggest he’s gotten much, much worse."

Good grief, what can you expect from a man who advised people to use Chlorox or flourescent tubes to kill COVID? It was stomach-churning to watch the White House press corps, the elite of reporters cover those COVID "press briefing" science-fiction, cringeworthy travesties. Except the creme de la creme should have boycotted them entirely instead of giving credence to Trump's Dr. Caligari.

The New York Times executive editor thinks it a violation of "neutral" media coverage to say that Trump's next home shouldn't be the White House but rather a padded loony bin.

But here we are.

When the GOP frontrunner was asked Tuesday whether he thought Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, he jumped into the hottest new conspiracy theory feet first—because of course he did.