Rising fascism in the US

I don't even know why people are on Twitter. Or how they can be influenced by any tweets. Think for yourself!

oralloy wrote:

blatham wrote:

Newt Gingrich is evil, for sure,

Wrong again.

How?

oralloy wrote:

He's one of the good guys.

Why?

oralloy wrote:

If you want evil find a mirror.

Who "wants" evil?

Newt gingrich has never ever been a good guy. Your value system is askew. Ever since his Contract on America in 1992 he has sucked.

Dr. Simone Gold, a convicted U.S. Capitol insurrectionist and the founder of the vaccine disinformation group America’s Frontline Doctors, has offered to help Elon Musk assemble a team of doctors to fact-check medical information on Twitter.
[...]
Gold is the ringleader of a network of right-wing health-care providers that have made millions selling so-called alternatives to vaccines, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have been repeatedly discredited as treatments for Covid. Gold has referred to Covid-19 vaccines as “experimental biological agents.” She’s also currently in a legal fight with AFLDS and its board chair who are suing her, alleging extravagant spending and that she lives rent-free in a $3.6 million house bought with AFLDS charity funds.

Gold’s appeal to Twitter’s owner was not in response to any public plans to create a medical fact-checking team — Musk hasn’t said anything along those lines. Rather, billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted a suggestion to Musk, and a cryptocurrency influencer who noticed that Musk liked that tweet announced it as breaking news.
{...]
While there’s little evidence that Musk plans to convene the fact-checking team, he has already made decisions that enable the spread of Covid misinformation on Twitter. In fact, one of Musk’s first changes after taking over Twitter was to scrap the site’s Covid misinformation policy — essentially removing Twitter’s existing fact-checking system for medical information. Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, which is responsible for moderating misinformation, has also been depleted by layoffs and mass resignations.

Musk also immediately restored accounts that were banned for Covid misinformation, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account. Throughout the pandemic, the Republican lawmaker repeatedly posted false information to her hundreds of thousands of followers, including that Covid vaccines are deadly and that ivermectin, an anti-paras

Musk himself has also frequently tweeted Covid misinformation and antagonized evidence-based health-care professionals. Over the weekend, Musk flirted with the anti-vaccine crowd by tweeting, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” — an apparent call to prosecute the chief medical adviser to the president, Anthony Fauci, mixed with some transphobia for good measure. The refrain to take Fauci to court for how he managed the pandemic is popular on the far right.

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(...) In the last few years, starting during the heat of Donald Trump’s first impeachment saga in 2019, the Turley phenomenon has gone from odd to puzzling to disturbing. The tonal pretense is still that he is the rare Burkean honest man, horrified that politics have become too contentious and law too political. But his earlier interest in showing up on Fox News and in chastising Democrats and liberals has become, well, compulsive and obsessive. Not just in his Fox News appearances but also in his prolific tweets and blog posts, we see Republican sycophancy rendered in a sober scholarly tone with pearl-clutching sanctimonious nostalgia for some pre-political era of American law. There is the unintentionally comical self-referential stuff (roughly translated: “As readers of my earlier columns will recall,” or “When I was honored to be asked to testify before Congress,” or “The court has now agreed with the position I earlier expressed”). But a newer reader of Turley might conclude that he now actually despises Democrats in a venomous way.

Turley gleefully reports court decisions that go against Biden or other Democrats—and almost never or barely mentions any that the GOP loses. While his supposed added value is legal expertise, he takes time to chortle at random Biden gaffes. But what about the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world? Well, he has mentioned her, but it was to argue that the calls to disqualify her from Congress were unsound. He virtually second-chairs the Trump lawyers fighting searches and subpoenas, or the defense of Jan. 6 figures facing indictment. Oh, he does the occasional feint the other way, reminding us, say, that he once said that there were some crimes at the Capitol.

A related role for Turley is, as he puts it, a Free Speech Absolutist or Internet Originalist. Calling out every offense to these principles—and asserting that the public/private distinction should not matter—he has treated Elon Musk as a savior. Of course, the left gives plenty of fodder when it says foolish things about obviously protected speech being too harmful to be tolerated—especially on college campuses. But almost every day, Turley plays the anti-left Paul Revere on this, again with the occasional reassuring reminder that somewhere a while back he noted that a leftist was censored. Read enough of Turley’s pronouncements on this subject and you might begin to think that maybe the cure for bad speech really IS less speech. (...)