Stories Chosen For You
In an op-ed published at HuffPost this Tuesday, journalist Andrea Cooper confesses that she was the one responsible for catapulted the controversial evangelical Duggar family to fame.
By highlighting the Arkansas family with 14 children, Cooper writes that her goal was to "share a tale about unusual people, in the same vein as my profiles of a hairdresser for mall Santas or the director of an association for nude recreation" for the blog Parents, which ran her story in September 2003 under the title “Count Our Blessings.”
"After my article was published, someone at Discovery Health Channel read it and commissioned a documentary for the channel about the Duggars, according to Michelle on the family’s website," Cooper writes. "That eventually led to the TLC reality show “17 Kids and Counting” ― a show that ran in some incarnation for seven years, but that I never once watched."
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Cooper didn't think much about Duggars after her story ran, until In Touch Weekly ran the now-infamous report, “‘19 Kids and Counting’ Son Named in Underage Sex Probe,” which identified Josh Duggar as the alleged offender, prompting TLC to end the show, now titled "19 Kids and Counting" after Michelle Duggar had two more children. In April of 2021, Josh Duggar was arrested on charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. He was later found guilty on two counts.
"At the pretrial hearing for Joshua’s recent trial, a family friend said Josh had told her years ago he’d 'digitally penetrated' a young girl while she sat on his lap and he read her Bible stories, according to a prosecutors’ supplemental brief filed on Nov. 30 and reported by E! News. I feel dizzy typing those lines, especially as the mother of a daughter," Cooper writes.
Read her full op-ed over at HuffPost.
If the 2020s are shaping up to be about any one thing, it's ultimately about how this was the decade in which millions of people decided no amount of evidence or rationality could ever pry them from their dumbest, most reactionary beliefs. We see this in the Big Lie, of course, but also in the ongoing pile-up of asinine right-wing myths and hoaxes currently taking hold like "critical race theory," accusations that Disney employees are "groomers," and claims that kids in schools are pooping in litterboxes. If there's an ethos of this era, it's that you can believe whatever idiotic thing you want, so long as it's "anti-woke." And, of course, any effort to dislodge you from your stupid idea with annoying facts is "cancel culture."
In recent weeks, the most virulent example of this hasn't come from likely culprits Donald Trump or Florida's Republican governor cursed with permanent constipation face, Ron DeSantis. No, it's the nauseating defamation trial that pits the bloated remains of what used to be a handsome and promising movie star against a long-suffering actress. In the real world, as many a journalist with a high tolerance for Twitter abuse has reminded us, Johnny Depp's defamation case against Amber Heard is not legitimate. Any jury that actually follows the evidence should throw the case out, as investigative journalist and podcaster Michael Hobbes recently explained on Twitter.
Thread: I've noticed a weird reluctance on the part of liberal journalists to assess the evidence in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial. The right has spent weeks screaming "she's lying!" and so far, the left has responded with "it's complicated!"
It's not. Let's take a look.
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) May 21, 2022
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And yet, under a deluge of both right-wing media and online vitriol, the preposterous notion that Depp is in the right has taken root. It's not due to any evidence, as was already shown in a British court. No, it's just because Depp's toxic supporters, through sheer belligerence, have willed their false narrative into the public understanding of the case. The social media toxicity has largely been dismissed by the press not as a backlash to #MeToo, but as celebrity worship run amok. But this story is also being driven by right-wing media figures who don't give a single hoot about "Pirates of the Carribean."
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As Melanie McFarland noted at Salon last month, Depp has become "the celebrity poster model" for the Fox News hysteria over an entirely fictional "war on masculinity." Last week it was revealed that the Daily Wire, which is shaping up to be a real competitor against Fox News, has also been spending thousands of dollars in social media ads bashing Heard.
Right-wing media is smart to invest this much in the false narratives defending Depp because misogyny is the perfect gateway to lead young white men towards a more expansive constellation of reactionary politics. Get them in the door with a story about how feminism and #MeToo have "ruined" women, and then hit them with a larger narrative about the "great replacement," "critical race theory," and other conspiracy theories the increasingly fascist right-wing media is using to radicalize their audiences.
RELATED: Boosted by Candance Owens, The Daily Wire spends thousands on ads to discredit Amber Heard: report
In the wake of the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York that left 10 people dead, there's been a great deal of attention paid to the "great replacement" conspiracy theory that inspired the alleged shooter, and how it's been mainstreamed by the right-wing press. On Tucker Carlson's popular Fox News show alone, the conspiracy theory was hyped on over 400 separate episodes. For understandable reasons — the shooter was targeting Black patrons of a grocery store — most of the discussion has focused on the racist paranoia driving the conspiracy theory that holds that shadowy "elites" are trying to "replace" white Christians with people of color.
Right-wing media is smart to invest this much in the false narratives defending Depp because misogyny is the perfect gateway to lead young white men towards a more expansive constellation of reactionary politics.
But "great replacement" is also a deeply misogynist conspiracy theory. These "elites" — who are either Jews or progressive leaders, depending on who is telling the story — are also said to have pushed white women out of their "natural" roles as homemakers and into the workforce, leading to lower birth rates and the supposed destruction of the white race. This aspect of the conspiracy theory was on full display at the Conservative Political Action Conference held in Hungary over the weekend, in which "traditional" family structures and curtailing reproductive rights were held up as strategies to fight back against this mythical war on white Christians.
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Anti-feminism makes good bait to pull young men deeper into authoritarian — and even fascist — politics.
Polling demonstrates that a distressingly large number of young men long for old-fashioned gender roles. A 2018 poll by Perry Undem, for instance, found that while most teenage girls wanted equality in the workplace and in the home, the majority of teenage boys preferred men to dominate in the workplace while women are stuck at home caring for the family. As feminist Jessica Valenti noted in a 2020 article, male support for female equality has actually gone down in recent years. Not only are young married men still foisting the majority of domestic duties on their wives, but the percentage of men who openly long to have a housewife rose from 17% in 1994 to a whopping 45% in 2014. In reaction, increasing numbers of women are turning their noses up to marriage, preferring to be single rather than be with men who don't respect them.
Once you've got these guys on board with lies painting feminism as a conspiracy against men, it's a short jump to convincing them feminism is also a conspiracy against the white race.
The reason men want inequality is, quite obviously, entirely selfish. Men reject gender equality because, duh, it sounds nice having a full-time unpaid servant and emotional support system at home, all for your benefit. But no one wants to believe they're a selfish jerk, especially to someone you're supposed to love, such as a real or even hypothetical wife. So a lot of men are open to narratives, however silly, about how it's feminists who are the bad guys. They long to hear that it's men who are the victims of a conspiracy of "selfish" women who supposedly use false accusations and other shady tactics. It's not true, of course, but we live in times where facts are increasingly discarded if they cut against a will to believe. Once you've got these guys on board with lies painting feminism as a conspiracy against men, it's a short jump to convincing them feminism is also a conspiracy against the white race.
RELATED: What trial? Johnny Depp is playing the role of a lifetime, pandering to fans outside the courtroom
The Depp/Heard trial is perfect fascist agitprop, which is why right-wing media cannot get enough. As anyone who has glanced at social media can attest, the trial has become an occasion for a staggering number of men to wallow in their false sense of victimization. Heard has become the scapegoat for all this male anger about women's independence and women's freedom. That it's laughably false to view Depp as the victim here clearly doesn't matter. Heard is an imperfect person, so misogynists can derail any discussion about the case with demands that Depp's detractors defend every single life choice that Heard has ever made. But mostly, Depp's victim status — and therefore the victim status of men generally — can be established through the sheer power of relentless repetition, drowning out all available facts. And once those young men have bought onto one self-pitying right-wing conspiracy theory, they have been softened up to accept all the rest of them.
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Herschel Walker argues with reporter Trump 'never said' election was stolen www.youtube.com
A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that those who engaged in an insurrection could be barred from running for office in the future. The decision comes from a challenge to Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who lost his election just a week ago.
A judge had previously ruled in Cawthorn's favor, citing an 1872 amnesty law passed by Congress. But the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling.
"To ask such a question is nearly to answer it," the court filing said. "Consistent with the statutory text and context, we hold that the 1872 Amnesty Act removed the Fourteenth Amendment’s eligibility bar only for those whose constitutionally wrongful acts occurred before its enactment. Accordingly, we reverse the district court’s grant of injunctive relief and remand for further proceedings."
The appeals court didn't weigh in on whether Cawthorn should be banned from running for office. "We express no opinion about whether Representative Cawthorn in fact engaged in ‘insurrection or rebellion’ or is otherwise qualified to serve in Congress,” the ruling stated.
They also said in the footnote that Cawthorn suggested that the issue didn't matter because he was going to lose anyway. The court argued that it did matter.
"Nevertheless, based on the record before us, this appeal is not currently moot in an Article III sense because a primary winner has not yet been certified and it does not appear the challengers have withdrawn their challenge," the ruling read.
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In the case of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), she wasn't charged with being involved in the attempt to overthrow the government. If she is charged in the future by the Justice Department and convicted, this ruling holds that she could be barred from running for office.
The same is true in Arizona, where a Maricopa County judge ruled that the petitioners didn't have the standing to challenge candidates in court. There is no law that gives individuals the private right of action to sue to stop them from running. It's unclear if that means any other entity could. That was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which withheld the ruling.
In North Carolina the law is different. According to the court, it allows "[a]ny qualified voter registered in the same district as the office for which [a] candidate has filed or petitioned” to file a challenge with the state board of elections asserting “that the candidate does not meet the constitutional or statutory qualifications for the office."
Arizona doesn't have that law on its books.
There were questions about whether former President Donald Trump disqualified himself from office by calling for a "Civil War" on his new social media site. Legal analyst Seth Abramson suggested that Trump's call bolsters an "already-strong case" that he should be disqualified for running for any future office.
Read the full court decision here.
NOW WATCH: Herschel Walker argues with reporter Trump 'never said' election was stolen
Herschel Walker argues with reporter Trump 'never said' election was stolen www.youtube.com
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