All posts tagged "Matt Drudge"

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told a group of college students Friday morning that the "only hope" for U.S. electoral politics is Republican Sen. Rand Paul (KY) and his brand of Libertarian politics. According to the right-wing college news site CampusReform.com, the international fugitive and accused acquaintance rapist also heaped praise on right-wing blog mogul Matt Drudge, calling him a "media innovator."

While Matt Drudge cranks out a constant flow of propaganda to convince his easily-bewildered audience that there's some kind of black-on-white race war going on, CNN is reporting an actual hate crime in Mississippi. Warning: while the video isn't gory or anything, they do run surveillance footage of the murder.  

Alex Pareene at Salon has an excellent report on how Matt Drudge has spent the past few years concocting a picture of America as one torn apart by a crime-based race war, where random black people are "rising up" and attacking and killing white people.  If you, like me, find this image strange (including going to your window to make sure that so far, it's mostly birds chirping and moms pushing strollers, and not in fact mob violence), then you're not wrong!  Crime levels, especially violent crime, continue to cascade downwards in the U.S.  Overall, the nation has become a gentler one, at least within its borders. (The argument about our imperial adventures is outside the bounds of this discussion.)  I would even argue that the one area where crime is going up---domestic terrorism---is partially a response to the other trends in the U.S.  A lot of right wing extremists look at the growing emphasis on non-violence in the U.S. and feel like it's emasculating and turn more violent and gun-loving in response. 

Let me get right wing punditry's arguments straight here. It's right and good to fire Dave Weigel from the Washington Post for making private criticisms of a single individual who had personally fucked him over, so long as the individual insulted was conservative. But it's wrong to fire Juan Williams for making public statements implying that millions of people who are innocent of any crimes are potential terrorists because they share a faith that's different from most of conservative America?

I was going to post on the newest fucked up revelations about the Sharron Angle campaign, but right now I'm so fucking pissed about this whole situation with Dave Weigel resigning and Ezra Klein shutting down Journolist, I'm going to post on that instead. My thoughts are scattershot, so instead of even attempting to flow them together, I'm just going with old-fashioned numbering.

What I find fascinating about the wingnuts stoking fears about a one world currency is how it's a classic example of how the rich and powerful that conservatism exists for are exploiting the paranoid but often powerless. Having read Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, I'm aware of how currency trading is used a) as another fancy way for rich people to make more money and b) to punish errant countries for perceived slights against capitalism and white supremacy. I'm sure there's many reasons to oppose it, some good and some bad, but it's incredibly relevant that the currency market is used by the powerful to control the not-powerful.