October 18, 2024

The Stuttering Lede, Oct. 18th, 2024

18 days until we learn if we can stop fascism

Life begins on the other side of despair. Jean-Paul Sartre

Elections 2024

• Trump is basically just doing his rally speech but the Al Smith dinner audience is laughing at his lines like it's supposed to be comedy. Never forget how they have normalized fascism.

• Good for Vice President Harris to highlight Gen. Milley calling Trump a fascist and Trump's "enemy within" comments.

• An 81-year-old Georgia woman says she voted for the first time in her life yesterday. She said she never voted before because her husband did not think she should. He died last year.

• Elon Musk: "There isn't any one puppet master behind Biden and that apparatus. Biden is not in charge. Kamala is not in charge. They just replaced the Biden puppet with the Kamala puppet. You can tell if the teleprompter breaks they start looping. There's many puppet masters. "I'd love to see the crossover of puppet masters and the Epstein client list." Elon reprises Fascist rhetoric. The "Jews" as secret controllers was a staple of Fascism. Bannon organized a "Globalist Puppet Masters" conference a few years ago.

• Why does Trump sound like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini? Because he thinks it will work.

• Trump admits he's demanding Rupert Murdoch to stop running 'negative ads' on Fox News.

• Trump questions why the Civil War wasn't settled before it started, saying "Lincoln was probably a great president although I've always said, why wasn't that settled?"

• A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet.

• Trump's entire career has been built on lies.

• A Mystery $30 Million Wave of Pro-Trump Bets Has Moved a Popular Prediction Market.

• Billionaire Elon Musk spoke and answered questions for a little over an hour in Delaware County, PA yesterday, painting an apocalyptic portrait of a crime-ridden, 'Mad Max' style nation that would worsen under Democratic control.

• We've been through eugenics before, and it has been thoroughly discredited as hateful, xenophobic pseudoscience. Trump's "bad genes" rhetoric is incredibly dangerous and profoundly wrong.

Politics

• Lucy Connolly, wife of Tory councillor, who posted expletive-ridden twitter posts on day three girls were killed in Southport is jailed. Worth noting that a tweet which earned its poster 31 months in jail for incitement of violence was deemed by Twitter to not be a violation of its rules. Which definitely says something about the way Twitter is managed these days.

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will warn in a speech that the type of tariffs planned by former President Donald Trump, if he were to retake the White House, would reignite inflation and harm the economy.

• Trump ally Laura Loomer launches disgusting homophobic attack on Pete Buttigieg, saying he's not "a real father" and calling his husband "a freak."

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• Man says he was exercising his 2nd amendment rights to threaten FEMA employees with firearms.

• Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith are tag-teaming Trump today, and I'm here for it.

• The European Union is considering imposing sanctions on Tucker Carlson, potentially including a travel ban, accusing him of acting as a propagandist for Vladimir Putin.

• Which is worse - that Trump bilked the U.S. government or that he gave a Chinese company a discount.

• Just ask these residents why their streets were named after Confederate generals in the 1950s and 60s. Ask them to do a little critical historical thinking. What was happening across the country? How was Confederate iconography being deployed across the South?

• USPS is accused of retaliation after employee raised concerns about racism.

• Sarah Kendzior interview on the election, music, writing and evil tech lords.

Ukraine/Russia

• The Prime Minister of Canada says under oath that RT, which the U.S. State Department alleges is engaged in "information operations, covert influence, and military procurement," is funding Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson.

Middle East

• Israel has likely killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar during a strike in Gaza.

• US can’t decide if Israel is blocking aid.

• Doctors have offered overwhelming evidence about Palestinian civilians being systematically butchered. What does it say about the Western media that their testimonies are not centre stage?

Tech

• On Musk’s racism and antisemitism, free speech and leveraging Twitter to help elect Nazis.

• 'The world’s biggest trade publisher has changed the wording on its copyright pages to help protect authors’ intellectual property from being used to train AI tools'.

• In addition to union-busting, Kroger will now use facial recognition to surge pricing!!

• Elon Musk has dropped $75M to boost Donald Trump, whose campaign field operation is smaller than 2020. There are signs of growing pains, and Rs are worried it might not live up to billing—which could make the difference in a close race.

• A South African can come to America for our world-class universities, make $250B off U.S. capitalism, then travel to blue-collar towns to say the nation is falling apart.

• Elon Musk quietly created two new entities this month — one called "United States of America Inc," which names him as its sole director.

• It would be nice if Dominion won Twitter in the coming defamation settlement.

Women Rights

• Republican war on women: Red states want to raise the teen birth rates. The new mifepristone lawsuit claims that mifepristone is suppressing teen birth rates, which injures plaintiff states by depriving said states of population increases - as if teen girls are inherently meant to serve the state as baby factories.

• John Hopkins Study finds that Texas Abortion Ban led to 216 additional infant deaths in 2022.

• A great and pertinent article on Black women and academia.

• This story is one of the most disturbing I've ever covered. It's about how the views of a deeply weird ideological sect affected science, medicine and the media, with devastating impacts on patients.

Climate Change

Education

• University of Connecticut is reviewing low-enrollment programs amid budget deficit. Majors like philosophy, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and animal science are on the chopping block.

Misc.

• This new Donald Trump — Stormy Daniels story is déjà vu all over again.

• Tow truck needed to haul away bloody remains of massive 12-foot shark that washed up on Cape Cod beach.

Humor

For those either too young or too old to have experienced it, Maxim was the answer to question "what if Axe Body Spray were a magazine."