In a fascinating interview with Vox’s Sean Illing, Sykes described himself as:
“…the kind of person that actually bought the Weekly Standard and thought the National Review defined what the conservative movement was, at least until earlier this year.”
When asked to clarify if by “earlier this year,” he really meant what he has seen with this election cycle, Sykes didn’t holdback:
“It’s extremely disorienting and disillusioning and I haven’t made any secret of that. To realize, first of all, that you’re part of a movement that was not the movement you thought it was, that you’re aligned with people that you didn’t really understand you’re aligned with, and to realize that everything that you thought about the conservative intellectual infrastructure was really piecrust thin.
You thought you had this big principled movement and then suddenly along comes Donald Trump and you realize that it was just was just the pastry on top. So I think disorienting is a great term. Disillusioning is not too strong either.”
Sykes continued to make the case that with Trump’s nomination, the Republican party has solidified its standing as the anti-intellectual party:
“Well seriously, this is the party that just nominated Donald Trump, and we’re supposed to believe that. Watching a party that had eight years ago mocked Democrats for having low information voters and a cult of personality, and now it’s like we have the lowest information voters ever and the worst cult of personality that I’ve seen since the 1930s.”
To his credit, Sykes recognizes that he and many others who have created a cottage industry out of fanning right wing flames, are partly to blame:
“Oh, yes, absolutely. I’m different than Rush Limbaugh, but there’s no question that we got caught up in certain word salad, certain narratives that perhaps we did not fully understand how they were playing among our base.
I’m not trying to pose for holy pictures here, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years and critiques of the mainstream media were always a part of everything we did. Some of that critique is valuable, but it did lead to this nihilism that we have now.”
Saturday Night Live may have had Halloween weekend off but that doesn't mean it's not in the spooky spirit. The show uploaded a veritible highlight reel of Halloween-themed skits to YouTube on Friday featuring original characters like Drunk Uncle and Stefon as well as expert portrayals of Steve Harvey and Vincent Price. It's a howlin' good time.
10 Perfect Twitter Reactions to the Shocking Oregon Militia Verdict
The jury's decision left many scratching their heads.
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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A group of seven armed antigovernment protesters, led by brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were acquitted Thursday on charges of federal conspiracy stemming from a 2015 takeover of a federal wildlife sanctuary in Oregon.
The decision shocked many who watched the armed standoff play out last year; according to the New York Times, the jury was swayed by the occupiers’ insistence that they were protesting government overreach and did not actually pose a threat to the public. But for many, the jury’s acquittal reeks of white privilege. Some were reminded of the crackdown on tribal communities protesting the North Dakota Access pipeline.
Trae Crowder is the “Liberal Redneck.” He’s a comedian from Tennessee and he recorded a must-watch message for his fellow rednecks about Donald Trump. It’s hard to do it justice, just take a listen. Before you click play, be forewarned this message is loaded with (enjoyable) foul language.
“My mom was an addict, in and out of jail,” he remembers in a strong Southern accent. “She wasn’t sitting around with her girlfriends talking about Clinton foreign policy.”
Yet the 30-year-old Crowder–who is now a comedian known better by his stage name “The Liberal Redneck”–is still a product of his upbringing. His dad, who raised him, was the original liberal redneck, mainly because his brother, Crowder’s uncle, is gay.
“He was never going to get into all that regressive stuff that comes with being a conservative now-a-days,” Crowder says of his father. “It sucks that (gay rights) is even a political thing. Whenever that was brought up in school, I would get fired up about it; it was the first political issue I really got into.”
With the election less than two weeks away, HBO’s Bill Maher had a message for voters complaining that they are being forced to choose between the “lesser of two evils.”
“Grow the f*ck up,” the Real Time host suggested.
“Republicans have one path to this election and it’s ‘false equivalency,'” Maher explained. “They can’t deny Trump is horrible – it’s on tape. So they want voters to believe that Hillary is just as bad. And in pursuit of that goal they have a very powerful ally — lazy people.”
“People who like to say, ‘they’re all bad.’ Because when you say that, you don’t have to do any homework,” he continued. “Say, ‘they’re all the same,’ and you can sound justifiably jaded by the entire process when, really, you just don’t know anything.”
Turning to voters — and specifically mentioning millennials who are obsessed with “bullsh*t” trivia — who fail to educate themselves about the stark differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Maher lectured, “I am so tired of hearing that Hillary doesn’t seem genuine. Grow the fuck up.”
Despite having an A rating from Charity Watch, Republicans continue to make an issue out of the Clinton Foundation. Billionaire Mark Cuban appeared on Fox News to discuss the issue of Bill Clinton’s speaking fees going to the Clinton Foundation.
Host Neil Cavuto questioned whether Clinton’s $250,000 speaking fees were inappropriate. Cuban pointed out that the $250,000 was fairly average for an ex-president and pointed out that conservative icon Ronald Reagan made far more than that from speeches.
‘Look. You have to ask yourself, “What’s the market for a former president giving a speech, right?” So first of all, Ronald Reagan was paid more than a million dollars for speeches in 1989. He went to Japan and gave two speeches. Second of all, Bill Clinton made, I think it was $250K give or take, for a lot of speeches. I’ve made $250K for a bunch of speeches. For the most part, he gets paid a little more than I do, but the point is he was right inside the market. He wasn’t getting paid more or less than the market.’
Cavuto tried to make the argument that it wasn’t the amount of money Clinton made, but rather the supposed pay-to-play nature of the arrangement. However, Cuban quickly dismantled that argument by pointing out the lack of evidence for any illegal unethical activity.
‘…They’ve been investigated more than anybody. They’ve turned over all their emails. They’ve talked to everybody who’s ever emailed them and there’s been no support for — ‘
Cavuto then argued that the Clintons have not turned over their emails and that it has required multiple court orders in order to get the most recent release.
‘But Neil I really want to make this point. the FBI talked to everybody that she emailed. So whenever you email there’s two sides right? There’s the sender and the receiver.’
Cavuto then interrupted Cuban to ask whether the Clinton email controversy was a big deal to him. Cuban replied that it’s a non-event and he’s correct. The FBI has investigated Clinton and found no evidence of wrongdoing. People to her right and left have legitimate issues with Clinton regarding policy, but the email issue is nothing more than a distraction. A presidential election should be a discussion about the serious issues facing our country and not about petty controversies that have been investigated several times over.
You can check out the full interview for yourself:
When a Nebraska woman left in the early morning to go shopping with her six-month-old baby, she didn’t know that she would be bringing home more than just a bag of groceries.
After Shelby Lanning, a mother of two, dropped her oldest kiddo off at school, she went to pick up a few things from her local store. After she finished shopping, she returned to her vehicle to find a very unpleasant note left on her windshield by a Trump supporter:
On the same evening that police clashed with fervent protesters of a controversial oil pipeline in North Dakota, the ringleaders of another high-profile standoff in Oregon were acquitted of illegally occupying a federally-owned wildlife refuge.
In both cases Thursday night, demonstrators had been taking a stand and exercising their First Amendment rights over what they perceived to be an injustice that threatened their land rights, but that is about as far as the similarities go.
Here is how the developments concerning the two protests played out:
In North Dakota, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, environmental activists and various Native American groups have been protesting for months the four-state Dakota Access Pipeline, a crude oil pipeline which they say traverses culturally sacred sites and could contaminate the area's water supply.
The tribe has sued to block construction of the pipeline in the courts, but a federal judge and a subsequent appeals court denied the tribe's requests for an injunction to halt construction near its reservation. Tribal leaders have argued that they were never meaningfully consulted before permits were granted to the pipeline company. The pipeline company argued in court documents, however, that they followed a standard review process.
Thousands of people have camped out on the reservation and nearby federally-owned land to protest, including private property owned by Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners, that will build the pipeline. Energy Transfer CEO Kelcy Warren wrote that "concerns about the pipeline’s impact on the local water supply are unfounded," and that "multiple archaeological studies conducted with state historic preservation offices found no sacred items along the route."
Meanwhile, more than 1,000 miles away in Oregon, an armed group of mostly white protesters led by Ammon Bundy took a stand earlier this year against the federal use of land by taking over a federally-owned bird sanctuary, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in the rural, eastern part of the state. The protesters objected to the prison sentences given to Dwight and Steven Hammond, two ranchers who had been convicted of arson.
The Oregon protesters wanted the government to free the two ranchers and release publicly-owned land to local officials, according to The Associated Press. The protesters began their initial occupation on Jan. 2. At the time, ABC News referred to the protesters as "a group of militia members."
Bundy said the group's goal was to help local workers, including ranchers, miners and hunters, benefit from the land. The group wanted to assert that the federal government does not have the right to own or control land inside the state, according to Bundy.
Protesting Tactics
Protesters in North Dakota have been for the most part unarmed, and any acts of violence have been condemned by tribal leaders.
"We call on the thousands of water protectors who stand in solidarity with us against DAPL to remain in peace and prayer. Any act of violence hurts our cause and is not welcome here," according to a statement released yesterday by Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
Joye Braun, 47, who has been protesting the pipeline since April, told ABC News earlier this week that "we are completely unarmed, we have been praying, we have been singing, we have been dancing."
The Morton County Sheriff's Department in North Dakota did report that one woman, of the hundreds of protesters, was armed and fired three rounds at police officers. She was subsequently arrested last night.
Meanwhile, more than 30 guns were seized from the Oregon protesters following their standoff last winter, and an FBI agent testified that 16,636 live rounds and nearly 1,700 spent casings were found in their hideout, according to the AP.
Matt Mills McKnight/Getty Images
Anti-government protesters raise their arms in the air and shout "hands up don't shoot" outside the Harney County Courthouse on Feb. 1, 2016 in Burns, Oregon.more +
Law Enforcement Response
Law enforcement officials have taken markedly different approaches to the protesters.
In Oregon, a few days after the armed takeover of the federal land, Harney County Sheriff David Ward told local newspaper The Oregonian: “We're not amassing some army because we're looking for a fight." ABC News reported at the time of the standoff that the federal government was taking a "low key" approach to dealing with the militia group. Eventually a lengthy negotiations process was set up by authorities, but protesters stayed in control of the federal land for nearly 40 days.
The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge's manager told employees to stay home rather than confront armed strangers, according to the AP.
Most of the protesters in Oregon were eventually arrested on Jan. 26 during a police standoffduring which protester Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed. A few demonstrators remained until Feb. 11; all eventually surrendered. Late yesterday, a jury acquitted all seven defendants involved in the armed standoff of federal conspiracy and firearms possession charges.
In North Dakota, the Morton County Sheriff's Department public information officer said they were not disclosing the number of law enforcement officials they had assembled, but photos and video from the scene depict dozens of heavily armed officers clad in riot gear. The public information officer said they were using SWAT trucks and a LRAD, a long range acoustic device (often colloquially referred to as a sound cannon), used to disperse crowds by emitting a painful, high-pitched frequency sound.
Police also reportedly used tear gas on protesters and arrested 141 protesters on Thursday night, bringing the total number of arrests since mid-August up to 410 people, according to the Morton County Sheriff's Department. Police unleashed pepper spray and beanbags on protesters yesterday, according to the AP.
en the Raw Story visited the Bundy bunch inside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge they were calling for a revolution against the federal government. Rifle-toting supporters said, “ I’m here to fight for freedom and get our Constitution back,” and “I would support this to the death, literally.”
Now eight months after their occupation came to an end the government case has ended in a jury acquitting the two Bundy brothers and five other supporters on all charges but one, including the main one of conspiracy. The government failed to provethe Bundy Bunch “had engaged in an illegal conspiracy that kept federal workers — employees of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management — from doing their jobs.”
The jury’s logic is not known yet, but it is a double standard that almost certainly turns on race. If a group of heavily armed Muslim Americans or Black Lives Matter activists seized public facilities and land, the government would have rushed in with all guns blazing and anyone who survived would be locked up for life. The record of post-9/11 terror prosecutions is littered with hundreds of cases of entrapment, paid informants, and “fake terror plots.”
For more than a decade the feds have also prosecuted similarly flimsy cases against environmental, animal-rights, and Occupy Wall Street activists, known as the “Green Scare.” Numerous peaceful activists have been sentenced to prison for more than a decade for little more than conversations egged on by paid FBI provocateurs. Even in cases where violence was planned, no one was ever injured and it was often completely instigated and organized by the government.
But when it comes to the Bundys, they actively planned the illegal armed takeover. At least two months before the refuge occupation began Jan. 2, 2016, the Bundys visited local sheriff Dave Ward and warned him to prevent two local ranchers convicted of arson from going to federal prison. According to Ward, the Bundys said they would “bring hundreds of people to town [and] attempt to overpower or overthrow my authority as sheriff.”
Inside Malheur, in a two-hour conversation with Ammon Bundy in his pickup truck, when this reporter pointed out their intent was to spark a violent uprising against the government, he did not deny it. Militia members openly carried weapons on federal land, which is illegal, and the Raw Story witnessed the militia stealing and damaging government equipment, violating the law in tearing up sensitive archeological sites, and building barricades and bunkers for an apocalyptic showdown. The Bundys also set up a kangaroo court to indict, try, convict, and remove government officials from office.
Yet according to the jury the government did not prove a conspiracy. Meanwhile, halfway across the country in North Dakota, a huge force of police and private security are viciously attacking Native Americans peacefully protecting their land from the ravages of the oil and gas industry.
The Bundy case is more proof of the well-documentedracial bias embedded in the jury system. The notion that an armed militia with snipers stationed in the watchtower, blockading all road into the refuge and vowing to die for their cause did not impede federal workers from doing their job is as absurd as it sounds and is an indictment of the deep racial biases in America.
The silver lining is the Bundy brothers and their father still face trial for their violent confrontation in Nevada with government officials in 2014 over their refusal to pay $1 million in overdue grazing fees on federal lands.
The Bundy acquittal will embolden violent right-wing militias to seize other public lands, especially West of the Rockies where there is a movement funded by the Koch Brothers to undermine federal control of huge swaths of land.
Undoubtedly these violent militias will be aided and abetted by legions of Trump’s supporters calling for a “violent revolution” if Clinton wins the presidency as expected. The government’s hands-off approach toward the militia movement is a failure. This isn’t a call for more repression as used against Muslims, African-Americans, and left-wing activists. It’s a demand the government protect the public and its lands from the growing threat of right-wing terrorism.
THIS VERDICT IS SCARY!!!! White with guns and taking over Federal Properties is now OK!! (Only for White Folks though)
A jury’s quick acquittal of seven militants in Oregon on charges stemming from the armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge raised cries of racial bias and white privilege. The all-white jury took just six hours to find all of the defendants not guilty on all conspiracy charges despite the fact the armed takeover was live streamed to the world and authorities discovered huge caches of weapons and ammunition on the property.
Critics noted the irony of images of native protesters being maced and attacked over their peaceful protest on the very day the verdict was delivered. Many charged that if the militants had been Native American or black, they would have been killed, not acquitted.
In an exclusive interview with Lawrence, real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran details the time Donald Trump sued her and how she beat him in court. You won’t believe what she did after her court victory.
A team of scientists have revealed new research that seems to indicate intelligent aliens beyond planet Earth exist and are trying to communicate with others.
A paper titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" doesn't necessarily sound like a stunning discovery to most people, but the research paper published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific may turn out to be the first step in the quest to establish the presence of intelligent life beyond our solar system.
Consultant Jesse Benton of the pro-Trump Great America Super PAC was just caught on camera admitting that he and his associates have been conducting a voter suppression campaign targeting African-Americans and women.
“In Cleveland, if we can return Hillary to normal turnout levels … we can turn her to regular turnout levels she’s gonna lose about 60,000 votes in that area – that’s dead heat. So we have a voter suppression campaign quite frankly, targeting African-Americans, and sort of suburban moms, just bad stuff about Hillary, just trying to take their taste for her away.”
Benton is the same Trump operative who was convicted of purchasing the vote of an Iowa state Senator and was recently busted attempting to funnel $2 million in illegal donations from a Chinese donor who turned out to be an undercover Telegraph reporter.
The Donald Trump campaign has been accusing anybody who dares to speak against them – the Clinton campaign, the media, polling organizations – of “rigging” the election against them. But time and time again it’s been obvious that the Republican Party has been the one behind the scenesworking to disenfranchise the American voter – especially non-white, male voters.
Since the Republicans can’t win this game, they have elected to change the rules instead, by passing restrictive voter ID laws that disenfranchise a large number of voters – especially minorities – from exercising their right to vote, closing down polling stations.
They justify this in an underhanded appeal to “protecting the integrity” of our democracy by waving the imaginary specter of “voter fraud” over the nation’s head. This is an entirely manufactured crisis that does not exist, but has been used to deprive thousands of potential Democratic voters of their rights. The Republican Party is an enemy of American democracy, and we must punish them for it at the ballot box.
Former House Speaker — and current Trump supporter — Newt Gingrich flew off the handle Tuesday night after Fox News host Megyn Kelly reminded him that he is backing a “sexual predator.”
During the combative 7-minute interview, Kelly kept pointing out that Trump is losing badly in the polls — with a terse Gingrich batting away the numbers and sarcastically suggesting that maybe they should all “just go home.”
After the conservative broadcaster brought up the sexual assault allegations against Trump, Gingrich blew up.
“I’m sick and tired of people like you using language that’s inflammatory that’s not true!” Gingrich blurted. “When you use the words, you took a position. And I think it’s very unfair of you to do that, Megyn!”
A nonplussed Kelly responded, “Your defensiveness on this may speak volumes.”
“You wanna go back through the tapes of your show recently?” Gingrich snapped at Kelly. “You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy! That’s what I get out of watching you tonight!”
The three Fox & Friends cohosts were in for a rude awakening Sunday when they tried to coopt Martin O’Malley into attacking Hillary Clinton and the “rigged” process that got her nominated. Instead, O’Malley shredded Donald Trump so thoroughly that the cohosts were obviously dumbfounded and flummoxed.
I’ve long said that the key to being a Democratic or liberal guest on Fox is to reframe the discussion your way and to stay on offense. O’Malley was a textbook case in how to do it. And, by the way, this was not the first time he aced a Fox appearance.
The segment was clearly designed to do Trump a solid by suggesting that a Wikileaks release shows that O’Malley is at least partly on the same “rigged election” page as the Friends' guy, Trump.
First, we saw an excerpt of a February, 2016 email from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta asking for former Democratic presidential candidate O’Malley’s support. Then we saw an excerpt of O’Malley’s response: “Americans feel their own politicians have rigged the economic opportunity game against them.”
“Your email sounds a lot like it could have been written by someone like Donald Trump,” cohost Pete Hegseth started hopefully. “What led you to write that and why does that draw you to Hillary Clinton?”
O’Malley took control from his first answer.
“All of us” were talking during the primary about how “the system was not serving people in our country as it once did,” O’Malley began. He quickly added that the solutions for that are the ones that Hillary Clinton is offering. He named “a return to common-sense wage and labor policies” and “affordable college” as two examples. His third example started in on Trump: “Making sure those at the very top, like Donald Trump, actually start paying taxes again and paying their fair share to invest in our country.”
Cohost Tucker Carlson tried his hand at using O’Malley to smear Clinton. “Isn’t Hillary Clinton, herself, the embodiment of the system you’re decrying?” Carlson asked. He was referring to the fact that she and her husband have gotten very wealthy from their connections to power.
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