My latest piece at @mmfa:

Fox
News keeps trying to justify GOP efforts to object to the Electoral College vote by pointing to the number of people who think the election was stolen (after spending 2 months telling their audiences that it was

This is Fox, basically: https://t.co/dkc0J8Dviw
Another comparison to the role Fox is playing here via one of my favorite Onion articles: https://t.co/7R5PsQ8xvT
Or maybe a human centipede, but with the front connected back to the end for a loop of shit-eating. Yeah, that's it. That's the role Fox is playing here.
But seriously, check out the *more than 2 months* of Fox-enabled conspiracy theories (a partial list): https://t.co/STD1vheqU4
https://t.co/ZfqbWncekD
https://t.co/haivFSEztO
https://t.co/51fYDdcxet
https://t.co/ZBGDh2IkZs
https://t.co/ElP1TxOl8j
https://t.co/F9BZrLL53m
https://t.co/0kppjxyPLs
https://t.co/C8ZdCa1RLQ
https://t.co/WRc4zEdfXT
https://t.co/tC1VgFTdnw
https://t.co/Lt5hwatqi3
https://t.co/MKTYbrFlIc
https://t.co/Lc819P581T
https://t.co/isMAsmSSi0
https://t.co/Q5PehkHPZj
https://t.co/tZN0CzH9sg
https://t.co/rru2ZBAP5M
https://t.co/QI1lHwM2AU
https://t.co/M70PxE141Q
https://t.co/B4euDlyeJN
Fox is the dad in the "I learned it by watching you!" anti-drug PSA https://t.co/4MML4lM056
But check out this example from last month:

* Fox promotes the false "Georgia suitcase" conspiracy theory

* Fox reports that it wasn't true...

* And then Fox promotes the story again https://t.co/IUs7shC9pA
It doesn't help their case or Trump's case that they have spent *years* scaremongering about widespread voter fraud that didn't exist. https://t.co/D4uYQWE9k2
And it certainly doesn't help their case that when Trump got angry that he didn't win the popular vote in 2016, he devoted government resources to create a "voting integrity commission" run by Trump toadies who couldn't find any evidence of fraud https://t.co/epGfcl2yuq
The problem with all of this has been that mainstream news organizations and tech companies are way, way, way too afraid of upsetting Trump or Republicans.
"But I FEEL like social media is biased against conservatives!" was enough of an argument to actually get Facebook to bend over backwards to specifically boost right wing content. Working the refs works.
And it's been Trump's go-to move throughout his presidency. "This is the greatest economy ever," he'd say when it objectively was not. "I built the wall!" he'd say when he didn't. "Mexico is paying for it," when we were paying for his goofy pet project.
For the most part, news organizations took him at his work and would just print what he said. Worst case scenario is that they'd run some sort of mealy mouthed "both sides" piece.
(This is exactly what Josh Hawley did when he *lied* about "antifa thugs" attacking his house or whatever... it's on tape! It didn't happen that way! Still, WaPo ran a story giving him the benefit of the doubt.)
So really, why *wouldn't* they try this? These clowns haven't come up with a single bit of evidence to support any of their insane claims. Look at how relatively chill mainstream media is about all of this, treating it like a totally normal thing to do.
Republicans face zero consequences for their actions. Zero. Chuck Todd still invites them on Meet the Press, lobs them softballs for a few minutes, and then *thanks them* for coming on the show.
So while this is a Fox News problem (and an OAN/Newsmax/etc. problem), it's also a CNN problem, an NBC problem, a CBS problem, an ABC problem, an AP problem, a New York Times problem.

It's the mainstream outlets that created the conditions for all of this.
And what have they taken away from this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So while we watch as more than 100 House Republicans try to overturn the election results tomorrow, let's all remember that it goes back beyond right-wing media.
And just like that... another headline that shows just how much mainstream media have failed. “Political calculus?” Give me a break.

More from Parker Molloy

If you're curious what Trump's defense will look like, all you have to do is turn on Fox News. My latest at @mmfa

The tl;dr is that for years right-wing media have been excusing Trump's violent rhetoric by going, "Yes, but THE DEMOCRATS..." and then bending themselves into knots to pretend that Dems were calling for violence when they very, very clearly weren't.

And in fact, this predates Trump.

In 2008, Obama was talking about not backing down in the face of an ugly campaign. He said "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

https://t.co/i5YaQJsKop


That quote was from the movie The Untouchables. And there's no way anybody reading that quote in good faith could conclude that he was talking about actual guns and knives. But it became a big talking point on the

In 2018, Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder was speaking to a group of Georgia Democrats about GOP voter suppression. He riffed on Michelle Obama's "When they go low, we go high" line from the 2016 DNC.
This is a good piece by @AaronBlake. I've been scratching my head over claims that there was something in this trove of emails that implicated Fauci in something bad because pretty much everything matched up with what was being said publicly at whatever time the emails were from.


One thing that's occurred to me over the past few years is that there's a sense that the mere *existence* of emails is seen as evidence of wrongdoing, which is obviously nonsense.

It played out that way when it came to the DNC and Podesta emails in 2016, the Hunter Biden e-mails in 2020, these e-mails in 2021. It wasn't that there was much that was damning in, say, the DNC emails that helped sink Clinton's candidacy, but just their existence ...

... gave off a sense of corruption/scandal/etc., that weighed more heavily on people's perception of them as the result of them taking the form of a leak/data dump.

And it's kind of similar with the Fauci e-mails (which weren't leaked, but were FOIAed).

Anyway, again, @AaronBlake's post is a good and methodical breakdown of some of the bizarre claims being thrown about. If there's anything we didn't already know contained in those e-mails, I haven't seen it.
This is what pisses me off about the constant bad faith victimhood crap people on the right do:

1. They wildly misrepresent something innocuous (no, Pelosi did not “ban” anything).

2. They come up with a “gotcha” example of hypocrisy... that relies on their misrepresentation.


This same exact nonsense gets trotted out constantly. “Oh, so now we’re not allowed to call ourselves husbands or mothers or uncles or aunts or men or women?! Outrage!” But no one at all is doing that, nor have they ever been doing that.

Yet the right loses its shit over this every few months. A lot of the time it’ll be something like... a lawmaker will introduce a bill that would tweak applications for marriage licenses to say “spouse 1” and “spouse 2” instead of just “husband/wife” because the status quo ...

... will have been creating actual legal issues for gay couples who then have to put something false on legal documents designating one of them as “wife.”

It’ll be something like that, just meant to fix an issue that has no material impact on 99% of people.

And the right, like clockwork, will lose their minds over it as though anyone is trying to “ban” the concept of someone being a husband or a wife or a man or a woman or whatever.

From a few years back, here’s Bill O’Reilly doing that
This is what happens when the Trump cultists refuse to acknowledge anything outside their extremely insular bubble: they can’t grasp that the majority of the country thinks he sucks and voted him out.


Not once in 4 years of Gallup’s 3-day tracking of Trump’s approval rating was it ever higher than 49%.

He was the least popular incumbent since Carter to run for re-election. It’s not shocking that he got his ass kicked in the election. https://t.co/7BSCQR2vI2


But if you do nothing other than consume conservative media, you’d be under the false impression that he’s popular, that his ideas are popular, and that the people who oppose him are a small group of haters.

In Gallup’s last update before the election, Trump had a -6 net approval rating. The last time it was a net positive was in May when it was +1.


And here’s how you get numbers like that: you do absolutely nothing to try to win over people who aren’t already part of your base. Look at those numbers among independents.

More from News

.@louiscasiano from @FoxNews reached out to ask if we are actually planning on contaminating the hotel rooms of Proud Boys with bedbugs. The short answer is no, we don't even know if that's possible. But here's our full response.


That post was clearly satire. We have no idea how one would actually go about the activity that was suggested.

What is not satire are the numerous death threats that were sent to us by Trump supporters in the lead up to the November election.

Here are a few tweets depicting detailed and credible death threats that you didn’t ask for comment on:
https://t.co/UiI12M0Aey.
https://t.co/PPe75XWImX
https://t.co/4Ia8659wK8
https://t.co/n5ov6R8Gyh


Each of those tweets includes the email address of the sender. We wish you luck in reaching out to them for comment.

Further, the hate crimes committed by the Proud Boys during their last visit to DC were not satire. A marauding band of drunk white nationalists stormed through our city, tearing down and burning religious symbols declaring respect for Black lives.

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