Funny events in anti-woke world

BrawlMan

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Guy needs a decent decking.

Good on the store lady handling it calmly like that.
Yeah, the insecure dickwad needs a Double Dragon style knee bash to the face.

I give major props to the lady in the employees working there. I know it ain't easy to deal with jackasses like him.
 

BrawlMan

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Here's the thing that gets me. He planned this, recorded how it actually turned out, uploaded the minutes long video, and (assumedly) shared it online all without realizing how absolutely moronic it makes him look. How does one even get to that level of (lack of) self-awareness? And who exactly are his audience that are cheering him on for "owning the libs" in such a pathetic manner?
I know I just checked YouTube comments for the video, and most of the people in the comment sections are mocking him for being a complete dumbass and jackass. So there's at least that.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — For nearly 10 years, Joseph Moore lived a secret double life.

At times the U.S. Army veteran donned a white robe and hood as a hit man for the Ku Klux Klan in North Florida. He attended clandestine meetings and participated in cross burnings. He even helped plan the murder of a Black man.

However, Moore wore something else during his years in the klan – a wire for the FBI. He recorded his conversations with his fellow klansmen, sometimes even captured video, and shared what he learned with federal agents trying to crack down on white supremacists in Florida law enforcement.

One minor mistake, one tell, he believed, meant a certain, violent death.

“I had to realize that this man would shoot me in the face in a heartbeat,” Moore said in a deep, slow drawl. He sat in his living room recently amid twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, remembering a particularly scary meeting in 2015. But it was true of many of his days.


Before such meetings, he would sit alone in his truck, his diaphragm heaving with the deep breathing techniques he learned as an Army-trained sniper.

The married father of four would help the federal government foil at least two murder plots, according to court records from the criminal trial for two of the klansmen. He was also an active informant when the FBI exposed klan members working as law enforcement officers in Florida at the city, county and state levels.

Today, he and his family live under new names in a Florida subdivision of manicured lawns where his kids play in the street. Geese wander slowly between man-made lakes. Apart from testifying in court, the 50-year-old has never discussed his undercover work in the KKK publicly. But he reached out to a reporter after The Associated Press published a series of stories about white supremacists working in Florida’s prisons that were based, in part, on records and recordings detailing his work with the FBI.


“The FBI wanted me to gather as much information about these individuals and confirm their identities,” Moore said of law enforcement officers who were active members of or working with the klan.

“From where I sat, with the intelligence laid out, I can tell you that none of these agencies have any control over any of it. It is more prevalent and consequential than any of them are willing to admit.”

The FBI first asked Moore to infiltrate a klan group called the United Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK in rural north Florida in 2007. At klan gatherings, Moore noted license plate numbers and other identifying information of suspected law enforcement officers who were members.


Moore said he noted connections between the hate group and law enforcement in Florida and Georgia. He said he came across dozens of police officers, prison guards, sheriff deputies and other law enforcement officers who were involved with the klan and outlaw motorcycle clubs.

While operating inside this first klan group, Moore alerted the feds to a plot to murder a Hispanic truck driver. Then, he says, he pointed the FBI toward a deputy with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, Wayne Kerschner, who was a member of the same group.

During Moore’s years in the United Northern and Southern Knights, the FBI also identified a member of the klan cell working for the Fruitland Park, Florida, police department. Moore said he’d provided identifying information that was useful in that case.

His years as an informant occurred during a critical time for the nation’s domestic terrorism efforts. In 2006, the FBI had circulated an intelligence assessment about the klan and other groups trying to infiltrate law enforcement ranks.

“White supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement,” the FBI wrote. The assessment said some in law enforcement were volunteering “professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.”

The FBI did not answer a series of questions sent by the AP about Moore’s work as a confidential informant.

CREATING A CHARACTER

Moore was not a klansman before working for the FBI, he said. He said he joined because the government approached him, and asked for his help. As a veteran and Army-trained sniper, he said he felt that if his country asked him to protect the public from domestic terrorists, he had a duty to do so. He saw himself, he said, as a safety net between the violent extremists and the public.

He said he never adopted their racist ideology. To keep a lifeline to his true character, Moore claims to have never used racial slurs while in character — even as his klan brethren tossed them around casually. On FBI recordings reviewed by the AP, he was never heard using racial slurs like his former klan brothers.


But he also acknowledges that successful undercover work required him to change into a wholly different person so that he could convince his klan brothers that he was one of them.

“I laid out a character that had been overseas. That had received medals in combat. That was proven. That had special operations experience — more experience than I had. But someone that they would feel confident would be a useful asset to the organization at a much higher level,” Moore said.

It worked, and Moore was given high-level access and trust.

“If you’re not credible, if you’re not engaged on all levels, you don’t get to go home to your family. So you have to jump all in in order to keep you and your family safe,” he said.

It also required Moore to lie — to his wife, to her parents, to everyone. Nobody could know what he was doing. But eventually, Moore’s wife became suspicious of his activities, and he cracked. He told her and her parents what he was doing.

“You can’t tell them. And they continue to probe because they want to know what’s going on in your life. So there’s this concern that you have to lie to your own family and I didn’t want to be lying to my family,” he said.

Moore was also being treated for bipolar disorder and severe anxiety, which he’d gotten under control with medications. But given his struggles with mental illness, his wife didn’t immediately believe him. He’d eventually take her with him to a few klan gatherings, a decision he regrets because it put her at risk.

When the FBI agents with whom he worked discovered that his wife knew, they ended the relationship with the agency, and Moore sought additional mental and physical health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Still, after some time away, the FBI would come back to him and recruit him for his second mission.

THE GRAND KNIGHT HAWK

In 2013, an FBI agent who’d worked with Moore during his first stint as an informant recruited him again. This time he was asked to infiltrate the Florida chapter of a national group called the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Within a year of becoming “naturalized,” he’d become a Grand Knight Hawk of the “klavern” based in rural north central Florida. He was in charge of security and internal communications, and because of his military background, he was the go-to guy for violence.


It was at a cross-burning ceremony in December 2014 that Charles Newcomb, the “Exalted Cyclops” of the chapter, pulled him aside to discuss a scheme to kill a Black man. Warren Williams was a former inmate who’d gotten into a fight with one of their klan brothers, a correctional officer named Thomas Driver. Driver, corrections Sgt. David Moran and Newcomb wanted Williams dead.

Moore alerted the FBI and was approved to make secret recordings over the next few months. By this time, he’d become enmeshed in Newcomb’s life: They drank together, hung out at barbecues, and talked about life’s problems. This allowed Moore to get close enough to record the three current and former Florida correctional officers as they planned Williams’ murder. He captured discussions of the murder plot that would lead to criminal convictions for the three klansmen.

“And this wasn’t the only person that they wanted to target,” said Moore. “There were other people in the community that they wanted to target. But this was the one that we could build a case on.”

Over his decade inside, Moore said his list of other law enforcement officers tied to the klan grew. The links, he said, were commonplace in Florida and Georgia, and easier to identify once he was inside.

“I was on track to uncover more activity in law enforcement, but the immediate threat to the public with the murder plot was a priority,” Moore said. “And I was only one person. There was only so much I could do.”

Moore said the three current and former prison guards implicated in the murder plot case operated among a group of other officer-klan members at the Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler, Florida, a prison where new inmates are processed and given health checks. He said the officers he knew were actively recruiting at the prison.

Florida’s Department of Corrections said that’s not true.

“Every day more than 18,000 correctional officers throughout the state work as public servants, committed to the safety of Florida’s communities. They should not be defamed by the isolated actions of three individuals who committed abhorrent and illegal acts several years prior,” the department said in an emailed statement.

Spokeswoman Michelle Glady has told the AP the agency found no evidence of a wider membership by extremist white supremacist groups, or a systemic problem. She said every allegation of wrongdoing is investigated by the department’s inspector general.

“That statement by the state is not accurate based on the facts,” said Moore, who asserts he saw evidence of a more pervasive problem than the state is publicly acknowledging. He said he gave the FBI information about other active white supremacists who were working as state prison guards and at other law enforcement agencies. He said he also provided information about klansmen applying to be state prison guards.

After testifying in the murder conspiracy case against the klansmen he’d spent years working with, Moore’s work with the FBI ended. He’d been publicly identified, and in 2018 he began life under a new name.

By then the work had taken an enormous toll on his mental and physical health. He says the character of Joe Moore, Grand Knight Hawk of the KKK, had to develop a kinship and almost familial relations with those he was investigating in order to make it out alive.

But he lost close friends, he said, who were angry that he had claimed fraudulent military honors as part of his alter ego.


Today Moore is worried that the men he helped put into prison know where he is and are looking for revenge. They’re all due out in a few years.

Moore has installed motion-detecting surveillance cameras outside the home that allow him to monitor any activity, and carries a gun everywhere he goes.

He said, at this point, he believes coming out of the shadows and publicly discussing his story is the best way to protect himself and his family.

“We have had to change our names. We have tried to move, we have had our address placed in confidentiality. However, there are people that have investigative capacities that have tracked us, they’ve uncovered our names,” Moore said. In recent months, people connected to the klan have appeared at his house, he said. Moore alerted the FBI and filed a report with the local sheriff’s office.

Moore also does not want his work, and those of other confidential informants who put their lives on the line to help expose domestic extremists, to have been in vain.

He said he wants Florida’s corrections and law enforcement leaders to conduct systemwide investigations to root out white supremacists and other violent extremists.

“If you want to know why people don’t trust the police, it’s because they have a relative or friend that they witness being targeted by an extremist who happens to have a badge and a gun. And I know as a fact that this has occurred. I stopped a murder plot of law enforcement officers,” said Moore.
 

AnxietyProne

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Pure Bloods....
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Conservatives using Harry Potter terms. This is where we're at.

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Wouldn't be so funny if I hadn't literally just gotten back from Christmas shopping...

This one, I ain't got no comment. Don't need it.
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XsjadoBlayde

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Pure Bloods....


Conservatives using Harry Potter terms. This is where we're at.

Wouldn't be so funny if I hadn't literally just gotten back from Christmas shopping...

This one, I ain't got no comment. Don't need it.
Best prepare yourself, there are such countless, sweet sights yet to see...


Using audio from the 2007 film version of The Transformers, the TikTok users are picturing themselves climbing atop or striding toward various things, facing away from the camera. “I am Optimus Prime,” the voiceover intones, “and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars. We are here. We are waiting.” The videos are hashtagged with a mixture of anti-vaccine hashtags like “#unvaccinated” and others, in a bid to have them appear on users’ “For You” pages and get more views. The most-viewed video has nearly half a million likes thus far.



There are actually two ways to read the Optimus Prime videos, and it’s not totally clear which one any given TikTok user believes. The first option is that they’re saying the vaccine will soon kill everyone who takes it (many of the videos’ text boxes refer to “unvaccinated survivors”). Some versions of the claim state that each person who has received the vaccine will die in “three years, as a generous estimate,” per one video making the rounds on TikTok. That messaging isn’t just confined to TikTok, of course: The conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and other elites are trying to depopulate the world through vaccines has been spreading in anti-vax circles practically since the pandemic started. Before that, vaccines were often falsely held out as part of a depopulation scheme or a “death plan.” The Nation of Islam, for instance, has urged its members since the 1960s not to accept vaccinations; Minister Louis Farrakhan and other top NOI leaders have renewed that claim around the COVID vaccines. Needless to say, the world’s population has not been decimated by any previous vaccine and this one isn’t any different; COVID, though, has thus far killed a staggering 3 million people worldwide.

The other way to read the Optimus Prime TikToks is that people are trying to position themselves as lone, courageous holdouts in a world full of vaccinated sheeple. The Optimus Prime videos are part of a larger genre: Other users have depicted themselves duck-lipping for the camera as Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” plays in the background, in what appears to be a bit of an online singles bar for people who hate vaccines and love Under Armour, Trump hats, pro-police T-shirts, and abundant self-tanner. Those videos are often hashtagged “#experiment” or #eua (“emergency use authorization”).

They’re playing into the false claim that COVID vaccines aren’t “real” vaccines, but “experimental treatments” granted an emergency use authorization by the FDA, the reasons for which are easy to find the moment you click away from TikTok. The false claim that COVID vaccines are rushed, “experimental,” or somehow unsafe has been promoted by everyone from anti-vax social media influencers to state legislators like influential Texas State Senator Bob Hall.

😬
 
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Trunkage

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XsjadoBlayde

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Not fucking around.

It's been nearly a year since the United States suffered an unprecedented attack on constitutional democracy.

When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump to a second term.

Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt, it was fueled by what's known as the "Big Lie": the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than 7 million votes.

Many are warning that over the past year, that "big lie" of a stolen election has grown more entrenched and more dangerous.

"I've never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the 'big lie,' " says election law expert Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine.

"This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States," Hasen says. "I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we're not too late already."


A "big lie" with roots in history

In rallies across the country, Trump continues to hammer on the fiction that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Speaking at a rally in Georgia in September, Trump trumpeted his familiar, baseless claim that the election was "corrupt" and "rigged."

"I have no doubt that we won, and we won big," Trump said. "The headlines claiming that Biden won are fake news — and a very big lie."

A couple of weeks later, he repeated the fiction at a rally in Iowa. "We didn't lose," he insisted to a crowd that rewarded him with chants of "Trump won!"

By inverting the narrative, attempting to slough off the "big lie" and pin it instead on his opponents, Trump exploited an age-old tactic, says Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder.

"Part of the character of the 'big lie' is that it turns the powerful person into the victim," he says. "And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it's a promise for the future."

Snyder, author of the books The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, has spent years studying the ways tyrants skewer truth. Snyder points to Hitler's original definition of the "big lie" in his manifesto, Mein Kampf and the ways he used it to blame Jews for all of Germany's woes.

"The lie is so big that it reorders the world," Snyder says. "And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf."



A lie that's become embedded in public opinion

Over the past year, Trump's lie that election fraud cost him the White House has become firmly anchored in public opinion.

According to a CNN poll conducted this summer, fully 36% of Americans do not believe that President Biden legitimately won the election. Among Republicans, that number leaps to 78%.

In an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll conducted in October, just 34% of Republicans say they trust that elections are fair, while 75% of Republicans say Trump has a legitimate claim that there were "real cases of fraud that changed the results." Just 2% of Democrats agreed with that statement.

What's more, says Timothy Snyder, "the 'big lie' is not just in people's minds. It's also now in the law books."

Snyder points to the raft of new laws passed in Republican-led states that restrict voting. Over the past year, at least 19 states have passed laws limiting ballot access.

In addition, Trump loyalists in battleground states are running for powerful offices that control elections. These are candidates who are endorsed by Trump, because they've embraced his lie that he won the 2020 election.

And some Republican-controlled state legislatures have moved to seize power over elections, opening a path where they could overrule voters and substitute their own slate of electors to choose the winner.

All of it, Snyder says, is a direct outcome of Trump's "big lie" and is deeply troubling for the future.

"All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States," Snyder says. "I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now."

That scenario needs to be confronted immediately, Snyder says: "It's right in front of our eyes. The most interesting and the most distressing thing about American news coverage right now is that we don't treat the end of democracy in America as the story. That is the story."

We delude ourselves, Snyder says, if we think we're immune from an anti-democratic turn. "We imagine that there's somehow this immovable American democratic background, which doesn't really exist," he says. "We can lose democracy just like anybody else can, just like most people have in the history of democracy. We can lose it, and we're losing it right now."



"The fierce urgency of now"

As of yet, the Democratic-led Congress has been unable to pass legislation to protect voting rights, a fact that Carol Anderson, professor of African-American Studies at Emory University, finds appalling.

She argues that passing voting rights laws would "short-circuit the damage that the 'big lie' is doing and will do."

Anderson sees "a Democratic Party that does not understand that American democracy is hanging by a thread, and does not grapple with the fierce urgency of now."

We have been, in her words, "baptized in American exceptionalism" — the naive belief that the demise of democracy can't happen here.

"Even after you have had the insurrection," Anderson says, "even after you have had these legislatures write these laws figuring out not only how to stop Black people, brown people, indigenous people from voting, but also how to lower the guardrails of democracy that prevented Trump from being able to overturn the results in these states; so even after seeing this, to not move and do what needs to be done to protect this nation?" Anderson sighs. "It's unconscionable."

For Anderson, author of the books White Rage and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, Trump's lie about the election sprouts from the same twisted roots as his birtherism lie, which is the conspiracy theory Trump peddled, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and therefore ineligible to serve as president.

Linking both, she says, is a clear racist throughline.

"Foundational to that is the devaluation and the dismissing of American citizenship for Black people," Anderson says. "This is about, 'My nation is about the real Americans. And all of those folks aren't real Americans.' It is so vile. It is so racist. And it works. That's the thing, it works."

After all, Anderson says, if you repeat the lie enough times, it starts to sound like the truth.



A failed coup is practice for a successful one

In Congress, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has interviewed hundreds of witnesses to establish the truth of what happened that day.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is one of just two Republicans on the committee. An outspoken Trump critic, he has announced he won't run for reelection.

Kinzinger compares conspiracy theories to a cancer eating away at the Republican Party, and feeding that cancer, he says, is the "big lie."

"The thing that's most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence," he says. "And I've gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people's minds."

Beyond his committee's mission of uncovering what happened on Jan. 6 itself, Kinzinger has broader questions.

"More importantly in my mind, what is the rot in the system that led up to Jan. 6? And where have we come since? And how do we stop anything like this from happening again?" he asks. " 'Cause even though Jan. 6 technically failed, there's a lot of areas where you can learn from, if your goal is to overthrow a legitimate election and potentially do it successfully next time."

And that is precisely the lesson from history, says Yale professor Timothy Snyder.

"It wasn't enough, but next time, it could well be enough. And the fact that it's been rehearsed makes me worry," he says. "This is what historians and political scientists who study coups d'etat say. They say a failed coup is practice for a successful one."

What we're potentially looking at, Snyder warns, is nothing less than the end of the democratic United States as we've come to know it.

"That's just the reality," he says. "And in order to prevent things from being frightening, you have to look right at them and say, 'OK, that's the monster. How can I disassemble it? How can I take it to pieces? How can I make sure that that story isn't our only story?' But it will be unless we tell it to ourselves straight."

We have to confront that reality, Snyder says, if we are to find the courage and conviction to do something about it.
 
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Fallen Soldier

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This is gonna sound like an unpopular opinion, but it was Trump who gave funding to make the vaccine. Like him or not ( And I surely don’t and I will vote against him again if he runs). He did help create the covid vaccine with operation warp speed. So I will give credit where credit is due.
 
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Avnger

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This is gonna sound like an unpopular opinion, but it was Trump who gave funding to make the vaccine. Like him or not ( And I surely don’t and I will vote against him again if he runs). He did help create the covid vaccine with operation warp speed. So I will give credit where credit is due.
Of course. It's a shame he also spent months purposely downplaying the virus and feeding the pro-pandemic extremists to the point that his own supporters won't take the vaccine he helped fund the development of. Honest to God, Trump would have easily sailed into a second term with covid as his "war," but he couldn't even do that right.
 
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