Are you watching the new season of Succession? My friend John, a TV addict, says he finds all the characters so odious that he can't stomach it. The odiousness of the characters-- based loosely on a kind of amalgam of the Murdochs and Trumps-- is actually the point. And the family business is a kind of stand in for Fox-- Waystar. The could have called it Lox-TV or Pox-TV, but they took the company name from a well-known christo-fascist tv network based in Bedford, Texas (near Dallas). Founded in 1993 by Marcus Lamb-- a slimy, evangelical hustler (a proponent of Satan's own anti-Jesus "prosperity theology"). Daystar is the second-largest Christian television network in the world.
Outside of the christo-fascist community, Lamb is best known for two things. He took $3.9 in PPP funds under the guise of paying Daystar's employees' salaries during the pandemic but was forced to pay it back when it was discovered he used the money to buy himself private Gulfstream jet. The other thing Lamb is best known for-- aside from a series of sordid extra-martial affairs common in the christo-fascist universe-- has been his and Daystar's virulent and unending anti-vaccine messaging.
The old pervert, 64, died yesterday after being infected and then hospitalized with COVID-19. Lamb's son, Jonathan, said his father's illness was "a spiritual attack from the enemy," (presumably God, who smote him). Marcus Lamb is just the latest of the anti-vaccine COVID-cheerleaders in the christo-fascist community to die (unvaccinated) including far right sociopathic radio hosts like Dick Farrell, Phil Valentine and Marc Bernier.
Daystar's false reporting about vaccines and mandates have killed untold thousands of people and a functioning government would have shuttered them long ago and thrown Lamb and his family into prison for murder. But we don't have well-functioning governments that can protect us from hucksters like Lamb... and Trump.
Speaking of whom... Trump apparently tried to kill Biden. Although Trump denied it this morning, his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wrote in his book, due out next week, that Trump tested positive 3 days before-- not after-- his first debate with Biden.
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Meadows also writes that though he knew each candidate was required “to test negative for the virus within seventy two hours of the start time … Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there.”
Trump, Meadows says in the book, returned a negative result from a different test shortly after the positive.
Nonetheless, the stunning revelation of an unreported positive test follows a year of speculation about whether Trump, then 74 years old, had the potentially deadly virus when he faced Biden, 77, in Cleveland on 29 September-- and what danger that might have presented.
Trump announced he had Covid on 2 October. The White House said he announced that result within an hour of receiving it. He went to hospital later that day.
...Meadows says Trump’s positive result on 26 September was a shock to a White House which had just staged a triumphant Rose Garden ceremony for the supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett-- an occasion now widely considered to have been a Covid super-spreader event.
Despite the president looking “a little tired” and suspecting a “slight cold,” Meadows says he was “content” that Trump travelled that evening to a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania.
But as Marine One lifted off, Meadows writes, the White House doctor called.
“Stop the president from leaving,” Meadows says Sean Conley told him. “He just tested positive for Covid.”
It wasn’t possible to stop Trump but when he called from Air Force One, his chief of staff gave him the news.
“Mr President,” Meadows said, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19.”
Trump’s reply, the devout Christian writes, “rhyme[d] with ‘Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me.’”
Meadows writes of his surprise that such a “massive germaphobe” could have contracted Covid, given precautions including “buckets of hand sanitiser” and “hardly [seeing] anyone who ha[d]n’t been rigorously tested.”
...On debate day, 29 September, Meadows says, Trump looked slightly better-- “emphasis on the word slightly”.
“His face, for the most part at least, had regained its usual light bronze hue, and the gravel in his voice was gone. But the dark circles under his eyes had deepened. As we walked into the venue around five o’clock in the evening, I could tell that he was moving more slowly than usual. He walked like he was carrying a little extra weight on his back.”
Trump gave a furious and controversial performance, continually hectoring Biden to the point the Democrat pleaded: “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”
The host, Chris Wallace of Fox News, later said Trump was not tested before the debate because he arrived late. Organisers, Wallace said, relied on the honor system.
The White House had not said Trump had tested positive and negative three days before.
Three days later, on 2 October, Trump announced by tweet that he and his wife, Melania Trump, were positive.
