Australian media covers Fox News more thoroughly than media in most countrties, at least in great part because Fox was founded by homegrown fascist Rupert Murdoch. This Australian documentary, Fox And The Big Lie, deserves widespread attention in the U.S. "For weeks after the election, high profile Fox anchors peddled the lie that the election had been stolen... That the Murdochs' Fox News joined the effort to spread lies and propaganda for Donald Trump was no surprise to the insiders" who ABC spoke with. "Rupert Murdoch today," said former Fox News military analyst Lt Colonel (ret) Ralph Peters "is doing direct harm to my country and it bewilders me that there's no mechanism to stop him... The Green Room over the last several years into the Trump administration, when I left... the guests got more and more bizarre, more distasteful. The Green Room started to be like the bar scene in the first Star Wars film; these people are freaks-- and then you realize, you're one of the freaks. People with no qualifications, who could not even speak cogently, who could only speak the lines they'd memorized praising Trump as though he were a heathen god that had to be appeased with slavish rhetoric."
From its introduction to Fox & The Big Lie, ABC explained that "The poison of Trump's lies, widely spread, widely believed and cynically used by politicians, drove the raging mob that invaded the Capitol on January the 6th. Congress has finally begun investigating the actions of a disgraced former president around the January 6th insurrection but Trump's staunchest media allies will face no serious scrutiny here."
The foot soldier participants in the 1/6 riot look like anti-patriotic drooling imbeciles... primarily because that is exactly what they are. And it's more than obvious that even if they didn't know the riot was planned, the leaders-- from members of Trump's administration and his congressional allies to the organizers and bus drivers-- certainly did. Their job was to get the sheeple there and to Trump's ancillary rallies. You want to see what happens when people with pitifully low IQs jump into politics-- watch the unmasked bus trip to the Trump rally from Strongsville, Ohio. Cuyahoga County includes Cleveland and is deep blue. In the 2020 election, Trump only scored a pathetic 32.3% countywide, but in the Strongsville part of the county, he won. These "happy pilgrims" on the buses may not know anyone who voted for Biden. This white bread southwest corner of Cuyahoga County has more in common with Mississippi than with Cleveland. They are all brainwashed by Fox.
ABC's correspondent ran into Marjorie Traitor Greene at a post-defeat Trump rally. "Inspired by Trump, the congresswoman is testing the waters for a presidential run. Her loud advocacy for guns, bigotry and the stolen election lie makes her a celebrity here."
Yesterday Austin Evers of American Oversight, in an OpEd for the Arizona Mirror, wrote about how Trump's Big Lie is still being propagated. "Right now," he wrote, "the Arizona Senate is gearing up to release the findings of its so-called audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election. Based on the actions of the Senate and its contractors, Arizonans already have ample reason to dismiss the results. But the recent aggressive attempts to block transparency should be the final straw. In multiple lawsuits, the Senate is not only refusing to comply with longstanding Arizona public records laws; it is arguing that the law does not even apply to it. It has gone from attacking faith in Arizona elections to assailing a core tenet of representative democracy: that government officials work for the public.
The Senate’s determination to shield information about the sham process from the same public it purports to be working to reassure is reason enough to doubt both its commitment to the public interest and the credibility of the audit itself. In recent court filings, the Senate has evinced a startling disdain for basic government transparency. It has characterized the request for the records of contractors and subcontractors-- who, on behalf of the legislature, are engaged in a public function-- “invasive and sweeping,” and has referred to calls for transparency as “generalized bromides” and “pleasant-sounding platitudes” while rejecting the demand that it show its work as “partisan.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that the Senate wants to avoid transparency at all costs. As delays have stretched the audit’s timeline from weeks into months, stories about embarrassing security issues and other errors have demonstrated the consequences of the contractors’ lack of qualifications. An independent evaluation conducted by the States United Democracy Center found that the process “does not meet the standards of a proper election recount or audit,” citing error-prone methodology and problematic contracting, among other major issues. Just last month, Doug Logan, the CEO of lead contractor Cyber Ninjas, unleashed a new wave of misinformation with an outlandish claim of 70,000 extra mail-in ballots. It was easily revealed as false-- but not before it took hold online.
...In July, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Kemp ruled that releasing records was a matter of “compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny.” The Senate asserted that it does not have custody of contractors’ records, while failing to address the fact that those records are of vital public interest. At the same time, it has released a few hundred pages of documents, including communications of Senate President Karen Fann and audit spokesperson Ken Bennett, exhibiting an apparent belief that it can pick and choose which items to show to the public. The week before Kemp’s ruling, the Senate even said it was reviewing more than 15,000 additional documents for voluntary release; during the hearing in the appeals court, that number rose to 22,000. None have been produced.
Given what has been released-- from text messages with conspiracy theorists to boasts from Fann of having been thanked by Trump personally for “pushing to prove any fraud”-- that obfuscation should worry not just the Arizonans whose ballots have been examined and handled by inexperienced contractors, but also Americans across the country who have seen their own state legislators adopt the same incendiary rhetoric to push for more election-undermining investigations and unnecessary reviews.
As we wait for the Senate to share its biased and non-credible “findings,” what we have already learned about the audit’s biased origins and its deleterious effect on faith in our elections represents a grave threat to U.S. democracy. The amount we have yet to learn about its operations is just as alarming.
Paul Ryan, once Speaker of the House, will never be able to run for office as a Republican again, not after this: "It was not rigged. It was not stolen. Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won the election. It’s really clear." Paul Ryan's former party ain't never coming back. It's no longer a conservative party-- the Democrats are; the GOP is a fascist party now.
And you might want to watch this too: