My question is how would they handle someone not named trump & not a former president.
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FB certainly gets no points for even pretending to create a fairness agenda.
What do you think they’d do?
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Not a lot of love out there for Zuckerberg and FB.
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Discussion on how the Dems let the R’s lead them around.
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Looks like more evidence that protection for the rioters was being given before the riots, even if The DC authorities normally would go in an instant to help protect people caught in a riot.
The commander of the D.C. National Guard said the Pentagon restricted his authority ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, requiring higher level sign-off to respond that cost time as the events that day spiraled out of control.
Local commanders typically have the power to take military action on their own to save lives or prevent significant property damage in an urgent situation when there isn’t enough time to obtain approval from headquarters.
But Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took that power and other authorities away from him ahead of a pro-Trump protest on Jan. 6. That meant he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call from the Capitol Police chief warning that rioters were about to enter the U.S. Capitol.
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Thanks Sen Rand Paul…
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Qanon Congresswoman Greene calls for violence towards Pelosi on FB.
Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress - CNNPolitics
(CNN)Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments from Greene’s Facebook page shows.
Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, frequently posted far-right extremist and debunked conspiracy theories on her page, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy which casts former President Donald Trump in an imagined battle against a sinister cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children.
In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the “deep state” working against Trump.
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Google today joined the long list of companies who will not support the Congress members who would not certify the vote.
Major corporations say they will stop donating to members of Congress who tried to overturn the election - Popular Information
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Unclear what it really means, withhold donations until when?
Also, seems most said they would “withhold donations to both”.
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If they are still contributing to PACs then it’s just symbolic…
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So this guy was a professional narc for the police. Wow.
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The Government Donald Trump Left Behind — ProPublica
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Post Insurrection 
2 Capitol Hill Policemen have committed suicide and the one who was attacked.
A third member of law enforcement, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, died from injuries he sustained during the Capitol attack.
“We honor the service and sacrifices of Officers Brian Sicknick, Howard Liebengood, and Jeffery Smith, and offer condolences to all the grieving families,” Contee said in his testimony.
The report of an additional officer’s death once again shook Capitol Hill, where many members and staff are still reeling in the three weeks since the insurrection. Five people died as a result of the riots, and two officers later died by suicide — a death toll that has horrified lawmakers of both parties and led them to demand answers from Capitol security officials.
Pittman also admitted that the Capitol Police Board denied a request on Jan. 4 for additional support from the National Guard. It wasn’t until the building was overrun by a pro-Trump mob the panel relented, an hour after another plea was made.
Appropriators left the briefing with a number of questions — chiefly, that intelligence agencies had “ample evidence an angry mob would descend on Washington” and they failed to “act on this intelligence or adequately prepare for the looming threat,” House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said in a statement after the briefing.
Contee told appropriators that about 850 MPD officers responded to the riot and 65 members sustained documented injuries.
“Many more sustained injuries from the assault — scratches, bruises, eyes burning from bear mace — that they did not even bother to report,” he said.
MPD’s estimate for the response totals about $8.8 million, he said.
“The costs for this insurrection — both human and monetary — will be steep,” Contee said. “The immediate fiscal impact is still being calculated.”
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Going after a troll in 2016 election…charged today.
A far-right social media influencer was arrested Wednesday and accused of interfering in the 2016 election through an organized campaign to boost Donald Trump’s candidacy by conning supporters of his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, into voting through illegitimate means such as text message or online.
Prosecutors allege that Douglass Mackey, 31, used an alias, reportedly derived from actor Charlie Sheen’s character Ricky Vaughn in the 1989 film “Major League,” to circulate messages on Twitter that encouraged Clinton’s supporters to “Avoid the line. Vote from home,” according to charging documents. Nearly 5,000 people fell for the ploy, according to the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, which announced the arrest.
William Sweeney, assistant director in charge the FBI’s New York field office, called Mackey’s alleged efforts “nothing short of vote theft.”
Mackey was arrested in West Palm Beach, Fla., and charged with conspiracy against rights. The Florida public defender who represented him at his court appearance Wednesday could not be reached for comment. Mackey was expected to be released on a $50,000 bond.
Authorities said that Mackey used multiple social media accounts and conspired with others online in a bid to prevent people from voting for Clinton, who won the 2016 popular vote despite losing the electoral college.
One of his Twitter accounts, @Ricky_Vaughn99, had about 58,000 followers at the time it was suspended by Twitter in October 2016. The account was rated the 107th most influential with respect to the that year’s election, according to an analysis done by the MIT Media Lab — ahead of accounts belonging to former House speaker Newt Gingrich, “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert and NBC News, according to the criminal complaint.
A person with knowledge of the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it with the media, said that Mackey was not charged before now because it was a complex investigation — one that did not begin until it was discovered that Mackey was behind the Ricky Vaughn persona. That was revealed in a HuffPost article published in April 2018.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump faced extensive criticism from the president and other Republicans for pursuing criminal cases connected to the 2016 election — most notably the investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, who spent two years examining Russia’s interference in that presidential contest and whether anyone in Trump’s campaign conspired with those efforts.
Seth DuCharme, the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and a holdover from the Trump administration, said in a statement Wednesday that, “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes.”
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The Huff Post’s take:
FBI Arrests Prolific Racist Twitter Troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’ For 2016 Election Interference
HuffPost can also identify three anonymous co-conspirators named in the federal indictment unsealed Wednesday.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fbi-ricky-vaughn-election-interference_n_60120aeac5b6b8719d89a072
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Some of the Q’s are getting alienated over what they might now realize was manipulation. Here’s one person’s journey to finding that out. Obviously, Q’s feel like they are saving the world. But they do not realize they were on a fools errand.
At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this doesn’t fit,’” Lenka Perron said. “We are being manipulated. Someone is having fun at our expense.
…
Her journey out of that world could be instructive: As the country begins to sort through the political fallout from four years of Donald J. Trump, one looming question is what will happen with the followers of QAnon and other anti-establishment conspiracy theories that have been bending Americans’ perceptions of reality.
There are signs that some have lost faith: Mr. Trump left Washington last week, blowing a hole through a key QAnon belief — that Mr. Trump, not President Biden, was the one who would be inaugurated on Jan. 20. But others are doubling down, and experts believe that some form of the QAnon conspiracy theory will remain deeply embedded in the nation’s culture by simply morphing to incorporate the new developments, as it has before.
QAnon believers are part of a broader swath of Americans who are immersed in conspiracy theories. Once on the far-right fringes, these theories now hold people from across the political spectrum in their thrall, from anti-lockdown libertarians to left-wing wellness types and “Stop the Steal” Trumpists.
The theories can be malevolent, causing real-life damage to people who end up in their cross hairs: the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting who have been harassed by conspiracists, or a Washington pizza restaurant shot up by a man who had come to take down a child trafficking ring he believed was housed inside. Q sweatshirts dotted the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But while much has been said about how people descend into this world, little is known about how they get out. Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends.
The theories seem crazy to Ms. Perron now, but looking back, she understands how they drew her in. They were comforting, a way to get her bearings in a chaotic world that felt increasingly unequal and rigged against middle-class people like her. These stories offered agency: Evil cabals could be defeated. A diffuse sense that things were out of her control could not.
The theories were fiction, but they hooked into an emotional vulnerability that sprang from something real. For Ms. Perron, it was a feeling that the Democratic Party had betrayed her after a lifetime of trusting it deeply.
Her immigrant family, from the former Yugoslavia, were union Democrats in working-class Detroit who had seen their middle-class lifestyle decline after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. As an inspector for the insurance industry, she spent decades in factories seeing union jobs wither. Still, she stayed with the party because she believed it was fighting for her. When Bernie Sanders became a presidential candidate she found him electrifying.
“He put into words what I couldn’t figure out but I was seeing around me,” said Ms. Perron, who is now 55. “The middle class was shrinking. The 1 percent and corporations having more control and taking more of the money.”
She felt sure the Democratic establishment would back him, and she began volunteering for his campaign, meeting many new friends in the movement. But she felt that the news media was barely covering him. Then he lost the 2016 primary. When she began reading through leaked emails that fall, it looked to her like the party establishment had conspired to block him.
She spent weeks combing through the emails, hacked from Mr. Podesta, the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton. Her stunned discovery enraged her and put her on the path to conspiracy theories and, eventually, QAnon.
“There was no hint of conversation about the working class,” she said about the emails. Instead, she said, it was “expensive dinner parties, exclusive get-togethers.”
The emails were Ms. Perron’s doorway to the conspiracy world, and she found others there too. She was no longer a lonely victim of a force she did not understand, but part of a bigger community of people seeking the truth. She loved the feeling of common purpose. They were learning together how to research, looking up important people in the emails and figuring out how to trace them back to big donors.
“There was this excitement,” Ms. Perron said. “We were joining forces to finally clean house. To finally find something to explain why we were suffering.”
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This is a strange upending story…
From Crooked Media
A sign language interpreter at the White House turned out to be a Trump supporter with a history of interpreting videos rife with far-right disinformation. Heather Mewshaw appeared in the White House coronavirus briefing alongside Jen Psaki and was quickly identified online as having worked as a volunteer for the right-wing interpreters group Hands of Liberty—the far-right conspiracy hub of the deaf and hard of hearing community. In one video, Mewshaw interprets an OAN commentator calling the 2020 election a “military-grade sting operation;” in another, posted three days before her White House debut, Mewshaw provided sign-language interpretation for pro-Trump comedian Terrence Williams, who said, “Joe Biden, you will never be my president.” Like any interpreter, a sign language interpreter has the power to shift or color a message with word choice, informed (consciously or unconsciously) by their own bias, so this lady interpreting for the Biden administration is…not ideal! (It also seems to be a violation of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf’s code of professional conduct.) A very weird start to a well-intentioned effort to expand press briefing accessibility.
A gesture meant to bolster President Biden’s call for unity and inclusion instead inspired divisiveness, after news emerged that a White House American Sign Language interpreter was a Trump supporter who previously interpreted videos rife with misinformation.
Heather Mewshaw, who appeared in the White House coronavirus briefing on Monday beside press secretary Jen Psaki, was identified by deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates and Time magazine, fueling questions about the White House’s vetting process and what could have happened if Mewshaw had misinterpreted Biden officials or inserted her own bias. No one has publicly disputed her interpretation, but many questioned why the White House would legitimize her by giving Mewshaw the national platform.
A right-wing group she produced videos for acknowledged it was Mewshaw, who has not appeared in a White House briefing since Monday.
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Butch Bowers, the lead attorney that was slated to represent former President Trump during his second impeachment trial, has left the legal team along with four others.
Nobody will represent this guy, & the QAnon Shaman is going to testify against him. Wow.
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