BY BRIAN BEUTLER, TANYA SOMANADER,

& CROOKED MEDIA

Monday, March 18, 2019

—Greta Thunberg, teenage climate-activist sensation, on annoying oldsters who like to say young people are the planet's only hope

BIGOT LEAGUE

Less than a week after a Trump-inspired white separatist murdered 50 people at two New Zealand mosques, President Trump returned to stoking hatred of Muslims, while his enablers fanned out online and in the media to claim insultingly that Trump doesn’t have a bigoted bone in his body.

Trump, who has said nothing about the fact that the New Zealand killer wanted to exterminate Muslims, spent the weekend demanding that Fox News reverse its suspension of Jeanine Pirro, who did not host her show this weekend after accusing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of disloyalty because she wears a hijab. Yes, Trump went to bat for someone who managed to get herself kicked off the air for being too Islamophobic for Fox News.

The president is also upset at the backlash to Fox’s marquee bigot, Tucker Carlson, who lost most of his sponsors after the conservative media watchdogs at Media Matters unearthed audio of him calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”

In responding to obvious questions about Trump’s role in creating a global climate of anti-Muslim violence, and his (at best) indifference to a mass murder of Muslims, his top advisers disgraced themselves.

His counselor Kellyanne Conway disputed that the killings implicate Trump and his anti-Muslim rhetoric at all. She instead referred to the self-avowed fascist and Trump-supporting mass shooter as an “ecoterrorist,” and later encouraged people to read the killer’s entire white-supremacy manifesto. You read that right—she encouraged viewers to read a document designed to radicalize others and incite more violence.

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told CBS, “I don’t think anybody can say that the president is anti-Muslim.” Trump ran for the presidency on a promise to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, and then instituted a travel ban that plainly targets Muslims. Maybe Mulvaney was trying to threaten us into not stating the obvious?

The political commentariat has a depressing tendency to feign surprise and disappointment when Trump misses “an opportunity to denounce” white nationalism, and to ask his advisers why he’s so reluctant to condemn white-nationalist violence. It couldn’t be clearer at this point that Trump supports white nationalists, or at least doesn’t want to demobilize them, and that his advisers, who see this as a useful way to maintain political support for regressive tax cuts, are fully on board with his approach and willing to lie about it. That should be the starting point for coverage of his presidency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new law allowing authorities to jail or fine any citizens who post “fake news” or disrespect government officials online.

The language of the law defines fake news as information that threatens harm to individuals, public order, or vital public infrastructure, and defines “disrespect” as content that undermines “society, the state, [and] state symbols of the Russian Federation," including Putin. Punishments max out at $15,000 fines or 15 days in “administrative detention” which is what Professor Umbridge might call her millennial-pink jail.

Russia has exerted increasing control over content on its Internet (RuNet), aspires to create a firewall between RuNet and the global internet, has worked with China to beef up its Internet-censorship capabilities, and champions “cyber sovereignty” laws. Once President Trump is done complaining that Saturday Night Live reruns should be illegal, he will get around to praising Putin’s online leadership.

Beto O’Rourke raised $6.1 million online in the first 24 hours of his campaign, just a few hundred thousand dollars more than Bernie Sanders did, and the Internet handled the news with inspiring maturity.

“I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the—anybody who would run” for the presidency. -Joe Biden [fake?] accidentally tipping his hand about his campaign plans with a dubious claim.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing about the rise of white nationalism. Good.

Federal prosecutors have joined the Department of Transportation’s internal watchdog in investigating the development of the 737 Max and how it got certified to fly passengers. Black-box data from the Ethiopian Airlines crash earlier this month show “clear similarities” between that fatal flight and another Boeing 737 Max flight that crashed earlier in October.

Warner Brothers CEO Kevin Tsujihara stepped down on Monday amid allegations that he promised actress Charlotte Kirk roles in exchange for sex. Kirk insists that their relationship was consensual.

When the FBI raided the office of Trump campaign donor/former RNC Deputy Finance Chairman/admitted felon Elliott Broidy last year, agents were looking for evidence of conspiracy, money laundering, and covert foreign lobbying. The other former RNC deputy finance chairman was Trump’s criminal co-conspirator Michael Cohen, and the former RNC finance chair was accused rapist Steve Wynn.

Meghan McCain clapped back at President Trump for continuing to attack her father, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who died several months ago. Trump libeled McCain in a tweet this weekend, then retweeted a supporter of his who attacked both Meghan McCain and her father. Totally normal behavior for a president. [Likely future What Else entry: Meghan McCain endorses Trump for re-election.]

Former interim DNC chair and prominent Democratic strategist Donna Brazile is a Fox News contributor now and she devoted a ton of words to justifying her terrible, greedy decision.

Tip for Rosario Dawson: Destroy Cory Booker’s Keurig like a MAGA-hat wearing Sean Hannity fan might do.

J.K. Rowling confirmed that some characters in Harry Potter are gay, including Albus Dumbledore and his partner Gellert Grindewald. Exciting! They were gay all along. In other news, Tom Clancy’s estate says that Jack Ryan is bi-curious.

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Kamala Harris reportedly shut down an effort by California prosecutors to investigate the scam nutritional supplement company Herbalife when she was the state’s attorney general after Democratic super-lobbyists who worked for Herbalife donated to her 2016 Senate campaign.  

Facebook is sad because its service to provide users with local news is underperforming due to a lack of local news outlets, many of which have been driven out of business or forced to lay off staff by Facebook. The fucking nerve of those guys! After running the program “Today’s In” for a year in 400 cities, the tech giant found that 40 percent of Americans live in local news deserts, which is about what you’d expect after 1,800 U.S. newspapers closed their doors over the last 15 years.

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