Yea that second one is super cringey. First one could be poorly excused as “old man doesn’t understand how to elbow bump and doesn’t recognize the nazi salute” but then going right back to it while seeming to laugh is the tell.
That’s covered in the MLB thread.
Looks like he got caught doing something stupid and tried (poorly) to play it off as a joke of some kind.
Good news! Karen got hired by the Freedom to Breath Agency and has been tasked with harassing low level employees at grocery stores.
I’ve had enough. These people are murders. Try 'em in a state with the death penalty imo.
Sounds extreme, right? But they’re out there defrauding people in a way that will cause significant amounts of suffering and death. They’re fucking sociopathic murderers.
I don’t think av clark has her pulse on federal agencies in 2020.
200ish people in mega liquor store today, all of them wearing their masks other than one Karen who’s Trump mask is around her neck. What’s the proper thing to do?
I’d be ecstatic with 80-90% mask compliance, so I would let her go about her business.
Proper thing is to discreetly take a picture that makes it clear it’s a Trump mask and post it on social media.
Why discreetly? Walk right up to her and say “Hi, I’d like to snap a picture of the only person in the store not wearing their mask so I can post it to Facebook.” Then take the pic and walk away before she can react.
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Went to the grocery store this morning. Only saw two maskless: 60ish white man and woman (not together). Each looked somewhat “off.”
Yeah this is exactly what I thought, just walk up take a picture walk away. Unfortunately didn’t know it was a Trump mask until wife told me after we left.
She might cover up if she knows she’s being watched.
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Wow, another victim of people not respecting the first amendment.
Run amok, IMO.
On April 9th, before any protests had occurred, Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor from Onsted, created a Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine. He expected to attract perhaps a few hundred followers. Within a month, the group had more than four hundred thousand members. As enrollment skyrocketed, Soldano told me, he spoke with Republican state senators, via Zoom, “to figure out what we needed to do.”
…
In addition to owning two chiropractic offices, Soldano is a motivational speaker and the author of a self-help book, “God’s True Law,” in which he writes that disease can be “caused by interferences in the natural vibrational frequencies.” Last year, Soldano became a national director of Juice Plus+, a dietary-supplement company with a multilevel marketing strategy. (Such business models have been likened to pyramid schemes.) Two days after Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine was expelled from Facebook, Soldano launched a Web site called Stand Up Michigan, whose home page includes a video of him wearing a blue suit with a pocket square. “We want to be the lantern in the darkness of today’s challenges,” he proclaims.
The Web site promised paying subscribers “relevant and timely information on current issues” and “expert insight and education.” An online store sold backpacks (a hundred and ninety dollars), yard signs (a hundred and fifty dollars), and other merchandise. Most of the products showcased the Stand Up Michigan logo: a silhouette of Paul Revere on a galloping horse, holding a lantern.
Across America, seemingly grassroots mobilizations against lockdown policies have turned out to be partly financed or directed by Republican donors and operatives. The chairman of the Michigan Freedom Fund is a former political adviser to Betsy DeVos’s husband, Richard, who is the heir to Amway—another multilevel-marketing company. The DeVoses have contributed at least half a million dollars to the organization. According to Soldano, Stand Up Michigan has received no outside financial support. (He also told me that he has “not taken a penny” from the Web site’s proceeds.) He said that the Republican state senators with whom he spoke advised him to launch a petition to repeal a 1945 law that allowed Whitmer to issue executive orders without legislative approval. “That gave us a goal that we needed to achieve,” Soldano explained.
On May 21st, Soldano put on an event called the Freedom Festival, in Newaygo, a town on the Muskegon River. In a park with an outdoor amphitheatre, hundreds of people congregated. Corporate-looking banners read “ EQUIP AND EMPOWER ”; tables under tents offered Stand Up Michigan apparel. Soldano led the crowd in chants of “U.S.A.” He then issued a confounding series of words with such ardent emotion that it was hard not to be moved by them: “Every action is a call set in motion, and its effects build on past effects, to move us into a definite direction. That direction is our destiny. That direction is the new America!” Later, he implored, “Buy some T-shirts—support the movement.”
…
At one point, the owner of a mixed-martial-arts studio told the crowd that he had reopened his gym after researching COVID -19 and concluding that widespread exposure to it would “perpetuate and move the species throughout history.” My neighbor applauded as fervently as he had for an attorney who had denounced the unconstitutionality of executive orders. When Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” came on, he turned to me and said, “I love this music! I love this, brother!” He scanned the park, taking it all in. “ These are my people. ”
…
In 2012, users on the Web site 4chan appropriated the title of “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”—a 1984 movie about break dancing, starring Black actors and directed by an Israeli-American—to ironically dub their anticipated armed insurrection Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. White supremacists, envisaging the Boogaloo as a race war, popularized the meme online, and since then the concept has been adopted and modified by Second Amendment advocates, preppers, survivalists, and conspiracy-minded youth. An alternative name for the Boogaloo is the Big Luau, and every anti-lockdown protest I attended in Michigan had at least a few so-called Boogaloo Bois, who were easily identifiable by their signature ensemble: Hawaiian shirt, flak jacket, assault rifle.
…
The next month, Facebook banned Boogaloo proponents from its platform, erasing more than a hundred groups. I had been monitoring several of them. The discussions had tended to revolve around defining Boogaloo priorities—a debate often reduced to who should be “yeeted,” or killed. The general tone of trollish causticness and misanthropy was distinct from anything I heard at the anti-lockdown rallies, whose participants could often be defensive, earnest, and shrill. The online groups were rife with racism, and anti-Semitic postings were prevalent: Jews were behind all manner of diabolism that the Boogaloo would remedy, from the media to child pornography. At the same time, nearly every hateful comment was met with incensed responses from other Bois, for whom the Boogaloo meant universal emancipation from government oppression.
…
Before Floyd’s death, much of the anti-lockdown anger had been directed at law enforcement. Protesters at the April 30th rally had called the officers guarding the Michigan House chamber “traitors” and “filthy rats.” Karl Manke’s customers had told me that the state police who served Manke with a cease-and-desist order were “Storm Troopers.” When officers issued citations to some of the female stylists at the second Michigan Freedom Fund rally, protesters likened them to the Gestapo. “People like me used to fucking back you!” an Iraq War veteran carrying an American flag had shouted. “But you are trash!” Several of the officers being praised by Kelley were the same ones who’d been berated that day.
“There’s a lot of chaos right now,” Kelley said. It broke his heart “to see elected politicians telling police to stand down.”
Suddenly, a group of young people appeared on the lawn. Among them was Birdsong. Notably taller than those around him, he had the thick but rounded build of a former athlete, and he wore red Chuck Taylors, black shorts, and a red bandanna tied around his wrist. Walking into the crowd of pro-militia demonstrators, he lay face down and crossed his hands behind his back, reënacting George Floyd’s final minutes. The other counter-protesters followed his lead. None had weapons. Some wore empty holsters. Birdsong later told me that he had forbidden guns.
“What are we gonna do here, guys?” Kelley said into the microphone. “What are we gonna do?”
The militia members and their supporters called Birdsong and the counter-protesters “faggots,” “pieces of shit,” “pussies,” and “fucking inbreds.” Birdsong lifted his head from the pavement and told those lying around him, “Don’t say anything.”
Kelley shouted, “We will not stand for the destruction of our state, of our country, of our citizens! You will not terrorize us!”
…
After a while, Kelley and several other rally organizers pulled Birdsong aside. When Birdsong stated that the Constitution meant something different for African-Americans, whose enslavement it had allowed, Kelley said, “Slavery has been abolished. That has all changed.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Birdsong said. “The torture, the oppression, the beatings—it’s just done in a different way.”
A discussion of sorts ensued, but Kelley seemed most interested in being photographed, and kept interrupting Birdsong to demand that journalists take their picture. At one point, he suggested that Birdsong recite the Pledge of Allegiance with him on the capitol steps. Birdsong agreed—if Kelley would raise his fist with him. Kelley declined. Shortly afterward, he said, “I gotta get back to the rally.” Smiling for the cameras, shaking Birdsong’s hand, he told him, “I think this conversation should continue.”
Three days later, the American Patriot Council published an article on its Web site describing Birdsong as a “local thug” and “an ongoing problem in the community.” The article also mentioned Michael Lynn, Jr., calling the Lansing firefighter a “gang banger.”
…
In the first days of the pandemic, Trump attempted to do what Presidents traditionally do in a crisis: unify the country. “We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together,” he said. Presenting himself as a “wartime President,” he called COVID -19 “the invisible enemy” of all Americans.
By the summer, Trump had set his sights on a different enemy. On the eve of July 4th, he addressed the country from Mt. Rushmore. Barely mentioning the virus, which had killed more than a hundred and thirty thousand Americans, he instead warned of “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” The people behind this scourge were agents of “far-left fascism” determined “to overthrow the American Revolution.” He intimated civil conflict: “Tonight, before the eyes of our forefathers, Americans declare again, as we did two hundred and forty-four years ago, that we will not be tyrannized—we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”
Another reminder that chiropractors are quacks.
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That district has shifted from fairly red to overwhelmingly blue in the past 10 years. I’m assuming she has no chance.
