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RIGHT WING EXTREMISM

Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Impeach Biden, Fire Fauci and Expel Waters in Red-Meat Alabama Speech

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke Friday night to the Alabama Federation of Republican Women, an event for which the media had been told to leave after a press availability beforehand.

But the conservative Alabama website www.yellowhammer.com managed to be in position to report on Greene’s remarks. It happily described the event as one that “went off with no disruptions and instead, spells of raucous applause from the attendees.”

The reporting did offer a glimpse into what Greene says behind closed doors when tossing out the rarest of the red meat. Here’s how that went:

“Greene kicked off her speech by reiterating three of her ‘favorite things’ she often says while speaking before crowds,” Yellowhammer reports.

“That’s like three of my favorite things: impeach Joe Biden, expel Maxine Waters — we’ve got to take out the trash in Washington, D.C. — and fire Dr. Anthony Fauci,” she said to applause.

“I’m not going to apologize for saying what I’m about to say, but I’m a big fan of President Donald J. Trump,” she continued. “That’s how I always test my crowd. Then I’m going to tell you something else: I believe Trump won the election.”

The website added, “Greene spoke for an hour and hit some highlights of her first seven months in the U.S. House of Representatives, including her interactions with U.S. Reps. Marie Newman (D-IL), Cori Bush (D-MO) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

What she had to say about those three was left to the imagination. But Yellowhammer did report that Greene reiterated her comments from earlier in July distancing herself from fellow wacko Mike Lindell’s claims that Donald Trump would be reinstalled as president in August.

That’s not news: Greene pushed back against Lindell publicly earlier in July. But unbiased observers would have been choking on their fried green tomatoes listening to Greene impersonating a sober voice of reason in Alabama:

“I will tell you this: Sometimes you hear people saying crazy things like, ‘President Trump is going to be back in the White House in August,'” she said. “That is not going to happen. Please don’t believe anyone who is telling you those kinds of things. I get so frustrated with that. There are three members of Congress sitting right here that will tell you that’s not going to happen. The process for putting President Trump back in the White House — it’s not there.”

“We don’t have a constitutional process for that,” Greene continued. “So, I don’t want anyone to get their hopes up over something that is not going to happen. What we’ve got to do is reveal the fraud that took place in the 2020 election — reveal it, then hold people accountable that made it take place, make sure we have good election laws, get rid of this crazy absentee ballot voting, make sure our machines are OK. Then we win in 2022 and 2024.”

Somehow, hearing Greene use the phrase “crazy things” when discussing someone else’s conspiracy theories is a bit much. She gets “so frustrated” with people becoming misinformed by this one? Really?

Greene is just a few short years away from spreading the grossest of QAnon craziness, from 911 denial to Pizzagate to Frazzledrip to Jewish space lasers and more. She was not some QAnon apologist: She was full Q.

Here’s how that was recaptured in a Business Insider analysis laying out the litany of Greene’s wildness:

“Greene said “Q” is “someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.” And she said, “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.”

That was four years ago, not four decades. Within a year came Greene’s unspeakably cruel deceits claiming that mass shootings at Parkland, Sandy Hook and Las Vegas were “false flag” events staged to promote gun control.

As Business Insider noted, “A recently resurfaced video from earlier that year shows Greene accosting David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting, who was 17 at the time, in Washington, DC. Hogg was in town to advocate for gun control at the Capitol. Greene followed the teen down the street, calling him a “coward,” just weeks after the shooting at his high school killed 17 people.”

Now, instead of stalking some poor young survivor on the streets outside the nation’s Capitol, Greene works in the building. In another time, Greene was the sort of individual who might have been housed in an institution for troubled souls.

In 2021, tragically, that’s the Republican caucus in Congress.

 

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law

Arkansas Senator Files Bill to Abolish State Library, Give Education Department Control

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The right-wing war on knowledge continues as an Arkansas state senator filed a bill Thursday to abolish the State Library as well as the library board.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro), along with State Rep. Wayne Long (R-Bradford), filed Senate Bill 536 on Thursday. The bill would not just remove all references to the State Library from existing laws, but also put the state’s other libraries under the control of the Arkansas Department of Education.

A previous version of the bill, SB184, would have also shuttered the Arkansas Educational Television Commission, which oversees the state’s PBS stations, according to the Arkansas Advocate.

READ MORE: Clean Up Alabama Wants State to Dump ‘Marxist’ American Library Association

The Arkansas State Library is not just a regular library. In addition to providing information to state agencies and lawmakers, it also distributes funding to the other libraries around the state. Under SB536, the Department of Education would take on all its responsibilities. The State Library is officially a part of the Department of Education already, but it operates as an independent organization.

While the proposal may sound like a shuffling-around of duties, the main thrust of the bill is to allow more direct control over the Arkansas library system by controlling the purse strings. The bill would keep libraries from distributing “age-inappropriate materials” to those under 17 years old and sex education materials from those under 12. Libraries would also have to set up a system where those in the community could request that certain items be banned for minors, according to KARK-TV. Those that don’t meet these restrictions will have state funding pulled.

Earlier legislation filed by Sullivan and passed into law includes Act 242, which ended the requirement for library directors to have a master’s degree in library science, the Advocate reported.  Sullivan, however, was unsuccessful with a proposed amendment to another bill that would strip funding from libraries affiliated with the American Library Association—meaning most, if not all of them. That amendment was rejected this week over concerns the language in it was too broad, according to the Advocate.

The ALA has been a target of right-wing politicians and activists upset with its free speech stance and fights against censorship. Sullivan in particular has objected to a provision in the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights protecting library access for all ages, the Advocate reported. He also called for the state’s chapter of the ALA to be defunded—despite the fact that it receives no state funding.

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BIGOTRY

Texas to Investigate Anonymous Complaint Teachers Used Trans Student’s Pronouns

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After a Moms for Liberty member claimed that teachers at a Texas high school used a trans student’s new name and proper pronouns, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered an investigation.

On February 13, Denise Bell of the right wing, anti-LGBTQ group Moms for Liberty, addressed the Houston Independent School Board. She read a statement that she said came from the parents of a trans student at Bellaire High School. The parents were upset that teachers used the student’s new name and pronouns, according to Erin in the Morning. The anonymous statement Bell read said that the change happened without parental consent, and “goes against our Christian faith, the advice of [their] therapist and quite frankly common sense.”

Bell then claimed that the school district was “purposely and secretively transitioning minors.”

READ MORE: GOP Candidate Complaining She Wasn’t Allowed to ‘Have Kids Laugh At’ Transgender Students in Viral Video Draws Rebuke

State Representative Steve Toth—who represents a different district than the school is in—informed Abbott of the complaint in a letter on February 26. Two weeks later, Abbott replied to Toth’s letter, revealing he told the Texas Education Agency to investigate the Bellaire High School, accusing the teachers of helping “to ‘socially transition’ a student—violating the express wishes of the child’s mother,” which Abbott called “inappropriate and potentially unlawful.”

Abbott directed the TEA to not just determine whether or not the teachers did indeed use the trans student’s name and pronouns, but also open a full investigation into the school. TEA was told to find out if the school had also violated “policies concerning sexual education curriculum, parental consent for communications with students, mental health services or guidance to students, and parent grievances”; if any school employees had “engaged in misconduct”; and whether any student “has been subjected to abuse or neglect.”

That last one has a footnote on “abuse or neglect,” referring to a statement from President Donald Trump’s March 4 speech in front of a joint session of Congress:

“A few years ago, January Littlejohn and her husband discovered that their daughter’s school had secretly socially transitioned their 13-year-old little girl. Teachers and administrators conspired to deceive January and her husband, while encouraging her daughter to use a new name and pronouns—‘they/them’ pronouns, actually—all without telling January, who is here tonight and is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse.”

This is not the first time Abbott and his administration have attacked the state’s trans community. In his “State of the State Address” this year, he said that teachers who discuss gender transition with students should be fired, according to KTRK-TV. Texas has also banned trans students from sports as well as the use of puberty blockers in cases of minors experiencing gender dysphoria, according to the Houston Chronicle.

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AMERICA FIRST?

Tim Walz: ‘Racism’ Motivates MAGA Movement to Pardon Derek Chauvin

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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz didn’t mince words when asked what the motivation was for the new movement among MAGA Republicans to convince President Donald Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who killed George Floyd in 2020.

“Racism. It’s racist. OK? That’s what I believe,” Walz said in an interview with Semafor published Wednesday.

The calls to pardon Chauvin started with an online petition earlier this month, according to The Independent. The pardon push picked up steam this week when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire launched a webseries, “The Case of Derek Chauvin.” Shapiro claims the officer was convicted on “extraordinarily scanty evidence,” saying Floyd did not die from having Chauvin’s knee on his neck for over nine minutes, but rather from drugs in Floyd’s system and heart disease.

READ MORE: Derek Chauvin Sentenced to 22-and-a-Half Years for Murder of George Floyd – Less Than Maximum Possible Sentence

Walz, however, disputes this interpretation of events.

“This was a man who murdered George Floyd on TV,” Walz said, adding that a pardon “would undermine the faith in the system.”

The White House, however, has denied that a Chauvin pardon is in Trump’s plans. Earlier this month, Trump said he hadn’t even heard about a push to pardon Floyd’s killer, and on Wednesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated that a pardon is “not something he’s considering at this time,” according to The Grio.

However, some commentators, like The Hill’s Juan Williams are skeptical, pointing out that Trump has pardoned two police officers convicted of killing a Black man in the first days of his second term.

In 2020, after the killing, Trump condemned Chauvin.

“We all saw what we saw. It’s hard to conceive anything other than what we did see. It should have never happened,” Trump said.

If Trump were to pardon Chauvin, it would be largely moot. Presidents can only pardon those convicted on federal charges. Chauvin was convicted on both federal and Minnesota state charges. In the event Trump cleared the federal charges, the main thing that would happen is that Chauvin would be moved from the federal prison in Big Spring, Texas to a Minnesota state prison.

Minnesota sentenced Chauvin to 22 and a half years for murder; on the federal level, he was sentenced to 21 years for violating Floyd’s civil rights. Barring a federal pardon, the two sentences are running concurrently, not consecutively.

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