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This Radio Show’s Disgusting Homophobic Pranks Just Hit the National Airwaves

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‘Brooke and Jubal’ Features Phone Calls from Effeminate, Sexualized Caricature of a Gay Man

Seattle-based radio program Brooke and Jubal recently entered the national syndication arena, bringing with it co-host Jubal Flagg’s “phonetaps” in which he prank calls targets in the guise of, amongst others, an overtly effeminate, highly sexualized caricature of a gay man.

Premiere Networks, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia that syndicates conservative radio shows like The Sean Hannity Show and The Rush Limbaugh Show, announced in March that it had obtained the rights to distribute the show. The network describes Brooke and Jubal as “[featuring] conversation on the latest happenings in pop culture and entertainment, hilarious skits and listener interaction,” airing weekdays between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. nationwide.

The so-called hilarious skits include co-host Jubal’s aforementioned “phonetaps,” in which Flagg solicits listeners to submit ideas for prank calls. Listeners are asked to provide ideas, the expected reaction and “two things that really bug” the receiving party: namely, what’s going to upset them enough to evoke a negative, and thus radio-worthy, reaction.

One tool Flagg employs to evoke these reactions is the character Movin’ 92.5 often refers to as “everyone’s favorite sassy Christian” — his overtly effeminate, self-absorbed, highly sexualized caricature of a gay man, now airing in various timeslots nationwide.

Versions of this character appear to have been part of Flagg’s “comedy” since at least the 2008 election cycle, as seen in videos of a “convergaytion” in which he weeps over “the best American” Perez Hilton and the potential of “our greatest assets” (celebrities) leaving the country. But the character of Christian appears to have first made an appearance as a “phonetap” regular in 2011’s “Christian is stuck in the closet.”

While the audio of Christian’s debut on the station’s website is no longer available, more likely due to its tenure than its offensive nature, the description asserts that “Christian gets what Christian wants!”

Some examples of what the character has wanted since, which are currently circulating nationwide as new content via syndication, include:

• Arguing with a straight man that he’s accidentally booked a gay cruise, asserting that he’ll go on the cruise or Christian will spank him, insisting that “everybody’s ‘not gay’ until they’ve tried it”:

• Insisting that a straight man’s bride-to-be is a “bridezilla,” and insulting her appearance before complimenting his own:

• Convincing a straight woman that he’s training her boyfriend, with the goal of getting him in shape so that he can find someone more attractive than her:

• Making a dinner reservation with a laundry list of demands: new menus to accommodate his recent manicure, a reservation time three hours before his arrival to ensure that he’s fashionably late and a table where everyone can see him:

• Attempting to convince a straight man’s personal assistant that he’s the extramarital boyfriend of her boss. After the prank is revealed, the two casually laugh about the idea of her boss having a “gay lover that he was hiding”:

• Convincing a man that Christian is a personal trainer at the gym he attends, and that he needs to start working out elsewhere because he’s more attractive than Christian. After a rather long description of his “tasty abs,” Christian insists that he needs to go because, “I’m the hot one at the gym”:

• While there are more examples, finally: Lodging a complaint to a retail manager because her “minions” were awestruck by how attractive he was. This was a detriment to his well-being as they brought him a larger pair of pants to try on, implying he was fat:

The character of Christian isn’t Flagg’s only portrayal of gay men, however. In another prank, he calls the brother of a prison inmate who asked only that his brother be made “nervous.”

After Jubal reveals that the conversation’s been a prank, it ends with the two men laughing about how “hopefully [his] brother’s nobody’s butt steak.” Here’s the full audio: 

Fox-syndicated show Dish Nation, which “dishes on celebrity news with humorous commentary on pop culture,” has further displayed the Brooke and Jubal team and their stance on LGBT representation.

One video featured a broadcast of the show highlighting a segment in which, rather than “pranking the audience, [they] prank[ed] each other,” and shows a same-sex kiss between Jubal and a horrified, overtly disgusted team member concerned that others might think he’s gay.

In a follow-up video, the entire Brooke and Jubal team muse over an audience member believing that Flagg and the team member are in fact gay, leading him to jokingly indicate that he’s strived his entire life to “be an icon to the gay community.” (This shouldn’t be shocking, co-host Brooke advises, as Flagg “[takes] his shirt off every moment [he] can.”) The horrified, overtly disgusted team member, of course, remains horrified and overtly-disgusted.

Often, the pranks made on the show are made on straight men, at the request of other straight men, and are always carried out by Flagg, a straight man, as another straight man laughs in the background. Undoubtedly, however, they aren’t only heard by straight men.

In February, Nielsen released its annual State of the Media report, concluding that 265 million Americans ages 6 and up listen to the radio on a weekly basis. The study indicated that radio reaches 93 percent of the population weekly, more than any other platform, including television, TV-connected devices, PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Nielsen determined that 66.5 million millennials (ages 18-34) use the radio weekly, spending an average of 11 hours and 9 minutes listening, and studies have also concluded that of millennials alone, 10.8 million US households have children, many of which are potentially LGBT.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), just two weeks ago, released its national report on the health risks facing children and teenagers, specifically those that identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual:

• More than 40 percent of LGB students seriously considered suicide and 29 percent reported attempting suicide in the past year.

• Sixty percent of LGB students reported having been so sad or hopeless that they stopped doing some usual activities.

• LGB students were up to five times more likely than other students to report using several illegal drugs.

• More than one in 10 LGB students have missed school during the past 30 days because of safety concerns.

While the at-risk youth live in a society where 72 percent of Americans support LGBT non-discrimination laws, they also live in a society where 28 percent do not. Likewise, while they live in a country where 62 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, 38 percent do not.

They live in a society where just over two months ago, 49 members of the LGBT community were murdered in the country’s deadliest mass shooting — a hate crime that was the worst terror attack since 9/11.

They live in a society where a man claiming to be a “Christian warrior” was only just arrested for a YouTube video, viewed over 73 million times, in which he threatened to massacre “gays, f*gg*ts, lesbians and satanists.”

And they live in a society where a man running a presidential candidate’s campaign is well-known for his anti-LGBT news site that’s published headlines such as, “Dear Straight People: I’m officially giving you permission to say gay, f*gg*t, and queer.”

The CDC’s report doesn’t indicate, however, if the 40 percent of LGB students who have considered suicide in the past year, or their potentially homophobic parents, fellow students or bullies who have led to over one in 10 students missing school for safety concerns, are among the 265 million Americans listening to the radio on a weekly basis.

The number of LGBT listeners of the show, voluntary or not, is unknown. Also unknown is the number of those in the LGBT community who aren’t in a position to find humor in a straight man pranking another straight man, at the request of another straight man, as another straight man laughs in the background.

Despite this, “Brooke and Jubal’s tremendous success in Seattle and Portland proves they can deliver quality programming that drives results in a highly-competitive landscape,” Premiere Networks President Julie Talbott said. “[We] look forward to expanding Brooke and Jubal’s unique brand of entertainment to additional markets across the country.”

Recent expansions include Meadview, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, Louisville, Kentucky, Biloxi, Mississippi, Columbia, South Carolina, and Tampa, Florida.

Rachel Nelson, Peremiere Networks contact for guests, media and listeners, did not respond to a request for comment.

 

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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