The [Bureau of Land Management] hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director in 5 years. [In other words Trump never bothered.] And Stone-Manning’s tenure begins as the Biden administration is under intense pressure to end all fossil fuel development on federal land in the West. Environmentalists see that as a key component to fighting the climate crisis. But the oil and gas industry still expects the US government to afford it new drilling opportunities.
It’s that “But” – that’s why. On the one hand: we need to “fight” the climate crisis because it’s an existential threat to the planet, to humans, to everything that depends on the planet. On the other hand, an industry wants to continue making $$$. Those two things should not be treated as equally important or urgent or impossible to ignore. The existential threat should knock the profit-desire all the way out of the picture with a single blow, but it never does.
It’s up to Stone-Manning to strike that tricky and some say contradictory balance.
“Some say” – yes, NPR, it’s just a quirky eccentric opinion of some wacky people.
It shouldn’t be up to Stone-Manning to strike any kind of “balance” between trying to slow climate change and what The Oil And Gas Industry wants.
… the oil and gas industry has warned that stopping all new – and discouraging existing – development could cost local economies in the West tens of billions of dollars.
Wait til they see what the rise in sea level is going to cost, to name just one item.
Hundreds of people tricked into making explicit videos for porn websites have been awarded the rights to the videos and millions of dollars in damages.
Hundreds of people? Wasn’t that scam perpetrated on women? It’s not PeopleDoPorn it’s GIRLSDoPorn.
The sites, GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, had been the subject of a long-running legal battle.
The US Department of Justice has ruled that rights to videos and images produced by the now-defunct sites belong to the women.
More than 400 victims can now ask for the online footage to be removed.
They belong to the women, so it’s women, so why people? Has the BBC or at least some of its staff developed a reflexive caution around the word “women” as if it’s tainted, suspect, to be avoided, or at least diluted with random substitutions of “people”?
But the fact that it’s women is of course the core of the story – men do this to women.
“I just did an interview with BBC World Asia. It was to talk about the shows I’m doing in Singapore and Bangkok,” he wrote in a Twitter thread.
“Instead, the interviewer, whose name was, I think, Karishma, started by asking me questions about Cancel Culture.”
I replied courteously and in full I explained that if parents were over protective, it did not prepare children well when they entered the real and often not-very-nice world.
“She then asked a disjointed question, clearly trying to portray me as old-fashioned, uncaring and basically harmful.”
A federal judge on Thursday evening unraveled a painstakingly negotiated settlement between Purdue Pharma and thousands of state, local and tribal governments that had sued the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin for the company’s role in the opioid epidemic, saying that the plan was flawed in one critical area.
The judge, Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that the settlement, part of a restructuring plan for Purdue approved in September by a bankruptcy judge, should not go forward because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioid-related cases.
Although the Sacklers did not file for personal bankruptcy protection, they had made immunization from opioid claims an absolute requirement in exchange for contributing payments amounting to $4.5 billion to the agreement.
The judge says the bankruptcy code doesn’t spell that out so nope.
Lawyers for a small group of states that had appealed the plan immediately hailed the ruling. “This is a seismic victory for justice and accountability that will re-open the deeply flawed Purdue bankruptcy and force the Sackler family to confront the pain and devastation they have caused,” said William Tong, the attorney general of Connecticut.
That’s capitalism.
The Sacklers appear to have taken careful steps to protect their billions as the corpses piled up.
During oral arguments, Judge McMahon said she was troubled by what she saw as a red flag: the more than $10 billion that the Sacklers withdrew from Purdue between 2008 and 2018, as the opioid epidemic was cresting. The Sackler dividends were largely deposited in offshore accounts and trusts that are inaccessible to American authorities.
And notably, she said, the withdrawals escalated after Purdue and three top executives pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal and civil charges related to aggressive marketing of opioids, paying more than $600 million.As Judge McMahon wrote: “Concerned about how their personal financial situation might be affected, the family began what one member described as an ‘aggressive[]’ program of withdrawing money from Purdue almost as soon as the ink was dry on the 2007 papers.”
Those withdrawals left the company without deep cash reserves to resolve thousands of opioid lawsuits that, by late 2019, forced Purdue to seek shelter in bankruptcy. But to settle the lawsuits and emerge from bankruptcy, Purdue needed the Sacklers’ contribution.
That reliance put the Sacklers in a position to make a line-in-the-sand demand: They would only give the money if they received immunity from all opioid-related cases filed in civil courts.
Trans women are, by definition, men who “identify as” women or call themselves women or whatever formula you like for a man who wants to roleplay womanitude. Of course they’re men. If they were women they wouldn’t be trans women, would they. It’s only women who are women. Men who pretend to be women are men who pretend to be women; they’re not women.
Yo, people, climate change is going to eat our lunch so how about devoting all this energy to sabotaging all the cruise ships or something instead of all this whining about men who wanna be women.
The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea could collapse within three to five years, scientists reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.
Thwaites Glacier is “one of the largest, highest glaciers in Antarctica — it’s huge,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Boulder, Colo.–based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told reporters. Spanning 120 kilometers across, the glacier is roughly the size of Florida, and were the whole thing to fall into the ocean, it would raise sea levels by 65 centimeters, or more than two feet. Right now, its melting is responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.
Cruise companies are even now planning cruises to go look at the ice shelf while it’s still there.
Satellite data show that over the last 30 years, the flow of Thwaites Glacier across land and toward the sea has nearly doubled in pace. The collapse of this “Doomsday Glacier” alone would alter sea levels significantly, but its fall would also destabilize other West Antarctic glaciers, dragging more ice into the ocean and raising sea levels even more.
Worse than predicted and much much sooner than predicted.
Why did eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory and six workers at an Illinois Amazon warehouse die this week? They were killed when a powerful tornado destroyed their workplaces, but it wasn’t really the storm that killed them, any more than a sailor forced to walk the plank is killed only by the waves. They were not random victims. They were sacrificed. We here in the most advanced nation on earth offered them up to the gods that we actually worship.
Why did they die? They died because they were inside their workplaces in the path of the storm. They died because they did not leave work before disaster struck. And they did not leave work because they were allegedly ordered not to, by their bosses. The factory workers in Kentucky say that managers threatened to fire them if they left. Amazon workers say that they were told not to leave in advance of the storm. They also say that lack of adequate safety procedures is par for the course at Amazon, where the employee handbook notifies workers that they can be fired for leaving without “permission”.
And why is that? Because the workers have no union. The bosses have seen to it.
None of them had a union to empower them to stand up to a boss who demanded that they do something that put them in danger. None of them had a union to give them the collective ability to require their employers to value their lives. Unions are the only – the only – reason industries from construction to coal mining are far safer today than they were a century ago.
And why didn’t the Amazon workers and the candle factory workers have a union?
They didn’t have unions because employers believe that unions will cost them money, and therefore all of corporate America and much of our political structure has conspired for many decades to make it extremely hard for regular working people to form and maintain unions. Amazon, in particular, goes to great lengths to fight unionization everywhere. It spies on workers; it hires expensive anti-union consultants; it violates labor law; it lies to its workers and tries to scare them.
As corporations did with impunity until some new laws and agencies emerged from the New Deal. Reagan and his successors reversed all that.
This is the American system as we like it. As a society, we prefer a world in which a large number of people live paycheck-to-paycheck and will therefore take jobs as “independent contractors” with few rights and little safety and no union and low wages. We want a world in which people are so afraid of losing their jobs that they will quite literally ride out a tornado for less than $20 an hour, because the alternative is poverty. This is the social arrangement that allows us to have lots of cheap stuff, fast.
Maybe the workers should try identifying as bosses.
Parents of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team are demanding the NCAA change rules that have permitted transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to dominate the competition, declaring ‘at stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,’ DailyMail.com has learned.
The parents of about 10 swimmers sent a letter last week to the NCAA and forwarded it to the Ivy League and University of Pennsylvania officials.’
At stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,’ they wrote in the letter obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com. ‘The precedent being set – one in which women do not have a protected and equitable space to compete – is a direct threat to female athletes in every sport. What are the boundaries? How is this in line with the NCAA’s commitment to providing a fair environment for student-athletes?
‘It is the responsibility of the NCAA to address the matter with an official statement,’ the parents continue. ‘As the governing body, it is unfair and irresponsible to leave the onus on Lia, Lia’s teammates, Lia’s coaches, UPenn athletics and the Ivy League. And it is unfair and irresponsible to Lia to allow the media to dictate the narrative without the participation of the NCAA.’
You know what I don’t care about here? What’s unfair to Lia. Lia’s the one who is unfair and I don’t think he should come first in the list of people who are being treated unfairly. Include him at the end, if you must, but not at the beginning. He knows what he’s doing and he’s smirking about it. He’s not one of the victims in this situation. Yes the adults are helping him do it, but he’s not innocent.
The university sent a terse response to the parents, claiming the school is doing what it can to help the student-athletes navigate Lia’s success, [and] shared a link to mental health services.
“Don’t like it? Go see a shrink, i.e. fuck off.”
‘Please know that we fully support all our swimming student-athletes and want to help our community navigate Lia’s success in the pool this winter,’ the university replied. ‘Penn Athletics is committed to being a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our student-athletes, coaches and staff and we hold true to that commitment today and in the future.’
And blah blah blah to you too, but being “inclusive” shouldn’t mean excluding girls from the girls’ swim team in order to be “inclusive” of a boy. Include the boy on the boys’ swim team if he’s good enough, but leave the girls’ swim team for the girls.
‘We’ve encouraged our student-athletes to utilize the robust resources available to them at Penn, and I’d like to share them with you as well,’ the school wrote the parents, providing links to ‘counseling and psychological services, the LGBT Center, Restorative Practices and our Center for Student-Athlete Success staff.’
Yeah no, they don’t want “resources,” they want their swim team back.
Planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels and other human activities has already raised global temperatures more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). But the effects are particularly profound at the poles, where rising temperatures have seriously undermined regions once locked in ice.
In research presented this week at the world’s biggest earth science conference, Pettit showed that the Thwaites ice shelf could collapse within the next three to five years, unleashing a river of ice that could dramatically raise sea levels. Aerial surveys document how warmer conditions have allowed beavers to invade the Arctic tundra, flooding the landscape with their dams. Large commercial ships are increasingly infiltrating formerly frozen areas, disturbing wildlife and generating disastrous amounts of trash.
…
The rapid transformation of the Arctic and Antarctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift and ecosystems will be altered. Unless humanity acts swiftly to curb emissions, scientists say, the same forces that have destabilized the poles will wreak havoc on the rest of the globe.
There’s a lot more in the same vein. It’s all very bad news.
It's heartbreaking, but women are going to have to start all over again with everything we have built. I genuinely fear so, the capture has been so profound https://t.co/2OOlBZIvLC
How can we start over again when the “trans women” and their deranged allies will just grab whatever we build?
The trans cult is destroying everything women have built up since the late 60s, so how would we prevent them from destroying anything we build anew in 2022 and beyond? It’s not as if they’re going to say “Okay, fair enough, we’ll take all your stuff that exists to date and you can have whatever you make starting now.” Of course they’re not. They’re going to go right on saying anything that’s for women is for them too because they are women and you’re a criminal demon if you deny it. They’re inside the house and they’re not leaving.
We have evidence not only that women in Scotland need access to these services on a female-only basis, but that many are self-excluding right now & unsupported. (Please note RCS & SWA consider 'women-only' to include males; 'female-only' precludes males, hence our terminology).
We have evidence of the impact all of this has had on survivors – including one unsupported woman did not even report her rape to the police for fear of being considered transphobic – & we will be writing to the Scottish Govt presenting this evidence, when we are back in January.
The actual police, the people responsible for recording crime, will acquiesce to a male rapist’s desire to be referred to as female. The consequences of this deranged, hyper-relativist policy will be dire. Crime stats will become a joke, with numerous rapes being falsely attributed to women. Female prisons could be swarmed by male rapists. And complainants in rape cases could face the prospect of having to use female pronouns in court when addressing the man who brutalised them.
Could? Will. This is all too obvious. It’s already happened in the assault case in which the judge ordered the victim, Maria MacLachlan, to call the man who assaulted her “she.”
How long before judges start reprimanding complainants for incorrect pronoun use? ‘She forced her penis into you – please respect the pronouns, Miss.’
It has already happened.
[Rowling’s] point was crystal clear: it is positively Orwellian to refer to rapists as women. It is a flagrant and authoritarian denial of reality to record a violent sexual assault that was carried out by someone with a penis – what we used to call a man – as having been committed by a woman. There is unquestionably something very Big Brother about officialdom’s threat to erase truth in order to avoid offending the cult of genderfluidity and its noisy adherents.
And why is it so urgent to avoid offending the cult of gender souls? It’s never been urgent to avoid offending women, but it’s terribly urgent to avoid offending men who call themselves women? Says a lot, doesn’t it. Too much.
JK Rowling’s name has been downgraded in a trailer promoting the latest film of her Fantastic Beasts series amid a row over her views on trans identification.
Unlike previous adverts for the franchise, Rowling’s name barely features in the two-and-a-half-minute trailer for the third instalment, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is out next year.
The new trailer opens with the caption “Warner Bros invites you” while the 2018 film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald said “JK Rowling invites you” and credited her with writing and producing the film.
It is only at the end of the new trailer that a small publishing rights note bearing Rowling’s name appears.
Yes yes yes but Trans Women Are The Most Vulnerable so shut up.
But words and language don’t have to be “inclusive” of everything at all times – if they did they couldn’t do their jobs as words and language. If words are to mean anything they have to be non-inclusive, because if they include everything they might as well include nothing. Meaning is inherently exclusionary.
The 30-page pamphlet said the words “woman” and “female” “mean different things but are often used interchangeably”, adding: “Referring to women as females is perceived by many as reducing a woman to her reproductive parts and abilities.”
Yes, that can be true. “Females” can sound downright insulting…but on the other hand they don’t exactly mean different things. They have different overtones, but the literal meaning is the same.
But then they tip their hand.
“Not all women are biologically female, and the conflation of ‘female’ to ‘woman’ erases gender nonconforming people and members of the trans community.”
All women are biologically female; that’s what the word means. Pretending that not all women are female erases women, so don’t do that. “Gender nonconforming people and members of the trans community” don’t matter more than women do, and there are way fewer of them, so don’t go redefining what “female” means to tickle the egos of a tiny narcissistic minority. Or to put it another way, cut your ties to Stonewall.
The Telegraph understands there are no plans to disband or redirect the MoD’s Diversity and Inclusion Directorate, which was responsible for the guide.
The news came as the new CDS, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, said the push for greater diversity in the military is not about being “woke”, but addressing the “woeful” lack of women and ethnic minorities in the forces.
If you want more women in the forces, don’t be telling women that not all women are female.
But don’t go thinking other women who are branded with the scarlet letters of TERF are innocent of wrongdoing. No no no no no no don’t think that for a second – that would be very wrong, in fact it would make you a TERF.
Does violence against trans people occur with depressing regularity? Is there a citation for that? (No, there is not.) Are trans people murdered at a grossly disproportionate rate? Is there a citation for that? (No, there is not.) Is there a “cultural panic” about “transness”? Well, that one depends on who is doing the labeling.
Anyway. It doesn’t get more “Do it to Julia” than this fetid little pile of dung.
Billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk lashed out at Senator Elizabeth Warren on Twitter, calling the Massachusetts Democrat a “Karen” after she accused him of “freeloading” by not paying his fair share of taxes.
But Karen is definitely not a substitute for “bitch,” no no no not at all. It’s about the haircut.
Musk engaged in the Twitter spat with Warren on Tuesday, one day after the senator shared an article about the billionaire being named Time magazine’s person of the year. Warren tweeted that the “rigged tax code” should be changed “so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”
But he’s Good for the Economy.
The world’s richest person responded to the senator by tweeting a 2019 Fox News opinion article calling the then-presidential candidate a “fraud” while maintaining that she had spread “lies about being Native American” in order “to benefit from affirmative action or other preferential programs.” Musk captioned his link with the comment, “Stop projecting!”
Warren on Monday also retweeted a tweet from Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, that contended it was “‘TIME’ for Elon Musk to pay his fair share of taxes.” The senator responded that she had “a plan for that.”
Earlier this year, Warren, Jayapal and Pennsylvania Representative Brendan Boyle introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, a proposal that would place a 2 percent annual tax on households with a net worth above $50 million and a 3 percent annual tax on households with net worths above $1 billion.
So…rapists who identify as women are the most vulnerable population in the world? No, I don’t think that can be right. There’s the being a rapist bit first of all – raping isn’t being vulnerable, it’s being raped that’s being vulnerable. Then there’s the part about being a man. Men who rape: most vulnerable in world? No, I’m not buying that.
Let’s think of some genuinely vulnerable populations in the world. Women in Afghanistan, there’s one. Then you can add women in a long long long list of countries – women are vulnerable because of religious misogyny, because of poverty, because of violence, because of preferential treatment for sons and brothers, because of tradition – the list is long.
Uighurs. People in Somalia, people in Syria, people on Pacific islands that are disappearing because of climate change, people in countries torn apart by war, people in authoritarian countries, people in areas ruined by drought, people who have lost everything in wild fires – I could go on like this for hours. There are literally billions of very vulnerable people in the world, and I don’t think for one second that men in prosperous countries who identify as women are anything like as vulnerable as that. Many are subject to ridicule or hostility or both, I don’t doubt that, but the hyperbole that’s built up about how “vulnerable” they are is ludicrous. And as for rapists – which was the subject of Rowling’s tweet – how about the vulnerability of the woman raped? Eh?
The Guardian has obtained a letter, written in 2003 by Dr Richard Budgett, in which he discusses the consequences of trans women competing in women’s sport. Responding to a government inquiry, Budgett, then at the British Olympic Association, states: “The effect of allowing male transsexuals to compete as women would be to make competition unfair and potentially dangerous in some sports and would undermine women’s sports.”
Ya think? It’s still weird that anyone would have to say that, let alone that he would “evolve” to stop saying it.
Society has shifted. Language has changed. Budgett is now medical and scientific director at the International Olympic Committee. And his views, according to IOC sources, have evolved – particularly when it comes to finding ways to balance the need for inclusion and fairness in sport.
There is no “need for inclusion” in sport of the “men can compete against women” type. Inclusion in sport should mean making sure disadvantaged people get more opportunities and help; it should not mean making sure men replace some women in women’s sport.
A controversial new IOC framework, drawn up in part by Budgett, adopts a strikingly different stance. While stressing that men’s and women’s competition should be “fair and safe”, it also tells sports that, “until evidence determines otherwise”, trans athletes “should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage”.
As I pointed out the other day, that’s a sneaky evasive cowardly way of putting it, because the issue isn’t “trans athletes” but men. Men have an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage over women. Everybody knows that, but way too many people are determined to cover it up.
This is something being done to women, and there is no equivalent being done to men. Wouldn’t you think that should be enough to alert people to how fucked up it is? There can’t be any equivalent, ever, because men are bigger and stronger than women, end of story. The equivalent being done to men would have to be allowing adult male gorillas to compete against men. I don’t see any plans to do that currently.
No magic bullet, no one-size-fits-all policy can satisfy all sides. The issue involves competing rights and strong emotions. Worryingly a recent UK Sports Councils Equality Group report also found that women in sport were told to keep quiet by their national governing bodies and feared abuse on social media if they voiced their opinions.
The issue does not involve “competing rights.” There is no “right” for men to compete against women and shatter all their records, while the women are told to shut up. That’s not a right, it’s a fucking insult.
Yet perhaps times are changing. At the Sport Resolutions dispute resolution service last week several experts were able to discuss openly and courteously what sports should do next. It made for fascinating listening. For David Grevemberg, of the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, inclusion mattered most. And if sport had to radically change, then it should. “Are there ways, that are not infringing on human rights, to create a level playing field?” he asked. “Are there other conditions that we can create – for example staggered starts in the 100m? Or delayed starts?”
No. Just no. Stop. Leave the women alone. Letting men compete against women creates a very tilted playing field indeed.
Gender extremists hate Rowling not just because she is famous and has a platform, but because her barbs hit home. She uses language precisely, avoiding ad feminam abuse and hyperbole, while they — how can I put this politely? — do not.
It’s about this business of ratifying men as women on a mere assertion. If a man says he’s a woman then he’s a woman, says the Scottish government, and if he’s a woman why then if he blots his copybook he gets imprisoned with his fellow women.
Police Scotland admitted as much in a response to a question from a former SNP justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, about how they would deal with rapists when the new law comes into force. Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie confirmed that a rapist who was ‘born male, but who identifies as a female’ could be recorded as a woman without even going through the process of getting a gender recognition certificate. This is already happening in England and Wales, where a staggering 436 male-bodied sex offenders were classified as women between 2012 and 2018.
Rowling’s intervention is crucial because this issue, more than trans-identified males demanding to use women’s toilets or changing rooms, is one that exercises a wide swathe of opinion. People baulk at the prospect of vulnerable women prisoners, many of them victims of domestic violence, being forced to share intimate spaces with men who have been convicted of serious sex offences. Rowling has experienced domestic abuse herself, so she knows how unpalatable this is. She also knows exactly how and when to intervene — and that makes her a very dangerous adversary.
Has “the rise of transphobia” made “lesbian identity” obsolete? One “form of marginalization equates lesbianism with transphobia.” The true, traditional, correct, acceptable, approved lesbian identity is “political, nonessentialist, intersectional, and community grounded.” You were probably thinking it was to do with women loving women, but that’s obsolete. The new improved lesbianism is “inclusive of trans, nonbinary, and cis women.” Obviously “cis women” are last in the list because really, who gives a shit about women? Men who call themselves women are so much more fascinating and enlightened and – let’s face it – sexy than boring old dreary tedious women. If we understand lesbianism as “grounded in politics of inclusion” i.e. dominated by men we can fight climate change.
This is published by something that calls itself Journal of Lesbian Studies.
Prior to a unanimous vote to refer Mark Meadows for contempt of Congress charges, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the ranking Republican on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, read a series of text messages she said Meadows received during the Capitol attack.
In the messages, several figures, including Donald Trump Jr. and Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, urge Meadows to get then-President Donald Trump to tell his supporters to leave the Capitol.
Cheney said Meadows, who was Trump’s White House chief of staff during the siege, turned over the materials before he stopped cooperating with the panel.
Cheney says Meadows is refusing to testify about text messages “that he admits are not privileged.”
On January 6th, our Capitol building was attacked and invaded. The mob was summoned to Washington by President Trump. And, as many of those involved have admitted – on videotape, in social media, and in Federal District Court – they were provoked to violence by President Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen. On January 6th, our Capitol building was attacked and invaded.
The violence was evident to all – it was covered in real time by almost every news channel. But, for 187 minutes, President Trump refused to act when action by our President was required, indeed essential, and compelled by his oath to our Constitution. Mr. Meadows received numerous text messages, which he has produced without any privilege claim – imploring that Mr. Trump take the specific action we all knew his duty required.
Emphasis mine. It’s clearly wrong and bad and illegal on its face but in addition to that he swore an oath to prevent it. That will mean precisely nothing to him, but that’s because he’s a psychopath, not because the oath is meaningless.
These texts leave no doubt: the White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol. Republican members of Congress and others wrote to Mark Meadows as the attack was underway:
-“Hey, Mark, protestors are literally storming the Capitol. Breaking windows on doors. Rushing in. Is Trump going to say something?”
-“We are under siege up here at the Capitol.”
-“They have breached the Capitol.”
-“There’s an armed standoff at the House Chamber door.”
-“We are all helpless.”
Dozens of texts, including from Trump administration officials, urged immediate action by the President:
-“POTUS has to come out firmly and tell protestors to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed”
-“Mark, he needs to stop this. Now”
-“TELL THEM TO GO HOME”
-“POTUS needs to calm this shit down.”
Indeed, according to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the President needed to act immediately. They texted Meadows that:
-“Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home…this is hurting all of us…he is destroying his legacy.” Laura Ingraham wrote.
-“Please get him on tv. Destroying everything you have accomplished.” Brian Kilmeade wrote.
-“Can he make a statement?…Ask people to leave the Capitol.” Sean Hannity urged.
As the violence continued, one of the President’s sons texted Meadows:
“He’s got to condemn this s*** Asap. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.” Donald Trump, Jr. texted.
Meadows responded: “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.”
But that was then. Now Meadows refuses to cooperate.
