News From Zontar: The convicted felon and sex offender must step aside to save the country!

Editors’ Note: Every so often the Spy Deep Space Desk gets a transmission from the mysterious planet of Zontar, located in the Remulac galaxy millions of light years from Earth. The planet is populated by a race of intelligent alien life forms whose communications, while largely incomprehensible to those of us here, may shed some light, however dim and distant, on the thought patterns of these bizarre creatures.  Apparently there was an election on Zontar coming up (but of course given the speed of light the election actually took place 634,000,000 years ago).  If we get a later transmission, we'll be sure to let you know how it came out!

By Bill Lee
Spy Deep Space Correspondent

In the wake of a recently hologrammed debate between the two leading contenders, the performance of one of the candidates, a former Zontarian Supremo named Donald R. Drumpf, has generated a nitrous oxide storm of controversy on the planet and generated calls for Drumpf to drop out for the good of the planet.

Drumpf's lie-filled debate performance has
raised concerns among content binners he isn't fit

Drumpf, who had previously been convicted of 34 business fraud felonies by a state court in the Zontarian imperial city of New Zork.  He also faces three other sets of criminal indictments elsewhere in Zontar, including charges related to insurrection and undermining national security by failing to secure highly classified files.  He has also been found by a jury to have committed rape, and by a judge of business frauds totaling over 18,425.64 Zontariums (or approximately $364 million in real money). 

According to media reports on many Zontar content bins, including the prestigious New Zork Times and Zontarian Post, Drumpf spent the entire debate spewing a farrago of lies:

For most of Thursday night’s debate, former President Drumpf painted his political opponent as an ineffective leader with a torrent of attacks that were frequently false, lacked context or were vague enough to be misleading.

He tried to accuse Mr. Ziden of corruption, dubbing the president as a “Manchurian candidate” who was “paid by Zhina,” a nod to frequent accusations of undue influence for which there is no evidence.

He directly blamed Mr. Ziden for a wave of immigrants “coming in and killing our citizens at a level we’ve never” seen, a hyperbolic claim that is falsified by indisputable data.

And in a wild misrepresentation of facts, Mr. Drumpf claimed falsely that Mr. Ziden “encouraged” Ruzzia to attack Zukraine, when it was in fact Mr. Drumpf who has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Ruzzia's dictator and tried to extort the President of Zukraine by conditioning military aid on smearing his opponent.... 

Further Drumpf refused to agree he would respect the outcome of the election win or lose and lied about his involvement in the insurrection that almost overthrew the Government of Zontar four years earlier, after he had been defeated in his re-election bid.

The combination of Drumpf's reliance on lies, his unwillingness to protect the democracy he previously tried to overthrow, and his record of criminal convictions, indictments, and civil judgments of rape and fraud has led some influential content bins to declare that Drumpf is not fit to run for President and should stand down before it is too late.

The court of King Zarthur XVI, whose family has controlled the New Zork Times for a hundred generations, declared:

Donald Drumpf has proved himself to be a significant threat to Zontarian democracy — an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust. He systematically attempted to undermine the integrity of elections. His supporters have described, publicly, a second-term agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. If he is returned to office, he has vowed to be a different kind of president, unrestrained by the checks on power built into the American political system....

King Zarthur XVI has decreed that Drumpf must go

It is a tragedy that Republicans themselves are not engaged in deeper soul-searching after Thursday’s debate. Mr. Drumpf’s own performance ought to be regarded as disqualifying. He lied brazenly and repeatedly about his own actions, his record as president and his opponent. He described plans that would harm the Zontarian economy, undermine civil liberties and fray Zontar’s relationships with other nations. He refused to promise that he would accept defeat, returning instead to the kind of rhetoric that incited the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. 

Although the Republican Party has been co-opted by Mr. Drumpf’s ambitions, the burden rests on all responsible Republicans to put the interests of Zontar above the ambitions of a single man.

Even Zontarian hologram critics have gotten into the act:

Drumpf blustered, dodged, made false statements and repeated his denials of his election loss. He cited his golf game as proof of his acuity and uttered the line, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.” But Mr. Drumpf, kept to glowering between answers by the mute button, was outrageous and misleading in a familiar way; it was the standard man-bites-fact-checker story.

The pushback the debate moderators gave was limited to reminding the debaters of how much time they had left and firmly asking them, again, to answer questions they had sidestepped, as Ms. Bazh did when asking Mr. Drumpf if he would accept the results of this election as he had not when he lost. (He gave the qualified answer that he would accept a “fair” and “legal” election.)

The fact-checking was missed. If Mr. Drumpf can get away with saying anything, he will, and he did, and who knows how many viewers stuck around for the eventual hologrammic truth-squadding after prime time? 

Powerful stuff.

The Zontarian content bins also mentioned that the incumbent stumbled over his words several times and his voice was raspy, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate their commitment to fair and balanced coverage.

Warning labels for media - what a good idea!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Social Media Expert Sir Nigel Gottgelt de Murdox

What's the latest grave threat posed to our children that consumes hundreds of hours of Congressional and cable news bloviating? 

Is it the repeal of vaccine mandates after a pandemic killed tens of thousands of them?

Is it the insane repeal of gun laws protecting our kids from being massacred by machine guns at recess? or 

Is is the unimpeded global warming that threatens to make huge swaths of the Earth uninhabitable for millions of children here and around the world?

Of course not.  Those are real problems.

The real threat to our youths we are told is in their pockets (which is what Victorian prudes thought too): their smartphones.  The fear and loathing attached to kids consuming social media has landed on all front pages.  The alleged news peg was a suggestion from the U.S. Surgeon General seeking a warning label on social media accessed by children and adolescents (the insane proliferation of insurrection-inducing lies directed at supporters of the Tangerine-Faced Felon not being a problem at all, apparently).

Smartphones, like other solitary pastimes enjoyed by kids before such as television, comic books, and rocket polishing are linked to all kinds of horrible things, not including seeking the overthrow of U.S. democracy, white supremacy, and misogyny, among other real social ills.

Even the normally gullible New York Times had to point out some inconvenient truths:

For many years, researchers have tried to determine whether the amount of time a child spent on social media contributed to poor mental health, and “the results have been really mixed, with probably the consensus being that no, it’s not related,” said Dr. Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association....

“It’s kind of like saying, ‘Is the number of calories that you eat good for you or bad for you?’” said Dr. Prinstein, ...“It depends. Is it candy, or is it vegetables? If your child is spending all day on social media following The New York Times feed and talking about it with their friends, that’s probably fine, you know?” 

Is it though? 

The idea that promiscuous media consumption can hurt you, and that you deserve a warning to protect you is surely applicable to all media.  

As part of our continuing effort to protect you, the social media consuming public, we propose our own warning labels that should be slapped on all kinds of media which if absorbed without warning, could lead to terrible effects, up to and including installing a corrupt Russian-owned sex offender as President of our United States.

For example, we have long known that reading and believing any number of New York Times op-ed columnists can lead to utter brain rot.

Let's protect ourselves, like this:

WARNING: This columnist supports anti-trans bigotry and hatred while whining hypocritically about cancel culture and should not be taken seriously by any fair-minded reader.

WARNING: This distinguished expert in Italian smoked and cured deli meats has passed off lazy generalizations as argument, while peddling a conservative both-sides myth that attempts to let his fellow Republicans off the hook for their angry violent support of white supremacy, plutocracy and Christian extremism.  You should disregard everything he says.

WARNING: This champion of undeserved white Irish reactionary privilege platforms the racist lies of her so-called brother Kevin.  Her facile both-siding in 2016 and her blind rage against Hillary Clinton for being married aided immensely, and possibly decisively, the election of the Tangerine-Faced Felon, who went on to install Supreme Court Justices she now is shocked to learn took away the rights of women.  If you see her in Georgetown, do not try to engage her, unless you are safely accompanied by a celebrity. 

This warning label idea seems so powerful it would be a shame to restrict it to just our favorite wypopo columnists at the Times.  It could apply to entire publications, right at the top of their home pages:

 

Of course, the power of the warning label isn't limited to legacy print media by any means.  It can apply to broadcast outlets who propagate reactionary lies masquerading as news in violation of their FCC licenses, which require them to serve the public interest as a public trustee:

Speaking of public service, the Pulitzer jury knows how to reach us. We think.

From the Archives, 1964 - Present at the Lobotomy

By Spy Archivist Aula Minerva
with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

As the demented Tangerine-Faced Felon unites the Republican Party around his platform of bigotry, corruption, and subversion, some lifelong Republican hacks once again raise the question of how this could have happened to their beloved Grand Old Party.

Long-time Republican apologist Peter Wehner has to his credit seen through the Trump Show for years.  Here he describes his evolution from Republican goon to human being:

Gosh, what happened to the good old moderate GOP?

I assumed that the claim that the Republican Party’s effort to win the South’s support in the late 1960s was part of a “southern strategy” relying on a coded racial appeal was unjust. Enforcing law and order is certainly a legitimate issue for politicians to run on, and a basic function of government.

Today I see the Republican Party through the clarifying prism of Donald Trump, who consistently appealed to the ugliest instincts and attitudes of the GOP base—in 2011, when he entered the political stage by promoting a racist conspiracy theory, and in 2016, when he won the GOP nomination. He’s done the same time and time again during his presidency—his attacks on the intelligence of black politicians, black journalists, and black athletes; his response to the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; and his closing argument during the midterm elections, when he retweeted a racist ad that even Fox News would not run.

Others similarly eventually woke up and smelled the crazy.  Joe Scarborough, now pocketing millions as a cable news gasbag, started out as a garden-variety Redneck Riviera impeachment hellhound.  What happened, Joe?

Asked by Colbert why other Republicans have not been as critical of Trump as he has, Scarborough said he thinks their tacit support of the president is “inexplicable.” He argued that the party has “betrayed its core values” since long before Trump took office, pointing to December 2015 when then-candidate Trump first called for a “total and complete” ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

“I said on the air, it’s very simple, it’s black and white,” Scarborough continued. “I said I can never vote for anybody in my party that said they were going to ban people for the god they worshipped.” He said he found Trump’s words and actions “disturbing” throughout the entire campaign, from the time he claimed to not know anything about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan to when he said a judge from Indiana couldn’t be fair to him because he was of Mexican heritage.

And then there's Mr. Kellyanne Conway, a long-time Federalist Society court-packing stalwart.  Not anymore: 

I just think the party is gone. I mean, the party needs to basically be destroyed, frankly, it is destroying itself. And I don’t think there’s any way that it can be repaired and I think Trump is going to take them down....

But it’s like crack, I mean, they’ve addicted themselves to these lies. They live off of these lies, the conservative media profits off of these lies, the political consultants profit off of these lies. The congressmen basically make a living selling these lies to the American people for contributions and funding—they’re lining their pockets or providing for their necessities of life through their PACs and whatever. There’s no way out, because they basically locked in a certain number of people to these lies.

Pete, Joe, and George sound hurt, shocked, and surprised by what happened to their Republican Party that they supported so loyally and loudly for decades.  But should they have been so surprised?

We looked into our archives to see if this Republican insanity is in fact a recent phenomenon.

Let's go back to 1964 and take a look from the pages of the Spy (including material it reprinted from the New York Times News Service). 

We picked 1964 because that was the year the Republican Party turned its back on the moderation of the Eisenhower years and embraced white supremacy, among other bats**t crazy ideas.

Although by June 1964 it was clear that Goldwater and the crazies were going to win, the besieged moderates were still hoping for a miracle from their flag-bearer, Gov. William Scranton.  According to James Reston,

In these last two weeks before its Presidential nominating convention, the Republican Party faces an issue that can be compared only to its past great struggles over slavery,.. Reconstruction... isolation and industrial reform....This general issue can be reduced to a number of specific questions that will face the Republican delegates in San Francisco in a few days:

Is the party that emancipated the Negroes now to be identified with the policy of leaving the Negro's battle for equal rights to the states, as Senator Goldwater proposes?

Is it in the interest of the Republican party,...to ally itself with those who oppose the Negro battle for equal civil rights...? Does the “respectable” Republican party...think Mr. Goldwater's civil-rights policy is either good morals or good politics?...

The policies of Mr.Goldwater...amount to a proposal that the Republican party should let him lead it in a counter-revolution against the trend of social-economic and foreign policies of the last generation....

But the Goldwater Revolution wasn't just white supremacy and protection of the rich and powerful.  It contained the historical hatred of the America-First Republicans to multinational organizations, including those intended to deter Soviet expansionism in Europe, like NATO.  Reporting from San Francisco, the Spy's ace Political Editor David Bloviator said:

Although the Goldwater right talks a frightening warmongering game against the Soviet Union and what it calls Red China, it opposes effective mechanisms of collective security like NATO, jeopardizing U.S. national security and the uneasy peace in Europe.

(For further information see E.H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life (2021) at 140 & 281.)

If you've forgotten how the Republican “great struggle” turned out in San Francisco, let us remind you.

On the eve of the Convention, Republicans organized a last-gasp opposition to Goldwater, leaking to The New York Times:

How...could Governor Romney of Michigan, or Senators Scott of Pennsylvania and Keating of New York...campaign on a ticket with a man who had once proposed putting Social Security on a voluntary basis, had questioned the need for a civil rights bill, [and] had at least once suggested withdrawal from the United Nations....

Most politicians could scarcely believe that in...January...[Goldwater] had suggested an investigation to see whether the poor were to some extent to blame for their poverty.  Far from weaseling, he later said the same thing in cruder terms.  [Like welfare queen? – Ed.]

All of which became mainstream Republican positions.

No wonder that worried moderates were seeking to get away from the coming debacle by booking rooms at the Concord to see Milton Berle on July 6 or Sammy Davis, Jr. on July 12. Not to mention three golf courses and five superb orchestras.

And they were right to worry:

As Tom Wicker reported for The New York Times,

The Republican National Convention sounded a thunderous “no” last night to the proposition that it should condemn the John Birch Society.  Then the delegates defeated a proposal to broaden the civil rights plank of the party platform [by expressing support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Goldwater opposed] ....

Spectators...and some delegates drowned out Governor Rockefeller with boos when he spoke strongly for a platform amendment that would have repudiated the right-wing Birch Society and other extremist groups....

Everything was fine before 2015, Republicans say

Nothing could have better demonstrated the hopelessness of the effort more than the howling response to Governor Rockefeller's speech.

(Don't worry; ol' Nelson was shown the love when he massacred prisoners and guards at Attica seven years later).

The great Russell Baker summed it up:

It was Bastille Day at the Cow Palace, too, and...the Cactus Jacobins demonstrated how things stand for the ancien regime. The guillotine is ready.

By the end of the Convention it was clear to even the meanest intelligence that the Republicans had been captured by hard-right reactionary white supremacist hatemongers. 

Which has been the case ever since.

So to answer the supposedly vexing question of what happened to the great Republican Party, all you have to do is read the news from 1964.  The GOP wasn't lassoed and kidnapped by the Tangerine-Faced Felon.  They chose each other.

And they deserve each other.

The media is shocked, shocked to discover white extremist violence

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Alison Porchnik in Manhattan

Recently a man was convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 felonies in a New York State criminal court.  His high priced lawyers ruthlessly attacked the prosecution's witnesses, but the man for whatever reason chose not to testify in his own defense after stating out of court that he was innocent.

He was convicted, as so many people are in New York State.

Normally this is not even news in New York (or anyone else), except there was one difference: the man is the Republican nominee for President.

The reaction of his partisans to the verdict was grisly:

Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

Convictions of criminals are not unusual

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.

“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.

On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting."

Threats of violence and intimidating rhetoric soared after Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed the vote was stolen. As he campaigns for a second White House term, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt tools of the Biden administration, intent on sabotaging his White House bid. His loyalists have responded with a campaign of threats and intimidation targeting judges and court officials.

Quite the response from the party of law and order, although in the aftermath of wide Republican approval of the violent January 6 insurrection against the United States perhaps not surprising.

What was more surprising however was that the media was surprised by threats of violence and subversion from Republicans.

Here's former National Review gasbag and forced-birth extremist mouthpiece David French shocked to discover that his beloved Republican Party is violent and intolerant:

Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.

There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered before. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.

I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats. 

Ah yes, the good old days before the Republicans became suddenly and unaccountably violent and extremist. 

To be clear, there's no excuse for these vile attacks and threat of violence against someone who writes stuff (or even argues in court to force 12-year-old rape victims to bear their rapist's child, speaking of violence).  

But why in the name of Clio was he surprised?  What did he think was going to happen?  Didn't he ever see Blazing Saddles?

The forces of white supremacy constitute the base of the Republican Party.  Although their partisan preferences shifted about half a century ago, their love of violence and vengeance goes back a lot longer.

They were just as cute about it back then as the Tangerine-Faced Felon is today addressing heatstroke victims in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

In 1964, when an integrated crew of young people had the temerity to venture into the heart of white supremacist power to help Black citizen register to vote (a right they had been denied for 80 years or so), the white power structure welcomed them like this, according to the June 7, 1964 New York Times:

Two weeks later, three of those civil rights workers – James Cheney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24 – found out what happens when you push white supremacists too damn far:

Nor was this an isolated incident. As recounted in the Spy recently, in 1970, the Republican Party endorsed the deliberate slaughter of unarmed antiwar protesters at Kent State to the general approbation of Republican voters. The following week, white construction workers attacked peaceful antiwar protesters while the NYPD did nothing.  The mob riot was lionized by white Republicans as a patriotic response to hippie scum.

Prof. Penny Lewis argued that

the Hard Hat Riot was more than just the straightforward narrative of ‘construction worker versus longhair.’ It was a convergence of genuine pro-Nixon sentiment, an administration eager to capitalize on a nation in crisis, and the dawn of a political realignment that would shape the nation's direction for generations.

That would be the realignment of angry violent white supremacists as the foundation of the Republican Party, with the results we see today.

As Republicans took control of the White House for 20 of the 24 years between 1968 and 1992 the threat of white violence subsided somewhat, because they held the levers of government power.

When Bill Clinton had the nerve to win the Presidency in1992, the white goons came back:

The militia movement in the United States is a right-wing extremist movement with an anti-government ideology and a strong emphasis on paramilitary activity. It emerged in 1993-1994, quickly engaging in criminal activity—often centered around illegal weapons and explosives—and violence, including some murders and numerous terrorist plots. After a significant slump in the early 2000s, the militia movement experienced a second major growth spurt starting in 2008 that has resulted in continuous activity since then, including more crime and violence.

The origins of the militia movement are rooted in longstanding traditions within the American far right as well as the reactions of anti-government extremists to certain specific events and controversies of the 1990s.  

That assessment was made by that well known tool of woke Democrats, the Anti-Defamation League.

Which brings us to the Tangerine-Faced Felon and the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, which the Republican nominee now claims was a justified action by freedom fighters.  And hardly a Republican says otherwise.

Which is why the media's shocking discovery of the violent streak of Republican white supremacy sounds so odd to us:

Some startling beliefs in the United States were revealed in a study last fall by the University of California, Davis: Nearly one in three respondents said violence was justified to advance political objectives, like stopping an election from being stolen, or to “preserve an American way of life I believe in.”

Startling, really?

The threat of violent white extremism has been real and obvious for decades.  If more evidence of that reality were needed, take a look at what The New York Times found fit to print on June 7, 1964.

The Times featured a front-page report on the 20th anniversary commemoration of D-Day.  One surprise was that General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander for the invasion, wasn't there, like Rishi Sunak, but for different reasons.  

The hero of D-Day and last honorable Republican to sit in the Oval Office had other more important things on his mind, as explained by the lead story on the front page of the Times that Sunday:

Gen. Eisenhower had to skip the commemorations in Normandy because he realized that he was needed to fight a battle at home: the gallant but ultimately unsuccessful effort to save the Republican Party from the clutches of extremist white supremacy.  Unlike D-Day, he failed, but not due to his lack of effort.

On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, our beloved mainstream media, unlike Eisenhower, is unable or unwilling to focus on the strategic imperative of our time: the defense of democracy against the current assault on it by the violent forces of insurrection and white supremacy.

We are, like England in 1940 and Eisenhower in 1964, on our own.