The Republican Party and the right-wing propaganda machine pushed by a handful of billionaires must now come up with all kinds of subterfuge to cover the fact that Donald Trump seems to have clearly scuttled away classified, possibly Top Secret, nuclear secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate. In fact, after first trying to create doubt about the legitimacy of the FBI’s legal search of the Mar-a-Lago premises, on Friday Trump released a statement all but admitting to having had nuclear secrets in his possession.
“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
Regardless of the implications of this statement, the right-wing-o-sphere has one job and one job only: Attack anything and everything in the hopes that their audience will latch on to at least one if not all of the easily debunked talking points. In so doing the propaganda machine will have created enough doubt to slide past the fact that Donald Trump and by extension the GOP are a criminal enterprise set on creating an authoritarian country. But another, equally important function of the propaganda pushed by the right is to intimidate and punish anyone for speaking up and doing the right, legal, and moral thing.
One of those people doing the right thing was Judge Bruce Reinhart, the person who signed the FBI’s search warrant. Fox News and others are going full conspiracy globalist antisemitic at him and are willing to do and say anything to stoke that hate.
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Since the announcement of the raid on Monday, conservatives online and on screens have been working to tie Reinhart to President Barack Obama as well as to former Trump buddy and serial rapist, child molester, and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The former connection is silly as Reinhart has donated to both parties pretty routinely and is married to a then-Gov. Rick Scott appointee. The latter connection has to do with representing a handful of Epstein’s employees in early 2008. The misinformation here is that many on the right are implying Reinhart was Epstein’s personal lawyer, making him a possible pedophile and criminal.
Reinhart and his family are now the target of angry online pieces of shit, trolling in their fascist incel cyber spaces. As VICE reports, everyone in Reinhart’s family and private circle are targets of online extremists. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals told the news outlet: “The U.S. Marshals are responsible for the protection of the federal judicial process, and we take that responsibility very seriously. While we do not discuss our specific security measures, we continuously review the measures in place and take appropriate steps to ensure the integrity of the federal judicial process.”
On Thursday, Brian Kilmeade—best known for having the emotional fortitude of a young third-grader—stood in for Tucker Carlson on Carlson’s evening show. How did he open his show? With a clearly doctored photo showing convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell giving a foot massage to Reinhart on a private jet. Kilmeade flashes the photo and continues his opening monologue while smirking. It is that smirk that is supposed to give him plausible deniability in the matter. It’s that smile that is supposed to imply that this is satire and not something he and Fox News can be sued for.
But the damage is done. Whether or not people believe that is a real photo, they can believe that the connection to Epstein is intimate, based on nothing. Considering how much evidence there is that Donald Trump and Epstein hung out in intimate situations, it is sickening to watch such projection of true moral degradation on the part of Kilmeade and his producers.
To be clear, this isn’t a heavy lift at this point in the propaganda factory that is Fox news. The entire GOP machine has been promoting a sometimes vague, most of the time right-on-the-nose antisemitic global conspiracy for decades now, vacuuming in everything from President Barack Obama being a secret Kenyan Muslim to Hillary Clinton murdering a former friend to hide land dealings.
It is the kind of stuff that has led to a rise in antisemitic incidents of harassment and crime and assholes like this one, trying to overthrow our government.
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