Corrected: Arizona and the Big Lie: Part 1
Do we know bullshit when we see it?
“Arizonans know BS when they see it.” -Kari Lake
I know about bullshit. I have some native expertise in BS. I’m Irish. I’m genetically predisposed to produce bullshit in large amounts and I am able to identify bullshit when I see it, a gift I did not always possess..
I recall standing on our ladder next to my dad, the Master Sergeant, on a Christmas morning, here in the Old Pueblo, long ago . The old man was showing me the indisputable, irrefutable evidence that Santa was real. ““Look, boy. Over there. By the swamp box. See that, boy? That’s reindeer poop.”
Did this boy think for a moment it was possible I was looking at mere dog turds Pop had planted on the roof the night before? I did not. I chose to believe eight flying reindeer, hauling a sleigh from the North Pole, had landed on our roof in Tucson that night. Just like my, neighbor Joe chooses to believe Fox News is real every night.
Thanks to the Dominion defamation suit against Fox, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have all been caught sputtering the truth we, the sentient, the hominids capable of critical thought, always knew. Fox News traffics in bullshit. The kind of bullshit that can pull in high ratings while shattering a democracy. And it doesn’t shake their souls because Fox fears the rabid “Clockwork Orange Base” they lovingly groomed and infected over several decades with civic rabies far more than they fear the end of America.
Fox News traffics in bullshit. The kind of bullshit that can pull in high ratings while shattering a democracy.
In Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley’s “Frankenstein” Doctor Victor Frankenstein, while quilting a creature together with cadaver remnants, makes one tiny mistake. He transplants the brain of a sociopath into his beast. In the novel, Dr.Frankenstein flees to the Arctic to escape the monster he created. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham will be wishing they were in the Arctic rather than choking on their lies downtown in a courtroom.
Fox News kept shoveling Trump’s bullshit until Dominion came knocking with a summons. Meanwhile, in Arizona we saw Kari Lake go into bullshit overdrive the moment she lost to Katie Hobbs. Flinging it like a monkey on meth, she literally sold bullshit to every sucker west of the Potomac. Before the year was out Lake had conned every MAGA sap in every Sun City in America out of $2.5 million dollars. Every lawsuit Kari’s supporters funded was ruled to be bullshit. And “Fact Skipper” the Barbie doll anchor kept a fat chunk.
Before the year was out Lake had conned every MAGA sap in every Sun City in America out of $2.5 million dollars. Every lawsuit Kari’s supporters funded was ruled to be bullshit.
The world of fundraising is a very small world. Mark Finchem gave more than $1.5 million to “Go Right Strategies”, an anti-democratic bullshit super-spreader run by a Mr. Spence Rogers, who is coincidentally, surprise, surprise, the nephew of Arizona’s pro-bullshit anti-Semitic pine cone from Flagstaff, State Senator Wendy “I love a good white supremacist rally” Rogers! It’s a very small world.
Hawking “stop the steal ” bullshit, Wendy, won the bullshit lottery, raising a stunning $2.5 million off her fan base of MAGA suckers, jew-haters and billionaire wing nuts. No one else came close. Whacky Wendy hauled in $2.5 million dollars to help her win a piddling Arizona legislative seat that pays a piddling .01% of that sum. Whacky Wendy funneled $450,000 of her haul right to her nephew’s “Go Right Strategies” firm.
The mega-donors are happy to cheer on Trump’s “Base” with a simple quid pro quo: Destroy democracy all you want. Just cut our taxes and slash regulations.
Is that what PayPal billionaire Peter Theil was thinking when he handed his out-of-touch radical pal, Blake Masters, $15 million to run against Mark Kelly back in 2022?
Maybe that’s what multi-millionaire Fredric Eshelman, founder of Eshelman Ventures, was thinking when he gave $7 million to Trump. Destroy democracy all you want, Donald, just cut taxes and regulations.
And here’s another $2.5 million for your “Legally Blonde meets the Manchurian Candidate” crackpot lawyer, Sidney Powell, to pay for her “True the Vote” and “Defending the Republic” cavalcade of bullshit court cases. Now the sap is suing to get his money back.
Did billionaire, and Schlitz beer heir, Richard Uihlein, founder of the shipping company Uline, hand millions over to Trump the Insurrectionist because he cares deeply about working families?
Remember Doug Logan’s “Cyber Ninjas”, Arizona’s barn load of ballot counting bullshit? Logan’s circus act hauled in $5.7 million from the usual pro-bullshit nonprofit groups and a nice chunk of charity for his charade from the multi-millionaire founder of overstock.com, Patrick Byrne.
Who would give a Mark Finchem, a bozo up to his boots in bullshit, a dime? BS believer Lewis Topper did. Topper, Wendy’s biggest franchisee, gave Finchem $9,300.
BS believer Alan Blair, an IT entrepreneur, gave Finchem $4,455.
BS believer Brian Kennedy of “American Strategy Group” gave Finchem $5,000. Coincidentally Kennedy has ties to the Claremont Institute, the conservative think tank ( an oxymoron if I ever heard one) that employed John Eastman. Eastman is the Trump lawyer who was neck-deep in authoring the plot to refuse the results of the election which motivated the despicable insurrection that Finchem attended and then skedaddled away from.
It’s small world. Full of small men and small women.
And it just got smaller.
For this rant I depended on the reporting of these fine journalists. Subscribe to them. Read them.
Amisa Ratliff, reporting for “Issue One: Fix Democracy First”
Who profited from election deniers
https://issueone.org/articles/who-profited-from-election-deniers/
Jane Meyer, reporting for “New Yorker”
Big money behind the big lie
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie
Richard Salame, reporting for “The Intercept”
Was Election Denial Just a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme?
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/06/election-deniers-profit-lawsuits/
Jim Small, reporting for “Arizona Mirror”
Election denial is lucrative: Kari Lake raised $2.5 million after Election Day
https://www.azmirror.com/2023/01/24/election-denial-is-lucrative-kari-lake-raised-2-5-million-after-election-day/
Laurie Roberts, writing for “The Arizona Republic”
Kari Lake's campaign may be over, but the grift goes on…
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2023/01/25/kari-lake-election-campaign-fundraising/69840863007/
Rachel Leingang, Hank Stephenson, reporting for “Arizona Agenda”
