Check out this interview with the QAnon Shaman’s mom with journalist Laura Segall:
As I watch this, once again I’m bewildered why journalists like Segall don’t ask about how the rest of us, you know, the 81 million Biden voters, might have reacted if the insurrectionists had succeeded. Instead, the focus continually remains on the deluded Trump voter. We are told there are many of them who believe the vote was stolen from Trump and that their numbers are “significant”. But significant is not a “majority” of either total number of voters or electoral college votes or their representatives.
Is it any wonder that Shaman’s mom thinks that she and her cohort are the only ones that matter? We’ve only heard from their side for four GD years. The media hunts them down in diners in rural Indiana or at a Trump rally or on the street. It’s like the rest of us are completely absent. If you only watched the US media, you would get the impression that there is a bunch of righteously indignant Trump voters who are the equivalent of the Orange movement in the Ukraine and the whole country is behind them because there’s a complete void where the majority of voices should be.
Should we be surprised that Shaman, his mom, Richard Barnett et al feel entitled to special treatment and pardons? No one has told them yet that they are the bad guys. They’re feeling a bit Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western about it. Or Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry movie. Or just Clint Eastwood on a good day.
The fascination of the media trying to decipher the way their screwed up minds work, coupled with the extraordinary amount attention they are getting, is giving them the idea that they really are special people in the most destructive, narcissistic meaning of that word. If they don’t get what they want, they will simply bulldoze their way through any democratic process and obstacle and then they will wait for the presidential medal of FREEEEDOM! or something from their newly reinstalled leader.
No. No, Ms. Segall. You missed an opportunity to get a once in a lifetime reaction from someone like Shaman Mom and capture the moment her head short circuited like a Fembot. You should have asked her about the other 81 million of us. You should have done your homework and told her that the Pennsylvania legislature dominated by Republicans passed the mail in ballot bill in October 2019, well before Covid or Louis DeJoy. You should have asked her if she knew that Biden’s win in PA was independent of any mail in ballots that arrived in the three day period following Election Day. In other words, regardless of how the PA state Supreme Court ruled on how equitably the vote was administered according to the state constitution, Biden won without those late ballots.
Segall could have asked if the vote was conducted fraudulently, why was Trump et al challenging PA, GA, MI, AZ? Why not go after the motherlode of potentially illegal ballots- California? Wouldn’t that have been a lot more convincing? He could have eliminated 55 electoral college votes in one fell swoop. Could it be that California doesn’t have a cooperative state legislature that wanted to get involved and some of these other states did?
Ask Shaman Mom to do a thought experiment: your son and his friends have successfully staged a coup, shot some members of Congress, hung Mike Pence and halted the electoral college certification. Then what? In a country chock full of guns and a majority angry enough to use them, what would have happened then? Would Trump impose martial law? Was that the end goal? Would his droogs have shot protestors in the streets? What kind of American carnage was she trying to achieve?
But no, Segall asked none of these questions. So Shaman Mom blithely goes on with her day believing the Big Lie, oblivious to the fact that more than half the country out there doesn’t agree with her and isn’t going to leave or put up with her s^*%.
Meanwhile, her slow witted son languishes in jail betrayed and depressed about not getting a pardon. Yet no one has told him yet that Trump couldn’t and wouldn’t pardon him without incriminating himself.
Plus, shaman doesn’t have the money or connections that Manafort and Steve Bannon had. You’ve got to have money if you want a “Get out of jail free!” card.
So, shaman and his mom and all their friends continue to live in their own little universe, convinced that they deserve grace of some kind, internally not accepting that their leader, and his party, is no longer in charge.
And we can’t force them off the airwaves. Instead, we gloss over the domestic terrorism and ask them for more interviews where they can profess their faith and hawk images of dangerous propaganda.
Jeez.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
So well stated that i really have nothing to add! It does express the anger and frustration i have felt over years of the media’s absolute infatuation with Trump voters and right-wing talking points. As if (and I’ve used this analogy before) there is one child who is good, and does the right things, so is taken for granted; and there is another who is always upset and complaining and does violent things; and the parents are always spending their time giving that one the attention, and trying to understand, and help,and sympathize.
The vast majority of these people are inarticulate, stupid and bellicose. But the media is fascinated with them. And yes, they came very close to killing half the Congress; and even then the media would ask, “Well, what was it that got you so angry?” They spent the entire campaign going to those diners to get the same inane theories from the Trump supporters, and just why they are so angry and upset! In the entire 2016 campaign, I am not sure if they interviewed even one Hillary supporter. Someone from a foreign country would have assumed that there weren’t any. And now, after people were killed, so many more could have been; and we have ongoing threats both specific and general, the media is still drawn to them, and their twisted logic and skewed perceptions, while the people who run the Republican Party use them as support for their vote suppression and refusal to vote for anything the Democrats support.
Occam’s Razor sez:
If the media exposed the full, ugly truth about the Treason Party (or GQP, fka GOP), then angry voters might put enough Democrats into power that those Democrats might feel bold enough to raise taxes on affluent and richer people, including rich media owners and affluent higher-ranking media employees.
(Why yes, I am a cynic. Why do you ask?) 😉
I guess that part of it is that the media is so afraid of being charged with ignoring Republicans, so they have to seek them out to be sure they have equal time. And they know that the average right-wing person hates them, so they want to try to be their friends, and maybe somehow they can increase their viewing base.
Meanwhile. Bernie Sanders seems to think that he is the Majority Leader, or the co-President. He never is chastened, either. Get the Relief Bill through, work on the minimum wage later, because you can’t get it through this time, no matter how much you inveigh.
The media is in love with sensation and ratings. This is why trump was so successful.
And if that’s the case, Fembotting the Trumpers could be just as fascinating and train wreck watching as anything the media has covered before. I’m thinking that they haven’t caught on to that yet. But they’re starting to. The coverage of Richard Barnett’s temper tantrum yesterday was hilarious.
They need to run with it. There are 81 million voters and about 20 million recovered Trump voters who are dying to see it.
i actually know what fembots are, since a couple of years ago i got all the Bionic Woman episodes! I may not have gotten to the last season yet, and i guess that is where they mostly came in. Lindsay Wagner does some really nice commentary tracks on a few of the episodes, and in one she said something about not really knowing (probably in terms of show strategy)”what was going on with those fembots.” BTW, the show was not renewed for some reason when it was doing quite well in the ratings, which seems to be too often the way. i am still waiting for the second season of “Ringer, ‘ ‘Awake,” and “Crossbones.”
Yeah but do you know THESE fembots:
No, I had no idea! Shades of Matt helm. Well executed, scene!
Introducing the Fembots;
Laughing. I never saw those movies, but that was a good part!
I thought you’d like them. 😉
I first posted this here roughly two months ago. I got it from Sedagive over at Wonkette.
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Great Post.
And as always, right on the money.