On today’s BradCast: Our former President is slimier and even more racist than you knew. And Fox “News” is at least as slimy and racist as you thought. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
FIRST UP, just before airtime, and just as attorneys in Dominion Voting Systems‘ $1.6 billion defamation suit were literally moments away from beginning opening arguments in a Delaware courtroom, the judge announced the case was over. Fox had agreed to settle with the private voting system vendor, essentially conceding that every claim made on their Republican propaganda outlet, claiming the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Trump, was actually a lie.
We wade through today’s news, even as it breaks this afternoon, in which Fox has apparently agreed to pay $787.5 million to make their problems — at least in this case — go away. Star witnesses previously expected to take the stand in the case starting this week had included Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, and hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo. For now anyway, they’re off the hook and won’t have to testify about the lies they repeatedly told their listeners.
It was unclear as of airtime whether there was more to the settlement agreement. In other words, whether Fox would be forced to inform their brain-poisoned listeners about the lies they were told. But, Fox issued a statement conceding, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” and adding: “We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”
Dominion’s separate defamation suits against Trump’s lawyers and liars Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and others continue, as does the $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox, as filed by Smartmatic, another voting system company about which Fox “News” repeatedly and knowingly lied.
Additional problems are expected for Fox in the days ahead, including a bevy of shareholder lawsuits and a campaign by the nation’s largest progressive veterans group, Vote Vets, to demand U.S. military installations stop airing the Republican fake news network in common areas. “Nearly one-in-seven of those arrested in relation to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol had military backgrounds,” the group notes in their ad campaign, “showing the ill-effect of disinformation among military and veteran communities.”
NEXT UP (after a quick note on the scheduled start next week of columnist E. Jean Carroll‘s rape and defamation suit against Trump in New York), have you noticed those weird comments that Donald Trump keeps making in regard to Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s name? He’s been doing it since just after the prosecutor was tapped to oversee the criminal probes of Trump’s January 6 insurrection and the documents he stole upon leaving the White House.
“Jack Smith (nice, soft name, isn’t it?),” Trump wrote on his social media site last November. “Speaking of LEAKS, Special ‘Prosecutor’ Jack Smith (What did his name used to be?) leaked massive amounts of information to The Washington ComPost,” the disgraced former President lied at the same outlet the day before he was indicted on 34 criminal felony charges in New York earlier this month. That night, as he spoke to his supporters back at Mar-a-Lago, he did it again, referencing “this lunatic special prosecutor named Jack Smith,” before adding: “I wonder what it was prior to a change?” He then paused for effect, as some of those present shared a knowing, sinister chuckle.
I read and saw all of that as it happened, but had no idea what the hell Trump was insinuating. Neither, apparently, did many in the mainstream media, according to our guest today, author DAVID MARGOLICK, who wrote about it last week at The Nation. He explains that it was part of a long-faded anti-Semitic trope. Notorious racist and Jew-hater Henry Ford deployed it about 100 years ago in his newspapers, and members of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s infamous UnAmerican Activities Committee used it as well to tar Jewish entertainers as Communists.
“I thought that it needed to be explained,” Margolick tells me today, as he explains it, “because if even someone like you didn’t pick up on it, it just shows how ancient this trope is, how largely forgotten it is, and how deeply embedded it is in the psyche of Donald Trump. I think that subsequent generations need to know what was going on with him, and how hard-wired this is with him, that he can’t help doing it, even if no one is going to pick up on it.”
We discuss the long, grotesque history of the slur in the U.S., and how dangerous it remains, even as many Americans have no clue what it’s all about. Some of his supporters certainly do. “The history of this thing should be called out. People should really know what’s really going on with him,” says Margolick, noting a line from his piece at The Nation, in which describes Trump as “a perfect time capsule of prejudice.”
“It’s really odious,” argues Margolick, discussing what moved him to take a break from working on books about Sid Caesar and Jonas Salk. “It’s disturbing that it’s going on uncontradicted, and nobody is objecting to it.”
FINALLY, Desi Doyen joins us today for our latest Green News Report, with news on the Administration’s newly released list of Electric Vehicles that are now eligible for $7,500 rebates, thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats’ landmark Inflation Reduction Act. Also of note in today’s report, Germany has finally shut down the last of its nuclear power plants. So, that’s a good thing…right?
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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The orange shitstain himself claimed, wrongly, to be of Swedish heritage as least until 1987 — he wrote in The Art of the Deal that his grandfather had come to the U.S. from Sweden. Actually, The Boston Globe reported last year and Axios recalled on Monday, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, made up the Swedish ancestry after World War II so he wouldn’t have problems selling apartments to Jewish buyers on account of his German heritage.
In reality, grandpa bonespurs was ordered to be deported from Germany in 1905 because he avoided serving in the military when he was a teenager.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/...wedish-decades
https://www.washingtonpost.com/...mpanied-minor/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-...n-royal-decree