Article Analysis: Trust in Media & Fake News (Re-Post)

 

Editor's note: given that it's Sunday morning and I don't have a lot of new content to share today, I thought I'd continue my ongoing content migration project to escape Facebook's absurd anarchist and antifascist bans. Today's article analysis was originally published on September 24th, 2019 and concerns the (understandable) lack of trust many Americans have in the media.

Poll: 77 percent say major news outlets report 'fake news'

In today's article analysis we're going to take a brief look at a April, 2018 Monmouth University poll covered by Politico Magazine - so please keep in mind that this article is over a year old. On the one hand you could argue that it makes the result irrelevant, but I'd probably counter by pointing out that the same poll taken the year before (and during the height of Trump's ongoing war with the mainstream American media) still returned a result of 63 percent of respondents who "registered concerns about the spread of misinformation."

This particular poll is bizarrely enough a hyper-specific variation on the classic "trust in media" polls that are typically conducted in the lead up to the election. In particular Monmouth asked if respondents believed that "major traditional television and newspaper media outlets report “fake news.”

This is important because the term "fake news" is of course politically hyper-charged in American politics and traditionally associated with Trump and his fanatical base of support. In the past I have noted the similarities between "fake news" and the term "Lügenpresse" - the blatantly fascist overtones in Trump's chosen terminology are (at least to me) self-evident and thus I have avoided using the term myself in my writing. In other words, I would hypothesize that as alarming as learning that three quarters of the population believes mainstream media purposely publishes "fake news" the fact is that number is probably depressed by the question's vague association with Trump and American fascism.

Truthfully however what really matters here is the clear and overwhelming signs that a significant if not overwhelming majority of people do not trust mainstream corporate media in the United States. 

Shockingly enough, even this poll represents a marked improvement on the 2016 Gallup poll that indicated a mere six percent (yes, single digits six) of Americans had complete trust in their media.This result has truthfully been a very long time in coming and while it's utterly repugnant that a fascist like Donald Trump was able to seize power by riding on the back of this mass distrust in media - it doesn't mean he's wrong when he says nobody trusts them.

In light of this information, I strongly advise readers to release a deep calming breath and relax. The next time you're reading today's fiftieth article about why Liz Warren already has the nomination in the bag, or some blithering idiot stenographer's op-ed about why Bernie Sanders is a whackjob conspiracy theorist for reading Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" - just remind yourself that you're not going crazy and nobody else believes this bullsh*t either.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Fear, Loathing and Mayonnaise in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest

Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a lengthy thread posted during November 21st, 2019 on my Mastodon account - there may be a few reference links I didn't feature here, that appear at the bottom of that thread if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Over the past few months, I've extensively covered the US corporate "liberal" media's clear attempts to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party nomination process in excruciating detail.

From NY Times smears designed to make the Sanders campaign look like a sexual harassment factory, to endless hours of coverage defending Palooka Joe Biden's racist babbling and on through the nonexistent coverage of a bigoted Liz Warren surrogate, a clear pattern of anti-Bernie bias has emerged. While this bias often expresses itself it many different and subtle forms, I think at this point it's safe to say that the pattern has been clearly demonstrated and the American corporate media is openly (and increasingly frantically) trying to influence the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest against Sanders - and in favor of candidates who are perceived by the liberal establishment as capable of beating Sanders. 

Clearly the machine is no longer sure that Joe Biden is such a candidate either.

This brings us to the “liberal” corporate media coverage surrounding an unlikely rise in the “First in the Nation” state polls of neoliberal candidate-like substance Pete Buttigieg; who will hereafter referred to in this space as Dollar Store Macron, or Mayo Pete - as befits his soulless, plastic & relentlessly focus-tested politics. To note that Mayo Pete has become the mainstream liberal establishment's latest "Great White Hope" is both not a metaphor and indicative of their open desperation.

If at this point you are still blissfully unaware of who Dollar Store Macron is, or precisely why I would describe his politics as "plastic and soulless" I'd encourage you to take a moment to stop and read this excellent profile of Mayo Pete by Nathan J Robinson over at Current Affairs - a piece recommended by  Noam Chomsky himself:

All About Pete

To learn more about the super villain factory Mayo Pete used to work for, a corporation called McKinsey & Company; check out this article by an anonymous former employee of the company, also published at Current Affairs: 

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners

Finally, if you're still on the fence about whether or not Dollar Store Macron is an objectively terrible candidate for both the nomination and the office of POTUS, please read this extremely detailed and well sourced Twitter thread by user @niktaylorde for more information:

Why You Shouldn't Vote For Pete Buttigieg - A Thread

In other words, Pete Buttigieg is not only a terrible candidate for the labor class, but also a reasonably horrible human being - not that you'll really hear much about any of this in the media of course; the fact that he's young, gay and currently skullf*cking a "catchy" Panic At the Disco track to generate false enthusiasm at his campaign events, is pretty much as far as the corporate media's analysis is going to go when it comes to Mayo Pete.

This is unfortunate for the American voter because the Dollar Store Macron campaign has a serious problem that not only makes his campaign nonviable in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest, but could imperil his general election chances even if he somehow managed to win - Mayo Pete is currently polling below "raisins in potato salad" with African American voters; depending on which poll you examine, we're talking about a number between zero and one percent, literally.

Why? Well if you believe the insinuations of obtuse Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, it's because African American voters are homophobic; a narrative that even Dollar Store Macron himself has since (wisely) rejected:

Sharpton: 'We don't have an epidemic of homophobia' in the black community

  

Of course, that didn't stop the Buttigieg campaign from quietly leaking a focus group study that explicitly said Pete's sexuality is why black voters don't like him, back in October:

Buttigieg focus groups found being gay ‘a barrier’ for some black South Carolina voters

For a more accurate (and less "objectively racist") picture however, let's turn to The Intercept's Ryan Grim to study an example of the staggeringly tone-deaf, low-key racist way Mayor Pete has approached winning over African American voters in the run up to the 2020 Democratic Party primary season: 

The Problem with Pete Buttigieg's "Douglass Plan" for Black America

Whoa boy, so let's get unpack this for a moment here:

Mayo Pete, a man who is already haunted by anger over a court battle brought on by the South Bend, Indiana mayor's firing of a black police chief for recording his racist co-workers, and accusations of racist policies in his "model college town" of South Bend, is reaching out to black voters with a policy program named after cherished African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass - and amazingly enough, that's only strike one here.

Efforts to promote the Douglass Plan revolved around a published list of 400 prominent South Carolinians who were behind the plan, but this too demonstrated a willful attempt to mislead and deceive by the Buttigieg campaign. The list was represented as consisting of prominent African Americans, and yet almost half of the names on it were from white voters. The list also featured a cover letter that by use of the phrase “there is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the Black experience, and that’s Pete Buttigieg” strongly implied the signers had endorsed Dollar Store Macron for the Democratic Party nomination; that wasn't true either - in fact, some of the "signers" worked for the Sanders campaign and others didn't even mean to endorse the Douglass Plan itself, let alone Mayo Pete.

When asked about this discrepancy directly the Buttigieg campaign offered up the wholly unserious answer that the so-called signers were sent an email encouraging them to "opt out" of endorsing the plan; you probably don't need me to tell you that this is absolutely *not* how endorsements work in American politics but as a side note, I'd like to point out that only a soulless cockroach McKinsey consultant would try to use the Columbia House Records scam to swindle endorsements from black leaders.

The final cherry on top of it all, and indeed the only part of this whole sad saga that received any significant amount of attention in the mainstream media at all, was that the Buttigieg campaign included a photo of a black woman who hadn't endorsed anything or anyone, had no connection to the campaign and had no idea why she'd been used in Dollar Store Macron's promotional material - because she's from Kenya. 

Pete Buttigieg says he was unaware that stock photo on his website depicted a Kenyan woman

And therein lies the crux of my argument and the definitive proof that the corporate "liberal" media is openly campaigning for anyone but Bernie in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.

Imagine just for a moment the absolute righteous fury that would have consumed "liberal" mainstream pundits and influencers if it was Bernie Sanders who'd lied about African American endorsements to prop up his credentials with black voters? Imagine if it had been Bernie who'd responded with "Ma'am, I’m not asking for your vote" when confronted by a distraught African American voter about a police shooting of a young black man in the city he served as mayor? What if Bernie had started his political career by forcing out a black police chief on behalf of clearly racist cops inside the South Bend power structure?

Keep in mind that we're talking about the same guy here, Dollar Store Macron is responsible for all of these actions.

Frankly, you really don't even have to imagine - contrast the utter silence on Mayo Pete's (at best) obtuse honky nonsense, with the mainstream media dogpile Sanders was subjected to when he advised a young African American man to focus on not getting shot first, when pulled over by the police; after a question I won't describe as "unfair" but tragically, I cannot say there was a possible "good answer" for.

All throughout the 2016 primary process we were told by "Very Serious People TM" in the liberal media that African Americans, in particular black women, were the most important demographic in the electorate, and that a Democrat victory would not be possible in either 2016 or 2020 without the support of non-white voters. Specifically this narrative was used to hammer Bernie's campaign as supposedly "too white, and out of touch" or perhaps even outright racist - the last of which is absurd.

Now, today we find that the polling numbers show Sanders has*the* most diverse group of supporters, while pumped-up chosen "Bernie Slayers" like Elizabeth Warren and now Dollar Store Macron are driven by the same "too white, out of touch" voting demographic that supposedly rendered Bernie unelectable - and the response from the mainstream "liberal" media has been literally some combination of excuse-making apologia to go with complete and utter silence.

Of course none of that is to say that Dollar Store Macron hasn't been in the news; corporate "liberal" media in a America are falling all over themselves to type up a 255 respondent poll with dodgy methodology and an admitted 6.1% margin of error that shows Mayo Pete up an astounding +15% and leading New Hampshire - this of course pairs nicely with an equally dodgy recent poll from Iowa that once again showed Buttigieg leading, this time up by a mere (and implausible) +14%. Even that coverage demonstrates a considerable amount of bias; after all the media is hardly mentioning that Pete is dropping a massive amount of money to try to win one of these two (mostly white) "First in the Nation" primaries, or that if he doesn't win at least one of them the puffed up narrative (again aided by this same "liberal" media) surrounding his presidential aspirations is going to look like a pathetic punchline - instead, the corporate media would rather continue to attack Bernie Sanders.

Like all truly good lies however, there was a tiny bit of truth in the mainstream media's smearing of the Sanders campaign - it is in fact awfully hard to win a national election as a Democrat with only white voters, and doubly hard to win a Democratic Party nomination contest by that same measure; the trick is that this isn't a problem for Bernie (who appeals to young people and women especially across all demographics) it's a problem for candidates like Mayo Pete and Pow Wow Chow Liz Warren.

Furthermore, if one presupposes that most of the people reading this are in fact not racists and would prefer to live in a word where the fight against racism is undertaken seriously, the fact that the liberal media cynically used cries of racism to burn down the Sanders campaign, but has hardly chirped a note about the kind of cracker nonsense Mayo Pete's campaign is engaging in, represents a troubling continuation of longstanding enabling of structural racism by affluent liberals and Democrats.

The truth here is that no matter how hard the so-called "liberal" mainstream media in America tries to shove Mayo Pete into the spotlight and generate a plausible theory by which he can become president, Dollar Store Macron isn't going to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination contest - and it's not because he's gay, or because black people aren't thankful enough for his casual displays of obtuse racism; it's because he f*cking sucks as acandidate and bougie "liberal" pundits are getting desperate.

- Nina Illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

 

Cracker Barrel of Bullcrap

Editor's note: as you may have already heard, I am having an incredibly long week and that's why this essay about a story from early Friday morning is only coming to you now. Hopefully life is out of curve balls to throw at me this month, but I've learned to not to promise anything in these situations.

Last Thursday night, the 2019 NBA Finals came to a bizarre if fitting conclusion with the Toronto Raptors' nail-biting 114-110 win over the then-defending champion Golden State Warriors in Oakland, California. It was a majestically theatrical moment for basketball; the fall of a dynasty, the crowning of a new best player in the NBA and the close out contest for one of the high-churches of basketball in Oracle Arena. Triumph and tragedy were on full display as the Warriors finally succumbed to a brutal run of league-altering injuries, the Raptors role-players helped Toronto finally learn to stop shooting itself in the foot and the National Basketball League finally went truly global - Toronto, now the favored sons of an entire country, is the first team from outside of the United States to win an NBA championship.

Inextricably joined to both the rise of the Toronto Raptors and the league's realization of its global ambitions stood team president Masai Ujiri - the Nigerian born world-famous NBA executive, global basketball philanthropist and superstar Camp Director of the league's Basketball Without Borders operation in Johannesburg, South Africa. A close personal friend of former U.S. President Barack Obama and widely considered among the five smartest men in the NBA, Ujiri was watching his team on screen in the tunnels under the Oracle Arena stands when the final seconds ticked down and six excruciating years of high-stakes gambles finally paid off for the Raptors team president and his long-suffering franchise. After hugging a bystander, Ujiri shouted in jubilation before striding triumphantly towards the court and the Raptors victory celebration.  

It was in short, a beautiful and emotional moment shared by millions of people around the globe - that is until some fascist cracker pigs from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office decided to shit all over it:

U.S. authorities push ahead with battery charge on Raptors president Masai Ujiri following Game 6

Well, this whole story is almost certainly some happy horsesh*t but let's try to unpack it anyway. According to Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly, literally moments after watching his team win the NBA title, Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri assaulted a police officer working security at Oracle Arena who had merely stopped Ujiri because he didn't recognize him and needed to see the Raptors President's on court NBA Finals credentials - credentials which Kelly initially claimed, Ujiri did not have on him (keep this in mind, it will be important in a moment.)

"A spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office said Ujiri was making his way to the court when he was stopped by a sheriff's deputy and asked for his credentials.

"This deputy had no idea who [Ujiri] was," Sgt. Ray Kelly said in a phone interview.

Ujiri didn't have the credentials on him, Kelly said, adding that the former NBA executive of the year then allegedly pushed the deputy out of the way in an effort to get on the court.

"Our deputy pushed the man back and told him he couldn't go onto the court," Kelly alleged. "At that point, the gentleman pushed our deputy again, and during that push his arm struck our deputy in the jaw."

Before we go any further here, let's start with something sharp-eyed observers who looked at the header image of this article are undoubtedly already aware of; namely that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is openly lying about at least one aspect of this story already. As you can see, Ujiri is quite clearly holding his on court credentials in his hand during recordings made both before and immediately after the alleged "battery" incident. Undeterred by mere photographic evidence, police apologists in sports media have since altered the accusation to suggest that Ujiri merely refused to show his credentials (more on this later) or simply lacked the proper credential for the post-championship celebration - specifically an NBA-mandated gold arm band; a detail the ACSO spokesman was quick to emphasize in our lead story above:

"Asked about the appearance of a well-known executive being held back from celebrating a historic win with the team he built, Kelly said optics were of no concern.

"There is a credentialling policy that the NBA has in place. Everybody from the top executives all the way down ... know that you must wear credentials to get on the court," he said. "We would expect more from a team president."

Kelly told CBC News they get a "tremendous amount" of celebrities and VIPs who go to Warriors games and it would "almost impossible" to know every team executive."

Woah boy, this is starting to smell like five day old cod.

First, let's set aside the fact that I have no idea why a Sheriff's Deputy is checking the credentials of court-side visitors while half a dozen members of arena security (who would normally handle this task) are standing within a seven foot radius. Then, let's ignore the reality that it's a little hard to believe the pig in question had no idea who Ujiri is; Kelly's excuse that the ACSO deals with too many important people to remember them all doesn't hold much water given that there were literally only two NBA team Presidents in this Finals and Masai Ujiri had already been inside Oracle Arena with the Raptors during games three and four of this very series. As Sports Illustrated's Michael McCann notes:

"It’s not clear why the deputy didn’t recognize Ujiri, who stands 6’4", was wearing a full suit and was probably being called by players, coaches and staff to join them on the court. At least in NBA circles, Ujiri is a highly-recognizable figure. He has also gained significant media attention during the finals. The deputy works in Oakland and might not be an NBA fan or at least not one who is familiar with the Raptors. Still, it stands to reason that security at games would familiarize themselves with the appearances of high-ranking persons from each team in order to avoid these kinds of situations."

The real problem here however is that a cursory examination of the film reveals that there are an awful lot of people wandering around the court during that post-game celebration, who are absolutely not wearing gold armbands or ribbons - only the media appears to be complying with this "rule." This brings up the fairly obvious question, why was Ujiri targeted for carding in the first place? We'll get back to that in a moment, let's keep moving forward with our original story.

Although it's not mentioned in the above article, it has further been reported that the deputy who attempted to stop Ujiri was taken to a local hospital for evaluation after complaining of a "sore jaw" before being released. Of course, one might be inclined to question why the Deputy did so after reading the testimony of sixty-one year old Warriors season ticket holder Greg Wiener - from Olga Rodriguez and Rob Gillies of the Associated Press, emphasis mine:

"Greg Wiener, a 61-year-old Warriors’ season ticket holder, said Friday he was standing next to the deputy during the encounter and didn’t see Ujiri strike him in the face.

Wiener said the encounter began when the deputy put his hand on Ujiri’s chest and pushed him. Ujiri shoved him back before bystanders intervened, Wiener said.

“The thing about the cops saying the policeman asked for his credentials, that didn’t happen. There was no conversation at all,” Wiener said. “This part about striking him in the face, yeah that didn’t happen.”

Wiener said he hadn’t been interviewed by authorities.

“This looks like somebody trying to embellish what happened to protect what they did, what the policeman did,” Wiener said."

On several fundamental levels Weiner's testimony directly contradicts the story provided by Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Kelly; obviously someone here is lying and from where I'm sitting, it's hard to see how that someone is Greg Wiener. After all, the ACSO is the one with an obvious motive here given the high profile nature of the incident, we've already caught the Sheriff's Office lying about this encounter and while the video evidence remains inconclusive, the aftermath of the incident sure does fit Weiner's description of events more closely than it fits Kelly's - clearly, the Deputy is the one who has to be restrained while Ujiri looks like he's in absolute shock at what has just occurred.

Additionally there are other reasons besides simple self preservation to question the motives of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and by extension, the Sheriff's Deputy. Keeping in mind that Masai Ujiri is black, an internationally famous U.S. migrant, a known friend of former President Barack Obama and has quite publicly repudiated President Trump's racist comments about "sh*thole countries" - would it surprise you to learn that lead by Sheriff Gregory Ahern, the ACSO has a long history of racial profiling, expressing sympathy with white supremacists and supporting hard line anti-immigration policies? Let's dive a little further down that rabbit hole for a moment:

Was Masai Ujiri Falsely Accused? Alameda Cops Have A History Of Racism

Nothing to see here right? Just a fine example of typical police activities like working to promote armed reactionary anti-government militias, harassing Public Defenders for the crime of "driving while black" and following the exploits of known white nationalists on Twitter. Not openly fascist enough for you yet? Then check out the bottom of the article for a brief glimpse of the ACSO's shockingly familiar (and statistically unsupportable) bias in its approach to countering "terrorism":

"And while that might seem like a long time ago, just last year the department was accused of using an anti-terrorism grant from the Trump administration to “focus on Black, Muslim inmates returning to society,” according to the East Bay Express. Specifically, the wording of the proposed use for the grant came into question.

“The Express found that the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘violent’ appeared 31 times each in the sheriff’s proposal; ‘extremism’ appeared 26 times; and ‘radicalization,’ 12 times,” the local news outlet wrote in October. “‘White supremacists,’ by contrast, is mentioned only once. The application does not mention civil liberties.”

At this point I think we can safely say that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is a haven for racists and liars, but they're still cops and that means they respect the rule of law, doesn't it? Not so fast my friend:

Opinion: Audit actions of Alameda County Sheriff’s Office

So now on top of the fascist sympathizing, open racism and delusional Isamophobia we can also add excessive use of force, routine violation of civil liberties and objectively inhumane, at times even deadly neglect of prisoners. Disturbingly, none of this really appears to be any sort of secret:

"Since 2015, 41 lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office have cost $15.5 million for civil rights violations that include a string of in-custody deaths and abuse of prisoners.

There have been 33 in-custody deaths since 2013, and in June two prisoners died at the Santa Rita Jail in three days. That includes the death of Dujuan Armstrong, whose family still has not received an explanation from the Sheriff’s Office.

Moreover, recent reports have detailed how county prisoners are malnourished and provided inadequate healthcare. In one 2010 case, a man arrested for jaywalking and a prior warrant for DUI died in Santa Rita while suffering from alcohol withdrawal.
Sheriff Ahern has also been complicit in the Trump administration’s draconian and racist anti-immigrant policies, facilitating ICE detentions by publishing the release dates of undocumented prisoners and allowing ICE access to non-public areas of county jails."

Naturally, all of this might make a reasonable observer question why much of the mainstream media initially chose to treat a cyrpto-fascist nutjob racist Sheriff's Office's outrageously out of character claims about Masai Ujiri's as objectively true in a vacuum; especially since none of this is happening in said vacuum. We are after all talking about an NBA Finals series that just featured a wealthy white team owner literally laying his hands on African American Raptors guard Kyle Lowry while shouting belligerent obscenities; I don't recall the Alameda County Sheriff's Office recommending any charges after that incident, do you?

Stepping backward to look at the larger league context doesn't improve the picture either. Lead primarily by the players and in the wake of an ugly racist taunting incident in Utah, this past year has represented a watershed moment for the National Basketball League and conversations about targeted racism. Indeed, these very same topics of police racial profiling, white privilege and the inherently racist assumption that those brutalized by the police must have done something wrong formed the central core of a widely acclaimed and deeply moving April 2019 piece by NBA veteran Kyle Korver in the Players Tribune. I guess it only took "professionally white" America and the corporate media a couple of months to forget all those "important lessons" they'd learned from Korver?

Taken together, these stories and other high-profile reports of celebrity civil injustice highlight a growing climate of hostility, contempt and gleefully racist abuse of petty authority by bigoted, militarized American law enforcement agencies who routinely use lethal force without cause, are functionally above the law, and undoubtedly remain fully aware of that fact. How else can you explain the behavior of a Sheriff's Office that will transparently lie about harassing a black celebrity in front of 19,000 people, only to then crassly declare their attempts to criminalize Ujiri for the offense represent an act of magnanimous international diplomacy? From Patrick Redford at Deadspin, emphasis is again mine:

"Spokesperson Ray Kelly said they did not detain Ujiri on the court because they didn’t want to make a spectacle on national TV:

“We decided to take the high road in light of their victory but will submit a report for complaint,” Kelly said. “We’ve got two countries involved in this. It’s not something we wanted to have happen. It didn’t have to go this route.”

Look, let's cut the crap here for a second; I'm just one lone woman with a word professor and a black belt in "search engine-fu" - if I can punch holes you can drive a truck through in the line of bullshit the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is selling, there is simply no excuse when mainstream media outlets fail to report everything I just told you alongside critical analysis of spokesman Kelly's clearly fraudulent accusations.

This isn't a question of intelligence, resources or an honest mistake either. As traumatizing video after traumatizing video piles up, it has become virtually impossible for any credible observer to deny the staggering reality of overtly racist police harassment, targeting and brutality any longer; and that certainly includes folks who work in the media. In the age of the smartphone camera, everyone with a a Wi-Fi connection is now constantly inundated with reams of video evidence that fascist pig cops routinely lie under oath with impunity; in such an environment spreading police lies verbatim is not an act of nativity but rather an open embrace of cowardice and complicity.

Today I find myself still among the living nearly five years after Ferguson, four years after the murder of Sandra Bland and a mere two months after the NBA's "Kyle Korver" moment... "and still I see no changes."

We all deserved better than this media minion, cop-sucking clown show; not just the NBA and Masai Ujiri, but every single person who tuned in to get the straight dope and instead left with an ear full of reactionary Gestapo lies the (primarily white) talking heads were too afraid to challenge. For one brief but beautiful moment, the 2019 NBA Finals transcended traditions, borders and all of our wildest expectations; then almost as quickly as it came and amid a cacophony of moronic collaborating stenographers - the cracker fascist establishment snuffed it out with a barrel full of old-fashioned, racist American pigshit.

God damn you Amerikkka. 


- nina illingworth



Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.