F**king Mondays: The Russia Blame Game, Bill Maher's Rant, And Tucker's Racial "Journalism"
It's that time of the week again!
Welcome to another edition of our “F**king Mondays” column! In the round up today:
The Russia blame game
The tragic terror attacks in the Crocus city hall in Moscow over the weekend have set off a frenzy of conspiracy theories across the political spectrum. The major theme is that a) Ukraine is to blame, and b) the US is lying about it and probably helped organize it:
Conspiracy theorist and long time friend of The Banter Caitlin Johnstone’s response to the attack summed up the intellectual thinking going on in Alt circles:
Perhaps coincidentally, Johnstone’s statement is almost identical to the Russian Federation’s Director of the Information Maria Zakharova’s, who stated that: “ISIS generally attacks enemies of the United States; this is a strange coincidence.”
Back in reality, the United States had actually warned Russia of an impending Islamic State organized attack due to what now appears to be highly accurate intel (via the BBC):
The 7 March warning from the US to its own citizens was unusually specific. It talked of reports that "extremists" had "imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow" and specifically mentioned concerts. It advised Americans in the city to avoid large gatherings over the coming 48 hours.
The timing may not quite match, but other details do tally closely with events on 22 March. It seems clear Washington had some kind of intelligence and that it related to Islamic State (IS) - the group that has issued a statement saying it was behind the Moscow attack.
As well as the public warning to its own citizens, the US also said it had communicated with the Russian government directly.
"The US government also shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its long-standing 'duty to warn' policy," a US official said in a statement after the attack.
Because when you plan a terrorist attack by proxy, the first thing you’d do is warn your enemy both publicly and in private…
While heartbreaking for the innocent Russians killed, the event will no doubt be used by the Kremlin to hit Ukraine even harder in the coming months. As Timothy Snyder notes, this is part of a highly predictable pattern :
1. US warns that Russia will invade Ukraine. General disbelief, daily Russian mockery. (December 3 2021-February 24 2022)
2. Russia invades Ukraine, kills tens of thousands of people, kidnaps tens of thousands of children, commits other ongoing war crimes (February 24 2022-present)
3. Russia blames US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (March 2022-present)
4. US warns of terror attack in Moscow. Putin denies any risk and mocks the United States. (March 7 and March 19 2024).
5. Terror attack near Moscow, ISIS takes responsibility, Russia meanwhile kills Ukrainian citizens with drones and missiles as it has for more than two years. (today, March 22 2024)
6. Russia's security apparatus, focused on bringing carnage to Ukraine, has failed in Moscow. Russia's leaders, focused on demonizing the US, did not protect Russians. What next? Where to direct the blame?
7. It would not be very surprising if the Kremlin blames Ukraine and the United States for terror in Moscow and uses the Moscow attack to justify continuing and future atrocities in Ukraine.
And here we are.
Bill Maher goes there
This might be an uncomfortable fact for Democrats, but they are losing huge numbers of black and hispanic voters to the Republican Party. Anecdotally, I’ve seen this trend up close in the Latino community (my extended family is Latino), and it worries me greatly. Much of this comes down to the liberal myth that minorities automatically share all of their values. They don’t, and Democrats have badly underestimated how conservative black and Latino communities can be. The emergence of radical identity politics has undoubtedly made all of this worse. While the obsession over racial identity, gender and oppression status plays well with privileged minority college kids, it doesn’t with their parents or other working class minorities. Democrats are accordingly paying a heavy price for this, and if they don’t stop they risk throwing away easily winnable elections.
While you might not agree with everything Bill Maher says, he has been using his platform to urge Democrats to change course before it is too late. This monologue from his latest show is a warning the party really does need to listen to:
In response to my repeated calls for the left to calm the identity politics down, we have lost a lot of our paid subscribers in recent months. While this is obviously upsetting, it’s a price I’m willing to pay, and I’m glad people like Bill Maher are too.
Liberals are funding cannibalism!
To prove that Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau are responsible for cannibalism in Haiti, Tucker Carlson invited former Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe to his show on Twitter (Lamothe, it should be noted, was banned from entering the US after the State Department concluded he stole “at least $60 million from the Haitian government's PetroCaribe investment and social welfare fund for private gain.”)
As part of my duty to Banter readers, I watched the interview with Lamothe in full so you don’t have to. There are a couple of points worth mentioning: Before the intro, Carlson made sure to implicate the Clintons in the desperate situation Haiti finds itself in, then primed his viewers to hold the liberal leaders of America and Canada responsible. During the interview, Lamothe barely spoke about Biden or Trudeau, and lay the blame on Haiti’s current predicament on recently ousted prime minister Ariel Henry. Lamothe did note that Biden and Trudeau backed Henry, but that was far cry from Carlson’s assertion that the US and Canadian leaders have “in effect been running Haiti for the past few years,” (they haven’t). The reality of course, is that the disastrous situation in Haiti is incredibly complex, and the entire international community has failed to come up with anything vaguely helpful.
If you’ve followed Carlson for any length of time, you’ll know Carlson isn’t remotely interested in the political situation in Haiti, who is to blame, or whether Lamothe is a credible guest. The real motivation for the story is of course, far more cynical.
Carlson’s first aim is to perpetuate racist stereotypes of black people (cue the footage of Haitians fighting/looting), and the second is to blame liberals for letting savage black people run wild. Carlson does this regularly on his show, showing hours of footage of looting in liberal run cities. If you only ever watched Tucker Carlson, you’d believe every major city in America was overrun by uncontrollable black criminals, granted license to loot by gender neutral bathroom loving liberals.
The desperate events in Haiti simply represent another opportunity for Carlson to promote this narrative. It’s always good to remember that Tucker Carlson isn’t doing news or edgy journalism, he’s a performance artist peddling repellent fascist propaganda for his audience of maladjusted young men.
See you next week!
Please support The Banter by becoming a paid member. You’ll get access to all premium articles and The Emergency Meeting podcast. Your support is greatly appreciated.
Listen to the latest episode of The Banter Roundtable Podcast:
For Banter Members:
Speaking only about the SF Bay Area (where I live), among an admittedly increased incidence of street crime, robberies, break-ins, carjackings, etc., violent crime is noticeably down (as it is nationwide), particularly compared with 2020-21. Additionally, almost a dozen arrests have been made in the last month or so of perpetrators of retail “smash & grab” group robberies and carjackings. Too bad the arrests never get the attention that the crimes do. 🤔😉😊
It is both depressing and shocking to me at how easily the Russians have completely taken over one of our political parties. I'll bet that the ghosts of Stalin through Brezhnev are shaking their heads and thinking, "We spent all of this money on arms when we could have just started a news network (hypothetically, let's call it Fox News) and won the war that way!"