Marjorie Taylor Greene Falls for Clearly Fake Trump Video

They say a lie travels around the world before the truth has time to put on its pants. Lies shoot through MAGAworld before the truth even has time to wake up and figure out what the heck is going on. On Monday, far-right accounts began circulating videos purporting to show fencing and barricades lining the Supreme Court. The only hitch? There aren’t any fences or barricades around the Supreme Court. The claim originated out of thin air.

QAnon conspiracy theorists and, of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared the footage, with many speculating the fences and barricades were put up ahead of an impending ruling from the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. “Are they afraid that the left is not going to like the ruling?” asked one far-right aggregator account in a now-deleted post. “This could be for the Presidential Immunity case later this week,” speculated Greene in response. According to The Daily Beast, the account MTG boosted deleted its bogus post, with Greene’s speculation continuing to stick around like a dense fart before she finally quietly deleted it on Tuesday.

NBC News court reporter Daniel Barnes posted a photo outside the Supreme Court debunking the spreading rumor, quote-tweeting serial plagiarist Benny Johnson’s assertion that there was fencing around SCOTUS. Barnes’s debunk was succinctly captioned, “No there’s not.” Turns out much of the footage Johnson used originated from a post made by D.C. radio reporter Mitchell Miller reporting around the building following protests ahead of the high court overturning Roe v. Wade in May 2022.

The Supreme Court has until July 1 to issue its decision on presidential immunity, a case Trump brought to the court that will determine whether he can claim immunity from federal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A federal appeals court unanimously denied his claim in February, declaring, “We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.” The Supreme Court has multiple options on how to decide the case, with some indications in April that they may kick it back down to lower courts.

The Supreme Court has a hilarious opportunity to rule against Trump and foil the aspirations of his staunchest supporters concocting nonsense for clicks. In the meantime, there are plenty of better options to meet your thirst for content other than spinning silly yarns. Subscribing to The New Republic is a fantastic one.

Right-wing media behemoth Sinclair Broadcast Group has doubled down on its misleading reporting about President Joe Biden, insisting that they stand by their coverage despite basing their assumptions on highly questionable edited footage and verifiable misinformation distributed by the RNC.

The cable news network has advanced a coordinated story across 86 of its local news websites over the course of June, targeting Biden’s age and physical ability based on social media posts made by RNC Research, a wing of the Lara Trump–run Republican National Committee. But some of the stories went beyond the facts and into the realm of fiction, including accusing Biden of physically freezing and being in a “stupor” during a White House Juneteenth event. Another article baselessly claimed that Biden had pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, all based on a video of the president sitting down, reported freelance accountability journalist Judd Legum.

Responding to an issue of Legum’s newsletter, Popular Info, which examined the company’s deceptive tactics, Sinclair responded that the claims were “FALSE.”

“We do not ‘work with’ any political party and to insinuate otherwise is spreading disinformation,” Sinclair’s corporate account wrote on X. “Our political reporting includes sources/comments/posts/research from both sides of the aisle. We stand by our journalists and their reporting.”

In a private notice, Sinclair further accused Legum of failing to be “objective” while examining its reporting tactics—tactics that included automatically syndicating identical, questionable stories across dozens of its affiliates on the same day at the same time, seemingly without any editorial discretion or vetting time allotted to the local editors and reporters staffing the channels.

But denying the accusations didn’t stop Sinclair from trying to clean up its image. Shortly after responding to Legum, Sinclair’s national desk published a new story acknowledging that Donald Trump has his own “problems stumbling over words and mixing up dates.”

Donald Trump visited a half-assed, half-white event at a Black church on Saturday, in a desperate and botched attempt to stir up support among Black voters in Detroit—but none of that is as bad as what he did next. 

Trump went on to deliver the keynote speech at the Turning Point USA “People’s Convention,” alongside his old buddy, far-right activist Charlie Kirk. 

Kirk, a meme-loving fascist who is known for getting booed off of college campuses and then whining that the girls there don’t like him, happily announced that he’d be partnering with the Trump campaign earlier this month. For someone trying to court the support of the Black community, taking the stage with someone as openly racist as Kirk is nothing less than mind-boggling. 

Earlier this year, Kirk tried to make waves by suggesting that the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, was a “mistake” and that the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped to create a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” which he believes to be harmful to white men like himself.  

Last year, Kirk posted to X (formerly Twitter), “Whiteness is great. Be proud of who you are.” Earlier this year on his podcast he fretted over flying in an airplane flown by a Black pilot. 

“I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” he said, before insisting that it’s not what he believes, but how DEI initiatives make him feel. To Kirk, unabashed racism is a necessary “thought crime,” one that sets him apart and gives him power. 

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in an attempt to consolidate the conservative youth movement and then systematically draw them further and further right. Trump hopes to harness this power to reach the conservative youth vote, which Kirk purports to influence, but honestly, even that doesn’t seem like it’s going well. 

If Trump’s Black church roundtable failed to draw in Black audience members, it seems that Turning Point USA’s pull for the youth vote was also unsuccessful: The crowd skewed distinctly old, according to Mother Jones. 

Racist sunspot and far-right Trump adviser Steve Bannon won’t be spending his upcoming time in the clink at Club Fed, according to sources who spoke with CNN. Bannon and his legal team had expected he’d go to a minimum-security prison camp, which is still not a walk in the park, but where conditions are more comfortable and relaxed than most. As it turns out, Bannon is ineligible because he still has an open criminal case against him, and will instead report to a low-security prison—with the possibility of doing time at Rikers.

Bannon was ordered earlier this month to report to prison on July 1 to begin a four-month stint for contempt of Congress. Bannon was convicted by a federal jury in 2022 for refusing a subpoena from the House January 6 committee’s investigation into the Capitol insurrection, the flames of which Bannon had gleefully stoked in the lead-up to the deadly riot. In 2022, Bannon refused to be interviewed or to produce documents to the subcommittee—only later, after Donald Trump abstained from using executive privilege to protect him, offering to testify in a public hearing—an offer that prosecutors and the House deemed too little, too late.

Lowest-security federal prisons for nonviolent offenders convicted on federal charges are referred to informally as “Club Fed,” a dark moniker inspired by the all-inclusive luxury resort, though they bear no resemblance to its inspiration. Incarcerated people are afforded the luxury of freedom of movement and sleep in barracks-style rooms packed with dozens of other people instead of being locked in a cramped cell, without air conditioning during the summer months or heat during the winter. It is not, by any length of the imagination, cushy or comfortable—the only perk is it’s slightly less inhumane than most prisons.

Bannon is expected to report to prison in Danbury, Connecticut. That low-security federal prison holds more than 1,000 men, according to CNN, and its neighboring women’s prison was the inspiration for Orange Is the New Black. Due to his upcoming trial in New York City, it’s possible—but currently undetermined—that Bannon may be transferred to the infamously inhumane Rikers Island during his upcoming criminal trial.

Bannon’s pending criminal case, which precludes him from being able to ride out his time in “Club Fed,” stems from charges in New York where he is accused of defrauding donors with empty promises to build a border wall. He pleaded not guilty to charges from state prosecutors of money laundering, fraud, and conspiracy in September 2022 and is expected to stand trial this September in the same courthouse that convicted Trump.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s  final conversation with Donald Trump was “unnerving,” according to the infectious diseases expert.

With his new book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, released on Tuesday, Fauci spoke in more depth about the conversation on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Live Monday night, detailing how Trump, in a phone conversation, called Joe Biden “that fucker” and promised to “kick his fucking ass” in the final days before the 2020 election.

Maddow read an excerpt from the book, quoting Fauci’s narration of that call:

“Everybody wants me to fire you,” the president said to me during [a] call [that day], “but I’m not going to fire you. You have too illustrious a career, but you have to be positive. The country cannot stay locked down. You have got to give them hope.

“I like you but so many people, not only in the White House but throughout the country hate you because of what you are doing. I’m going to win this fucking election by a landslide, just wait and see. I always did things my way, and I always win no matter what all these other fucking people think. And that fucker Biden, he’s so fucking stupid. I’m going to kick his fucking ass in this election.”

Maddow asked Fauci if the conversation “unnerved you a little bit.”

“You know, it did,” Fauci replied. “It was a little incongruous because he ended it by saying take care, see you soon, something like that. I wasn’t quite sure.

“It was unnerving. Even though you’re convinced you’re doing the right thing, which I had been, you know, trying to say all along, just level with the American public, you wind up being better off to do that; it is not a pleasant thing to have the president of the United States, when you have such a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States, for the president to get on the phone and scream at you the way he did. So that was very tough,” Fauci added.

Fauci’s new book includes many new details about how Trump dealt with Covid-19 and how he felt about Fauci. Trump would “announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone,” Fauci wrote. Their contentious relationship was apparent even in the early days of the pandemic, with Trump reportedly flying into a rage after hearing incorrectly reported information and attributing it to Fauci.

Fauci’s time as the public face of the government’s efforts during the pandemic, as well as Trump’s treatment of him, earned him attacks from conservatives, who spread conspiracy theories about him and attacked efforts such as lockdowns and masks. He was the target of several smears on a recent visit to Capitol Hill, with Republicans proposing getting hold of his personal emails. More new revelations from his book, along with more public appearances, will likely draw him more vitriol and attacks, despite his career in public service.