HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Saturday, January 30, 2021
CRAZY BITCH
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Controversies Are Piling Up.
Republicans Are Quiet.
In a video from 2018, Ms.
Greene falsely suggested that 9/11 was a hoax, President Barack Obama was a
Muslim and the Clintons were guilty of murder.
- Published Jan. 29, 2021Updated Jan. 30, 2021, 11:31
a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Marjorie Taylor Greene had
just finished questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on
Sept. 11, 2001, and flatly stating that President Barack Obama was secretly
Muslim when she paused to offer an aside implicating another former president
in a crime.
“That’s another one of those Clinton
murders,” Ms. Greene said, referring to John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death in a 1999 plane crash, suggesting
that he had been assassinated because he was a potential rival to Hillary
Clinton for a New York Senate seat.
Ms. Greene casually unfurled the
cascade of dangerous and patently untrue conspiracy theories in a 40-minute video that was originally posted
to YouTube in 2018. It provides a window into the warped worldview amplified by
the freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who in the three months
since she was elected has created a national brand for herself as a
conservative provocateur who has proudly brought the hard-right fringe to the
Capitol.
In the process, Ms.
Greene, 46, has also created a dilemma for Republican leaders, who for months
have been unwilling to publicly rebuke or punish her in any way for her
inflammatory statements, in part for fear of alienating voters delighted by her
incendiary brand of politics and conspiratorial beliefs.
After avoiding the issue for months in
the hope that it would resolve itself, Republicans are now facing calls from
Democrats to expel Ms. Greene from Congress, pressure from a prominent group of
Jewish Republicans to discipline her, and private consternation from within
their own ranks.
Their reticence to take action is yet
another example of how Republican leaders have allowed those forces to fester
and strengthen. Some leaders have privately said they are eager to move past
the fringe movements and the charged messaging used by President Donald J.
Trump that fueled the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Representative Kevin McCarthy,
Republican of California and the minority leader, has yet to say anything
personally about Ms. Greene’s comments or conduct, even after a week in which a
slew of problematic social media posts and videos have surfaced from the years
before she was elected. In them, Ms. Greene circulated and endorsed a seemingly
endless array of hate speech and conspiracy theories explicitly rooted in
Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the belief that government actors were secretly
behind a sweeping range of violence.
The liberal watchdog group Media
Matters for America reported last summer on
the video in which Ms. Greene questioned a basic fact about the deadliest
terrorist attack in history, falsely called Mr. Obama, who is Christian, a
Muslim, and hinted that the Clinton family had Mr. Kennedy killed. Since then,
much more has emerged about her conspiracy claims.
Ms. Greene suggested
in a 2018 Facebook post, unearthed this week by Media
Matters, that a devastating wildfire that ravaged California was
started by “a laser” beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish
banking family with connections to powerful Democrats. She endorsed executing Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy
Pelosi. She served as a prolific writer for a now-defunct conspiracy
blog called “American Truth Seekers,” writing posts with headlines including “MUST
READ — Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult.” And
she argued that the 2018 midterm elections — in which the first two Muslim
women were elected to the House — were part of “an Islamic invasion of our
government.”
Ms. Greene has repeatedly claimed in
multiple videos and social media posts that several school shooting massacres
were “false flag” events perpetrated by government officials in an attempt to
drum up support for gun control laws. In an October 2020 video surfaced on Friday by Mother
Jones, she said that the “only way you get your freedoms back is
it’s earned with the price of blood.”
Ms. Greene is perhaps best known for
having endorsed QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement that claims that Mr.
Trump was facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles. (She told Fox News last
year that she decided to “choose another path,” and a spokesman, Nick
Dyer, told The New York Times this week that she did not
support QAnon.)
Sent a list of detailed questions about
her beliefs and postings, Mr. Dyer declined to respond to any of them. In her
own statement posted on Twitter on
Friday afternoon, Ms. Greene assailed the “radical, left-wing Democrat mob” and
reporters she said were trying to smear her, and claimed she was profiting
politically and financially from the outrage she has provoked, saying that
every negative news report “strengthens my base of support at home and across
the country.”
She also issued what amounted to a
threat to top Republicans who might be contemplating punishing her, warning
that they would pay steep consequences.
“If Republicans cower
to the mob, and let the Democrats and the fake news media take me out,” Ms.
Greene said, “they’re opening the door to come after every single Republican
until there’s none left.”
The statement came as
internal pressure was mounting for Republican leaders to address Ms. Greene’s
comments. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which over the summer intervened in
a rare move to back Ms. Greene’s primary challenger, disavowed the
congresswoman in a scathing statement and said it was “working closely with the
House Republican leadership regarding next steps.”
“She repeatedly used offensive language
in long online video diatribes, promoted bizarre political conspiracy theories,
and refused to admit a mistake after posing for photos with a longtime white
supremacist leader,” the group said. “It is unfortunate that she prevailed in
her election despite this terrible record.”
A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy told Axios this
week that newly surfaced Facebook posts written by Ms. Greene and reported by CNN, in
which she discussed executing top Democratic politicians, were “deeply
disturbing” and that Mr. McCarthy planned to “have a conversation” with her
about them next week.
But Mr. McCarthy’s silence so far
reflects, in part, the sway Mr. Trump still has over the Republican Party and
its leaders. The former president has praised Ms. Greene effusively and refused
to condemn QAnon, despite being asked to disavow it repeatedly while in office.
On Friday evening, Representative Jim
McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Rules
Committee, suggested Democrats could move unilaterally to strip Ms. Greene of
her committees if Republicans did not act.
“We could break precedent,” Mr.
McGovern said on CNN. “We should talk about that if nothing changes.”
In her own telling, Ms. Greene became
more outspoken about her politics in 2016, after she sold the CrossFit gym she
owned and felt she no longer needed to worry about alienating her customers by
stating her beliefs.
She began traveling
to Washington for conservative events, including a prayer rally hosted by the
White House, and to lobby lawmakers against
passing gun safety measures. On one such trip, Ms. Greene accosted David Hogg,
a student who had survived a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., who was also on
Capitol Hill, but to lobby in support of stricter gun laws. In a video that CNN reported this
week, Ms. Greene follows Mr. Hogg as he walks toward the Capitol, calling him a
“coward” and accusing him of “using kids” to promote his own political agenda.
When Ms. Greene decided to run for
Congress, she initially started her campaign in a Georgia district held by
Representative Lucy McBath, a Democrat. But after Representative Tom Graves, a
Republican, announced he would retire, Ms. Greene moved her campaign to his
more conservative district. She eventually placed first in a crowded primary
race, and advanced to a runoff election against Dr. John Cowan, a mild-mannered
neurosurgeon.
On the campaign trail, Ms. Greene
presented herself as a deeply conservative, pro-Trump Christian mother and
business owner, arguing that her work in the construction industry had imbued
her with the toughness that comes from working in a male-dominated field. She
railed against the ascendant progressive wing in Congress, emphasized the
importance of the Second Amendment while toting an AR-15, and
warned of “thousands” of immigrants “pouring over” the southwestern border.
Ms. Greene largely veered away from the
conspiratorial on the trail, though she did cut a campaign ad claiming that “‘Deep State’
actors tried to sabotage President Donald J. Trump before he even took office”
and claimed on her campaign
accounts that George Soros, the billionaire investor and
Democratic donor, was “bankrolling left-wing movements worldwide who want to
destroy Israel.”
The messaging raised alarm at the time
among House Republican leaders and some members of the Georgia delegation who
worried that if elected, Ms. Greene could create a grave problem for their
party. But they never mobilized to defeat her. While the top three House
Republicans condemned a series of racist videos Ms. Greene made, surfaced by Politico,
only Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, endorsed
Dr. Cowan. Mr. McCarthy and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the
third-ranking leader, stayed neutral.
Privately, according to a person
familiar with their thinking, top Republicans hoped that outside groups would
swoop into the primary race in support of Dr. Cowan and weaponize Ms. Greene’s
incendiary comments against her, dooming her candidacy. But the outside effort
never materialized.
Instead, Ms. Greene’s campaign received
an important boost when the political arm of the ultraconservative Freedom
Caucus endorsed her, as did Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, the group’s
chairman, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder. She handily won the runoff in August
and cruised to victory in November.
That left Republican
leaders hoping that, once sworn in, Ms. Greene would clean up her act,
disavowing her past comments and dialing back her outlandish rhetoric.
Instead, she charged into Congress and
immediately faced scrutiny for her support of the “Stop the Steal” campaign
that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 presidential election.
She referred to Jan. 6, the day
Congress was slated to formalize the election results, as Republicans’ “1776
moment” in the lead up to the violent storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump
rioters. After the rampage, she pledged that Mr. Trump would “remain in office”
and that attempts to remove him from the White House constituted “an attack on
every American who voted for him.”
Days later, she announced she would
file articles of impeachment against President Biden.
“Troll level: EXPERT,” Dinesh D’Souza,
a right-wing firebrand, wrote on Twitter.
Ms. Greene liked the post.
Friday, January 29, 2021
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Republican weakness enables domestic terrorism
Opinion: Republican
weakness enables domestic terrorism
Opinion by
Columnist
Jan. 28, 2021 at 6:45 a.m. CST
The Department of
Homeland Security has acknowledged what most Republicans do not: Mobs of white
supremacists who have aligned themselves with the MAGA party are a threat to
national security.
A DHS bulletin released Wednesday reports:
“Throughout 2020, Domestic Violent Extremists (DVEs) targeted individuals with
opposing views engaged in First Amendment-protected, non-violent protest
activity. … Long-standing racial and ethnic tension—including opposition to
immigration—has driven DVE attacks, including a 2019 shooting in El Paso, Texas
that killed 23 people.” (And let’s not forget the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre and the pipe bomber threats that preceded these events, both
of which featured terrorists spouting anti-immigrant rhetoric.)
DHS specifically
warns that “these same drivers to violence will remain through early 2021 and
some DVEs may be emboldened by the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol
Building in Washington, D.C. to target elected officials and government
facilities.”
Sen. Mark R. Warner
(D-Va.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells me,
“This step is wildly overdue, and I applaud the Biden administration for taking
it.” Former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance agrees:
“Law enforcement has
to base its work on data, not ideology.” Vance adds, “While Republicans may be
ready to move on, our national security depends on facing threats and dismantling
terror groups. It’s good to see the new administration taking the threat posed
by white supremacist domestic terrorists seriously.”
Though the Senate did
not have a specific “heads-up” about the bulletin, Sen. Richard Blumenthal
(D-Conn.) tells me this kind of bulletin was very much expected given the rise
in domestic terror and violent threats. “This is more than a red flag,” he
observes. “This is a blaring warning.” The rise in white-supremacist violence,
Blumenthal says, was “stoked and inflamed by four years of Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, the
Republican attitude about the attack on the Capitol is entirely at odds with
the reality of the threat we face. As the danger of domestic terrorism rises,
Senate Republicans are still foot-dragging on the confirmation of Alejandro Mayorkas to be homeland security
secretary. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) reminded
his colleagues on
Wednesday: "It has been three weeks since a mob of domestic terrorists
stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to thwart our democratic system of
government. In the weeks since, the underlying threat of violence to our
government remains a great concern.” Schumer went on: “My friends on the other side don’t
have to agree with Mr. Mayorkas on the finer points of every policy, but surely
we can all agree that he knows the department, he understands the threats to
our nation’s security, and has what it takes to lead DHS. The Senate must
confirm his nomination in very short order, and we will make sure that
happens.”
This raises the
question: Are Republicans comfortable with the moniker “weak on terror”? It
seems so, at least when it is white supremacists who are the terrorists. Given
the growing threat of domestic terrorists linked to the Jan. 6 action,
Republicans’ indifference toward addressing domestic terrorism and punishing
the former president for stoking a violent insurrection is as breathtaking as it
is predictable. The Republican Party’s notion of “law and order” seems to have
evaporated.
As Blumenthal
observes, Republicans “would very much like to ‘move on’ … But there is no
wishing this away.”
Perhaps their excuse
for acquitting the former president is not so much based on the argument that
the Senate cannot convict a former president (a flimsy rationale easily
rebutted by precedent and the text of the Constitution), but instead on their
own aversion to tackling white supremacists. After courting the MAGA crowd,
doing their bidding in seeking to overturn the election and taking offense at President Biden’s innocuous comments denouncing
white supremacists who attacked the Capitol, perhaps Republicans are nervous
that the impeachment trial hits a little too close to home. When Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-Mo.) raises a fist in solidarity with the Confederate flag-waving,
noose-carrying crowd, the problem goes well beyond the former president.
By averting their
eyes from the former president who instigated an attempted violent coup, they
are “putting themselves on the wrong side of the American people and also of
history,” Blumenthal says. Even if the Senate cannot convict the ex-president,
“There is real virtue in a public trial regardless of the outcome.”
Indeed, one could
make the case that it is not simply Trump who should be on trial. The
Republican Party as a whole needs to be held responsible for feeding
anti-immigrant sentiment, coddling armed white supremacists, perpetrating the
Big Lie that the election was stolen and, yes, refusing to hold the instigator
of a domestic terrorist attack responsible. They are not simply weak on
domestic terrorism; their indifference makes us all less safe.
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Howard Tullman appears on Fireside Chats
As part of the Fireside: Chicago initiative, each episode highlights the expertise of thought leaders and professionals in the Chicago area — including one of our most recent episodes featuring Chicago legend Howard Tullman.
As a successful serial entrepreneur, Howard provides insights into types of technology companies he believes will be the most up and coming investment opportunities.
Watch the Intro Here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fireside-chicago_chicago-chicagobusiness-chicagotech-activity-6760218785594032128-HrqR/
Hear more of Howard’s thoughts:
🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/egC94A7
🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/euv5YK3
🎧 Google Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/ezUnzsW
#chicago #chicagobusiness #chicagotech #startups #leadership #podcast #chicagojobs #chicagoland
🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/egC94A7
🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/euv5YK3
🎧 Google Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/ezUnzsW
#chicago #chicagobusiness #chicagotech #startups #leadership #podcast #chicagojobs #chicagoland
Monday, January 25, 2021
NEW INC. MAGAZINE ARTICLE BY HOWARD TULLMAN
Netflix
is Crushing Idiotic TV Advertising
And how can we thank them? By successfully rejecting the
broadcast model, the company is dragging the traditional broadcasters with
them, because consumers will pay for a quality product.
I've heard it said that TV ads are the penalty you pay for
watching cheap and endless crap for free. Network television is effectively a
tax on people who can't afford something better - they have to watch this junk
and the endless ads as well if they want any sort of entertainment. Network TV
has become the shop window for every creepy and frightening ad for the perils
of aging and dysfunction, the threat of every newly imagined and cleverly named
disease, combined with incessant reruns of shows we hated from their debut.
There's also the traditional flood of car and beer ads -- never mind that the
average age of a new car buyer is likely to be an aging boomer.
If you've begun to painfully realize that the aggregate number
of ads, as well as time consumed, in any 30-minute slot of prime-time
television seems to grow every few months, join the club. Likewise, the bulk of
cable programming is no better than the rubbish the big broadcast guys promote
except that - as hard as this is to accomplish - the ads are even worse, more
crudely made, and dumbed down as well. But at least they provide regular
employment for broken down old jocks flogging Medicare supplements and hearing
aids while otherwise unemployable or shameless actors pitch reverse mortgages
and end-of-life term insurance.
This is precisely what "broadcasting" was always
intended to be: a tool to reach the masses via one-size-fits-all, lowest
common denominator offerings with the least objectionable material, so that you
don't change the channel. And all of it delivered through a framework to
support the ads and advertisers that paid the bills. And the whole thing worked
pretty well for all concerned except the viewers. None of us was really a loyal
or grateful customer - we just didn't have a better alternative.
When cable came along, it promised massive amounts of
programming choices, but there was only one distributor-- the dreaded cable
company, selected by local government. This is why cable was always
a grudge buy. There was no competition, you paid for a bunch of junk
you didn't want, and the cable company owned the local politicians and
rate-setting authorities as well. Sweet deal, but not for us.
But now, if you're willing and able to pay for the privilege, we
have streaming solutions and a growing flow of podcasts (and a few well-done
vodcasts) that - with the exception of Peacock, which seems like a glorified
invitation to a digital root canal - represent a new attempt at narrowcasting.
Smaller, more affluent, self-selecting and better identified audiences composed
of folks who are actually anxious and interested in seeing the offered material
and, of course, also willing to pay for it.
The entire initial premise of Netflix was that by trading your
privacy and viewing preferences and choices for automated personalization you
could have the system select and deliver higher-quality, more tailored, and
more entertaining suggestions, recommendations, and content for you. The
content was as good as anything else out there, and the discovery element was
real and serious. But what has become more and more apparent is that millions
of us were looking for and willing to pay for ad-free and uninterrupted
entertainment.
One of the tactical errors that some of the erstwhile and
flailing Netflix competitors have made is to offer a basic, less expensive
service with traditional ads along with ad-free access at an upcharge, which
seems to me to simply reinforce the depressing message and reality that these
days only paupers, morons and cheapskates watch ad-riven network programming.
If these competitive vendors had the courage of their convictions and believed
in their own offerings, they'd go with a single price structure. Thinking that
you can buy eyeballs and subscribers with bait-and-switch expiring offers or
deep, short-term discounts ("Get 2 issues of XXX magazine for $2 and then
we'll charge you $50 for the next 6 months.") hasn't worked for the few
survivors in the high-end magazine business. That pricing matrix is unlikely to
be a solid, long-term strategy for streamers either.
But it's going to be very interesting to see how long the new
ad-free models can be sustained and whether their managers can resist the
constant pressure from the market and their investors to further monetize their
captive viewer eyeballs. This is the constant debate we hear every day about
Twitter and others and it's a nasty disease that no industry can withstand for
too long.
But in the case of Netflix, the debate ignores a very critical
data distinction. Netflix can sell actionable targeting data about its users -
demographics, habits, tastes, interests, spending cycles -- to advertisers
without permitting them to show a single ad on Netflix itself, which would
jeopardize the customers' experiences.
You already know how this works. You look for something on
Amazon or search for anything on Google and - surprise of surprises - suddenly
half the other places you visit on the web are showing you ads relating to the
products and services you recently researched. Targeting your travels on the
internet is easy as pie. Amazon does this a lot better than Google because
Amazon, unlike Google, knows your purchase behavior as well so they won't waste
your time or try your patience showing you ads for stuff you bought two days
ago.
But Netflix never even has to let you know how the magic works.
And even if you ask, much like Facebook, they will likely tell you that all the
data they sell to third parties is anonymized so that while the ad targeters
"know" your interests and preferences, you should feel comfortable
that they don't really know who you are.
So, the modest good news is that you're unlikely to see ads on
Netflix any time soon and, if their competition has any smarts at all, they'll
be careful not to put their toes in that ugly pool of sludge as well.
Tullman is a graduate with honors of Northwestern University and of its School of Law where he served as Chairman of the Editors of the Law Review and he is admitted to the Illinois Bar and to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.
Tullman is a world-class serial entrepreneur and has successfully founded more than a dozen high-tech startups in his 50-year career and created more than $1 billion in investor value as well as over 10,000 new jobs. He is a tireless supporter of entrepreneurs and a mentor to many startups, growing businesses of all sizes, political leaders and government agencies as well as a board member of several of Chicago’s fastest-growing tech companies.
He has written over 30 books and writes a regular weekly column on The Perspiration Principles for INC. Magazine which reaches over 2 million website visitors a week. He lectures on technology trends, innovation, entrepreneurship and change management all across the world as well as at the Kellogg School of Management and the Law School at Northwestern University where he is an Adjunct Professor.