Month: January 2021

After a violent, pro-Trump mob gathered and stormed the capitol last week in an attempt to prevent the Senate from finalizing the process of confirming Joe Biden as president, many celebrities and entertainers have been weighing in on the aftermath. For her part, Keri Hilson lamented Twitter removing the president from their platform after inciting this violent mob that killed five people.

On the other end of the musical spectrum, vehement leftist Neil Young issued a statement today that expresses empathy for those in the mob. He shared his thoughts today on his website in a post called A Message From Neil, touching on his sadness about those who have had their beliefs used as political weapons and how hatred is not the answer. Read the full message below.

Sadness and compassion hit me last night as I watched fellow Americans telling their stories

A young lady in tears spoke of being maced in the Capital [sic]. She was crying because she had been attacked and all she was doing was trying to have her voice heard in the Revolution. She was one of thousands who have been carrying the feeling of being persecuted for their beliefs, their feeling that American power just didn’t care.

This, to me is beyond my own feelings that our president has betrayed the people, exaggerated and amplified the truth to foment hatred. Resentment of the Democratic party among the insurrectionists at the Capitol was rampant. We don’t need this hate. We need discussion and solutions. Respect for one another’s beliefs. Not hatred.

I was devastated to see the double standard. The way people were treated in the BLM demonstrations recently, compared to the other day. There is no place here for White Supremacy. People need each other to be truly free. Hatred will never find Freedom.

I learned that a some of the people storming the Capitol were police themselves, and gained peaceful entry by showing their badges. I was shocked to see the Confederate flag being waved inside the chamber; the destruction and disrespect. But mostly I felt bad for the people. With Social media, issues are turned to psychological weapons and used to gather hatred in support of one side or the other. This is what Donald J. Trump has as his legacy.

I still have my strong beliefs. That has not changed. But now I feel empathy for the people who have been so manipulated and had their beliefs used as political weapons. I may be among them. I wish internet news was two-sided. Both sides represented on the same programs. Social media, at the hands of powerful people – influencers, amplifying lies and untruths, is crippling our belief system, turning us against one another.

We are not enemies. We must find a way home.
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As Donald Trump enters the final days of his presidency, he has become more erratic and even some of his longest and most loyal supporters have jumped ship following the Capitol insurrection he incited last week.

Numerous members of his cabinet and staff have resigned — albeit, with just two weeks left it’s little more than an empty gesture — and he now faces another impeachment trial as the House prepares to move forward with a vote in coming days on bringing impeachment charges against him once again for his actions last week. However, the thing that has hurt Trump most is how the world of sports is even turning on him, most notably with the PGA announcing they would be moving the 2022 PGA Championship away from Trump’s Bedminster course, which reportedly left him more “gutted” than being impeached again.

Over the weekend, word emerged that among Trump’s plans for his final full week in office was to give Patriots coach Bill Belichick the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to which Belichick has now politely declined citing the actions of Trump last week and how this year “conversations about social justice, equality, and human rights moved to the forefront and became actions.”

Given Trump’s adoration of football, an arena he’s never successfully gotten into despite his best efforts both in trying to buy the Buffalo Bills and then in helping to sink the USFL, this, like the PGA moving on from him, will almost assuredly sting him as bad if not worse than the other, far more important things happening right now in the nation’s capital.

It is the latest instance of people who have previously been supporters of Trump beginning to distance themselves publicly as he becomes increasingly toxic on his way out of office.

Since the terrifying events of last Wednesday, in which a whipped-up crowd of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building, trying (and, luckily, failing) to overturn the 2020 election, people have been looking for humor — anything to bring some levity to what could have gone even worse. There’s been the “Chewbacca bikini” guy, and the claim that he wishes his prison food was organic. There’s been the Goodfellas-inspired supercut of perpetrators being rounded up by the feds. And there was this: one of the five people who died was a Trumpist who tased himself in the balls. Alas, that last one is, as the outgoing president would put it, fake news.

Snopes, the internet’s beloved team of tireless investigators, went to work on the claim, which had spread around social media late last week. It involved one Kevin Greeson, a 55-year-old Alabama man who died of a fatal heart attack during the skirmish. Soon some, notably comedian Kyle Hess, were spreading word about what really happened: “apparently a guy accidentally tasered himself in the balls and then died of a heart attack while trying to steal a painting yesterday and if we can’t all come together over how hilarious that is we may be beyond hope”

But that, Snopes reports, is just a fantasy. They spoke to Kristi Greeson, Kevin’s widow, who said there was no stealing of paintings and no fatal tasering. In fact, it had more to do with the fact the had high blood pressure and had put himself in a highly stressful situation:

Greeson said that her husband attended the Capitol riot but never entered the building. Kevin had told his wife that he was in a safe area, but then he described seeing people pushing a barrier at a nearby location.
“He just stopped talking, and I could hear all the people. That’s when he had the heart attack,” Greeson told Snopes over the phone. “He died instantly.”

Greeson’s account of her late husband’s whereabouts on that day are corroborated by a report in The New York Times. Greeson told the paper that she “didn’t want him to go. I didn’t feel like it was safe.”

(Via Snopes and The New York Times)

After rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, forcing lawmakers into hiding and ultimately leading to the deaths of five people (six, if we count the Capitol Police officer who died by suicide in the days following), Twitter took the unprecedented step of permanently banning Donald Trump from its platform. Since the election Twitter had flagged the president’s tweets that pushed disinformation about the election, but in the wake of the violence in the Capitol, concerns about incitement to more violence led them to warn Trump that he risked being banned if he kept up his inflammatory posts.

He was warned. He was given an explanation. Nevertheless, he persisted. And so Twitter followed through, as did Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms that could be used to stir up extremist violence.

And quite predictably, people who inexplicably still support the president started crying about free speech.

Twitter also took the step of removing in bulk accounts that were dedicated to pushing QAnon, the quacky conspiracy theory that says Trump is in the process of taking down a secret cabal of Satan-worshiping, pedophile Democrats and celebrities. QAnon adherents have been a growing part of Trump’s extremist base and the falsehoods they push have grown more and more a part of mainstream right-wing rhetoric.

In fact, they’ve grown so mainstream in the conservative ecosystem that removing those accounts resulted in many high-profile conservative politicians and personalities losing tens of thousands of followers all at once. And hoo boy, were they not happy about it.

But instead of acknowledging that a big chunk of their following are living in a dangerous bonkersland (and that many of those followers were probably disinformation-pushing bots anyway), they started crying about free speech.

Let’s be clear. The first amendment of the constitution guarantees the right to free speech, meaning that the government cannot silence us. We have the right to say (almost) anything without being shut down or locked up by the government.

Government is the key word here, though. Twitter is not the government. Neither is Facebook or YouTube or any other company. Free speech is a constitutional right; a social media account is not. A social media account is a product we get to use in exchange for seeing ads and handing over some of our personal info. It’s also something we can only access if we agree to a set of terms and conditions and then abide by them. Once we’ve done that, the company is well within its rights to boot us if we break the terms of service.

Trump was not silenced by the government. In fact, he has a literal microphone that can literally reach the entire world literally down the hall from where he lives and works. He can hold a press conference and say whatever he wants at any time. His free speech is still totally intact—and he still has a huge megaphone at his disposal.

As for the other people who have had their social media accounts suspended? Their right to free speech is also intact because, again, a company is not the government. No one is entitled to a platform.

This is how the free market works. Pretty much the only thing a company can’t do is discriminate against someone based on their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age, thanks to anti-discrimination laws. But a business can deny you service for being a nuisance, for yelling at other customers, for using profanity, for not wearing shoes, and all kinds of other actions if their rules stipulate that they won’t tolerate those things.

There are also common sense things we just can’t do, even if they aren’t explicitly laid out in a business’s rules. For instance, I can’t walk into Nordstrom and shout into megaphone, “Hey fellow customers! Feel free to just take whatever you want for free because Nordstrom’s prices are exorbitant and they don’t need our money anyway!” That would get me kicked out in three seconds, and the company would have every right to do that.

The president can’t go on Twitter and tweet messages that are likely to incite violence, especially after his followers already stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf and chanted about killing the vice president. That would be incredibly dangerous.

People can’t go on Twitter and push the idea that our nation’s lawmakers are part of an evil cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who stole the election from Trump and deserve to be publicly executed. That’s dangerous, and we’ve let it pass as absurdity instead of recognizing it as radicalization for way too long.

There are things people just can’t do in a business space. Incitement of violence is something that people can’t legally do in any space, but even pushing disinformation that fuels the beliefs that have led to violence—namely the entire “Stop the Steal” lies about election fraud—is dangerous at this point. Our country is on fire. Anything that directly fuels that fire needs to be kept far away.

Let’s be extra clear here. These social media companies are not banning “conservative” speech or silencing conservative voices. Political views that aren’t insane and dangerous conspiracy theories and that aren’t driving people to mob violence are still up and running and will continue to be up and running (assuming they don’t start violating those rules). In fact, Facebook’s top 10 posts today are 80% conservative voices, as per usual, so cries of partisan censorship fall a bit flat.

Banning the president of the United States is a huge decision, of course. But again, he has an entire press corps at his disposal and his title and position do not exempt him from terms and conditions. It’s not like Trump hasn’t broken Twitter’s rules of service before. As Sam Harris pointed out in his podcast today, people have gotten kicked off of Twitter for far less every single day that Trump has been president. As Harris said:

“Trump has been violating any sane terms of service on Twitter for years. He’s threatened nuclear war on Twitter. More importantly, he has ruined people’s lives intentionally on Twitter. As president of the United States, with tens of millions of rabid followers—many of whom he knows to be quite deranged—he’s attacked private citizens repeatedly, knowing they would be doxxed and inundated with death threats. That should get you kicked off Twitter. He should have been kicked off years ago. In recent months, he’s relentlessly spread misinformation about the election, and he’s destabilized our society in the process. And then he incited an attack on the Capitol. Twitter isn’t obligated to give him a platform to do those things.

This is not a free speech issue. This isn’t a ‘Why can’t we just debate all ideas?’ issue. This is ‘Why should we let the most dangerous cult leader on Earth use our platform to sow division in society’ issue. Why should we give him the tools to produce mob violence? Honestly, I would expect to get kicked off of Twitter for causing 1/1,000,000th the harm Trump has caused on the platform.”

Those clear violations aside, there is a lot of gray area in terms of what counts as violating a social media platform’s rules, and there are legitimate complaints to be had about what does or doesn’t get flagged or banned. We have to rely on the people who make such judgments to be working in good faith, and we can’t always trust that that’s the case. We also need to have important discussions about the power of these huge tech companies and the role they play—or should play—in keeping the world from spinning out of control. But those discussions will necessarily involve the role of government regulation, and right now that’s tricky as most of the people complaining about social media purges at the moment are the same people who decry government regulation.

At any rate, suspending a social media account has nothing to do with free speech. Unless the government makes Twitter shut down someone’s account, no one’s first amendment rights are being violated here.

If you ask conservatives, a double standard has unfairly emerged in the wake of last week’s failed MAGA coup at the US Capitol. That double standard, of course, is that social media websites have been cracking down on them and their misinformation. Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter; Senator Josh Hawley lost a book deal. Meanwhile the Democrats…actually, well, they never stormed a federal building armed with zip ties, or close to it.

Anyway, The Daily Show feels that a different double standard exists in the wake of Donald Trump losing to Joe Biden in November. Namely, that Trump voters, who are holding on to the lost cause that the election was stolen from Trump, are fragile souls hurt by defeat. They need to be given time to grieve and, you know, attempt a coup that left five people in Washington dead.

As The Daily Show pointed out, that same grieving period (sans coup) was not allowed to Democrats by Fox News when Trump won in 2016, as the network routinely roasted Democrats for not accepting defeat. In a video posted on Twitter on Monday, the show roasted Fox News by directly comparing the way they covered Dems after Trump’s victory in 2016 with how they’re covering Trump supporters after they’ve spread baseless voter fraud accusations and incited a riot.

It will likely do little to change the dysfunctional political discourse in America, but there really is something satisfying about hearing Tucker Carlson say, “My god, you crybabies, you lost,” even if he’s talking about Democrats in 2016. It’s another example of how media coverage on Fox is markedly different when dealing with Democrats or Republicans, and the grace extended to the latter when it comes to pretty much everything.

It’s been a while since the movie had a really inspired Mad Libs movie pitch, so this one should be a doozy: As per Entertainment Weekly, the next movie from Darren Aronofksy, the oft-eccentric director of Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and the quite divisive mother!, will star Brendan Fraser as a 600-pound man eating himself to death. Why not! Everything else in the world remains weird, so sure.

Mind you, it’s not the first time this story has been told. The film will be based on The Whale, an acclaimed play first staged in 2012, which netted its author, Samuel D. Hunter, the prized Obie Award. It revolves around Charlie, who spend the majority of the piece on a couch, dying and dealing with such visitors as his ex-wife, his longtime caretaker, a young missionary, and his estranged daughter. During its initial run in 2012, the Chicago Tribute called it “one of the very best plays” of the year.

Aronofsky has never shied away from material that sounded bizarre on the page, and which wound up bizarre on the screen. But it also sounds like it’s in the same wheelhouse as his most accessible film, 2008’s The Wrestler, also about a self-destructive loner with a daughter who doesn’t like him. There’s every chance this could be the calmest movie from a director who previously sent Hugh Jackman soaring through the cosmos in a space bubble.

(Via EW)

Monday was the start of a new era on Jeopardy! as the show aired its first episode taped after the death of Alex Trebek. The legendary Jeopardy! host died in November after a battle with pancreatic cancer, and the remaining episodes Trebek taped before his passing hit TV screens on Friday.

That episode, originally scheduled to air Christmas Day, featured a lovely tribute to Trebek over his tenure on the show. Monday saw a guest host, Jeopardy! GOAT Ken Jennings, take his spot behind the podium as the show looks for a new permanent host in the coming months. And though Jennings is far from the first person to host a Jeopardy! other than Trebek, he’s certainly filling big shoes in the coming weeks.

Ahead of his first episode airing in most markets, the show shared an interview with Jennings where he described his excitement for taking over the hosting duties. Jennings, who won a record-shattering 74 straight episodes and last January won $1 million against Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer in the show’s Greatest Of All Time Tournament, certainly knows his way around the soundstage. But when asked what’s different about hosting, he said that going behind the host podium made him realize just how good Trebek was at hosting for so long.

“The main thing I learned is just what an impressive, perfect job Alex Trebek did behind the desk here for 36, 37 years,” Jennings said. “And I thought I knew from over there.”

For decades, part of a contestant’s prep for competing on Jeopardy! was quite literally studying Trebek. The cadence he used when giving clues and the way he finished sentences were important factors in determining when it was the right time to ring in on the signaling device. Getting that timing down helped players not buzz in too early, which locks you out from buzzing in again, and in fierce competition, that fraction of a second can make all the difference.

But Jennings said there’s so much more to hosting than it appears from afar, and it took actually getting control of the game to realize just how great Trebek was at keeping things going.

“I thought I had studied the man and had understood just what a remarkable job he was doing keeping the game going, mastering the sense that he understood all the clues, because he did. Explaining it to the audience,” Jennings explained. “And I thought ‘ah, I understood it all.’ And when I had to do it I realized he was doing 10 things I wasn’t aware of for every one I saw. It’s a very demanding job and he was just the best.”

One thing we know for sure that Trebek — and now Jennings — has control over as Jeopardy! host is the tone that plays when time has run out to answer a question. That was all done via a button at the podium, as we learned late last year. It will certainly be interesting to see what feels different about Jeopardy! with another host manning that button and reading the clues, let alone if contestants start studying the way Jennings speaks in order to gain a new edge.

Wednesday’s attempted coup, in which Trump supporters tried, and failed, to stop the ratification of Joe Biden’s election, was no laughing matter. Well, for the most part. Along with terrifying images of geared-up MAGA heads bearing zip ties, there was the appearance of Jake Angeli, aka the “QAnon Shaman,” a far-right conspiracy theorist who showed up in little but tan pants and a fur hat with horns. One person dubbed his outfit “Chewbacca bikini,” to the consternation of Star Wars heads. Like many of the storming rabble, Angeli was arrested. But we now know he’s not as old school macho as he’d like us to think.

On Monday, Angeli, whose birth name is Jacob Chansley, made his first appearance in federal court, albeit telephonically from a quarantine section of a detention facility. According to ABC7, Chansley is accused of “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds” — both federal misdemeanors. He did not make any statements regarding the two charges.

Chansley has also allegedly not eaten since he was arrested Thursday. The public defender representing him said it was for religious reasons. His mom, however, said it was because “the detention facility won’t feed him all organic food.”

The latter prompted widespread mockery at perhaps the most ridiculous member of the invading MAGA claque.

Yahoo! News also had some revelations about Mr. Chansley, reporting that he’s a “failed actor” who lives with his mom. Their neighbors consider him “bizarre.” His mother, though, calls him a “patriot” and the “gentlest person I know.”

(Via AB7 and Yahoo! News)

Drake has his ear to the ground when it comes to up-and-coming musicians, like when the rapper signed PartyNextDoor to his OVO label way back in 2013. But Drake also keeps an eye out for viral fame, much to the delight of young Nigerian artist Hyzah. After his freestyle went viral over the weekend, Drake gave a friendly cosign to the aspiring musician.

Hyzah’s viral moment sparked when a Twitter user walked passed him on the street in Lagos and was blown away by his rhythmic flow. After posting a video of him, Hyzah’s image went viral and other clips of his different freestyles began to circulate.

In the midst of his viral fame, Hyzah made an Instagram account to further share his music. Hyzah gained tens of thousands of followers overnight as more people saw his videos. One of the many followers was Drake himself, an impressive feat as the rapper only follows 2,400 people compared to his 74.2 million follower count.

Sharing news of Drake’s follow, Hyzah wrote: “Just yesterday i had only 2 followers only to wake up this morning to see Drake @champagnepapi following me…”

Drake’s support didn’t end there. After Hyzah publicly thanked Drake, the rapper and the young artist swapped some friendly DMs. “U are amazing,” Drake praised Hyzah in a message.

Check out Drake cosigning Hyzah above.

The life of being an NBA player is one filled with flights all over the country, and for the unadjusted, it can take some time to learn the rhythms of team flight schedules, which can fluctuate between overnight trips after a game or flights the next morning.

As such, many teams have instituted rules that fine players for delaying departure times by being late to a team flight, because players young and old will sometimes put the team on their time, either purposefully or accidentally and need to pay the price. In Golden State, the fine is apparently $500 per person who shows up late to a team flight, and Steve Kerr doesn’t care what exactly your excuse is — or who you are — because he’ll get that $500 from anyone.

He illustrated this with a story on Sunday in a press conference when he was asked about the relationship many on the Warriors have with Drake, as Golden State was facing Toronto, and Kerr offered up a tale of how one time Stephen Curry and Draymond Green were late to a postgame flight from the Bay to L.A. because they were hanging out with Drake at the arena. As the story goes, Drake was actually catching a ride with them on the plane and Kerr made all three cough up $500 for it.

Drake has famously rapped about the Warriors — and specifically Curry and Green — a number of times, most notably saying “Golden State running practice at my house” on “Summer Sixteen,” and earlier this offseason video emerged of Steph and Drake having a shooting contest at the latter’s home court. While he might not have the skills on the court to ever make it in the NBA, he can at least say he got a rare NBA experience in being fined by a team, which honestly is more rare than playing in a game.