Month: January 2022

To “honor” the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building, The Daily Show went above and beyond by erecting monuments to the “patriots” of the “Freedomsurrection” that fully captures their actions before and after the failed attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Naturally, Donald Trump is front and center considering the whole thing was done out of loyalty to him, but The Daily Show made sure to chronicle the “bravery” of Ted Cruz, Rudy Giuliani, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and even Tucker Carlson.

You can read the full plague inscriptions below:

Donald J. Trump

No hero played a bigger part in the Freedomsurrection than President Trump himself. Though to humble to willingly relese documents detailing the full scope of his efforts to stop the tyrannical will of the the people, we do know he fought tirelessly to install turnover-friendly allies in the Justice Department, and directed officials to “just say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me.” While his efforts were not enough to keep him in the White House, his bravery on January 6 will never be forgotten, unless Republicans retake Congress and disband the committees investigating it.

Sen. Ted Cruz

When faced with danger, some men slink away to more pleasant climates. Not Cruz. In the buildup to January 6, he was a star attraction, expectorating into any convenient microphone with the courage and resolve for which Trump bestowed the nickname “Lion Ted” upon him. Cruz rallied the troops with all his natural charisma and oozing likeability. And when the Freedomsurrectionists ransacked his papers on the Senate floor, they knew where he stood, ‘He’s with us!” they told each other on video that would soon become very useful to prosecutors. “Cruz would want us to do this!”

Rudy Giuliani

The day the election was called for Joe Biden, Giuliani boldly made a call of his own: to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, where he held a historic press conference to declare war on the election results. This would spark a movement — and also a series of defamation lawsuits against him. On the morning of the Freedomsurrection, Giuliani told the crowd to prepare for “trial by combat.” This would later turn out to be the only kind of trial he could take part in, as his law license was soon suspended.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Declaring January 6 “our 1776 moment,” Greene reportedly met with organizers of the Freedomsurrection in advance to coordinate her efforts to overturn the election on the floor of the House with their slightly more boisterous attempts outside the building. With 700 of them now facing charges and Donald Trump still not president, Greene’s comparison to 1776 may have been premature, but she can still hold her head high as the Freedomsurrectionists celebrate their 1865 moment: meeting in courthouses to negotiate the terms of their surrender.

Tucker Carlson

As a leader of the Rapid Revisionists, Carlson fought not on January 6 but in the weeks and months after, arguing that the Freedomsurrection was both a nonviolent expression of patriotism and also a false flag operation conducted by liberals. Armed with the resources of (but for legal purposes, no affiliation with) Fox News, Carlson produced a docuseries proving that the Freedomsurrection — which he had earlier proclaimed was made up of “solid Americans” — was, in fact, carried out jointly by long-standing allies Antifa and the FBI in order to justify purging “legacy Americans” from society.

Rep. Lauren Boebert

Boldly defying a corrupt order from the House Sergeant at Arms to stay off social media during the Freedomsurrection, Boebert flipped the safety off on her phone and blasted out a round of tweets to keep her fellow patriots outside apprised of the situation inside during that chaotic day. “We were locked in the House Chambers,” she helpfully revealed, adding, “The Speaker has been removed from the Chambers.” Did she tweet to help Freedomsurrectionists locate targets? Or was she just bored during the siege and looking for a way to pass the time? Really, why does anyone tweet when you think about it?

Plagues “honoring” Josh Hawley and Steve Bannon were also included at the monument that currently sits at 23rd St. and Broadway in New York. The Daily Show asks that they not be torn down, “because history.”

(Via The Daily Show on Instagram)

A mere three weeks ago, Burial announced that the Antidawn EP would be out in early 2022 and it turns out we didn’t have to wait very long for it to arrive. The 43-minute, five-track project is officially out and the music feels like the soundtrack to the cold winters of South London where Burial is from. The album bio does a masterful job of describing yet another new world that Burial has just created with Antidawn:

“Antidawn reduces Burial’s music to just the vapors.

The record explores an interzone between dislocated, patchwork songwriting and eerie, open-world, game space ambience.

In the resulting no man’s land, lyrics take precedence over song, lonely phrases colour the haze, a stark and fragmented structure makes time slow down.

Antidawn seems to tell a story of a wintertime city, and something beckoning you to follow it into the night. The result is both comforting and disturbing, producing a quiet and uncanny glow against the cold. Sometimes, as it enters ‘a bad place’, it takes your breath away. And time just stops”.

So with that, your eerie electronic winter soundtrack has arrived. It follows up a pair of 2021 EPs from Burial: Shock Power Of Love (a split with Blackdown) and Chemz / Dolphinz.

Antidawn is out now via Hyperdub. Get it here.

On New Year’s Day, Long Beach rapper Vince Staples tweeted that he only needed one more thing to finish his upcoming follow-up to his acclaimed 2020 self-titled project — and it looks like he got it. Vince previously told Desus & Mero that he has a new album called Ramona Park Broke My Heart on the way and it looks like it’ll be out sooner rather than later.

That’s because the one remaining criteria he set has likely been fulfilled. When he tweeted, “This album is done if I can get @djquik,” no one could have predicted that he’d have made that particular meeting happen inside of a week. But that seems to be exactly what happened, thanks to an Instagram post from the Compton hitmaker himself featuring Quik, Vince, and Quik’s son David Blake Jr. at Westlake Studios in Hollywood.

Astonishingly, this might only be one of a pair of future projects for the fatalistic Long Beach rapper, who also revealed he’d recorded an album worth of material with The Alchemist last year. If he can find time to roll that one out, 2022 just might be the year Vince gets the recognition he’s been earning ever since he dropped his first mixtape, Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1, back in 2011.

Since Adele’s new album 30 was released late in 2021, the LP still has plenty of life left for 2022. It’s still No. 1 on the latest Billboard 200 chart, and now Adele has revealed that she’s getting ready to unveil a new video for “Oh My God,” which is set to drop at noon ET on January 12.

Adele shared a quick teaser clip for the video today, which features a shot of Adele standing in front of a halo-like circular light and donning a seemingly religious-inspired outfit, both of which would play nicely off the song’s title. In the brief message she shared alongside the post, she indicated that she plans to keep busy this year: “Rested and Re-Set! Feeling ready for 2022, there’s so much coming, I’m excited for you all to see it x.”

Adele previously told Audacy of “Oh My God,” “[It’s] about the first time that I basically left my house after my anxiety and stuff like that started to sort of subside. I went out with some girlfriends and my girlfriends are like, ‘You’re single, 30, and ready to mingle.’ And I was like, ‘I ain’t ready to mingle at all. What the hell are you talking about?’ It was just about the prospect of sort of dating and stuff like that in bloody LA, which is not the vibe. I was terrified, I wasn’t ready to start dating anyway, but I was scared that if I did, that I would probably make some really bad decisions because I wasn’t ready. I remember the first time [someone flirted], and I was like, ‘Do you mind? I’m married.’ And my friends were like, ‘But you’re not.’ And I was like, ‘Oh sh*t, OK, oh my God.’”

Check out the teaser above.

Mad Money host Jim Cramer is aghast that “so many smart people” could have fallen for Elizabeth Holmes’ bullsh*t blood-testing devices. On Tuesday morning, just hours after Holmes was found guilty on four federal counts of defrauding investors, the shouty CNBC personality took to Twitter to express his utter amazement that anyone with half a brain could be taken in by the crazy-eyed Theranos co-founder.

What Cramer neglected to mention, or perhaps remember, was the time he interviewed Holmes and openly gushed over how dang brilliant she was. It didn’t take long for Twitter to remind him.

In a video clip that has now been widely retweeted (mostly at Cramer), he’s practically drooling as he tells Holmes, “I usually don’t do this,” then proceeds to compare her to “Steve Jobs and what he did for computing.” As if the fawning nature of his intended compliment wasn’t obvious, Cramer went on, telling Holmes that “I regard you as a visionary, next-generation person.”

Cramer, of course, was not alone in his effusive awe of Holmes and what Theranos was creating… probably because she had dared to do the impossible, which turned out to actually be impossible. Holmes (knowingly falsely) claimed to have built a blood-testing device that could detect a variety of diseases and conditions with just a small needle prick.

There is definitely at least one prick in that lost interview from 2015, and it appears to be Cramer.

But Cramer was far from the smartest person Holmes ended up scamming. Her supposed creation was so revolutionary, for both technology and medicine, that at one point Theranos’ “all-star” board of directors included such heavy-hitting names as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, former U.S. Senator and heart-transplant surgeon Bill Frist, and USMC general James Mattis.

Good thing Cramer didn’t fall for it and publicly marvel at how Holmes was “disrupting the world” or congratulating her on “all the success you’ve had” or admitting that “I sure hope you win”… oh, wait…

You can watch the sycophantic clip above.

Back in May 2021, all three Fox and Friends co-hosts made sure to point out that they got the Covid vaccine. This appeared to be a counterpoint to Tucker Carlson’s perpetual vaccine skepticism, and all three members of the Fox and Friends gang seemed pleased to be spreading science rather than propaganda. Steve Doocy was fully onboard, Ainsley Earhardt described the shot as “freedom,” and even Brian Kilmeade seemed to be cool with it. However, the latter’s tune has abruptly changed over the past several months.

Kilmeade soon began to go on regular rants over Covid mandates and masks and vaccines while Doocy kept urging viewers to get the shot. Long story short, Omicron arrived, and Doocy’s entire family caught it over the holiday season. And Doocy now believes (in alignment with the CDC and reputable scientists everywhere) that being vaccinated and boosted is what kept his family from falling prey to severe illness. As Doocy revealed, “A lot of people trade gifts. We traded Omicron. It pretty much went through our whole family.”

From there, Kilmeade decided to welcome Doocy back by ranting about how he doesn’t believe in the boosters. “I don’t want to be a pincushion and show horse … I’m losing a lot of faith in ‘go get another shot,” he ranted in the below clip, to which Doocy responded, “I trust the doctors, I trust the science.”

Here’s another thing: Steve, his wife (Kathy), and his son (Peter, the Fox News White House correspondent) all contracted Omicron. Meanwhile, Steve’s daughters (Sally and Mary) caught Delta. Steve went on (via Mediaite) to explain why immunocompromised Kathy may have seen her life saved by the vaccine:

“Kathy’s doctor said that given her situation, if she got Covid, she would die. It just was like, if you get it, you’re going to die. And so we did everything we could to isolate her before the vaccine came out, and as soon as she could get the vaccine and she got it. I’m of the opinion that if the scientific data supports it, people should get it — with the exception of people who cannot tolerate vaccines and stuff like that — get it because it can save your life. It can save the life of somebody in your family. Ultimately, there are a lot of people who, for a variety of reasons, are not getting the vaccine. But unfortunately, right now, there are a lot of unvaccinated people who are infecting other unvaccinated people and ultimately people are going to get sick and in the worst-case scenario, they will die. I base it on just the practical application of, we all got vaccines to go to school. That was the price of admission to go to school. You had to get chickenpox, MMR, all that stuff, tetanus. If that’s what you need these days to get through life, get the shot. And so I said that. And I know people said, ‘Hey Steve Doocy said he’d get the shot.’ Sean Hannity said he was the pro-vaccine as well. It goes back to my core, and that is, trying to be an explainer.”

Kilmeade stood firm in his stance, much like he can’t quit that awkward Christopher Columbus obsession of his.

The bottom line is this: Steve Doocy and his family have all recovered from Covid without too much incident, and that’s largely down to having their immune systems primed through vaccination.

(Via Mediaite)

Of the many unsettling things Donald Trump did during his presidency, one of the most dangerous occurred on January 6, 2021, when he encouraged his followers to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building and make their voices heard.

“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the amped-up crowd that had gathered in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

When hundreds of Trump supporters eventually did make their way to the Capitol, then violently force their way inside the building, their fearless leader was nowhere to be found. And has quietly spent much of the last year attempting to distance himself from the violence that erupted following his so-called “Fight Like Hell” speech, which Trump swears was “extremely calming.” Meanwhile, more than 730 people have been charged with a variety of crimes related to the events that day, and they want to know what happened to the solidarity their president promised them.

As the Daily Beast reports, the former president is being called out by Edward Jacob Lang, a 26-year-old insurrectionist who feels betrayed by the former anarchist-in-chief. On Wednesday, Lang—who was arrested nearly a year ago on more than a half-dozen charges after attacking officers on January 6th and beating them with a bat—spoke with bounty hunter-turned-conservative shock jock Stew Peters and expressed his annoyance.

“I am so disappointed in Trump for canceling his January 6th press conference,” Lang, who claimed to be on the verge of tears, told Peters. He’s extremely bothered by Trump’s refusal to stand up for defendants like him, who he described as “January 6 political prisoners.”

“It just shows how far we have fallen,” Lang said. “Where is our rally tomorrow? … [T]here should be a hundred thousand people in D.C. tomorrow at the very minimum… President Trump, where are you? … We are rotting in jail because we stood up for what you told us to stand up for!”

Peters, too, expressed his dismay at Trump canceling his January 6th press conference. “We had hoped that Trump would address all of the evidence that the chaos of January 6th was orchestrated by agent provocateurs,” he said. “Instead, Mar-a-Lago has signaled today a surrender of the narrative.”

Unfortunately for Trump and the hundreds of those who rioted in his honor, surrendering the narrative is sometimes the only move you’re left with when the “evidence” that the chaos was caused by someone else simply does not exist.

(Via Daily Beast)

January 8 would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday, so Amazon Music is celebrating all month long with their [RE]DISCOVER campaign. Today, that celebration manifested itself with a cover of “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” a highlight from Bowie’s 2016 album Blackstar, by Spoon.

Britt Daniel says of the recording, “‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ is a tune Alex and I have been playing since we learned it for an acoustic and piano show in Mexico City in 2016. It’s just a fantastic song, and as the last song on Bowie’s final album, it doesn’t disappoint. We recorded this version live in December 2021.”

In 2019, Daniel told Stereogum of covering the Bowie track, “I just found it to be a very, very moving song. I can’t remember why that ended up being the one Alex [Fischel] and I did. I guess I must’ve really just loved it.” In 2017, he also told Spin, “I ended up listening to even more Bowie than usual last year. [Tarbox Road Studios is] out in the middle of the woods, nothing happens. The control room’s nice, but the living quarters — if you wanna listen to music, there’s only one way: It’s on this jambox, and you have to play a CD. So we burned maybe six, seven CDs, Bowie’s Lodger was one of them, and they got played constantly.”

Listen to Spoon’s “I Can’t Give Everything Away” cover above.

Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade were well aware of the severity of what happened a year ago at the Capitol Building in Washington DC, but you wouldn’t know if you were watching Fox News that day. In private, they were texting Trump’s former-chief of staff Mark Meadows to urge the then-president to speak out against what was happening (“This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote). But in public, “on various programs, they played down the violence and, in some cases, suggested that antifa may have been to blame,” according to PolitiFact.

A review of their on-air and social media comments show that on Jan. 6, Ingraham, Hannity, and Kilmeade broadly condemned the attack while at the same time questioning whether those who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters. Ingraham and Hannity also minimized the event, likened it to protests from the summer of 2020, and entertained the conspiracy theory that antifa instigated it.

This dangerous discrepancy was highlighted in a new video from The Daily Show that pairs footage of the failed coup on January 6th with Fox News hosts discussing Black Lives Matters protests. “It’s not a protest. These aren’t children, these are adults, and they’re destroying our children,” Tucker Carlson said… the same Tucker Carlson who also asserted that January 6th “was definitely not a violent terrorist attack.”

You can watch the video above.

In recent months, Britney Spears hasn’t hesitated to take shots at her family following the whole conservatorship saga. Yesterday, she was at it again in a new Instagram post, in which she revealed that she just had her “first glass of red wine last weekend.”

Spears has been sharing videos of herself dancing to Madonna songs lately (like this one and this one), and she addressed those in a new post, writing, “I’m sure it looks weird me dancing to @madonna so much [shrugging emojis]… I see it … it’s like I’m not trying as much like I’m INDULGING [crying laughing emoji] ….. well thats exactly what her music does to me !!! I mean I had my first glass of red wine last weekend !!! I’ve waited 13 years … that’s long enough !!!”

She then went after her family, saying, “The sarcasm of me me me … my family taught me well by their actions … to be selfish and love thyself … play on [red rose emojis]!!! In a world where we all have the right to speak … drive … buy alcohol … party … have cash … I apologize for INDULGING in front of the masses … and dancing a touch slower !!! I mean what was I thinking [crying laughing emoji]?? Nobody’s perfect !!!”

This comes after she recent unfollowed her sister Jamie Lynn on Instagram.