Drug Addled Stories That Aren’t April Fool’s Jokes
I swear all these stories are real
A horse is a horse… The biggie this week is the conclusion that the neigh sayers were right about Ivermectin as a COVID treatment, according to the results of a large scale study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The experiment itself was simple: More than 1,300 COVID-19 patients in Brazil were enrolled in this randomized clinical trial. Half of them were given ivermectin, an off-label anti-parasite drug, and half of them were given a placebo. Wait and see if the patients given ivermectin were either admitted to hospitals less frequently or recovered more quickly during their stays.
Taking ivermectin — an anti-parasite drug of choice for many conspiracy theorists and right-wing figures — does not reduce one's risk of COVID-19 hospitalization.
I know this won’t have any impact on the anti-vaxxers and their fellow travelers, but just in case anybody was curious….
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“The emperor's not just naked, the emperor's having sex with a kid. Congressman Matt Cawthorn’s claim about orgies has now been cross-bred with the QAnon believe about children being kidnapped… Although I thought it was only Democrats that were doing it… Whatever…
On Thursday, Lauren Witzke, the far-right former Republican Senate nominee for Delaware, claimed on The Stew Peters Show that Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) "exposed" the GOP as child traffickers with his recent assertion that Republican members of Congress engage in drug-fueled orgies — an unsubstantiated claim that has gotten him broadly disowned by many Republican officials in his state …
…"When we hear congressmen like Congressman Cawthorn speak out in this manner, we have to applaud them," said co-host Edward Szall. "We have to stand with them because what he's doing is he's showing us behind the scenes. He's showing us behind the curtain. The emperor's not just naked, the emperor's having sex with a kid. Okay?"
"Yes," said Witzke. "And not only that, now [House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy's getting involved. He heard about it. It sparked some outrage. It's upset some people in the GOP that Madison Cawthorn would have the audacity to expose them for the orgy-attending, drug-sniffing, children-raping people that they are."
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Speaking of children, the righties are gonna bring those trans-loving executives at Disneyland to their knees.
The social media influencer who started the anti-CRT movement has declared war. Now that the company has declared its opposition to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Law, it’s time to rally the troops.
As usual with rightie campaigns, this one starts off with twisting the truth.
Via Charlie Sykes at the Bulwark
Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, announced on a company-wide Zoom call Monday that as “the mother of two queer children”—one transgender and one pansexual, she elaborated—she intends to drastically ramp up queer visibility within the Magic Kingdom, increasing characters in Disney productions that are LGBTQIA or other underrepresented minorities by a whopping 50 percent by the end of 2022, according to the New York Post via meeting footage obtained by journalist Christopher F. Rufo and posted to Twitter.
But but but..
The video doesn’t say that at all. Nowhere in the video posted by Rufo does Burke say that she “wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.”
Even the Washington Examiner (which ran a breathless piece declaring: “Of course Disney wants to indoctrinate your children”) acknowledged that, at least on this point, Rufo was full of sh*t.
Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, who knows a good grift when he sees one is all over it, especially since the “junk health news” they’ve been publishing about the pandemic has lost interest among readers.
From the Washington Post
… At an employee town hall, Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing said the company will spend at least $100 million over the next three years to offer children’s entertainment. DW Kids will provide live-action and animated shows to subscribers through the company’s streaming service starting next year..
The project had been in the works for months, with plans to announce the venture during the midterm elections in November. But, Boreing added, the recent “woke” actions of the Walt Disney Company, including its opposition to a new Florida law that will restrict the teaching of LGBTQ topics in public schools, led executives to push up that announcement.
“Americans are tired of giving their money to woke corporations who hate them,” Boreing said. “They’re tired of giving their money to woke media companies who want to indoctrinate their children with radical race and gender theory.”
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Cue the Outrage… Righties aren’t the only ones full of bull on the interwebs, as the Twitterstorm about a House vote supposedly lowering the price of insulin to $35 proves.
I mean, please, pick your battles…
Also unmentioned in this wave of clickbait is the fact that this bill has zero chance of passing the Senate.
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Smoke Dope, Get High, All the Pigs Are going to Die… You get a two-fer with this headline.
I suppose it’s appropriate that April 1 is the day when the House of Representatives goes through the annual rite of considering legislation decriminalizing marijuana. Poll after poll shows that less than a third of Americans think the stuff should be banned; headlines saying otherwise are actually asking questions about HOW it should be legalized. (State or federal?)
Here in California, where the legal pot business is so confusing that people still rely on their underground dealers, there is a tendency to assume that the question is settled.
Sadly, that’s not true, especially if you’re not of the white persuasion. Nearly 1,000 people a day are arrested for a marijuana-related crime, a rate of one person every 90 seconds.
I could put up a bunch of videos of Republicans saying things like their reason for voting no was the war in Ukraine, or that as a pharmacist they know about addiction (pot isn’t the same as all the Oxy scripts they’ve filed without question), but I won’t. Here’s Gym Jordan with just one:
Do you need balance? Here’s Democrat Jamie Raskin casting some shade:
Feral pigs in California are no joke… and they’re threatening to take over. There is no truth to the rumor that certain swine are being taught how to run for office by extremist evangelicals looking to speed up the apocalypse.
The Los Angeles Times has a story about the debates over how to bring them under control:
California’s feral pig population has become a monumental headache for government land managers, farmers, homeowners, conservation biologists and water district officials. But there is no clear way to ease the pain. Making it easier for hunters to kill pigs is a dubious proposition. Going after their food sources would cut a wide swath through California’s fauna and flora. Short of culling their numbers with a full-scale military operation, the porcine pests will continue to do damage.
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Okay, this April Fool tweet was too good not to share:
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com