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big lie
Trump's Latest Big Lie: 'Radical Left Violence'
The GOP is using this lie to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protesters, and to justify the monopolization of our media by right-wing billionaires.
Sep 30, 2025
US President Donald Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud.
They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as 10 million Americans being denied their vote in 2028.
But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, starting back in the 1960s, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.
The newest Big Lie for 2025 is that America is racked by “radical left violence” leading to the disintegration of law and order in our cities and the spread of terror among politicians and anybody else who dares speak out about the issues of our day.
Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.
They’re using this to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people (including lifelong Republicans like Comey, Krebs, and Taylor) who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protesters, and to justify the monopolization of our media by right-wing billionaires.
Most recently, when a Trump-supporting (Trump sign in his yard, Trump “Make Liberals Cry Again” T-shirt) straight, white, self-proclaimed Christian who thought Mormons were the anti-Christ murdered worshipers in a Latter Day Saints church in Michigan, Trump’s first response was to claim it was “anti-Christian violence.”
Instead, it appears this former Marine war vet with PTSD thought he was defending Christianity. But instead of asking if he was “radicalized” by preachers like Trump’s guy “Pastor” Robert Jeffress (who goes on and on about how the LDS Church is a “false religion”) or the algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, or X, right-wing media is today filled with rants about “attacks on Christianity,” blaming “the left” even for this attack.
It echo’s the GOP’s efforts to portray the two people who tried to assassinate Trump, Charlie Kirk’s killer, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shooter last week, and other political violence as originating from the “radical left.”
Which is really and truly another Big Lie.
First, there’s basically no “radical left” in America anymore. The anti-capitalist pro-violence subset of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that I knew back in the 1960s when I was part of Michigan State University’s SDS are long gone and well discredited (and a few imprisoned).
Second, the “far left” folks who are still around aren’t violent, by and large. Lefties are more interested in protecting Social Security, getting a national healthcare system into place, raising taxes on the morbidly rich, and getting guns off the streets instead of pointing them at people. The last high-profile “leftie” shooter was the mentally ill guy who took a shot at Republican Congressman Steve Scalise back in 2017.
Even the FBI and the Department of Justice themselves had acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of politically-inspired violence in America was coming from the right, at least until puppy-killer Kristi Noem or one of her lickspittles (or her boyfriend) ordered the reports removed from the government websites.
The independent and nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies analyzed 893 terrorist plots that took place between 1994 and 2020. Their report concluded:
Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.
But don’t expect to hear that from anybody in the administration or on Fox “News” or other right-wing media outlets. Instead, they’re using “far left violence” as their excuse to dismantle our rights, impose soldiers on cities run by Democrats, and pour your tax dollars into extreme policing and militarization of our society.
This isn’t the first time the GOP has used the Big Lie technique to sway public opinion in a way that demonizes Democrats. On September 23, 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters and said:
“he opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.
Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.
He then did what Democrats—and what honest news media we have left—need to be doing today: He called out their lies and exposed their technique:
Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression from which this Nation was saved in 1933.
That this Administration—this one today—is responsible for all the suffering and misery that the history books and the American people have always thought had been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was in power.
He followed that with a list of four other Republican lies, including their assertion that he’d tried to get America into WWII, that he was secretly planning to prevent GIs from leaving the service when the war was over, and even a lie about his dog (Fala, after which his speech was named in the press). He summed it up:
Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting. Too much is at stake to forget.
They’re still doing it. Which raises the question: What will be Trump’s and the GOP’s next Big Lie?
They’ve already tried convincing Americans that:
- Immigrants are a major source of crime (when crime rates regarding immigrants are about half that of natural born Americans);
- Democrats are the party of rapists and pedophiles (ahem…Trump’s “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein, E Jean Carroll);
- Democrats want to defund the police (when they’re fighting for more cops in virtually every city in America);
- Are in favor of abortion “after birth”;
- That former President Joe Biden wanted to ban gas stoves and gasoline cars;
- Biden wanted to “ban meat";
- Democrats plan on huge tax increases on the middle class;
- "Antifa” (“Anti-Fascist”) is a domestic terrorist organization;
- Democrats are “deranged pieces of shit"; and
- Liberals want to “force taxpayers to fund transgender surgeries for minors’ nationwide” and, yesterday, Trump said Democrats want to “reopen the wall.“
This after promoting the Big Lie that got three police officers killed and 140 hospitalized on January 6 about the 2020 election was “stolen” and their Big Lie about immigrants voting that resulted in over 4 million citizens being denied their right to vote last year.
Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.
It’s way past time that Democrats and the media start calling these Big Lies exactly what they are, and pointing out that the strategy originated in the modern era with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.
Enough is enough.
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Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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Trump Taps 'Comically Unfit' Election Denier to Head Key Legal Ethics Office
"Leading the Office of Special Counsel requires independence and experience," said one watchdog. "Paul Ingrassia seemingly has neither of these things."
May 30, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday nominated a far-right former podcast host with white supremacist views who called for martial law to keep Trump in power after his 2020 election loss to lead a key legal ethics office.
Trump tapped 30-year-old Paul Ingrassia—who is currently serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security—to head the Office of Special Counsel, an independent investigative and prosecutorial agency tasked with enforcing ethics laws and protecting federal whistleblowers.
"Paul is a highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar, who has done a tremendous job serving as my White House Liaison for Homeland Security," Trump wrote Thursday on his Truth Social network. "Paul holds degrees from both Cornell Law School and Fordham University, where he majored in Mathematics and Economics, graduating near the top of his class."
Critics, however, had a different assessment of Ingrassia's qualifications.
Hampton Dellinger, the previous OSC chief, was initially fired by Trump in February but was temporarily reinstated via court order before being fired again after he began investigating the administration's mass layoffs of federal workers under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Dellinger dropped his legal challenge in March and announced that "my time as special counsel... is now over."
The OSC enforces the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activity of civilian executive branch employees. In 2021, the agency found that 13 senior Trump aides violated the law by campaigning for the president's failed 2020 reelection bid.
At that time, Ingrassia and his sister Olivia Ingrassia were hosting the "Right on Point" podcast. As Trump stoked the conspiracy theory that Democrats stole the election, Ingrassia amplified the president's "Big Lie" and called for authoritarian measures to keep him in the White House.
On December 12, 2020, the podcast's handle on its Twitter page was renamed "Stop the Steal HQ." The account reposted a tweet from prolific white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes with the added message, "Time for @realDonaldTrump to declare martial law and secure his re-election!"
Ingrassia has expressed his own white supremacist views, including the assertion that "exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization, but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage." He also replied to a call for slavery reparations by demanding that the descendants of slaves "pay reparations to the descendants of slave owners" and advocated replacing the "treasonous" Ukrainian flag with the Confederate battle flag under penalty of "serious fines."
During the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, Trump boosted a false birther smear by Ingrassia that Nikki Haley—the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador during the first Trump administration—was ineligible to run for president because her parents were not American citizens when she was born. Ingrassia posted several racist aspersions of Haley's Americanness, which have been archived by freelance journalist Jason Hart.
In March, Daily Dot's Amanda Moore revealed that Ingrassia misrepresented himself as an attorney for more than a year prior to his admission to the bar. During this time, he represented former professional kickboxer, self-described misogynist, and alleged rapist, sex trafficker, and money launderer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate in a civil suit. The Tates deny the charges.
As Moore reported:
As early as May 16, 2023, months before he took the bar exam, Ingrassia referred to himself as "an Associate Attorney at The McBride Law Firm, PLLC" on his personal Substack. But his bio on the site frequently changed. In a July 2023 piece on Tate, he described himself simply as an "associate" at the firm. In August, he referred to himself as a "law clerk." New York state records show that Ingrassia, a 2022 graduate of Cornell Law, took the bar on July 25-26, 2023, under his given name, Paolo Ingrassia. While Ingrassia received his results in October 2023, he was not admitted to the New York State Bar until July 30, 2024.
Responding to his nomination, Ingrassia wrote Thursday on X that "it's the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump!"
"As special counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch—with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce, and revitalize the rule of law and fairness in Hatch Act enforcement," he added.
"This is a pattern with the president's picks for watchdogs: partisan yeasayers whose willingness to stand up to the administration is questionable at best."
However, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan watchdog, said Friday: "Leading the Office of Special Counsel requires independence and experience. Paul Ingrassia seemingly has neither of these things."
"This is a pattern with the president's picks for watchdogs: partisan yeasayers whose willingness to stand up to the administration is questionable at best," POGO added.
Conservative writer Bobby Miller said on X that "the most insane thing about the Paul Ingrassia appointment is that he's been tapped to lead the Office of Special Counsel, an ethics watchdog tasked with enforcing laws that protect federal employees from abuse and safeguard the government from politicization."
"No one's even pretending that this Andrew Tate fanboy, Putin stooge, and martial law enthusiast would do anything even close to the job description," Miller added.
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