Dominion & Smartmatic Lawsuits Against Lying Right-Wing Medi

[AnBr]

This is the answer to Faux. Keep hitting them with one law suit after another. Make it cost them more than their reich-wing disinformation machine makes them.

[LFC]

Faux loses another stonewalling attempt in a unanimous decision.

A New York state appeals court rejected Fox News' bid to dismiss a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit accusing the network of falsely accusing an electronic voting systems company of helping rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election to favor Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

In a 5-0 decision, the Appellate Division in Manhattan said Smartmatic USA alleged in "detailed fashion" how Fox News and some anchors and guests "effectively endorsed and participated in (defamation) with reckless disregard for, or serious doubts about" whether the company engaged in election fraud.

Smartmatic had sought $2.7 billion in damages, saying Fox News knowingly lied about its technology and how it was used in order to boost ratings, and keep Trump supporters from defecting to the right-wing networks Newsmax and One America News.

Fox News (FOXA.O) has long said its job was to inform the public, and that airing fraud claims was protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

Tuesday's decision lets Smartmatic continue its cases against Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo and former host Lou Dobbs.

[goldenvalley]

Dominion's summary judgement motion against Faux has a lot of interesting quotes from Faux celebrities.  A summary judgement motion essentially claims that all facts necessary to prove a claim are not disputed so that a judgment on them can be issued without a trial. In a defamation case against a news organization Dominion would have to prove that Faux acted with malice against it.  That malice requirement is a high bar. (The link is a gift one so you can read the whole article.)

The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

Mr. Carlson continued, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” he added, making clear that he did not.
The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”

On one occasion, as Mr. Murdoch watched Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on television, he told Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.”

Watch out what you put in text messages.

On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.

“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ms. Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.

The brief cites senior executives and editors responsible for shaping Fox’s coverage behind the scenes who weren’t buying the election denial, either.

“No reasonable person would have thought that,” said the network’s politics editor at the time, Chris Stirewalt, referring to the allegation that Dominion rigged the election. Bill Sammon, Fox’s managing editor in Washington, is quoted as saying, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

Fox pushed out both journalists after the 2020 election.

Ron Mitchell, a senior Fox executive who oversaw the Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham shows, texted privately with colleagues that the Dominion allegations were “the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud,” referring to false claims that microchips were injected into people who received Covid-19 vaccines.

We'll see what the court does with this.  It would be an entertaining trial to watch if a trial happens. 

[LFC]

Whoa! Dominion's attorneys have come out of the gate swinging, and hard. They're f***ing burying Faux News right up front and asking for a summary judgement because the evidence is so overwhelming!

Never Seen Anything Like This

Dominion Voting Systems’ billion-dollar defamation case against Fox News is unlike any defamation case I can remember.

You’ll recall that Fox News gave relentless air time in the weeks after the Election Day 2020 to the bogus conspiracy theories that Dominion rigged the election against Trump, that its voting machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden, that the company was connected to vote-rigging by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and that it paid kickbacks. None of those things is true.

Typically the meat of a defamation case happens early on when the defendant (in this case Fox News) tries to get the case dismissed on the grounds that the claim is insufficient as a matter of law. If that fails and discovery proceeds (as it did in this case), the defendant will take another big bite at the apple by filing a motion for summary judgment to end the case before trial on the grounds that it can’t be held liable as a matter of law.

But in this case, everything is turned on its head. The plaintiff, Dominion, has filed a motion for summary judgment, asking the court to rule in its favor and against Fox before trial, and yesterday it filed a partially redacted 40,000-word, nearly 200-page brief in support of its motion. The Dominion argument is that no reasonable juror could find Fox News not liable and that the evidence in so overwhelming that as a matter of law Dominion should win on liability now. The damages phase – how badly was Dominion hurt by the alleged defamation and how much does Fox News have to pay – would come later.

If nothing else, the massive filing with its firehose of damning evidence against Fox News sets Dominion up well to force Rupert Murdoch’s crown jewel into a settlement. The filing, especially the eminently readable 14-page introduction, targets a dual audience: the judge and people like me, who will write about it for people like you, heaping more bad PR on Fox News and making it want to settle.

Dominion’s brief offers an extraordinary inside look at Fox News based on months of depositions and endless text messages and emails, including amongst and between its three biggest stars: Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. More on that momentarily.

Fox News, I should note, vigorously denies Dominion’s claims and filed its own brief yesterday arguing that it was engaged in legitimate reporting on newsworthy matters of great public interest.

“Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law,” a Fox spokesperson said in statement.

Read the introduction of Dominion's request starting on page 14. (It's just over 13 pages long.) Here's a taste from the first page. Quotes from actual Faux News employees and "talent" fill nearly the first two pages.

[LFC]

More from that TPM link on Faux News and their wild, cynical lies about Dominion.

Why Did Fox News Do It?

What prompted Fox News to collectively lose its mind and embrace the inane and implausible Big Lie conspiracy theories spouted by Sidney Powell et al.? I know, I know … it seems true to character. But Dominion has a theory of the case that is more compelling than Fox doing Fox things.

Fox News’ motive for going all-in on wackadoodle conspiracizing, Dominion alleges, was to do damage control. It had infuriated its audience on election night 2020 by being the first network to project Joe Biden as the winner in Arizona. In addition, Dominion alleges, Fox News was terrified that farther-right news outlets like Newsmax would seize on the disaffection of many Fox audience members to steal them away.

Dominion brings the receipts for its theory of the case, with the internal communications about the incensed Fox audience and the threat of Newsmax.

Fox going all in on the Big Lie to show its Trumpian bona fides and win back its audience is a rich plot detail that establishes motive in Dominion’s telling of the story.


As Cynical As You Thought … And Even More

Most of the news coverage of the Dominion filing has and will be about the startling revelations contained in the internal Fox News communications. Lots has already been written and more will be today on the things Fox News executives, journalists, and on-air personalities said privately about the crazy conspiracy theories that Dominion rigged the election against Trump.

NYT: Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’

The Daily Beast: Fox News Stars Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity Privately Trash-Talked Trump’s Election Lies

NPR: Off the air, Fox News stars blasted the election fraud claims they peddled

AP: ‘A complete nut’: Fox News hosts didn’t believe 2020 election fraud claims

Of greatest interest are the text messages among Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. As presented by Dominion, they are cold, calculating, forever cynical about their audience, and well aware of what game they were playing. In Dominion’s telling, the primetime trio was aghast that Fox News called Arizona for Biden, angry that the news side of Fox News was trying to fact check the bogus Dominion claims, and deeply concerned that they would lose their preeminent position as a right-wing news outlet and hemorrhage audience to an upstart like Newsmax.

[LFC]

Amazing how stories change when under oath and potentially facing jail time for lying. Rupert Murdoch admitted that the Faux News folks "endorsed" the lies they knew were false.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 27, 2023 22:39:07 GMT LFC said:

Amazing how stories change when under oath and potentially facing jail time for lying. Rupert Murdoch admitted that the Faux News folks "endorsed" the lies they knew were false.

Now the apologists for those talking head types will be saying "well Murdoch is old, senile...no one should believe what he says because he isn't competent"...like Joe Biden is.

[LFC]

Is MyPillow Boy trying to maximize the damages awarded to Dominion?

Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and noted Trump acolyte, has vowed to support election administrators in Shasta County, California, after they upended the county’s election process over some officials’ belief in conspiracy theories about a stolen 2020 election.

At a board meeting this week, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors announced that they were canceling the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems, citing debunked conspiracy theories promoted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets about the security of the company’s machines. Officials said they would look into other options for voting in the county, like hand-counting ballots, and claimed that residents don’t trust the Dominion equipment.

Supervisor Kevin Crye also announced that he’d been in touch with none other than Lindell – an election denier and chief proponent of the lies about Dominion – about the issue. Lindell offered to support a pilot voting system to replace the machines and help the county fend off any possible legal challenges, Crye said.

“There is a great sense they would like to return to something simpler and safer, and more secure from outside hacking,” Board Chairman Patrick Jones told the Los Angeles Times.

In a statement to the Times, a Dominion spokesperson said the vote to remove the machines was “yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the public’s faith in elections.”

[goldenvalley]

Mar 3, 2023 21:16:43 GMT LFC said:

Is MyPillow Boy trying to maximize the damages awarded to Dominion?

Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and noted Trump acolyte, has vowed to support election administrators in Shasta County, California, after they upended the county’s election process over some officials’ belief in conspiracy theories about a stolen 2020 election.

At a board meeting this week, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors announced that they were canceling the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems, citing debunked conspiracy theories promoted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets about the security of the company’s machines. Officials said they would look into other options for voting in the county, like hand-counting ballots, and claimed that residents don’t trust the Dominion equipment.

Supervisor Kevin Crye also announced that he’d been in touch with none other than Lindell – an election denier and chief proponent of the lies about Dominion – about the issue. Lindell offered to support a pilot voting system to replace the machines and help the county fend off any possible legal challenges, Crye said.

“There is a great sense they would like to return to something simpler and safer, and more secure from outside hacking,” Board Chairman Patrick Jones told the Los Angeles Times.

In a statement to the Times, a Dominion spokesperson said the vote to remove the machines was “yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the public’s faith in elections.”

If Dominion hasn't sued him yet My Pillow guy better get ready to receive some legal papers real soon.  How much money did he make selling pillows anyway?  

[goldenvalley]

I am not shocked! shocked to see this. Certain media ignores the revelations about Fox big wigs sending emails and texts that show they knew there was nothing to the Big Lie.

On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.

The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)
Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.

And because the audience must be respected:

The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”

“But,” he continued, “the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”

And a couple of others:

Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by The Times that mentioned Dominion’s lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News’s hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News. The Western Journal, another one of the four, mentioned the lawsuit in an article about Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC anchor, a regular critic of Fox News.

The hosts’ comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Mr. Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald J. Trump. One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on right-wing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the right-wing internet.

When users on right-wing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.

[jackd]

Catholic theologians use the phrase, "invincible ignorance" to describe those who cannot accept doctrine. There's something analogous with extreme right wingers.

[LFC]

Mar 5, 2023 17:26:38 GMT jackd said:

Catholic theologians use the phrase, "invincible ignorance" to describe those who cannot accept doctrine. There's something analogous with extreme right wingers.

Funny, I feel that term applies to people who can't accept reality because of their doctrine.

[jackd]

Maybe my snark wasn't evident. I was likening right wingers to religious hierarchy. I share your interpretation. Newsmax and the others are calling the Fox pundits invincibly ignorant on the "reality" of the stolen election.

[LFC]

The current lawsuits may only be the start. These two companies have suffered real harm. They also have money, lawyers, more smoking guns than a Texas bachelor party, and motivation.

The filings from Dominion vs Fox are stunning.
But more is in the works.
And it's not just Dominion suing, or Fox being sued.

🧵/1

In the Dominion suit, many names we haven't yet seen in stories appear on the docket as having been subpoenaed* &/or deposed. That list includes:

Interesting that Shep Smith is on the list. I wonder what he heard before being pushed out of Faux News.

[andydp]

Waiting in the wings: Smartmatic !!  In a moment of "it couldn't happen to nicer bozos":  Smartmatic lawyers just have to get the court records from the Dominion suit for evidence.  What was that term again ? Slam Dunk !!

'Another crisis is building' at Fox News as second defamation lawsuit gets green light for trial

An analysis by The Guardian found that the $2.7 billion lawsuit could be "more dangerous" than the $1.6 billion lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. In both cases, Fox News personalities are accused of falsely claiming President Joe Biden won the election because of a voting machine conspiracy.

"The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four," Smartmatic's 2021 complaint began. "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable."

www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/another-crisis-is-building-at-fox-news-as-second-defamation-lawsuit-gets-green-light-for-trial/ar-AA18zUgU?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=17c6a58f68724f3ea3bf8b6458aa8f0b&ei=19

[AnBr]

This may be the only viable answer to Faux. Bleed them dry.

[andydp]

Mar 14, 2023 15:21:40 GMT AnBr said:

This may be the only viable answer to Faux. Bleed them dry.

Just destroy their return on investment:  keep suing them and make it an income loss for them to keep broadcasting. 

[andydp]

Another chapter in the ongoing saga of the "pillow guy".  He'd finding out statements have consequences

Mike Lindell says he had to borrow $10 million last year to keep MyPillow afloat — and is running out of cash, too

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told Insider he had to borrow $10 million in 2022 to keep MyPillow afloat.

Lindell said he'd also sold a building for $2 million and borrowed a further $2 million for himself.

Lindell says he's burning through $1 million dollars every month on causes related to voter fraud.

"I sold a building I had in Savage, in Minnesota, in October," Lindell told Insider. "And I had to borrow 2 million too. I've spent it all on fighting for this country."

Lindell told Insider that some creature comforts — like his private jet, which had a door come off it in October — haven't been sold yet.


www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/mike-lindell-says-he-had-to-borrow-10-million-last-year-to-keep-mypillow-afloat-and-is-running-out-of-cash-too/ar-AA18HdWv?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=61323827c9624e9be1da6d9675330a43&ei=107

[pnwguy]

Unlike the other Stolen Election crazies, Lindell seems like a true believer. So now the grifters are bleeding him dry.

[LFC]

Faux's business model of lying for dollars keeps getting dragged out into the light. Everybody with more than half a brain already knew it, it's just interesting to see that they put it in writing.

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sounded the alarm inside the company about the financial fallout that the right-wing network would suffer if it continued fact-checking then-President Donald Trump’s lies after the 2020 election, according to messages that became public Wednesday.

In one instance, Scott emailed Meade Cooper, executive vice president of prime time programming, and laced into correspondent Eric Shawn for fact-checking Trump.

“This has to stop now,” Scott said in a December 2, 2020, message.

“This is bad for business and there is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows,” Scott added. “The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

Gotta' love the spin. How wonderful that they believe in the First Amendment without even knowing what it says!

“These documents once again demonstrate Dominion’s continued reliance on cherry-picked quotes without context to generate headlines in order to distract from the facts of this case,” a Fox spokesperson said in a statement. “The foundational right to a free press is at stake and we will continue to fiercely advocate for the First Amendment in protecting the role of news organizations to cover the news.”

[goldenvalley]

Mar 29, 2023 21:32:40 GMT LFC said:

Faux's business model of lying for dollars keeps getting dragged out into the light. Everybody with more than half a brain already knew it, it's just interesting to see that they put it in writing.

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sounded the alarm inside the company about the financial fallout that the right-wing network would suffer if it continued fact-checking then-President Donald Trump’s lies after the 2020 election, according to messages that became public Wednesday.

In one instance, Scott emailed Meade Cooper, executive vice president of prime time programming, and laced into correspondent Eric Shawn for fact-checking Trump.

“This has to stop now,” Scott said in a December 2, 2020, message.

“This is bad for business and there is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows,” Scott added. “The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

Gotta' love the spin. How wonderful that they believe in the First Amendment without even knowing what it says!

“These documents once again demonstrate Dominion’s continued reliance on cherry-picked quotes without context to generate headlines in order to distract from the facts of this case,” a Fox spokesperson said in a statement. “The foundational right to a free press is at stake and we will continue to fiercely advocate for the First Amendment in protecting the role of news organizations to cover the news.”

If these folks wouldn't keep saying incriminating things there would be nothing to cherry pick!

[LFC]

Thank you Shasta County, CA for providing Dominion with a fresh example of real damages.

Election officials in a Republican-leaning California county on Tuesday voted to dump their Dominion voting machines and attempt to hand-count elections moving forward after being influenced by right-wing conspiracy theories about the security of the Dominion systems.

And of course MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is involved.

Earlier this month, Lindell encouraged county officials to drop their contract with Dominion and communicated with county officials as they voted to dump the machines. After county officials voted to move to a hand-count system on Tuesday, Lindell celebrated the development Wednesday morning on his show “The Lindell Report” and offered once again to “cover” any legal expenses the county might incur by ditching the machines.

When right-wing TV personality Brannon Howse asked how he felt about national media saying he’s to blame, Lindell responded in the affirmative: “I want to be to blame. That’s fine,” he said before encouraging “everyone in this country” to go to their county clerks and “say we want paper ballots hand-counted.”

At the Shasta County officials’ Tuesday meeting, members of the elections board considered two alternatives to the Dominion machines now that they’ve ditched the devices: replace them with a different electronic voting system or try counting all ballots by hand.

They voted 3-2 to hand-count the ballots by the end of the day, an expensive process that could open the county up to errors.

“It’s pretty clear the supervisors don’t quite understand what they’ve undertaken,” Shasta County elections chief Cathy Darling Allen told SFGATE, saying she was “in a little bit of shock” about the decision.

[pnwguy]

Mar 31, 2023 16:22:49 GMT LFC said:

Thank you Shasta County, CA for providing Dominion with a fresh example of real damages.

Election officials in a Republican-leaning California county on Tuesday voted to dump their Dominion voting machines and attempt to hand-count elections moving forward after being influenced by right-wing conspiracy theories about the security of the Dominion systems.

And of course MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is involved.

Earlier this month, Lindell encouraged county officials to drop their contract with Dominion and communicated with county officials as they voted to dump the machines. After county officials voted to move to a hand-count system on Tuesday, Lindell celebrated the development Wednesday morning on his show “The Lindell Report” and offered once again to “cover” any legal expenses the county might incur by ditching the machines.

When right-wing TV personality Brannon Howse asked how he felt about national media saying he’s to blame, Lindell responded in the affirmative: “I want to be to blame. That’s fine,” he said before encouraging “everyone in this country” to go to their county clerks and “say we want paper ballots hand-counted.”

At the Shasta County officials’ Tuesday meeting, members of the elections board considered two alternatives to the Dominion machines now that they’ve ditched the devices: replace them with a different electronic voting system or try counting all ballots by hand.

They voted 3-2 to hand-count the ballots by the end of the day, an expensive process that could open the county up to errors.

“It’s pretty clear the supervisors don’t quite understand what they’ve undertaken,” Shasta County elections chief Cathy Darling Allen told SFGATE, saying she was “in a little bit of shock” about the decision.

Orwell was just off by 40 years.  The 2024 election will be America's time for Peace is War, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, brought to you by Faux News and the GOP.  

How many fingers am I holding up, America?

[goldenvalley]

Shasta County politics are a mess. Totally ripe for the Pillow Man to spread his BS. 

On Feb. 1, a militia-backed anti-government group in Northern California won a recall vote that will effectively give it control over Shasta County’s local government. The official being recalled was Leonard Moty, a Republican who had once been police chief and has served as supervisor since 2008. If the early results hold, which have the recall winning with 56 percent of the vote, the sponsors will have scored a victory against the already conservative county’s insufficiently insurrectionist status quo. One of the groups in this saga, Recall Shasta, has received at least half a million dollars in funding from a disgruntled multimillionaire with a personal vendetta against Shasta County’s local government. But the most notable aspect of the effort is how self-conscious it was: Leaders of the recall effort went out of their way to bill their initiative as a model for what other far-right groups across the country can do. Their goal was not just to win, but to evangelize. Members have even been producing a docuseries about the effort aptly named The Red, White, and Blueprint. That bizarre events in an out-of-the-way place like Shasta County could constitute a template for national movement-building would at one point have seemed far-fetched. No longer—it worked. And it’s working in many other places, too, in school boards and town halls across the country. Observers think the Shasta County election might indeed become a template of sorts for what’s to come.

It’s hard to say how exactly this all started for the city of Redding and its environs. Back in October 2020, a far-right supervisor, Les Baugh, proposed that the county withdraw from California’s color-coded tier system designed to manage the pandemic. The proposal didn’t pass—one official pointed out that it was illegal, and other supervisors worried that the state might retaliate by withholding funds. To future members of the recall effort, this moment would be held up as a massive failing—a lack of courage by the board of supervisors.

Or maybe it started even further back, in 2014, when the aforementioned multimillionaire battled and settled with Shasta County because he bristled at the permits required to work on his land. He characterized local government as an assault on his liberty and has since—from his home in Connecticut—been financially supporting far-right extremist groups and the 2020 election of one of the current extremist supervisors, all leading up to the recall.

Or perhaps it began with the failed 2021 effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, which energized factions in Shasta County eager to force some governmental turnover, even if their targets were all Republicans. (Sixty-nine percent of Shasta County voted in favor of recalling Newsom.)

But one clear escalation was in January of 2021, when two of the five county supervisors, Les Baugh and Patrick Jones, opened the chambers to the public in violation of the county’s own ordinance banning in-person meetings because of the pandemic. The other three supervisors voted to censure them for this in February. In March, Baugh proposed yet again that Shasta County reject the state COVID-19 tier system. And again the proposal failed. By April, the recall effort against the other three supervisors was well underway.

It's interesting that a rural county is part of this...It's pretty hard to spark some sort of contagion from such small places. Suburban and urban based people aren't going to be so anti government.  They aren't going to be able to take over state governments with only rural voters unless states are gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.

[LFC]

Faux is desperately trying to block the consequences of their actions from being discussed because they would "inflame passions." So good enough for their business model but no place in court.

Oliver Darcy
@oliverdarcy

News: Fox has asked a judge to prohibit references to the January 6 insurrection at the Dominion trial. "Any reference to the Capitol riot will only unfairly prejudice the jury against Fox, inflame passions, prevent a fair trial, and taint any resulting verdict."

More: Fox asks judge to bar references to threats Dominion staff faced after election. Fox says the threats were "horrific and absolutely inexcusable," but argues they'd "arouse the jury’s sympathy and provoke a desire to punish Fox for the actions of unrelated third parties."

Dominion (naturally) objected to these motions by Fox, arguing the 1/6 attack "is central to almost every element of this case" and that threats its employees have faced are relevant because "people are unlikely to want to work for" a company "that is besieged by death threats."

Regarding threats Dominion has faced, its lawyers add in its motion, "It also became incredibly difficult for Dominion to retain and win business because would-be customers themselves are inundated with death threats, harassment, and protests related to Dominion."

Full story here:
www.cnn.com/2023/04/06/media/fox-news-dominion-motions-in-limine/index.html