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5dEdited

It's remarkable to me how feeble the GOP has been in looking for the actual real dirt on our gal Ilhan. It's not that she may or may not have "married" her brother and perhaps committed immigration fraud on his behalf. It's that she first had a religious but not civilly-registered marriage to the father of her children and I've suspected for a long time that she may have committed welfare fraud by perhaps claiming herself to have been a single mother while having carefully avoided living in religious sin.

Also, once she'd divorced her first husband, in Islam she could not remarry him without an intervening religiously legal marriage to another man. And she did in fact later remarry her first husband and that marriage was civilly registered. So a fiction was likely created for the "bridge" marriage.

Of course now she's married to the white guy who'd been running her re-election campaign and it's remarkable, isn't it, that her community wasn't hysterical about her adultery with an infidel? She brings in the bucks for them and is quite successful at her purpose.

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James Mills's avatar

The fascinating thing is (1) I don't think most journalists see themselves as rank propagandists, and (2) a LOT of people still buy the nonsense.

(1) Has a lot to do with journalists being midwits who cling to the proclamations of agencies and studies and public figures like beetles to a floating leaf. They lack the intellectual horsepower and skeptical natures required to actually question (or even fully understand) the information they're hearing. Class blinders are a HUGE part of the problem as well. Also, journalists are shallow and status-seeking and desperately afraid of being criticized or shamed within their weird little twitter/X-obsessed bubble.

In all of these ways, journalists do not reside in reality.

(2) means that after dozens of clear campaigns of deception and obfuscation there are still people willing to trust the news media. Why? Because the media flatters their political prejudices. It's telling them things they want to hear. This kind of cultivated confirmation bias is extremely difficult to undo. Rather, the institutions will have to be reformed, and funding/power flows diverted. THEN people will begin to change their minds (while pretending they never actually believed or said any of the things they did).

I always recommend that people forget the manufactured stories in the news. Focus on deeper social trends (the kind that they do NOT want you to attend to). Maintain a long-term perspective. Ignore journalists. They're sick people.

https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/matters-of-importance

https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/churn

https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/oppressors

https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-morality-of-loathing

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