Thursday, December 27, 2018

Paranoid Nincompoop Of The Day

Are there no mental asylums?
Dan Zak / Washington Post:
What is Ginni Thomas saying now?  The evolution of an unusually outspoken Supreme Court spouse  —  What is going on with Ginni Thomas?  —  She still looks and sounds like the Washington wife of yore, with the pearl earrings, the Reagan-red cocktail attire, the sunglasses tiara'd atop her blond bob.

[...]

But her most visible work is on Facebook, which she considers a prime conduit for influencing the conservative base. Her specialty is meme warfare — sharing loving tributes to Trump, derogatory takedowns of progressives and broadsides against congressional Republicans. A week after a neo-Nazi killed a woman by driving a car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Thomas derided House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for not speaking out against violence on the left.

“LiberalFascists have their useful idiots,” she wrote, and we are left to wonder, as always: What is going on with Ginni Thomas?

These memes come off the assembly line of jingoistic conservative Facebook groups with names such as the Citizens Mandate and the Great American Movement, which have 160,000 followers between them. The groups seem as automated and leaderless as many of the murky forces in social media these days, but the latter appears to be linked on Twitter to a fellow Groundswell member, and the former was apparently born of a 2014 pledge to “Stop the Fundamental Transformation of America” — which was signed by anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, evangelical James Dobson and 50 other conservatives, including a few that Thomas has honored with “impact” awards.

“I can’t believe that the wife of a Supreme Court justice would be spreading such dangerous lies,” wrote a Facebook commenter named Elizabeth in October, after Thomas equated Democrats with rioting and mob rule.

A handful of Thomas’s fellow warriors, when asked about her Facebook activity, say they haven’t observed it or haven’t caught anything objectionable, though at least one says she can overreach at times.

“She’s hardcore to a fault,” says an alumnus of the Heritage Foundation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly. “Sometimes it clouds her political judgment.”
Dangerous lies & "meme warfare": Politics for pinheads who have to move their lips when they read. You know, conservatives & the religious.

No comments: