Why Do Young People Have Such Contempt For The Republican Party? That's Easy

Last month Paul Ryan's corporately funded, sleazy SuperPAC ran thousands of dollars of really nasty radio ads beating up on progressive Democrat Kara Eastman for having been in a punk band, Pieces of Fuck, when she was in college. Ryan's PAC is desperate to save the Omaha congressional seat-- which is quickly slipping from their grasp-- for failed Trump rubber-step Don Bacon. That's why they've dug up something inocuous from when Kara was in school. What clowns they are-- and they pulled they same sort of silliness on Beto O'Rourke yesterday, in both cases to get voters' minds off the issues that contrast Kara with Bacon and Beto with Cruz.



Today, Philip Trapp, at Alternative Press, wrote about the GOP's rock'n'roll problem. The Texas Republican Party must have thought they were helping their pathetic U.S. Senate candidate-- and former mime-- Ted Cruz, by "tweeting photos of O’Rourke skating, rocking and just generally appearing relatable (as opposed to being a two-faced morality robot) in what seems a misguided effort to discredit the congressman and save Cruz’s [rapidly shrinking] lead."

Failed mime failed U.S. senator, Ted Cruz

Conservatives from both parties have always feared young people and feared and hated everything to do with young people. I remember spending too much time fighting with right-wing asshole Joe Lieberman when he started attacking one of the artists on my label, Ice-T. But it's usually Republicans who are the culprits. Now, they seem to believe that Beto can't be a senator from Texas because he was in a popular El Paso emo band, Foss, that started when he was in high school. One of his bandmates, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, became famous as the lead single for Mars Volta and At The Drive-In. Beto will be even more famous when Texans send him to the U.S. Senate. Here he is, more recently, playing with Texas music icon, Willy Nelson. Anything you want to say about that, Ted Cruz?

And it's not like Beto is the first politician-- or even first member of Congress-- to have been in a band. Probably the only nice thing that anyone can say about Dana Rohrabacher (R-Moscow) is that he was too. And when I asked someone in Palm Springs, some years ago, why they elected a goof ball like Republican Sonny Bono to the House, he said it was because everyone hoped Cher would show up in town sometimes. She didn't.



A few years ago, Blue America backed John Hall for Congress in upstate New York-- and he won. The fact that he had been a member of the band Orleans didn't play much of a part in the race but, if anything, it helped him with name recognition running against an entrenched Republican incumbent. People still love his song, "Still the One," which music-hating conservative Joe Lieberman tried appropriating as a campaign song, forcing Hall to serve him with a cease and desist order. It's still being payed on the radio today-- over 4 decades later. It had a positive impact on people's lives, more than you can say for most politicians.



I'm pretty sure Orrin Hatch was in a band too. He's definitely a serious songwriter. Here he was (below) at a recording session for one of his hit songs, "Eight Days of Hanukkah." It looks like he's trying to be the producer. Maybe he was. He definitely was eager to show everyone he was wearing a mezuzah, at least for the session.



Not my cup of tea but I'll give equal time to another well-known senator who served with Hatch, John Kerry whose 1960 high school band, The Electras has songs all over YouTube. Kerry was the bass player. Give it up or "Guitar Boogie Shuffle":



Back to Utah for a minute-- former governor (and serial presidential hopeful) Jon Huntsman dropped out of high school in the 1970s to join a Salt Lake City band called Wizard. He sported a mullet and played keyboards while they did covers of REO Speedwagon and Led Zeppelin.

In 1978, Senate majority whip Robert Byrd released an album called Mountain Fiddler with covers of folksy West Virginia standards like "Rye Whiskey" and "Cripple Creek." Like Beto and Kara, he was proud of his musical roots regardless of what assholes like Ted Cruz have to say. Here he was on TV-- fiddlin' and singing while he was already Senate Majority Whip. Audience loved it too!



Republican senators Connie Mack (FL), Larry Craig (ID, later caught trying to blow an undercover policeman in a public toilet), John Ashcroft (MO), Jim Jeffords (VT) and Trent Lott (MS) were in a barber-shop quartet, more of a Republican thing than a rock band. They released an album, Let Freedom Sing in 1998. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) is always trying to jam with anyone and he was in a band called Capitol Offense, a band that mostly covered Boston songs, until Tom Scholz had him served with a cease and desist order for fucking up "More Than a Feeling" so badly. A video of them playing "Mustang Sally" can still be found on YouTube. Unfortunately, neither Mack Rice nor Wilson Pickett ever made them stop performing it.



Florida congressman-- now MSNBC host-- Joe Scarborough fronts-- to this day-- an eponymous nine-piece band, Scarborough, mostly performing covers of Prince and Eagles tunes.

I can't remember, but did the Texas GOP complain when Kinky Friedman ran for governor of their state? He sucked up 13% of the vote too. Others elected to office include Jon Fishman (Phish) who was elected a selectman (like city council member) in Lincolnville, Maine; Martha Reeves-- from Martha and the Vandellas-- who was elected to serve a term on the Detroit City Council; and Jerry Butler, the longest-serving Board Commissioner for Cook County, Illinois.




And still threatening to run for something or other every now and then are three somewhat crazy Republican crackpots, Ted Nugent, Kanye West and Kid Rock. Look, in the course of writing this, I was listening to a lot of songs and when I heard this song just below I literally could.not.keep.myself. from jumping up and dancing my ass off as if I was back at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater waiting to give Maxine Brown a kiss backstage.



One last thing-- this tweet by Dayna Steele, east Texas congressional candidate, absolutely owning the Republican Party of Texas:

UPDATE: Kara

Kara Eastman's Communications Director got me this statement, which is worth reading: "The Congressional Leadership Fund was quick to villanize Kara's membership in her college's performance art band, Pieces of Fuck. In high school, she was in a singing group called the All Americans (but you don't see the CLF talking about that band name). We find it ironic that the opposition would want to attack Kara, and Beto, for doing something many American teens do - join a band, sing songs about issues that matter to them, and express themselves through music. Congress would be a better place with more musicians, and while we were joking about a College Band Congressional Caucus, Kara is looking forward to working with politicians like Beto who lead with heart-- and music."

If you like music and free expression, you can contribute to Kara's campaign here.

Gay Couple Has Taken To Fake News Like Ducks To Water-- Alas, Trumpanzee Has Gays Too

What's your identity group? If you're Jewish and a Jew does something heinous or embarrassing, does that irk you even more than it would if someone whose identity group you're not part of did it? I love it that Mark Pocan, a gay man, has the best voting record in Congress and I'm embarrassed that a Kyrsten Sinema and Sean Patrick Maloney, both also gay, have two of the worst voting records of any congressional Democrats. I remember a Chinese friend of mine in San Francisco telling me his whole community felt a collective sense of... almost guilt because a Chinese immigrant shot someone. Well, there are a lot of gays in Los Angeles and overwhelmingly they're a good bunch when it comes to politics-- aware of what happens when you let solidarity slip and how vulnerable groups can be. Every single neighborhood with big gay populations-- from Manhattan, Key West, Wilton Manors in Fort Lauderdale, Provincetown and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on the East Coast thru Boystown in Chicago, Pleasant Ridge near Detroit, Oak Lawn, Dallas and Montrose in Houston to the Castro and Noe Valley in San Francisco, West Hollywood and Silverlake in L.A. and Palm Springs-- voted overwhelmingly against Trump. Gays knew. According to NYTimes exit polling Mitt Romney got nearly half the gay vote in 2012. Señor Trumpanzee didn't do quite so well. 14% of LGBT voters pulled the lever for Señor... very, very, very sick people, who were not just voting for Trump, but for the most psychotically obsessed homophobe in American politics, Mike Pence and his who murderous posse of mentally deranged misfits.

24 year old Sinclair Treadway lives in the faded-but-once-ritzy El Royale in L.A.'s Hancock Park with his husband Sean Adl-Tabatabai, 36. Sinclair says he was a Bernie primary voter. But he and Sean have gone down a very dark path since then. They have a fake news site, Your News Wire, whose credo is something like this quote from Sean: "Reality is how you perceive it. You can change that perception of reality-- dictate it." And today they are dictating it on behalf of the neo-fascist movement behind Trumpanzee. The "3-year old website of murky fact and slippery spin, has in the past year helped usher Donna Brazile out of her CNN gig and foment the Pizzagate frenzy with a key early post (which has generated 28,000 Facebook shares), all from an unlikely HQ for an alt-media operation: the couple's live/work apartment at the historic El Royale (sometime home to the likes of Katie Holmes, Josh Brolin and Cameron Diaz) in L.A.'s Hancock Park."

Now YNW is emerging alongside the more high-profile Breitbart as an integral player in the Trump era's L.A. alt-media axis. Despite Google's decision to cut off YNW's ad revenue and fact-checking site Snopes' relentless efforts to debunk its incendiary reports, its founders are more energized than ever, as Treadway puts it, "to focus on what people aren't focusing on-- the information that the public isn't already being told."

Like fellow outsider outlets (most notably Infowars, with which it periodically trades tips), YNW, whose output has been labeled fake news and Trumpist propaganda by critics, is fueled by populist politics and social media shares. Those in Hollywood retweeting its links include EL James (a story speculating on the origins of unknown "sky trumpet" sounds heard across Europe), Elijah Wood (an article concerning GMOs and cancer) and James Woods (a report that a former Haitian government official due to testify about alleged Clinton Foundation misdeeds was found dead in Miami).

Snopes debunked Your News Wire’s story in May about U.K. authorities allowing the Manchester terror bombing to happen.

The outlet's most devoted celebrity reader, however, is likely Roseanne Barr, who has repeatedly shared with her social media followers YNW's coverage of everything from Benghazi to Pizzagate. "We've communicated a couple of times-- I have the emails," says Adl-Tabatabai, who notes that the "kooky" Barr also has written to him to "slam" stories. "She's frank, opinionated-- our perfect audience." (Barr didn't respond to a request for comment.)

While YNW fields plenty of tips, most of which Adl-Tabatabai deletes ("I'll get quite a lot of, 'Kanye West is being readmitted to the hospital due to MKUltra,' that he's being mind-controlled"), the editorial approach of its tiny, work-from-home staff is chiefly to identify and highlight overlooked nuggets published elsewhere, then recirculate them with provocative new angles. They pull material from disparate outlets, whether Iranian state-backed TV or right-leaning Circa (owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group), usually pinpointing details tucked far down in articles or hidden away in obscure government reports.

Alienated liberals, the two share a suspicion of established stories and presumed facts that borders on the radical. Adl-Tabatabai's views are informed by what he sees as British media's failures during his formative years-- cheerleading the Iraq War, ignoring rumors of BBC host Jimmy Savile's sexual abuse of children-- while Treadway's are forged by a conviction that Bernie Sanders, whom he ardently supported during the Democratic primary, wasn't given legitimate consideration by the press.

They are critical of Donald Trump on some policy points (including his transgender military ban) but view him as a salutary influence in politics. "He may be a buffoon, and he may make some really bad mistakes during his presidency, but he's still an anti-establishment figure," reasons Adl-Tabatabai. "A vote for him was a vote to smash the system."

...In the months after Trump's election, several British papers published accounts criticizing YNW as a purveyor of fake news, with one reporting that a European Union task force set up to combat Russian propaganda had classified the outlet as a proxy. While the couple acknowledges that state-sponsored Russia Today is a favored source ("They have angles," notes Adl-Tabatabai, "and sometimes their angles vaguely match our angles"), they deny any links to the Kremlin. Such a claim, contends Adl-Tabatabai, is "part of an overall political game that's being played by big corporate media outlets to purge independents."

The negative attention has had a bottom-line impact. Google AdSense dropped YNW from its network, resulting in what Adl-Tabatabai notes was a 60 percent drop in revenue (he declines to reveal dollar figures). He says he learned from a "brutally honest" discussion with an AdSense rep that there are internal divisions at Google over whether to work with publishers like YNW. "The thing that infuriated me most is that Google itself admitted to me that they didn't view us as a 'fake news' website," he says.

Just a couple of Mike Pence enablers

In a statement provided to THR, Google writes, "We don't comment on specific sites, but if a site violates our policies, whether intentionally or not, we take quick action and stop serving ads to that site." The couple's site briefly appeared under another banner, NewsPunch, in early September-- Adl-Tabatabai says "the decision to rebrand [had been] brewing for a while"-- and was an AdSense site again. Google wouldn't reveal whether it was aware that NewsPunch was simply YNW with a new logo and tagline. At any rate, the site within days reverted to Your News Wire-- because of technical difficulties, says Adl-Tabatabai, who adds it's still "moving toward a rebrand."

He and Treadway regularly find themselves in the sights of Snopes, the web's best-regarded fact-checker, which wrote in May of YNW's "track record of promoting false information." (It attempted to debunk the publication's false-flag conspiracy reporting the British government knew in advance that Ariana Grande's May 22 concert in Manchester would be bombed but "'allowed' this attack to happen in order to justify cracking down on the innocent population even further.") Snopes head David Mikkelson observes that the couple also has a history of publishing what he considers defamatory claims about his own operation, and Snopes' legal counsel has sent cease-and-desist notices.

Given Snopes' role as one of Facebook's official partners in efforts to address the spread of misinformation, Adl-Tabatabai says he has been weighing his options for a campaign against what he sees as a competitor with an unfair stranglehold on dictating reality-- a move right out of Trump's anti-press playbook. "We're all now questioning reality as it's being handed down, how it's interpreted, how it's portrayed," reasons Adl-Tabatabai on the rooftop of the El Royale as Treadway nods. "The audience itself is already questioning the facts."

The other night-- in a brief post about the new Tom of Finland film-- we looked (admiringly) at the idea of gays as outlaws and rebels, a theme I've explored here at DWT before. Damn, I hate thinking of Treadway and Adl-Tabatabai in that context! I think I'd rather see them as nothing really more than just contrarian idiots steeped in ignorance, ambition and a deep-seated need to be-- at least in each other's eyes-- as fabulous as Cher when she sang "Believe." What do you think, are Treadway and Adl-Tabatabai as fabulous as Cher? John Rechy they'll never be-- let alone Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, William Burroughs, James Baldwin or Touko Laaksonen.