FSTDT

Balaji Srinivasan #elitist #wingnut newrepublic.com

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco[…]you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan[…]
“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen[…]in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country[…]
In 2013, a New York Times story[…]described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent”[…]
Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference[…]In a podcast interview one month before[…], Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith[…], Theodor Herzl[…], and Lee Kuan Yew[…]Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts[…]
Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city[…]The Grays would make an alliance with the police[…]
Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords[…]Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together[…]
Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone[…]except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”)

“Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips[…]
“Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first)

Michael Peroutka and Dan Cox #wingnut #fundie #dunning-kruger newrepublic.com

Republican primary voters in Maryland picked two radical extremists as their nominees in November’s race for governor and attorney general[…]
Peroutka has been elected to county-level office[…]ran in 2004 for president on the far-right Constitution Party[…]
Cox and Peroutka have appeared alongside Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial[…]Doug Mastriano[…]Peroutka has falsely claimed that “there is a lot of evidence that some of these, what you might call voting anomalies, serious anomalies, that have existed across the country, exist here in Maryland as well,” and pledged to “investigate those things, empanel grand juries”[…]
Peroutka’s twin pledges to “prosecute unlawful officials” and “bring God back” to state government emerge from Christian Reconstruction[…]
A central tenet of this ideology is that guns are an essential tool for citizens to rise up against a “tyrannical” (i.e., secular) government. In a May 2021 interview with a radio program called Gun Freedom Radio, Peroutka said “enemies” of America have tried to “use various methods and methodologies to try to undermine a system of government that is based on a biblical worldview.” He claimed the goal of public schools, which he also called “Pharaoh’s schools” and “Hitler’s schools,” was to “de-Christianize America”[…]“They have to get rid of guns, because guns are a practical way, obviously a practical way, the citizenry can fight back”[…]
Peroutka, who has also served on the board of the secessionist League of the South, often gleefully displayed his affection for the Confederacy. In giving an award to Ten Commandments judge Roy Moore in June 2011, he made note of the fact that he was doing so on Jefferson Davis’s birthday[…]
Cox[…]no wallflower when it comes to subverting democracy.[…]On January 6, 2021[…]Cox, who had chartered three buses for constituents[…]tweeted: “Pence is a traitor”

Russian News Media #conspiracy newrepublic.com

The best of the bunch is, of course, an elaborate one: MH17 is actually MH370, that Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared into the Indian Ocean. According to this theory, the plane didn’t disappear at all, “it was taken to an American military base, Diego-Garcia.”

Then it was taken to Holland. On the necessary day and hour, it flew out, bound for Malaysia, but inside were not live people, but corpses. The plane was flown not by real pilots; it was on autopilot. Or take-off (a complicated procedure) was executed by live pilots, who then ejected on parachutes. Then the plane flew automatically. In the necessary spot, it was blown up, without even using a surface-to-air missile. Instead the plane was packed with a bomb, just like the CIA did on 9/11.

The theory also notes that the passports of victims at the crash site all look brand new even though there was an explosion and a fire. “That is, the passports were tossed in [after the crash].” And, most damningly, all the victims’ Facebook pages were created in one day and the media is not showing any of the victims’ families, just the crash site.