Trump just claimed Biden 'will cancel the Christmas season' in bizarre rally speech

Posted by Greg Evans in news

Donald Trump's spree of campaign rallies in the run-up to the US election continued on Sunday when he spoke to supporters in Carson City, Nevada.

The president spoke for nearly 90 minutes to the jam-packed crowd, where the was little to no evidence of social distancing.

Trump covered the usual topics that he likes to delve into at these types of events such as deriding Joe Biden and downplaying the seriousness of coronavirus.

However, he made a truly bizarre comment about Biden's plans for Christmas, claiming that the Democrat will end the season if he is elected.

Around 65 minutes in the president went on a rambling rant about Biden's plans for the state of Nevada and in a seemingly unrelated note added that Biden will completely end the Christmas season.

Under the Biden lockdown, the lights of Reno and Las Vegas we’re extinguished. Carson City will become a ghost town. If he comes in, Carson City will become a ghost town. And the Christmas season will be cancelled.

Trump didn't really explain how or why Biden would do this but almost immediately went on to another story, claiming that he had single-handedly got people saying 'Merry Christmas' again.

Look, remember I said we’re going to bring back Christmas? The name. Remember? We brought it back. Remember? I used to go around saying, 'We will bring…” Because I saw these big department stores. They thought it was politically correct. So they’d say, 'Have a great season.' I say, 'No, I don’t want to have a great season. I want to say Merry Christmas. Say Merry Christmas.' Now, they’re all saying Merry Christmas.

The president's bizarre and seemingly baseless accusation against Biden comes just a few weeks after audiotapes revealed that the first lady, Melania Trump, isn't a big fan of Christmas

It's not the first time he's taken credit for Christmas either, claiming in 2017 that people did not use the phrase "merry Christmas" before he was president, leading many people to point to the many occasions where Barack Obama had used the phrase.

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Replying to @atrupar

"The Christmas season will be canceled" -- Trump says Biden will cancel Christmas

6:25 PM · Oct 18, 2020

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Other comments from Trump that raised eyebrows during the rally included the president calling for major US states to open up despite coronavirus still posing a danger.

A classic gripe of the Trump presidency has been water pressure and sure enough, it came up again and went on to talk about people having to flush their toilet 15 times and his 'beautiful hair.'

He then mocks Biden for not having big crowds at his rallies, which is what should be happening during the pandemic, and then claims he's had the 'biggest crowds in the history of politics.'

So he goes out. Gets no people at any of the rallies. I go out, we get 35, 40,000, 25,000, 15,000. We go, boom! 15,000. We get the biggest crowds in the history of politics. Look, everything I say, they’ll correct. They’ll say… Who cares? I don’t even care what they say at this point. But we get these massive crowds. He gets nobody.

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Replying to @atrupar

Trump mocks Biden for pledging to listen to scientists. Watch this clip and ask yourself if Trump was trying to kill Americans by infecting them with coronavirus, how would it sound different?

5:36 PM · Oct 18, 2020

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Another potentially controversial moment was when Trump commended his son-in-law Jared Kushner for being 'skinny' and 'not having a weight problem.'

In terms of Trump rallies, this was hardly the most outrageous but he's been non-stop on the campaign trail and is set to speak twice in Arizona on Monday and then again in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

New Zealand's deputy PM had the perfect comeback when confronted by American conspiracy theorist

Posted by Iana Murray in news

Getty

New Zealand's deputy prime minister Winston Peters has no time for Covid denial, or Flat Earthers for that matter.
At a re-election campaign meeting in Tarunga, the leader of the New Zealand First party was confronted by a conspiracy theorist with an accent that sounded very American.

The incident was captured on video, as the sceptic asked the deputy prime minister to provide evidence that “there is a virus that causes the disease.”

Before he could even finish the question, Peters cut him off and proceeded to show him the science:

We’ve got someone who obviously got an education in America. 220,000 people have died in the United States, there are 8 million cases to date. We’ve got 79,000 cases probably today in India, and here is someone who gets up and says, “the Earth is flat.” Sorry sunshine, wrong place.

Just a reminder: New Zealand currently has zero cases. So Peters and recently re-elected Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern are obviously doing something right.

People were a fan of the deputy PM’s brutal takedown.

Some Americans were also met with a wake-up call as to how the country is seen by the rest of the world.

Rex Chapman

@RexChapman

New Zealand: Winston Peters — deputy PM of New Zealand addresses an American COVID-19 denier at a press conference. “Sit down. Sorry sunshine, wrong place.”

3:24 PM · Oct 16, 2020

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Perhaps the lesson we can take from this is to be more like New Zealand, less like the US. Also, Winston Peters has some zingers.

Pro-Trump televangelist predicts that president will win the election and the world will end

Posted by Joshua Zitser in offbeat

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A famous televangelist has claimed God told him who will win the November presidential election and about the chaos that will ensue afterwards.

Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, told viewers of his show The 700 Club: “First of all, I want to say without question, Trump is going to win the election.”

Trump is currently down about nine points in the national polls but, according to election forecasters 538, still has about a 12 per cent chance of winning the election.

Robertson has defended the president in the past and has previously made dark predictions

Things got gloomier after this initial prediction thought.

Robertson said: “What I think very frankly is the only thing that will fulfil the word of Jesus … is some kind of asteroid strike on the globe.”

He continued: “It’s sudden destruction. It’s not going to be some nuclear war. We’re not going to be allowed to blow this earth up.”

Robertson predicted that more than five years will pass between the election and the destruction of the earth by an asteroid.

In the meantime, he argued, there will be civil disobedience, riots and two assassination attempts on Trump.

To top things off, he also prophesied that there will be a war on Israel which will only end when God intervenes.

Robertson has previously made prophecies which have proven to be totally wrong. He predicted the world would end in 1982 and also in 2007.

Evidently, it did not.

Why did conspiracy theorists believe that JFK Jr was going to become Trump's new running mate?
Posted 1 day ago by Greg Evans in news

Picture: STF/AFP via Getty Images/MANDEL NGAN/AFP

Over the weekend, followers of the baseless pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were bracing themselves for a major announcement from the president that could have changed the trajectory of the US election.

Images began circulating on Twitter from QAnon accounts that the president was going to sensationally announce at a rally in Dallas, Texas on Saturday that he was replacing Mike Pence as his running mate with John F. Kennedy Jr.

There are several problems here.

Firstly, Trump didn't hold a rally in Dallas on Saturday. He was actually at a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin instead.

Secondly, it would be against the law to announce a new running mate in the election as millions have already cast their votes.

Finally – and this is the biggest problem of them all – JFK Jr has been dead since 1999. The son of the former president died in a tragic plane crash on 16 July.

Kennedy was flying the light aircraft which crashed into the Atlantic ocean, a tragic accident which also claimed the lives of his wife Carolyn Bessette, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette.

Obviously, JFK Jr wasn't announced as Trump's new choice for vice president because that would have been impossible but QAnon followers seem determined to believe this otherwise ludicrous theory. There are even pieces of merchandise that have been created for the very unlikely Trump Kennedy partnership.

So where does this bizarre theory come from?

Well, according to Rolling Stone this conspiracy first started to do the rounds in June 2018.

Apparently, posts began appearing on the notorious 8Chan messageboard suggesting that JFK Jr had faked his death and had gone into hiding over fears that he was going to be targetted by the same deep-state conspiracy that QAnon believes has also been targetting Trump since he moved into politics.

The theory reportedly picked up momentum when the right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin told YouTuber Jenny Moonstone that she believed that the person behind Q was actually JFK Jr because of how lovingly they spoke of the former president. Rolling Stone quotes her as saying:

The way that Q talks about JFK Sr. in the posts, it is with such love and passion, it makes me think that it is someone that is close to him. If JFK Jr. faked his death and was alive, it would make sense that he was Q.

Daily Dot also reported in April 2019 that QAnon believers had tried to link JFK Jr's death to the start of Hillary Clinton's political career as she had run for the New York senate seat that he was allegedly running for, despite never announcing his intention to run for office during his lifetime.

Another claim trying to link JFK Jr to Trump is a quote from supposedly from the June 1999 edition of George magazine, a publication that Kennedy Jr was the editor-in-chief of. The quote, which is said to be from Kennedy Jr says:

If my dear friend Donald Trump ever decided to sacrifice his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become president he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate.

The fact-checking website Snopes has completely debunked this quote as not only did JFK Jr never say this, it was also never printed in the magazine.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Trump and JFK Jr were friends. There are photos of the two together which QAnon have used for their memes but they look to be from Trump's time as a New York socialite when he pretty much ran into anybody.

Another bizarre link to JFK Jr is a well known Trump supporter called Vicent Fusca who has been frequently spotted at Trump rallies. Despite having zero resemblance to Kennedy Jr, QAnon followers have been claiming that Fusca is Kennedy in disguise and has used plastic surgery to alter his appearance.

It can't be said how many members of the QAnon community believe in this conspiracy but they have twice suggested, prior to last weekend, that Kennedy was going to come out of hiding and side with Trump.

At Trump's 4 July celebration in 2019, they believed that JFK Jr was going to make it public that he was still alive. They had also looked very deeply into the 55th anniversary of the assassination of JFK and claimed that JFK Jr would reemerge on 22 November 2019 and 'usher in the storm' and help Donald Trump rid the world of the global Satanic paedophile rings that QAnon is so firmly against.

Not even a smidgen of this has ever happened and it appears to be another prime example of a conspiracy getting way out of hand and people wanting to believe something that clearly isn't true.

That being said, although it's unlikely that Trump believes in the JFK Jr theory, he has refused to disavow himself from the community. During a recent town hall event on NBC, Trump claimed to not know anything about the conspiracy before he started to praise them, saying:

I do know they are very much against paedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it … I just don’t know about QAnon.

Whether this theory continues to gather pace remains to be seen and with just a few weeks to go until the US election it will be interesting to see what the future of this wild conspiracy theory and its followers will be.