MEGAN RAPINOE CALLED OUT MITCH MCCONNELL'S TWEET ABOUT KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

“This is so gross.”

BY JILLIAN GIANDURCO
MARCH 25, 2022
GILBERT CARRASQUILLO/GC IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

Even though Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings ended on March 24, some people are seriously fed up with the way Jackson was treated throughout the hearings — including soccer star Megan Rapinoe. After Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, tweeted he would not be voting to confirm Jackson to the Supreme Court, Rapinoe called out the senator for his support of Brett Kavanaugh during his controversial Supreme Court hearing in 2018, and addressed what she says his refusal to elect Jackson actually means. If you think there’s a chance the senator may change his mind, Megan Rapinoe’s tweet about Mitch McConnell and Ketanji Brown Jackson says it all.




On March 24, McConnell took to Twitter to release a statement saying he “cannot and will not support” Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson “for a lifetime appointment to our highest court,” citing Jackson’s record and “performance this week” as the reasons why. It’s a pretty lame excuse, considering she’s held five different roles with the U.S. legal system, including public defender, district judge, and judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. As The Washington Post pointed out, this experience makes her more qualified than any sitting member of the court. Luckily, Megan Rapinoe — who is no stranger to speaking out about her political beliefs — saw right through his sentiments and responded to the minority leader’s flagrant display of double standards in a quote tweet, writing, “Your dude couldn’t even answer questions about beer.”

Rapinoe finished off her clap back tweet by calling out McConnell’s real reason for refusing to elect Jackson, writing, “You couldn’t possibly yell ‘it’s because she’s a Black woman’ any louder. This is so gross.”


Jackson would be the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court, and, surprise surprise, her confirmation process has been troubling. Through her process, Jackson has had to face racist and sexist lines of questioning, bad-faith questions about her credentials, and suggestions that her record shows her to be incompetent or immoral. At the same time, Jackson has the highest approval ratings of any Supreme Court nominee in 35 years, according to a Gallup poll. Many of those watching the four days of her hearings called out her treatment as racist, sexist, or both, particularly as compared to previous confirmation hearings.

It’s that comparison that clearly troubled Rapinoe — the “dude” she referred to was Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who famously lashed out during his confirmation hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018. Kavanaugh’s hearing was an exceptionally bad one, and included Christine Blasey Ford’s harrowing recount of Kavanaugh’s alleged attempt to sexually assault her in 1980s (Kavanaugh denied her allegations), and Kavanaugh’s famous defense of beer as part of his rebuttal of Blasey Ford’s allegations. Still, McConnell’s support for the nominee never wavered. McConnell even went so far as to call Kavanaugh “one of most qualified and most impressive Supreme Court nominees in our nation’s history” on October 1, 2018, and referred to Kavanaugh’s hearing responses as “thoughtful” and “expansive.”



Of course, McConnell’s history with controversial Supreme Court nominees is, uh, thorough. Back in 2016, McConnell threw his support behind President Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch: The push for Gorsuch came after McConnell spent 11 months stonewalling Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, claiming that new justices shouldn’t be confirmed in an election year.

But fast forward four years, and McConnell managed to expedite the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, just before that year’s election. Barrett was confirmed to the lifelong position exactly 30 days after her nomination announcement, and eight days before Election Day on Nov. 3. (His rationale at the time was that it didn’t count this time, because Trump was running for re-election.) Noticing a pattern yet?

I guess at least this time, McConnell just said “no” without trying to justify it. It’s almost a shame — who knows what he might have come up with this time.

'Depressed' Ukrainian-Born Russian General Walked Out On U.S. Military Meeting: Report

U.S. officials said Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Ilyin called the situation in his native country "tragic" in what they interpreted as a sign of greater divisions in Russia.

By Mary Papenfuss
Mar. 25, 2022



In a rare burst of emotion, a “depressed” Ukrainian-born Russian major general called the military operation in his home country “tragic” and suddenly walked out of a meeting with U.S. officials, CNN reported Thursday.

The Americans indicated the emotional moment was likely a sign of a broader upheaval and poor morale in Russia over the military operation in Ukraine.

Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Ilyin, deputy chief of the main directorate of international cooperation, became upset in a rare meeting late last month with Americans at the Russian ministry of defense in Moscow, CNN reported.

A U.S. defense attaché inquired about Ilyin’s Ukrainian family roots just as the meeting was breaking up, according to a U.S. summary of the meeting obtained by CNN.

The typically “stoic” Ilyin became “flushed and agitated,” according to the U.S. account of the meeting. He said he was born in Dnipropetrovsk and then moved with his family to Donetsk, where he went to school. Both cities are in Ukraine.

He then called the situation in Ukraine “tragic and I am very depressed over it” — then exited the room without shaking anyone’s hand, according to the account, CNN reported.

What specifically Ilyin was reacting to, as well as the circumstances of the meeting and other details, could not immediately be determined, according to CNN.

“At the very least,” noted the American account, “it is clear that morale problems among Russian forces are not limited to front-line troops,” the summary concluded.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is reportedly furious and humiliated that Russia wasn’t able to conquer Ukraine in just days, as he expected. Amid his fury, top spies have been placed under house arrest and at least one top government official, Putin aide Anatoly Chubais, has reportedly fled Russia over his opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.

Kremlin Flabbergasted by Putin Adviser Who Fled Russia

A sunset over Kremlin churches in Moscow on Thursday. (AP Photo)

By Luca Cacciatore    |   Friday, 25 March 2022 

The Russian government is reportedly beside itself after the former chairman and CEO of Rusnano, Anatoly Chubais, a champion of privatization in the post-Soviet era, fled the country despite no Western sanctions, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

Chubais also resigned from his position as Russian President Vladimir Putin's special envoy for sustainable development, according to the outlet. He was last seen in Istanbul, a site quickly becoming a hotspot for fleeing oligarchs after Turkey refused to join EU sanctions.

Russian political analyst Ilya Grashchenkov told the Moscow Gazette on Friday that the reason for Chubais' departure was probably the result of a multitude of factors.

Grashchenkov said the oligarch's role as the special envoy for sustainable development "was highly connected to the relations of Western elites." After the total economic war on Russia began, Chubais' position became a liability for both parties, he theorized.

"Now is the time for Chubais to leave; if he stays, he will be part of the current system in the eyes of the West and the opposition," Grashchenkov said. "Chubais openly opposes the Kremlin. He is an open opponent of the special operation [in Ukraine] and Putin's politicians — plus, he can conduct some political activities in the West."

Others see the departure as almost entirely politically motivated, signaling Chubais may be in danger of Kremlin retaliation.

Andrei Kolesnikov, a political scientist at the Carnegie Moscow Center, compared the Russian elite to a submarine during an appearance on a Russian syndicated broadcast on Wednesday.

"The Russian elites are now a submarine from which it is terrifying to step out." He said. "It is very difficult to emerge.

"For rich people, bound by a large amount of information that is inaccessible to us, it is almost impossible to leave this submarine."

Kolesnikov compared Chubais' exit to former Russian adviser to the World Bank Boris Lvin earlier this month

"There was also a man who left the World Bank staff — Boris Lvin, a man of liberal and libertarian convictions," Kolesnikov said. "All these people are economists and liberals, such a combination of circumstances. All the rest sit in their seats and respect their leader.

How Joe Biden turned into a leading boogeyman for Republicans

COULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED TO A NICER GUY

Analysis by Adam Wollner, CNN
Fri March 25, 2022

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to the media in the framework of a European Union leaders summit amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Brussels, Belgium March 24, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

(CNN)One year ago, Republicans were struggling to find a line of attack that stuck to President Joe Biden, who enjoyed approval ratings in the mid-50s.

It would be an understatement to say much has changed since then. While there were some signs the public's views of Biden were on the uptick following his State of the Union address and initial response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, his job performance numbers have still been mostly mired in the low 40s.

Now, new polling from Pew Research Center suggests Biden is not only broadly unpopular, but emerging as a chief campaign villain for Republicans in this year's midterm elections.

Pew's survey found that 71% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they think of their vote for Congress this fall as being "against Biden." Among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, just 46% said they view their vote as "for Biden." (Among all registered voters, 36% said their vote would be "against Biden," 24% said "for Biden," and 38% said Biden would not be much of a factor.)

While that wide party split should be concerning for Democrats, it's not terribly surprising. Historically, voters tend to deliver a rebuke to the party in power during the first midterm of a president's tenure.

What's more surprising is that Biden -- who was seen by many as a middle-of-the-road alternative to Trump in the 2020 election and immediately after -- is more of a motivating factor for midterm voters of the opposing party than other recent presidents who were initially seen as more polarizing.

Pew's polling found in June of 2018 that 61% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said their vote for Congress would be against then-President Donald Trump, who was despised by liberals from the outset. In June of 2010, 54% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said their midterm vote would be against then-President Barack Obama, who faced opposition from the Tea Party movement early on in his administration.

And in June of 2006, ahead of the second midterm election of George W. Bush's presidency, 65% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said their congressional vote would be against him. At that point, Bush's popularity was in the tank for a variety of reasons, including the Iraq War and his response to Hurricane Katrina.

In all three years, the president's party encountered a midterm "shellacking," as Obama famously put it in his case. (In Bush's first midterm in 2002, the GOP bucked historical trends and gained seats in Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attack.) And right now, Biden is even more of a motivating factor for the rival party.

So, what's changed for Biden? The President's numbers may say less about him personally than the increasingly polarizing nature of the country's politics.

Rather than landing on a single line of attack, Republicans have just attacked Biden on, well, everything, ranging from the Afghanistan withdrawal, to the pandemic, to inflation, to his Supreme Court pick. And they've done so relentlessly in ads, congressional floor speeches and appearances on Fox.

That's not to say the criticism Biden has faced is unwarranted or that he hasn't had his fair share of missteps. And his numbers among Democrats and independents have suffered over the past 14 months too.

But the reality is there's likely very little the President could have done in an increasingly divided and nationalized environment to avoid a stinging and widespread backlash from Republicans (some of whom don't even believe Biden was duly elected in the first place).

Republicans know this and will look to take full advantage of it heading into November.

The Point: Biden's numbers in the Pew poll further underscore the uphill climb Democrats face this fall -- and just how polarized the political climate has become.

The Supreme Court rules that Joe Biden is commander-in-chief. Three justices dissent.

The judiciary cannot be part of the chain of command.

By Ian Millhiser Mar 25, 2022,

President Joe Biden salutes Marines outside the Marine Barracks as he makes a surprise walk down Barracks Row in Washington, DC, on January 25, 2022. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The Supreme Court on Friday evening decided, no, it was not going to needlessly insert itself in the military chain of command above President Joe Biden.

The Court’s decision in Austin v. U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 largely halted a lower court order that permitted certain sailors to defy a direct order. A group of Navy special operations personnel sought an exemption from the Pentagon’s requirement that all active duty service members get vaccinated against Covid-19, claiming that they should receive a religious exemption.

A majority of the Court effectively ruled that, yes, in fact, troops do have to follow orders, including an order to take a vaccine.

The decision is undeniably a win for the balance of power between the executive branch and the judiciary that has prevailed for many decades. But the fact that the Court had to weigh in on this at all — not to mention that three justices, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the majority — is a worrisome sign about America’s judiciary.

As Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained in a brief opinion laying out why the lower court erred, this court “in effect inserted itself into the Navy’s chain of command, overriding military commanders’ professional military judgments.” Had the Court ruled the other way in SEALs, it would have effectively placed itself at the apex of the military’s chain of command, displacing Biden as commander-in-chief.

But as Kavanaugh correctly notes in his concurring opinion, there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs.

In Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), for example, the Court held that “the complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force are essentially professional military judgments,” and that “it is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence.”

Nevertheless, Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan judge in Texas who is best known for a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruled in favor of the service members who refused to follow a direct order. And the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused the Navy’s request to stay key parts of O’Connor’s order.

That left the responsibility of restoring the military’s proper chain of command to the Supreme Court. Though the Court’s order does not wipe out O’Connor’s decision in its entirety, it temporarily blocks that decision “insofar as it precludes the Navy from considering respondents’ vaccination status in making deployment, assignment, and other operational decisions.”

But the astonishing thing about the SEALs order is that the Supreme Court needed to intervene in this case at all.

Order prevailed, but several justices wanted to upend things

The most astonishing thing about the SEALs order is that at least three justices dissented. (While it is likely that six justices sided with the Navy here, only four justices — the three dissenters plus Kavanaugh — chose to reveal how they voted. So it is possible that one other justice silently dissented.)

Thomas did not explain why he dissented, but Alito published a brief opinion, joined by Gorsuch, which lays out why he thinks that judges should be allowed to countermand orders handed down to military personnel by their commanders. Among other things, Alito complains that the Navy did not provide service members with a meaningful process they could use to request a religious exemption from the vaccination requirement.

The Navy provided the Court with several statements from high-ranking officers explaining why it requires nearly every sailor to be vaccinated, and why it generally considers unvaccinated special warfare personnel undeployable.

According to Adm. William Lescher, the Navy’s second-highest-ranking officer, Navy vessels have only limited medical facilities. So, if one of the ship’s crew becomes seriously ill, that “would require a return to port or an emergency medical evacuation by helicopter” — potentially forcing the whole ship to abandon its mission to accommodate one unvaccinated service member.

Special warfare personnel, moreover, often deploy in very small units. So one member becoming sick is a big blow to the team. And, the Navy argued, special operations “are often conducted in hostile, austere or diplomatically sensitive environments” where a severely ill service member might not be able to obtain local medical care and may need to be evacuated by the Navy — an operation that is itself dangerous and that could force the sick service member’s fellow sailors to risk their lives on his or her behalf.

To these concerns, Alito essentially said, “Prove it.”

“In order to win at trial,” Alito wrote in response to the Navy’s warnings, “it would not be enough for the Government to posit that sending an unvaccinated Seal on such a mission might produce such consequences.” Rather, the Navy would have to prove that requiring vaccination “is the least restrictive means of furthering the interest it asserts in light of the present nature of the pandemic, what is known about the spread of the virus and the effectiveness of the vaccines, prevalent practices, and the physical characteristics of Navy Seals and others in the Special Warfare community.”

I want to emphasize the sheer enormity of what Alito is suggesting here. Once the Supreme Court permits a single servicemember to defy a direct order, that opens the door to any member of the armed services who disagrees with an order running to court to seek an exemption.

Think of the kinds of orders that military personnel have to obey — “take that hill,” “guard this prisoner,” “cease fire.” And even if Alito did not intend for his dissent to apply to such battlefield orders, his dissent could effectively neutralize major military assets while religious liberty cases brought by service members are being litigated. Imagine, for example, if the captain of an aircraft carrier is ordered to deploy his ship close to Ukraine — but the captain refuses because, for religious reasons, that captain believes that Vladimir Putin should prevail in his war against Ukraine.

The Court has understood for many decades that the military simply cannot function if its members think orders may be optional. As the Supreme Court held in Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), “the essence of military service ‘is the subordination of the desires and interests of the individual to the needs of the service.’”

Permitting service members to seek exemptions from the courts, Goldman explains, would undermine service members’ “habit of immediate compliance with military procedures and orders” — a habit that “must be virtually reflex with no time for debate or reflection.”

At the end of the day, every service member must know who their commander is, and everyone must respect the chain of command. There can only be one person at the apex of that chain, and it can either be Joe Biden or Samuel Alito.

And, as Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, the Constitution is very clear about who is at the top of that chain. It says, in unambiguous terms, that “the President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

Ginni Thomas-Mark Meadows texts expose the Christian nationalism that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection: religious scholars

Travis Gettys
March 25, 2022

Supporters of President Donald Trump protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. - Yuri Gripas/Yuri Gripas/TNS

The shocking texts between Ginni Thomas and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows reveal the key role that Christian nationalism played in the efforts to overturn Donald Trump's election loss, according to experts on America's Christian right.

Meadows promised the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that “King of Kings” would ultimately “triumph” in a "fight against good versus evil," and allow Trump to remain president despite his election loss, and Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent said the exchange was crucial to understanding the insurrection.

"We haven’t paid enough attention to the role of right-wing Christian nationalism in driving Trump’s effort to destroy our political order," Sargent wrote, "and in the abandonment of democracy among some on the right more broadly."

Many on the Christian right believe that Trump was "anointed" by God to fulfill their "goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation," according to religious scholar Sarah Posner, and the former reality TV star became the unlikely focus for their hopes.

RELATED: Time for Clarence Thomas to step down after 'haunting the court for years': NYT editorial board member

"In this narrative, Trump — despite his glaring and repugnant personal imperfections — became the vessel to carry out the struggle to defeat various godless and secularist infestations of the idealized Christian nation, from the woke to globalists to communists to the 'deep state,'" Sargent wrote.

Right-wing Christians justified the violence carried out on Jan. 6 as necessary to their "holy war against an illegitimate state," Posner argued, and she said Meadows and Thomas both saw themselves as "soldiers in this spiritual battle."

The movement is inherently violent, according to Robert Jones, the founder and CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, who said right-wing Christians see their fight as existential.

“It is a violent reclamation movement,” Jones said. “If we’re going to move into the promise of a multireligious, multiethnic democracy, these forces are going to have to be confronted.”

NOW WATCH: GOP's Kevin McCarthy rejects calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse from Jan. 6 cases despite wife's involvement

 

‘Astounding’ texts from Ginni Thomas put Chief Justice Roberts ‘in a terrible pickle': MSNBC panel

Travis Gettys
March 25, 2022

MSNBC

Panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" agreed that "unhinged" texts sent from Ginni Thomas to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows cast serious doubt on the integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, urged Meadows to help overturn Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson was shocked by the fringe conspiracy theories she used to justify her efforts to subvert democracy.

"These texts from Ginni Thomas are completely unhinged," Robinson said. "The thing that gets me is that she is arguing that Sidney Powell, the lawyer, be the sort of face and voice of the resistance, I guess, or of, you know, true democracy or of the Trump cult. This is after Donald Trump himself has decided that Sidney Powell is off the rails and is not making sense, but Ginni Thomas is still right in there with her to the bitter end. It's just amazing, this radicalization or -- I don't know what you would call it -- of the Republican Party, of the conservative movement in Washington is just astounding."

Co-host Mika Brzezinski wondered whether Clarence Thomas shared his wife's views or whether he knew about her communications with Meadows when he ruled on a case regarding Trump's presidential records.


RELATED: 'Really sick stuff': Morning Joe lays waste to Ginni Thomas-Mark Meadows election plot

"Did it penetrate the Supreme Court?" Brzezinski asked. "Was the Supreme Court justice's decision compromised? That is the question."

Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig said the situation put Chief Justice John Roberts under tremendous pressure to protect the court's reputation.

"I would say Chief Justice Roberts is in a terrible pickle because of this," Leonnig said, "and it raises, you said, Mika, and it also raises a question of when does a Supreme Court justice recuse himself? When will this happen in this appearance of a conflict?"

The “Watermarked Ballots” Theory Ginni Thomas Texted Mark Meadows Is Even Crazier Than It Sounds

BY JEREMY STAHL

SLATE

MARCH 25, 2022

Just some cool friends hanging out, having a good time. 

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

On Thursday, the Washington Post and CBS News broke the news that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had frantically texted with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the 2020 election and leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection to discuss an array of conspiracy theories alleging that the presidential election had been stolen by Democrats.

The implications of the report are astounding for a number of reasons. First, it means that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice was deeply enmeshed in Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Second, it means that this justice’s wife could come under scrutiny by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Third, it means that in January when Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting vote in an 8–1 decision by the court to allow the release of National Archives documents surrounding the events of Jan. 6 to the select committee, he was protecting documents that might implicate his wife—a clear conflict of interest that should have demanded recusal. It’s uncertain how all of this will play out, though Democrats do not seem to have the votes to impeach and remove Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after spending several days there with an infection, and will thus likely not attempt that route.

There’s much more that has yet to be made public: The Post reported that the exchanges “pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence.” What we do know now, though, is just the full extent that Clarence Thomas’ wife has embraced the most radical and demented conspiracy theories of QAnon and Alex Jones.

Specifically, the Post describes a deleted YouTube video forwarded to Meadows by Thomas. It’s worth diving deeper into that clip to further understand just how far into QAnon territory Thomas has gone, and how the conspiracy theory about “watermarks” that captured her attention after the election still animates many conservatives.

Here’s how the theory is introduced in the Post report:

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda.

The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

Thomas further said she believed that the Bidens might ultimately be locked up in Guantanamo Bay, quoting a passage about “military tribunals for sedition” that had circulated on right-wing websites.

The deleted video appears to be this Nov. 5 interview with Pieczenik with Infowars host Owen Shroyer.



In it, Pieczenik—a former Carter administration official who has spent recent years writing spy novels—describes a theory that has become foundational to those who claim the election was stolen.

As Pieczenik said to Shroyer:

This is really a sting operation, contrary to what everybody else said. Trump knew this was happening. Eric knew this was happening and warned the public. I knew this was happening, however I could not say anything about it. What happened was we marked, watermarked every ballot with what’s called the QFS block chain encryption code. In other words we know pretty well where every ballot is, where it went, and who has it, so this is not a stolen election. … All of this is part of the sting operation we’re running. And let me tell you that 48 hours ago, not only did we put markers on those ballots, but I can say now with the permission of people in the intelligence community and elsewhere that we have sent out thousands and thousands of national guard to 12 different states. … This is our counter-coup against the Bidens. … [Arrests are] coming not just down the road, they’re being implemented. … People will be arrested as of tonight, tomorrow, and it will go on for quite a while and this was a total sting operation. … We use [the watermark] in any way that we need to use it in terms of counting, knowing which ones were fake, which ones were not, it’s a very sophisticated code.

For anyone not steeped in this world, this is all a bit challenging to even comprehend. The debunking website Snopes, though, wrote a comprehensive explanation of this conspiracy theory a week after it emerged. As Snopes explains, “QFS” is short for “quantum financial system,” a supposedly secret financial system that conspiracy theorists believe was passed into law in the 1990s and will wipe out debts. “A ‘quantum blockchain system’ is like the ‘quantum financial system’— an imaginary notion,” Snopes notes. According to this “nonsensical” theory, the technology was supposedly embedded by the federal government on ballots to differentiate real ballots from false ones that were allegedly dumped into the system by Biden and his backers. As Reuters journalist Brad Heath reported, this specific conspiracy theory was supported by at least one of the affiants in an early Trump election lawsuit in Michigan. As that “witness” wrote on Facebook:

On Sunday, November 8, 2020, a recount of ballots nationwide was being done by elite units of the National Guards [sic]. To prevent fraud, official ballots had been printed with an invisible, unbreakable code watermark and registered on a Quantum Blockchain System. As of writing, in five states, 14 million ballots had been put through a laser scanner – 78% of which failed because there was no watermark to verify the ballot. Of those ballots that failed, 100% had checked for Biden.

When Ginni Thomas referred to the “white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states” in a text to the White House chief of staff, she was referring to a theory that the Trump administration secretly watermarked millions of ballots in order to catch the Democrats in the act of stealing the election. Conspiracy theorists also understood a connection between the “watermarking” theory and a 2018 QAnon thread which cryptically warned adherents to “watch the water.” And QAnon—the cultlike belief in a Democratic cabal of child predators—received a boost this week from a series of Republican attacks about child porn sentencing during Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings.

At this point, you might be thinking that more than a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, these theories might no longer hold as much sway in the world Thomas inhabits. However, less than a year ago, the Cyber Ninjas’ ostensible audit of the election results in Arizona used ultraviolet lights to hunt for secret watermarks that had allegedly been inserted by Trump. And just this week, Alabama’s Republican attorney general refused to say that Biden had been legally elected. Meanwhile, Shroyer—the Infowars host of the program on which the theory originated—is fighting charges related to his presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 by claiming that if he deserved arrest “then Jesus Christ or the Dalai Lama would have been arrested for trying to be a peacemaker.”

Ginni Thomas was also at the Trump rally that sparked the mob attack on Jan. 6. Meanwhile, her husband continues to sit on nation’s highest court and participates in cases that might directly implicate his wife. The distance from the furthest reaches of far-right fairy tales to the highest seats of power has almost never been shorter.

#HERESIOLOGY

Pope Francis’ Response to Ukraine Has Tapped Into One of Catholicism’s Deepest ANTI-BOLSHEVIK Conspiracy Theories

BY MOLLY OLMSTEAD

SLATE

MARCH 24, 2022

The statue of Our Lady of Fátima, carried around the Fátima shrine in Portugal on May 13, 2020, for the 103rd anniversary of the apparitions. The apparitions in 1917 led to decades of speculation, confusion, and conspiracy theories. Patricia de Melo Moreira/Getty Images

The Vatican announced last week that Pope Francis had invited all the bishops and priests of the world to “join him in the prayer for peace and in the consecration and entrustment of Russia and of Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” The prayer, which is to take place Friday afternoon, seemed on its face to be an uncontroversial sign of support for the Ukrainian people, but the news sent shockwaves through a certain segment of the Catholic world.

To the average person, the responses seem nearly impossible to decipher. “Holy Father, I am a little bit worried,” one person wrote on Twitter. “This won’t be a legitimate consecration either,” another scoffed. “Only Idiots think this Freemason will do the consecration,” said another. “It’s about time, but what took so long?” one asked. Others pointed to blog posts and videos that warned the pope’s plans amounted to a “globalist trap” or that “an anti-pope’s ‘consecration’ of Russia” would lead to dire consequences. What in the world was happening here?

The pope’s announcement had tapped into one of the strangest and most heated debates in Catholicism, one that involves speculation about body doubles and forgeries; prophecies and visions of hell; secret messages; two global wars; the attempted assassination of a pope; and, above all, the Virgin Mary.

The story starts in 1917, when Mary appeared repeatedly to three shepherd children in Fátima, Portugal, in what is considered to be the most recent major apparition to be officially confirmed by the Vatican. Mary gave the children prophecies related to the Great War and a promise to perform a miracle on Oct. 13. When that date came, thousands reported seeing the sun dance in the sky. The children were also given three secrets: apocalyptic visions and global prophecies that two of the children, who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, would never see made public. The third child, their cousin Lúcia dos Santos, would not divulge the first two secrets until the 1940s. The third wouldn’t be revealed until the turn of the century.

The three secrets were cryptic. First, the children were given a vision of hell. Second, they were warned that another, even worse world war would come. And third, they were shown a pope slain at the foot of a cross. This last vision is commonly thought to allude to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981, and the ambiguity has fascinated Catholics—and Catholic conspiracy theorists—for decades.

But it’s the second secret that concerns us here. Sister Lúcia—by then a Carmelite nun—wrote in her 1941 memoir that Mary had told the children of a way to avoid an even more devastating war:

To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and the communion of reparation on the first Saturdays. If they listen to my requests, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not she will scatter her errors through the world, provoking wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and it will be converted and a certain period of peace will be granted to the world.

According to Lúcia, Mary visited her again in 1929, repeating that request: “The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father, in union with all the Bishops of the world, to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means.” Without getting too deep into the theological meaning, a “consecration” here is akin to a dedication—setting aside a person or thing or even concept for a holy purpose.

Sister Lúcia’s prophecies were taken seriously by the church. While the Vatican has maintained that the terrible war in the second secret referred to World War II, it also saw in the revelation “the prediction of the immense damage that Russia would do to humanity by abandoning the Christian faith and embracing Communist totalitarianism.” Over the decades, a number of popes have tried to stave off or resolve international conflict by invoking Mary’s protection: In 1942, Pope Pius XII consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In 1952, he consecrated “the peoples of Russia, specifically.” Pope Paul VI renewed the consecration in 1964, and Pope John Paul II did similar renewals during the Cold War in 1981, 1982, and 1984.

This last consecration in 1984, conducted in St. Peter’s Square in Rome on behalf of the entire human race—naming Russia specifically would have been politically dangerous—and “in spiritual union with all the bishops of the world,” is considered the one that officially fulfilled Mary’s request in her visions at Fátima. In 2000, during the momentous revelation of the third secret, Rome revealed that Sister Lúcia, in a handwritten letter in 1989, had assured the pope that the consecration had been “accepted in Heaven.”

That, according to the Vatican, was the resolution of the second secret. The Cold War ended, communism fell, and Mikhail Gorbachev publicly embraced the Orthodox Church.

But that was not the end of the story. Many traditionalists, who believe the Catholic Church has betrayed its identity by softening and liberalizing to adjust to the modern world, became enamored with the revelations and questioned the official Vatican line. How could it be, they reasoned, that the 1984 consecration had satisfied Mary’s requests when the pope didn’t specifically mention Russia? And the previous consecrations that had mentioned the country had surely failed because they had neglected to secure the cooperation of “all the bishops of the world.”

It wasn’t totally unreasonable, they asserted, to think the Vatican had lied about having Sister Lúcia’s stamp of approval, just as they could have lied about the nature of the third secret. The letter could have been a forgery. (Elements of the Fátima conspiracy theories include private letters that appear to contradict Sister Lúcia’s public statements, reports of the Vatican hiding the nun away to silence her, and even body doubles for Sister Lúcia.) And as they saw it, Russia had not experienced mass conversions to Roman Catholicism, so it was fairly clear that the prophecy had never been fulfilled. No pope had done it right.

“There’s a subset of Catholics who are really into Fátima,” said Mike Lewis, the managing editor of the pro-Francis blog Where Peter Is. “It’s sanctioned by the church, but the message is very apocalyptic, so traditionalists love it. Children seeing a vision of hell—it comes off as fire and brimstones. It’s been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since the ’60s.”

According to Lewis, only a tiny percentage—maybe 3 to 5 percent—of the 50 million Catholics in the U.S. even know about the Fátima debates. “But it’s a key 3 percent,” he said. “They follow Catholic news, want to know what’s going on in the Vatican, are die-hards for apparitions. And they’re seminarians—young priests. … This stuff is preached from the pulpit.”

In 2017, Cardinal Raymond Burke, considered a fringe but very influential figure on the Catholic right, gave a speech calling on Pope Francis to do the consecration properly, according to the specific conditions. “A mainstream cardinal calling out the pope and embracing the conspiracy theory—it becomes a rallying cry for the anti-Francis movement,” Lewis said.

But Burke was not fixating on the fine print of Lúcia’s visions. He was instead making a distinct theological claim. Burke argued that the world had reached such a place of corruption that it needed a new consecration to “put an end to the time of apostasy and the great shortcomings of the Church’s pastors.” He told the National Catholic Register more recently that those shortcomings dealt with “the violation of the most fundamental tenets of the natural law,” citing abortion, euthanasia, divorce, transgender rights and feminism, and restrictions on religious liberty.

Francis didn’t comply. His decision to do another consecration this month, however, didn’t come from pressure from Burke or the previous popes’ skeptics; it came from a plea from the bishops in Ukraine. “During this painful and difficult situation of war, we continued to pray, to celebrate the Holy Mass, to adore the Holy Sacrament, to fast and to offer our sufferings requesting God’s mercy. We were joined by the whole world in this, but we see that the war continues,” Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki of Lviv, Ukraine, told the Catholic News Agency. “But Our Lady of Fatima in 1917 said that the consecration would be followed by a time of peace. That time of peace is over now, so we need to repeat the act of consecration of Russia and Ukraine. … We believe that this act will be listened to by Our Lady and she will intercede before God for peace in Ukraine.”

On March 15, Francis announced he would say a prayer for the two nations. At first, the announcement was considered a nice gesture and not much more. But when, three days later, a letter circulated that requested the bishops’ participation as well, the story dramatically changed. This was the consecration. For the Fátima enthusiasts, this was big.

So why would Francis do this? There has been some speculation that the announcement has to do with his own efforts to quiet the radical traditionalists in the church. “It is a rare case where he’s being applauded by the traditionalist right, and so that’s a good thing, in one sense,” said David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “In some ways, this can be read as the pope throwing a bone to conservatives.”

But that strategy is doomed to fail—conspiracy theorists will always find something else to feed the conspiracy—and sure enough, opponents of Francis have already started finding issues with the pope’s approach. They claim that naming Ukraine negates the process, or that all bishops won’t actually participate, or any number of other things. So it seems unlikely that Francis is doing this entirely for internal political reasons.

There’s another theory, though: that Francis really believes in this rite and in the secrets of Fátima. Given that headlines often tout the pope’s more progressive statements, people often forget that Francis is a traditionally devout man with an affection for old-school, popular forms of piety. He often prays at icons, and he’s known for encouraging exorcisms. “So if you take the church politics out of it, this is very much in keeping with who Francis is,” Gibson said.

Despite the fact that the Vatican in its consecration announcement explicitly mentions Fátima, Gibson says Francis hasn’t bought into the conspiracy theorists’ arguments. “He does not see these consecrations as magic, where you need to recite the words perfectly every time,” he said. Instead, Gibson said, Francis likely sees the consecration as something to adapt to different geopolitical situations to call on Mary’s support. “This is something where you can do these kinds of prayers again and again.”

Gibson had one more theory about the Francis consecration, one that assumes the Vatican is more aware of the theories than it lets on. “In a way, the pope’s taking back Fátima and this idea of consecration from the conspiracy theorists,” he said, who have “owned it for more than a century. And this is an effort to say, ‘No, this is not some crazy apocalyptic thing. This is standard Catholic practice.’ ”

Solar Orbiter probe snaps the sharpest ever image of the Sun's corona
By Nick Lavars
March 24, 2022

A close-up from Solar Orbiter's record-breaking 83 million pixel image of the Sun
ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI team; Data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)

Since launching in February of 2020, the Solar Orbiter probe has been zeroing in on the Sun with a suite of instruments designed to unravel some of its secrets. Among those is an advanced ultraviolet imager, which mission control has now used to capture the highest-resolution image ever of the Sun's outer atmosphere.

The incredibly detailed new image was captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager aboard NASA and the ESA's Solar Orbiter, which shoots at the wavelength required to image the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, where temperatures sit at around one million °C (1.8 million °F).


The Sun's outer atmosphere, shown in glorious new detail
ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI team; Data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)

The spacecraft was around 75 million km (46 million miles) away from the Sun on March 7 when it captured this sharp new view, taking 25 individual images over the course of four hours to create the final mosaic. This resulting image features more than 83 million pixels in a 9,148 x 9,112 pixel grid, which is a resolution around 10 times that of a 4K TV.

At the same time, the probe's Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument was used to image the Sun in the wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted by different atoms. This enables it to peer beneath the corona and take the Sun's temperature at a layer known as the chromosphere.


Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) images ultraviolet light emitted by different atoms
ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE team; Data processing: G. Pelouze (IAS)

The purple depicts hydrogen gas at 10,000°C, blue depicts carbon at 32,000°C, green depicts oxygen at 320,000°C, and yellow depicts neon at 630,000°C. These kinds of insights will help scientists understand how temperature rises through the atmospheric layers of the Sun, which counterintuitively is much higher at the corona than it is at the surface (around 5,000 °C).

The full-resolution version of the Sun's corona, as captured by the Solar Orbiter probe, can be viewed online here.

Source: ESA