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New Orleans The clock clicks on. Another decade comes and goes. Somethings don’t exactly change though in the frozen lands and wild reaches of the conservative world.
Take Megyn Kelly for example. Please! It is somewhat amazing to witness the disgraced and terminated former Fox anchor and NBC talk show host rebrand herself as a sexual assault victim and women’s warrior. Sitting on a pile of money from her contract settlement, she now self-produces videos to continue to give her name and fame a heartbeat in the hopes that she can escape her racist, warmongering, and hard right on-the-air positions and past. The Hollywood production of Bombshell, where Charlize Theron plays her with an all-star cast, is giving her a new opportunity to creep back from under the rocks.
The papers covered a 30-minute promo of several of the Fox abuse victims of former Fox chieftain Roger Ailes with Kelly watching the movie and reacting, often with tears, to their portrayals. No question Ailes was an evil ogre. No question either that from the beginning and for too long, Kelly, a lawyer and former prosecutor, went along with it. She has said as much. Claiming she should have done more. Her quoted complaint in the Times was about the “twirl,” where female anchors where asked to turn around by Ailes when interviewed so that he could evaluate the backside along with the frontside. Admitting that she had done it, she protested having been a lawyer at the big Jones, Day firm, rather than having finally realized that it was insulting to any woman from cleaner to CEO. Nor does she concede how the lust for power, fame, and money made them co-conspirators, as her prosecutorial work would have called it, in his crimes. My own brush with Kelly on the other side of an interview with her in the aftermath of the ACORN attack taught me firsthand about her bad faith. She was #MeFirst always and #MeToo only very come lately.
Another election cycle, brings the falsehoods about ACORN out in the open again as well. Someone named Hayden Ludwig wrote a piece for the far-right Capital Research Center, which is surely misnamed by including “research” in its name, called “ACORN’s Legacy Lives on in the Sixteen Thirty Fund.” He claims:
According to its initial filings with the IRS in February 2009 (archived here), the Sixteen Thirty Fund—the 501(c)(4) advocacy arm of Arabella Advisors’ “dark money” empire—was seeded with over $350,000 from five major left-wing groups: ACORN, Americans United for Change, the Sierra Club, USAction, and Working America.
I was long gone by then, but his claim that ACORN would have put up $25,000 for whatever this 630 Fund is likely a stretch, unless someone gave the organization money to do so for some reason. Regardless, we were obviously in great company, so what’s the beef? Hard to say, though he thinks by using ACORN as a smear tactic and bogeyman for the right, that’s all he has to say.
Leap first, look later. Act first, think never. Like the old rock tune, “blinded by the light,” some folks can’t see past their own self-interest to even worry about the facts because they are so interested in clickbait and building their brands.
Milan I read the papers, so I knew that Russell Crow and Sienna Miller, playing the evil Fox News genius Roger Ailes and his wife, had endured hours of daily prosthetics applications for the parts and the pay that comes with it to star in this seven-part bio-pic on Showtime called “The Loudest Voice” that looks at Ailes work and life in yearly pieces. I don’t subscribe to Showtime, and even if I did, this is not a show I would watch at any time. I’m not into horror shows!
