Biden Admin on Fence About Paying to Maintain Twitter ‘Blue Check’

$8

“The White House hasn’t decided whether it would pay $8 a month to maintain verification of its Twitter accounts,” Bloomberg reports. Said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “I don’t believe it’s an issue that made it to the president’s desk yet, not a conversation that the president is aware of. That’s something for the president that we need to talk to the president about.”

MAGA Lies About Pelosi Attack Are Cynical Assertions of Power

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Republicans’ and MAGA right-wingers’ lies about and mockery of the attack on Paul Pelosi in the face of contradictory facts are an assertion of power and the first step toward autocracy. So argues Greg Sargent in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.

It’s a compelling argument:

In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself.

The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics. Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.

Read the rest in this gift article here.