Quick Hits - Ghislaine Maxwell Corporate Media Red Carpet, & More
(Mike Bloomberg [L] with Ghislaine Maxwell)
With accused child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial beginning, corporate media outlets like Bloomberg News are already spouting offensive and absurd things to make her look sympathetic. A new column from Bloomberg asks “Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial is set to be one of the biggest of the #MeToo era. But the jury may have to grapple with a unique question: is Maxwell herself a victim?”
Though it is possible that Maxwell has faced any number of difficulties throughout her life and faced discrimination and/or abuse, none of that seems relevant to her case at hand - and that is the credible allegations that she helped her longtime partner and friend Jeffrey Epstein traffic and rape children. By even asking this question outlets like Bloomberg News lay the groundwork for the gross idea that a grown adult woman might have trafficked and assisted in the rape of child girls but could still be just as much of a victim as those children.
Whatever Maxwell’s relationship dynamics with Epstein may or may not have been, she was a grown adult for the entirety of their relationship, which places her in another stratosphere above the innocence and victimhood of the children he abused. Maxwell could never have been as innocent a victim as any of the children who say she and Epstein abused them, for the simple reason that she was an adult.
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I will never get over the lack of perspective shown by reactionaries who advance shock and fear over issues that are either non-existent or miniscule in comparison to real problems society faces, on-scale. We operate concentration camps. If you think "cancel culture" is a problem, for example, you're malevolent, an idiot, or both.
We torture journalists and their sources. If you think “wokeism” is a problem, you’re fragile and have no sense of proportion.
Our government - the richest in the history of humankind - still refuses to take any meaningful efforts to end the covid-19 pandemic, a year and a half into it, whether by providing universal healthcare, increasing hospital capacity, opening up vaccine patents, sharing our extra millions of doses with the Global South, nationalizing pharmaceutical production and distribution, giving sustained and sufficient direct cash aid to its nation’s inhabitants, providing job protections, universal paid leave, or any number of other common-sense measures long ago taken up by the rest of the industrialized world. In the face of all this, you think the pandemic persists because your aunt shares anti-masking memes, you’re not paying attention.
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Ali Watkins of the New York Times recently wrote a feature about an unsolved murder in New York. To promote it, Watkins tweeted “Pre-COVID, NYPD was solving nearly 90% of murders. But that rate plunged over COVID, even as violent crime rates spiked. I spent 2 months with a family as they went from hopeful, to frustrated, to distraught, waiting for NYPD to catch their son’s killer.”
It is strange to see a NY Times writer lie so blatantly about something that isn't meant to get us to bomb a foreign country. The NYPD was not solving nearly 90% of murders, pre-covid.
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If you all are outraged by Rep. Boebert's most recent Islamophobic comments, wait until you hear about our nation's Islamophobic policies, uniformly supported by both her and Rep. Omar's parties.