Marjorie Taylor Greene's latest attempt stroke Trump's - uh - ego, gets blowback, By Hal M. Brown

 

There are so many Trump travesties every day that it is hard for me to decide which is bad enough to write about. Here's one comparatively minor story that got my attention from HUFFPOST:

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘Disturbing’ Post About Reporter’s Foreign Accent Is Slammed.

I followed up on this and found that this was also covered in marie france.

Above: BFMTV journalist attacked for her French accent in the United States, "She thinks I should be deported"

Here are translated excerpts from the long article which is written in French:

BFMTV journalist Sonia Dridi, who was criticized for her French accent by MP Marjorie Taylor Greene, has received support from her channel.

The latter was the target of harsh criticism from far-right US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who pointed out her French accent.

BFMTV JOURNALIST SONIA DRIDI CRITICIZED BY US MP

In a tweet published this Sunday on X (formerly Twitter), the SDJ of BFMTV, an association of journalists formed within the editorial staff of the continuous news channel, defended its correspondent at the White House.

Earlier, Sonia Dridi, based in the US capital Washington, took the microphone during a press briefing led by Karoline Leavitt, the new spokesperson for Donald Trump's government. The French journalist, who had asked two questions about diversity within aeronautical agencies after the terrible plane crash in Washington, was then criticized for her accent by a far-right US Congresswoman. 

BFMTV SOCIETY OF JOURNALISTS DEFENDS SONIA DRIDI

Faced with this situation, the SDJ of BFMTV was quick to react. In a statement published on social networks, the society expressed its unconditional support for Sonia Dridi, emphasizing that such an attack constituted a direct attack on freedom of the press.

The SDJ recalled that the work of foreign correspondents, like that of Sonia Dridi, is essential to offer a global and critical vision of international issues.

"The SDJ of BFMTV gives its full support to its correspondent in the United States Sonia Dridi, ostracized as a foreign journalist by the American far-right MP Marjorie Taylor Green, who attacked the fundamental principle of freedom of the press. The work of national and foreign media in the United States is more necessary than ever at this time to highlight the reality of Donald Trump's mandate," we can read in the press release.

Here's the post from The Honorable Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Marjorie Taylor Greene has decided that a foreign accent is toxic. Of course she means the accent of someone from another country, since all American accents are considered foreign by people in other countries. This is Make America Great Marjorie, so an accent from anywhere else is considered foreign the way a parasite is an unwelcome foreign creature in a human being,

For some people a southern or Maine accent sounds foreign to people from other parts of the country. When I went from New York to Michigan to go to college my accent led one kid in the dorm to ask me "what are you?" There are at least 30 accents or dialects spoken in the United States (reference), but Greene doesn't care about this because the reporter was a woman from, horrors upon horrors, France. You know, those French women with offensive accents...

Sonia Dridi, a reporter from France24, was asking about Trump's repsonse to the Washington, DC plane crash. 

After Greene attacked her on X, this was her straightforward response:

Translation: Marjorie Taylor Greene apparently didn't appreciate my accent while I was occupying the seat reserved for the few foreign journalists who are in our White House Foreign Press Association. She is now suggesting that we kick the foreign press out of the press room.

I doubt that Greene would be able to identify the French flag on Dridi's first post.

I am curious about how Dridri even found the Greene post. She follows over 7000 people on X and I have no way of knowing if Greene is one of them. Perhaps she is.

I see Greene's X post as an attempt to stroke Donald Trump's, uh, ego, and prove what a loyal soldier she is.  Let's wait and see whether Trump follows Greene's suggestion and ends up barring members of the Foreign Press Correspondents USA from his press conferences.  He has to contend with American reporters asking inconvenient questions especially as they, hopefuly, get more bold.  I doubt he wants some woman with what many would find a sexy French accent asking him a question.

Addendum:

Some of the comments on the HUFFPOST article...

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches

What does DEI stand for now? This one Trump is promoting. By Hal M. Brown

 

Trump might as well add people with disabilities to his list of people like those I depicted above who don't have the rights of "real" citizens and don't belong here in his America.

Sorry guys, the FAA won't hire you.

In case you doubt me when I say Trump dosen't have any empathy for people with disabilities here's a reminder. The man revels in cruelty and has no capacity for empathy.

Trump wouldn't president today if he didn't have two campaign issues. One was being anti-woke and the other was in his demonization of immigrants. He used forced sex change operations of children and men playing in women's sports as examples of how woke was destroying the country. He said immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country, called them animals and not human. He said they were rapists and eating pet dogs and cats.

Trump has his minions currying favor by disinfecting (as they see it) websites and walls by removing anything having to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion no matter how remotely.

At the FBI Academy 

If someone attended a seminar on diversity they risk losing their job. People hired under DEI are being fired as their colleagues, who I liken to concentration camp kapos, turn them in.

I wrote about this yesterday in "Want to join the MAGA Mafia or Amercian Gestapo? Make your bones by turning in your DEI neighbor or colleague."

Trump has his oh so pleased posturing psychopaths Tom Homan and Dr. Phil all over TV as they oversee the roundups of immigrants. 

Trump wants to make every person who can meet the criteria for being a DEI hire as not worthy of being an full-fledged American. They are, in effect, in the same category as immigrants. They are not welcome as full citizens in Trumpland.  He gave us a partial list of the unwelcome in talking about the plane crash. 

Read: Trump suggests 'dwarves, amputees and epileptics' are 'DEI hires' and not qualified for Air Traffic Control positions.

Excerpt:

Trump highlighted a series of articles covering the FAA’s "diversity push," saying they were actively recruiting workers who “suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions.”

Trump included examples of some of the disabilities and conditions that are listed on the FAA’s website, including individuals missing extremities, paralysis, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism, among others.

He said: "'The FAA website states they include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism all qualified for the position of a controller of air planes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot. A little dot on the map. A runway."

If you're woke, you are by definition anti-Trump. For the sake of my new DEI abbreviation I'll say that since we know Trump would like to deport you, or worse,  I'll call you an immigrant. 

What does my new DEI stand for?

It stands for Destroy Every Immigrant.

It isn't just these people. It is you, it is me, it is everyone Kash Patel has identified as an enemy of the state. It is not merely anyone who went against Trump. It is everyone who doesn't support him.

We are all immigrants.

We are on the enemy's list. He wants to destroy us.

Related:

Wearing a white hat doesn't make her a good guy.

Another Chapter In The Annals of Irony:

Unless we are a Native American, we are all either descendants of immigrants or immigrated ourselves. Trump is the former and his wife is the latter.

Snark of the Day

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches

Want to join the MAGA Mafia or Amercian Gestapo? Make your bones by turning in your DEI neighbor or colleague. By Hal M.Brown

 

Frank Figluizzi,who served as assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, posted a photo of someone painting a wall at the FBI Academy on BlueSky (here) which lists operativenss, fairness, compassion, integrity, initative, respect, and stability as some of the core values of the agency. It also lists diversity.

The photo was published in The Washington Post article 

Several senior FBI leaders told to leave agency or be fired, people familiar with matter say: 

The ultimatum was unusual for the FBI and suggested that President Donald Trump is purging leadership at an agency he has harshly criticized.

If you don't have a subsription to the Post you can read a summary of the article on RawStory.

This coincides with news that senior FBI agents are being fired across the country.

What I wondered about was just who decided this wall was offensive because it had one word, diversity, on it which would offend Kash Patel when he saw it. I think the bottom word is Constitution which would also be unacceptable to the likes of Patel and Trump.

It occurred to me that somebody with authority thought that they could curry favor with Kash Pateland Trump if they took credit for getting rid of it. I thought this was like a foot soldier in the Mafia making their bones by carrying out a hit for the capos. I bet they have a smile on their face today and are waiting for their reward.

I thought this was akin to ordinary Germans, an adult or a child, reporting a Jewish family they knew of to the Gestapo. Germans proved how loyal they were by being accessories to murder. I have no doubt that they were rewarded when they informed on Jews. In Holland citizens were paid a bounty for informing on Jews.

No Americans will be sent to a concentration camp and die in a gas chamber, starved, or worked to death because of the quest to root out DEI from the government. They won't exactly be like those who were called "willing executioners" in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen. Not exactly, but how many of them would have been like Hitler's willing executioners?

People are being incentivized to report those they think are DEI hires. In this effort to purge the federal government of all DEI hires, people will loss their jobs, their lives will be disrupted, they and their families will suffer.

As a result of proving their loyalty and zeal, lower members of the MAGA mafia move up to positions of having more power. 

I made screen grabs of parts of the Mission Page on the FBI website because it has the word diversity on it, and also includes on the very top upholding the Constitution and, under priories, protection of civil rights.

Diversity is on the bottom of the list of core values. How long it will take before it is sucked into the black hole of Trump's lsy for revenge remains to be seen. I'll keep up on this and let readers know.

Something else that may disappear from an FBI website is on the FBI Selection page. Below is a list of the disqualifiers. Note what is listed at number three.

Click to enlarge

Having knowingly or willfully engaged in acts designed to overthrow the U.S. goverment would disqualify anyone who was part of J6. There's nothing there about them having been pardoned. I wonder if this will be dropped as a disqualifier and J6 insurrentionists will end up as FBI agents.

This could mean that Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes might become an FBI agent as long as his disability, having lost an eye, wouldn't make him a DEI hire.

He could end up as a member of the FBI SWAT team.

The FBI under Kash Patel will become a modern day Gestapo as it tracks down members of "the deep state." 

Instead of the small caliber Walther PPK (above) the Gestapo carried, they carry  full-size Glock 17 and compact Glock 19 pistols in 9mm. Regular agents can be backed up by FBI SWAT teams with assault rifles when they make arrests. Wait for the photo ops.

I bet Kash Patel can't wait to have an FBI badge and a Glock on his belt as he struts into the FBI building (which I doubt will be turned into a museum) with his protection detail.

Addendum:

Here are some of the replies to Frank Figluzzi's BlueSky post (click to enlarge them):

Updates: Read this by Andrew Weissmann.

Not all of the DEI scrubbing makes the headlines. Consider:

'Absolutely furious': Pioneering female astronomer’s legacy rewritten amid diversity purge

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches

What's wrong with this picture? Anti-DEI Trump demands best and brightest and gives us RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel, by Hal M. Brown

 

Nuff said.

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

It is time for Rachel Maddow cut the chuckling and get deadly serious. by Hal M. Brown

 

I have admired Rachel Maddow ever since she began her show on MSNBC. I always agree with everything she says. I don't always agree with how she says it or how she produces her show. I address the latter today.

Last night Rachel Maddow found something to smile and chuckle over about something Trump did. I found this to be inappropriate.

I wanted to find a picture for this Substack of Rachel Maddow to illustrate the habit she has of laughing inappropriately when discussing something serious. I looked up "Rachel Maddow laughing" and found more than I expected to in this: 

Rachel Maddow laughs at white supremacists whining about money woes before Charlottesville trial

Out MSNBC host Rachel Maddow laughed at complaints from white supremacists about their upcoming trial for inciting violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Maddow also mocked the white, straight, cisgender men at their choice to represent themselves after their lawyers quit the case, saying “couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.”

The article didn't offer an opinion about her laughing about something so serious.

Last night Rachel Maddow began her show with a long explanation about Trump using a family crest which the previous owners of Mar-a-Lago left behind on a wall for his own self-agrandizement. It was off-putting to me because she sounded rather chipper and she smiled and chuckled occasionally as she went on. 

She told about his new challenge coin. Wikipedia explains what they are, but in brief, they have been used by many other presidents and by the military to show appreciation to individuals.  

Bottom: Trump's coin with the crest and Donald J. Trump on it.

At least she didn't waste time, like I am about to do, telling about his 2017 challenge coin. This is from The NY Times:

What’s big and shiny and gold and features Donald J. Trump’s name splashed across the front? No, it’s not a new development on the West Side of Manhattan. It’s the redesigned presidential challenge coin.

A custom dating back 20 years, presidential challenge coins have traditionally been handed out to service members in commemoration of special achievements and milestones. President Trump’s coin, which many saw on Friday for the first time, is unmistakably different from its predecessors.

Gone is the national motto, E pluribus unum, meaning “out of many, one.” In its place appears the president’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” which the administration has also used on official White House documents.

This would have been approprate if the segment was merely about Trump's narcissim. Besides, his stealing the family crest is old news. The only thing new is his putting it on a coin. Here's a BBC article about it from 2017:

The title of this segment was "Trump makes laughingstock of America with repeated embarrassments in early days of term." His being the laughingstock of the world doesn't mean we should be laughing at him. You can watch the segment here. 

She talked about his saying that Hezbolah used condoms in making bombs and quizically asking just how this would work. She talked about his saying that the US sent military troops into Calfornia to turn on the water, and other things not at all related to his appropriation of the crest of another family. She talked about how Trump thought Spain was a member of the BRIC nation group. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. All this is fodder for discussion, but it had nothing to do with the family crest story. 

Rachel frequently begins her show with a backstory, but it always connects to what she then goes on to address. This one didn't. It just gave her something light to talk about.

Rachel never made the connection between Trump's wanting to have a family crest and an aspect of his dark and dangerous personality. She could have made the connection by doing this.

Better yet...

 ... she could have explained that demonstrates that Trump is an exemplar of someone manifesting all of the traits of The Dark Triad. The triad is narcissism, psychopathology, and Machiavellianism. These traits have been described as occuring together in a malevolent way. I won't waste space going further into this here since you can look it up on Wikipedia.

Click to enlarge image

I have never seen Rachel Maddow address the psychopathology of Trump. On the other hand, Lawrence O'Donnell regularly has mental health professionals on his show addressing this subject. 

Recently he had psychoanalyst Lance Dodes on. This was just after Trump announced his desire, or threat, to take over Greenland. You can watch the segment here.

O'Donnell previously had both Dodes and psychologist John Gartner, the founder of Duty to Warn, on the show.

Rachel Maddow came back to doing a five night a week show to cover the first 100 days of Trump's presidency with great fanfare on MSNBC. 

I see from the MSNBC website that she went on to discuss Trump going too far in his zeal to dismantle the federal government and interviewing Tim Walz. I don't know whether those segements were worth watching because when she went to commercial after 25 minutes we went back to watching "The Night Agent" on Netflix.

This is the second Substack I've written expressing dismay that Rachel sometimes takes things too lightly. Read it all here.

I wrote, among other things, the following:

I don't want to pick on Rachel Maddow in particular, but she seems to be the worst offender. Others, like Lawrence O'Donnell, Michelle Wallace, and Ali Velshi, report on Trump and what he is doing with gravity. But Rachel seems to have a kind of nervous reaction sometimes, not all of the time, when she laughs or chuckles when reporting on Trump and his cadre.

There is nothing remotely amusing about Trump and about what he is doing. He is hell-bent on turning the country into a ruthless dictatorship as soon as possible.  Nobody on MSNBC should crack a smile when they talk about him even if they are reporting on some of his faux pas. 

I am open to considering that Rachel's approach is acceptable just because, however she comes across, she gets under Trump's thin skin. I measure this possiblity against how it effects her audience. I think of the impact Walter Chronkite had when he came out against the VietNam War.  

It is time for Rachel to say she isn't going to crack so much as a hint of a smile until the menace of MAGA is gone.

I think the peril of Trump will begin to sink in. It may take more reporting on children cowering in fear and crying when ICE agents manhandle their parents who are in chains when they are loaded onto airplanes.

Rereading this, written just five days ago, I realize that the actions Trump has taken since then demonstrate that he is hellbent on riding roughshod over democracy. In his fervor to get revenge on his enemies as he demands alligence from the GOP lest they, too, become his enemies, he makes no secret of the fact that he wants to become a ruthless dictator. Forget the "day one" crap and the lie about not knowing about Project 2025. This is his plan.

I expect more from Rachel Maddow. I think her lead-in last night was basically shtick. Chuckle, chuckle, so Trump is a self-aggrandizing asshole. Yeah, we know that, but he's an asshole that has nominated somone to be FBI director who, as a wrote about yesterday, wants to put you in prison.

I've given up on the "Morning Joe" crew. They or their producers insist on spending time talking about sports and having entertainment segments on. The other morning they had a relevant discussion about Trump and then had John Larrouqutte on talking about the revival of "Night Court." That's when we tuned in to CNN. 

What is happening to the couunty is, as the sayings go, as serious as a heart attack or a cancer diagnosis. Now it is time for Rachel Maddow to get deadly serious. 

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.