Tag: oprah winfrey
#EndorseThis: Colbert Roasts The Royals And Piers Morgan

#EndorseThis: Colbert Roasts The Royals And Piers Morgan

With four years of an imbecile in the Oval Office, late night hosts have had a plethora of material to keep viewers amused, however darkly. But Oprah Winfrey's interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry -- and its aftermath -- offer an entirely new comic opportunity.

All late night hosts have had their way with the Royal Family, but it's Stephen Colbert for the win. It's a joy to watch him dismantle the "royal rebuttal" and take down "Spotted Dick" Piers Morgan, who had an embarrassing tantrum and then quit Good Morning Britain.

Dressed in a ridiculous herald outfit, Colbert notes how "fans of the royal family dumped a crumpet in their knickers." He doesn't let up -- and you will laugh.

Palace Refutes Meghan And Harry's Claim Of Royal Racism, Piers Morgan Quits In A Fitwww.youtube.com

QAnon Conspiracists Smear Oprah Winfrey In Campaign Against “Pandemic Hoax”

QAnon Conspiracists Smear Oprah Winfrey In Campaign Against “Pandemic Hoax”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Now that Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, are out of the hospital but still self-quarantining after their coronavirus diagnosis, the QAnon conspiracy crowd—which had descended on Hanks on social media, claiming the diagnosis was a cover story for Hanks’ arrest for his role in a global pedophilia ring—has moved on to a fresh new target amid the pandemic: Oprah Winfrey.

According to the QAnon-generated—and entirely, risibly false—rumors, Winfrey also was diagnosed with COVID-19, similarly signaling her imminent arrest as part of the first wave of “The Storm,” the imagined flood of arrests being secretly arranged by Donald Trump. The rumors became so widespread on Twitter that Winfrey herself took to the medium to thoroughly debunk them.

“Just got a phone call that my name is trending. And being trolled for some awful FAKE thing. It’s NOT TRUE. Haven’t been raided, or arrested. Just sanitizing and self distancing with the rest of the world. Stay safe everybody,” Winfrey wrote. Neither has Winfrey been diagnosed with the coronavirus.

That did not prevent a wide swath of QAnon enthusiasts from spreading the falsehoods far and wide. One avid QAnon figure—a Florida man named “Tank”—posted a video that was seen widely on YouTube in which he rambled for about seven minutes while standing in front of a random vacant parking lot in Long Island, claiming that Winfrey’s residence “in Boca Raton, Florida,” was being raided by law enforcement officers. The raid was in the process of uncovering, with excavation equipment, the pedophilia ring’s secret “tunnels” in which the children were kept, he claimed.

The only problem with this claim: Winfrey doesn’t own a home in Boca Raton, or anywhere else in Florida, for that matter.

Another QAnon fan posted a video of a police raid at a modest home in suburban Detroit and claimed that it was actually Winfrey’s secret pedophilia den. (In reality, the footage came from a 2012 Detroit SWAT team raid; the account describes itself as “satirical” in its “About” section.) Other QAnon fans with YouTube accounts chimed in with their own far-flung speculations on the “#PandemicHoax.”

Winfrey has been among the many celebrities identified previously as a likely participant in the ostensible global pedophilia ring overseen by liberal political and media figures, in QAnoners’ bizarre alternative universe. She is believed to be connected to the pedophilia ring primarily through her long friendship with disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who they connect to the late Jeffrey Epstein, whose sex-trafficking operations are central to the QAnon theories.

One prominent QAnon account described Winfrey once, during speculation she might run for the presidency, as “Procurer of the United States,” and Weinstein as her “No. 1 customer.”

Some QAnon fans even openly acknowledge that the Winfrey rumors are utterly bogus, but eagerly promote them on social media anyway because they help propel the Q theories into mainstream media. As journalist Travis View, who tracks the QAnon phenomenon closely, observes: “Extremists don’t care if their propaganda is true. They just want it to spread.”

To Hell With Cultural Commissars Who Condemned ‘American Dirt’

To Hell With Cultural Commissars Who Condemned ‘American Dirt’

 I don’t mean to disillusion you, dear reader, but Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep (Bogart and Bacall) was never a private eye. An Englishman, he pretty much perfected the hardboiled L.A. detective novel after losing his job as an oil company executive. “When in doubt,” he famously advised “have a man come through the door with a gun.”

Patrick O’Brian, author of the encyclopedic Aubrey-Maturin series of twenty novels about the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars (think Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe) never served a minute on a square-rigged man-of-war. Born a century too late, you see. O’Brian apparently did do some sailing on a friend’s yacht. The rest of it he made up.

Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice opens with this epigrammatic, unforgettable line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” 

Austen herself, however, never married anybody, much less a handsome gentleman with an inherited title and 10,000 pounds a year (or a few million in today’s dollars).

She was a literary genius, that’s all. 

Novels, you see, are make-believe. Storybooks. Products of the imagination. Not to be confused with newspaper stories or other documentary forms. Needless to say, that’s a bit simplistic. But then, this is an 800-word newspaper column.

Anyway, try to keep the fundamental distinction between fact and fiction in mind regarding the ugly furor over American Dirt. It’s a sentimental thriller about an Acapulco bookstore owner and her son fleeing for the U.S. border hunted by vicious “narcotrafficantes” with a grudge against her late husband, whom they’ve already slaughtered at a “quinceañera” (a teenager’s birthday party). 

(Notice how the columnist certifies his sophistication by dropping Spanish words into the text?)

It’s a novel written by a white American woman (with a Puerto Rican grandmother) who did five years of research. “I went to the border,” she has said. “I went to Mexico. I traveled throughout the borderlands. I visited Casa del Migrante in Mexico. I visited orphanages. I volunteered at a desayunador, which is like a soup kitchen for migrants. I met with the people who have devoted their lives on the front line to the work of protecting vulnerable people.”

Then novelist Jeanine Cummins hit the jackpot. Her novel earned a million dollar advance, drew pre-publication blurbs from best-selling authors like Stephen King and John Grisham (both inclined to be generous to other writers.) The crime novelist Don Winslow, author of a dark trilogy about the Mexican drug wars, called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our time.” The movie rights sold. Then Oprah Winfrey made American Dirt her next book club selection.

All that tells me two things: it’s a page turner, well-calibrated to excite the sympathies of Oprah’s audience of women who watch daytime TV. The Perils of Pauline. Or in this case of Lydia Quixano Pérez; a brown-skinned woman otherwise very like the novel’s intended audience. 

Then the guacamole hit the fan, bigtime. 

Chicana writer Myriam Gurba posted an angry review to the effect that author Cummins didn’t know squat about Mexico or Mexicans, addressing her as “pendeja” (jerk, bitch, or worse). American Dirt’s protagonist, she wrote, “perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.” (As I say, pretty much Oprah’s core audience.)

The diversity police jumped in. A group of 123 authors, few household names among them, signed a petition urging Oprah to withdraw the novel on grounds of something called “cultural appropriation.” 

America’s original sin and greatest genius, in other words. But hold that thought.

Her publishers cancelled Cummins’ book tour. The usual death threats ensued, both against the author and her critics. So tiresome, these online bullies. The New York Times published a review of American Dirt by Parul Sehgal, who complained of a prose style “so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry.” An Indian-American writer with no dog in the fight, she provided examples. A woman’s expression: “It’s as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they’re all pulling at once. One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek.”

“Yes, of course,” Parul snarks. “That expression.”

Back in my own book-reviewing days, prose like that made my back teeth ache. The best-seller list overflowed with it anyway. 

Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros was more generous. Yes, American Dirt has its awkward moments, she acknowledged to NPR’s Maria Hinojosa.  But its intended audience “maybe is undecided about issues at the border. It’s going to be someone who wants to be entertained, and the story is going to enter like a Trojan horse and change minds. And it’s going to change the minds that, perhaps, I can’t change.”

As for these literary commissars demanding birth certificates and passports, to hell with them. Anybody’s free to appropriate whatever they choose. 

#EndorseThis: Oprah Delivers A Brilliant, Inspirational Scolding In Georgia

#EndorseThis: Oprah Delivers A Brilliant, Inspirational Scolding In Georgia

You may have heard that Oprah Winfrey just visited Georgia to campaign for Stacey Abrams. But what you need to hear is her speech introducing the Democratic gubernatorial candidate — and explaining why she had to show up.

She denied emphatically that her purpose was “to test any waters” for a potential 2020 presidential candidacy. “I don’t want to go in those waters,” she insisted.

No, she felt obliged to remind everybody of the power and responsibility of the right to vote. And she delivered that message in an exceptionally moving way.

Oprah told the story of Rev. Otis Moss, Sr., an African-American clergyman, who was deprived of his vote by Georgia’s white authorities in an especially cruel manner. Every time she votes, said Oprah, it is to honor him, and her grandmother, and so many other Americans who never exercised their democratic franchise.

“I’m here today because of the men and because of the women who were lynched, who were humiliated, who were repressed, who were oppressed,” she said. “Their blood has seeped into my DNA. I refuse to let their sacrifices be in vain. I refuse.”

And she had a few words for anyone, especially younger people, who fail to join her at the polls.

“For anybody here who has an ancestor who didn’t have the right to vote, and you are choosing not to vote, wherever you are in this state or this country, you are dishonoring your family. You are disrespecting and disregarding their legacy and their dreams when you don’t vote.”

Click and see why this formidable woman scares Donald Trump into acting polite whenever he dares to mention her name.