Bruh

Yesterday, National Public Radio, your mom’s favorite news source, tweeted out the entire Declaration of Independence in honor of July 4th.

Here’s a couple excerpts, we’ll spare you the whole thing.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

— NPR (@NPR) July 4, 2017

that all men are created equal,

— NPR (@NPR) July 4, 2017

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations,

— NPR (@NPR) July 4, 2017

it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government,

— NPR (@NPR) July 4, 2017

we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

— NPR (@NPR) July 4, 2017

While this may have been pretty annoying for the social media intern to type out the entire document, it was a pretty simple and poignant gesture… there shouldn’t be anything upsetting about a news organization tweeting the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day.

And yet, here we are.

The MAGA Twitter crew took NPR tweeting out the Declaration of Independence as an affront, going into full meltdown mode over the series of tweets.

So, NPR is calling for revolution.
Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound "patriotic".
Your implications are clear.

— D.G.Davies (@JustEsrafel) July 4, 2017

Yes, NPR is talking about a revolution. The one that happened in 1776 and the reason this country exists.

A few of the replies to @NPR’s tweeting the Declaration of Independence on this, the 4th of July. pic.twitter.com/v56DGg57Nt

— Brent Jones (@brentajones) July 4, 2017

It’s not like it was one dude either! The whole squad of MAGA minions took offense to the Declaration of Independence.

https://twitter.com/jbillinson/status/882418386143260673

What’s particularly notable is that while Trump supporters didn’t understand what they were looking at was the Declaration of Independence, they were able to find a way that it related to Trump.

Point many missed, re: @NPR DOI hilarity, is not that trump supporters didn't recognize the doc, but that they DID recognize trump

— Alicia_for_the_present (@alicia0824) July 5, 2017

Basically, the way in which the founding fathers spoke about King George III is how Trump supporters view the media’s criticism of the president.

Ultimately, this isn’t a big deal. A couple fake patriots with American flags in their Twitter bios don’t know about the Declaration of Independence, whatever.

But this whole thing is representative of a larger issue. Trump sees the ‘liberal media’ as his main enemy. The president tells his supporters that news organizations are the main enemy. His supporters believe him that the media is their enemy.

Not to get too Old News Guy here, but any functioning democracy relies on transparency and a free press. Trump has disdained the press for his entire professional life, and now he has turned the government and their supporters against the media.

Many of these publications may have supposed biases on their editorial page, but facts are facts and Trump’s war against the media means we now we live in a world where fringe conspiracy websites like Infowars are treated as credible by a large swath of the country.

This leads to extremist ideology, exemplified by this NRA ad that seems to calls for violent revolution against the left.

Conservative tv host Dana Loesch says of the scary liberals,

“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”

DOWN WITH THE COMEDY SHOWS!!

Man, this whole country needs a major reset. Let’s all take a collective breather for a little while.

Donald Trump’s resident fat guy and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie lounged on the beach on Saturday amid a state government shut down that closed that very beach to the public.

On Friday morning, New Jersey closed all state parks, beaches, and historic sites as Garden State residents were literally turned away from their July 4th vacations.

It was all good for Chris Christie, though, he had the beach all to himself.

My favorite @AndyMills_NJ photo: Look at the people on the public beach, and then Christie's beach. https://t.co/8jAY6dp4DQ pic.twitter.com/asqnOB73st

— Steve Politi (@StevePoliti) July 2, 2017

It’s very important to shield precious Chris Christie away from the hordes of peasants trying to enjoy their 4th of July weekends.

Naturally, you’d expect someone to be slightly remorseful or maybe try and change the general narrative in lieu of pictures like the one above.

Nah, this is Chris Christie we’re talking about.

He was rather unrepentant in a press conference on Monday in which the New Jersey Governor announced a $34.7 billion budget to end the shutdown.

Christie said of the beach pictures,

“I don’t apologize for it. I don’t back away from it. Whenever I get done tonight, I’ll go back to the beach. That’s where my family is and that’s where I’ll go back to.”

Folks, it doesn’t even really count. Christie explained,

“I don’t count going out on the beach after I’d been working all morning to sit and talk with my wife and our guests for 40 minutes before I had to leave and come back to work as ‘getting sun.’”

Chris Christie hates the sun. He wants nothing to do with this ‘sun’ you speak of,

“That wasn’t what I was out there to get.”

Makes you think, if a fat politician is on the beach and they’re not ‘getting sun’ did it ever even happen?

The round mound of running his state into the ground went on to say that going to the beach is a non-story. But he did have some interesting ideas as to what would make it a story!

“Now, if they flew that plane over the beach and I was sitting next to a 25-year-old blonde in that beach chair next to me, that’s a story.”

JUST TO REITERATE, HE WAS NOT WITH A 25-YEAR-OLD BLONDE.

“I wasn’t sitting next to a 25-year-old blonde. I was sitting next to my wife of 31 years surrounded by my children and some of their best friends. If that’s a scandal, then that’s a scandal I’m guilty of every day of my life.”

THERE WEREN’T EVEN ANY BLONDES ON THE BEACH, OK?

Chris Christie is such a blatant scumbag it almost makes you nostalgic for the days of yore, when politicians were just generally trash (like Christie) and not, like, apocalyptically scary (like our president).

Honestly, shoutout Chris Christie for making politicians boringly awful again.

A new article in The Washington Post titled, “It’s summer, and Washington smells like weed. Everywhere, all the time” chronicles what happens in the nation’s capital when weed is legalized.

The article is a kind of hilarious look at how citizens of Washington D.C. have responded to the constant, lingering smell of pot in the air.

One character in the article, Arash Shirazi, a music agent and filmmaker, who, “hangs out with creative types and bohemians” (eye roll) notes that that smell follows him everywhere, even to the upscale neighborhoods in the District (the horror).

Shirazi notes incredulously to the article’s author Maia Silber that he caught a whiff of bud even in the Georgetown neighborhood!

“Of course he’d smelled marijuana before. But this was a weekday afternoon — in Georgetown!”

There feels like a sort of generational gap in these weed articles, the likes of which we’ve seen from the New York Post, especially when Silber calls upon a man named Joe Tierney (blogger at Gentleman Toker) to, “Navigate this District of Cannabis.”

While Silber acknowledges that most D.C. residents are perfectly chill with legal weed, “Theoretically, we should all be much more blase about this — nearly 70 percent of D.C. residents voted for legalization,” the article seeks some sort of profound answer as to why it smells like weed everywhere, “Yet the city’s sharp new fragrance remains a curiosity. Who’s that smoking? Where’s that coming from?”

So Silber enlists Joe Tierney to further “understand” the D.C. weed scene, as if there’s some deep anthropological reason for people smoking weed in a place in which it is now legal.

Silber has Tierney break down the different areas of the city where she has smelled weed (everywhere) and asked the trusty ‘Gentleman Toker’ why people are smoking there.

Look at Tierney’s answers.

“In the downtown office corridors? That’s a sweet spot, actually — not enough of a nightlife scene to attract police presence, but not too touristy either. A toker can easily fly under the radar.”

Hmm.

Outside the FBI building? Hardcore activists, sticking it to the man. Tierney has seen the boasts on social media.

Smoking weed outside the FBI building as a ‘way to stick it to the man’? I’m not so sure that blazing is really such a point of protest anymore. It’s not 1968.

“And in the no-smoking confines of a discount department store? Probably just a fellow shopper who recently hotboxed, i.e., lit up in an enclosed space. The stuff can really stick to your clothes.”

So the reason Silber smelled weed in a department store is because… someone smoked there! Got it.

“Really, Tierney says, there’s almost nowhere you won’t smell it. One tip: If you smell it once, expect to smell it again. ‘Cannabis enthusiasts are creatures of habit,’ he explains.”

These ‘answers’ seem way overly complicated. Then again, sounds about right coming from the Gentleman Toker, who clearly takes this plant far too seriously.

I honestly appreciate the earnest attempts to try to understand why people are smoking weed here but I’d posit it has something to do with the fact that weed is pretty fun and it is legal in that place in question.

It’s not that deep, folks!

As Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidates his power and persecutes dissenters, some Turks are standing up to the authoritarian leader.

Many have sided with Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric living in the Poconos who Erdogan blamed for planning a failed coup against him last year, which killed roughly 250 people.

Recently, Turkey has faced attacks from the Islamic State and the P.K.K., the main Turkish militant group.

In a heavy-handed response, Erdogan has aligned Turkey with Russia, causing many citizens of the secular nation to become increasingly worried about the future of their country.

Among them is Oklahoma City Thunder forward Enes Kanter, who has been an outspoken supporter of Gulen and a critic of the government.

In a retaliatory move by the government, Kanter’s father, Mehmet, was detained by Turkish authorities in early June. “HEY WORLD,” Kanter said on Twitter. “MY DAD HAS BEEN ARRESTED by Turkish government.”

HEY WORLD

MY DAD HAS BEEN ARRESTED
by Turkish government and the Hitler of our century
He is potentially to get tortured as thousand others

— Enes FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) June 2, 2017

Later, he released a statement on his website,

“My father is arrested because of my outspoken criticism of the ruling party.  He may get tortured for simply being my family member.”

The arrest came as a surprise because Kanter’s father has disowned the basketball star due to his criticism of the government.

In May, Kanter was stopped at a Romanian airport after the Turkish embassy canceled his passport. He was later allowed to fly back to New York, but a few days later the Turkish government issued a warrant for his arrest accusing him of being a member of a terror group.

Yesterday, Vice sat down with Kanter for a wide-ranging discussion about his career and his criticism of the Turkish government.

Kanter believes the Turkish government targeted him because he is an outspoken critic of the government. If Kanter was sent back to Turkey he believes he would be put in jail and tortured.

“Probably the second day, you’ll hear from the news ‘Oh, he just got poisoned and he’s dead, he got food poisoning and he’s just dead. Or [they will] say its depression and he hanged himself, I don’t know I’m just giving examples.”

Kanter didn’t appear to be afraid of any impending danger, but he understands the importance of the role he is playing in Turkey.

“I love my country, I love my flag, I love my Turkish food,” Kanter told Vice.

“But this is way bigger than basketball, this is way bigger than the NBA, this is way bigger than everything I’m doing.

It doesn’t appear the issues in Turkey will be resolved anytime soon as the government continues its crackdown on free press and human rights.

Kanter deserves our respect and support for standing up to a ruthless government that is torturing thousands of its own people.

Folks, I regret to inform you that there is something very wrong with President Donald Trump.

No, not the whole maniacal personality, or the pretending to record an FBI Director who he fired, or trying to strip vulnerable populations of their civil rights, or starting a constitutional crisis by being mad on Twitter, or surrounding himself with sociopaths.

All those things are very bad, but there’s something new threatening the integrity of the office of the President of the United States.

This has to do with Trump’s sartorial senses. And let me tell you, it’s not good.

Take a look:

https://twitter.com/JoeMande/status/879061224100552704

Look how this man wears his watch!

This is very worrisome stuff. How can we rely on our president to make calm, collected decisions regarding the state of this great nation if he wears a watch like a wrist choker?

Granted, I think most of the general public has lost (not that it ever existed) hope of lil’ Donny actually being competent, but these pictures of his watch band really raise some pressing questions.

That can’t… feel comfortable. All of these pictures of said watch band strangling the shit out of Trumpy’s wrist seem to be taken while the President is golfing. Wouldn’t that cut off all the circulation to his left arm?

How can Trump hit one of his (definitely trash) drives with no blood in his little sausage arm?

What kind of person wants their watch to clasp as tightly around their wrist as possible? This has to be a sign of some sort of psychological issue.

I don’t mean to make light of our President’s clear mental incapacities, but this watch band is just too much to handle.

So, I urge all of you to stay very woke as to how Trump wears his watch. The entire future of our nation may depend on it.

Johnny Depp is on one.

With controversy swirling around the actor with revelations of abuse of his now-ex-wife Amber Heard, Depp is now facing more scrutiny after making comments about assassinating President Trump.

While introducing a screening of his film The Libertine on Thursday at the Glastonbury arts festival, Depp asked the crowd, “Can you bring Trump here?”

As the New York Times reports, “The remark was met with booing and jeering,” to which Depp responded,

“You misunderstand completely. When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? I want to clarify: I’m not an actor. I lie for a living. However, it’s been awhile, and maybe it’s time.”

Depp seemed to realize that these comments would cause a stir,

“By the way, this is going to be in the press and it’ll be horrible. It’s just a question; I’m not insinuating anything.”

The Pirates of the Caribbean star seemed to be alluding to the 1865 murder of President Abraham Lincoln by actor John Wilkes Booth.

Depp’s comments were met with outrage from Trump supporters, calling for a boycott of the actor’s movies.

https://twitter.com/immigrant_legal/status/878090451559084033

Others saw Depp’s comments as an obvious attempt at humor and shouldn’t have been taken seriously.

Johnny Depp was joking people… that means it is not serious, stop being such snowflakes. It shouldn't even be a story.

— ⚾️ Jim ⚾️ (@JimTouz) June 23, 2017

Others saw the hypocrisy of Trump supporters attacking Depp and the left, what with Trump admitting to sexual assault on tape and the active oppression of sexual assault victims under the proposed GOP healthcare bill.

Johnny Depp made a joke about Trump and now the Trump trolls are pretending they care about domestic abuse. They disgust me. pic.twitter.com/ZHEgH0phD8

— molly (@isteintraum) June 23, 2017

This whole thing is a mess.

Johnny Depp, who seems to be a huge scumbag if these domestic abuse allegations are true, made a really dumb and weird comment.

Is he some sort of hero of The Resistance for making this dumb joke? No. Is Depp a bloodthirsty terrorist for saying this? No.

Realistically, Johnny Depp is a completely irrelevant figure. I can’t recall the last actually good film he starred in and he seems to have lost his marbles.

Let’s all save our outrage and excitement for people that are actually doing stuff that matters, good and bad.

Another week, another truly ridiculous moment from our overly-tanned president.

While Mitch McConnell and his crew of tax-cut-humping minions were busy taking healthcare away from millions of people, Donald Trump took to twitter to resolve any notion that he may have taped his conversations with former FBI Director James Comey. Trump tweeted,

“With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”

This is a classic Trump tactic. There’s no real admission of anything here, despite the fact that the president himself started the entire debacle when he tweeted that Comey “better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations.”

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

According to CNN, Trump was urged by figures within his own administration to clear up his claims of the tapes’ existence,

“A senior administration official said Thursday that it became clear Trump had to come clean on his lie about the Comey tapes before the Friday deadline set on him by Congress to hand over any recordings.”

Up until now, Trump administration spokespeople have tried to talk around the question of the tapes, with Sean Spicer saying back in May that the tweet “speaks for itself.”

With Congress applying pressure to the Trump administration, albeit a very small amount of pressure, it became clear that Trump had to clear the situation up.

Trump has a history of threatening people over the possible existence of tapes. According to Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, speaking on Brian Stelter’s “Reliable Sources,” this tactic seemed all too familiar.

O’Brien said of Trump’s claims that he had recorded their conversations,

“My attorney said, ‘Mr. Trump, do you have a taping system?’ And he said no. And he said, ‘Well then, why did you say this to Mr. O’Brien?’ And he essentially said, ‘I wanted to intimidate him.'”

This is not just some shoddy prospective business deal that Trump is running his mouth about, he alluded to taping the FBI Director in a private conversation.

The entire fiasco is purely Nixonian. President Richard Nixon was known to record virtually every conversation he had.

With former members of Nixon’s staff behind Trump’s own rise to prominence, the similarity in styles is clearly far from coincidental.

Whether or not Donald Trump actually recorded James Comey is not really the question at hand here.

The President of the United States of America is tweeting about secret “tapes” in order to intimidate a former FBI Director who was fired for investigations around possible Russian cooperation with that very President’s campaign.

Our democracy continues to crumble slowly away under the non-watchful eye of this president.

The news cycle has become so intense and ridiculous that this story will probably vanish within hours, especially in lieu of the healthcare bill the GOP put forth today, which will strip millions of Americans their health insurance.

No tweaks by amendment can fix this monstrosity. If you vote for this evil, intellectually bankrupt bill, it will ruin millions of lives.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 22, 2017

All of the drama around the president and his Twitter account takes away from the very real issues of the GOP-led Congress, like the healthcare bill and consistent degradation of civil rights across the board.

Luckily, with our country leaving the Paris Agreement, we can all take solace in the fact that there probably won’t be much of an earth for much longer. I, for one, welcome the rising tides of the oceans.

America is a rather large mess at the moment. When our president briefly takes time off from golfing, he mostly tweets out his anger at the press, or asks his cabinet to go around and tell him what they love most about him.

Meanwhile, the GOP-led Senate is trying to pass a healthcare bill behind closed doors that would take an estimated 24 million people off healthcare and (of course) slash taxes for the 1 percent. No one has seen the bill, the Republicans are literally trying to force the legislation through in the dead of night because, as one staffer put it, “we aren’t stupid.”

And, while trying to pass a secret bill that will end up in Americans losing lives, today, Mitch McConnell banned the press from asking questions in the Capitol building, which is definitely something a functional and transparent government does.

ALERT: Reporters at Capitol have been told they are not allow to film interviews with senators in hallways, contrary to years of precedent

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) June 13, 2017

The GOP is turning our country into a flaming hellscape of misery as we careen further to environmental and healthcare disaster; the Republicans seem set on letting as many poor and sick people die as possible to enforce their voter base and keep cutting those taxes.

Things are very bad. There’s a fucking endless list of apocalyptic-level issues that threaten our Democracy on a daily basis, so naturally our brave Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to go after… medical marijuana.

Jeff Sessions has taken a careful look at the plethora of issues that threaten our great nation and has concluded that people that legally use marijuana as medicine are the problem that he wants to focus his efforts on.

In a May letter to Congress, first obtained by Massroots.com and verified by the Washington Post, Sessions wrote,

“I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.”

Specifically, Sessions wants Congress to take away the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which, according to the Post, prevents the Justice Department from using federal funds “to prevent certain states ‘from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.'”

Basically, the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment keeps the federal government from going into a state and enforcing federal law on medical marijuana users or practitioners.

Sessions has seemingly linked marijuana and the opiate epidemic, claiming a “historic drug epidemic” is the reasoning behind his request to congress.

An issue with this logic, as everything with Trumpism, is that it is grounded in old white men’s prejudicial emotions, as opposed to actual fact.

A 2014 report from medical journal JAMA found that states with medical marijuana laws saw 25% fewer opiate deaths over the study period from 1999-2010.

Obviously there is nothing but Jeff Sessions’ own agenda against marijuana, minorities, hippies, or whatever the hell he thinks is going on with medical marijuana. Surely the Attorney General of the United States would be doing actual research into the science regarding laws he wants to pass or people he wants to put in jail.

Sessions reacted in February to a Washington Post op-ed criticizing the Trump administration’s marijuana policy, demonstrating that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the massive amounts of federally-funded studies that prove that marijuana can help sick people.

Sessions said,

“I see a line in The Washington Post today [link added] that I remember from the ’80s, ‘Marijuana is a cure for opiate abuse.’ Give me a break. This is the kind of argument that’s been made out there to just — almost a desperate attempt to defend the harmlessness of marijuana or even its benefits. I doubt that’s true. Maybe science will prove I’m wrong.”

The most recent, most prominent study that does indeed prove Sessions wrong is a January 2017 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that found concrete evidence of therapeutic uses of cannabis.

From the study,

“The committee found evidence to support that patients who were treated with cannabis or cannabinoids were more likely to experience a significant reduction in pain symptoms.  For adults with multiple sclerosis-related muscle spasms, there was substantial evidence that short-term use of certain ‘oral cannabinoids’ – man-made, cannabinoid-based medications that are orally ingested – improved their reported symptoms.  Furthermore, in adults with chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, there was conclusive evidence that certain oral cannabinoids were effective in preventing and treating those ailments.”

So, there’s science refuting Jeff Sessions dumb, Keebler elf-looking ass. Medical marijuana helps people, often those dealing with the gravest of illnesses.

As for the voting base, an April 2017 Quinnipiac poll found that 94 percent OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC SUPPORTS MEDICAL MARIJUANA.

And as for Sessions’ own party? Trump himself said back in February that he wants to leave medical marijuana up to states and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Calif.) slammed Sessions’ letter, saying through a spokesperson,

“Mr. Sessions stands athwart an overwhelming majority of Americans and even, sadly, against veterans and other suffering Americans who we now know conclusively are helped dramatically by medical marijuana.”

Medical marijuana has been scientifically proven to help people with a variety of ailments. For certain sicknesses, like children with rare diseases that cause chronic seizures, a dose of CBD oil is literally the only treatment that has worked.

Quite simply, Jeff Sessions is a danger to the American people as long as he holds his place atop the Justice Department.

Sessions testifies to Congress today about his own involvement with Russia and the Trump campaign.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that things in the White House are a total disaster.

Donald Trump is lashing out at his closest aides and communications team as leaks and gross incompetence keeps the administration from actually doing anything.

I suppose it’s better for us that they can’t actually do anything. Like, they’re evil as it gets, but their incompetence gets in the way of them making the evil shit go down.

It appears that all is not well in the private life of the First Couple as well if we can read into Melania Trump’s body language around her own husband.

Whether it’s aboard Air Force 1, during The Pledge of Allegiance, or while being hosted by world leaders, Melania stays curving her overly-tanned partner.

There are certain rumors in the bowels of the internet that Melania is stepping out on Donny and they were on the ropes and going to get divorced before the election, but then… Donald Trump became the President and Melania has had to tough it out.

It makes sense that she’s tight 24/7 around Trump with all of the enhanced scrutiny and criticism they’ve gotten during the campaign and after the election. I mean, she really had to go on national television and claim her husband saying that he grabbed women’s genitals was just “locker room talk.” She never signed up for this!

While we can’t really side with Melania, realistically she’s complicit with all of the Trump administration policies and everything they represent, we do feel kinda bad for her…

Don’t believe that things aren’t going well with the Trumps? Watch the video above for yourself.