altfact3 bak
3/20
see Fox 5
covid
see echo/escalator silo
see photoshop manip
bak 1020 html mistrust
==
~ putin bounty $? plus bin laden win not real
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/bizarre-benghazi-conspiracy-theory-traveled-through-right-wing-echo-chamber
Over the last several days, a fringe right-wing narrative has been circulating alleging a secret plot among Obama administration officials and the CIA to protect Osama bin Laden and assassinate members of SEAL Team 6. The claims appear to have originated at a conservative conference last weekend and quickly spread across the internet, reaching President Donald Trump by Tuesday evening when he retweeted an unverified account affiliated with QAnon. This conspiracy theory is not the first time that the president has amplified fringe, far-right accounts, but it shows the speed that such false and baseless claims can spread on social media through the web of far-right outlets and fringe conspiracy theorists.
A conservative conference legitimizes a wild, Benghazi-related conspiracy theory
The claim seems to have originated from AmpFest 2020, a conservative conference hosted by American Priorityand held in Miami during October 8-11. Charles Woods, the father of a victim of the 2014 Benghazi attacks, and Nick Noe, a conservative activist who has repeatedly pushed
conspiracy theories, gave a presentation featuring aninterview with “whistleblower” Alan Howell Parrot, who claims to have worked for U.S. intelligence. Parrot alleges that the Obama administration made a $152 billion payout to Iran to cover up the truth about hiding bin Laden and the killing of SEAL Team 6 members. Similar conspiracy theories have circulated regarding the attacks and the Iran nuclear deal, and Trump even referenced some during the 2016 campaign. But all have been debunked.
As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer explained:
Parrot claims that Biden cut a deal with Iran to set up Bin Laden’s 2011 death in Pakistan. But when Iran double-crossed the United States and switched in a Bin Laden body double, in Parrot’s telling, Biden and Clinton arranged for a Navy SEAL helicopter to be shot down to keep the truth about the raid from getting out— a reference to a real-world helicopter attack in Afghanistan that killed 38 people, including 25 Navy SEALs.
“Vice President Biden paid with the blood of Seal Team 6,” Parrot said in the video. “He spent their blood like currency.”
Later in the video, Noe claims that the Benghazi compound was attacked to cover up the fact that, supposedly, the missile used in the helicopter attack came from the United States.[false flag?]
“It’s just so wicked,” Parrot said in the video, adding that he has “terabytes” of evidence to prove the conspiracy theory to Trump.
The video clip containing the conspiracy theory appeared online
On October 11, conservative personality Anna Khait tweeted about the presentation alongside a video clip of Parrot’s claims, which went viral and currently has 1.2 million views. The next day, Khait tweeted a YouTube interview with Noe, including the hashtags “#BenghaziAintGoingAway #BenghaziBombshell.” Khait also tweeted out a YouTube video of a panel interview with Woods and Noe at AmpFest. Both videos received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
On October 12, YouTube conspiracy theory channel The Next News Network also published an interview with Khait on the new findings, which currently has nearly 2.9 million YouTube views. The story was further pushed by right-wing blog DJHJ Media’s Kari Donovan, QAnon-adjacent YouTube channel RedPill789, and dubious Iranian blogger Heshmat Alavi, who was recently reported by The Intercept as being a seemingly fake persona created by an Iranian opposition group.
The story circulated on right-wing YouTube, Twitter, and fringe blogs until Trump shared the post
On October 13, Donavan’s blog post was tweeted by user @The171111 alongside the claim that “Hiden Biden and Obama may have had Seal Team 6 killed,” which was then retweeted by Trump. The account, which also reportedly pushed QAnon content, has since been suspended by Twitter. Donovan and Khait both posted that Noe is releasing documents on Twitter that prove the conspiracy theory. Noe, on his part, sent out a series of disjointed tweets which supposedly contain audio transcripts from Parrot.
Message boards and QAnon supporters picked up on the wild claims
Throughout Tuesday, the story continued to spread in the fringe far-right ecosystem; it was pushed by QAnon influencer Praying Medicon Twitter, and multiple large 4chan threads on the far-right “politically incorrect” message board known as “/pol/.”
Former Navy SEAL Craig Sawyer and Project Veritas “whistleblower” Ryan Hartwig both tweeted about the story. Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney tweeted a link to the Next News Network interview, and QAnon account “Greg Rubini” -- who is actually “Gregorio Palusa, a 61-year-old Italian sound engineer and marketer with no national security or intelligence credentials” -- tweeted that he can “now officially confirm that Trump KNOWS: he has been informed of the whole thing, and given documents & files”; Rubini’s tweet got over 12,000 retweets and 26,000 likes.
On October 14, Khait published two more YouTube videos claiming to have 2011 audio recordings from Parrot discussing the conspiracy with others. Far-right accounts and message boards continued to push the story on Wednesday along with Trump’s amplification, which some took as proof of the story.
Hashtags helped the conspiracy theory spread between platforms
In addition to individual accounts pushing the story, the following hashtags flooded social media with claims about the conspiracy theory: #BenghaziAintGoingAway, #SEALTeam6, #OsamaBinLaden, #BenghaziBombshell, #Benghazi, #SealTeamSix.
This debacle is yet another example of the president of the United States promoting fringe conspiracy theories; Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan has found that Trump has promoted QAnon accounts on Twitter over 200 times throughout his presidency.
11/17
mirror? whataboutism?
redumbdent? see alt right, gamergate, troll ~ PC
gateway drug to alt rt?
see mass shooter
see violence
see bully
see domestic violence as precursor to mass shootings
see incel
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-fact-checking-may-be-futile-against-trumps-black-hole-of-lies/
Donald Trump has publicly lied at least 20,000 times since taking office, according to the Washington Post. He does this in part because he has shown himself to be mentally unwell, if not a sociopath. But he also lies because he is a fascist authoritarian. For such leaders, lies are a way of assaulting reality and truth as a means of achieving unlimited power. These explanations are not discrete. They overlap with one another.
In a season of massive death, Donald Trump and his regime's lies about the coronavirus are a public health emergency – one which has killed at least 216,000 people in the United States.
Donald Trump and his regime's lies have also severely damaged America's prestige, alliances and global power. The country's enemies have also been emboldened by the Trump regime's lies and overall lack of consistency in foreign policy and principles.
Most important, Trump and his regime's policy of lying (in conjunction with wanton cruelty and other evil) has undermined American democracy. A common understanding of reality is the foundation of a health democracy. The Trump regime's lies and those of its agents are rotting that foundation.
In "The Death of Truth," Michiko Kakutani explains that the damage Trump has done to the country's institutions and foreign policy will take "years to repair."
"And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away," Kakutani writes.
Why is Donald Trump such a powerful and effective liar? Why has the mainstream American news media largely surrendered to his lies, and by doing so normalized them? Would more aggressive fact-checking have blunted Donald Trump and his regime's strategy of lying? What explains why the mainstream American news media as a whole refused — and for the most part, continues to refuse — to describe Donald Trump and his regime accurately as being fascist and authoritarian?
In an effort answer these questions, I recently spoke with Eric Alterman, a columnist at The Nation and the author of more than 10 books, including the bestseller "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News." His latest book is "Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie and Why Trump is Worse."
Why are there now so many more voices in the mainstream American news media who, several weeks from Election Day, are finally using language such as "fascism" and "authoritarianism" to describe Trump and his regime? This was obvious several years ago. Why the delay? What were they waiting for?
There are many disincentives to tell the truth about Donald Trump. The most obvious one is that he's the President of the United States and people consider it disrespectful to use certain words about the president, like "liar" and "racist" and "conman" and "conspiracy nut," even when they're true. It is worse in Washington D.C. to call someone a liar than for them to actually be a liar.
In Washington, that rule is part of how a person makes a living. Therefore, people in the news media have to show respect for the office of the presidency. The second reason is that the ideology of "journalistic objectivity" does not have a framework for determining what the truth is. It has no bias for truth. "Journalistic objectivity" says on the one hand, so-and-so said this; on the other hand, his opposition said that, and you, the reader, you, the viewer, you, the listener, it is up to you to decide what's true.
Donald Trump is an idiot in many ways, but he is a genius when it comes to media manipulation.
The Washington Post has now documented at least 25,000 or so lies by Donald Trump — and nothing has changed in his behavior. If anything, he has become more brazen.
I do not find fact-checking as done in that way to be very helpful, because Donald Trump is not being fact-checked as he says the lies. If a person reads the fact-checking article, they will learn what Trump said is not true. Trump's lie still has power because it is repeated by the president and circulated. Again, Donald Trump has been winning this battle against the mainstream news media every day and they still have not really caught up to his strategy. The New York Times still does not really know what to do about Donald Trump in this regard and others.
Is the reluctance, if not fear, of calling Donald Trump a liar a function of the corporate culture of American's mainstream news media? Are reporters and journalists afraid of being punished in terms of their careers if they tell the unpolished truth about Donald Trump?
I have a different idea of lying than most of the country's journalistic institutions do because they will almost never use the words "lie" or "liar" when it comes to the president or most politicians. Instead most in the mainstream news media will say, "We can't know his intent. We can't know what's in his heart." They assume that a lying politician may believe the nonsense that they are saying. My position is if a politician should know what is true and he does not, then he is lying.
I do not care what the excuse is. I don't care if Trump or some other politician thinks God is talking to him. I don't care if Trump is too disengaged from reality. I don't care if Trump is so much of a narcissist that he makes up stuff and he believes it. If it's the president's job to know something and he misinforms the country, then he's lying. Worry about his motivation some other time.
There has never been a historical moment in this country where a president, in this case Donald Trump, could be ignored because everyone knows he's so full of lies and nonsense.
Donald Trump might get reelected and destroy our democracy because so many in the mainstream news media are treating Donald Trump's lies and delusions as though it is all somehow normal.
Why has the White House press corps been so accommodating and enabling of Trump's lies? He also uses them as props for his fascist performances. Why do the members of the White House press corps not just walk about of the briefings or stand up and turn their backs to him?
They do not know how to do their job any other way. Their job is defined as getting whatever information is available at the White House. So even if it's lies, even if it's daily humiliation, the press corps has to go back the next day. Those reporters need to be on good terms with the people who are giving out the information — even if they're not giving out real or otherwise substantive information. It would be nice if the job of the White House press corps was to actually go out and find news, but that's not what they're there for. They're there as conduits for the White House.
There are few public voices who have been consistently warning the American people and the world about the realities of Trumpism and the threat Trump represents to the country. Why have the American people, largely, been in so much denial about the horrible reality that is the Age of Trump and what it means for the present and future of the country?
There's about a third of the country that lives inside this bubble where the truth never reaches them.They watch Fox News, they listen to conservative talk radio, they read Breitbart and Daily Caller and so forth, and they are lied to, and the lies that they are told make them feel good about themselves. They blame other people, mostly Black and brown people and Muslims and immigrants and so forth, sometimes Jews, for the problems in their lives, and it works for them. Such people are unreachable. You cannot get through to them.
There is a battle over the rest of the American people. Trump and his spokespeople and others who are doing all the lying on the right have a gravitational effect on the entire public discourse.
It began initially with Ronald Reagan and then went into warp drive with Newt Gingrich. But before Ronald Reagan, and especially before Gingrich, both parties pretty much had an idea where the goalposts were on what you could get away with in terms of not telling the truth. There were a lot of problems. Nixon was a big problem, Lyndon Johnson was a big problem, but still people understood what was all right and what wasn't all right, and then Reagan and Gingrich just started making stuff up all the time. They did this with no consideration for the truth — and they discovered that the media wouldn't call them on it.
The American right-wing learned that the American people did not care enough. As long as the news media was attacked as having a "liberal bias" it did away with the problem of them being called on their lies. This dynamic expanded and grew until Donald Trump could run for president with his claims that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Kenya. There were 30 or 40% of Trump voters believing that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring inside a pizza parlor in Washington. They actually believed that.
Now the country is facing QAnon nuttiness with millions of people believing such nonsense because as a country we have just completely lost track of the truth in our political discourse. As Hannah Arendt warned, "This is how you create a dictatorship. You destroy the idea of truth."
Why this obsessive narrative and all these expeditions out to Trumplandia to talk with "white working class" and other Trump followers by the mainstream American news media? What is there left to learn? The research shows that Trump's voters are driven by racism, white supremacy, misogyny and authoritarianism, if not outright fascism and in some cases Nazism.
They just have to be defeated. Enough is enough. We have to beat them into the ground as hard as we can and let them start over. For example, the Lincoln Project is seeking to destroy every single Republican senator because they believe that the Republican Party cannot be saved. It's been taken over by crazy people, by corrupt people, by the equivalent of a mafia gang, and they just have to be beaten. There is no sense in trying to talk sense into them anymore.
Fox News really is sports talk radio for conservatives. What are the implications of how American politics is now treated like some type of sport by the right wing?
I recall an observation that Noam Chomsky made when I was writing my first book. He said, "What we need in this country is a politics where people care as much about sports as they do about politics, because if you listen to people on sports radio, they're very knowledgeable in a way that people did not have the same passion about the Democratic and Republican candidates."And then there was the rise of talk radio and the internet and it brought in all this passion — but it seems to only exist on one side. The conservative side is driven like mad to care about every little thing. By comparison liberals do not feel that way. Liberals would let the people who are in charge do the right thing.
Liberals trust scientists and want to let them be the experts. Almost every single-issue group is a conservative group. They win. 90% of the country wants stronger gun control, but we're not getting it because the 5-10% that doesn't want it has a stronger voice than the 90% because they're so dedicated. They vote only on this issue, and you can't say that about really any issue for liberals. We see this on Fox News and on right-wing talk radio.
When Trumpists say that "all politicians lie" and "Trump is no worse than Obama," and the news media is being "mean" and "unfair" to Donald Trump, how do you respond?
The New York Times tried to answer that question about Obama. Trump followers say that, "Why all the fuss about Donald Trump lying? Why don't you explain that Obama lied too?" The New York Times looked at the entire eight-year record of Obama's presidency and they found 12 false claims over eight years, none of which he repeated, all of which he then corrected when he found out that what he had said was not true. Trump can tell 12 falsehoods in 10 minutes. He does it all the time. There is no comparison between Trump and Obama. Some presidents lied a lot. Trump is in his own category. Trump lies about absolutely everything, and he gives his cabinet and his advisors permission in doing so to lie about everything as well.
Are our expectations of the American public too high or too low in terms of their understanding of politics, generally, and capacity to intervene against and reject Trump's lies, specifically?
Too many Americans have had a full meal of bullshit and now they have no way to judge good and bad, right and wrong. I'm very angry at the people who support Donald Trump because they are destroying my country. They are responsible for putting people in cages and separating families. A lot of Trump's supporters do not know any better. Some of them are just terrible people. I do not really care why people think what they think anymore, I just want to beat them. Trump's supporters are on the wrong side.
Does Donald Trump believe his lies? Or is this all some type of performance?
All that Donald Trump cares about is winning the next five minutes — and he only really cares about the next minute or so. Trump is always doing the wrong thing. Trump is a toddler and he just wants to have his belly stroked every minute or so and then he forgets that it happened.
What is your greatest hope in this moment? What is your greatest fear?
My hope is that we turn this ocean liner around in the 2020 election. I hope that the Republicans are defeated, that Trump is defeated, that the Supreme Court is made rational, and we start moving the country back in the direction of sanity and decency. My fear is that the upcoming election is the last time we actually have a chance to save the United States from an American form of fascism. I'm only 60, but I'm an American historian, and I don't think things have ever been this bad since the Civil War. I wish there was more of a sense of alarm among the institutions that really matter to this country's democracy.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-has-the-white-house-obfuscated-trumps-medical-condition-because-the-right-thinks-it-can-make-its-own-reality/
salon
... Sunday morning, the medical team supervising President Trump's care at Walter Reed Medical Center returned to the microphones to address misinformation they had divulged the previous day. The president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, admitted he had obfuscated the fact that Trump had been administered oxygen and explained his misleading statements by saying he was "trying to reflect the upbeat attitude" of Trump and "didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction…"
This bizarre episode capped off a truly strange weekend in which the condition of the president of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, was puzzled over as one conflicting account after another battled for precedence. It was reminiscent of the propaganda-laden crises of authoritarian states and failed nations, times in which leaders were either perfectly healthy or functionally dead and crises either under control or raging unabated.
The disturbing truth is that this seemingly inexplicable moment is the result of a decades-long war over the very nature of reality within America.I had struggled to understand this before writing "American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People" and finding that modern American history has been dominated by this conflict and the Republican Party's insistence on constructing an alternate reality to aid in its consolidation of power.
It is no accident that the Republican Party has evolved into Trumpism. After decades of manipulation, including the vilification of academics and experts and an all-out onslaught on science, it was sadly inevitable for the GOP to reach the point where even the medical condition of the president is subject to relentless propaganda and subjective pseudo-science.
In the post-Vietnam era, this project was best summarized by William E. Simon, a businessman who served as Richard Nixon's secretary of the Treasury, who wrote in his influential 1978 book "A Time for Truth" that liberals had so dominated cultural conversation with their array of academics and experts that it was necessary for conservatives to create their own "powerful counterintelligentsia." This followed on the heels of the civil rights, free speech and antiwar movements that found purchase on college campuses and among academic circles in the 1960s and '70s. What followed was a backlash against the academy itself and a desperate attempt to forge an alternate establishment that would protect Republican power and capitalist interests.
This would lead to the creation of an army of right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, bodies that offered opinions troubling scientific and academic consensus while preparing pundits to challenge experts in the public arena. Corporate and private donations were mobilized to tempt experts into espousing anti-establishment views. Even while major corporations internally distributed their own studies of scientifically-proven threats like climate change and carcinogenic products like cigarettes, large-scale discrediting operations were undertaken to inject doubt in the public mind.
To assist this effort, the American right founded a powerful media operation that began with print and moved to the airwaves with talk radio, cable news and eventually websites and social media networks dedicated to proliferating misinformation. With the death of the FCC's "fairness doctrine" in 1987 — a rule that had guaranteed equal time to opposing viewpoints in the media — the right was free to construct a self-sustaining, impenetrable alternate reality its supporters and adherents could reside within, beyond the reach of experts, science or even a passing conflicting opinion.
There is a line to be drawn fromSimon's urge to push "non-egalitarian" voices in order to protect Republican and moneyed interests to our peculiar moment. The reliance on politically favorable opinions and personally advantageous pseudo-science has given room to misinformation, disinformation and the proliferation of conspiracy theories that "feel real" to people while existing solely as weaponized narratives.
It is this war on science and expertise that gave rise to attacks on scientists urging the wearing of masks, and to the "miracle cures" of hydroxychloroquine, UV light and household cleansers, not to mention the empty promise by a president — who had been caught on tape admitting he knew better — that a generational pandemic might simply solve itself, saying, "One day, it's like a miracle, it will simply disappear."
But with more than 214,000 deaths so far during the coronavirus pandemic and the disastrous consequences of climate change as evident as the flaming maelstroms on the West Coast — not to mention an ailing president who is either all better, improving or gravely ill, or maybe all three at once — it is time to recognize the manipulation that has occurred and the necessity to move beyond a war on objective reality. As perhaps even President Trump's partisan doctors could be made to admit, propaganda simply does not exist at the microscopic level.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/reality-might-no-longer-be-an-option-reporter-details-the-cognitive-dissonance-trump-defenders-grapple-with-in-support-of-the-president/
One of the most jarring aspects of watching Fox News or One America News Network is the mental gymnastics President Donald Trump’s supporters must perform in his defense. Being a Trump supporter often means defending the indefensible. Journalist Anne Applebaum describes those extremes in an article published in The Atlantic on September 25, stressing that their defenses of the president require a total defiance of logic and reason.
Applebaum cites Trump loyalist William B. Crews as one of the wildest examples. Crews, Applebaum notes, was an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. Crews, the Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markey recently reported, was angry because Fauci’s messages on the coronavirus pandemic sometimes conflicted with what Trump had to say — and Crews responded by attacking Fauci on the Red State website using the pen name “Streiff.”
As “Streiff,” Applebaum notes, Crews also defended Trump on everything from the Ukraine scandal to the George Floyd protests.
“Nothing that (Crews) wrote was clever or surprising,” Applebaum explains. “Day after day, he produced boringly predictable pablum — the sort of average-vile stuff pumped out on Fox or Breitbart News all the time. The only thing remarkable about this writing is that Crews was doing it while simultaneously being employed by a government body whose most important task is to fight exactly the kinds of conspiracy theories he was producing.”
Another example of a Trump supporter who has gone to insane lengths to defend the indefensible, according to Applebaum, is Michael Caputo,former Trump-appointed spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo, Applebaum observes, “was caught meddling with scientific reports on the pandemic put out by the CDC, which, like Fauci’s agency, is part of HHS. He then posted a Facebook video claiming that scientists at the CDC were plotting ‘sedition’ and worse.”
Applebaum quotes Caputo as saying, “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going. There are hit squads being trained all over this country. If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”
The “cases” of Crews and Caputo, Applebaum writes, indicate “that people whose jobs require them to provide ‘alternative facts’ on a regular basis might eventually break under the strain. Maybe there is a price to be paid, in loss of mental clarity, for supporting the fantasy world needed to sustain this president.”
Trumpworld, Applebaum warns, has become so unhinged that even supporters of the far-right QAnon cult are now welcome in the GOP.
“In order to make sense of the world they can see all around them, (QAnon) have created an elaborate and obviously false explanation — that an omniscient Trump is fighting a cabal of deep-state Satanists and pedophiles,” Applebaum observes. “No wonder Republicans, instead of shunning QAnon believers, are working to elect some of them to Congress in November. They genuinely serve a function, helping Trump supporters navigate the gap between the reality they live in and the fiction they see on Fox and Facebook.”
Applebaum wraps up her piece by warning that if Trump wins a second term in November, his administration could become even more divorced from reality.
“Voters can still choose to grapple with reality — to read real news, to seek accurate information, to use our daily experience as a guide before deciding what to believe —without fear,” Applebaum stresses. “But for people like ‘Streiff’ — people who actually work in this administration, and people who would choose to work in a second Trump Administration — reality might no longer be an option.”
aha-let: lie vs dumb/delusional? lying:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-constant-lies-reveal-a-big-truth-about-the-right-wing/
are they stupid or evil?
When I first started writing about politics, way back in the George W. Bush era, this was a legitimate question when it came to trying to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially when it came to their stubborn refusal to accept scientific truths. Republicans have denied or cast doubt on science in so many ways — denying that condoms are effective, that evolution is real, that climate change is actually happening and largely caused by human activity — and many liberals and progressives have felt legitimately confused about exactly why.
Was it that right-wingers were too ignorant or benighted to accede to scientific realities? Or was it more sinister than that: They knew full well what the science said, but were too selfish and cruel to care, and also selfish and cruel enough to lie about it to our faces?
Well, with the West Coast on fire, a pandemic spreading across the land, and a pathological liar in the White House as the Republican standard-bearer, I think we can consider that debate settled: It’s not ignorance. It’s malice.
the cruelty, as Adam Serwer of The Atlantic famously wrote, is the point.
Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid man — so stupid that he appears to have actually believed it was a stroke of genius to suggest injecting household cleaners into people’s lungs — but even he, as we now know for certain, was only pretending not to understand that the coronavirus is deadly and easily transmitted. Famed journalist Bob Woodward has been steadily releasing audio clips from the interviews he conducted with Trump over the spring for his new book, “Rage.” These recordings make clear that Trump knowingly lied about the scale and danger of the pandemic. In one, he tells Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down” and “I still like playing it down”.
New tapes released on Monday indicate that, even as Trump was publicly claiming that the virus “would soon be in full retreat” and encouraging protests against lockdown measures, he was privately admitting that “this thing is a killer” and that the virus “rips you apart” if “you’re the wrong person.”
In other words, Trump gets it but simply doesn’t care. That was confirmed again on Monday by a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who confronted Trump about his decision to hold a packed (and largely mask-free) indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, despite warnings from public health officials that such events easily spread the coronavirus.
“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump told the reporter. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”
So the safety of the thousands of people who showed up to show fealty to Trump is clearly of no importance. He was far away from them! So he’s “not at all concerned.”
Trump’s odious attitudes towards the people who are being harmed by his failure to take science seriously were on display later in his trip, when he visited McClellan Park in Sacramento, California, where the skies are clogged from smoke from wildfires tearing up the West Coast.
That the frequency and severity of wildfires around the world — and currently up and down the Pacific Coast at a level never seen in human memory — is a result of climate change is beyond dispute. But when a California state official asked him about the issue, Trump simply responded, “It will start getting cooler. You just watch.”
“I don’t think science knows,” Trump insisted, while trying to pretend the problem on the West Coast is about forest management, instead of soaring summer temperatures that turn bone-dry wooded areas into kindling. (It was just nine months ago that similar summer fires in Australia reportedly killed more than a*billion* animals.)
Claiming that the science is still unclear or that the continued existence of winter proves that there’s no climate crisis are standard issue deflections from Republicans. It worked for many years, however, because the consequences of climate change weren’t readily apparent to most people, and many people didn’t grasp that snow in December doesn’t negate the problems caused by record hot summers. (In fact, one aspect of the climate crisis is more extreme weather in all directions: Record heat, epic hurricanes and sometimes powerful blizzards.)
But the “I don’t see the problem here” act is a lot harder to pull off when you literally have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get to the microphone where you deny the problem.
The term “gaslighting” —when someone pretends not to know something that both they and their target know is true — has been around in psychology for a long time and recently made the leap to politics, since it so perfectly describes the nature of Trump’s obvious lies.
That’s also what Republicans have been doing all along when it comes to denying science. Even the duller specimens within the party tend to be a little sharper than Trump, after all. So if he understands the facts and is just pretending not to, it’s safe to assume the same thing about the vast majority of Republicans whose lead he follows, and who are perhaps a bit more skillful at performing ignorance.
They aren’t ignorant. They don’t really believe the science is controversial. That’s just an act to cover for a sadistic agenda....
leading media expert tells Bill Moyers why presidents lie — and breaks down the biggest offenders
Bill Moyers September 17, 2020
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Want to know why presidents lie – and which one is the worst? You’ve come to the right place. The prolific Eric Alterman is…
==
Liar-in-chief’ Trump has broken the last vestiges of trust Americans had in their government
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 15, 2020
For the last four years, the busiest people in journalism have been the fact-checkers who compile Trump’s lies, which total well over 20,000. Early in this administration, there were discussions about what…
parker m
https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/pro-trump-disinformation-efforts-could-tilt-entire-election-if-media-outlets-and-tech
In January 2017, my colleague Matt Gertz wrote a piece titled “What Journalists Can Do When The President Is A Liar” in which he urged the press to rethink the way presidents are covered in the context of President-elect Donald Trump:
Journalists typically treat presidential statements as both newsworthy and generally trustworthy until proven otherwise. Trump is hardly the first president to dissimulate. But unlike his predecessors, Trump does not lie strategically or rarely. He lies habitually, on matters great and small. By following their typical practice and reporting the president-elect’s comments as both factual and significant, reporters are doing a disservice to their audience, which is left with the impression that what Trump has said is both true and substantive.
Since taking office, Trump has continued to lie about all manner of things, whether it be his false claim that The New York Times sent a letter to subscribers apologizing for negative coverage of his campaign, his wild exaggerations on the size of the crowd at his inauguration, or the more recent and much more consequential laundry list of lies he’s shared about the COVID-19 pandemic this year. The Washington Post’s count of Trump’s lies as president crossed the 20,000 mark on July 9.
Trump was not changed by the office upon his swearing-in, and unfortunately, neither was the press.
Throughout all of this, mainstream media organizations have continued to offer the same level of deference to Trump as they have previous presidents, boosting his objectively false statements on social media and in stories, often without noting that what he said wasn’t true. This is precisely what Gertz was warning against in his 2017 post. Now, this uncritical amplification of Trump’s misinformation comes at a time when the press needs more than ever to shore up its standing as society’s fourth estate, a bulwark against antidemocratic authoritarianism. Instead, this failure of the press has enabled a truly destructive reelection campaign strategy.
With Trump’s potential reelection just weeks away, he and his supporters have ramped up disinformation efforts well aware that there’s no one willing to stop them.
In March, for the first time, Twitter slapped a “manipulated media” label on something tweeted by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by Trump. The tweet included a video of Democratic nominee Joe Biden making what seemed to be an accidental endorsement of Trump.
“Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump,” Biden says in the edited clip, omitting the second half of his statement. “Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s got to be a positive campaign,” he says in the full video.
On August 29, Trump ally and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) shared a video on Twitter that edited the words said during an interview with Biden by activist Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and uses assistive technology to speak. Scalise added the words “for police” to a question Barkan asked about funding things that might mitigate crime such as social services and mental health counseling. The goal of Scalise’s deceptive editing was to make it seem as though Biden was in favor of defunding the police, a position he has repeatedly said he does not support.
Twitter again added a “manipulated media” flag to Scalise’s tweet following backlash. Scalise later took the post down, but stood by the video.
On August 30, Scavino shared another edited clip. In this one, the clip superimposed an image of Biden over footage from a 2011 interview between a Bakersfield, California-based news show and actor Harry Belafonte. This was edited together with a snoring sound effect to make it look as though Biden had fallen asleep in the middle of a TV appearance, though this obviously was not true. Twitter again applied the “manipulated media” flag to the post, leaving it up. It wasn’t until the video’s copyright holder filed a takedown request that Twitter removed the post altogether.
Belafonte said of Scavino’s use of that clip, “They keep stooping lower and lower. A technical glitch in an interview I did 9 years ago now becomes another one of their lies, more of their fake news. I beg every sane American-please vote them out. I knew many who gave their life for the right to vote. Never has it been so vital to exercise that right.”
On August 31, Trump’s campaign tweeted a clip of Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” a complete distortion of what Biden actually said: “Since they have no agenda or vision for a second term, Trump and Pence are running on this, and I find it fascinating. 'You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.’ And what's their proof? The violence we're seeing in Donald Trump's America.”
Yet again, Twitter slapped the “manipulated media” label to the post, but not before the video had racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Later, the campaign defended the post, tweeting, “To all the triggered journalists who can’t take a joke about their candidate, it’s not our fault Joe Biden was dumb enough to say this on camera.”
The press and tech companies need to incentivize truthfulness, and that means ensuring that the political and social cost of lying outweighs the benefits.
Would the Trump campaign have posted the deceptively edited clip of Biden if there was a chance that its entire account would be suspended from the platform? Would Trump have repeatedly claimed that just 6% of COVID deaths were actually because of COVID if newspapers and nightly news broadcasts insisted on doing more than just quickly noting that what he said wasn’t true and moving on?
It used to be treated as a scandal when the public learned of an instance of the president lying to the American people, but now it’s just an accepted fact of daily life that something the president says to us today will likely turn out to be untrue. If the press had taken Trump’s candidacy seriously, holding him to the same standards as other candidates, it’s possible he wouldn’t have ever become president. Had journalists stopped offering Trump the benefit of the doubt, he would have been forced to either lie less often or face a barrage of nonstop criticism for his dishonesty. Fact-checking is important, but we’re beyond the point of simply being able to correct our way out of the situation the world is in. Fact checks can’t simply be something brought up in a single segment squeezed between hours of uninterrupted lies, and it cannot be something that gets siloed into its own separate section of news coverage.
The many lies of Trump’s presidency have been enabled by the press and by social media companies afraid to take real action to stop the spread of false information. As November’s election approaches, it’s become clear that disinformation is no longer a tactic for his campaign, but the tactic. The extent to which that tactic will be successful will depend on whether the press is willing to cover his campaign the way it should have all along, and if tech and social media companies are willing to hold him and his allies to the same standards as every other user.
In July, Trump wrongly claimed that Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued a document outlining a plan “to abolish our police departments.” In June, he shared a deceptively edited video made to look like a CNN segment. In May, he lied about a “rogue Secretary of State” in Michigan sending 7.7 million absentee ballots to voters across the state. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and who he will always be.
Trump and his allies keep telling lies, and they will continue to do so as long as the benefits of lying outweigh the costs. It’s because of a deferential news media and timid social media companies that the cost of telling blatant lies remains so low. If the worst thing to come of a manipulated Twitter video is a tiny label applied to a tweet long after its engagement has already peaked, it makes perfect sense to continue to spread increasingly brazen false claims and deceptive footage in hopes of influencing voters’ actions.
Once you’ve hit 20,000 lies, what are a few more on the pile?
nevada rally lies/rant not even fox ran?
best for AA too 920 ew
President Trump told a crowd in Jupiter, Florida Tuesday that he is an environmental president, claiming that "it's true: number one since Teddy Roosevelt. Who would have thought Trump is the great environmentalist?" according to the White House transcript of the speech. He added, "And I am. I am. I believe strongly in it."
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I’m not going to let you do this’: CNN anchor shuts down Republican’s attempt to dodge Trump’s lies
Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos September 11, 2020
If you haven’t heard, this Donald Trump guy doesn’t seem to be a particularly good guy. He doesn’t seem to be a particularly competent guy. Frankly, he seems like he’s bad…
no lnx twt
Trump vaccine that actually works
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 9, 2020
If you talked politics over the last few days with Trump supporters, you probably got a good lesson in how they have become inoculated against information that contradicts their assumptions about the president.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic about how Trump referred to Americans who have died in war as “losers” and “suckers” was published last Thursday—just in time to ruminate over the three-day weekend. It included three to four sources per quote and was eventually confirmed by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times. As David Frum documented, the reports seemed plausible based on all of the other times Trump attacked members of the military. The silences are also resounding.
Amid the clamor, it’s easy to overlook those who are not yelling, those who are keeping silent. Where are the senior officers of the United States armed forces, serving and retired—the men and women who worked most closely on military affairs with President Trump? Has any one of them stepped forward to say, “That’s not the man I know”?
How many wounded warriors have stepped forward to attest to Trump’s care and concern for them? How many Gold Star families have stepped forward on Trump’s behalf? How many service families?
The silence is resounding. And when such voices do speak, they typically describe a president utterly lacking in empathy to grieving families, wholly uncomprehending of sacrifice and suffering.
It wasn’t long before Trump responded with attacks against Goldberg, The Atlantic, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the magazine’s majority owner.
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Most of the president’s supporters didn’t need the prompt, however. It quickly became labelled “fake news.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been preparing to launch a book tour this week, defended Trump by describing a president most of us have never seen.
While Sanders says that she has witnessed Trump showing heart and demonstrating respect, we’ve never actually witnessed that kind of behavior from him in public. It makes her denial much less plausible. But her description of the president is something his supporters desperately want to believe. So they utilize the closure mechanisms Trump has provided for them by calling The Atlantic report “fake news,” which automatically makes the president a victim. It is exactly the process described by Julian Sanchez in his explanation of the term “epistemic closure.”
Over the weekend a chorus arose asking for John Kelly, who was present during most of the discussions cited by Goldberg, to address what happened. Underlying that call is the assumption that the former White House Chief of Staff could actually clear things up. While I think that he should do so for the sake of his own conscience, it is absurd to think that Trump supporters would listen to him any more than they did when former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called the president a threat to our Constitution.
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The president’s supporters are not going to change their minds about the most dishonest and corrupt man to ever occupy the Oval Office. While it remains important to document his incompetence and malfeasance, it isn’t likely to have any impact politically. Trump has one vaccine that actually works: He’s inoculated his supporters against anything that might threaten their loyalty to him.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democracy-wilts-on-the-vine-trump-campaign-resorts-to-lies-conspiracy-theories-and-disinformation-as-biden-leads-in-the-polls/
Reporter Ashley Parker, in an article published in the Washington Post over Labor Day Weekend, discusses some of the ways in which President Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies have been aggressively promoting disinformation — from “doctored and misleading videos” to bogus conspiracy theories.
For example, Parker notes, Trump recently “retweeted footage of a black man violently pushing a white woman on a subway platform under the caption, ‘Black Lives Matter/Antifa’ — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October (2019).” And according to Parker, “White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.”
In addition to those things, Parker notes thatHouse Minority Whip Steve Scalise — a Louisiana Republican and Trump ally — “released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.”
Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at Syracuse University, told the Post, “When you have this disinformation and it’s introduced to one side of the forest, for example, it can travel so quickly through so many different communities and does so many unintentional things before you can even do a fact-check. He’s able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine."
trump, Parker points out, has “repeated a false claim that just 6% of the nation’s death toll” in the coronavirus pandemic “was actually caused by the novel coronavirus itself — part of his ongoing effort to portray the virus as less deadly or pervasive than it actually is.” That conspiracy theory has been promoted by QAnon and has no basis in reality, but that hasn’t prevented Trump and other Republicans from promoting it.
Trump is hardly the first candidate to play hardball during a presidential race. From President Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous “daisy ad” of 1964 to President George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton ad of 1988 to the Swift Boat Veterans ads that helped President George W. Bush defeat Democrat John Kerry in 2004, presidential candidates — both Democrats and Republicans — have dealt some harsh blows to their rivals over the years. But Lily Adams, a Democratic National Committee senior adviser, argues that Trump’s campaign is taking disinformation to another level.
Adams told the Post, “Spin has been something that folks in politics have come to expect,but this is the invention of a totally new reality. Because they can’t run on the reality that every American is seeing, they’re inventing a new one.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/chaos-at-fox-news-as-some-refuse-to-believe-the-networks-own-reporting-on-trumps-contempt-for-troops/
ALL TWEETS not here
Bob Brigham / Raw Story September 5, 2020
On Friday, Fox News confirmed much of the reporting by The Atlantic on President Donald Trump disparaging American service members.
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The network followed the Associated Press and The Washington Post in largely confirming the reporting.
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But even after Fox News reporters matched the reporting, Fox News personality Greg Gutfield falsely claimed on-air that the story had been “debunked.”
twt: As Fox's own reporters confirm parts of the Atlantic story, Greg Gutfeld refers to it on air as a "hoax" and a "scam"
The split continued throughout the day.
“Fox contributor knocks Fox reporter for noting Fox has now confirmed key details of The Atlantic’s reporting,” CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy noted.
Fox contributor knocks Fox reporter for noting Fox has now confirmed key details of The Atlantic's reporting.
Darcy also noted a bizarre headline on the Fox News website following the network’s confirmation of the reporting. This was noticed by his CNN colleague Jon Passantino, who used to manage the webpage for Fox News,
and suggested the editorial choice was “extraordinary and unusual.”
[I used to manage the Fox News dot com homepage. This would be an extraordinary and unusual decision to run this denial as the top story despite having confirmed key details of the reporting
Oliver Darcy
@oliverdarcy
Replying to @oliverdarcy @JenGriffinFNC and @BretBaier
Just remarkable that after Fox's own reporter *CONFIRMS* key details of The Atlantic's report, this is the headline on the network's website.]
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But Fox News personality Laura Ingraham seemed to be bashing her colleagues for a “fake” story on Friday evening.
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It would save a lot of time if the Media would just tell us what fake stories they will be announcing over the next six weeks, and when each story will be released]
The uncomfortable position the network is in was hilariously driven home by Pete Buttigieg on Friday evening.
[PeteButtigieg
Even if you don't believe the multiple news organizations—including @FoxNews—that have confirmed these reports, believe your own eyes.
These comments are part of Donald Trump's pattern of disrespect for the military since he faked an injury to get out of serving in Vietnam.]
Chaos at Fox News as analysts refuse to believe the network’s reporting — because makes Trump look awful
Here is the Fox News reporting:...[twt]
yikes, q mainstream? misread CDC?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/medical-experts-slam-joni-ernst-for-echoing-qanon-conspiracy-theory-that-19-count-is-exaggerated-truly-unconscionable/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/cnn-reporter-unleashes-a-brilliant-fact-check-on-the-deluge-of-rnc-lies-its-hard-for-me-to-know-where-to-start/
convention
The lies and distortions at the 2020 Republican National Convention have been numerous, including claims that President Donald Trump had a first-rate response to the coronavirus and claims that he has tried to protect health coverage for Americans with preexisting health conditions. In response to this dishonesty Wednesday night, CNN’s Daniel Dale launched into a brilliant stream of fact-check of the mendacious event.
Dale told his colleague, Anderson Cooper: “There is just so much dishonestly and inaccuracy at this convention. It’s hard for me to know where to start. It’s not just big things like this broad revisionism on the response to the pandemic — it’s little inaccuracies, carelessness.”
Dale noted that Lara Trump, who is married to one of the president’s sons, Eric Trump, use a “fake Abraham Lincoln quote” — adding that “a number of tonight’s false claims came from the vice president, Mike Pence. He repeated one of Trump’s own favorite lies. He said that because of them, we now have Veteran’s Choice. As I’ve said over and over, (President Barack) Obama signed that Choice law in 2014.”
Dale explained that while Trump signed a 2018 law that “modified and expanded the Choice program,” he “did not create it.” And Dale went on to point out that “Pence boasted twice that Trump suspended all travel from China. He didn’t; he imposed a partial travel restriction that contained multiple exemptions.”
Pence, at the 2020 RNC, claimed that former Vice President Joe Biden supports open borders, but Dale noted, “Biden does not support completely unrestricted migration.”
Dale slammed Rep. Elise Stefanik, another RNC speaker, for saying that the impeachment of Trump by House Democrats in 2019 was illegal — and told Cooper, “Come on, it’s legal. Impeachment is in the constitution. And like Trump himself, we had Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany claiming that Trump stands by Americans with preexisting conditions. Look, Trump has repeatedly tried to get bills passed to weaken Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. And he is currently in court fighting to get the entirety of Obamacare overturned.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/networks-warned-the-republican-national-convention-will-be-a-disinformation-cesspool/
Ina letter to the presidents of major news networks Monday, a coalition of progressive groups asked that the airing of the Republican National Convention be delayed by one minute in order to “help prevent the spread of dangerous disinformation in real time.”
Members of the coalition—including UltraViolet Action, ACRONYM, BlackPAC, Color of Change PAC, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and others—warn that a number of scheduled speakers at the RNC, with speeches and prime time coverage kicking off Monday night, have actively spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, police violence, and abortion.
“As our nation battles the dual crises of systemic racism and the coronavirus pandemic, relying on the media for factual, life-saving information is crucial to the health of the American people and our democracy,” the letter to the presidents of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBCUniversal and CBS reads:[twt]
the letter highlights Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who has advocated against wearing masks to curb the spread of Covid-19, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple made famous when a photo of the pair waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters went viral, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has compared Covid-19 deaths to deaths from influenza while pushing the theory that the coronavirus was developed in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the letter.
The groups called out President Donald Trump for pushing a “birther” conspiracy against former President Barack Obama and, more recently, about Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
“The best way to combat the spread of disinformation is to stop it at its source,” the letter reads. “By putting the Republican National Convention on a one-minute time delay, your network will be able to actively correct disinformation in real time, and prevent the American people from being lied to on your airwaves. The future of our country, our people, and our democracy are at stake.”
CNN‘s Brian Stelter warned that news outlets would have to deal with“asymmetric lying” by the nation’s political parties, noting CNN fact-checks of the DNC convention last week showed the Democrats spoke mostly in “generalities or offered subjective opinions” but that factual assertions made by convention speakers “have largely been accurate.”
“We have seen throughout history how false theories and misinformation have been used to justify oppression and racism if they are not countered and debunked in real time,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, director of Higher Heights Political Fund. “The rhetoric that is anticipated to come from the RNC will put lives in danger whether it is misinformation about Covid-19 or language that can be used to justify attacks on Black and brown people. We strongly implore all of the major networks to institute a time delay and fact checking because it can and will save lives.”
Bridget Todd, a spokesperson for UltraViolet Action, warned the GOP gathering would be a “disinformation cesspool filled with toxic misogyny, virulent racism, and flat out lies about the coronavirus pandemic.”
Todd said that while it’s not possible to keep the networks from airing the convention, “we can ask that they do their part to correct disinformation in real time and help stop its spread.”
“CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS have previously cut away or run fact-checks in real-time during coronavirus briefings, and this should be no different,” Todd added. “We’ve seen what happens when disinformation is allowed to spread unchecked, and the risks are just too great.”
...
an 820
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/why-arent-journalists-holding-trump-and-his-allies-accountable-for-their-lies-and-distortions/
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omg
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/report-facebook-employees-have-evidence-showing-pattern-preferential-treatment-right-wing
A new BuzzFeed report reveals that Facebook employees have evidence that shows the platform gives preferential treatment to right-wing Facebook pages, which is at stark odds with conservatives’ frequent and unsubstantiated claims that social media platforms are censoring right-wing accounts.
An August 6 article from Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac reports that there are growing internal concerns about how Facebook handles misinformation, particularly misinformation related to voting and the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
In internal message boards, employees questioned “the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages” including the far-right outlet Breitbart, which Facebook considers a “trusted new source.” Reportedly, employees have evidence that shows “a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages,” including interference in Facebook’s fact-checking process from company leaders such as Facebook Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan. Kaplan, a former deputy White House chief of staff for the George W. Bush administration, reportedly pushed for Facebook to partner with right-wing groups and wasinvolved in nixing proposed solutions to stop political polarization on the platform.
This reporting comes as right-wing politicians and figures continue to baselessly accuse Facebook and other social media platforms of censorship and anti-conservative bias. During the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing last month, conservative lawmakers repeatedly alleged that Facebook is biased against right-leaning content. Additionally, Fox News attacked Facebook and accused the platform of censorship after Facebook enforced its policy against COVID-19 misinformation.
Media Matters has repeatedly found that claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms are false. In multiple studies over the course of several years, Media Matters has shown that right-leaning and left-leaning content thrives on Facebook, with right-leaning Facebook pages earning more interactions -- reactions, comments, shares -- on posts about voting and posts about protests against police brutality than do posts from left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages. In recent weeks, this trend has continued to hold.
BuzzFeed’s latest report about Facebook employees claiming there is a pattern of preferential treatment toward right-leaning Facebook pages and figures further underscores how Facebook has caved to pressure from conservatives, despite evidence repeatedly debunking conservatives’ baseless accusations. From BuzzFeed’s August 6 article:
With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.
Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.
Zuckerberg danced around the question, but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company's news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)
“This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don't have others in the last 90 days,” Zuckerberg said. “So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make sense to remove them.”
But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.
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aha, not new? pre-truth? ;)
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/historian-details-how-anti-science-views-of-white-evangelicals-in-the-south-helped-fuel-the-2nd-wave-of-19/
alex h
when the coronavirus pandemic was killing thousands of New York City residents in the spring, many far-right Republicans in Texas and the Deep South argued that they shouldn’t be forced to practice social distancing or wear protective face masks because of a Northeastern Corridor problem. They failed to realize that pandemics, from the Black Death in Medieval times to the Spanish flu in 1918/1919, can rapidly spread from one place to another.Historian Laura Ellyn Smith, in a blistering op-ed for the Washington Post, discusses the fact that COVID-19 has been hitting the South so hard recently — and argues that the “anti-science” views of far-right white Christian fundamentalists are partly to blame.
“After initially striking the Northeast and Pacific Northwest,” Smith explains, “COVID-19 has spread throughout the country. And now, the states with the highest new cases per capita are those across the South and Southwest. The Bible Belt — which stretches from South Carolina through the Deep South, west across Texas and Arizona — has seen high numbers of cases. And although the United States has seen cases everywhere, these states’ early reopening plans and hands-off measures — most recently, a ban by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on local mask requirements — reflect a cultural emphasis on prioritizing freedom from government dictate and an anti-science bias rooted in the history of the region.”
Smith, who graduated from the University of Mississippi and now teaches politics at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, England, notes how far-right southerners and supporters of President Donald Trump who “have resisted even simple measures, including social distancing and the now highly politicized wearing of masks.” And she points out that in Palm Beach County, Florida, extremists claimed that proponents of mandatory mask-wearing in public places “want to throw God’s wonderful breathing system out.”
To understand the origins of the “anti-science bias” in the Bible Belt, Smith notes, one needs to examine history.
"Where did this anti-science bias come from?” Smith writes. “It became rooted in southern culture and politics with the Scopes trial, popularly known as the Monkey Trial, in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. The trial stemmed from the modernism rising in the post-World War I era. Southern whites felt that these changes challenged their way of life, including seeing the teaching of evolution as an attack on traditional values. They moved aggressively to retain socio-cultural control in a time of transformative change by limiting modern influences.”
After the Scopes trial, Smith notes, “anti-intellectualism” in the South “drew strength from the gathering of religious fundamentalists whose mission to spread their beliefs became more public as southern whites responded to changes that occurred as the result of the civil rights movement.” During the 1960s, Smith recalls, “White southern evangelicals saw their longstanding regional dominance threatened by civil rights activism and federal legislation expanding black civil rights…. During the same period, Congress and the High Court shattered Jim Crow segregation and banned prayer in public schools.”
Smith adds that in the 1980s and 1990s, “southern white evangelicals, who increasingly became the base of the Republican Party, came to associate intellectualism and science with coastal elites who looked down upon them and scorned their values…. This political culture fueled ever-increasing anti-intellectualism that traced its origins back to the Scopes trial.”
Smith wraps up her op-ed by arguing that the type of “anti-intellectual” forces that raged in the Bible Belt in past are still alive and well — only now, their target is anti-coronavirus measures.
“COVID-19 is proving that an unwillingness to listen to doctors and scientists can do great harm,” Smith warns. “Religious freedom and public health aren’t actually incompatible, but countering the anti-science bias that has become a stalking horse for the culture wars is crucial to creating better policies and allowing citizens to make the best possible choices for themselves and for society.”
820 an
CNN fact checker Daniel Dale on Thursday showed how President Donald Trump’s campaign has been blatantly manipulating photos of former Vice President Joe Biden to make it look like he has spent the last year sitting in his basement.
While appearing on “New Day,” Dale dissected images of Biden in Trump’s new ad and showed how the campaign used Photoshop to put the photos in a completely different context.
“[The ad] uses three misleading images, one of which is egregiously altered,” Dale said. “That first image shows Joe Biden speaking at a town hall in Iowa outdoors at a nature preserve… what the ad does is remove the microphone from his hand and remove the trees, replacing it with a wall to make him seem like he’s alone and not talking to anyone.”
Dale also said that Trump campaign manipulated a photo of Biden praying at a church to make him look weak.
“A third misleading use of an image in that ad, they also show Biden sort of looking down, hands clasped, looking defeated,” he said. “Well, he was actually praying at an African-American church in Delaware after the death of George Floyd. This wasn’t him looking downcast because he’s being beaten by Donald Trump, it was a solemn moment used to make him look bad.”[vid]
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-conservative-media-are-killing-trumps-campaign/
Even close allies of Donald Trump are flummoxed about why he hadn’t grasped earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic that it was in his own best interests to “at least pantomime[ a sense of command over the crisis or convey] compassion for the millions of Americans impacted by it,” according toThe Washington Post.
Part of the answer, per the report, was “his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error.” But another factor was the existence of “a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News.” Trump, a malignant narcissist, is known to lash out at aides who provide him bad news so it appears that they’ve fed him a steady diet of the kind of Pollyannaish stories that are a mainstay of the conservative media’s coverage of the pandemic, and of his regime’s response to it.
Trump is running a historically awful campaign for re-election. At present, his twin pitches for a second term are his ability to pass a rudimentary test designed to diagnose dementia and a promise to deploy thousands of unidentifiable and poorly trained federal paramilitaries to American cities, against the protests of state and local officials, in the name of protecting statues and federal buildings from vandalism.
For anyone who consumes a balanced media diet, these strategic choices are inexplicable. While it’s true that as we approach 150,000 mostly avoidable deaths from the pandemic and millions continue to file for unemployment, he doesn’t have a lot to run on, a competent candidate would make an effort to show that he understands how this crisis is impacting people and demonstrate that he’s focused on containing the outbreak and rebuilding–whether or not it’s true. This is politics 101.
polls find that Trump is losing to former Vice President Joe Biden on both of the quixotic issues he’s chosen to litigate the race; more voters question his cognitive abilities and physical stamina than do Biden’s, and while a majority of Americans oppose the removal of Civil War memorials, Biden is nonetheless more trusted to “effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues,” AKA “law and order.” And polls aside, Democrats cleaned Republicans’ collective clock running on healthcare against Trump’s argle-bargle about invading refugee caravans in the 2018 midterms, long before the pandemic hit.
But what seems like an incomprehensible strategy on its face makes perfect sense when you consider that, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is an avid consumer of conservative media who tends to be impervious to advice from experienced Republican campaign hands. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s been led astray by the conservative press.
I’m sure that if you look hard, you could find a conservative commentator or two who acknowledge the existence of peaceful protesters standing against systemic discrimination in policing.But you’d have to really look for them. The overwhelming majority of right-wing discourse about these protests is premised on the belief that everyone out in the streets are rioting, looting or engaging in vandalism. It is also a given in these circles that the protests are motivated by Marxism or a desire to destroy the “American way of life” or whatever other fanciful idea occurs to the conservative commentariat–anything other than racial injustice.
That discourse leads to a significant reality-gap. While there were scattered instances of vandalism and rioting early on, real reporters on the ground in cities across the country consistently describe mostly peaceful protests, with small numbers of people occasionally crossing the line and damaging property.
Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t ensconced within the right-wing media bubble have been alarmed and appalled at an endless stream of reports–almost always accompanied by viral videos–of unprovoked police violence against reporters, legal observers and of course protesters who were only “guilty” of refusing to disperse when ordered–or in many cases, guilty of nothing at all. That police brutality has contributed to an extraordinary shift in public opinion toward the Movement for Black Lives and away from Trump’s preferred narrative of what’s happening in American cities.
A similar dynamic may be driving Trump’s mystifying decision to make his ability to pass a simple dementia test–and his bragging that the doctors who administered it were shocked that he passed–into a news story. It’s the kind of attack that would be condemned as dirty and vicious if it were delivered by an opponent.
For those of us outside the conservative epistemic bubble, Joe Biden stutters, is prone to gaffes and suffers from occasional “senior moments” when he flubs a date or gets a number wrong. Most of us have had an older relative or acquaintance who was perfectly sharp and entirely “there,” as Biden pretty clearly is, but who had similar lapses. (My late grandmother did eventually develop dementia in her mid-90s, but she started having those “senior moments” 20 years earlier, when she was about the same age as Biden.)
While this line of attack is born of desperation as the Trump campaign has failed to land solid punches on Biden–a white man who’s been around forever and is well known as a moderate, mainstream Democrat–it’s also a matter of faith in the conservative press that the “liberal media” are covering up Biden’s dementia, and that Trump would have a good chance of turning his campaign around if only he manages to expose the former Vice President as the drooling dotard they claim he is. As Greg Sargent reported a couple of weeks back, “Fox News has been relentlessly pushing the line that Joe Biden might be suffering from dementia.”
It would be wrong to attribute Trump’s stunning decline in support among seniors–long a reliably GOP-leaning constituency that he needs to remain competitive in the must-win state of Florida–to these hamfisted attacks on Biden’s cognitive acuity. That decline is clearly a result of his gross mismanagement of the pandemic, and of his party’s consistent refrain that we must sacrifice the elderly and infirm on the altar of the stock market. But those attacks certainly can’t be helping.
The carefully constructed alternate reality presented by the conservative media is a double-edged sword. They keep the Republican base engaged by maintaining a constant state of anxiety about the horrors of immigrants, socialists, modest expansions of public health insurance, tax increases on the wealthy, etc. But while savvier Republican operatives rely more on polling and focus groups to devise strategy, Trump’s ego drives him–and the sycophants he surrounds himself with–to embrace their partisan propaganda as reality. And that appears rendered him and his campaign incapable of making the substantive and enduring course-correction that they so desperately need.
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aha: trump whisperer, fox feedback loop? alt fact post truth there's an alternate reality made of images on Fox (videotape editied, which is a futher subset of story, which is a further subset of POV of that story, which is in turn a subset of other stories/ bigger context; recall also seattle autonomous zone with camo guy superimposed/photoshopped, when called on it call a "collage" tho only 2 pix?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-why-the-white-house-is-sending-stormtroopers-into-portland/
In one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere.
Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now.
We should not allow ourselves to become numb to this. It is helpful psychologically–even if tired and stale as a rhetorical device–to remind ourselves what the reactions would be if a Democrat were acting similarly. Imagine if President Obama had sent in in military-garbed federal stormtroopers to round up Tea Party protesters into unmarked cars, over the top of the objections of local governors and mayors. It’s unthinkable. It’s the sort of thing that drove bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories like Jade Helm, but that if any shred of them were true would instantly have embroiled the country in a civil war.
So why is Trump doing it?
many theories abound—none of them entirely convincing on their own, but all of them deeply disturbing. One explanation is that it’s a trial run for future police state actions, partly to push the window of the possible, partly to desensitize the public to further abuses, and partly to see precisely what they can get away with and what Americans will tolerate.
This is no doubt true to a certain extent, but the challenge is that it also carries enormous downside risk. If Trump doesn’t win re-election he has less than six months left in his presidency–hardly time enough for a deeply unpopular and divisive president to engineer a police state coup. And just as with the outrage in Lafayette Square, the mere action itself will likely make Trump even more unpopular with the few undecided voters who remain.
Another convergent explanation is that making a show of supposed toughness in conducting military counterinsurgency in Democratic-controlled cities that want no part of it will thrill Trump’s base. This is reasonable to assume, since Trump’s base takes no greater joy than in seeing authoritarian cruelty exercised against their political enemies. And it’s likely true, since Trump is obsessed with his base to the exclusion of all else beyond his own personal profit. But the problem is that almost everyone in the Trump campaign’s immediate orbit beyond the president himself knows that Trump must expand beyond his shrinking base to have any chance of winning re-election. The more Trump gives aging bigots dopamine hits, the more the rest of the country falls away from him. Camouflaged stormtroopers used against American citizens will almost certainly lose him more votes than he gains.
But there is a third explanation, simultaneously dumber and yet more convincing: the Fox News effect. Trump spends endless hours watching garbage cable television, specifically One America News (OAN) and Fox News. Judging from Trump’s tweets, his entire political universe revolves around Fox News–and, more recently, the even more bizarrely propagandistic OAN when even Fox News fails to adequately toe the line.
Ever since the beginning of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Fox News has been portraying liberal American cities as hellscapes of violence in which the police and the Trump Administration played the role of hero against rampaging hordes. Most Americans, of course, didn’t see it that way. But if you live entirely in the Fox News bubble, then this narrative is as self-evident a truth as the rising of the sun in the east. Most recently, Fox News has been describing Portland in particular, in the words of former Media Matters for America contributor Oliver Willis, as if it were Baghdad circa 2003. This is not the case, of course. Crime rates in Portland have been on a steady decline for decades, with the last month being no significant exception. In fact, the worst Acting HHS Secretary Wolf could point to was literally a few instances of graffiti. No kidding.
But if Fox News were the sum of your reality, you would believe that emergency action needed to be taken before the residents started to erect a Thunderdome and the services of Snake Plisskenwould be required. You would send in the troops despite the potential cost out of a belief that relieved Americans would be desperately grateful for your embrace of “law and order” (even if it were heavy on the “order” and light on the “law.”) You would do whatever it took to bring the situation to heel, and figure the public approval would follow from the new Pax Trumpiana. After all, Fox News declared it must be so.
This last scenario is admittedly ridiculous. But it’s also likely closest to the truth. While figures like Stephen Miller no doubt have a laser focus on instituting an authoritarian apartheid regime to save white supremacist Republican rule the demographic tsunami preparing to overwhelm them, they are not the president.Donald Trump is. Trump is a man of impulse, not of plans. His head is not set on the next 20 years of power, but on tomorrow’s cable news ratings. The constructed reality of Fox News is his reality. The rest of the authoritarian project follows from there.
And that more than anything else likely explains why the president is precipitating a constitutional crisis by sending stormtroopers into Portland.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-sociophysicist-explains-how-to-save-the-internet-from-clutter-lies-and-garbage/
Once upon a time, the internet was seen a wondrous fount of knowledge and information, empowering users and spreading democracy. This utopian view resonated widely with early adopters in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, but it resonated much more broadly around the world in 2011, during the Arab Spring. There were always dark shadows noted by observers, as in Gene Rochlin’s 1997 book, “_{Trapped in the Net}_,” but collectively we’ve been blindsided and bewildered by how different the online experience has become — how much of a marketplace for rumor, fear, conspiracy theories and polarized worldviews, all watched over by purportedly neutral platform manipulations bringing us exactly what we’re told we want.
Could it be possible to recover that original promise? In a way, that promise was always naïve, as illuminated by Paulina Borsook’s 2000 book, “_{Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech}_.” As Borsook notes, it took more than half a century of government investment to make the internet’s commercial incarnation possible, contrary to Silicon Valley’s self-serving mythos. But democratic theory, history, philosophy and psychology is far richer than libertarians suppose, and there is a much more sober, realistic version of that promise — one that, for example, scientists collaborating worldwide have experienced for more than a generation now.
So could something like that become possible for all of us? A new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour strongly suggests that it could, and lays out an initial framework for what it might be like, reshaping things from the bottom up: “_{How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online}_.” As the abstract explains, the problem can be simply put:
The current online ecosystem has been designed predominantly to capture user attention rather than to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. How can transparency and autonomy be promoted instead, thus fostering the positive potential of the web?
Framed like that, this is a scientific problem, susceptible to scientific solutions. Of course, knowing that solutions exist and implementing are two different things: Consider theclimate crisis. For a better understanding of how such a future could come to be, and what some specific steps would look like, Salon reached out to lead author Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. This interview has been edited, as is customary, for clarity and length.
What struck me first on seeing your article was that it’s not reactive, but rather affirms a positive, arguing that behavioral science “can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online.” So before talking about the paper itself, I’d like to ask about what informs your positive approach.
I think a bit of forward-looking is probably necessary. We need to be careful we don’t get into a whack-a-mole game. So, I was searching for more sustainable solutions, and you get end up getting less reactive and trying to find solutions that come from the bottom up, to think about how to change the system itself.
Were there any previous examples in internet history that were resonant for you?
One of the rare examples of online environments that promote truth — one of the shining examples — is Wikipedia. This was an inspiration, to think about how different this website looks, compared to Amazon, how it’s designed and how things are arranged.
Your paper draws attention to the asymmetry between what platforms know about users and vice versa. How do you characterize that asymmetry, and what negative consequences result that you propose to address?
The asymmetry probably comes out of dependencies we live with in this information-rich world. It gives the human brain too much to process, so we must rely on some kind of curation. That’s what the platforms do for us. That’s probably why they are successful. Google and Facebook are skyrocketing, successful, because we really, really depend on them to navigate through this information world.
Additionally, “intransparency” contributes to it. We get recommendations that we cannot really follow where they actually come from, what factors contribute to them. So we are getting increasingly dependent on intransparent platforms, where we have to rely on trust. And the remedy we propose is increased transparency, and giving back a bit of autonomy to the user.
To improve the online environment, you identify available but untapped cues and two kinds of behavioral interventions — “nudging” and “boosting” — that employ these cues. The cues differ in different contexts, so let’s start with the interventions. Folks may have heard of them, but just to be clear, what do each of them do?
They are both classic behavioral interventions, so they’re more umbrella terms. They both interact with the decision process. “Nudges” do that mainly or exclusively through the choice architecture. So whenever parts of the choice architecture are emphasized to steer behavior or influence behavior, that’s nudging. In our case, we just try to draw the attention of the reader to some piece of information that might be good for them — that will be the broad class of nudging....
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/outright-lies-how-voting-misinformation-flourishes-on-facebook/
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guk 9/19 vid lnx
https://yyy.theguardian.com/media/2019/sep/19/**why-cant-we-agree-on-whats-true-anymore**
see https://yyy.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/29/why-we-stopped-trusting-elites-the-new-populism
It's not about foreign trolls, filter bubbles or fake news. Technology encourages us to believe we can all have first-hand access to the ‘real’ facts – and now we can’t stop fighting about it.
by William Davies
Published on Thu 19 Sep 2019
We live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, in everything from the latest movie reviews to sports commentary to the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. These complaints and controversies take up a growing share of public discussion.
Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed. The “mainstream media” is the principal focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an occasionally troubling window into their thinking.
But this is not simply an anti-journalist sentiment. A similar fury can just as easily descend on a civil servant or independent expert whenever their veneer of neutrality seems to crack, apparently revealing prejudices underneath. Sometimes a report or claim is dismissed as biased or inaccurate for the simple reason that it is unwelcome: to a Brexiter, every bad economic forecast is just another case of the so-called project fear. A sense that the game is rigged now fuels public debate.
Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more? – podcast
Read more]
This mentality now spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world. A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment.
This spirit of indignation was once the natural property of the left, which has long resented the establishment bias of the press. But in the present culture war, the right points to universities, the BBC and civil service as institutions that twist our basic understanding of reality to their own ends. Everyone can point to evidence that justifies their outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable.
This is not as simple as distrust. The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. It is a mindset that begins with legitimate curiosity about what motivates a given media story, but which ends in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world. We can all probably locate ourselves somewhere on this spectrum, between the curiosity of the engaged citizen and the corrosive cynicism of the climate denier. The question is whether this mentality is doing us any good, either individually or collectively.
Public life has become like a play whose audience is unwilling to suspend disbelief. Any utterance by a public figure can be unpicked in search of its ulterior motive. As cynicism grows, even judges, the supposedly neutral upholders of the law, are publicly accused of personal bias. Once doubt descends on public life, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works. One effect of this is that facts no longer seem to matter (the phenomenon misleadingly dubbed “post-truth”). But the crisis of democracy and of truth are one and the same: individuals are increasingly suspicious of the “official” stories they are being told, and expect to witness things for themselves.
On one level, heightened scepticism towards the establishment is a welcome development. A more media-literate and critical citizenry ought to be less easy for the powerful to manipulate. It may even represent a victory for the type of cultural critique pioneered by intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall in the 1970s and 80s, revealing the injustices embedded in everyday cultural expressions and interactions.
But it is possible to have too much scepticism. How exactly do we distinguish this critical mentality from that of the conspiracy theorist, who is convinced that they alone have seen through the official version of events? Or to turn the question around, how might it be possible to recognise the most flagrant cases of bias in the behaviour of reporters and experts, but nevertheless to accept that what they say is often a reasonable depiction of the world?
It is tempting to blame the internet, populists or foreign trolls for flooding our otherwise rational society with lies. But this underestimates the scale of the technological and philosophical transformations that are under way. The single biggest change in our public sphere is that we now have an unimaginable excess of news and content, where once we had scarcity. Suddenly, the analogue channels and professions we depended on for our knowledge of the world have come to seem partial, slow and dispensable.
And yet, contrary to initial hype surrounding big data, the explosion of information available to us is making it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth. As the quantity of information increases, the need to pick out bite-size pieces of content rises accordingly. In this radically sceptical age, questions of where to look, what to focus on and who to trust are ones that we increasingly seek to answer for ourselves, without the help of intermediaries. This is a liberation of sorts, but it is also at the heart of our deteriorating confidence in public institutions.
The current threat to democracy is often seen to emanate from new forms of propaganda, with the implication that lies are being deliberately fed to a naive and over-emotional public. The simultaneous rise of populist parties and digital platforms has triggered well-known anxieties regarding the fate of truth in democratic societies. Fake news and internet echo chambers are believed to manipulate and ghettoise certain communities, for shadowy ends. Key groups – millennials or the white working-class, say – are accused of being easily persuadable, thanks to their excessive sentimentality.
This diagnosis exaggerates old-fashioned threats while overlooking new phenomena. Over-reliant on analogies to 20th century totalitarianism, it paints the present moment as a moral conflict between truth and lies, with an unthinking public passively consuming the results. But our relationship to information and news is now entirely different: it has become an active and critical one, that is deeply suspicious of the official line. Nowadays, everyone is engaged in spotting and rebutting propaganda of one kind or another, curating our news feeds, attacking the framing of the other side and consciously resisting manipulation. In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might once have brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their compromises and biases.
The threat of misinformation and propaganda should not be denied. As thescholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have shown in their book Network Propaganda, there is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem on the American right through which conspiracy theories and untruths get recycled, between Breitbart, Fox News, talk radio and social media.Meanwhile, the anti-vaxx movement is becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. This is a situation where simple misinformation poses a serious threat to society.
But away from these eye-catching cases, things look less clear-cut. The majority of people in northern Europe still regularly encounter mainstream news and information. Britain is a long way from the US experience, thanks principally to the presence of the BBC, which, for all its faults, still performs a basic function in providing a common informational experience. It is treated as a primary source of news by 60% of people in the UK. Even 42% of Brexit party and Ukip voters get their news from the BBC.
Protesters with a sign reading 'BBC fake news' in Westminster, London, May 2019
Protesters in London earlier this year. Photograph: Avpics/Alamy]
The panic surrounding echo chambers and so-called filter bubbles is largely groundless. If we think of an echo chamber as a sealed environment, which only circulates opinions and facts that are agreeable to its participants, it is a rather implausible phenomenon. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that just 8% of the UK public are at risk of becoming trapped in such a clique.
Trust in the media is low, but this entrenched scepticism long predates the internet or contemporary populism. From the Sun’s lies about Hillsborough to the BBC’s failure to expose Jimmy Savile as early as they might, to the fevered enthusiasm for the Iraq war that gripped much of Fleet Street, the British public has had plenty of good reasons to distrust journalists. Even so, the number of people in the UK who trust journalists to tell the truth has actually risen slightly since the 1980s.
What, then, has changed? The key thing is that the elites of government and the media have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their prominence in the public eye. They have become more like celebrities, anti-heroes or figures in a reality TV show. And digital platforms now provide a public space to identify and rake over the flaws, biases and falsehoods of mainstream institutions. The result is an increasingly sceptical citizenry, each seeking to manage their media diet, checking up on individual journalists in order to resist the pernicious influence of the establishment.
There are clear and obvious benefits to this, where it allows hateful and manipulative journalism to be called out. It is reassuring to discover the large swell of public sympathy for the likes of Ben Stokes and Gareth Thomas, and their families, who have been harassed by the tabloids in recent days. But this also generates a mood of outrage, which is far more focused on denouncing bad and biased reporting than with defending the alternative. Across the political spectrum, we are increasingly distracted and enraged by what our adversaries deem important and how they frame it. It is not typically the media’s lies that provoke the greatest fury online, but the discovery that an important event has been ignored or downplayed. While it is true that arguments rage over dodgy facts and figures (concerning climate change or the details of Britain’s trading relations), many of the most bitter controversies of our news cycle concern the framing and weighting of different issues and how they are reported, rather than the facts of what actually happened.
The problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the “mainstream media”, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public institutions. Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story. Such scepticism is healthy and, in many ways, the just deserts of an establishment that has been caught twisting the truth too many times.But political problems arise once we turn against all representations and framings of reality, on the basis that these are compromised and biased – as if some purer, unmediated access to the truth might be possible instead. This is a seductive, but misleading ideal.
Every human culture throughout history has developed ways to record experiences and events, allowing them to endure. From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. Newspapers and broadcasters share reports, photographs and footage of things that have happened in politics, business, society and culture. Court documents and the Hansard parliamentary reports provide records of what has been said in court and in parliament. Systems of accounting, audit and economics help to establish basic facts of what takes place in businesses and markets.
Traditionally, it is through these systems, which are grounded in written testimonies and public statements, that we have learned what is going on in the world. But in the past 20 years, this patchwork of record-keeping has been supplemented and threatened by a radically different system, which is transforming the nature of empirical evidence and memory. One term for this is “big data”, which highlights the exponential growth in the quantity of data that societies create, thanks to digital technologies.
The reason there is so much data today is that more and more of our social lives are mediated digitally. Internet browsers, smartphones, social media platforms, smart cards and every other smart interface record every move we make. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are constantly leaving traces of our activities, no matter how trivial.
But it is not the escalating quantity of data that constitutes the radical change. Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important. Journalists did not just report news, but determined what counted as newsworthy. TV crews turned up at events that were deemed of national significance. The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties.
The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged “important” to be captured. Consciously, we photograph events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone. For the first time in human history, recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed separately.
This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply “speak for itself”. Patterns will emerge, traces will come to light. This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.
Andrejevic argues that the rise of this fantasy coincides with growing impatience with the efforts of reporters and experts to frame reality in meaningful ways. He writes that “we might describe the contemporary media moment – and its characteristic attitude of sceptical savviness regarding the contrivance of representation – as one that implicitly embraces the ideal of framelessness”. From this perspective, every controversy can in principle be settled thanks to the vast trove of data – CCTV, records of digital activity and so on – now available to us. Reality in its totality is being recorded, and reporters and officials look dismally compromised by comparison.
One way in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers. “Pics or it didn’t happen” is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience. It is often a single image that seems to capture the truth of an event, only now there are cameras everywhere. No matter how many times it is disproven, the notion that “the camera doesn’t lie” has a peculiar hold over our imaginations. In a society of blanket CCTV and smartphones, there are more cameras than people, and the torrent of data adds to the sense that the truth is somewhere amid the deluge, ignored by mainstream accounts. The central demand of this newly sceptical public is “so show me”.
This transformation in our recording equipment is responsible for much of the outrage directed at those formerly tasked with describing the world. The rise of blanket surveillance technologies has paradoxical effects, raising expectations for objective knowledge to unrealistic levels, and then provoking fury when those in the public eye do not meet them.
On the one hand, data science appears to make the question of objective truth easier to settle. Slow and imperfect institutions of social science and journalism can be circumvented, and we can get directly to reality itself, unpolluted by human bias. Surely, in this age of mass data capture, the truth will become undeniable.
On the other hand, as the quantity of data becomes overwhelming – greater than human intelligence can comprehend – our ability to agree on the nature of reality seems to be declining. Once everything is, in principle, recordable, disputes heat up regarding what counts as significant in the first place. It turns out that the “frames” that journalists and experts use to reduce and organise information are indispensable to its coherence and meaning.
What we are discovering is that, once the limitations on data capture are removed, there are escalating opportunities for conflict over the nature of reality. Every time a mainstream media agency reports the news, they can instantly be met with the retort: but what about this other event, in another time and another place, that you failed to report? What about the bits you left out? What about the other voters in the town you didn’t talk to? When editors judge the relative importance of stories, they now confront a panoply of alternative judgements. Where records are abundant, fights break out over relevance and meaning.
Professional editors have always faced the challenge of reducing long interviews to short consumable chunks and discarding the majority of photos or text. Editing is largely a question of what to throw away.This necessitates value judgements, that readers and audiences once had little option but to trust. Now, however, the question of which image or sentence is truly significant opens irresolvable arguments. One person’s offcut is another person’s revealing nugget.
Political agendas can be pursued this way, including cynical ones aimed at painting one’s opponents in the worst possible light. An absurd or extreme voice can be represented as typical of a political movement (known as “nutpicking”). Taking quotes out of context is one of the most disruptive of online ploys, which provokes far more fury than simple insults. Rather than deploying lies or “fake news”, it messes with the significance of data, taking the fact that someone did say or write something, but violating their intended meaning. No doubt professional journalists have always descended to such tactics from time to time, but now we are all at it, provoking a vicious circle of misrepresentation.
Then consider the status of photography and video. It is not just that photographic evidence can be manipulated to mislead, but that questions will always survive regarding camera angle and context. What happened before or after a camera started rolling? What was outside the shot? These questions provoke suspicion, often with good reason.
The most historic example of such a controversy predates digital media. The Zapruder film, which captured the assassination of John F Kennedy, became the most scrutinised piece of footage in history. The film helped spawn countless conspiracy theories, with individual frames becoming the focus of controversies, with competing theories as to what they reveal. The difficulty of completely squaring any narrative with a photographic image is a philosophical one as much as anything, and the Zapruder film gave a glimpse of the sorts of media disputes that have become endemic now cameras are ubiquitous parts of our social lives and built environments.
Emily Maitlis ‘rolling her eyes’ on Newsnight
Minor gestures pored over for hidden meanings … Emily Maitlis (left) with Nadhim Zahawi and Barry Gardiner on the BBC’s Newsnight. Photograph: BBC]
Today, minor gestures that would usually have passed without comment only a decade ago become pored over in search of their hidden message. What did Emily Maitlis mean when she rolled her eyes at Barry Gardiner on Newsnight? What was Jeremy Corbyn mouthing during Prime Minister’s Questions? Who took the photo of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds sitting at a garden table in July, and why? This way madness lies.
While we are now able to see evidence for ourselves, we all have conflicting ideas of what bit to attend to, and what it means. The camera may not lie, but that is because it does not speak at all. As we become more fixated on some ultimate gold-standard of objective truth, which exceeds the words of mere journalists or experts, so the number of interpretations applied to the evidence multiplies. As our faith in the idea of undeniable proof deepens, so our frustration with competing framings and official accounts rises. All too often, the charge of “bias” means “that’s not my perspective”. Our screen-based interactions with many institutions have become fuelled by anger that our experiences are not being better recognised, along with a new pleasure at being able to complain about it. As the writer and programmer Paul Ford wrote, back in 2011, “the fundamental question of the web” is: “Why wasn’t I consulted?”
What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.
This is the tension that many populist leaders exploit. Officials and elected politicians are painted as cynically self-interested, while the “will of the people” is both pure and obvious. Attacks on the mainstream media follow an identical script: the individuals professionally tasked with informing the public, in this case journalists, are biased and fake. It is widely noted that leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini are enthusiastic users of Twitter, and Boris Johnson has recently begun to use Facebook Live to speak directly to “the people” from Downing Street. Whether it be parliaments or broadcasters, the analogue intermediaries of the public sphere are discredited and circumvented.
What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout even louder about their commitment to “truth”, as some American newspapers have profitably done in the face of Trump. But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past 20 years.
What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? After all, reality becomes incoherent and overwhelming unless it is simplified and narrated in some way or other. And what if we accepted that journalists, editors and public figures will inevitably let cultural and personal biases slip from time to time? A shrug is often the more appropriate response than a howl. If we abandoned the search for some pure and unbiased truth, where might our critical energies be directed instead?
If we recognise that reporting and editing is always a political act (at least in the sense that it asserts the importance of one story rather than another), then the key question is not whether it is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. The problem becomes a quasi-constitutional one, of what processes, networks and money determine how data gets turned into news, and how power gets distributed. On this front, the British media is looking worse and worse, with every year that passes.
The relationship between the government and the press has been getting tighter since the 1980s. This is partly thanks to the overweening power of Rupert Murdoch, and the image management that developed in response. Spin doctors such as Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson, Tom Baldwin, Robbie Gibb and Seumas Milne typically move from the media into party politics, weakening the division between the two.
Then there are those individuals who shift backwards and forwards between senior political positions and the BBC, such as Gibb, Rona Fairhead and James Purnell. The press has taken a very bad turn over recent years, with ex-Chancellor George Osborne becoming editor of the Evening Standard, then the extraordinary recent behaviour of the Daily Telegraph, which seeks to present whatever story or gloss is most supportive of their former star columnist in 10 Downing Street, and rubbishes his opponents. (The Opinion page of the Telegraph website proudly includes a “Best of Boris” section.)
Why we stopped trusting elites
Read more] https://yyy.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/29/why-we-stopped-trusting-elites-the-new-populism
Since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been regular complaints about the revolving door between the financial sector and governmental institutions around the world, most importantly the White House. There has been far less criticism of the similar door that links the media and politics. The exception to this comes from populist leaders, who routinely denounce all “mainstream” democratic and media institutions as a single liberal elite, that acts against the will of the people. One of the reasons they are able to do this is because there is a grain of truth in what they say.
The financial obstacles confronting critical, independent, investigative media are significant. If the Johnson administration takes a more sharply populist turn, the political obstacles could increase, too – Channel 4 is frequently held up as an enemy of Brexit, for example. But let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/propaganda-fox-news-photoshops-gunman-into-stories-about-seattles-autonomous-zone
no pix url
Propaganda’: Fox News photoshops gunman into stories about Seattle’s autonomous zone
Image via Screengrab.
Written by The New Civil Rights Movement June 14, 2020
Legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern noticed that Fox News added a man carrying a military-assault rifle into images of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) on Friday. The CHAZ is a police-free area currently occupied by protesters police violence.
Fox News featured the images on their website without any mention that they had been altered. They placed the exact same gunman in two different photos. In one, the gunman’s left arm had been weirdly cut off in a straight line from the shoulder to the elbow.
Fox claimed that the image of a shattered window in the CHAZ was taken this week, but it seems it was actually taken on May 30.
Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC
Fox News, a totally normal and respectable media outlet, digitally manipulated photos of Seattle’s “autonomous zone” by photoshopping in a gunman. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/ …
View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
“Given how vigorously Fox News personalities have argued that men toting assault weapons in public are not inherently threatening,” Stern wrote, “it’s curious the outlet digitally inserted a man toting a gun to make the autonomous zone seem more threatening and scary.”
Fox News eventually issued the following editor’s note:
A FoxNews.com home page photo collage which originally accompanied this story included multiple scenes from Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ and of wreckage following recent riots. The collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced. In addition, a recent slideshow depicting scenes from Seattle mistakenly included a picture from St. Paul, Minnesota. Fox News regrets these errors.
Here are some reactions to the news of Fox’s photoshopping from Twitter:...
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Robt R
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-deadly-formula-behind-the-fox-news-trump-syndicate
as the coronavirus crisis rages on, Fox News is contributing almost as much to the deaths and disease as is Trump’s White House.
Trump spouts a shocking amount of misinformation during his daily press briefings, but it’s Fox News’ equally misleading coverage of the crisis that closes the lethal circuit of lies.
It’s easy to feel outraged and defeated by Fox News. (“I can’t believe they’re saying that! How are they getting away with this?”) But it’s important to understand its formula for misleading Americans, particularly in the crisis we’re in.
The formula goes like this:
First, deny there’s a problem. Lay the groundwork for later conspiracy theories by calling it “a hoax.” Blame political opponents for “using” the issue to make Trump look bad. Mock anyone taking it seriously, and downplay the consequences.
Then, when deaths mount and the coronavirus can no longer be denied, promote the same dangerous miracle cures Trump promotes.
Third, attack the experts. Question what public-health experts recommend, such as social distancing. Question whether the death toll from Covid-19 is even true, and broadcast misleading graphics. Attack the experts themselves, and parade around alternative “experts” to promote an array of conspiracy theories.
Fourth, deflect attention from Trump’s botched response by blaming others. Blame China! As the virus hits black and brown communities especially hard, trot out the white supremacists.
If nothing else works, revise history.
Finally, make reopening the economy about “freedom,” and attack Democratic governors who are trying to keep people safe.
That’s Fox News’s tried-and-true formula, folks: Deny, promote quack remedies, attack the experts, blame others, and change the subject to “freedom.”
It works for Fox. It keeps Fox viewers. It helps protect Trump.
But it is making a deadly calamity even more deadly.
Polls show that a majority of Republicans think it’s perfectly safe to go to establishments like nail salons and dine-in restaurants, and a new study found that Sean Hannity’s viewers were less likely to adhere to social distancing guidelines.
Meanwhile, a conspiracy theory peddled by Tucker Carlson made it all the way to the White House, where it fell on Trump’s receptive ears and led him to yank a multimillion-dollar grant to an organization on the frontlines of coronavirus research.
In theory, the FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about a catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false and will cause substantial “public harm” if aired. But Trump’s FCC won’t do a thing, and Fox News has no broadcast ethics. It has no journalistic integrity.
If this formula of deceit shows us anything, it’s that they know what they’re doing, and they don’t care who they hurt.
So, what can you do?
First, make a ruckus. Speak out. Write letters to your local paper, and local Fox News outlets.That’s precisely what forced Fox to cut ties with Trish Regan, and with 5G Conspiracy peddlers Diamond and Silk.
Second, boycott Fox’s major advertisers.That helped get Bill O’Reilly off the air.
Third: leverage your power. Correct Fox’s lies when you see them. Share this video with Fox News viewers you care about.
You might just save a life.
Watch:
aha: 2 sep big pict analysis see gt recession as root; (also effect); inequality
see salon, wa mo connects dots
aha critical thinking is systems thinking, it is the antidote to nihilism and authoritarianism, which is radically reductionist
aha: someone said alt right is search for uncastrated father; jordan p gives rules; muslim kids in french ghettos get radicalized, so do cuck in parent's basements who can't be pick up artists and wohl of wall street. [matrix 4 guy does sys analysis:darwin/ invis hand meritocrisy leaves losers to blame themselves, not structural forces.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-administration-has-ripped-away-any-connection-with-truth-and-the-real-victim-is-democracy-itself/
meh
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one out of 3 Americans used bleach ‘in non recommended high-risk practices’ to battle coronavirus: CDC
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement
One third of Americans used bleach or other household disinfectants “in non-recommended high risk practices” in attempts to reduce the spread of the deadly coronavirus, a new CDC survey finds.…
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620 an
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cdv
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/matrix-4-writer-breaks-down-the-clash-between-trumps-right-wing-revolution-and-the-democrats-wishful-thinking/
Matrix 4’ writer breaks down the clash between Trump’s right-wing revolution and the Democrats’ ‘wishful thinking’
Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 3, 2020
The American people are in pain. There have been days of protest and civil unrest in many American cities following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day.
This article was originally published at Salon
These convulsions in the American body politic are not just the result of one more murder of an unarmed, surrendered black man by a white cop, televised before the world like a New Age lynching. America’s problems are vast.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people in the United States, with the total number of cases now approaching 2 million. Donald Trump and his administration have responded with malevolent indifference. These deaths are but another entry in a social Darwinist ledger where the “useless eaters” are being left to die for “capitalism” — and in service to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Now the American people are struggling through a second Great Depression, in which tens of millions cannot pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families. Republicans have only offered a pittance for ordinary people amid this global economic disaster — a onetime payment of $1,200 — while giving big corporations and the richest citizens trillions of dollars of the American people’s money.
Overall, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong in this country and this society, which elevated a racial authoritarian demagogue and avatar of corruption to the presidency. Many Americans feel ashamed by how their country now appears before the world. There is great potential for positive change in America, but to this point no great hero or leader has emerged. That vacuum is what makes Trump’s power so great. Even though he lacks a great mass movement after the model of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, he commands cult-like followers who will carry out his every wish.
Trump is an authoritarian and neofascist, who only knows how to destroy and not create. He is not a unifier but a divider. Like other leaders of that ilk, Trump uses violence, chaos and pain as a primary means of expanding and securing power.
For Trump and the Republican Party, America’s pain is a target of opportunity for their gangster capitalist agenda.
Trump has used “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violent threats by his followers and enforcers against prominent Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has also targeted nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and “liberals” in general with violent threats.
Trump has made reference to “Second Amendment solutions” as a way of inspiring right-wing militias and other paramilitaries to attack his perceived enemies. As seen with his recent declaration of “MAGA Night,” Trump would like to mobilizes white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists as his street hooligan enforcers.
Trump has urged his armed followers to threaten or perhaps overturn the governments of Democratic-led states and cities if they do not bow to his will by ending public health measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. To some extent, they have been successful: The Michigan state legislature was recently forced into recess by such threats of violence.
This week, Trump has threatened to invoke a 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act to crush the protests and civil unrest which has burst forth in response to the killing of George Floyd. This is one more step in Trump’s effort to create an autocratic pseudo-democracy where he rules indefinitely. Martial law would be the most efficient way for Donald Trump to use a “state of emergency” — his personal Reichstag-fire moment — as a way to end America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law.
Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy, just as surely as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his on the throat of George Floyd.
In a recent article for the Intercept, Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon — also the co-writer of the forthcoming “Matrix” sequel — warns that the United States is careening towards ethnic violence, civil war and self-destruction under Donald Trump. The “most important and troubling symptom,” he writes, is the rising atmosphere of conflict “meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization.” Hemon continues:
As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful. …
For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.
When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.
In our recent conversation, Hemon warned that Donald Trump and the far right are engaged in revolutionary politics where compromise is not possible because they are preparing for armed conflict, while Joe Biden and the Democrats are only worried about the normative strategy and tactics of electoral democracy. Hemon also described Trump as leading a death cult organized around white supremacy and the related existential insecurities of the white men who are attracted to such politics. Like other death cults, Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die in his name, believing it will lead to personal rebirth and glory.
Hemon also shared details on a proposed project he developed with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell in 2017, about a United States ruined by Trump-like demagogues, civil war, environmental disasters and — believe it or not — a pandemic. As usual, our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
So many people are in a state of terror and fear right now. From my perspective they should have been afraid at least four years ago in response to Trump. Why were so many people in denial about the dire dangers of Donald Trump and what he represents? Why are they so late in realizing the reality of the situation? It was all so obvious.
The fight is not over. This moment with Trump, the other members of the global right-wing and the virus is going to have consequences across many areas of our lives. We are struggling just to stay alive right now. There are going to be severe consequences from all the forces coming together that no one can quite predict.
The virus allows Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians to accelerate a total reconfiguration of their respective societies. Such leaders are not fighting the virus so much as they are fighting to radically change society to serve their far-right agenda. That goal and agenda is not always visible to many people.
Donald Trump keeps saying that he is a “war president.” That claim is being misinterpreted by most observers in the mainstream news media. What Trump really means is that he is an authoritarian and the rule of law does not apply to him. Trump is able to hide his true intent because hefloods the zone with chaos, distractions and lies. In most important ways, Donald Trump is open about his plans.
This is part of a strategy. The global right and its leaders want to make everything meaningless. They want people to “fish in murky waters,” as the saying goes back in my home of Yugoslavia. One headline by itself would stand out and the public would understand the danger. People either understand the entirety and wholeness of this dangerous situation or they choose not to. If the public cannot see the big picture, they will also not be able to see how the smaller parts fit together as a whole. It all seems like one isolated series of events after another. For those who cannot see the big picture, it is a maelstrom and they lack perspective to make sense of it all.
Another element of Trump’s authoritarianism — and this is why the mainstream media is still unable to effectively grapple with this crisis — are the threats against reporters and journalists, where he calls them “fake news” and “human scum”. Journalists have also been attacked and killed in America under Trump.
There is an inability to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe. Before the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, the catastrophe of war was so huge that people were too fearful to imagine what was happening because that would have meant — as turned out to be the case — that their entire way of life, the very structure of life, would be destroyed. If the people in Bosnia or the former Yugoslavia were then to have acknowledged or understood the magnitude of the catastrophe it would have meant making choices about changing their lives. This would have helped them to keep their agency. But too many of them waited, therefore losing their agency, and the catastrophe of the civil war and ethnic cleansing made the decision for them.//AGW
This is a frightening proposition to a lot of people. That meant, in case of their war, they would have to get up and leave their lives and not take much for themselves. And so one finds oneself in a situation where you see that there is a catastrophe unfolding and say, “But what am I going to do now?”
Difficult decisions must be made. And it’s terrible. It is a horrible proposition. People start negotiating with reality to avoid the catastrophe and the real possibility of death. In this country at present that looks like, “Maybe it’s not that bad? Maybe Biden is going to fix it? Maybe somehow Trump is going to turn presidential all of a sudden? Maybe the Republicans actually do love this country? Maybe I should wait to see what happens, and decide in a month?”
With Trumpism the news media has to change the entire way in which they interpret and engage with reality. The American news media, for the most part, cannot do it. They cannot make that pivot. The rules are different with an authoritarian such as Donald Trump.
At the same time, the advantage of Trump and his movement is that they do not care about reality or the truth. They are a death cult. They are not afraid to die. The Trumpists and Republicans are excited and motivated by the possibility of remaking reality itself, because they are in revolutionary mode. The Democrats and everyone else are, by comparison, trying to find a magical way to retain the status quo. Which, even if the status quo was somehow good enough, is now impossible to salvage. The American right’s, and the global right’s, revolutionary process is far too advanced at this point.
What guidance would you give the average person about maintaining perspective and reorienting themselves to this new reality?
People are struggling with the logistics of life, just staying on the surface and not drowning. Given the circumstances with the economy and the state of the world I would not blame anyone for that. But there has been this longstanding notion that America is a stable society. It is a country with its own deep tradition of checks and balances. In America, however deep the social injustice and inequality, the future was something that could be reasonably anticipated. Even if things were bad, there was a sense of continuity and predictability.
But what is happening now with COVID is that people in the United States simply do not know what is going to happen in a month. The future has become unpredictable. In America, people are now negotiating reality. Having to figure out reality and what is true or not on a basic level is a shocking change for many people in America and some other parts of the world. People are now thinking of the “future” in terms of months and not three or 10 or 30 years in the future. With this disruption in even being able to plan for the future, it takes agency away and gives it to other people and individuals. Someone else is now deciding your fate. Meanwhile, the people on the right have guns and think that they are some type of liberation force. They think they are the ones with the agency and freedom. Being on the left puts you in a position of not having agency in the United States at present.
One person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. The global right wing has purpose. They have got the guns. They are highly ideological and committed. There is a core group of the global right-wing extremists who are committed to “accelerationism,” destroying society in order to create their own new world.
The right wing is in revolutionary mode because part of every nationalist movement or discourse is a myth of some kind of sacrifice or rebirth in blood and sacrifice. That logic justifies all of their wars and mass killing. Donald Trump has no ideology or understanding of political theory and philosophy. But Trump does have an instinctive understanding of nationalism.
He just said the other day, “Our doctors are at war.” It’s a war that is part of the rebirth of the nation.
Donald Trump and the right wing are in revolutionary mode, but there are so many observers who believe that they are just stupid and insane. These outsiders do not really understand what is happening. They dismiss what the right wing is doing as some type of farce or joke when it is deadly serious.
Revolutionary political parties do not need many supporters or members to succeed. Obsessing over how many people do or do not support Donald Trump is an error. Numbers are not the absolute measure of his strength. The true measure of Trump’s strength is how many people are willing to die for him. How many people in America and Europe are willing to die for a leftist cause? Donald Trump has stormtroopers. We don’t have stormtroopers. It is that simple. The Democrats are so afraid of anyone who even appears that they might just be a tiny bit radical. Even something like national health care is treated as too radical. The Democrats are not preparing for a fight; they’re preparing for a vote. Those are not the same things. It is not enough. And it is probably useless in the long run, when the Democrats are up against a revolutionary right-wing movement.
The other part of the equation is the people who are willing to kill for Donald Trump and his movement. Moreover, Trump’s supporters have been killing their “enemies” here in the United States through mass shootings and other violence. Those murders, assaults and other violence have been a feature of Trump’s regime. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media has not been consistently reporting on it because such outcomes are now normalized.
A large number of people who are willing to die for Donald Trump are also willing to kill for him. These Trump supporters are willing to sacrifice their previous morality and to be reborn through an act of blood and sacrifice in service to him. The military is very important here. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia it came down to who controlled the military. In the United States, people on the left are saying, “Well, if it really gets that bad, the military will intervene and save us.” We are at a point where people on the left in the United States are hoping for military intervention — as though that’s a good thing. What will the United States military do? I don’t know.
The Democrats really believe they can just vote Trump out of office. They are not properly organizing for all possibilities and in response to what the right wing is doing.
We hope that Biden will get elected and then somehow we’ll return to some status quo from before and pre-Trump democracy will be restored in some way. That’s just wishful thinking. Totally wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the right wing and the Republicans are preparing for a showdown.
Trump and the broader right are now saying that people should sacrifice themselves for “the economy” by dying from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, those who should die are the elderly and others who are vulnerable to the disease. This is social Darwinism. It is fascistic. That logic should be abhorrent but there has been little outrage from the American people.
I don’t know what could constitute enough outrage and opposition. There has to be change at the end. Otherwise it is just yelling at the wind. Moreover, what is needed now to counter Trump and his movement is more than just objections — it must be a vision and an alternative plan. There must also be a movement that is created out of that rage and anger in order to follow through on the necessary work and struggle.
Being angry is a precondition, I suppose, for some kind of radical or at least committed action. But it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There is plenty of outrage. What is lacking is a framework for what to do with that outrage. Democrats are afraid of that outrage. Whatever happens with Trump and the 2020 election, and afterwards, the United States is going to be radically different than before. The question becomes, who wins? Trump and the revolutionary right wing, or the left and the Democrats?
Suppose Joe Biden and the Democrats win. Who in their sane mind thinks that will lead to a radical correction to the country? Who really believes that Donald Trump and his enforcers are just going to drop their weapons and go home? That is not going to happen. The United States is heading towards a conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved politically. I believe that it may have to be resolved extra-politically.
I initially accepted the fact that some people voted for Trump in 2016 because they are straight-ticket Republican voters. I think that is a horrible decision, but I can understand it on a certain level. But to continue to support Trump at present given the authoritarianism, corruption, white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction and malevolent negligence is to be complicit. Trump’s supporters are now active agents of fascism. I have suggested in my writing and interviews that people of conscience and other good people should not interact in any way with Trump supporters, even if they are members of the family. How have you made such decisions?
I agree. Trump’s supporters are participating in a project that directly impacts my life, my family and the people I love in a very negative and dangerous way. We are past the point of understanding with Trump and his supporters. That moment was gone a long time ago. Any intelligent, active citizen understands the consequences of their actions. The whole idea that somehow these white people voted for Donald Trump while not meaning to be racist is just nonsense. If they somehow did not know that Donald Trump is a racist, then it is their responsibility to find out. Now it is evident because Trump is a rabid white supremacist who is aligned with the worst racist elements in the country. To support Donald Trump is to be complicit with white supremacy. It is to actively support a white supremacist project.
I do not talk to Donald Trump’s supporters. They are my enemies. I want them to go away and not be anywhere near me. I do not want to “unite” with such people in this country. I do not care if they live in the same country as me. Donald Trump’s supporters are my enemies and I want them gone from my life. And that’s a hard thing to say. Countries break up over such things. This is imaginable in this country now. And what is imaginable is possible.
You have written about the ethnic conflict and civil war in Yugoslavia and your fears of how such a thing is now on the horizon in the United States. How are people — especially young men — seduced and radicalized into committing such acts of violence?
It is empowering. It flatters their masculine power. Nationalism and fascism are always masculine political projects.This is why misogyny is always an aspect of any kind of nationalism. Fascism and nationalism also empowers old men. And in the context of white male supremacy, the advances of people of color and women were imagined as somehow disempowering white men. These white men became disgruntled. They lost jobs. But the problem with that white male anger is that it ignores that black and brown people lost their jobs too from deindustrialization, neoliberalism, globalization and related forces. The anger and sense of loss and feeling that they do not have agency was compensated for by uniting behind Donald Trump.
I always took Trump seriously. He was always capable of reaching this point. It’s not that he’s exceptional. It is rather that the conditions were right for Trump to win the presidency because he embodies this vulgar, blatant misogyny, sexism and arrogance. His psychopathic characteristics exactly match the fantasies of fascism.
There is another aspect of Donald Trump’s popularity among his followers. There is something terribly reassuring to a certain type of person that one can be stupid and lazy and so openly unpleasant and still become president of the United States. By comparison Barack Obama had to be a saint. He had to be perfect, Harvard-educated and wise. But Trump’s white supporters hated him intensely. Trump restores a certain type of faith in white supremacy for his supporters because someone as stupid and bad and lazy and evil as Trump can become president of the United States. Trump’s supporters now know that the worst of them can still be president. That must be terribly reassuring.
Donald Trump’s narcissism and other mental pathologies exactly match the collective pathology of white nationalists. Trump is a natural-born white supremacist because in any other context he is an idiot and a psychopath.
You are one of the co-writers of “The Matrix 4.” The Age of Trump, and now this pandemic and associated economic collapse is a surreal living nightmare. Could you have sat down and made up such a story? Would it even be believable?
With the same writers I worked with on “The Matrix 4,” we developed a spec script in December of 2017. The premise of the project was the disintegration of the United States and what happened afterward, as seen through the lives of several characters over 25 or so years of time in the story. Anything imaginable is possible. In our story there was a pandemic, environmental collapse, random violence, militias and rogue governors of different states.
I am sure people are writing science fiction stories based in this current moment, and his gets us back to politics in this moment and the power of imagination. I believe that many people cannot accept what is happening and are in denial because they lack imagination. They cannot make sense of the headlines because their minds eliminate so many possibilities about what is happening in the world right now — and what will happen in the future.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/we-need-to-speak-honestly-about-the-gops-evolution-into-a-conspiracy-cult
wa mon
One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.
But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality,forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.
But even faced with awful consequences of all these horrors, a defender of traditional journalism might simply chalk them up to policy differences in a democratic society. They would be wrong to do so, but the position would be intellectually defensible in principle.
But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy.
Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”)
But things have gotten even worse in the few years short years since the Trump era began. Once a far-fringe conspiracy theory relegated to 8chan and neo-nazi filled knockoffs of Reddit, the QAnon conspiracy theory (which, among other things, posits that a wide swath of prominent Democrats, celebrities and assorted rich people are engaged in pedophilia and adrenochrome harvesting of children, and that the Trump Administration is always just a few weeks away from conducting mass arrests and summary executions–but only once QANON followers have awakened enough of the “normie” public) has become so pervasive that not only do “Q” signs pop up at almost every major conservative rally or protest, but a true believer is now the GOP nominee for Senate in Oregon. When her campaign attempted to backtrack, she doubled down, saying “”My campaign is gonna kill me…How do I say this? Some people think that I follow Q like I follow Jesus. Q is the information and I stand with the information resource.” This conspiracy theory is destroying families, relationships, and the mental health of its adherents.A healthy and normal political party would inoculate itself from it and debunk it quickly. But the GOP is not a healthy or normal political party.
It doesn’t stop there. Almost half of Fox News viewers—the core of the GOP—believe that Bill Gates is using the COVID-19 pandemic to microchip them. And Donald Trump has been promoting a series of conspiracy theories on twitter each more outlandish than the last, from old debunked accusations against cable news hosts he dislikes to concocted accusations against former president Barack Obama.
Go to any conservative event and you’ll notice a shift from even the raucous detached weirdness of Tea Party rallies. They feel less like political events than cult rallies.Cult experts like Steven Hassan have taken note of this, calling it exactly what it is: a cult built around manufactured realities, shared grievances and us-against-them insular extremism. The increasing dependence of Republican politicians on a shrinking, embattled white evangelical base already given over to faith-based belief systems and racism-tinged “city on a hill” ideology has only exacerbated the phenomenon.
It’s long past time for even the venerable pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to start calling this what it is, and stop normalizing it as standard partisanship. It is deeply dangerous in a democracy whose constitution functionally guarantees a two-party system, for one of those two parties to become a conspiracy cult.
But that is exactly what has happened. And the first step to fixing it is to call it what it is, no matter how uncomfortable that might be for institutions and journalism professionals who find that sort of language loaded with unprofessional bias. The truth is what it is, even if it requires rethinking therole of a responsible press in an era of white anxiety and mass social-media-fueled disinformation.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-waging-a-war-on-reality-because-its-his-one-real-chance-at-reelection-columnist/
alex h
following Memorial Day Weekend on Tuesday, the United States was moving closer to a grim milestone: 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers in Baltimore. But President Donald Trump seemed oblivious, calling for states to reopen non-essential businesses sooner rather than later. Journalist Greg Sargent, in his Washington Post column, stresses that Trump’s salesman-like cheerleading is a key part of his game plan — and that he is pretending that “normalcy” is right around the corner.
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“Coronavirus deaths in the United States are rapidly closing in on 100,000,” Sargent asserts. “The economic depression is stretching out ahead of us as far as the eye can see. Joe Biden is holding a steady lead in polls. So, President Trump has decided he has only one real chance at reelection: to bet mostly on his magical ability to create the illusion that we’re rapidly returning to normalcy, rather than taking the difficult concrete steps that would make that more likely to happen.”
Sargent goes on to cite some examples of Trump’s “war on reality” — such as “new rage-tweets” aimed at North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper over “whether a full” Republican National Convention “will be held under coronavirus conditions,” and a “new federal testing blueprint that largely casts responsibility on the states.”
“All these things, in one way or another, show that Trump’s war on reality has veered into a new place,” Sargent explains. “Trump is responding to our most dire public health and economic crises in modern times with a concerted, far-reaching effort to concoct the mirage that we’re racing past both.”...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/irish-author-fintan-otoole-explains-the-suspension-of-disbelief-that-made-trumps-destruction-of-america-possible
...I recently spoke with O’Toole about the end of American empire, the decline of the country’s democracy and its abdication of its preeminent global leadership role. O’Toole also shared his views on the appeal Donald Trump holds, as an authoritarian and con man, to his cult members.
In this wide-ranging conversation, O’Toole also reflects on the rise of Donald Trump and global neo-fascism, how and why that movement’s appeals to fake populism and political sadism, and the cruel logic of the right-wing’s gangster-capitalist death...
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/disinformation-coronavirus-and-the-2020-presidential-election/
no lnx pix twet
The term disinformation tends to conjure up images of Twitter bot armies with thick Russian accents, but the disinformation landscape in 2020 is a lot more complex. While Russia has great expertise in roiling U.S. political waters, it isn’t the only foreign actor in the disinformation and trolling games. The Oxford Internet Institute issued a report finding “evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017.”Social media companies have removed content with disinformation campaigns originating in Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran.
Iranian Facebook post targeting Americans. (Source: Facebook)
But homegrown disinformation is a much bigger problem, starting with President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and extending into a vast network of pro-Trump super PACs, right-wing media outlets, and an organized army of MAGA warriors happy to amplify every lie, false conspiracy, and misdirection online. Domestic disinformers have adopted tactics deployed by Russia and other hostile actors in 2016, optimizing them for 2020.
The lessons of 2016 haven’t been lost on the legions of far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who have their own web-based video and audio shows. With the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout posing threats to Trump’s reelection, the president’s online far-right boosters have taken up disinformation messaging designed to discredit the judgment of public health officials and scientists on the severity of the pandemic and the resulting COVID-19 disease. For instance, Rodney Howard-Browne, a Florida megachurch pastor who convened large church services in defiance of social distancing orders, claimed that the pandemic was “planned” at a 2019 New York event hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And Rick Wiles, a religious-right broadcaster and font of anti-Semitic lies, suggested that the coronavirus emergency may have been “staged” to shut down the U.S. (Despite ample documentation of Wiles’ conspiracy-mongering and anti-Semitism, he is regularly granted press credentials by both the White House and the Trump campaign.)
In fact, MAGA-world influencer Brenden Dilley, whose YouTube channel has more than 12,000 subscribers, laid bare the MAGA disinformation playbook last year when he baldly asserted, “It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to go viral.” In that episode of his show, he used the example of the false claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination, had a racist knick-knack on display in her kitchen. On a more recent edition of his YouTube show, he reiterated that reasoning when explaining why he was advancing a false story about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
Right Wing Watch
@RightWingWatch
MAGA life coach Brenden Dilleypraises Trump for baselessly suggesting that Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of an intern: "It doesn't matter if it's true. This is how you fight back against people who are trying to destroy you."
Embedded video
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The Trump campaign and pro-MAGA super PACs have made it clear that the old rules of politics no longer apply, and their base now largely believes in an alternative reality. The president spreads and amplifies so much disinformation on his Twitter feed that it’s nearly impossible to keep up, and GOP elected officials for the most part now follow suit. Republican operatives have built disinformation tactics into their strategies.
Trump Campaign Facebook ad with misinformation.Facebook refused to take this ad down per their policy not to fact check political ads on their platform. (Source: Twitter, Judd Legum)
Trump’s online supporters can’t merely be dismissed as bots. His online fanbase is overamplified but made up of actual individuals happy to spend considerable time and resources getting pro-MAGA messages out into the ether. Social media researcher Erin Gallagher has a fascinating piece on #TrumpTrains, self-organized cells of Trump fans working in Twitter direct messaging groups to spread Trump’s rhetoric and recruit new supporters to the cause.Gallagher was able to get a #TrumpTrain “conductor” to go on the record about how the #TrumpTrains are organized, recruiting volunteers or “riders” to tweet pro-Trump content in large volume at the direction of “conductors.”
Facebook groups and pages are another hub for pro-Trump disinformation. Writing for Media Matters, social media researcher Natalie Martinez details how the far-right propaganda machine operates on Facebook, “On Facebook, right-wing meme pages play a vital role in condensing and recycling far-right talking points and keeping the MAGA base engaged online. These pages regularly post extremist content, arguably violating Facebook’s hate speech content policy, and often exploit tragic events in the news cycle, images of veterans, and violent anti-immigrant rhetoric for likes and shares.” Multiple candidates running for office as Republicans have been caught participating—some as page administrators—in right-wing Facebook groups.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/matrix-co-creator-calls-out-elon-musk-and-ivanka-trump-for-urging-people-to-swallow-the-red-pill/
no lnx twt
'Matrix’ co-creator calls out Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump for urging people to swallow the ‘red pill
Written by Alex Henderson May 18, 2020
Although the term “the red pill” has come to be identified with far-right anti-feminist websites such as Return of Kings, that’s not where it originated: the expression made its debut in sisters Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s first of three “Matrix” films. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently used the expression in a tweet that White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump forwarded — and Lilly Wachowski is calling them out for it.
In the first “Matrix” film, taking “the red pill” means accepting a dystopian world as it really is. But when the alt-right adopted the term, they give it a far-right, socially conservative anti-feminist connotation — one in which someone who “takes the red pill” has had an alt-right awakening and rejects liberal or progressive ideology.
On Sunday, May 17, Musk tweeted, “Take the red pill.” And Ivanka Trump, upon seeing Musk’s tweet, responded, “taken!” Lilly Wachowski, in response to their tweets, posted, “Fuck both of you.” In a separate tweet, Musk (who has 34 million followers on Twitter), described “the red pill” as “one of my fav Matrix memes.”
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Take the red pill
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Ivanka Trump
@IvankaTrump
- 21h
Taken! https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1262076474565242880 …
Elon Musk
?
@elonmusk
Take the red pill
Lilly Wachowski
?
@lilly_wachowski
Fuck both of you
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One area of the far-right anti-feminist movement, incels, have come up with their own twisted expression: “the black pill,” which refers to avoiding women altogether and sets itself apart from the “red pill” ideology that Return of Kings promoted before it went on hiatus in 2018. While Return of Kings founder Roosh Valizadeh promoted “PUA” or “pick-up artist” ideology and encouraged domination of women, incels (which is short for “involuntarily celibate”) embrace a different form of misogyny and see “taking the black pill” as avoiding women altogether.
Lilly Wachowski, who has been outspoken on transgender rights, followed up her anti-Musk, anti-Trump tweet with a request for donations to the Brave Space Alliance (an organization that supports transgender rights).
The “Matrix” co-creator wasn’t the only Twitter user who had a negative reaction to Musk’s tweet. Democratic activist Jon Cooper, @joncoopertweets, posted, “Take the red pill and shove it, Elon.”
Lilly Wachowski
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@lilly_wachowski
- 20h
Replying to @IvankaTrump
Fuck both of you
Lilly Wachowski
?
@lilly_wachowski
Support @BSAllianceChi if you can. https://www.bravespacealliance.org/donate
Donate — Brave Space Alliance
bravespacealliance.org
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Elon Musk
@elonmusk
- 22h
Take the red pill
Jon Cooper ????
?
@joncoopertweets
Take the red pill and shove it, Elon.
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https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Black%20Pill
see 4 chan, pepe, clown
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/involuntary-celibates-are-an-emerging-domestic-terrorism-threat-as-texas-warns-of-an-incel-rebellion
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https://www.cnn.com**/2018/04**/24/americas/toronto-van-investigation/index.html
no lnx pix vid
toronto (CNN)Toronto police have their suspect -- but they're still looking for a motive.
Alek Minassian, the man accused of plowing into pedestrians with a rented van on Monday, was charged Tuesday with 10 counts of first-degree murder.
The 25-year-old is also charged with 13 counts of attempted murder. Authorities said another count of attempted murder likely will be added.
Investigators are still trying to determine the motive behind the attack, which left 10 people dead and 14 hurt. One aspect they will look at is his social media posts and what a man who killed six people with a vehicle in 2014 meant to Minassian.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/misogyny-and-white-supremacy-its-time-to-fight-these-closely-linked-sources-of-violence/
no lnx
Misogyny and white supremacy: It’s time to fight these closely-linked sources of violence
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 12, 2019
It’s been a little over a week since the deadly shootings in El Paso and Dayton and, as usual, the nation’s attention is already turning to other things. In the Trump era, there’s always something horrible happening. The Democratic presidential candidates have put gun safety policies at the top of their agenda and perhaps it will stay there. But Mitch McConnell is still in Kentucky vaguely waving his hands about some kind of legislation, clearly assuming the country will have moved on by the time Congress reconvenes next month. This ritual response to mass murder is sadly predictable.
But before we leave this latest episode of horrific violence behind, it’s important to note that a new understanding has come out of these events about the nature of the threat we face. It’s not only from easy access to guns but about the ideology that’s driving some of these recent incidents. The mainstreaming of white supremacist language by conservative media — and by President Trump’s rhetoric — have been recognized as a contributing factor in the growing white power movement in the United States. That’s an important step to gaining an understanding of this phenomenon.
The threat of white supremacist violence has been with us for a long time, of course. But it has picked up in recent years and the government has been lax in confronting it, mainly because Republican politicians have a fit any time the topic is raised. (This should have sounded some alarm bells about the mainstreaming of this ideology long ago.) Law enforcement has long been aware that the advent of the internet has created fertile ground for recruitment and conversion and that the movement was spreading, but wasn’t given the resources to deal with it. Perhaps that will change, although it’s hard to see that happening any time soon when the president himself insists the threat does not exist:
Asked if he thinks white nationalism is a rising threat, Trump says, “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
Trump goes on to say he thinks it’s too early to draw conclusions about what motivated New Zealand mosque shooter. pic.twitter.com/maTx55ruCb
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2019
But the El Paso massacre by a white supremacist wasn’t the only deadly violence on that awful weekend in America. In Dayton, Ohio, a 24-year-old man killed nine people in another mass shooting, and his motivation is murkier. Apparently, the accused shooter’s social media accounts showed that he identified with progressive politics, expressing admiration for Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But that may be less important than the apparent fact that he also had a fetish for guns and held crude and violent misogynistic beliefs. Although law enforcement officials have drawn no public conclusions about the shooter’s motive, ABC News reported on Sunday that they believed the shooter had “demonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings.”
“Extreme” doesn’t really cover it. This man had been expelled from school for writing a “rape list” and was reportedly a singer in a “pornogrind” band — a tiny heavy metal subculture that celebrates extreme violence against women. (Although this musical genre is intentionally disgusting, it’s been around for years and has not previously been implicated in any acts of violence.) It appears the authorities believe the shooter’s motives weren’t explicitly political but rather tied somehow to his hatred of women.
Obviously a leftist can also be a violent misogynist, but left-wing politics doesn’t feature misogyny as part and parcel of its ideology. Generally speaking, the left rejects sexism and is open to a feminist critique of gender-based violence. In that regard, the Dayton shooter seems to have had more in common with the white supremacists than anyone on the left.
The Anti-Defamation League issued a report last year titled “When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy,” finding that hatred of women is often “a gateway into the white supremacist world.” That report found that cultural changes and the focus on gender equality in progressive politics inspire some men to turn to far-right, white supremacist movements that see women in highly traditional gender roles. Among “white power” and neo-Nazi groups, whose explicit aim is to repopulate the white race (so that black and brown people do no “replace” them), women are encouraged to bear as many children as possible. (In that they are echoed by mainstream white nationalists such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News.)
Jessica Reeve, the author of the ADL report, told the Independent:
There’s a profoundly anti-woman undercurrent to many white supremacist/alt right online exchanges, and that can easily veer from disrespect into the full-on promotion of violence, including rape. This is even more evident if you visit incel and MRA boards, where anger towards and hatred of women is the primary focus — and participants celebrate and encourage misogynist violence.
In other words, there seems to be a strong correlation between the people who believe they are being robbed of their rightful status by people of color and those who believe they are being robbed of their status by women. These overlapping forms of resentment and anger can all too easily lead to violence. Sometimes this is limited to “ordinary” domestic abuse, which remains widespread in America. Sometimes it results in lethal horror such as Dayton.
A recent New York Times article explored the issue of misogyny in these mass shootings. Much as the white supremacists of 8chan and similar forums have celebrated the mass killings of Jews, Mexicans and Muslims, online groups of “incels” have also celebrated the killing of women, especially the infamous case of Elliot Rodger, the young man who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, California, a day after posting an online video vowing revenge on women who had declined his advances. The Times cited a more recent example: “Alek Minassian, who drove a van onto a sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, had posted a message on Facebook minutes before the attack praising Mr. Rodger.”
It appears that the demographic and personality profile that can lead to white supremacist violence is not much different the demographic and personality profile that leads to misogynist violence. In fact, these killers often seem irrationally angry with everyone who isn’t a white male.
I hardly think it’s necessary to point out that our president is right in the middle of this phenomenon as well. The ADL paper reports that after Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape was released during the 2016 campaign, notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer defended the then-candidate, saying that “at some part of every woman’s soul, they want to be taken by a strong man.” Trump’s overt racism isn’t the only reason these extremists love the guy.
Much has been made of the fact that authorities have been starved of resources to combat this white supremacist threat. There is now some hope that will change. As important as that is, it’s time to put some resources — and some serious thought — into combatting misogynist violence as well.
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aha based on brazil fail tip pt: // ecosystem health and indig cult heath/ languages;indig and native Am ppl is EJ intensified; colonialism; they are the poorest, least educated but/and thus pay largest price in terms of toxic load; hit 1st and worst by AGW, but had the least to do with causing and the MOST to do with PROTECTING (defenders killed at high rates eg berta C]. killed at high rates b/c the CAN be: racism plus greed: those ppl do not know the true value of assets; they are block progress and prosperity. who will miss a murdered defender? if police on take and courts corrupt, no justice for them, and no incentive to stop killing them.[NB missing native women around man camps, a throwback to wild west gold rush? toxic masculinity, low density of women].
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A catastrophic prophecy or spiritless prophesying for the future that is not necessarily grounded in reality. A red pill gone hopelessly bleak.
John had swallowed too many red pills over the last few sleepless nights and tried to black pill me that the race war would be happening any day now.
Because of a bad breakup, Steven black pilled himself into believing that all women would cheat on him no matter what. A month later, he unexpectedly swallowed a white pill when he came and his new girlfriend kept sucking, proving the existence of a divine spirit and a glorious future for mankind.
#black pill#black-pilled#black pilled
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thom h
an 619
People are asking why the shooter in Virginia Beach used a gun to settle his workplace score. The answer is probably pretty simple.
When a man has a gun, he literally holds the power of life and death in his hand. That kind of power is extraordinarily seductive.
With a gun in his hand, a man can look around a room, a building, or a public area and specifically identify who will instantaneously die and whom he will allow to live. It’s a power that traditionally has only been held by doctors, priests, police and soldiers.
The power over life and death is greater and more intoxicating than any other power; it’s one of the reasons why some men are specifically drawn to these professions and historically have tried to regulate them to be male-only.
If you are not male and have never carried a gun in public, it’s only an imaginary experiment, but science shows that simply handling a gun alters men’s levels of testosterone and measurably increases their aggressive behavior.
This is largely a male problem because men commit 85.3 percent of all homicides and 97 percent of all homicides where the shooter and victim don’t know each other. In the case of school and workplace shootings, the shooters are also more than 97 percent male.
As a result of this male aggression provoked in part by handling guns, in America guns are the second leading cause of death (just behind car crashes) among children between 1 and 19 years old.
We honor our soldiers who are willing to face gunfire; they can even board airplanes before anybody else, and TV commentators reflexively say, “Thank you for your service.” We honor our cops for their willingness to face gunfire; when one dies, the funeral typically is a major, citywide event.
Yet more children die from firearms in the United States every year than all the police and American military deaths worldwide combined. No gate attendant, though, is saying to airplane passengers, “Children under 19 may board first because we thank you for your sacrifice of dying in your homes and schools to give men thrills and keep the gun industry profits high.”
This goes way beyond the joke of the Small Penis Gun Club or its Facebook site. Men, it turns out, are actually hardwired by evolution and biology to react to having power over others with a boost in testosterone and an increase in aggression.
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A 2006 study published in Psychological Science by Klinesmith, Kasser and McAndrew found that men who simply handled a gun were significantly more likely to give other men a higher dose of hot sauce (a commonly used research measure of aggression) right after handling the gun than were men who handled a child’s toy.
For men who feel that they’ve lost control of their lives, or who feel dismissed or disrespected by others, this is pure catnip.
Firing a gun, in addition to raising testosterone levels like simply handling one does, actually produces a feeling similar to intoxication. As UCLA Law professor Adam Winkler points out, shooting guns triggers higher levels of adrenaline and endorphins, producing a high like riding a roller coaster.
In this regard, guns can be thought of as a drug—an intoxicating, mind-altering, power-conferring drug that leads to aggression and, in the United States, to around 40,000 deaths a year.
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Driving a car at high speed can produce a “high” similar to shooting a gun, and large, powerful cars can cause testosterone levels to increase. We already figured out how to deal with this.
In 1920 you could buy and drive a car without a driver’s license in most states. We figured out the downsides of such a libertarian policy, and regulated cars; the result was a rapid reduction in deaths and morbidity.
If, to define a chain of ownership and thus responsibility, a car must be registered with the state annually from the time it’s manufactured to the time it’s destroyed, why not the same for a gun?
If, to make sure the people controlling 2,000 pounds of steel and glass flying down the freeway at 65 mph know what they’re doing, we require a driver’s license—acquired by proving both knowledge and competence—why not the same for a gun owner/user?
If a driver must carry liability insurance because his car could kill somebody, why not a gun owner? Why is it that if the Newtown or Parkland kids had been killed by a drunk or even malicious driver, their survivors would have gotten a million bucks each from Geico, but the families of kids killed with guns don’t?
Required liability insurance, by the way, is the most Republican/conservative of all gun control measures; it’s a “free market solution.”
Just as no insurance company will cheaply write insurance for a driver with a few DWIs, so, too, would they restrict people with domestic violence charges, etc. No government involvement necessary for this one, other than the simple requirement to have the policy so long as one owns a gun.
There are many reasonable ways to reduce gun violence in the United States without outlawing guns. It’s time we started a real conversation about how to enact them.
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gateway drug to alt rt?
https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right
no lnx grafs see alt rt troll
In this article
What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?
"Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"
Race realism
Chan culture
"Lolbertarians" and Neoreactionaries
YouTube personalities
"The JQ"
What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?
The question was posed in two threads posted during the last week of March on the white nationalist forum The Right Stuff (TRS), leading 74 individual users to describe their radicalization narratives.
Respondents recount a transformation that takes place almost entirely online. Led either by their own curiosity or an algorithm, the content they consumed became increasingly extreme, fostering their radicalization and guiding them eventually to TRS. Their responses reveal a pipeline between the alt-lite and racist “alt-right,” with many users explaining that alt-lite figures like Gavin McInnes were the first to introduce them to hardcore, veteran white nationalists.
The two threads, titled “WHAT BROUGHT YOU INTO THE MOVEMENT?” and “Path here beginning from Gavin,” asked posters to reflect on their own “red pill” narratives and provide tips for converting others. “Here’s the challenge,” a user identified as The Somalisher wrote. “Create a list of succession from the Alt-Light to us. I have friends who like Gavin…But I can’t exactly throw [Andrew] Anglin at them.”
The user continued, “It sometimes requires softer steps to ‘radical’ perspectives.”
The two threads refer specifically to bringing people into the fold of TRS and the Daily Stormer, which together serve as the core of neo-Nazism online. TRS, the brainchild ofMike “Enoch” Peinovich, started as a political blog in 2012 and has since transformed into one of the largest alt-right media platforms. It hosts a lively message board called the 504um and dozens of podcasts, the most popular of which are “The Daily Shoah” and news-oriented “Fash the Nation.” The Daily Stormer operates in the same orbit, consciously using humor to indoctrinate its readers.
Together, the two sites have become the preeminent propaganda machines for the alt-right. They’re also some of the most effective spaces for organizing real-world, local groups, called “book clubs” by the Stormer and “pool parties” on TRS.
The alt-right is a motley movement, drawing in people from a number of venues and subcultures. The 107 individuals and platforms mentioned by posters in the TRS threads have been labeled according to their ideology, which include alt-right, legacy white nationalist, alt-lite, mainstream, libertarian, skeptic, men’s rights activist, and conspiracy, in addition to a random category for those not easily classified. This heterogeneity is a boon to the movement, creating a number of avenues for individuals of different taste and predilections to fall within its clutches.
Though both the alt-lite and alt-right reject “establishment” conservatism, the former claims to adhere to civic nationalism — a poorly defined catch-all term for those who embrace nativism but shy away from more radical racist rhetoric — while the latter is explicitly white nationalist. Legacy white nationalists include those like Jared Taylor,Patrick Buchanan and Paul Kersey who, although they might be popular within the alt-right, were part of the white nationalist movement before that label emerged.
The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.
Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.
TRS and the Daily Stormer both argue that, with the right optics and messaging, they can attract a critical mass of followers to the cause and eventually shift what lies within the respectable terms of political debate. The respondents in these threads show how the current media landscape — replete with podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs that contain tempered bits of white nationalist propaganda under the guise of patriotism, “Western chauvinism,” science or hard truths — can aid that agenda, coaxing the “normies” down the path to white nationalism.
Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"
TRS 504um posters describe their radicalization as a gradual process, with charismatic alt-lite personalities like Gavin McInnes introducing them to ideas they would eventually take to their extreme. McInnes, especially, hides under a guise of irony, freely using racial slurs and making incendiary comments about women, Muslims and African Americans in the name of mocking political correctness.
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McInnes, who formed the Proud Boys in 2016, has repeatedly insisted the SPLC-designated hate group is simply a right-wing men’s drinking club in the vein of the Elks Lodge, and has taken pains to distance himself from the alt-right. But even he agrees that there’s overlap between his “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys and self-proclaimed white nationalists: “both sides have in common Western chauvinism, they’re not embarrassed by whiteness or whatever, [and] they don’t believe diversity is the end-all and be-all.”
Responses within the TRS threads show how easy it is to slip from the notion that “the West is the best” into believing that western culture is superior because it’s white. Of the respondents in the sample, roughly 15 percent mentioned McInnes as a step in their path to white nationalism or recommended using his videos and writing to convert others. There are more than a few real-life examples of Proud Boys moving into more extreme groups.
McInnes is loathed by many at TRS for being unwilling to take racial politics head-on and “counter-signaling” them, but he’s still credited with helping to cultivate their own belief in white nationalism. In a thread called “Do We Still Hate Gavin McInnes?” a user calling themselves KarlVonBraun came to his defense, writing “I remember first hearing Gavin trash niggers who do that pole/street dance thing on the subway…Basically he says everything short of calling them worthless niggers. I'd literally never heard anyone be brutally honest about what is uniquely nigger behavior while maintaining decorum, without crossing lines you can't cross. It was totally exhilarating.” Another user wrote, “I guarantee that he is still (without meaning to) funneling people into the Alt-Right.”
McInnes is also responsible for introducing a number of TRS users to Jim Goad and, indeed, for much of the writer and podcaster’s recent resurgence in popularity. Goad got his start as a writer in the 1990s producing his own controversial and acerbic independent magazine and, in 1997, published a book in the same vein. The Redneck Manifesto, which begins with a chapter called “White Niggers Have Feelings, Too,” bemoans liberals’ tendency to look down on poor whites and argues, “Multiculturalism is a country club that excludes white trash.” Goad (much like McInnes) began his career as a sort of small-time countercultural celebrity, but his focus on white persecution now earns him widespread praise within the alt-right.
McInnes has hosted Goad on his shows numerous times and, on a list he created of “required reading” on Western culture, included Redneck Manifesto together with Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America — both writers who are also mentioned as influences by TRS posters. One respondent called Goad’s book “an early redpill on the malicious anti-white agenda of the left.”
Goad takes advantage of the fact that he’s often treated as a serious literary figure, presenting his extremist views on race as simply thoughtful meditations on politically taboo topics or as an attempt to resist political correctness. He’s used his numerous platforms to perpetuate the myth of white slavery and criticized the “corporate globalist left” for making it difficult for the Daily Stormer to maintain a domain. He even hosted Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, on his podcast, as well as former Ku Klux Klanlawyer Sam Dickson and the Holocaust-denying author Michael Hoffman.
Goad, who is cited six times by TRS members, disparages “Those who blame Jews for everything.” But in the same breath, he repeats their rhetoric, making him into what one poster calls the “missing link” from people like Gavin to the white nationalist TRS. If you’re trying to red pill a friend and “they like Gavin,” NotDonSilvo wrote, “send them his old podcast with Jim and some of his Taki articles or guest appearances in Gavin’s Compound Media [show].”
Besides his podcast, Goad’s main platform is Taki’s Magazine, an extreme right-wing publication with an irreverent tone that promises its “only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by Hollywood and the mainstream media.” Along with Goad and McInnes, it publishes authors like John Derbyshire, who was fired from the conservative National Review after he wrote an article for Taki’s about advising his teenage children to “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.” It described black people as “ferociously hostile to whites” and is now listed in the “greatest hits” section on Taki’s website.
Taki’s contributors overlap with those at the hate site VDARE, including Steve Sailer — cited four times by TRS users — whose writing is largely dedicated to opposing immigration and drawing a false link between race and intelligence.
Both Taki’s Magazine and VDARE are cited by posters of the TRS threads as “good in-betweeners,” and, together, are cited in more than 16 percent of responses. Both websites, the user Cniva wrote, are “good at presenting racism in a ‘we’re just being reasonable/this is what the science says, why are you acting so upset?’ type of way.”
Race realism
Many members of the forum note that McInnes’s online videos were particularly impactful because they introduce viewers to more extreme figures. “[D]ude i got here from Gavin because there was a time about 2-3 years ago when Gavin would take [sic] to people like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer,” one user posted. In one of his genial interviews with Taylor (who he’s called a “super smart guy”), McInnes allowed the American Renaissance editor to peddle his racist tract “The Color of Crime,” which uses faulty statistical analysis to argue that non-whites are more prone to criminal behavior.
Respondents noted this kind of “race realism” — which relies on pseudoscientific evidence to argue that white people are a superior race — gave them a large push into the white nationalist camp. “If your prospect is an ‘objective’ type,” one forum member offered in a discussion of how to recruit others to their cause, “nothing beats race realism, and I’d say Jared Taylor and Alternative Hypothesis” — a “ human biodiversity” blog that argues race is genetically based — “are the most presentable, accessible, and pertinent in that field.” Another simply wrote, “Once I came across race realism it was over.” Indeed, Taylor is the second-most cited force for bringing people into the TRS/Daily Stormer network, with 20.3 percent of posters mentioning him.
Stefan Molyneux, a YouTube commentator, is also best known for amplifying scientific racism. Among his videos with titles like “Human Biodiversity and Criminality” and “Race, Genetics, and Intelligence,” he argues “skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by mother nature between various ethnicities,” and multiethnic societies are a “problem” because “the blacks and the Hispanics, they don’t end up acting the same as the white population.” He’s also done a show with Taylor, titled “An Honest Conversation About Race,” that one respondent said they were “able to use” to help their friends and family “open their eyes.”
“These programs I think are the first steps,” they wrote.
The prolific Molyneux has attracted more than 770,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, adding up to more than 230 million views of his videos. He relies largely on charisma, delivering ill-researched and scientifically unsound lectures with a degree of confidence that eases viewers into accepting his arguments.
Molyneux, one TRS poster explained, “remains a great stepping stone between the alt-light and the alt-right.”
“Gavin > Moly > AR [Alt-Right] is common,” another wrote.
The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence.
Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.”
For posters on TRS, Harris’ work blended easily into that of more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, whose popular blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like,” is reposted on American Renaissance. The site “really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers,” one user wrote. Their “biggest stepping stone” was from Harris’ work to Kersey’s blog: “It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic/political drivers behind the pushing of ‘diversity.’'
Chan culture
While many on the TRS threads describe becoming fans of specific personalities like McInnes and Molyneux, who most often led them to legacy white nationalists like Taylor and Kersey, nearly as many came up through the more amorphous and anarchic spaces of right-wing digital culture that originated with 4chan. The anonymous “meme factory” traffics in humor and transgression, centering on the “politically incorrect” board /pol/ that nurtured the early alt-right and, especially, its misogyny. Nearly 23 percent of respondents said that chan culture helped them land at TRS.
Many of those who were eventually radicalized by 4chan came there relatively innocently. One user said memes led them to 4chan in the mid-2000s, but they eventually found their way to overtly racist /pol/ after Obama was elected for a second term. Others noted they “ironically” looked at /pol/, or they were led there by the more absurdist “random” board, /b/. One wrote that their friend, who they specified was not right-wing, told them to “surf /pol/ for fun.” “Humor is a powerful drug,” explained a poster who came for the political discussions but “stayed for the racist memes.”
Chan culture was male-dominated and heavily misogynistic. The sexism of these spaceseventually led many into the alt-right. According to one poster, “I always hated feminism and female empowerment, despite liking many elements of the left. When I got older and realized the left was only open to feminists or allies i stopped claiming it.”
This extreme anti-feminism gave fuel to various factions of male supremacy, like Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) and MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), who profess to forswear women completely, then complain about them constantly on the internet. Then came Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women in gaming that began in 2014. Anonymous harassers targeted women who worked in or commented on the industry for daring to enter a male-dominated space. Abusers used 4chan and other platforms to organize. After choosing their targets, the mob would dox them, send them rape and death threats, distribute fake pornographic images of them and generally stalk and torment them relentlessly.
It was an extremely important moment in the development of the alt-right, when young men from right-wing online spaces came together in a shared campaign against the “politically correct” culture of the left. One poster described the years 2012 to 2014 as a political “void,” but explained that he was brought back into politics — and entered far more extreme spaces — thanks to Gamergate. After 4chan’s founder Christopher Poole banned discussions ofGamergatefrom the site, the campaign’s supporters migrated to the more extreme 8chan.
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The episode also helped bring figures like Milo Yiannopoulos to prominence. At the time, he worked for a small tech website and was one of the first journalists to cover the story, eventually leading to his job as an editor at the right-wing outlet Breitbart. More than 12 percent of users note that Yiannopoulos was part of their alt-right transformation, and often list him in tandem with Gamergate (cited by 8.1 percent of posters).
Alongside /pol/, Reddit was another crucial space in the growth of the alt-right — especially the infamous subreddit r/The_Donald, that arose in support of Donald Trump’s presidency. For some who came to the movement around 2015, it was the first place they went. “I’ve been an openly racist nigger hater since 2010, but I just didn’t know where to find content that was explicitly racist until I stumbled onto T_D and was able to find other stuff from there,” a TRS user wrote.
"Lolbertarians" and Neoreactionaries
Libertarianism is a common path to the alt-right.In fact, it was frustration with libertarianism that led Peinovich to create The Right Stuff. He became a libertarian after reading the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, but — after finding sources on human biodiversity — said he realized that libertarianism wasn’t “going to work for everyone” because different racial groups couldn’t be expected to behavior properly without a state to regulate them. TRS’s Ricky Vaughn — unmasked as Douglass Mackeyon April 3 — described a similar trajectory. The one-time Ron Paul supporter eventually rejected libertarianism because it failed to account for many things that “drive current events” like “race, culture, all those kind of things.” He first grew frustrated with feminism, and then, after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, openly embraced racism.
Six posters mentioned Ron Paul as one of their political starting points, and 16 others mentioned libertarianism more generally. One TRS user said that he was a libertarian until he realized that his fellow believers “were fags for being ‘so principled’ with their open borders bullshit, that they ensured their desired society would never come about,” while another wrote they were a “lolbertarian until I realized only white people actually believe that garbage.” One simply wrote that they followed the “standard libertarian to nazi pipeline.”
AnCaps — or anarcho-capitalists — operate in much the same universe as libertarians, advocating for the eventual elimination of the state. According to one poster, “A couple dudes in my online AnCap circle went full bore with ‘you can't have libertarianism with mud genetics’ arguments. I was like ‘nah, that ain't true, and I'll show it ain't true.’ Then within a couple months I was like ‘yeah, that seems to be true. I think I'll go listen to that [William] Pierce guy” — Pierce authored the race war novel The Turner Diaries and is one of the most influential white supremacists in modern American history — “again but with an open mind, maybe if I actually check his claims I'll find out they're true too.’” He decided that Pierce was right.
The Dark Enlightenment is a political theory detailed by an obscure former academic named Nick Land in an online manifesto posted in 2012. It is an influential force within the alt-right that, like libertarianism, advocates for the recession of state power, though with different aims. Also known as “Neoreaction” and often shortened to “NRx,” adherents believe that capitalism should be accelerated to the point that corporate powers rule society, allowing natural hierarchies to emerge. They firmly believe in human biodiversity and reject democracy and egalitarianism (“it is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in egalitarianism,” a sidebar on their subreddit suggests). In this essentially feudal society, the superior white race will supposedly rule. In other words, it is a rejection of Enlightenment principles. Many of its central ideas are popular within Silicon Valley, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannonhas reportedly expressed interest in the philosophy.
Four TRS posters cited the philosophy as an influence, with some embracing the manifesto as they moved away from libertarianism. “Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one person wrote.
While the tenets of the Dark Enlightenment and the manifesto were cited in numerous popular blogs and passed between users in anonymous forums like Reddit, the political philosophy received arguably its biggest boost from Millennial Woes, a popular YouTuber who began his broadcasts from his father’s basement in Linlithgow, Scotland, in 2013.
Millennial Woes, whose real name is Colin Robertson, developed his political views as he was struggling to overcome clinical depression (a subject he meditates on in many videos), and his nihilism became intimately wound up in his politics. In a 2013 video titled “Depression in Individuals, and in Society,” Robertson described the negative-feedback loop that affects people with depression as something that can also plague the larger political culture. Depressed people engage in forms of self-sabotage because they are so used to the idea of failure, he explained, but justify this to themselves and others as a sort of journey in self-discovery — a reflection of the idea “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Modern liberal society, Robertson claimed, was doing the same thing: slowly destroying itself with experiments in feminism and egalitarianism in the name of achieving some kind of enlightenment.
This landed Robertson firmly in the camp of Neoreactionaries and, eventually, the alt-right. “Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. The races are different. The sexes are different,” the description of a 2016 Millennial Woes video titled “We Are the Alt-right” read. The video itself presented the viewer with questions like “Are you disturbed by the condition of our societies?” and “Don’t want your daughter to end up in a burka or with a non-white guy?” “What you need,” the text continued, “is a visit to the Alternative Right,” before a long list of alt-right outlets — including TheRightStuff.biz, American Renaissance, Red Ice, Alternative Hypothesis, Stefan Molyneaux, and of course, Millennial Woes — flashed on the screen.
Robertson brought a huge number of followers with him on his journey to the alt-right. His channel currently has more than 47,000 subscribers, while his videos have been viewed upwards of 7 million times. And it seems that Robertson’s trials with depression weren’t only a fundamental part of his political development, but helped attract others looking for support online — apparently an entry point to the alt-right for many. One TRS poster explained that they “Watched a Millennial Woes video on depression (I was miserable). He mentioned various things I had never heard of (neoreaction, Alt Right). I found Richard Spencer. I found TRS. Life completely changed…”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/misogynists-who-hate-misogynists-the-bizarre-ways-rival-women-hating-groups-detest-each-other/
President Ronald Reagan famously asserted that someone who agreed with him 80% of the time was an “80% friend” rather than a “20% enemy,” which is how he was able to oversee a fragile right-wing coalition of libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, neocons, and theocratic Christian Right fundamentalists — despite their differences. Similarly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in 2019, finds herself overseeing a big bent of Democrats who range from unapologetically liberal/progressive to more centrist. Pelosi is a pragmatist.
But extremist movements are not known for being pragmatic, having a big tent approach or putting together diverse coalitions. They demand ideological purity. They will not agree to disagree.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/yale-philosopher-and-author-of-how-fascism-works-explains-why-the-pandemic-offers-trump-a-dangerous-opportunity-to-rule-by-decree/
an 520 cdv stanley
...It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me.
Who is Trump’s real audience? What other ways is he signaling his intent to them?
This goes back to the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The friend-enemy distinction is at the heart of fascist ideology.By summoning the logic of the friend-enemy distinction during a war or other type of dire emergency, then all actions by the leader or ruler are justified. The truth does not matter when you are fighting an enemy. There is no democratic way of dealing with the enemy or resolving the crisis or emergency. Science is not a solution. One must use any means available, be it fair or not fair. That’s what the friend-enemy distinction does. Again, it is Social Darwinism. Kill or be killed.
The anti-lockdown “protests” have featured armed right-wing paramilitaries and militias. What is their role in failing democracies and the emergence of fascism and authoritarianism?
Fascism involves the typed of paramilitary forces we have seen in Michigan and elsewhere during Trump’s time in office, and before as well.Trump has constantly called for his supporters to use force against their and his “enemies.” Trump is trying to organize armed paramilitary groups on his behalf if there is a contested 2020 presidential election or some other outcome he does not like.
Trump’s paramilitary forces are making violent threats against Democratic elected officials and other lawmakers. The armed militia that tried to take over the Michigan state capitol building by blocking the governor’s door is an example of such a threat.
Right now, we are seeing how many men with guns can be called out on to the street by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States military is controlled by civilians. But with Trump’s paramilitary forces and other armed groups, he can give them orders and then claim some type of plausible deniability. These types of armed militias and paramilitaries are given license to act by Donald Trump and other authoritarians.
The official leaders in a full-on authoritarian regime or failing democracy then deny responsibility for the violence. The history of fascism repeatedly shows that leaders such as Donald Trump inspire these militias and paramilitaries to act, and then Trump can say, “No, that violence and those groups have nothing to do with me. They’re not the government. Those are some random people on the street!”
What is the role of higher education in resisting fascism and authoritarianism, especially during this emergency?
One must locate the attack on colleges and universities within an international perspective. If you look at the other countries which are under the control of far-right leaders, such as Brazil, India or Hungary, they all have featured incredible attacks on universities and other sites of higher education and learning. Academic freedom has been overturned. Schools have been defunded. Universities and their professors, staff and students have been targets of right-wing violence. In these regimes, universities are being attacked for supposedly being hotbeds of left-wing ideology.
In the United States such attacks are being mainstreamed by the right wing, in terms of attacking colleges and universities by slurring them as sites of “cultural Marxism.”
In terms of dismantling resistance to fascism, how does that work?
If we cannot physically gather together it makes it harder to resist. Universities are sites of resistance, which is why they are always targeted by fascists and authoritarians. Universities are places for free speech, questioning the government and engaging with challenging ideas about the relationship between power and society.
What happens when there is an educational system which does not teach critical thinking and engaged citizenship? What types of citizens are being produced by such an educational system?
Those citizens will not be democratic, capable of understanding, nurturing, participating in and protecting a healthy democracy. Democratic citizens criticize the powerful. That is what they do.
The goal of these authoritarians and right-wingers in the United States is to reduce and replace critical thinking that is taught and learned in the humanities and social sciences with just a “great books” curriculum and job training. Any other type of education and thinking is to be vilified as “cultural Marxism.”
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520
https://theweek.com/articles/911883/selfinflicted-derangement-conservative-intellectuals
...One is that the right has finally surrendered fully to the hubris and postmodern relativism expressed back in 2004 by a senior Bush administration adviser (widely assumed to be Karl Rove), who dismissed the “reality-based community” of journalists and experts in favor of allowing and encouraging those in power to create whole new realities by manipulating information. This temptation has been radicalized by Trump's brazen mendaciousness and its electoral success. Trump has shown that Republicans can be rabidly right wing, refuse to compromise with liberals on anything, and still win. This has made the dismissal of facts too great of a temptation to forswear, especially when the flood of bad news following from the pandemic threatens to drown the president just as he's heading into a re-election campaign. Which is to say that conservative intellectuals haven't just been Trumpfied on policy. They've also been Trumpified on epistemology and ethics.
Another possibility is that we're seeing the consequence of conservative intellectuals deciding to allow the culture war to swallow everything else in our public life. Conservatives have long believed that economics and politics are ultimately downstream from culture. But only now have they started to view every political or economic conflict as an expression of an underlying cultural clash that they believe they can win. Instead of getting their hands dirty with data, statistics, modeling, or wrestling with the difficult trade-offs involved in responding to dual epidemiological and economic crises, they prefer to tell ideologically satisfying stories that shoehorn the behavior of people, classes, politicians, and dreaded “elites” into pre-existing assumptions about the culture war.
Finally, there's the antinomian (and very American) distrust of science and expertise, which has now combined with long-standing conservative respect for the metarational prudence or wisdom of statesmen, to produce an inverted form of deference to ill-informed hunches, instincts, and intuitions, provided they're felt by ideological friends and political allies. So libertarian legal author Richard Epstein gets taken seriously across the right and in the White House when he defies the consensus of public-health experts on the basis of no concrete evidence at all to claim that the coronavirus will kill just 500 Americans. (He later raised his prediction to 5,000. The virus has thus far killed more than 63,000 with no immediate end in sight.) So R.R. Reno, the editor of First Thingsmagazine, relies on his gut (and a willfully obtuse reading of the data) to denounce efforts to halt the spread of the virus, all but claiming the American economy and public life have been intentionally wrecked by a malicious hoax promulgated by demonic liberals.
And then there are the many other conservatives who have quite seriously argued that the lockdowns that were imposed to lower fatalities from the virus were unnecessary … because the fatalities from the virus under the lockdown were lower than they were predicted to be without the lockdowns. (No, I'm not kidding.)
...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/bombshell-report-reveals-trumps-careless-belief-early-on-that-covid-19-was-deep-state-conspiracy
CNN’s Jake Tapper did a special walking through the timeline of the COVID-19 crisis and the denial from President Donald Trump leading up to the middle of March.
While the virus was spreading across the world, President Donald Trump believed that all of the warnings from his government were just more from the “deep state” trying to conspire against him and his presidency.
“His focus, much of it, was on the U.S. Senate,” said Tapper of Trump in January.
“In his view, it was the so-called deep state, people in government who were hell-bent on bringing him down,” said Mark Mazzetti, New York Times investigative reporter. “So, by the time the coronavirus pandemic really started to worsen in the United States and scientists and experts were telling him of the problem, he saw some of these people as just an extension of the deep state, and so that led to I think, some of the skepticism that he had towards the advice he was being given"
Trump issued his China ban, but according to the report, public health experts said that Trump assumed it would take care of everything. He then took his foot off the gas for weeks, ignoring the virus and having political rallies throughout the country instead of focusing on the crisis.
Political correspondent Sara Murray explained that public health experts “really look with despair at those couple of weeks because they say whatever your feelings were on the travel ban at the time, it was a perfectly fine and reasonable step to take, and he bought himself a little bit of time, and then he just squandered it.”
While the FDA acted quickly to issue test kits, they quickly found that the tests weren’t working. Precious time was wasted because the FDA blocked anyone else from creating a test.’
“There was a test available from the world health organization, but the CDC did not choose to get it, and nobody inside the government asked outside labs to help,” said Tapper.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta said that it was clear in early February that there was human to human contact.
Warning stacked up health experts, but they all went ignored. When one Trump official crafted a memo about the crisis, the president became enraged that someone put something down on paper about the virus. In the notorious “Red Dawn” email chain on Feb. 9, the government health experts were calling for social distancing. It was five weeks later that Trump would finally agree to it. But on that same day, Trump’s team was giving a briefing to governors where they were saying it was a serious problem.
“They gave us a pretty detailed outline of what they felt was happening with this virus,” said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R). “We knew this was going to be a serious crisis.”
In early February, Trump was telling everyone that the virus was going to be down to zero cases in the United States, but behind the scenes, his experts were preparing for cases to go from 15 to millions.
See clips of the special below:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-the-massive-lie-that-paved-trumps-way-to-the-presidency-and-how-to-defang-it
...Truth-telling was suddenly for wusses. Bald-faced lying was but a tactic, shrewdly used only by the boldest of men. Good manners, conventional norms, good government, even the very concept of law-abiding citizenship were accused (and found guilty) of turning the country into a humorless, over-regulated chicken coop paralyzed to the brink of suffocation by namby-pamby sensitivities.
Enter the loudmouth hooligan hell-bent on cleaning up this mess. He alone would refuse to gussy up his opinions. He alone would tell it to us straight.
He alone would speak the unvarnished truth.
And there you had it, in all its garish horror. The monster lie that got Trump elected President was that he alone could be trusted to tell the truth!
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The COVID-19 coronavirus has been deadly not only because it is so infectious, but also because it is a novel pathogen that has no vaccination or known therapeutics.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-anti-intellectualism-didnt-come-from-nowhere-the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all
no lnx
Trump’s anti-intellectualism didn’t come from nowhere — the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all
Written by The Washington Monthly April 24, 2020
Donald Trump recently created a stir by retweeting a call by a Republican politician to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. The reason: Fauci had the temerity to contradict the president on scientific facts. Then, whether out of fear or a willful suspension of intellect, the president’s coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx proclaimed that Trump has been “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data”—in contradiction to the avalanche of lies Trump puts out in his daily propaganda rallies masquerading as pandemic briefings.
Yet these are but surface examples of an ongoing tension between experts and Trumpists.It is a dynamic that has been at play since the very beginning of the administration: the war between experts and propagandists, between actual facts and “alternative facts.” Driving it is a wave of anti-intellectualism growing in America. And now, in this era of pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives are at stake. So, too, is the nation’s credibility. Given Donald Trump’s relentless antipathy toward truth and expertise, the outlook doesn’t look promising.
As the novel coronavirus rampaged across the country, a storm broke out in the White House over how to respond. Rather than taking dramatic actions early on to curtail the spread of the virus and prepare states and hospitals to meet the coming surge, the administration reverted to its profound anti-intellectualism, all in a bid to deflect its own failure in protecting American lives.
Disturbingly, Trump promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychlorine to tackle the virus, despite the fact that it hasn’t gone through the proper testing and approval process. After hearing about a country doctor in upstate New York who claimed to have treated patients for the disease with a cocktail of hydroxychlorine and other drugs with positive results, the president ran with it as a magic bullet. “I’ll tell you what, what do you have to lose?” he said. A just-released Veterans Administration study shows not only no benefit from use of hydroxychlorine, but there were more deaths among patients given the drug.Then, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro asserted that studies have showed the drug to have “clear therapeutic efficacy” in treating Covid-19 patients. Asked his qualifications for making such a claim, Navarro told CNN, “I’m a social scientist.” Others also trumpeting the medicine include the president’s usual Fox News chorus, led by Sean Hannity, and Rudolf Giuliani. This has had real impact: the White House directed health officials to put the anti-malarial medication ahead of other efforts to combat the outbreak. The federal government has since stockpiled 29 million pills.
Scientists, however, are counseling caution. “In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” said Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist. American Medical Association President Patrice Harris added: “You could lose your life. It’s unproven.” Axios reported a major blow-up in the situation room at one point between Navarro and a skeptical Fauci, who has confided to colleagues that Trump “almost always” ignores the advice he gives him before the daily press briefings.
Trump’s own CDC issued a statement on April 7 saying, “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” Medical experts are cautioning it will take a minimum of 12 to 18 months to come up with a vaccine.
In the meantime, Trump is putting the public health at even greater risk by propagating lies and misinformation. As of this writing, the coronavirus has claimed more than 47,000 American lives. Fatalities far surpass those in China, a nation with four times our population. And the rate of confirmed cases is growing faster in the United States than in all of Western Europe. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts some 67,000 Americans could die by August. Right now, one American dies of coronavirus every 45 seconds.
How many more will die depends on who is calling the shots: experts or hacks.
The Trump administration’s attitude toward science can only be described as contemptuous.There has been an 85 percent turnover of federal agency senior executives,and President Trump has failed to appoint anyone to nearly half of the federal scientific leadership positions. More often than not, Trump appointees are unqualified and ideologically driven.
Trump’s disdain for science comes with grievous consequences.He was alerted by the intelligence community of an emerging pandemic in January. Still, the president squandered more than two months before treating the issue seriously. That came after he disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic team and defunded a $200 million USAID program for detecting virus outbreaks overseas. Simply put, the president rid the government of some of its best resources to prepare for and respond to this kind of emergency. These actions come on top of the administration’s measures to marginalize science and fact-based research, including denying climate change.
But Trumpism did not come out of nowhere. Undergirding the president’s war on expertise is a recurrent strain of anti-intellectualism in America’s social and political DNA. As the late writer Isaac Asimov observed, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Trump panders to rightwing populists’ contempt for empirical facts and expert knowledge. Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has named science as one of his so-called Four Corners of Deceit, which also include government, academia and media. The coronavirus, Limbaugh said, “appears far less deadly” than the flu, but the government and the mainstream news media “keep promoting panic.”
The evangelical movement, a bedrock of Trump’s base, promotes an anti-science culture that rejects critical thinking.Pro-Trump Pentecostal preacher Rodney Howard-Browne has called his followers to attend church services in defiance of social distancing restrictions, dismissing coronavirus as a “phantom plague.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that anti-intellectualism also extends into the halls of Congress, where a sitting congressman declared a few years ago that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” and where the chairman of a Senate environmental committee brought a snowball into the chamber to prove that climate change is a hoax.
The coronavirus is not a hoax. It’s a mega-killer. A month after President Trump assured everyone that it would “go away,” more than 850,000 Americans have tested positive and the U.S. leads the world in the number of Covid-19-related deaths. Now, with his call over the weekend to “liberate” states imposing shelter-in-place orders, and red-state governors taking a care-free approach to social distancing, the risk of these numbers burgeoning out of control becomes very real.
Perhaps reality will sink in as the body count rises. Statistics, after all, are stubborn things. No amount of bluster, bluffing, and bullshit by the president and his enablers can obfuscate or contradict them. If there was ever a moment when it should be clear to voters why the nation needs a return to policies based on facts, knowledge, and science, this is it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/study-finds-people-who-watched-sean-hannity-were-more-likely-to-die-from-covid-19/
no lnx many
Study finds people who watched Sean Hannity were more likely to die from COVID-19
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon April 22, 2020
A new study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that “greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”
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Fox News host Sean Hannity has been heavily criticized for echoing President Donald Trump’s initial attempts to downplay the threat posed by the new coronavirus. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, his colleague at the right-leaning network who has framed the issue in more nationalistic terms, has been credited with convincing the president to take the pandemic seriously.
“Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” the researchers wrote in the working paper.
The two hosts diverged greatly on the issue in February. While Hannity expressed optimism that “zero people in the United States have died from the coronavirus,” Carlson warned viewers that the virus could kill 1 million people across the country.
The researchers commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 Fox News viewers, which found that Carlson’s viewers were more likely to change their behavior earlier than Hannity’s viewers.
“We find that Hannity’s viewers on average changed their behavior in response to the coronavirus five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior three days earlier than other Fox News viewers,” the paper said.
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The researchers then compared the death rate in counties that favored either host, finding “approximately 30% more COVID-19 cases” in areas that preferred Hannity than those that watched Carlson.
“Already by mid-March, we see a statistically significant difference — that there are greater case loads in places that favor Hannity over Tucker,” researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott told The Chicago Tribune. “Then weeks later, we see a similar trajectory increase for deaths.”
After Hannity’s “shift in tone,” however, “the diverging trajectories . . . began to revert,” the study said.
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The researchers argued that their findings were consistent with “misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data.”
Polls have similarly found that Fox News viewers as a whole are far more likely to believe the threat of the virus is exaggerated. Another poll showed that Republicans, in general, were less likely to change their behavior in response to the threat than Democrats.
The attempts by certain Fox News opinion hosts to downplay the virus early in the outbreak came in stark contrast to steps the network’s executives and owners took to protect themselves against the virus.
“The selective cherry-picked clips of Sean Hannity’s coverage used in this study are not only reckless and irresponsible, but down right factually wrong,” a spokesperson for Fox News said in a statement. “As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered Covid-19 since the early days of the story. The ‘study’ almost completely ignores his coverage and repeated, specific warnings and concerns from January 27-February 26 including an early interview with Dr. Fauci in January. This is a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Hannity likewise defended his coverage of the virus in an interview with Newsweek earlier this month, arguing that his January interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, showed that his viewers were getting accurate information.
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“Go to my web site, and you’ll see irrefutable evidence that I have taken this seriously way before most in the media did. I warned in January that it was dangerous because it was highly contagious, but some people were asymptomatic, so it would spread quickly,” he said, though he also argued months later that the flu was “much more dangerous” than the new coronavirus and compared the associated death rate to the murder rate in Chicago.
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Hannity’s comments came in response to a letter from 74 journalism professors to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and CEO Lachlan Murdoch calling on the network to stop spreading “misinformation” about the virus.
“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers — and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” the letter said. “. . . Inexcusably, Fox News has violated elementary canons of journalism. In so doing, it has contributed to the spread of a grave pandemic. Urgently, therefore, in the name of both good journalism and public health, we call upon you to help protect the lives of all Americans — including your elderly viewers — by ensuring that the information you deliver is based on scientific facts.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-keeps-claiming-that-he-quickly-banned-travel-from-asia-and-europe-due-to-covid-19-but-that-is-a-brazen-lie/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/this-utterly-damning-coronavirus-timeline-lays-bare-trumps-total-lack-of-leadership/
several ticktock timelines exist that track covid fails/lies
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-the-perfect-antidote-to-trumps-orwellian-attempts-to-rewrite-recent-history/
no lnx
Here’s the perfect antidote to Trump’s Orwellian attempts to rewrite recent history
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 3, 2020
As a writer, it can be difficult to come up with words to describe what it’s like to live through a crisis with someone like Trump in the Oval Office. Words like “Orwellian” seem totally inadequate when I want to rage at how crazy-making it feels to be constantly barraged with lies.
For example, on Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence told Wolf Blitzer that the president has never belittled the threat of the coronavirus. What?! We all heard Trump belittle the threat over and over and over again—with our own ears. It is on tape for heaven’s sake.
How can someone go on national television and say something that is so blatantly refuted by the evidence? But the fact is that these folks do it all the time—which is where a word like “gaslighting” comes in because it is absolutely crazy-making.
The example that is most disturbing, however, is the fact that Trump is preparing to congratulate himself if this pandemic results in the death of 200,000 Americans. It’s coming. We all know it because he’s already teed it up.
Nancy LeTourneau
@Smartypants60
This is unconscionable. https://twitter.com/sparksjls/status/1244429399300112385 …
Jason Sparks
@sparksjls
Replying to @sparksjls
“If we have between 100,000 and 200,000 we’ve all together done a very good job,” Trump says, about up to 200,000 Americans dying of #COVID19.
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To step away from the crazy for a moment, it is impossible to know how many Americans would have died if this country had a competent president. But on the issue of initial testing as a means of containment, we can already see the vast difference between what happened in South Korea and this country.
Trump belittled the threat, ignored multiple warnings, and avoided testing because the numbers would make him look bad. By the time the administration got serious about this pandemic, it was too late for containment and we were left with mitigation strategies like social distancing. While it is impossible to quantify the number of lives that were sacrificed due to that particular failure, it is clear that this president is responsible for the deaths of thousands on that issue alone.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve often thought of Representative Adam Schiff’s warning about “midnight in Washington” at the end of the Senate impeachment trial—especially when he said, “You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute. Not for one election. Not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it…Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less. And decency matters not at all.” With those words, Schiff demonstrated that he doesn’t underestimate Donald Trump’s depravity. The congressman cut through the bullshit and grounded us all in the reality we are facing.
That is why I find some reassurance from this announcement.
When America has recovered from the coronavirus crisis and people are back to work, Rep. Adam B. Schiff thinks Congress should consider a 9/11-style independent commission to examine why the nation was so unprepared for the pandemic.
Schiff, a California Democrat, told me in an interview Monday that his staff has already started working on a discussion draft modeled after the 9/11 Commission, and that he would be talking about the possibility with others in Congress…
“We will need to delay the work of the commission until the crisis has abated to ensure that it does not interfere with the agencies that are leading the response,” Schiff explained in an email. “But that should not prevent us from beginning to identify where we got it wrong and how we can be prepared for the next pandemic.”
The antidote to the constant stream of Orwellian propaganda coming from Trump and his enablers is a grounding in the truth provided by people who have demonstrated that they recognize the depths to which this president has already gone. I can think of no one who would perform that task better than Representative Adam Schiff.
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https://theconversation.com/its-a-bad-idea-for-journalists-to-censor-trump-instead-they-can-help-the-public-identify-whats-true-or-false-134962
no lnx
It’s a bad idea for journalists to censor Trump – instead, they can help the public identify what’s true or false
March 28, 2020 10.44am EDT
Author
David Cuillier
Associate Professor, School of Journalism, University of Arizona
Disclosure statement
David Cuillier is former president of the Society of Professional Journalists and currently president of the nonprofit National Freedom of Information Coalition, which provides education and research regarding citizen access to government information.
Partners
University of Arizona
University of Arizona provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.]
In times of mortal strife, humans crave information more than ever, and it’s journalists’ responsibility to deliver it.
But what if that information is inaccurate, or could even kill people?
That’s the quandary journalists have found themselves in as they decide whether to cover President Donald J. Trump’s press briefings live.
Some television networks have started cutting away from the briefings, saying the events are no more than campaign rallies, and that the president is spreading falsehoods that endanger the public.
“If Trump is going to keep lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should, all of us, stop broadcasting it,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow tweeted. “Honestly, it’s going to cost lives.”
News decisions and ethical dilemmas aren’t simple, but withholding information from the public is inconsistent with journalistic norms, and while well-meaning, could actually cause more harm than good in the long run. Keeping the president’s statements from the public prevents the public from being able to evaluate his performance, for example.
Maddow Blog
@MaddowBlog
Maddow: If Trump is going to keep lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should, all of us, stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's going to cost lives.
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Truth and falsehood can fight it out
The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, updated in 2014 during my term as president, states that the press must “seek truth and report it,” while also minimizing harm.
When the president of the United States speaks, it matters – it is newsworthy, it’s history in the making. Relaying that event to the public as it plays out is critical for citizens, who can see and hear for themselves what their leader is saying, and evaluate the facts for themselves so that they may adequately self-govern.
That’s true even if leaders lie. Actually, it’s even more important when leaders lie.
Think of libertarian philosopher John Milton’s plea for the free flow of information and end of censorship in 1600s England. Put it all out there and let people sort the lies from the truth, Milton urged: “Let her and Falsehood grapple.”
If a president spreads lies and disinformation, or minimizes health risks, then the electorate needs to know that to make informed decisions at the polls, perhaps to vote the person out to prevent future missteps.
Likewise, there’s a chance the president could be correct in his representation of at least some of the facts.
It’s not up to journalists to decide, but simply report what is said while providing additional context and facts that may or may not support what the president said.
Maddow is correct that journalists should not simply parrot information spoon fed by those in power to readers and viewers who might struggle to make sense of it in a vacuum. That is why it’s imperative journalists continuously challenge false and misleading statements, and trust the public to figure it out.
Craving information
Those who would urge the media’s censorship of the president’s speeches may feel they are protecting citizens from being duped, because they believe the average person can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Communication scholars call this “third-person effect,” where we feel ourselves savvy enough to identify lies, but think other more vulnerable, gullible and impressionable minds cannot.
It is understandable why journalists would try to protect the public from lies. That’s the “minimizing harm” part in the SPJ code of ethics, which is critical in these times, when inaccurate information can put a person’s health at risk – or cause them to make a fatal decision.
So how do journalists report the day’s events while minimizing harm and tamping down the spread of disinformation? Perhaps this can be accomplished through techniques already in use during this unorthodox presidential period:
Report the press briefings live for all to see, while providing live commentary and fact-checking, as PolitiFact and others have done for live presidential debates.
Fact-check the president after his talks, through contextual stories that provide the public accurate information, in the media and through websites such as FactCheck.org.
Call intentional mistruths what they are: Lies. With this administration, journalists have become more willing to call intentional falsehoods “lies,” and that needs to continue, if not even more bluntly.
Develop a deep list of independent experts that can be on hand to counter misinformation as it is communicated.
Report transparently and openly, clearly identifying sources, providing supplemental documents online, and acknowledging limitations of information.
The coronavirus pandemic is a critical time for the nation’s health and its democracy. Now, more than ever, we need information. As humans, we crave knowing what is going on around us, a basic “awareness instinct,” as termed by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their foundational book, “The Elements of Journalism.”
On March 27, CNN provided live fact-checking of Trump’s statements during a coronavirus briefing. ]
‘People aren’t dummies’
Sometimes people don’t even realize they need information until after they have lost it.
In his autobiography, the late Sen. John McCain wrote that upon his release after five years as a Vietnamese prisoner of war, the first thing he did when he got to a Philippines military base was order a steak dinner and stack of newspapers.
“I wanted to know what was going on in the world, and I grasped anything I could find that might offer a little enlightenment,” McCain wrote. “The thing I missed most was information – free, uncensored, undistorted, abundant information.”
People aren’t dummies. They can decipher good information from bad, as long as they have all the facts at their disposal.
And journalists are the ones best positioned to deliver it.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-right-wing-coronavirus-deniers-want-to-kill-expertise-and-they-could-entice-trump-to-court-disaster/
no lnx
The right-wing coronavirus deniers want to kill expertise — and they could entice Trump to court disaster
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly March 31, 2020
Back in 2012, Donald Trump tweeted this:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
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Paul Krugman is right to suggest that we might experience a bit of déjà vu when we watch how the president and his enablers are responding to the coronavirus.
Let me summarize the Trump administration/right-wing media view on the coronavirus: It’s a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it’s China’s fault, which is why we should call it the “Chinese virus.”
Just as there are climate science deniers, there are a whole range of coronavirus deniers out there as well. They come in many different shapes and sizes, but the most common are those who simply deny the scope of the problem. While they accept that the virus exists, they tend to believe that Democrats, the media, or the “deep state” (pick your villain) are simply exaggerating the problem in order to make Trump look bad.
The more perverse of these folks started the Twitter hashtag, #FilmYourHospital. They take videos of the outside of hospitals and claim that the lack of activity indicates that the hype is all a hoax.
DeAnna Lorraine????
?
@DeAnna4Congress
Just went to 2 hospitals in LA to check out these “War Zones” the MSM keeps telling us about.??
They are very quiet & EMPTY.
We are not being told the truth. Why?? Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending. We ARE the news now. We can’t trust the news. Post pics of ur hospital here!
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One of the most prominent coronavirus deniers is radio talk show host Bill Mitchell. His most recent schtick has been to rail against the “stay at home” orders being issued by governors.
Bill Mitchell
@mitchellvii
I promise you, when we granted Governors these emergency powers, no one envisioned them shutting down their state for months at a time and imposing martial law.
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But it was Mitchell who initiated the right wing attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci. It all started back on March 3rd.
Bill Mitchell
@mitchellvii
So this Dr. Anthony Fauci is pushing the panic button today. Always helpful. Talking about closing schools and businesses?
Hell, why don't we just shut down the whole country over 104 sick, 6 dead?
Sorry President Trump, but replace this crackpot.
Almost immediately Fauci was accused of being a Democratic plant. The idea that he was a member of the so-called “deep state” took hold and eventually an email from Fauci surfaced among those that had been released by WikiLeaks. In it, the doctor had praised Hillary Clinton for her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee. Now the deniers were off to the races. They were soon doing the same thing to Dr. Deborah Birx.
Bill Mitchell
@mitchellvii
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate Conflicted Loyaltieshttps://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/exclusive-dr-birxs-connections-with-the-clinton-foundation-and-obama-unfortunately-indicate-conflicted-loyalties/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons …
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Birx's Connections with the Clinton Foundation and Obama Unfortunately Indicate...
Is Dr. Deborah Birx, the doctor with the scarf, a voice of reason or another Deep State doctor pushing economic disaster and suffering? Her past unfortunately provides the answer. Dr. Deborah Birx...
thegatewaypundit.com
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Isaac Stanley-Becker makes the important point about all of this (emphasis mine).
[T]he disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further — aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the “deep state” that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.
This is something we’ve seen over and over again from right-wingers. Whenever someone says something they don’t like—especially if it challenges “dear leader”—all they have to do is find a remote connection to a Democrat (preferably Hillary Clinton), and the opposing opinion can be discarded as nothing more than partisanship. That is how the right is attempting to kill the whole notion of expertise—be it on anything from climate change to coronavirus. The mainstream media provides an assist to those efforts when they assume a “both sides” approach to every issue instead of prioritizing the truth.
Over the course of the last three months, Donald Trump has dallied in many of the opinions espoused by these coronavirus deniers. His decision to extend the guidelines calling for social distancing and other measures to mitigate the virus indicate that at this point, he’s still listening to the experts—even if it is merely for his own self-interest. But we’re not out of the woods yet. The deniers are waiting in the wings with their conspiracy theory guns loaded for the moment he grows impatient with the experts.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/a-weak-man-with-delusions-of-competence-trump-buried-for-lying-his-way-through-the-daily-pandemic-press-conferences
no lnx
‘A weak man with delusions of competence’: Trump buried for lying his way through the daily pandemic press conferences
Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story March 21, 2020
In a brutally blunt piece for the New York Times, columnist Jennifer Senior went scorched earth on Donald Trump for his lie-filled performances in the now daily press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic — suggesting the media call them what they are: presidential “propaganda.”
Following a day when the combative Trump attacked NBC reporter Peter Alexander for merely asking what he could say to the public that is living in fear of the pandemic, Senior said enough is enough.
“In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda,” she wrote. “We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.”
According to the columnist, Trump’s press conferences are full of bluster and lies and stand in stark contrast with those being held by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY).
For many, Friday’s contentious press conference should be the tipping point for most journalists.
“At his Thursday news conference, a discussion of chloroquine and other experimental therapies formed the core of his remarks, when those drugs and therapies are untested and unproven and, in some cases, won’t be ready for several months, as NBC’s Peter Alexander pointed out the following day,” she recalled. “‘What do you say to Americans who are scared?’ Alexander pressed. ‘I say that you’re a terrible reporter,’ Trump answered. Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.”
“Most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to halt, Trump cut him off,” she explained. “Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.”
Then came the Cuomo comparison.
“I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement,” she wrote. “Then he spoke from the heart. One of his daughters was in quarantine. ‘To tell you the truth, I had some of the best conversations with her that I’ve ever had,’ Cuomo said. She was alone for two weeks. ‘We talked about things in depth that we didn’t have time to talk about in the past,’ he continued, ‘or we didn’t have the courage or the strength to talk about in the past — feelings I had, about mistakes I had made along the way that I wanted to express my regret and talk through with her.'”
“He was expressing fallibility. Imagine that,” she concluded.
You can read the whole piece here.
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hmmn
https://www.fastcompany.com/90474525/why-people-are-so-easily-fooled-by-conspiracy-theories-they-read-online
see theconv
3x?!
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/14/artificial-intelligence-app-climate-fake-science
Chris Impey, University of Arizona
Science gets a lot of respect these days. Unfortunately, it’s also getting a lot of competition from misinformation. Seven in 10 Americans think the benefits from science outweigh the harms, and nine in 10 think science and technology will create more opportunities for future generations. Scientists have made dramatic progress in understanding the universe and the mechanisms of biology, and advances in computation benefit all fields of science.
On the other hand, Americans are surrounded by a rising tide of misinformation and fake science. Take climate change. Scientists are in almost complete agreement that people are the primary cause of global warming. Yet polls show that a third of the public disagrees with this conclusion.
In my 30 years of studying and promoting scientific literacy, I’ve found that college educated adults have large holes in their basic science knowledge and they’re disconcertingly susceptible to superstition and beliefs that aren’t based on any evidence. One way to counter this is to make it easier for people to detect pseudoscience online. To this end, my lab at the University of Arizona has developed an artificial intelligence-based pseudoscience detector that we plan to freely release as a web browser extension and smart phone app.
Americans’ Predilection for Fake Science
Americans are prone to superstition and paranormal beliefs. An annual survey done by sociologists at Chapman University finds that more than half believe in spirits and the existence of ancient civilizations like Atlantis, and more than a third think that aliens have visited the Earth in the past or are visiting now. Over 75% hold multiple paranormal beliefs. The survey shows that these numbers have increased in recent years.
Widespread belief in astrology is a pet peeve of my colleagues in astronomy. It’s long had a foothold in the popular culture through horoscopes in newspapers and magazines but currently it’s booming. Belief is strong even among the most educated. My surveys of college undergraduates show that three-quarters of them think that astrology is very or “sort of” scientific and only half of science majors recognize it as not at all scientific.
Allan Mazur, a sociologist at Syracuse University, has delved into the nature of irrational belief systems, their cultural roots, and their political impact. Conspiracy theories are, by definition, resistant to evidence or data that might prove them false. Some are at least amusing. Adherents of the flat Earth theory turn back the clock on two millennia of scientific progress. Interest in this bizarre idea has surged in the past five years, spurred by social media influencers and the echo chamber nature of web sites like Reddit. As with climate change denial, many come to this belief through YouTube videos.
However, the consequences of fake science are no laughing matter. In matters of health and climate change, misinformation can be a matter of life and death. Over a 90-day period spanning December, January and February, people liked, shared and commented on posts from sites containing false or misleading information about COVID-19 142 times more than they did information from the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.
Combating fake science is an urgent priority. In a world that’s increasingly dependent on science and technology, civic society can only function when the electorate is well informed.
Educators must roll up their sleeves and do a better job of teaching critical thinking to young people. However, the problem goes beyond the classroom. The internet is the first source of science information for 80% of people ages 18 to 24.
One study found that a majority of a random sample of 200 YouTube videos on climate change denied that humans were responsible or claimed that it was a conspiracy. The videos peddling conspiracy theories got the most views. Another study found that a quarter of all tweets on climate were generated by bots and they preferentially amplified messages from climate change deniers.
Technology to the Rescue?
The recent success of machine learning and AI in detecting fake news points the way to detecting fake science online. The key is neural net technology. Neural nets are loosely modeled on the human brain. They consist of many interconnected computer processors that identify meaningful patterns in data like words and images. Neural nets already permeate everyday life, particularly in natural language processing systems like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s language translation capability.
At the University of Arizona, we have trained neural nets on handpicked popular articles about climate change and biological evolution, and the neural nets are 90% successful in distinguishing wheat from chaff. With a quick scan of a site, our neural net can tell if its content is scientifically sound or climate-denial junk. After more refinement and testing we hope to have neural nets that can work across all domains of science.
[graf]
the goal is a web browser extension that would detect when the user is looking at science content and deduce whether or not it’s real or fake. If it’s misinformation, the tool will suggest a reliable web site on that topic. My colleagues and I also plan togamify the interface with a smart phone app that will let people compete with their friends and relatives to detect fake science. Data from the best of these participants will be used to help train the neural net.
Sniffing out fake science should be easier than sniffing out fake news in general, because subjective opinion plays a minimal role in legitimate science, which is characterized by evidence, logic and verification. Experts can readily distinguish legitimate science from conspiracy theories and arguments motivated by ideology, which means machine learning systems can be trained to, as well.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” These words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, advisor to four presidents, could be the mantra for those trying to keep science from being drowned by misinformation.
Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona
amazonwatch 320
see divest, greenwash, hypocrisy
Last week, we released a groundbreaking report exposing five major financial institutions – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, BlackRock, HSBC and Goldman Sachs – which continue to pour billions into oil extraction in the western Amazon despite their recently celebrated climate commitments.
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ah the classics ;)
https://www.mediamatters.org/national-enquirer/national-enquirer-pushes-dangerous-lie-coronavirus-cures-have-been-found-and-are
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trump-repeats-lie-sean-hannity-about-obama-and-h1n1-flu
https://theconversation.com/4-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-disinformation-130767
theconv 320
4 ways to protect yourself from disinformation
Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University
As the 2020 elections near and disinformation campaigns ramp up, an expert on media literacy offers advice you can use to develop habits to exert more conscious control over your news intake.
320 hnn
i Taught my Students to Create Hoaxes in Public. Here’s Why
KEITH A. EREKSON
The discipline of history has much to offer our present age of misinformation in terms of subject matter and analytical methods.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-google-coronavirus-website-lie-may-be-the-ultimate-in-simply-making-stuff-up/
no lnx
Trump’s Google coronavirus website lie may be the ultimate in simply making stuff up
Written by Mark Sumner, Stephen Wolf, Daily Kos March 14, 2020
During his Friday afternoon press event—an event that seemed focused entirely on pumping up the stock market by name dropping as many corporations as possible—Donald Trump claimed that Google was working on a website that would help worried Americans figure out if they needed to be tested for the novel coronavirus. The website, according to Trump would be done soon, and would not only provide information on whether a test was called for, but advise on where to go for a test. Trump was not only very specific, noting that Google had “1,700 engineers working on this right now,” but took the time to make a backhanded swipe at the initial difficulties of the web site connected to the Affordable Care Act.
The only problem is … everything. Google is not building the website Trump described. Not with 1,700 engineers. Not at all. Another company owned by the same parent company as Google is working on a site connected to the coronavirus, but it is absolutely nothing like what Trump described. In a press event that was entirely designed to make Trump’s disastrous handling of this crisis look better, Donald Trump decided the best approach was to simply lie his ass off.
Trump’s claim about the Google site wasn’t something made in passing. He went on at length. “Google is going to develop a website,” said Trump. And getting in that knock against the difficulties in bringing the Obamacare insurance site up to snuff, he added, “It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past.” Trump then went on to detail how this site would direct Americans to testing facilities; testing facilities which Trump hyped as if he was opening a chain of chicken sandwich joints. “Determine if a test is warranted, and facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way. We cover this country and large parts of the world, by the way. We’re not gonna be talking about the world right now, but we cover very, very strongly our country. Stores in virtually every location.” Stores. He actually called them stores. “ Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress.”
This wasn’t the only time Trump referred to the site during his press event. Dr. Debbie Birx even brought a visual aid, a poster suitable for hanging in any fourth grade classroom, that supposedly showed the functionality of this site. Birx reinforced Trump’s statements that Americas would be able to select them symptoms, check on whether they needed to be tested, and get directed to the nearest facility. She even added to the supposed functionality, suggesting that after taking a test, people would be able to check on their results.
It was only hours after Trump talked that Google slipped out an announcement to explain just when Americans would be able to access this wonder site directing them to the nearest Honest Don’s Really Existing Testing Station. That would be never.
Google is working on nothing, they explained.Verily Life Sciences—another company opened by the same parent, Alphabet—is working on a site, but nothing about it matches what Trump said. That site is to help triage COVID-19 patients. It’s only for the Bay Area. And it’s not just about to appear, it’s still in “early stages of development.” Google doesn’t specify how many engineers are working on the site at Verily, but since the entire staff of Verily, most of whom are not web developers, is just 400 people, it’s a cinch it’s not “1,700 engineers.”
So where did Trump get that this was a national site? Where did he get the idea that it was going to be ready soon? Where were the descriptions of the functionality generated? Where did the figure of 1,700 engineers come from?
Those are really good questions. Which you can bet that the press will not ask at the next event.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/losing-reality-bill-moyers-asks-robert-jay-lifton-if-we-can-get-the-truth-back/
no lnx
Losing Reality: Bill Moyers asks Robert Jay Lifton if we can get the truth back
Written by Bill Moyers March 14, 2020
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to a conversation between Bill Moyers and psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton. The distinguished scholar is now 93. His memoir Witness to an Extreme Century reflects on seminal work exploring the experience of Hiroshima survivors,?Hitler’s Nazi doctors, the trauma of Vietnam veterans and the violent Japanese religious cult that pumped Sarin gas into Tokyo’s subways.
After helping to establish a new field in medicine, he has spent his adult life helping us understand the effect on human behavior of people who arbitrarily create truth and then resist fiercely any who question that truth.?His new book is Losing Reality, published by New Press.?Here’s Bill Moyers…
BILL MOYERS: This being the Trump era, we find ourselves once again engulfed in two realities. There’s the reality of a spiraling global challenge from coronavirus, and there’s the ALTERNATE reality created by the president and his political and propaganda empire. They are spreading a virus of their own, lulling true believers into complacent ignorance with lies and misinformation.
Even as the Centers for Disease Control urged us to prepare for “significant disruption”, President Trump told us not to worry — the disease, nudged along by a miracle, will disappear. It’s all a hoax anyway, he said of the outbreak – perpetrated by Democrats and media. His White House chief of staff agreed, telling the public that the relentless news coverage is aimed at bringing the president down. A junior Trump even speculated that his father’s enemies hope the virus does come to this country and“ kills millions of Americans” thus ending his father’s winning streak. But leave it to Rush Limbaugh to come up with the most malevolent and suicidal lie of all – that the coronavirus is just “the common cold” – really nothing more than a Democratic talking point.
Over at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the usual chorus of well-trained sycophants chimed in with the party line orchestrated by the president’s alter ego, Sean Hannity. Trump’s opponents, said Hannity, “are rooting for corona to wreak havoc in the United States.” Meanwhile, the President assigned the Vice President to be the commissar of censorship over government scientists and public health officials to make sure they hew to the official line, that is the White House view of reality. The Vice President promptly called them to a prayer meeting.
Dual realities. One exists in fact, in the world as it is. The other created by the President himself, to distract us from the truth. To make sense of this, I read Robert Jay Lifton’s new book Losing Reality and went by to talk to the distinguished scholar and psychiatrist at his apartment in New York City.
Bill Moyers: Losing Reality, when I first saw that title, I scratched my head. How do you lose reality?
Robert Jay Lifton: You lose it by creating falsehood and structuring that falsehood into a claim of reality. In terms of what we’re faced with, it’s Trump, but not only Trump, it’s people around him and associated with him. There is a kind of created reality. It’s what I call solipsistic reality, which simply means what is in your mind, what your sense of self needs and seeks, rather than what is based on the reasonable criteria for evidence. So that kind of solipsistic reality replaces what we would traditionally look at as reality. And that’s a dangerous moment.
Bill Moyers: What’s changed when reality is lost? What’s different?
Robert Jay Lifton: When reality is lost, it’s really impossible for democratic institutions to function. In fact, reality is never entirely lost. And the existence of institutions that depend upon a relation to reality is still hopeful. They’re being battered. But they’ve not been destroyed or eliminated.
Bill Moyers: Give me an example.
Robert Jay Lifton: Well, right now there’s a world epidemic, or even pandemic, that’s threatening us. A big issue has to do with health care, which has been ignored or nearly destroyed by right-wing Trumpists to the best that they could do that.
This is a truth of danger that we face which we must express. And the kinds of health care that we require are hard truths that can’t be falsified. And that’s why, despite all the lies, one must constantly counter them with truth and not wait for the lies to put forward truths.
And sometimes it gets weary to constantly expose lies and constantly reiterate truth. But one has to do that because that’s what a lawful society and a democracy require.
Right now, for instance, we’re in the middle of an attack — on the entire nature of the Justice Department, a major institution, for a law-bound society. There’s dreadful violation of their ordinary standards. And yet, there are struggles within the organization, from outside the organization, from people still working there, from people who have worked there in the past. The struggle is over resorting to law as opposed to personal authoritarianism. But it’s also a struggle over what is real, over what is true, over what we can depend upon. And that struggle is endless. And it’s become at the same time acute during the Trump era.
Bill Moyers: Just the other day, the president issued a slew of pardons for criminals who had committed serious financial and political crimes. And they were all mostly, men, white and privileged. What does that say to you about reality in America?
Robert Jay Lifton: They were not only mostly male, white and privileged. They were corrupt. That was a common feature. It parallels the corruption around Trump and in Trump. And his pardoning them is a negation of standards of corruption in favor of and acceptance and welcoming of them. And that too is playing with reality. When you pardon those among the most corrupt, you’re denying their corruption or accepting the corruption as part of the norm, what I call malignant normality. The two are almost the same. And preparing for further actions, further pardonings of corrupt people surrounding the administration.
Bill Moyers: Have we ever encountered a public figure who so consistently reversed truth and falsehood on such a vast scale?
Robert Jay Lifton: No. I think Trump is very unusual. The way he functions and evaluates reality only from the standpoint of the self and its needs. That’s the way that psychotic patients usually behave. We say they have a break with reality.
I don’t think Trump is psychotic. He’s, in fact, very talented at media manipulation and has some shrewd political sense that he employs. But the extremity of the solipsism and his paranoia and of his claim to being a messiah is so extreme in a person who is not psychotic, is what makes him so extraordinary and dangerous.
Bill Moyers: Over many years, you have studied people who claim ownership of the minds of others. You call them mental predators. Who are we talking about?
Robert Jay Lifton: Usually when we talk about those who seek ownership of reality and ownership of others’ minds, we’re talking about extremists, people who engage in what I call ideological totalism. That’s all or none belief systems, which claim absolute truth and absolute virtue.
And they’re often very complicated ideologies.
Trump would, at first glance, seem to be almost the opposite of them. He doesn’t have a systemic ideology. He has no ideology, really. It’s very changeable, the ideas he puts forward. But what he has in common with them is the claim to ownership of reality.
Bill Moyers: How do you own reality?
Robert Jay Lifton: You can’t. It’s a kind of fantasy and goal. One can never own reality. But the mental predators seek to own it. And they create all kinds of difficulty and pain and even violence in connection with that claim.
It isn’t new with Trump. People have sought to own reality from religious sources or political extremism. But with Trump, it’s a kind of simple or simplistic solipsistic endeavor. It’s ongoing. He has no other way of function. And in that sense, under him, our country is running on falsehood and unreality.
Bill Moyers: So what happens to the truth when an individual or a group claim to own reality?
Robert Jay Lifton: The truth doesn’t quite go away. It just becomes harder to connect with, or a little more unclear.And when we look at what’s been going on recently, first, the impeachment hearings and the impeachment itself. And then the trial, or so-called trial in the Senate. These were, of course, about Trump’s transgressions, his high crimes and misdemeanors for which impeachment became appropriate.
But they were also about reality, holding to reality, confronting falsehood and lies. And that struggle with reality is very much ongoing. And very much with us. And I tend to suspect that it may be Trump’s most lasting legacy in the difficulty we have coping with it and transcending it.
Bill Moyers: So reality in this case is what Donald Trump did, actually did, and what he says he did or didn’t do. And that’s the counter reality that he has created with the help of the Republican party, right?
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes. Well, people always ask me do I think that Trump believes in his falsehoods. And I say that the question assumes something about belief that may not be entirely true, that it’s definite and fixed. Belief is a form of behavior and it can change. It’s a form of adaptability.
So when you take some of Trump’s falsehoods, for instance, the primal falsehood of Barack Obama not being born in this country. He didn’t make that up. He got it from somewhere else. But he embraced it more than anybody else. Used it as a political lever for national presidential election.
And in that sense, we can say he was using it as a means of manipulation, consciously manipulating in relation to it. And that’s just plain old lying. But over time, one can suspect that he came in one side of his mind to partially believe it.
You know, you can’t really be effective as a conman unless you come to believe in your falsehoods. And that happens. And we see that in Trump.
Bill Moyers: Doesn’t that explain a lot about American history? We’ve been hospitable for conmen from the very beginning. And that becomes woven into the web of Americanism, what’s great about America, including our ability to fool each other.
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes, that’s all too true. And there are powerful strains in American society that feed the process we’re discussing. Yes, the conman. Many great American novelists have written about the conman at the heart of their novel. Beyond the conman, there are the nativists and Know-Nothing groups. And also the paranoid tendency — all these have affected the people around Trump.
And, of course, they long predated Trump. That’s why people can be confused about who’s responsible for all this. Some say it’s only Trump and it’s his psyche. Well, that’s not true because we have these trends in American society.
Others say Trump is of no account. It’s all American society. That’s not true either. There’s something sui generis about Trump. He contributes a lot of this with his solipsism. And also with his grandiose paranoia and angry and vitriolic impulses toward revenge toward anyone who doesn’t follow his falsehoods. So one has to see this kind of balance or imbalance or equilibrium involving Trump and these large and pervasive tendencies in American society that predated him and feed him.
Bill Moyers: You say he has Trumpistas, I would call them — one of the most powerful beingFox News and talk radio.
When a politically powerful individual is invested by the owner of a particular reality, say, Rupert Murdoch and his family, with a mandate to spread an alternative reality, he has a head start, doesn’t he?
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes. And that’s a terrible factor in all this.
I’ve also watched Fox News and now there are other places — Trumpist captivity of of more local outlets, recreated newspapers and radio stations. And these places live on falsehood. When just the latest conspiracy idea: The coronavirus was created intentionally by the Chinese communists to spread around the world in order to destroy their enemies.
Bill Moyers: Yeah, this is the rumor.
Robert Jay Lifton: This is the—
Bill Moyers: conspiracy theory.
Robert Jay Lifton: The latest conspiracy theory.
I listened to Fox News a little bit and, sure enough, their host was saying, “Well, how do you know they didn’t? Oh, you’re sticking up for China if you don’t believe it.” So what begins as wild conspiracism becomes repeated and reinforced by a very powerful medium and people who give it what seems like legitimation. That’s dreadful. And it very much contributes to what we’re calling losing reality.
Bill Moyers: What do they gain from it? What does Fox, including the owners of it, what do they gain from promoting such a widespread delusion?
Robert Jay Lifton: They don’t see it as a widespread delusion — the proponents any more than Trump does — because there’s been a process of delegitimation of the opposition. That’s really important. And—
Bill Moyers: What do you mean by that?
Robert Jay Lifton: Well, political theorists have begun to talk about it, in which they mean there no longer is a loyal opposition. There no longer are shared commitments to the national or international wellbeing.
You must defeat Democrats as the enemy. Not the loyal opposition, but the tarnished, evil enemy.And that takes precedence over anything else. Those who sponsor Fox News would have that kind of rationale. The delegitimation of the opposition, at least it’s more recent expression, is maybe several decades old.
And it’s devastating.
Bill Moyers: Yes, I’ve been around long enough to remember that Richard Nixon turned Democrats not into an adversary to be defeated at the polls, but an enemy to be destroyed in political warfare. And Newt Gingrich, who is probably the single most responsible individual for what is happening today, for changing the ground rules of politics to make it total war.
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes, from Gingrich rendering politics total warfare and when you make it absolute, win-lose and delegitimate the opposition, you’re moving toward some kind of authoritarian state. And there was that tendency in right-wing Republicanism before Trump which could join forces with Trump in this dangerous way. And could animate, could inspire those who back up or support Fox News and other outlets that profess only an absolute win-lose position.
Bill Moyers: And one of their achievements was to change the meaning of words and they simply twisted the meaning of language.
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes, what I called loading the language. Loading the language really means speaking in God words or devil words. And reducing large issues to what I call the thought terminating clichés. And that’s very much a characteristic of delegitimation. The language becomes so loaded that there’s no other way of thinking than those who are assuming authoritarian control and delegitimating the opponents.
Bill Moyers: So, are you saying that what’s happening to us now somehow fits the pattern of the totalistic ideologies that have consumed your life?
Robert Jay Lifton: I’m not saying that we are headed inevitably for an authoritarian society or Nazi-like society. What I am saying is that there are parallels. And they’re dangerous. You know, the Nazis didn’t do away with the major institutions of Germany.
They Nazified them. They had a term called gleichschaltung which simply meant reconstructing, reordering, re-gearing. They got rid of those who were unreliable, not reliable Nazis, [and] replaced them with reliable Nazis. And the institutions became sources of Nazi concepts and Nazi behavior.
Trump and his people are trying to do similar things with our institutions. Not do away with them, but Trumpize them. By removing, if possible, those with independent thought — and those who adhere to traditional realities — on the one hand, and replacing them with those who are willing to support his solipsistic reality on the other.
It doesn’t fully work. But it’s enormously confusing and harmful. It doesn’t fully work partly because, unlike Germany, we have had more substantive institutions of a Democratic kind. It doesn’t always feel that way. But they’ve been around for some time. And they’ve been law centered.
The Germany of Weimar, preceding Hitler, lacked such institutions of that kind. And in that sense, was more vulnerable to that kind of gleichschaltung or shift of gears in institutions. Trump is nonetheless, and his followers, attacking our institutions, weakening them.
There are times like now where our own institutions seem weakened and seem as if they’ll collapse under Trump and his followers’ attacks. But they don’t collapse that easily. We’ve seen that now in the struggle around the Justice Department. We’ve seen it in the Congress with the House of Representatives, which has been an enormous force in combating Trump.
And we’ve seen it among the common people in the various polls that show American people still believe in the rule of law and in the institutions that uphold that rule. Now, that doesn’t automatically guarantee that we’ll be successful.
Bill Moyers: You remind me of how much I felt the atmosphere had changed after I watched those patriotic public servants — the diplomats — who testified to what had happened in Ukraine, Yovanovitch and the others…
TESTIMONY FROM CONGRESS AUDIO
compared to how we all felt when we watched Cohen and Manafort and the others who paraded up there to tell their seamy stories. Do you believe that can happen, that people can be recharged by truth?
Robert Jay Lifton: When we watched these courageous civil servants testify at some personal risk and listened to them, we not only felt that justice was being served, we felt reality was being served. Here were people who had experiences of being attacked by Trump or his minions, and had witnessed harmful behavior that really betrayed our country. And they told about it in simple, honest words. We felt during those experiences of testimony a return to reality. That was the individual feeling that accompanied the larger sense of witnessing justice, rather than phony and false versions of what went on.
And it’s a struggle now through the whole society. The falsifications and conspiracism that we now live by in our society are not embraced by the majority of people as far as we far as can tell, but are embraced by enough people to worry us profoundly. And there’s every expectation that the majority here will hold. Meaning will cling to elements of truth, of reality and of institutional autonomy, which are crucial for a democracy to function. But nothing is guaranteed.
Bill Moyers: What do you think the Trumpsters are after?
Robert Jay Lifton: With Trump, there is no systemic or consistent ideology. But there is a narrative. And the narrative is that America was once great, it got into the hands of the wrong people, weak people. It then declined because it was taken advantage of. And now, “I will make America great again because I AM strong. I am chosen. And I can save America.”
So it’s a kind of purification. It’s a claim on the part of one man that has the — I don’t know if one would use the word “pure” — but he has the capacity because of his, yes, pure genius and pure capacity for being a savior, to rescue this country, make it great again. It’s a kind of purity of a single authoritarian person who claims to have nobility and claims that he alone and no one else can save the country. And by implication, the world. It’s pure megalomania.
Bill Moyers: I remember somewhere you told a story about meeting Adolf Hitler’s brilliant architect, Albert Speer, who built the Germany — physically, materially, aesthetically — that Hitler wanted.
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes. I interviewed Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, four times. Each time for a couple of hours, and I learned a lot about the Nazi movement from him. What he told me was that he was a graduate student in architecture in the ’30s when everybody was hopeless. There was no future. The economy had gone bad.
Nobody could imagine anything good happening to them in the future. And Hitler came. Hitler had two speeches. He had his vulgar, street speech. And then he has his relatively intellectual speech which he gave at universities. And in that latter speech he said, “I now can unify Germany. We will then all be strong again and have a positive future.”
And when he said, “Germany can be strong again,” that meant not only militarily, which, of course, was very important because they had to renounce the Versailles Treaty and other things, but also people could feel themselves psychically strong.
Speer said he was mesmerized by this speech. It was what William James described as an experience of religious conversion in the purest form. And he (Speer) eventually became disillusioned.
Bill Moyers: But he joined the Nazi party first, didn’t he?
Robert Jay Lifton: Oh, he joined the Nazi party. And he served Hitler. And he was very close to Hitler and hee made a point of getting to see Hitler in his bunker, making a very dangerous trip at the end of the war in order to say goodbye to him. He hadn’t divested himself of this love for the Fuhrer, of the man who became a cult-like master or guru to him.
Bill Moyers: And by listening to that one speech he was himself lifted out of his despair and sense of hopelessness about the future and marched triumphantly into that future, only to see his country destroyed.
Robert Jay Lifton: Hitler was saying Hitler could make Germany great again. And Hitler could make individual Germans feel strong and great again. That’s— and we hear echoes in Trump – and we hear this in any intense political movement and a version of it in religious movements too.
And one is impressed by the parallel with Trump. Doesn’t mean that Trump is a Nazi.
Bill Moyers: No.
Robert Jay Lifton: He’s not. He doesn’t have enough ideology to be a Nazi, or the people around him. I’m not saying that any of them are Nazis. I’m saying that they embrace an authoritarian vision of rendering their country strong again and claim that only they can fulfill this vision.
He becomes for many people, a combination mafia don and cult guru as well as political leader. So I say he’s cult-like. I don’t claim that the whole thing is just a cult and that’s all. Rather, there are strongly cult-like patterns. You can see it and hear it in the chanting back and forth, which is almost religious-like.
TRUMP RALLY: We’ll build a wall. Who will pay for the wall?
There’s a holding out of the phrase and then a response from the religious community so to speak. And also in more recent terminology of Trump as the chosen one. He’s used that term himself.
And some of the more evangelical people around him have used it with full biblical sourcing. He’s the chosen one. You know, I remember one Nazi doctor I interviewed who came from a middle class family, academic people. And at first, they were disdainful of Hitler because he seemed so crude.
He said, “And then, we talked it over and we thought, well, maybe he’s the right man because he is so crude.” There was a sense maybe he was chosen. Maybe history has chosen him, just as people around Trump and Trump himself say, “Maybe God has chosen Trump.” All the more so because he’s so crude and different from other leaders. And that’s really another parallel.
Bill Moyers: One of President Trump’s cabinet members, Rick Perry, claimed that Trump was chosen by God to lead America. And there’s a common belief among the many of the conservative fundamentalists Christians you were just referring to – Billy Graham’s son Franklin said, “I think God was behind the last election.”
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes, that’s right. And the president has referred to himself as the chosen one. And, this is saviour talk. This is the kind of messianism that has a religious root. And I think you’ll agree that intense and sometimes fanatical evangelical thought has a lot to do with right-wing thinking in the United States.
And this would be parallel with that. This would be consistent with that. So that some of the people in Trump’s cabinet, including Pompeo, are intense evangelicals, and see Trump as carrying out the greater good. And with that perspective, the Democrats — who are seen as more secular — are the ultimate evil who must be destroyed, defeated.
And in this way, Trump, despite being probably the last man on earth to claim genuine religious involvement, nonetheless can be seen as chosen in a kind of indirect or hidden way. Chosen by God to carry out theology purposes.
Bill Moyers: I want to play for you, Robert, a recording of the televangelist Paula White, who is Trump’s spiritual advisor. And also heads his evangelical council of advisors.
The first recording you will hear, she’s speaking in tongues, which means a language she can’t herself understand. Here she is.
Bill Moyers: President Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, who prayed at his inauguration. Here she is using her alleged spiritual authority to defend the president against what she calls demonic opponents.
Paula White: We declare every demonic network to be scattered right now. We declare right now that there is a hedge of protection over our president. We deal with every demonic attack against him, against his mantle, against his purpose, against his position as he stands in position as president.
Bill Moyers: So she is saying that they’re throwing up a wall of protection to protect the president from demonic opposition. In other words, she and Christian right wingers like her are aiding and abetting the delegitimation of all opposition, right?
Robert Jay Lifton: Yes. That’s right. They’re giving religious authority, that is God-given authority. They’re claiming God-given authority to protect the president and attack his opponents. That’s totalistic or what I call cultist.
And that’s again evidence that Trump didn’t create all of this. He stepped into it and intensified and recast it. But the roots are deep in American society. And particularly, we shouldn’t make the mistake of just saying, “Oh, we have the two sides and each can be intense and over-intense or fanatical.” This problem comes from the right wing — it isn’t that the left-wing people have never been guilty of taking advantage of dubious approaches to reality.
But this wave of losing reality is specifically right wing. This wave of delegitimation of opposition. This authoritarian wave of claiming absolute truth and absolute virtue is particularly right wing and we should recognize that.
Bill Moyers: So what is Trump doing when he hands the Presidential Medal of Freedom to one of the biggest liars ever to thrive on duplicity and venality? And, of course, I’m talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Robert Jay Lifton: Trump is being consistent. He’s following his consistency to the end, so to speak. I mean, Rush Limbaugh being given the Medal of Freedom is, I don’t know what to call it. It’s more than egregious. It borders on the comic. But it is consistent with Trump’s claim to values. Why does Rush Limbaugh get the Medal of Freedom? He gets the Medal because he’s been loyal to Trump. He’s mouthed Trump’s falsehoods.
He’s furthered them with his own originality. He’s been completely corrupt and among the leadership in thought of those who follow the Trumpist/cultist line. So it makes full sense for Trump, within Trump’s malignant normality, to give the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh.
Bill Moyers: So what’s the ultimate danger, what you call extreme assaults on reality, by a man who holds the most powerful office in the world and is surrounded by sycophants in government, culture, the media, who echo and imitate his mendacity?
Robert Jay Lifton: Well, when the president of such a country lives on and attempts to coerce the rest of us to live on falsehood and lies, it’s dangerous to us and dangerous to the world. My argument is we’re not wired to go down with Trump. There’s nothing in our neurophysiology or brain structure that says we must destroy ourselves as a species.
And there’s nothing either that says we will certainly adapt and live together in harmony. We’re capable of either, according to our wiring. It’s up to us.
When I did my study of Nazi doctors and completed it — and it was a very difficult study — my friends would say something like this, “It’s okay. Now you’ve been exposed to the Nazi doctors. So what do you think of human beings now?”
And they expected me to say, “Not very much.” But instead, I said what I just said now. “We’re capable of going either way.” That’s what I believe. And that’s why I think that the efforts we make individually, and especially collectively, are crucial to the outcome.
Reality fatigue is inseparable from democracy fatigue. And that’s one thing we can’t allow ourselves.
Bill Moyers: But don’t you sense some reality fatigue in the country?
Robert Jay Lifton: I sense lots of reality fatigue and I feel it like everybody else at times. What reality fatigue is a kind of tiredness, a sense of being overwhelmed by the stream of lies and falsehoods. And having doubts that one can reverse that stream or stand up to them.
So yes, how can we not feel reality fatigue? But how can we not also feel it’s a luxury? We don’t allow ourselves reality fatigue, because reality fatigue is inseparable from democracy fatigue.
And that’s one thing we can’t allow ourselves.
My sense is that Trump’s increasingly more egregious and wild and solipsistic and paranoid behavior, which people describe as feeling free to do whatever he wants, and he’s got some of that. But is also an expression of increasing anxiety and could well be part of his end game. His end game possibly in losing the next election or in some other way.
That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. And it doesn’t mean that, if it is his end game, it won’t be painful and dangerous. But there is reason to feel that the society is struggling to mobilize its forces, and is not totally beholden to Fox News or those right-wing intellectuals or followers and their embrace of Trump and Trump’s destructiveness.
Bill Moyers: You think we can get the truth back?
Robert Jay Lifton: It’s hard. I think one of our great problems is that we don’t make enough use of the freedom to protest that we still possess and can maintain.
There is still in the society a recognition of great importance, of truth, and of the malignant nature of the normality that we’re being subjected to. And we have to take advantage of, embrace, that continuing recognition without any prior assumption that it’s easy or that we can win without difficulty.
Bill Moyers: When a few weeks ago I first heard you talk about your book, you sent me home to reread the speeches of Vaclav Havel, who enunciated, you said that night, the great principle of those revolutions that overthrew communist suppression – the Velvet Revolution back in, what was it? 1989?
Robert Jay Lifton: That’s right.
Bill Moyers: He called it “living in truth.” Living in truth. What do you take that to mean?
Robert Jay Lifton: It was a powerful message. Living in truth meant for Havel, and for some other Eastern European protest leaders, it meant countering the falsehoods which the oppressors depend upon by living in truth. Telling the truth. Living your own lives with each other in truth.
When I visited Prague not too long after the Velvet Revolution, I met with people who had totally changed in relation to that successful overthrow of the oppressors.
And I met one part-time ne’er do well musician not responsible to anything, when suddenly he found himself in charge of a protest newsletter, which he had to keep secret and distribute to people. And he did so with complete dedication and responsibility, showing tendencies he never knew he possessed.
I found others like that as well. So, we do possess these capacities as human beings, sometimes without our being aware of them. And what I’m describing, of course, is not just a matter of individual behavior it’s collective behavior, which it was all the way for Havel.
We need this. And we are capable of embracing it to a greater sense than we’ve realized. So all this has no guarantee. But it does have considerable possibility.
Bill Moyers: I think you referred to it as the power of the powerless. “Living in truth, takes place at the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level.”
Robert Jay Lifton: Yeah. Yeah. That was Havel. In that sense, there’s a power to truth. There’s a power of life or death in truth. And he was right.
Bill Moyers: And I remember what I think is also one of your favorite quotes from Henry David Thoreau. “Rather than love, money and fame, give me truth.”
Robert Jay Lifton: Absolutely.
Bill Moyers: Thank you Robert.
Robert Jay Lifton: Thank you, Bill.
ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to Moyers on Democracy
That was Bill Moyers and Robert Jay Lifton
Until next time….read an excerpt of Lifton’s new book Losing Reality at Billmoyers.com. Check it out.
Postscript from Robert Jay Lifton
The coronavirus creates a new level of pressure on Trump in his reality struggles. The spread of this pandemic arouses primal anxieties in all of us that have to do with the vulnerability of our bodies and the threat of mortality. Even under ordinary conditions these are powerful concerns, as reflected in the importance of healthcare as a political issue.
The widespread death anxiety created by the present pandemic cannot be appeased by grandiose claims of perfect control over a minimized outbreak. When experiencing anxiety about medical mortality, we turn mainly to physicians, and they are frequently at odds with Trump’s version of denial and control. Trump has made uneasy compromises with medical views, but his erratic handling of the pandemic and his empty assurances about the economy do not inspire trust.
We then get a vicious circle of rejection of Trump’s false claims, leading to his increased anxiety and grandiosity, resulting in further mistrust of the population, etc. We can expect additional fantasy and ever more bitter attacks of those who question it.
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