fact data info empirical #

519 redumbdent?

SEE REALITY FACT

SEE POLL-STER ~ TRUMP bs PSEUDO-POPULISM

recall suskind reality -based jrnlism

see science vs denial

see alt facts Earth2

see authoritarian FASCISM hype fear

see satelite co2 86’d 8 25

see CDC NIH gubmint empirical experts/ facts ~ sched F

note recall not able to collect data on gun deaths? in covid slaughterhouse data not allowed to be released by local public health officials

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see CNN on fact check BS by gop (but AN bias?)

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see earth 2 ~ empirical fact eg job numbers, stock mkt record, crime border drop #

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AN 2 26

Note to the decision-makers at the Gallup Organization,which for nearly 90 years has tracked presidential approval ratings: Capitulation never works.

I learned this the hard way as a teen playing basketball on D.C. playgrounds. I regretted my fecklessness.

Gallup last week admitted it would no longer survey Americans’ sentiments on how the commander in chief was faring, though I couldn’t find news of that major switchon the company’s website.

The organization’s latest presidential barometer,in December, placed Donald Trump’s approval rating at an abysmal 36%. The worst was34%, another honorific Trump earned as he was leaving office at the end of his first term. It was right after the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the U.S. Capitol.

Yes, other companies conduct surveys nowadays about the presidency. Gallup, though, held a unique place in the industry.

A Gallup spokesman told The New York Times the company was shifting strategy. He also used other corporate-speak that, frankly, doesn’t justify Gallup’s cowardice.

As The Times noted, the polling firm’s decades of data gave “historical context to what amounts to a monthly snapshot of Americans’ views.” The independent barometer has been valuable.

It’s curious the company didn’t make the change under then-President Joe Biden, but is doing so now under a thin-skinned president.

Trump and his administration havetargeted journalists with criminal indictments,filed lawsuits against media outlets and often lied about theactions of violent federal immigration agents – even whenvideo footage andwitness statements proved the contrary.

My questions to Gallup’s media folks, including what role Trump’s attacks on journalists played in the polling decision, weren’t returned by my deadline.

Gallup’s groveling reminds me of when I relinquished my chance to play a playground basketball game – even though I’d earned it – to a guy bigger, stronger, and a little older than me. “I’m taking your spot,” he declared, with a hint of menace.

The shame was I didn’t fight for it, even if I would’ve gotten bloodied. I couldn’t return to that court because no one would respect me. As I got older, I stood up for myself more, no matter whether it made me uncomfortable.

That a private company like Gallup would cave so dramatically to this administration is reprehensible. Why is it acting beholden to officials who disrespect law, precedent and common decency?

The capitulation is a stain on Gallup’s reputation and legacy, and it leaves Americans with less information on how we all feel our top government executive is faring.

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AN 1 26 2026

Trump fires off post accusing Fox News of 'criminal offense' over plummeting poll numbers

Donald Trump on Monday renewed his attack on polling operations as his approval ratings continue to plummet, this time even roping in conservative stalwarts like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Throughout his second term, the president has consistently argued that stories and poll results that paint him in an overtly negative light are "fake." While this has been a common tactic over the course of his entire political career, more recently, he has started claiming that these stories and polls should be criminal acts, a move that would violate the Constitution's protections for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

In his Truth Social post from Monday, he reiterated these assertions and argued that his false claim that he won the 2020 election proves the current polling wrong.

"Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense," Trump's post read. "As an example, all of the Anti Trump Media that covered me during the 2020 Election showed Polls that were knowingly wrong. They knew what they were doing, trying to influence the Election, but I won in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all 7 of the 7 Swing States, the Electoral College was a route [sic], and 2,750 Counties to 525."

He continued: "You can’t do much better than that, and yet if people examined The Failing New York Times, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, Low Ratings CNN, or the now defunct MSDNC, Polls were all fraudulent, and bore nothing even close to the final results. Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling. Even the Polls of FoxNews and The Wall Street Journal have been, over the years, terrible! There are great Pollsters that called the Election right, but the Media does not want to use them in any way, shape, or form. Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!"

Despite Trump's claim in the post, the left-leaning news network MSNBC is not defunct, but recently rebranded as MS NOW.

While conservative outlets like Fox News have generally been known to publish more flattering polls of Trump, his sagging popularity has proven too much for these polls to overcome. In November, a survey from the network found the president's approval was at its lowest point on record.

Trump's latest round of grievance over negative polling appears to have been brought on by the most recent poll from the New York Times and Sienna College, which found that approval rating was down to 40 percent, a three-point drop since their last poll. It also found that over two-thirds of respondents felt the country was not better off than it was a year ago, while a little over half said that Trump's policies were actively making life less affordable, the latter representing the biggest issue on voters' minds heading into the 2026 midterms.

Lashing out against the results, Trump added the poll to his defamation lawsuit against the Times. In September, a judge tossed out the original suit for being too long and taking too many pages to get to its actual allegations, accusing the administration of using the filing as a platform lob more abusive language at the paper. Trump's legal team refiled the following month.

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cnn

no lnx

The perfectly fine, already-paid-for satellites Trump wants to destroy in a fiery atmospheric reentry

Andrew Freedman

Aug 13, 2025

An artist's rendering shows NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2).

NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October, sources inside and outside of the agency told CNN.

The destruction of the satellites — which will be abandoned and allowed to eventually burn up in a fiery descent into Earth’s atmosphere — marks the latest step by the Trump administration to scale back federal climate science.

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal takes a hatchet to NASA’s Earth science spending for fiscal year 2026, which begins in October.

The greenhouse gas monitoring missions, known collectively as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, are some of the many Earth science casualties in the proposal.

Other satellites and instruments on the chopping block include the long-lived Aqua satellite, which carries a high-resolution Earth imaging instrument called MODIS, that among other uses, helps detect wildfires worldwide. Also at risk are the Terra and Aura missions, each of which have climate science applications, and planned satellites that would precisely measure solar radiation, heavy precipitation and clouds.

While the Trump administration says it is looking to end the OCO and other missions to cut costs, scientists involved in the projects see an anti-climate science pattern at work.

Dave Crisp speaks during an Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 briefing in June 2014.

Congress is still considering Trump’s budget request and may reject some, or all, of the Earth science cuts, but NASA is proceeding as if the White House spending blueprint will be implemented as-written.

David Crisp, a former NASA scientist who worked on the OCO missions and managed them until he retired in 2022, confirmed the decommissioning planning for OCO-2 and OCO-3. Other sources, including one NASA employee, also confirmed this plan, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t approved to discuss the issue.

NASA calls a mission’s closeout phase — the period when the program team works out how to end it — “Phase F.” The Phase F state of planning for the OCO missions was first reported by NPR.

In response to questions from CNN, a NASA spokesperson pointed to Trump’s budget request. “It would not be appropriate for us to comment at this time as the budget process is still happening. Should the budget pass as proposed — it still needs to make its way through Congress — this will be implemented upon the start of the next fiscal year.”

An expensive decision with global impact

A United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket launches with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite onboard in July 2014.

Together, the OCO-2, a free-flying satellite, and OCO-3, which is mounted on the International Space Station, measure the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, specifically sniffing out climate pollution.

The OCO missions are particularly useful for tracking fossil fuel and ecosystem-related emissions, scientists told CNN. The instruments also help scientists monitor plant productivity — critical for farmers and the researchers studying forest loss.

While OCO-3 could be switched off and remain attached to the ISS, perhaps to be turned on again in the future, the decommissioning process for OCO-2 is far more complicated — and fiery. The satellite would be moved into a much lower orbit and exist there as space junk for years until it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The purposeful abandonment or destruction of multimillion-dollar satellites and instruments is essentially unprecedented, scientists told CNN. They are particularly baffled by the decision to destroy OCO-2, given it already has enough fuel on it to last through 2040.

The OCO missions are still functioning and are thought to have many years left of data-gathering, in addition to the fuel onboard, which has already been bought by American taxpayers. It is not business as usual to shut off working satellites without conducting a comprehensive review, sources told CNN, nor is it typical to kill functional spacecraft that can cost billions to put into space in the first place.

View of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) on the Japanese Experiment Module Exposed Facility of the International Space Station in June 2019.

“The reality is that as long as these instruments are producing high-quality data, it’s essentially unheard of to decommission the satellites, because keeping them going is so cheap compared to building them and launching them in the first place,” Anna Michalak, a climate researcher at Carnegie Science and Stanford University who works with greenhouse gas emissions data, told CNN.

The OCO missions are important for other countries, too, since they also use the data, Michalak said: “It’s not just that these are the only two NASA-funded missions. It’s that these have been the most impactful missions in this space, globally, period.”

Losing the OCO missions would hurt US leadership in climate science and create a multiyear gap in space-based climate pollution measurements, said Ben Poulter of Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit focused on climate risks and innovative fixes. Poulter was previously a NASA scientist and helped lead greenhouse gas monitoring efforts for the Biden administration.

“Losing these satellites prematurely gives away the leadership to Europe and to China in terms of monitoring CO2 concentrations and emissions,” Poulter said. Prematurely ending the OCO missions is consistent with the perception that the Trump administration “doesn’t want to do anything related to climate science and climate services,” he added.

In scathing letter, NASA workers rebuke ‘rapid and wasteful changes’ at agency

Crisp, the former NASA scientist, also told CNN that decommissioning so many Earth science missions at the same time fits a pattern.

“My guess is that they perceive these missions as missions that were designed for climate, for reinforcing climate hysteria or something,” Crisp said of the Trump administration. “They think these missions were designed for a regulatory reason, for example. But I want to point out NASA is not a regulatory agency.”

Billionaires to the rescue?

There are at least two possibilities for saving the carbon observatory mission, though researchers are not optimistic about either one coming to fruition.

The first is Congress. Lawmakers could reject Trump’s proposal and offer NASA the budget it needs to maintain US climate and Earth science status quo. Trump would also have to sign such a bill.

The second possibility is to create a public-private partnership that pays the expenses for maintaining these instruments and processing the data back on Earth. This could take the form of a philanthropic organization, a wealthy individual or perhaps a university taking over OCO-2 or OCO-3, or perhaps both, for a period of time.

The space agency has already issued a call for partnerships for OCO-3, and it is expected to put out a similar call for operating OCO-2 at some point this week, multiple researchers who work with OCO data said.

“There’s this scramble to see what can be done before any sort of decommissioning or Phase F protocols go into effect later this year,” Poulter said.

However, involving the private sector in operating OCO or other Earth-observing satellites can present complications, Michalak said, as it could diminish NASA’s role in providing an accurate backbone of Earth observations.

As the search for a partnership to save OCO-2 and OCO-3 begins, NASA only has less than two months to figure out how to keep the missions going.

The GISS facility is located at Columbia University’s Armstrong Hall in New York City.

NASA scientists describe ‘absolute sh*tshow’ at agency as Trump budget seeks to dismantle top US climate lab

After Steve Bannon called for “a MAGA Republican” to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Trump fired its commissioner

Trump took this action following a weak jobs report with major downward revisions. Economists say this move will create mistrust about economic data.

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 08/01/25

On the August 1 edition of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, he and Heritage Foundation’s E.J. Antoni called for getting rid of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner following a weak July jobs report.

Hours later, President Donald Trump said and NBC News confirmed that he had fired BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer. Economists quickly spoke up about how this action, which would decrease confidence in economic data and seriously risk politicizing it outright, poses a grave threat to the entire American economy.

The BLS reported this morning that in July, only 73,000 jobs were created, and job creation in May and June were revised downward by a combined 258,000 jobs.

In response, Bannon claimed to be concerned about “whether we get accurate numbers” from the BLS, adding: “What in the hell is going on there? And have we put in our own person into BLS? Is a MAGA Republican, that President Trump knows and trusts, are they running the Bureau of Labor Statistics yet?” Antoni replied, “No, unfortunately, Steve, we still haven’t gotten there. And I think that’s part of the reason why we continue to have all of these different data problems.” Antoni also talked up a previous BLS commissioner, and added: “He’s been replaced by someone who, frankly, I think is incompetent. And that shows with the fact that the problems in the statistics — that first became evident all the way back in the spring of 2022 — those problems are still there.”

Video

Citation

From the August 1, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Hours later, citing the July jobs report and a conspiracy theory about the BLS from the 2024 election cycle, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I was just informed that our Country’s ‘Jobs Numbers’ are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. … I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”

Economists reacted to Trump’s firing of the BLS commissioner by explaining that the revisions weren’t political, and that Trump could damage trust in the accuracy of economic statistics moving forward.

Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics for Yale’s Budget Lab, wrote: “Every economist who knows the 1st thing about labor data knows this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the challenges of real-time jobs estimation in the world's biggest economy.”

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Navy Federal chief economist and Washington Post columnist Heather Long wrote: “This is basically unprecedented and will raise concerns about US data integrity going forward.”

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Employ America executive director Skanda Amarnath wrote: “Even if nothing in BLS processes actually changes, public trust is permanently harmed when the BLS commissioner is fired after one bad jobs report. The optics are terrible and collective perception matters. So does reality.”

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MEF Associates senior research associate Matt Darling simply replied: “Banana Republic hours.”

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Some conservative economists also expressed alarm over Trump’s action.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jessica Riedl wrote: “Trump firing the BLS director for a bad jobs report - days after demanding the Smithsonian remove him from the list of impeached presidents - is banana republic stuff.” She added in a follow-up post: “Trump just ensured that we should not trust any government data coming out of his administration. Why should we trust data from agencies in which the director's job depends on altering any bad economic news? Any Republicans with a spine need to speak out.”

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American Enterprise Institute director of economic policy studies Michael R. Strain wrote: “Erika McEntarfer has devoted her career to public service. She has conducted herself as BLS Commissioner with great integrity. There is no evidence whatsoever that BLS data are politically biased. By incorrectly asserting that the data are biased, President Trump is undermining the integrity of the information that policymakers, businesses, households, and investors use to make important decisions that affect the welfare of the nation. It is imperative that decisionmakers understand that government statistics are unbiased and of the highest quality. By casting doubt on that, the President is damaging the United States.”

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MMA

Fox scrambles as Trump tariffs start to show up in prices and inflation accelerates

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 07/15/25

Fox News is continuing its previous celebrations and defenses of President Donald Trump's destructive tariff impulses as evidence shows that prices are accelerating and a key inflation indicator jumped to its highest level in four months. Trump’s sycophants on Fox deny the tariffs have anything to do with the acceleration as his massive country-by-country tariffs are set to resume in just two weeks.

The June Consumer Price Index report, released July 15, showed that inflation increased at a monthly rate of 0.3% — well above the previous monthly rate of 0.1% in May — and increased at a 2.7% annual rate. According to CNBC, “the annual rate is the highest since February and still above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.”

The report also noted that furniture and clothing prices increased last month, data points that economists have pointed out were likely impacted by Trump’s tariffs.

Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics for Yale’s Budget Lab, explained: “The impact of tariffs is becoming more salient. Apparel, which had seen cool inflation the last 2 months, grew 0.4% in June. Household furnishings grew 1%. Video & audio electronics grew 1.1%.”

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Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker wrote, “Trump's Big Beautiful tariffs are showing up in the data. The index for household furnishing and supplies (appliances and other household goods) rose 1.0 percent in June.”

Bloomberg’s chief U.S. economist Anna Wong stated, “Clear signs that tariffs pass through to CPI has picked up in June.”

Harvard University professor and former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman wrote: “You can see signs of tariffs in these numbers and that is only likely to grow.”

Meanwhile, Fox Business is denying that Trump’s tariffs are having any impact on price increases in its coverage of the inflation report. On Mornings with Maria, anchor Maria Bartiromo said, “You’ve got to look at this report as another victory for President Trump, who has focused on reigning in inflation, and that’s what we’re seeing from this report.” Former Trump CEA acting Chair Tomas Philipson responded, “What’s happening in this CPI has very little to do with tariffed markets, tariffed goods.”

Video

Citation

From the July 15, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

On Varney & Co., right-wing economist Art Laffer said tariffs are having “almost zero” impact on prices, and insisted that tariffs cause prices to decline rather than increase, citing the impact of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs enacted during the Great Depression. Laffer also argued that news reports explaining that Trump’s tariffs are contributing to accelerating inflation are wrong.

Fox’s praise for Trump amid an acceleration in the inflation rate stands in stark contrast to how the MAGA network covered inflation under former President Joe Biden, having specifically attacked the president over inflation even as it declined or remained flat.

Experts have long predicted that Trump’s agenda of universal tariffs and mass deportation would be inflationary, with 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists previously signing a letter warning that Trump would “reignite” inflation if he won the 2024 election. Indeed, the inflationary effect of Trump's tariffs may worsen as he continues threatening massive tariff increases on products from dozens of countries beginning August 1.

// Fox’s Lara Trump credits the president for “miraculous” drop in prices — but prices are actually higher

06/04/25 4:35 PM EDT

### Fox claims Trump's tariffs will restore American manufacturing. Experts say they are hurting business.

04/17/25 3:54 PM EDT

### MAGA media knives are out for Trump’s tariff advisers

04/14/25

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WHEN WILL HE KILL THE STATS?

BASICALLY GO AROUND TABLE BROWN NOSING; BONDI WENT FROM 20M KIA TO 258! actually 70k last year

AN 525

NO LNX

Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reacts as she walks towards the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Sabrina Haake, Raw Story May 03, 2025

UPS, the United Parcel Service, just announced that it is laying off 20,000 employees and closing 73 of its buildings by the end of June. It attributes the downturn to reduced shipping volume from its largest customer, Amazon, due to Trump’s tariffs.

When a division of Amazon considered telling consumers the truth, by posting the costs tariffs added to the price of each imported product, the mere possibility set the White House on attack mode. Trump immediately called Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who reassured him Amazon would never do such a thing, while Karoline Leavitt accused Bezos of a “political and hostile” act just for thinking about it.

When a presidential team of incompetent egoists calls truth-telling a “hostile act,” we’re in trouble.

Ruinous economic indicators prompt ruinous deflection

Trump’s first quarter report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reflects a sharp contraction in the economy, showing an annual decrease in the GDP of 0.3 percent. Compared to Biden’s last quarter, when “real GDP increased 2.4 percent,” the data suggest that perhaps Trump isn’t the economic genius he claims to be.

These are not partisan data; that the Bureau falls under the US Department of Commerce suggests Trump may soon hobble its reporting capacity. For now, the data show economic contraction, reflecting a colossal reversal from Biden’s expansion. Wall Street sums up Trump’s first 100 days in office as the “worst for the stock market in half a century.”

On brand, when faced with these data, Trump lied, deflected, and blamed his predecessor, posting,“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. This… has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that (Biden) left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”

Trump continues to manufacture Biden’s “bad numbers”

Trump can’t stop parroting his own campaign lies about Biden’s economy. During the 2024 presidential campaign, when he wasn’t manufacturing a border invasion to enrage people, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden’s economy. It worked. While remaining mum on how his own COVID-19 mismanagement worsened the economy, he convinced 49% of voters that they were impoverished, despite economic indicators to the contrary.

After commerce reports came out this week, Trump doubled down. During an embarrassing televised cabinet meeting orchestrated to praise himself, Trump confirmed that he sought to undo everything Biden did to improve the economy, stating, “We came in and I was very against everything that Biden was doing in terms of the economy. … We took over his mess in so many different ways.”

Trump and his cabinet may drink their own economic Kool-Aid, but Wall Street is abstaining. Multiple indicators confirmed that Biden delivered the strongest post-COVID economic recovery in the world, including: growth and job creation that exceeded G7 and other advanced economies' growth in 2024; inflation control despite global inflationary pressures; avoidance of the post-COVID recession predicted by many; wage gains; strong market performance with record S&P 500 highs; and stellarinfrastructure investment that Trump, in a toddler-esque pique of jealousy, is scrambling to unravel.

During Biden’s term, the U.S. added 16 million jobs, low earners were experiencing wage growth, inflation levels approached the Federal Reserve’s target, and unemployment hit a 54-year low. By these metrics, Biden performed economic jujitsu, delivering an economy that The Economist called “the envy of the world.”

Teaching Trump media how to lie better

After Trump officially blamed Biden this week for economic contractions caused by his own ill-conceived tariffs, he went further, instructing right-wing media how to spin bad economic news of the future. During his televised “Praise Dear Leader” cabinet meeting, Trump told his preferred outlets (Fox, Newsmax, OAN) that they should also blame any economic downturns in the second quarter on Biden.

Trump showed similar intransigence during an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man Trump is keeping in an El Salvador prison despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. Trump insisted during the interview that an obviously photoshopped picture showed Garcia with “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles. When Moran told Trump that the image was clearly photoshopped, Trump acted like a tyrant. He first suggested Moran owed him something – it was thanks to Trump that Moran got the interview at all. Frustrated by Moran’s continuing refusal to lie, Trump told him, “you’re not being very nice,” before pivoting to attacking media as a whole, saying this “is why people no longer believe the news … It’s such a disservice…”

Discussing the Supreme Court order to facilitate Garcia’s return, Moran stated the obvious — that Trump could simply pick up the phone, call El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and get him back. Trump confirmed that he is, indeed, flouting the Supreme Court’s authority, stating, “I could…. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.”

In one interview, Trump vacillated between being the all powerful Oz, and the cheap salesman behind the curtain. When Moran reminded him that the high court ordered him to return Garcia, Trump deflected, incredibly: “I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers who don't want to do this.”

Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

After the Supreme Court slapped the administration and ordered Garcia’s return with a 9-0 decision, White House adviser Stephen Miller simply lied about it. Miller claimed on Fox News that the administration had “won” the case, “clearly,” prompting a conservative columnist to retort, “Nope, you lost. Unanimously.” Fox viewers, of course, won’t hear that rejoinder as Fox anchors continue to throw falsehoods at the wall to see what sticks.

As Team Trump continues governing the country like a made-for-Fox-TV reality show, real-life consequences are piling up. China just canceled orders for American pork, soybeans, and lumber, putting US farmers in “full-blown crisis” mode.

Maybe, like dolls for Christmas, farmers can make do with selling one or two hogs instead of 30. As Trump put it during a town hall Wednesday night, he plans to defeat public skepticism over his tariffs through deception. “I just think that I’ll be able to convince people how good this is.”

NOW READ: Trump's rampage is out of control — but there's one way to stop it

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are or have been published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

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Right-wing media are celebrating JD Vance for his racist lie that Haitian immigrants are widely spreading disease in Springfield, Ohio

Data from Ohio’s Department of Health and Clark County Combined Health District shows only a handful of new tuberculosis and HIV cases, which Vance falsely claims “have skyrocketed”

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 09/14/24

Right-wing websites are celebrating Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance for spreading a longstanding xenophobic trope in a CNN interview that “communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed” in Springfield, Ohio, because of Haitian immigrants in the city. This falsehood follows his debunked smear that Haitian residents of the city were eating people’s pets, a lie reportedly linked to recent bomb threats.

Vance had already spread this smear in a September 10 post on X, formerly known as Twitter. But it was Vance repeating the falsehood in a CNN interview shortly after the ABC News presidential debate which right-wing websites are celebrating.

SEN. JD VANCE: And again, whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, whatever the case may be, Kaitlan, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in. Health care costs are up, housing costs are up, communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris' border policies have done.

Vance repeated this smear in a September 13 post on X as well.

Right-wing blogs have responded to Vance's misinformation with widespread praise.

A Townhall post which quoted his smear that Haitian immigrants are widely spreading disease in Springfield declared his CNN appearance “masterful,” adding, “Bravo, sir.”

The Media Research Center’s NewsBusters embedded a clip of Vance’s CNN interview, declaring: “JD Vance SCHOOLS CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Immigration and Cat Memes.” And RedState included a transcript of Vance’s disease smear in its post congratulating him for making “a very real and damning point about the media,” adding: “When you come at JD Vance, you better get ready for a fight. CNN's Kaitlan Collins certainly wasn't.”

For all of their congratulations to Vance over continuing to push this smear, these right-wing blogs missed the reality that Vance is simply lying. Making it up.

Data from the Ohio Department of Health and Clark County Combined Health District — which Vance presumably could easily obtain, given that he’s one of the state’s senators — shows that there are barely any new cases of either TB or HIV in Clark County, of which Springfield is the county seat.

The most recent data available, for 2018-22, shows that in 2018, Clark County reported 10 new HIV infections. Six new HIV infections were reported there in 2019, six again in 2020, 12 in 2021, and 13 in 2022. These five years of data reveal that between 2018-22, the county had a cumulative total of 322 HIV diagnoses — while the state’s cumulative total during this time period was 39,729 HIV diagnoses. To put it simply, Clark County, which includes Springfield, represented less than 1% of all HIV diagnoses in Ohio during this time period.

A December 2022 report of TB cases in Clark County prepared for the Clark County Combined Health District goes back a full decade, showing several incidences of 1, 2, 3, and sometimes zero cases of active TB in the entire county each year.

Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook told NBC News that Vance’s claim of a surge in diseases there is false: “Overall, we have not seen a substantial increase in all reportable communicable diseases. In fact, if you look at all reportable communicable diseases together (minus COVID) for the year ending 2023 you will see that we are at our lowest rate in Clark County since 2016.” And according to Bruce Vanderhoff, the director of Ohio’s Health Department, the state isn’t seeing a “measurable or discernible increase” in vaccine-preventable illnesses, further debunking Vance’s smear.

As Advocate explained, Vance is reinforcing “historical stigmas, stoking xenophobia and racial fear.” Right-wing media may be celebrating Vance pushing these cruel lies, but legitimate media organizations should be prepared to call him out.

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// haiti pet fail? mma 9 24

the “crime crisis” narrative Fox News concocted for Donald Trump was exposed at Tuesday night’s debate when moderator David Muir pointed out that FBI data shows violent crime has actually fallen dramatically in recent years. The network’s stars are responding by lashing out at Muir, falsely claiming violent crime is actually up, and arguing that even if data show violent crime is plummeting, “we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be.”

Trump, in a nonresponsive answer to a question about how he would carry out his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, claimed that due to migration under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, “crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”

Trump’s assertion of rising crime echoed months of anecdote-based Fox coverage — but Muir pointed out in response that actual data shows the opposite, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

Indeed, preliminary FBI data released in June found “steep drops in every category of violent crime in every region in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier, continuing a downward trend since a coronavirus pandemic surge” during Trump’s administration.

Trump responded to Muir by echoing baseless right-wing media claims that the FBI had been “defrauding” data. But the agency’s report is consistent with other sources showing that crime is falling.

Video

CitationFrom the September 10, 2024, presidential debate.

The co-hosts of Fox & Friends responded the next morning by arguing that data that shows violent crime has fallen is irrelevant in the face of the vibes.

“Any time people say violent crime is down in America,” offered Brian Kilmeade, “I ask you, people of Philadelphia, where they are hosting, find anyone in Philadelphia who thinks violent crime is down. I ask you, people of Chicago, site of the DNC, walk around and tell us how crime is under control. I ask you in Washington, D.C., where violent crime is down, the carjacking capital of the country, ask anyone in Washington, D.C., if they feel safer today than four years ago. There is the numbers and there is the reality.”

“It’s the word ‘violent,’ however they define ‘violent.’ Crime is up,” responded Ainsley Earhardt.

“Kamala Harris didn’t even make that point — it was the moderators,” Lawrence Jones added. “They’re not there covering these stories. They’re not going to all these major cities talking about the violence that is impacting urban America on the day to days, so they probably believe what the FBI numbers are saying.”

In fact, according to data compiled by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, all three cities Kilmeade mentioned have seen steep declines in homicides and at least one other category of violent crime the group reported (rapes, robberies, and/or aggravated assaults).

Video

CitationFrom the September 11, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends.

The trio returned to the subject later in the program.

“One of my favorite parts of the debate, and when it just became clear to me that the bias was jumping off the screen at one point, was the conversation about crime,” Jones complained. “And then David hops in and says, ‘Well, actually, the FBI is saying that the crime is going down.’”

“OK, well now, we know those numbers aren’t quite accurate,” he continued, echoing Trump’s false claim from the debate. Jones then urged Muir to spend more time focusing his broadcast on crime anecdotes, saying, “David, you have a newscast every single day. You may not report on it, but you have local affiliates in major cities all across this country. They are reporting on the crime in Chicago, in Philadelphia. Why not pick up the phone and call them and see what’s going on on the ground?”

“I think, Lawrence, the operative word there was ‘violent,’ and David said, ‘Violent crime has gone down,’” Earhardt replied. “We know that crime is up in these cities, we know that thousands, millions of more illegal immigrants have come over our border under this administration, many of them are affiliated with gangs. We know that more of them have murdered more little girls or young women than ever in my lifetime.” (Earhardt was alive in the 1990s, when violent crime and homicides peaked at levels dramatically higher than the present.)

“So violent crime might be going down,” she continued, “but crime overall, we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be."

“Ask anybody in the streets of Philadelphia, outside where that debate was taking place, if they think crime is going down,” Kilmeade added. “In New York City, you walk the streets here, I don't care what the bar chart or the pie chart says, it’s not going down.”

### Fox News' attempt to manufacture a Biden crime crisis runs into a problem: Violent crime is down

02/29/24 12:55 PM EST

### Fox has run nearly 1,000 weekday segments on “migrant crime” in 2024. The GOP turned that bogus narrative into a convention night theme.

07/16/24 9:04 AM EDT

### Trump's debate debacle put the GOP's dangerous obsession with MAGA media nonsense on display

09/11/24

Fox moved the goal posts on immigration after CBP report shows fewer migrant encounters at the border

05/23/24

===

an 4 24 tom dis

...First Up: Stop Discriminating Against Discriminators

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment discrimination based on race or sex.

Its author, Jonathan Berry of the Federalist Society, served in Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL). He begins his list of “needed reforms” with a call to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” “Under the Obama and Biden Administrations,” Berry explains, “labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” under which “every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

You may wonder what it means to advance “classifications” or why that’s even a problem. Berry addresses this question in his second “necessary” reform, a call to “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Those two targets for elimination would seem to carry very different weight. After all, “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is right-wing code for the view that structural barriers exist preventing African Americans and other people of color from enjoying the full rights of citizens or residents. It’s unclear that such “trainings” even occur at the Labor Department, under CRT or any other label, so their “elimination” would, in fact, have little impact on workers.

On the other hand, the elimination of “racial classifications” would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear. “The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.” Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Berry’s characterization of CRT is, in fact, the opposite of what critical race theory seeks to achieve. This theoretical approach to the problem of racism does not categorize individuals at all, but instead describes structures — like corporate hiring practices based on friendship networks — that can disadvantage groups of people of a particular race. In fact, CRT describes self-sustaining systems that do not need individual oppressors to continue (mal)functioning.

The solution to the problem of discrimination in employment in Project 2025’s view is to deny the existence of race (or sex, or sexual orientation) as a factor in the lives of people in this country. It’s simple enough: if there’s no race, then there’s no racial discrimination. Problem solved.

And to ensure that it remains solved, Project 2025 would prohibit the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such “data can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?

By outlawing such data collection, a Republican administration guided by Project 2025 would make it almost impossible to demonstrate the existence of racial disparity in the hiring, retention, promotion, or termination of employees.

:{Right-wingers in my state of California tried something similar in 2003 with Ballot Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. In addition to employment data, Prop. 54 would have outlawed collecting racial data about public education and, no less crucially, about policing. As a result, Prop. 54 would have made it almost impossible for civil rights organizations to address the danger of “driving while Black” — the disproportionate likelihood that Black people will be the subject of traffic stops with the attendant risk of police violence or even death. Voters soundly defeated Prop. 54 by a vote of 64% to 36% and, yes, racial discrimination still exists in California, but at least we have access to the data to prove it.}:

There is, however, one group of people Project 2025 would emphatically protect from discrimination: employers who, because of their “conservative and religious viewpoints… including pro-life views,” want the right to discriminate against women and LGBTQ people. “The President,” writes Berry, “should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.” Of course, Congress already made it clear that, under Title VII of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, “religious” employers are free to ignore anti-discrimination laws when it suits them.....

Dismissing positive jobs reports and a record-high stock market, Fox News is laying the groundwork for Trump to attack Biden’s economy | Media Matters for America

11 23 thom

something terrible and deadly is happening here in the United States, and House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced that he wants to double down on it. More on that in a moment.

If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia.

It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand.

Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78.

A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78.

And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.

That’s the main conclusion of a new study published in PLOS One, one of the world’s leading publications of peer-reviewed science across a wide variety of fields.

The report, rigorously scientific, was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH).

They concluded that if, in 2019, “liberals” (Democrats) had run all the Red states, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year. On the other hand, if “conservatives” (Republicans) had succeeded in imposing their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.

This follows the Brookings Institution study published two years ago that concluded Republican anti-mask and pro-snake-oil (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.) policies unnecessarily killed 400,000 Americans during the first year of the pandemic.

That study, along with a report from Congress detailing Trump’s incompetent --> malicious response to the pandemic, provoked psychologist Mary Trump to refer to her uncle as a “mass murderer.”

Add to that the Republican anti-vax propaganda and, as The New York Times reports, GOP policies are continuing to kill Americans:

“Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.”

And the majority of those dying are Republican followers. Not the Republican politicians and multimillionaire TV commentators, who are all well-vaccinated (Fox required vaccination for all employees), but the people who listen to them, watch them on television, and believe their lies about vaccines and masks.

None of this is new and none should be surprising.

In 2014 the International Journal of Epidemiology*published a report titled “US Infant Mortality and the President's Party” looking at the years between 1965 and 2010. They concluded:

“Across all nine presidential administrations, infant mortality rates were below trend when the President was a Democrat and above trend when the President was a Republican. … Republican administrations were characterized by infant mortality rates that were, on average, 3% higher than Democratic administrations.”

The results were, they wrote, solid. Very solid, in fact:

“Conclusions: We found a robust, quantitatively important association between net of trend US infant mortality rates and the party affiliation of the president.”

It turns out it’s not just American conservatives whose policies kill their own people.

Back in 2002 researchers looked at 100 years of data from Australia and England in a paper for theJournal of Epidemiological Public Health(JEPH) titled “Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000.”

They controlled the study for years of both war and drought, and concluded that more people kill themselves when conservatives are in power — in both countries, even at different times — than when liberals control the government. The subtitle of an editorial in the JEPH about their paper, in fact, was: “Do conservative governments make people want to die?”

The answer, according to the data, is yes. Noting an excess death rate of around 17% among the 238,431 suicides during years of conservative rule, the final sentence of that editorial was:

“[R]oughly 35,000 of these people would not have died had these Conservative governments not been in government. This is one suicide for every day of the century, or more appropriately, two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”

Drenching the country in blood seems to be a popular sport for conservatives and Republican politicians.

— United Republican opposition to negotiating drug prices is why here in the United States we’re paying $38,398 for an anti-cancer shot that costs $260 in the United Kingdom.

— Twelve Red states still refuse to offer Medicaid to their low-income workers, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. But while you can’t get healthcare in Red states, you sure can get a weapon of war.

— And with 120 guns for every 100 citizens, these deadly weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill humans — have become the leading cause of death for American children, a horror not found in any other country in the world.

— By the end of last year, fully half of American states abandoned all meaningful gun regulations, allowing permit-less carry, further increasing the carnage as The New York Times documented in heartbreaking detail.

— Republican advocacy for fossil fuels and lies about climate change are also killing Americans. An estimated 32,000 deaths a year come about just because of tailpipe and smokestack pollution.

— This doesn’t begin to measure the people who’ve died from extreme weather events causing wildfires across the West, derechos and flooding across the Midwest and South, and warming-amplified hurricanes in Mexico and the American Southeast. Or the people who’ve simply lost everything when their homes and jobs are wiped out.

Instead of doing anything about these issues, Republicans in Congress and state houses vote in a block to support the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaigns rather than supporting their states’ citizens who are getting whacked by the carbon pollution that industry lied to us about for over six decades.

And now House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” What he fails to mention is that 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.

As my colleague Chauncey DeVegapoints out:

“Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in ‘red State’ America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic ‘blue’ cities and regions.”

While all this is shocking in aggregate, it shouldn’t surprise us that a political party that swears its first allegiance to billionaires and giant multinational corporations would choose money and profits over health and life.

The Republican Party, as I noted lastyear, has ceased to be a legitimate political party with actual policy positions and become, instead, a loose collection of Nazis, cult-based “Christians,” antisemites, predatory hustlers, misogynists, gun nuts, bigots, and government haters, all funded by billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.

This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party; it’s barely Nixon’s anymore.

America can do better, but first we must overcome the billions that are being spent right now to put the GOP back in charge of the White House and Senate.

And that means we all have to do everything we can to wake people up and get out the vote.

===

https://www.alternet.org/ron-desantis-surgeon-general-altered-key-data-on-19-vaccines-safety-report/

no lnx

DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report

Ron DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report

Alex Henderson April 26, 2023

Throughout most of his career, Dr. Anthony Fauci, now 82, was hardly an object of hatred among Republicans. Fauci, who began working for the United States' federal government in the late 1960s, served under several conservative GOP presidents without any problem: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

The younger President Bush, in fact, praised Fauci when he gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award in 2008. George W. Bush's exact words: "As a physician, medical researcher, author, and public servant, Dr. Anthony Fauci has dedicated his life to expanding the horizons of human knowledge and making progress toward groundbreaking cures for diseases. His efforts to advance our understanding and treatment of HIV/AIDS have brought hope and healing to tens of millions in both developed and developing nations. The United States honors Anthony Fauci for his commitment to enabling men, women, and children to live longer, healthier lives."

But that was before Donald Trump's presidency, the far-right MAGA movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Attacking Fauci's response to the pandemic became a badge of honor among MAGA Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — whose surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, disagreed strongly with Fauci and President Joe Biden on the value of COVID-19 vaccines. DeSantis and Ladapo made vaccines a culture war issue in Florida, and according to Politico reporter Arek Sarkissian, Ladapo "personally altered a state-driven study about COVID-19 vaccines" in 2022 "to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document."

READ MORE: Inside Ron DeSantis' plan to take on Trump from the right: report

Politico published Sarkissian's report on Ladapo and the study on April 24. And CNN's Jamie Gumbrecht offered additional reporting in an article published on April 26.

Gumbrecht explains, "Politico said it obtained a document as part of a public records request that shows Ladapo's changes to the eight-page analysis. The changes deleted comments that said a link with slightly increased risk of cardiac-related deaths after COVID-19 vaccination was 'no longer significant' for multi-dose vaccines and 'there is little suggestion of any effect immediately following vaccination.' The document shows an added line that says mRNA vaccines may be driving an increased risk of cardiac-related death in males, especially those ages 18-39."

The CNN reporter adds, "The version released publicly in October 2022 said COVID-19 vaccination was 'associated with a modestly increased risk for cardiac-related mortality 28 days following vaccination,' and says the vaccines may be driving the risk, especially among younger men."

Gumbrecht notes that the "Florida analysis" of last year "was not peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, but was posted online by the Florida Department of Health and shared in a news release" published on October 7, 2022.

READ MORE: Inside Ron DeSantis' plan to take on Trump from the right: report

The Florida Health Department, on April 26, said it stands by Ladapo's 2022 statements. But Gumbrecht points out that the Sunshine State "is an outlier in its recommendations against the COVID-19 vaccine for young men and healthy children" and is "at odds with" the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."

Fauci and Biden, in contrast to Ladapo, have been aggressive proponents of COVID-19 vaccines — which they believe have saved countless lives. Both Fauci and Biden had mild COVID-19 infections in 2022 and believe that their infections might have been worse had they not been vaccinated.

COVID-19 has been the world's deadliest health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, COVID-19 has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide since it was first reported in Wuhan, China in late 2019. That death toll includes over 1.1 million people in the United States.

But much has changed since the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Although COVID-19 is still highly contagious, most of today's COVID-19 infections are not fatal and do not require hospitalization. Many COVID-19 restricts around the world have been lifted.

READ MORE: Inside Ron DeSantis' plan to take on Trump from the right: report

Read CNN's full report at this link and Politico's full report at this link.

tucker is unelected member of troll caucus

aha [amanda] earth2 = --> fascism

an 2 23

The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.

Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.

But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar.

Santos may not matter to "average" Americans, but his story is being leveraged directly into the right-wing propaganda machine that currently controls the Republican Party. On Thursday night, for instance, Santos was sanctified into the echelon of MAGA saints by the Pope of neo-fascism himself, Tucker Carlson. In a typically dishonest segment on his wildly popular Fox News show, Carlson painted Santos as a hapless victim of the bigoted news media by pretending that the only thing Santos lied about was his volleyball career. (Which is one of the more minor fake careers and hobbies Santos has claimed on his resume.) Media Matters has a sample of the extremely silly diatribe:

It was a tissue of lies constructed to deceive the American people. There was no volleyball scholarship. There was not a single dollar of volleyball scholarship. George Santos made it all up out of whole cloth, out of thin air. George Santos is an ersatz volleyball player. A fraud, a ghoul. People voted for this man believing he had played collegiate volleyball on a scholarship and he hadn't.

And yet tonight ladies and gentlemen, this thief of volleyball glory strides the halls of the United States Congress unimpeded by law enforcement. It's like another insurrection.

Carlson doesn't really have arguments or evidence, but he does do a bang-up impression of someone sarcastically brushing aside nonsense. Except what he's brushing away is usually pretty serious stuff, such as fascist attacks on democracy, attempts to save lives during a pandemic, or, in this case, unbelievable amounts of fraud that look potentially criminal in many cases. With Santos, the number of lies Carlson is ignoring is truly staggering. Santos lied about his resume, his religion, his marriage, his family history, and claimed connections he doesn't have to the Holocaust, 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and an assassination attempt that appears fictional. It is really no exaggeration to say it's easier to list the things he hasn't lied about (his age and his birthplace in Queens).

But just as Catholic saints get their status through martyrdom, the saints of MAGAdom must get theirs through falsified tales of victimhood at the hands of "woke mobs" or the "fake news media."

People right-wingers hate are alarmed at Santos and his staggering trail of fraud. So if the "libs" have a negative reaction to Santos, in the troll-based logic that drives the modern GOP, that must mean he's their newest champion. And let's just state for the record that, while Byler may not see left-leaning news consumers as "real people," he probably wouldn't say the same about the millions of Trump voters whose entire worldview is shaped by the crap that Fox News pours into their heads every day.

Carlson didn't reach the conclusion that Santos is the latest MAGA idol all on his own. Practically from the moment that Santos's deceit was exposed by the New York Times, Steve Bannon, the Joseph Goebbels-wannabe who frequently sets the GOP agenda with his popular "War Room" podcast, was championing the pathological liar. Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have also rallied to Santos' side, claiming he's only a target because he's a "fighter." It's unclear who he has ever "fought" for besides himself, but then again, the same could be said of most MAGA figures, from Donald Trump on down.

It's not a mystery why these leaders think the right-wing audience is ready to accept Santos as the next MAGA savior. All that matters to the modern right is "owning the liberals," and who better to do that than someone who lies constantly for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it?

Certainly, Santos seems to grasp that the move that will take him from a low-level con man to the ranks of the richest MAGA grifters is to lean into trolling. So he's been rolling out the standard issue liberal-owning stunts for weeks now: Flashing the white supremacist-aligned "OK" hand signal during a House vote. (He even knew how to do it so it was clear enough to photograph but so quick he could pretend later it wasn't intentional.) Wearing an assault rifle pin while playing dumb about why it offends people to celebrate the preferred weapons of mass shooters. Feeding the press donuts and actinglike they had somehow become complicit in the evil by eating them. Getting into Twitter fights with drag queens, who are the favorite punching bag of the authoritarian right. (Santos seems to have a past as a drag queen, as well, but this is just part of a favorite right-wing trolling tactic, to recruit members of a hated minority to speak out against their own.) Dunking on former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for criticizing him by tweeting "cry about it."

Reports suggest Santos is delighted by all the negative attention he's getting in the press. An exceptionally short-lived aide recorded a conversation in which Santos was dressing him down, and right in the middle of it, Santos suddenly exclaims, "Don Lemon just texted me — I'm sorry, I'm listening to you — Don Lemon just texted me!" Getting his name on CNN, even during a story on how he is the worst, was just that thrilling to Santos.

Santos even hired former Steve Bannon employee and professional troll, Vish Burra, as a top aide. Burra's defense of Santos is cynical and self-congratulatory: The lying is a form of "shitposting," which is internet speak for saying outlandish things to draw outrage and attention. For the Trumpist right, aggressive trolling is what politics is all about.

Imagining that they're outraging the left is what the GOP audience gets out of this. (No one tell them that the left's reaction to Santos is more amusement than genuine fury.) But there's an even darker reason that Carlson, Bannon, Taylor Greene, etc. have decided to rally round Santos: He's very useful as a weapon in their larger war on truth.

As with Trump, it's overly simplistic to look at these people, with their non-stop disinformation, as mere liars. Liars are people who are sincerely trying to deceive people. In many cases, it's not at all evident that right-wing audiences actually believe the asinine B.S. that is rolled out by the likes of Carlson and Bannon. For instance, the "outrage" over M&M spokescandy shoe choices is less sincere anger than it is a collective bit of performance art. Both Carlson and his audience merely pretend to be mad as a way to keep ironic distance from their own weird sexual hang-ups. Similarly, conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie are often less about true belief and more about displaying fealty to their tribe.

There's a point to right-wingers constantly saying and "believing" things they know not to be true. It's about devaluing empirical reality. Fascists want "truth" to flow from what the right-wing authority figures say is "true," not from lived experience or verifiable facts.They are trying to construct a world where facts don't matter, and only power does. The first step is getting their tribal community to agree collectively to stop distinguishing between true and false and to only claim to believe what is convenient for their leaders or their cause.

For that goal, Santos is useful. He is living the fascist dream of a man whose entire existence seems unmoored from the power of facts. If the MAGA leaders can turn him into a hero, he'd be a living exemplar of their post-truth yearnings: "Truth" can be whatever you want it to be. After all, right-wingers already hate the way facts — Trump lost the election, COVID-19 is real, LGBTQ people exist — get in the way of their desires. They just need permission to let go of that last tendril of reality and start living purely in their authoritarian fantasy world. Santos shows the way. It's unlikely he will be going away any time soon.

to be fair misspoke

Facts Are Stupid Things | NRDC

https://www.nrdc.org › experts › david-doniger › facts-...

Jan 8, 2008 — John Adams, our second president, famously said: "Facts are stubborn things." In a 1988 slip of the tongue, Ronald Reagan said: "Facts are ...

aha-let: note we have empir evidence that more guns does not work, but xian BS gives false humility and get out of jail free card from having to deal with empir facts:

gohmert plays old televangist BS that bad events are punishment for our sins, making god mad; ~AGW god promised not to flood the world again; humans too puny to ~ his power/will

an 6 22

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said recently that he would tell parents of young children killed in the Uvalde school shooting that "God has a plan."

Paxton, who took the leading role in a failed Supreme Court case aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election, went on a media blitz to fight calls for gun restrictions shortly after an 18-year-old shooter killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in the West Texas town of Uvalde.

In an interview with right-wing radio host Trey Graham, Paxton acknowledged that it is "difficult to give comfort" to families who lost their kids. "If I lost one of my children I'd be pretty devastated, especially in a way that is so senseless and seemingly has no purpose," he continued. "I think ... I would just have to say, if I had the opportunity to talk to the people I'd have to say, look, there's always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short no matter what it is. And certainly, we're not going to make sense of, you know, a young child being shot and killed way before their life expectancy."

Paxton's comments last week came ahead of emotional testimony by parents of Uvalde victims in the House last week. Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was killed in the attack, pleaded for Congress to take action on gun safety in response to the massacre.

"We understand that for some reason, to some people — to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns — that guns are more important than children," while testifying with her husband, Felix. "Somewhere out there, there is a mom listening to our testimony thinking, 'I can't even imagine their pain,' not knowing that our reality will someday be hers. Unless we act now."

Dr. Roy Guerrero, a Uvalde pediatrician who treated some of the victims, made a similar plea as he described how children's bodies were "pulverized" and "decapitated" by the bullets from the AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman, to the point that "the only clue as to their identities were the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them."

"Making sure our children are safe from guns, that's the job of our politicians and leaders," Guerrero said. "In this case, you are the doctors and our country is the patient. We are lying on the operating table, riddled with bullets like the children of Robb Elementary and so many other schools. We are bleeding out, and you are not there. My oath as a doctor means that I signed up to save lives. I do my job, and I guess it turns out that I am here to plead, to beg, to please, please do yours."

But after the heart-wrenching testimony, all but five Republicans in the House voted against a package that would raise the age to buy an AR-15 from 18 to 21 and toughen existing gun laws. Senate Republicans have already ruled out any new gun restrictions, as have Republican state leaders in Texas.

Paxton's immediate response to the shooting was to call for arming teachers, which some schools in Texas already do despite strong pushback from teachers.

"We can't stop bad people from doing bad things. We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer," Paxton said following the shooting.

Other Texas Republicans have also tried to blame anything but widespread easy access to guns. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called for "door control" in schools and Gov. Greg Abbott pushed an emphasis on mental health — despite slashing funds for mental health treatment.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, after Wednesday's hearing suggested that the answer is more "prayer."

"Look, maybe if we heard more prayers from leaders of this country instead of taking God's name in vain, we wouldn't have the mass killings like we didn't have before prayer was eliminated from school," he said.

Paxton in particular has a long history of opposing gun restrictions in response to mass shootings in Uvalde, El Paso and Sutherland Springs, arguing that mass shooters are "not going to follow a single gun law" even though gun laws prevented the shooter from getting a gun until he turned 18 — the legal age to purchase an AR-15, but not a handgun — just days before the attack.

Paxton has a close relationship with the gun lobby.The NRA, the Texas State Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fundhave all contributed heavily to his campaigns. Paxton also signed an amicus brief backing the NRA's petition asking the Supreme Court to strike down California's ban on high-capacity magazines. He even "welcomed" the NRA to Texas after the group tried and failed to file for bankruptcy to dodge a corruption investigation by New York's attorney general.

After a gunman killed 26 people in the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting, Paxton argued that the only answer to gun violence was more guns.

"In Texas at least we have the opportunity to have concealed carry," he told Fox News. "And so if it's a place where somebody has the ability to carry, there's always the opportunity that gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many."

After another gunman killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, Paxton again argued that more guns were the answer rather than fewer guns.

"The best way is to be prepared to defend yourself," he told CBS News.

Ironically, Paxton himself cannot buy a gun under federal law, because he has been under indictment since 2015 for breaking state securities law.

Researchers have found no evidence that arming teachers or other school personnel has any effect on school shootings. A review of 89 journal publications and media reports by researchers at the University of Toledo and Ball State University similarly found that armed school resource officers, restrictions on the number of school exits and active-shooter drills do not help either.

The "ideal method for eliminating school firearm violence by youths is to prevent them from ever gaining access to firearms," the researchers concluded, adding that "unfortunately, studies have found an alarming rate of firearms accessible to youths."

trump dump

BySamanthSubramanian:{

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/article/disappearing-data/#

INTRODUCTION

Whenever President Donald Trump is questioned about why the United States has nearly three times more coronavirus cases than the entire European Union, or why hundreds of Americans are still dying every day, he whips out one standard comment. We find so many cases, he contends, because we test so many people. The remark typifies Trump’s deep distrust of data: his wariness of what it will reveal, and his eagerness to distort it. In April, when he refused to allow coronavirus-stricken passengers off the Grand Princess cruise liner and onto American soil for medical treatment, he explained: “I like the numbers where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.” Unable—or unwilling—to fix the problem, Trump’s instinct is to fix the numbers instead.

The administration has failed on so many different fronts in its handling of the coronavirus, creating the overall impression of sheer mayhem. But there is a common thread that runs through these government malfunctions. Precise, transparent data is crucial in the fight against a pandemic—yet through a combination of ineptness and active manipulation, the government has depleted and corrupted the key statistics that public health officials rely on to protect us.

In mid-July, just when the U.S. was breaking and rebreaking its own records for daily counts of new coronavirus cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found itself abruptly relieved of its customary duty of collating national numbers on COVID-19 patients. Instead, the Department of Health and Human Services instructed hospitals to funnel their information to the government via TeleTracking, a small Tennessee firm started by a real estate entrepreneur who has frequently donated to the Republican Party. For a while, past data disappeared from the CDC’s website entirely, and although it reappeared after an outcry, it was never updated thereafter. The TeleTracking system was riddled with errors, and the newest statistics sometimes appeared after delays. This has severely limited the ability of public health officials to determine where new clusters of COVID-19 are blooming, to notice demographic patterns in the spread of the disease, or to allocate ICU beds to those who need them most.

To make matters more confusing still, Jared Kushner moved to start a separate coronavirus surveillance system run out of the White House and built by health technology giants—burdening already-overwhelmed officials and health care experts with a needless stream of queries. Kushner’s assessments often contradicted those of agencies working on the ground. When Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, asked for 30,000 ventilators, Kushner claimed the state didn’t need them: “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this.”

One of the administration’s most consequential failures was that it didn’t establish uniform reporting standards for states and counties. All the numbers from local agencies were just tipped into a mass of detail that was “inconsistent, incomplete, and inaccessible,” according to a report published by the American Public Health Association, the Johns Hopkins Center, and Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit led by a former CDC director. But Trump also urged authorities to slow down coronavirus testing. “Instead of 25 million tests, let’s say we did 10 million tests,” he told CBN News. “We’d look like we were doing much better because we’d have far fewer cases. You understand that.”

While Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading expert on COVID-19, was undergoing surgery and conveniently anaesthetized in late August, the CDC changed its guidelines to stop recommending testing for asymptomatic people, even those who had been in contact with carriers of the virus. Two federal health officials told The New York Times that the instruction came from higher-ups at the White House, even though experts think the U.S. needed more testing at that point in the pandemic, not less. The situation became so overtly politicized that Dr. Rick Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, came up with a plan for a national testing infrastructure, only to be sidelined by higher-ups. He resigned from his position in the National Institutes of Health on October 6. “He can no longer countenance working for an administration that puts politics over science to the great detriment of the American people,” Bright’s attorneys said in a statement.

Even details about Trump’s own bout of COVID-19—whether the president had been on oxygen, or a clear timeline of how long he had been infected—were suppressed or spun, by the admission of his own doctor. In real time, as the coronavirus blazes through the country, Americans are witnessing the chaos and dangers that ensue when the integrity of data is leached away.

The frightening thing is that Trump’s war on data isn’t limited to the pandemic. It has been waged throughout the federal government, warping policy and enfeebling institutions from the inside. Over nearly four years, his administration has defunded, buried and constrained dozens of federal research and data collection projects across multiple agencies and spheres of policy: environment, agriculture, labor, health, immigration, energy, the census. “It scares me,” said Katherine Smith Evans, a former administrator of the Economic Research Service, an agency under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “There are enough chances to make bad policy without lacking the data to make good policy.” We are witnessing a widespread act of erasure.

The impulse to ascribe this to a Republican devotion to small government is a mistaken one. “I don’t see an all-hands-on-board effort to get rid of everything,” Katherine Wallman, who was the chief statistician of the U.S. from 1992 to 2017, told me. “What I do see is that they’re taking on the inconvenient data. Or trying to get data that could help a particular point.” The ERS, which Evans ran until 2011, is a prime case. Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, complained last year that the agency’s research—which, among many other things, tells America how crop prices are moving, what school lunches ought to contain and who needs food stamps—was “based on political science rather than strong science.” The ERS was finding repeatedly that trade deals benefit U.S. farmers and that federal spending on food stamps had dropped steadily since 2013, flatly contradicting the administration’s claims on both counts.

In June 2019, Perdue told the ERS that its offices would be relocating from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Missouri. It was a tactic of brute force, executed in the knowledge that many employees wouldn’t move their lives halfway across the country. Budgets were scheduled to be cut in 2020, in any case. By October 2019, two-thirds of ERS positions were vacant. “I think it’s a decent hypothesis,” Evans said, “that some research results were uncomfortable or inconvenient, and that may have led to a desire to see the agency cut.”

The meticulous assembly of numbers is one of the government’s most overlooked functions, but it’s also one of the most vital. Federal statistics inform the administration about what problems have arisen, who is in distress, and where resources need to go. Citizens aggregate themselves in public data—forcing the state to heed them when individually they might be muted or ignored, and holding officials accountable if their needs aren’t met. By gutting the collection of federal statistics, the Trump administration is burning away the government’s capacity to regulate. By attacking numeracy, it is attacking democracy.

SUBVERTED, CONCEALED AND FAILED TO COLLECT VITAL STATISTICS ABOUT COVID-19

01.01

Good data about where the coronavirus is spreading, whom it’s affecting, and the capacity of health systems is essential for government officials to make better decisions on, for example, lockdown orders and where to send supplies. Epidemiologists and infectious disease experts can use the information to understand COVID-19 better and, more importantly, to contain it.

But over the past year, experts have watched with bewilderment at how the Trump administration has collected, distributed and used public health data. “We’re still flying blind,” said Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder of the the United States Digital Response, an all-volunteer effort to collect and publish COVID-19 data that the federal government hasn’t.

An early controversy erupted in May, when White House economist Kevin Hassett produced a set of charts on COVID-19 spread that appeared to predict a rapid decline in cases and deaths. In them, the country appeared to be nearly virus-free by summer. Hassett distributed the charts internally—much to the delight of President Donald Trump, according to The Washington Post. When Hassett published the charts on an official White House Twitter feed, experts reacted in horror and said reopening prematurely was likely to cause a new surge in cases, which is precisely what happened.

One month later, the administration abruptly decided to make a major change in how hospitals report their inpatient COVID-19 data. No longer would they submit information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, hospitals would file data directly (or indirectly through state governments) to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Administration officials said the change would allow them to collect more complete and standardized data. A chorus of angry public health officials, scientists and hospital representatives warned in a public letter that the transition was likely to lead to less information, not more, precisely when the information was needed most.

Sure enough, data on the HHS website was incomplete and lagging for several weeks, in part because the change came with almost no advance warning.

“Usually you’ve got months and months, sometimes years, to prepare for big changes like this,” said Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals. “Here, you had days.”

Larger hospitals and those that were already using the HHS portal were mostly able to adapt. Smaller hospitals frequently struggled because they hadn’t been using the new system and because they didn’t have the dedicated IT staff of larger hospital networks. “The majority of our hospitals in Nebraska are rural, and the staff at these hospitals are often responsible for many roles, which can stretch resources very thin,” said Margaret Woeppel, vice president for quality and data at the Nebraska Hospital Association. “The nurse who is taking care of patients may also be responsible for quality reporting and infection control.”

Panchadsaram, who served as deputy chief technology officer during the Obama administration, said the quality of the data is slowly improving. But he identified another problem: The Trump administration isn’t sharing it with the public.

Every week, the White House coronavirus task force puts together a detailed status report on the outbreak and the response for all 50 states. It includes everything from test positivity rates to a breakdown of which communities have rising caseloads, along with policy recommendations. The task force gives each governor a copy of their state’s report, but otherwise doesn’t make them public. (The few copies that have surfaced have been obtained by reporters and the Center for Public Integrity, which is posting the reports it obtains on its webpage.)

The White House has not responded to questions about why the reports remain private, leaving critics to wonder whether administration officials are reluctant to publish information that might contradict the optimistic outlook of, say, the president or some Reublican governors. “They have a really good analytics team creating these beautiful reports, those reports have really important recommendations on them, and they're not making them public,” Panchadsaram said. “Maybe that is because the reports clearly contradict what governors are saying, that it’s under control when it’s not.”

...

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/article/disappearing-data/#introduction

used flawed CALCULATIONS TO ARGUE THAT CURTAILING GREENHOUSES GASES WASN'T WORTH THE COST

02.04

The U.S. government has a calculation for the “social cost of carbon,” which measures the environmental, economic and public health damages associated with emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Federal agencies use this figure to evaluate the costs and benefits of new climate regulations. At the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure in office, that figure was $40 per metric ton (a number environmental groups argued was too low). The number is expected to increase as the planet experiences rapid global warming.

But shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that scrapped the Obama-era calculation, putting the economic harm of emitting climate-warming carbon dioxide far lower, at between $1 and $7 per ton. A July report by the Government Accountability Office determined that Trump’s calculations of the social cost of carbonare about seven times lower than previous federal estimates. And while Obama-era estimates placed future climate damages at $82 per ton of carbon by 2050, Trump’s calculation put it at just $11, the report found.

The lower figure allows the administration to argue that the upfront costs of reining in greenhouse gas emissions outweigh any future benefit to property, agriculture, coastal ecosystems and human health.Trump's EPA has used the number to justify weakening environmental safeguards and to roll back Obama-era regulations that slashed carbon pollution from power plants and new vehicles. For example, the EPA claims that rescinding the Clean Power Plan would save the U.S. $33 billion in “avoided costs” by 2030, a calculation it came to by looking only at the domestic costs of carbon pollution and by downplaying the impact that emissions will have on future generations.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has led a campaign to undermine the validity of climate modeling so it can ignore possible environmental threats when evaluating new infrastructure, such as pipelines, power plants, highways and airports.When more than a dozen federal agencies published a sobering 1,600-page report in November 2018 that warned of the dire threat of global climate change, then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed the assessment was “based on the most extreme model scenario” and “not data-driven.” Trump flatly denied the science: “I don’t believe it,” he told reporters.

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an hunter kos 10 21

Here's an entire New York Times story about a genuinely bad, malevolent person. It's not framed that way, of course, because Neutrality, but the Times tossed a reporter in the direction of Great Falls, Montana, to give us another report from the Trumpian underbelly of America and once again, it's a paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed, strategically dishonest sh-tshow that explains a lot about why the True Americans nesting comfortably in Trumpism have steadily been gravitating toward fascism as a matter of natural course.

The Times story is a long explainer about Rae Grulkowski and her quest to keep local civic-minded Montana residents from getting a token amount of federal funds by designating a chunk of the state a "national heritage area." It's a largely meaningless designation that provides minor federal funds to help preserve local points of interest and boost history-minded tourism.A bunch of Montana folks got a bee in their bonnets about it, part of the general True American suspicion that the federal government is evil and just out to trick people (thanks again, Ronald Jackass Reagan), and it became the local version of critical race theory, and hydrocorto-whateveritall, and ingesting horse dewormer because some friend of a friend of a cousin of an Online Influencer said horse paste cures gunshot wounds or whatever the latest version of that theory is.

But here's the thing: Rae Grulkowski—hero of the paranoid Montana class and partial impetus for Montana's reporter-attacking Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's theatrical ban on the federal government from creating any such heritage designation in the state—attacked the civic-minded proposal by lying her ass off, constantly, inventing or perpetuating a web of fabricated claims that the tourism designation would, in the Times'telling, "forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells, or use fertilizers." It would ban septic systems! It would raise taxes!

And it was all utter bullshit. As the Times noted and gave evidence of, Grulkowski was lying about all of it.

It was a local campaign dependent on crafting outright propaganda against something she didn't personally like, disseminating it to people who didn't give a damn whether it was true or it was false, rallying a crowd of like-minded liars to attack the opposition with furious disinformation, and turning it into the nextFarm Bureau and Republican paranoia campaign in which allies compared the National Heritage Area program to Hitler and nobody involved can stammer their way through any plausible defense of the nonsensical claims they're making.

So then, what are we to make of this? Well, Grulkowski and her allies are flat-out liars, that's for sure. They have disseminated provably false information as a political strategy, and local Republican (Trump) voters snorted it all up like ideological cocaine.Team Lying Bullshit has done its level best to make the lives of those evil civic do-gooders miserable.

It's only in the very last quarter of the story that we get to the kicker that explains all the rest of it: Rae Grulkowski is apparently a "QAnon" devotee, according to The New York Times. She claims to believe in conspiracies about "child trafficking that leads to everything," and believes that Donald Trump won the November election even though he most demonstrably got flattened, and thinks Black Lives Matter supporters were the actual culprits behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, and there we go. She appears to be someone who read a lot of hoaxes on Facebook and turned them into a personality, just one of a new "movement" of Americans radicalized by a single company's eagerness to monetize the nation's most deep-seated paranoias.

Well of course someone who believes an assortment of the most malevolent, antisemitic, racist, pro-fascist conspiracy theories being passed around the internet is going to be similarly loose when inventing anti-government reasons to oppose whatever her neighbors are doing. But—and this is the crux of the Times story and the lesson to be taken from all of this—it worked.

It worked, because of course it did. The propaganda effort was overwhelmingly successful, enough to gain the support of conservative state lawmakers who did not give a damn whether the claims were true. Nobody involved appears to have given a damn whether they were promoting lies. The invention of propaganda was the core strategy: taking a minor civic issue and turning it, through lies, into a new conservative touchstone.

The lying part is the most consequential "value" at play here. "Heritage" designations have nothing to do with any of it. Nobody gives a flying damn whether or not local historic landmarks get new plaques or whether they don't. The important part is for local Republicanism to stick it to anyone who tries to do an inch of good by inventing whatever lies are necessary to do it.

In battling a largely meaningless recognition of the area's rich history, Grulkowski was following the playbook of Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump himself. It is the fascist playbook: If the facts are against your beliefs, ignore those facts and lie. Create new "facts" that will galvanize the movement despite their fraudulence; rather than seeking the consent of the governed by explaining why the movement's ideas will solve current problems, manufacture a new reality in which the "problems" are whatever hoaxes the movement needs to produce in order to justify taking whatever actions the movement wants to take.

We are in a world of danger when flagrant political lies can so swiftly result in success rather than condemnation. That is the endgame to all of this. If a government can be established that governs the nation through fraud—and it is happening, in each Republican-held state using provably false election hoaxes to justify new voting restrictions, and in the establishment of Facebook as the nation's new news source, one in which false information is treated by the company as marketable entertainment rather than a poison, and in the pre-disgraced thug of a Montana governor adopting ananti-government propaganda campaign to attack a federal government program instituted by Ronald Reagan himself as a supposed secret attack on True American rights—then elections are already irrelevant.

Central to battling all of it, however, is to recognize that Rae Grulkowski disseminated lies in order to attack an action she didn't like; she did so while wallowing in an absolute sea of other lies. She succeeded in mustering a populist revolt against better people and better ideas by lying, outright, about the thing she was fighting against.Now, says the Times, she has further political ambitions, given that her equally toxic and cowardly neighbors proved to be so furiously supportive of her campaign of lies.

This is a person who should be scorned. This is a person who should be shunned, boycotted, considered a crackpot, and treated with universal contempt. This is a person who is attacking democracy itself, by attacking it at its root premise: Whatever civic challenges are presented to the voters, they must be based on truth. Democracy is meaningless, is absolutely meaningless, if each election is a competition not of competing solutions to civic problems but of the inventiveness of each campaign in creating new hoaxes and convincing the governed to believe them.

Instead, we get national debates over whether some of the most infamously dishonest people in government have been treated too roughly if private restaurant owners do not want to serve them. The pressure is not to shun liars as anti-American, anti-democracy propagandists seeking to manipulate public opinion through rampant dishonesty, but whether we are allowed to direct any scorn their way at all.

How did it come to this?

The short answer might be Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg was one of those who made a name for himself insisting that American journalism was intrinsically "biased" against conservatives, a claim which is now taken as a central movement tenet because it fits pleasingly with every other movement theme of displacement and victimhood. The evidence for this "bias," even decades into the claims, was almost always an assertion that because conservative ideologues were not given exposure equal to actual issue experts, it amounted to oppressing the conservative "side" of an argument.

Ideological claims, in other words, were being shortchanged because journalists were looking to scientists, medical experts, historical data, and other providers of hard facts rather than letting lobbyists, think-tank heads, and other professional political provocateurs speak with equal authority and at equal volume.

From there conservatism moved to a very successful crusade to reformulate "news" so that facts were always debatable, so long as there was a single professional spinner who could be paid to claim they were. The cable networks, especially, transitioned from that into new forms that rarely gave scientists or other experts a voice at all, preferring instead to pit one pre-determined ideologue against another for orchestrated spats in which nobody could beproven to have lied because the segment would be over before any actual journalist or expert could even phone the studio.

We moved on to public bellowing about "the elites must respect my beliefs," where "beliefs" consisted of believing that climate scientists were sabotaging world government or, eventually, that livestock dewormer was a miracle cure for a pandemic hospitals themselves could not keep up with.

But it was the Goldberg camp that insisted that liars and propagandists should not just be heard from but also treated with respect.That if there was a conflict between facts and conservatism, then it was biased to highlight one over the other. It was treated as a given, from the beginning, that conservatism was a counter to scientificand policy expertise. It was treated as a given that conservatism was the rightful and just opposition to such expertise.

We have reached that conservative promised land. All of the news now follows the formula of pitting ideologue against ideologue, the facts wedged in somewhere—or not, depending on the journalist—but with no reproach given to those who insist that the facts are something else. The paid propagandists and crafters of outlandish, impossible lies are now treated with impeccable respect by the media. The American people are taught to treat professional liars as dignified combatants—nay, true Americans, speaking powerful emotions in the face of uncomfortable, irritating data.

And, after hounding media relentlessly into giving respect to professional fraudsters, the conservative movement itself has now shed from itself everything but the professional fraudsters. The lies are the movement; the movement is defined by the lies, and shifts as rapidly as required to adopt new ones. tucker 1/6 false flag]

You need not look at anything beyond the last election to see that. Respecting, or actively propagating, the anti-American hoax that claims Republicans secretly "won" the last election only to have it stolen by invisible forces, is now a requirement inside the so-called "conservative" movement.Trump lied constantly, about everything, in genuinely malevolent ways, and he was a product of both Bernard Goldberg's insistence that sneering know-nothings be given media respect and the shouter who finally erased all further attempts to pretend Republicanism was anything but a collection of spite-based antipathies and hoaxes.

But Rae Grulkowski is, genuinely, a bad person. Steve Bannon is a liar, a propagandist, and a hack. Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who crafts propaganda demonizing immigrants to justify brutality against them. Mitch McConnell is a relentless liar, one who flaunts his absolute contempt for whatever ideal he blustered about a month, a week, or a day beforehand in order to invent an entirely opposing one. Sarah Huckabee Sanders promoted fraudulent information as a professional, and ideological, career move. Donald Trump is quite possibly the most loathsome sack of malignant neuroses to ever have shuffled through Washington and that is saying something.

Creating hoaxes for the purpose of manipulating public opinion is contemptible, evil behavior. It deserves fury. It deserves the scorn of the entire nation; journalism, and political media especially, should have such seething contempt for the propagandists that exposure of each lie and value judgments about those that perpetrate them should be, as they once were, the profession's central ambition.

It is not enough to point out that this or that person is fabricating a hoax in order to deceive their fellow Americans into holding a new political position. Those that do so are enemies of democracy. They are, in the true sense of the word, anti-American. They are frauds. They are doing direct harm to their neighbors, their towns, their states, their nation. They are ideological soldiers seeking to do harm to the government by taking, from the public, the ability to use their vote as means of steering that government. They are anti-civil rights. Their propaganda is stealing democracy by stealing votes by stealing political debate itself so that voters simply cannot discern what government is doing, what the parties are doing, what the issues are, where the dangers are, and where the future catastrophes lie.

These are all bad, evil, rotten people who need to be shunned with ferocity. They do not warrant respect. They do not warrant civil treatment. They do not warrant malicious burbles about how dare Americans seek consequences for their fraud; newspaper editors should be devoting themselves to identifying each face and name and lie and treating them as public enemy, not both sides denizen.

These are the footsoldiers that will end democracy, if we cannot throw them from our civic spaces and treat them with the contempt that hoax promoters deserve. These are not the days of tar and feathers, but they can certainly be the days of belittlement, consequences, and public reproach. These are the vapid, self-serving cowards whose lies spur domestic terrorists to violence, and who kill Americans by the thousands by pushing fraudulent information about a deadly pandemic. These are not people who lie of happenstance or impulse, but people who specifically seek to bend government through a pattern of anti-American deceit.

There is no neutrality to be had in reporting like this. Someone who manipulates American politics by lying to the American public is acting with malevolence; reporters should feel a civic duty not just to expose them, but to strip them of the usual deference and pleasantries. Treat propagandists with more scorn than those who craft financial hoaxes to prey on the elderly, or those who hide the deadly effects of a product so that they may sell more of them. The propagandists are attacking the soul of our very democracy. To hell with them. Shun them and those who enable their plots out of greed, ideology, or apathy.

Conservatism has now reached Bernard Goldberg's promised land in which facts and malevolent fictions are treated as equals. The movement itself has become a mass of hoaxes cowering under a red hat. If it cannot be condemned as a fraud, it will grow in power until it strips all truth from around us.

an 10 21 amanda

wildest thing about Donald Trump's Big Lie is that his own supporters don't actually believe it.

Oh, they say they do to any pollster who will ask them. A recent Morning Consult poll, like so many before it, shows nearly "7 in 10 GOP voters don't believe the 2020 election was free and fair and/or have little to no trust in the U.S. election system, while 49 percent doubt that next year's midterms will be free and fair."

But when pollsters dug a little deeper, they found that Republican voters don't behavelike people who think the elections are rigged. On the contrary, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to act like people who both believe that they will get a chance to vote and that their vote will be fairly counted.

"A full 92 percent of self-identified Republican voters said that they planned to vote in the 2022 elections, with just 4 percent saying they did not plan to," explains Meredith McGraw at Politico. "By contrast, just 70 percent of self-identified Democrats said they planned to vote, and 29 percent said they did not plan to."

People who think their vote doesn't matter don't get fired up to vote. So Democratic demoralization, for instance, is perfectly explicable in light of both widespread voter suppression and the rapidly dwindling possibility that President Joe Biden's bold economic promises will ever come to pass. Feeling like your vote never changes anything isn't unreasonable for Democratic voters, and they are accordingly less enthused about voting.

Republicans, on the other hand, are acting very much like people who believe their vote matters. Indeed, as the poll reports, GOP voters who espouse faith in the Big Lie are more likely to believe their vote has power[twt stat]

what gives? How can people both "believe" elections are rigged against them, but behave like people who have total faith in the system?

The likeliest answer is also the simplest one: They're lying.

Like their hero, Donald Trump, Trump voters know full well that the 2020 election wasn't stolen. They just repeat the lie, like a bunch of trolls. It's a useful cover for their true agenda, which is seizing power in 2022 and 2024 by any means necessary — even if doing so requires cheating.

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Postnoted on Twitter Thursday morning, "Their collective agreement to pretend the lies about 1/6 and 2020 are true is best understood as a collective unshackling of themselves from any obligation to abide by future election losses -- the precondition to overturning them by whatever means are necessary."

Sargent was responding to reports that Tucker Carlson of Fox News plans to do a "special" to amplify conspiracy theories that the January 6 insurrection was a "false flag" operation. As with the claims that the 2020 election was "rigged," it's important to understand that not only does Carlson not believe this, neither do his viewers — even as they eat up and repeat these conspiracy theories.

We know this for a very simple reason: The same people making claims that January 6 was a "false flag" will, depending on the situation, flip around and make the contradictory claim that the insurrectionists were patriots and martyrs. It's why Carlson will claim one minute that QAnon is a mythliberals made up to smear conservatives, and then the next minute defend the very real QAnon as a bunch of freethinkers resisting liberal hegemony. It's how MyPillow CEO-turned-fascist-propagandist Mike Lindell can keep moving the date for Trump's miraculous reinstallation in the White House without most of his followers starting to ask questions about why his predictions never pan out. It's why Republicans aren't rattled by the failure to turn up any real incidents of "voter fraud" for Biden. It wasn't something they ever believed to begin with.

Contradictions don't faze right-wingers for the same reason they don't change their minds in the face of facts: The truth does not matter. All that matters is power. Trolling through lies and contradictory claims is viewed as a crucial weapon in getting power.

To be certain, there is absolutely nothing new about this observation. On the contrary, it's quite clear that Trumpism is just fascism by another name, and the rhetorical game-playing of fascists is a subject that's been well-scrutinized. Semiotician Umberto Eco wrote in his 1995 analysis of fascist rhetoric, fascism is "a beehive of contradictions," because the point is to destroy rational discourse. To the fascist, Eco writes, "Thinking is a form of emasculation" and should be rejected in favor of a raw will to power. And, of course, there's the popular quote from philosopherJean-Paul Sartreabout how fascists "know that their remarks are frivolous" and they "are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."

This is why conservatives are so impervious to facts and become more so as the GOP slides further and further down the fascist path. Facts are only persuasive to people who believe that truth and empiricism matter. For the authoritarian right, however, facts are understood as inconveniences and obstacles. In that light, it makes sense why they take so much delight in rejecting facts and driving liberals bonkers by doing so. It's a show of power, to relish how reality itself cannot defeat them.

Like many on the left, I was amused watching perennial GOP troll Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia freaking out at the possibility that her robotic repetition of the Big Lie might actually cause her followers to believe it and choose not to vote. And certainly, there are a small percentage of numpty-heads in the GOP coalition who don't realize it's all a big con and might elect to sit out elections because of it. In close elections, that extremely small percentage of Republicans who aren't in on the joke may matter. But that 92% of Republicans are feeling confident and excited about voting in future elections shows that the faith in the Big Lie is, for the vast majority of them, an act performed for the cameras and not a sincerely held belief.

Republican voters are not misled by Trump's Big Lie. They are empowered by the opportunity to join in. If there's any chance of beating back the rising fascist movement in America, it starts with understanding this crucial difference.

yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-to-name-bombastic-loyalist-a-top-intel-chief-despite-lack-of-qualifications-report/

no lnx

Trump to name bombastic loyalist as top intel chief despite lack of qualifications: report

Ambassador Richard Grenell with California Wine Representative

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump is expected to install Richard Grenell, his current Ambassador to Germany, as his next Acting Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times. Grenell is known as a bombastic Trump loyalist who has not been well received in Berlin.

Some eyebrows are being raised, not due to Grenell’s harsh attitudes but his disturbing lack of qualifications for the job of Director of National Intelligence, also known as the DNI.

The DNI is a Cabinet-level official who sits at the very top of the entire Intelligence Community, serving as the head of the 17 federal agencies that comprise it. They also serve as the President’s chief advisor on national security, and produce the top-secret President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

Federal law states quite clearly, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Ambassador to Germany does not qualify. Grenell previously has served as the spokesperson for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He has run a public affairs consultancy, has been a Fox News contributor, and for a few days was presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s national security spokesperson, but was forced to step down after conservatives blasted the former governor over Grenell’s sexual orientation.

In November the german magazine Der Spiegel ran a damning profile of Grenell titled, “Trump’s Ambassador Finds Few Friends in Germany.” (Ironically, one of the reasons Trump gave for firing his venerated Ambassador to Ukraine was that she was not well-liked in the country, which was false.)

“Since arriving in Berlin as U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell has flouted diplomatic conventions and attempted to interfere in domestic politics. He has since become politically isolated in the German capital,” Der Spiegel reported.

In the extremely “unflattering” article, Grenell is compared to “a right-wing extremist colonial officer.”

“The powerful avoid him. Doors have been shut. Few politicians to the left of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the populist-conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), want to be seen with him.”

It gets worse.

Der Spiegel writes they spoke with 30 sources before publishing their report.

“Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism. His brash demeanor, some claim, hides a deep insecurity, and they say he thirsts for the approval of others.”

All that aside, again, Grenell is not qualified, neither by law nor by common sense.

Some experts agree:

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Garrett M. Graff

@vermontgmg

Reminder: Jim Clapper spent 50 years in intelligence, headed two agencies, and served as the Under Sec of intel at the Pentagon before becoming DNI. Ric Grenell was ... a notably rude Twitter troll. https://twitter.com/maggienyt/status/1230262310847029248 …

Maggie Haberman

@maggieNYT

News - President Trump expected to tap Ric Grenell for ODNI https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/us/politics/dni-national-intelligence-director-grenell.html …

Joe Cirincione

@Cirincione

This is a national disgrace. Grenell would be the least qualified intelligence chief in US history. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/us/politics/dni-national-intelligence-director-grenell.html?referringSource=articleShare …

Richard Grenell, the American ambassador to Germany, was expected to be the president’s pick to be acting director of national intelligence.

Trump Expected to Name Richard Grenell as Acting Head of Intelligence

The move would place a Trump loyalist atop the intelligence agencies long viewed skeptically by the White House.

nytimes.com

Steve Vladeck

@steve_vladeck

Because Grenell is Senate-confirmed (as Ambassador to Germany), the President has the authority to name him Acting DNI under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Of course, there'd be no reason not to _nominate_ him to be the actual DNI if he were actually qualified for the job... https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1230262310847029248 …

Maggie Haberman

@maggieNYT

News - President Trump expected to tap Ric Grenell for ODNI https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/us/politics/dni-national-intelligence-director-grenell.html …

Josh Moon

@Josh_Moon

The moron running the country is about to appoint the least qualified intelligence director in history - by a wide margin. A move guaranteed to make us less safe as a country. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/us/politics/dni-national-intelligence-director-grenell.html …

Richard Grenell, the American ambassador to Germany, was expected to be the president’s pick to be acting director of national intelligence.

Trump Expected to Name Richard Grenell as Acting Head of Intelligence

The move would place a Trump loyalist atop the intelligence agencies long viewed skeptically by the White House.

nytimes.com

3:29 PM - Feb 19, 2020

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Olivia Gazis

@Olivia_Gazis

Replying to @Olivia_Gazis

Apart from questions about Grenell’s qualifications, temperament and relevant experience for this role, the move also raises questions about the Worldwide Threat Assessment - how soon would a brand new, acting DNI present an annual threat assessment before Congress

AN no lnx

Inside the Trump administration’s war on science itself

written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon May 28, 2019

President Donald Trump administration has escalated its crusade against policies combatting climate change by attacking the science behind global warming.

One of the cornerstones of the administration’s new climate change policy is ordering parts of the government to stop studying the effects of global warming on the future of the planet, and in particular, the state of the planet by the end of the century if humanity does not control its carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to The New York Times.

Trump appointed former astronaut and petroleum geologist James Reilly to lead the U.S. Geological Survey, who in turn instructed his office to only use computer-generated climate models projecting the impact of climate change through 2040, thus abandoning the traditional practice of using models that stretch to the end of the century. And that is not the only major policy change Trump plans to implement regarding climate science.

As the Times reported, “In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.”

The administration’s move was foreshadowed by Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord; his systematic decimation of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the environment, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), through funding cuts and staff reductions; and his administration’s instruction to the EPA to significantly reduce its 2018 estimate that more than 1,400 people would die prematurely every year due to a proposed new rule on coal emissions.

Regarding that last policy Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon by email last week that “this is a logical next step in the effort by Trump and the polluting interests that dictate his environmental policies to dismantle the environmental protections of the past half century put in place by past both Republican and Democratic presidents.”

He added, “Let me be blunt: Trump is choosing to kill people in order to increase the profits of the polluting interests to which he is beholden. I cannot think of a more craven act than this, and we’re talking about a president who is known for craven acts. There is a reason I warned back in October 2016 that Trump is a threat to the planet.”

Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Department of Global Ecology echoed those thoughts, telling Salon by email that “it is one thing for the Trump administration to decide that more people should be killed from particulate air pollution, because their lives are worth less than the money to be made from loosened regulations. It is another thing entirely to enter an Orwellian world, in which we pretend that the loosening of regulations will not result in more people dying. Trump complains about fake news, but then to justify his policies, his minions create fake science and then use it to create real policy.”

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