alt facts post-truth

see post truth 2

neglected

trump lie count 9K 4/19? 10k 619?

this node apparently refers to the term itself

see also fake news and conspiracy

root?

see agnotology

broadend to post-truth, just plain lying 1018

impeachment: gop/ trump base sep wacko reality

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/inside-trumps-liar-circus/

as of Friday morning, the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States stands at roughly 198,000 people. Epidemiologists and other public health experts warn that the real number of deaths is much higher. By the end of this year, the virus may well have killed at least 300,000 people, conceivably many more. If the Trump regime is permitted to pursue its preferred “herd immunity” strategy, it’s reasonable to assume that several million people will die.

Journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage” reveals that Donald Trump knew that the coronavirus was a highly lethal plague that could potentially kill millions of people in the United States. The president chose to publicly lie about that fact and minimize the danger. Moreover, Trump has actively sabotaged coronavirus relief efforts in the United States for his own (perceived) personal, financial and political gain.

In this season of death, Trump is once again holding political rallies across the country where thousands of his followers gather, most not wearing masks, and revel in their defiance of public health. Attendees at such events can potentially spread the virus to thousands of other people. In essence, Trump’s followers are a type of human biological weapon.

Trump insists on holding these rallies because he is an apparent sociopath who lacks empathy, care or concern for other people. His need for narcissistic fuel is more important than the lives of others. what of Trump’s followers? Why do they continue to flock to his rallies, which are literal death traps?

To most outside observers, such behavior appears as mass insanity, proof that Trumpism is a form of religion, a literal death cult.

But the reality of TrumpWorld is perhaps even more frightening than that conclusion.

Carl Hoffman is the author of the critically-acclaimed bestseller “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest.” Hoffman’s writing has also been featured in such publications as National Geographic Adventure and the Smithsonian.

Beginning with Trump’s impeachment and ending with the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Hoffman traveled some 5,000 miles across the country attending Trump rallies, and spent almost 200 hours talking with the Trump faithful who attend those events. Hoffman documents these experiences in his new book, “Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrible Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.”

In this conversation, Hoffman explains that Donald Trump’s rallies function as a form of alternate reality for his followers. This “upside-down world” is tied together by conspiracy theories, ignorance, racism and a longing for an earlier time in America where life was “simpler” because nonwhite people, LGBTQ people, women and other marginalized groups “knew their place” and white Christian straight men were understood as the most essential Americans. Hoffman also explores the similarity between Trump’s rallies and evangelical church revivals where the sick are healed, sinners are “born again” and the charismatic preacher is seen as a semi-divine prophet.

Hoffman also warns that Trump’s rallies — and the realm of Trump believers more generally — are infused with delusions like the fast-spreading QAnon conspiracy theory, and that such beliefs pose a grave danger to American democracy and society overall.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

You have a unique insight into TrumpWorld given that you have attended so many of his rallies. Given all that has happened and is likely to happen in these final weeks before the 2020 election, how are you feeling?

I follow the news closely. I read the New York Times every day, I read the Washington Post. In general, I am a voracious consumer of the news. And yet I found that there is a profound difference between reading about something and being in the literal world of Trump at his rallies. That world was shocking to me.

I was shocked to see how Donald Trump has an urge, a type of deep need, for authoritarianism. I don’t think it’s a plan. He is not smart enough. But with Donald Trump — and you see this at the rallies — his ego is everything. Trump is such a damaged human being. He is empty inside and has to fill that space. He cannot lose. To lose is the worst thing in the whole world for Trump, psychologically. I saw it at the rallies. It makes one’s hair stand up to watch this urge toward power in person. As I explain in the book, Donald Trump is a dangerous person and anything can happen with him as president during the 2020 election.

What does the mainstream media, along with the general public outside of TrumpWorld, fail to understand about his power over and appeal to his followers?

It’s weird to be at a Trump rally. The first place I went to for a rally was Minneapolis. I went the day before the rally to get a sense of what was happening. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never been to any of his rallies before that one. The first 10 or 20 people were lined up. In line was a Black man wearing a stars-and-stripes baseball shirt and a MAGA hat. I didn’t talk to anyone. I left. The next morning, I got there about 6 a.m. and the line had grown exponentially throughout the night. I learned that I had to start getting in line much earlier.

At first, I was shocked because there were many more Black people there than I had anticipated. But then, as I hung out at more Trump rallies, I realized that 100 or 200 Black people out of 22,000 is nothing. And then. of course the Trump campaign people pick Black people out and put them in “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts and then have them standing behind Donald Trump’s podium so that the cameras can pick them out.

Donald Trump is a racist and a Trump rally is an overwhelmingly white event. Whether you see people engage in flagrant displays of outrageous racism or not, it’s a terrifically racist event. That slogan “Make America Great Again,” what does that even mean? What is a “great” America for people who are at a Trump rally? What they want is a world that looks just like a Trump rally.

The people at a Trump rally will tell you that what is great about being there is how everyone is alike. They are upfront about that. It is a very white world. The people at Trump rallies are very happy to have token Black people there who are wearing MAGA gear. Trump supporters do not want social change. The Black people at Trump rallies do not have any power. They do not threaten power. If you ask the people at the Trump rallies — I like to call them “Trumpians” — they will say right away, “Well, liberals always accuse us of being racist, and we’re not racist.” In reality, of course they are.

Trump’s rallies are a type of theater and scripted performance. What is the format?

Donald Trump’s world is an upside-down one. It is a fantasy world. One of the most popular songs at a Trump rally is “YMCA” by the Village People. There are 22,000 people pantomiming the letters YMCA at a Trump rally. The next person that comes on the stage is Vice President Pence. Out of 22,000 people, untold thousands of them are fundamentalist, evangelical Christians who think homosexuality is a sin. And yet their favorite song is a disco hit about having anonymous gay sex at the YMCA.

This detachment from reality happens over and over again at a Trump rally. Trump will come out and say, “How many union people are here? Trump is for the working man. Trump is for the union man,” even though the Republican Party has relentlessly attacked unions for decades. A Trump rally is really a wild place where this man appears and says he is going to fix everything wrong in the world. He is going to fix every problem that you have in your life. Trump says the other people, the Democrats and people who don’t support him, are just dirt, they’re trying to ruin your life. They’re coming after you. But Donald Trump? He is going to fix your life. And he’s going to fix you too.

Donald Trump has been credibly accused of sexual harassment as well as sexual assault by numerous women. He has cheated on all his wives. He also wants to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms. Yet millions of white women are devoted to Donald Trump. How do they explain themselves?

The women at the rallies are some of the most incredibly zealous Trump supporters. One of the great cultural strains at play with the Trumpians are issues with work and masculinity. This is particularly true for white, non-college-educated men who traditionally were able to make a living — and a relatively good living — and support a family just with their hands and the strength of their back and their work ethic.

Such white men have seen the world shift in some pretty dramatic ways. Women and people of color have become much more educated and much more integrated into the workforce during these last few decades. Women are more educated than men now in terms of degree attainment.

Many of the men who support Trump feel really lost. The women who are their partners feel the same way. Maybe those women had to work too, as teachers or as nurses. But they bought into a very old, traditional model of masculinity. With that world shifting, Trump’s “working class” supporters feel completely adrift. At a Trump rally one sees so many women buy into those emotions.

What are some of the shared values and beliefs at a Trump rally?

At a Trump rally, the biggest shocker for me was the extent to which everyone believes in the worst conspiracy theories. They do not read newspapers or follow the mainstream news. Trump’s supporters live in an upside-down fantasy world.

QAnon, for instance, is not some weird tangential belief held by a minority of nuts. QAnon is a mainstream cultural phenomenon among tens of millions of Trump supporters. It is also taken for granted that the American press is the “enemy of the people.” This would be repeated over and over again at Trump’s rallies on the speakers and the Jumbotron screen.

Moreover, there are a lot of people at Trump rallies who do not even watch Fox News. Again, they don’t watch any news at all. It was quite frequent for me to talk to somebody at a Trump rally, and they would tell me, “I do independent research.”

Trumpians are not doing critical thinking. They are looking at Twitter. Many of them are also into OAN, the One America News Network. OAN makes Fox News look progressive.

The role of right-wing evangelical Christianity is very important in understanding Trump’s appeal to these people. Many of them believe we are in the end times. That makes it easy for them to succumb to conspiracy theories. It is all fertile ground for the fantastical world that Donald Trump inhabits.

Why do Trump’s followers listen to him? Because they are used to listening to fire-and-brimstone preachers raging about the end of the world and the end times. They listen to him because there are tens of millions of non-college-educated white people who feel their privilege somehow ending. The world is changing, and they are very frightened of that. These are not people who live in Chicago, New York or Washington.

Is Trumpism a cult? Are the rallies cult meetings?

I do not believe that Trumpism per se is a cult. But I do think that Donald Trump plays off one of the great icons of American history and culture, which is the preacher.

When I first went to a Trump rally my assumption was that the lights would dim, and that Donald Trump would come out on the stage and there would be a spotlight on him. I was shocked and surprised to see that at a Trump rally it is hyper-lit — it is incredibly bright and there are no shadows. I shared that observation with a woman in Dallas. She explained to me that it is like church. Trump’s rallies are like a church revival. You want to see the preacher, and the preacher wants to see you. The idea of being “born again,” what does that mean? To be born again means you have to die. For an urban secular person, such thinking is very strange and foreign. But for millions of Americans it is all very mainstream and normal.

The idea of being reborn is something that happens because the preacher convinces you that the world is evil, and that you’re sinning so badly that you essentially die, and then he brings you back. At a traditional church revival, people faint, they pass out and then they come back to life and they are reborn. I have seen this happen at Trump rallies. I have watched people fall out at a Trump rally and then be carried out on stretchers and placed near the front row. To my eyes it is very clear and purposeful that the people who organize and plan Trump’s rallies are well aware of these echoes of the church and religious fundamentalism.

What do you think happens if Donald Trump is defeated by Joe Biden? As a group, will his followers become violent?

That is hard to answer. Most of the Trump people that I spent time with at the rallies were not violent. They were not carrying weapons — you can’t bring a weapon into a Trump rally anyway. I believe the Trump people I spoke with at the rallies would accept the outcome of the 2020 election.

Yes, there is certainly a much smaller subset of people who are potentially violent and dangerous. And I don’t know what happens with them. Perhaps I am being too optimistic? Maybe I believe in the goodness and innate people of human beings too much? I do believe that Donald Trump will do anything to win and that he does not like to lose. But I do hope that if Trump loses by a wide enough margin that will, in and of itself, be enough for a peaceful transition of power after the election.

You immersed yourself in TrumpWorld through all these rallies. What do you know now that you did not before?

I am shocked at the deep and widely held belief in conspiracy theories and the extent to which the right wing, from Fox News to Donald Trump, have perverted the truth to the point where people question if the truth even exists.

I believe that the truth exists. I believe it is reported in such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post and other places, every day. But there are many tens of millions of people who regard anything that comes out of the country’s leading newspapers as “commie propaganda” or what have you. Such beliefs do not bode well for the United States.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bolivia-coup-was-based-on-false-claims-of-election-fraud/

no lnx

Bolivia coup was based on false claims of election fraud

Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams February 28, 2020

A new study released by a pair of MIT researchers Thursday reveals that, contrary to claims from the U.S.-backed Organization of American States, there was no fraud in Bolivia’s Oct. 20, 2019 elections — an accusation used by the OAS and others as a pretext for supporting the coup in the country that deposed President Evo Morales and replaced him with an unelected right-wing government.

“Good lord,” tweeted MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes. “Given the fact the entire Morales government was toppled over accusations of election fraud, the OAS has a lot to answer for.”

The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz took a similar approach to the findings and the OAS’ conclusions.

Jon Schwarz

@schwarz

In a surprising development, it appears that the same political forces and media that have lied about absolutely everything about Latin America for the past 100 years were lying againhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-dismissed-its-october-elections-fraudulent-our-research-found-no-reason-suspect-fraud/ …

Analysis | Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to...

Bolivians will hold a new election in May — without ousted President Evo Morales.

washingtonpost.com

593

9:01 AM - Feb 27, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

248 people are talking about this

MIT researchers John Curiel and Jack R. Williams reviewed the OAS report on the election for the Washington Post and found that the “election irregularities” cited by the group were based on “problematic” statistical claims. The OAS report rested its claim on the assumption that these so-called irregularities gave Morales a boost in numbers that raised his results over 10% higher than any other candidate, precluding a runoff election.

The researchers say they requested a response from the OAS about their findings, but received no reply.

Curiel and Williams’ study was commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). The group’s co-director, Mark Weisbrot, said in a statement that the OAS has a lot of explaining to do after facilitating the coup through faulty information.

“The OAS greatly misled the media and the public about what happened in Bolivia’s elections, and helped to foster a great deal of mistrust in the electoral process and the results,” said Weisbrot.

The orgnaization’s report bolstered the accusations of fraud in the Nov. 10 OAS report that precipitated the coup and the institution of hard-right legislator Jeanine Añez as president. The ensuing unrest and threats against he and his family, as Common Dreams reported at the time, forced Morales to flee the country for Mexico.

According to Curiel and Williams, the data used by OAS doesn’t line up with the organization’s conclusion:

Our results were straightforward. There does not seem to be a statistically significant difference in the margin before and after the halt of the preliminary vote. Instead, it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round. …

There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find— the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’ margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS’ statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.

CEPR’s Weisbrot declared the researchers’ findings troubling and questioned the OAS’ credibility.

“This important analysis from MIT election researchers is the latest to show that the OAS’ statements were without basis, and that simple arithmetic shows that there is no evidence that fraud or irregularities affected the preliminary results, or the official results ? the ones that actually matter,” Weisbrot said. “The OAS needs to explain why it made these statements and why anyone should trust it when it comes to elections.”

“So much for that Bolivian election fraud,” tweeted the Intercept’s Ryan Grim.

The OAS is set to monitor new national elections in Bolivia set for May 3. Morales, still in exile, has effectively been barred from running.

Williams told Common Dreams that his and Curiel’s findings cast doubt on the organization’s impartiality and ability to act as a neutral arbiter.

“The OAS’s report has basic methodological and statistical errors that make it difficult to see the OAS as an impartial election observer,” said Williams. “The fact that they did not respond to researchers asking about their report on Bolivia seems to suggest they know this.”

National Nurses United director of communications Charles Idelson said on Twitter that the findings throw cold water on an attack line deployed by right-wing opponents of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, who have used his statement at Tuesday’s debate that the U.S. meddles in other countries against him.

“The fraudulent right wing military coup in Bolivia was carried out with Trump administration support,” said Idelson, “but some apparently still pretend the U.S. never overthrows governments of other countries.”

Curiel and Williams also point to the role in the media for uncritically regurgitating OAS claims on face value as the coup against Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS-IPSP) party was underway.

“The media has largely reported the allegations of fraud as fact,” the researchers write. “And many commentators have justified the coup as a response to electoral fraud by MAS-IPSP.”

Utah-based progressive activist Tom Taylor called for accountability on the part of the media.

“Our news outlets took what known liars like John Bolton said about Morales at face value,” said Taylor. “Zero critical thinking. The journalists were old enough to remember when we were lied into the Iraq War.”

“There’s no other way to put it,” Taylor added. “Our media supported a coup.”

https://www.salon.com/2020/01/28/why-does-trump-love-to-hang-with-bottom-feeders-crooked-lawyers-and-porn-stars/

...You take a really a deep dive into Trump's bottom-feeding world. What made you want to write a book about all of the characters in Trump World?

We felt that once we had broken the stories of Karen McDougal, who was paid off for Trump by the publisher of the National Enquirer, and then Stormy Daniels who was paid off by Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer. How did this happen? How do you have a president who has one guy paying off a porn star and another guy paying off a Playboy model? We decided to look back and see what the pattern was here, going back decades, of how Trump had people surrounding him who were just kind of willing to do his dirty work for him. That's how we came up with the idea of writing "The Fixers." It's the seamy underbelly of the Trump presidency. It's a world that most people probably don't know about, but where you have muckrakers, paparazzi, porn stars and all this, and they helped him refine the tactics that he took to The White House.

In the bigger picture, is it a coincidence Donald Trump is surrounded by all these shady characters? Or is this who he finds himself most comfortable around?

I don't think it's a coincidence because it goes back to Roy Cohn, who was his lawyer. The first fixer in our book was a mob lawyer, and he helped Trump game the political system in the '70s when he was coming up as a developer. Trump uses these types of people to do his dirty work, things that he doesn't want to do himself, and that most people, if they have good judgment, would not do so. Then you look at what has happened in the White House where he's trying to pressure Jim Comey to protect him. He wants Jeff Sessions to not recuse himself. He's a line-crosser, right? But he wants other people to cross those lines for him, so that he can try to keep his hands clean. It really does take us to where we are now with impeachment, right? Because he had Rudy Giuliani doing this for him in Ukraine. Trump obviously is at the center of impeachment, but Rudy is the fixer who did it.

It sounds like Trump is the Walter White of it all. He's pushing people to break bad and some of the bad ones are already morally ambiguous, let's be blunt. Some of them, like James Comey, he was trying to push to be bad, to be morally ambiguous, to not care about the law or ethics at all, and do what he wants.

Yeah, it was harder for him in The White House to find peace, because some of these are professional people who had careers before they ever met Donald Trump. But when he was in business he was Donald Trump, he was the Donald, he was a reality star. Michael Cohen owns taxi medallions, he's a personal injury lawyer and he comes from Long Island, so getting to work for Donald Trump was this tremendous honor for him and he would do whatever Trump wanted, and he suspended his judgment. He said that "The Art of the Deal" is the only book he's ever read twice. I mean, that's the kind of person that he was.

Let's talk more about Roy Cohn, the infamous mafia lawyer. How much do you think he's inspired Trump?

He set the model for how Trump operated throughout the decades. When somebody confronts you, you have an opponent, you just attack mercilessly, you never admit that you're wrong. You just keep saying what you want to be true, you make your own reality. I mean, these are the things that we see Donald Trump doing today. Roy Cohn was doing that for him in the '70s and the '80s. And for instance, we've heard from Michael Cohen about how Trump wanted him to exaggerate his wealth. I mean, we know Trump has exaggerated his wealth and Roy Cohn was doing that with him, with the Forbes list to try to make him seem more wealthy and important by creating the myth of Donald Trump. So that's all hearkens back to Roy.

Never admit you're wrong, declare complete victory, this is Trump. This the guy we're dealing with right now, the "perfect phone call" guy. He's the only guy in the world that scores his phone calls like they're perfect. Bill Clinton apologized after being impeached by the House. He said, "I made a mistake." Donald Trump doubles and triples down.

That's what most people don't realize. This is something that has been going on for decades and it's part of how Trump made it to the presidency by using these tactics. But then he does dispose of these people if they get in trouble. If they become no longer useful to him, then he gets rid of them. Roy Cohn got sick with AIDS and Trump became embarrassed or didn't want to deal with him. He steers cases to other lawyers instead of Cohn. Cohn was very loyal, so he didn't publicly complain about it, but privately he would say, "Donald has ice in his veins."

Trump is at Mar-a-Lago right before New Year's in 2017 and he's sitting around with a bunch of people and he's mocking Cohn. He says, "The last time Roy was here with AIDS, right before he died, then afterward I had to fumigate all the dishes and the silverware." One day Trump he can be nice and praising somebody and the next day he can be incredibly mean and cold-hearted.

Another character you focus on in the book is David Pecker. Tell us about Pecker, who had a long relationship with Donald Trump and played a role in helping Trump way before he ran for president in 2016....

an 220

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:

QS kill in sotu, but no cas --> headaches --> 50 tbi?! he said isis defunct when his kurd fail let 100's out of prison?!

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bombshell-report-finds-iraqi-officials-doubt-trumps-basis-for-escalating-to-the-brink-of-war/

no lnx

‘Bombshell’ report finds Iraqi officials doubt Trump’s basis for escalating to the brink of war

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, senior White House advisors and senior military personnel, delivers remarks during a national televised address Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, from the Cross Hall of the White House, responding to the retaliatory missile strikes against U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq on Tuesday by the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams February 7, 2020

In a “bombshell” revelation that calls into question one of the Trump administration’s stated justifications for assassinating Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani—a move that nearly sparked a region-wide military conflict—Iraqi intelligence officials told the New York Times that they believe ISIS, not an Iran-linked militia, was likely responsible for the Dec. 27 rocket attack that killed an American contractor at an airbase near Kirkuk, Iraq.

The Times reported Thursday that “Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets… saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack” was responsible.

“All the indications are that it was Daesh,” Brigadier General Ahmed Adnan, the Iraqi chief of intelligence for the federal police at the K-1 air base, told the Times, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. “We know Daesh’s movements.”

The Trump administration has not released a single piece of evidence showing that the Iraqi militia Khataib Hezbollah, which has ties to Iran, was responsible for the attack on K-1. The group has denied carrying out the attack.

The U.S. responded to the rocket attack days later with deadly airstrikes on Khataib Hezbollah targets in Iraq and Syria, setting off a dangerous escalatory spiral that brought Iran and the U.S. to the brink of war.

On Jan. 2, the U.S. assassinated Soleimani with a drone strike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump. Following the assassination, which was widely condemned as an act of war, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a statement claiming without evidence that Soleimani “orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months—including the attack on December 27th—culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel.”

But Iraqi officials told the Times that “based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place,” there is good reason to be skeptical about U.S. claims that Khataib Hezbollah was behind it.

As the Times reported:

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces…

These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.

“We as Iraqi forces cannot even come to this area unless we have a large force because it is not secure,” Brig. Gen. Adnan said of the area from which the rocket attack was launched. “How could it be that someone who doesn’t know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?”

In response to the Times report, Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, tweeted: “Al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and we went to war with Iraq. If this report is true, ISIS attacked the U.S. and we nearly went to war with Iran.”

Sina Toossi

@SinaToossi

This is huge: Iraqi military & intelligence officials say it’s highly unlikely that a rocket attack that killed an Iraqi-American contractor in early January—& led to an escalation cycle that almost started a war—was carried out by an Iran-allied militia.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/middleeast/iraq-iran-hezbollah-evidence.html …

Iraqi soldiers at the K-1 base, which was struck by rockets on Dec. 27.

Was U.S. Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran?

Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events.

nytimes.com

184

3:57 PM - Feb 6, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

119 people are talking about this

CODEPINK

@codepink

The US almost started WWIII based on questionable evidence.

After all of the violence in the Middle East following the attack on US bases, #Iraqi officials are now questioning the US's claim that the #Iran-backed militia Khataib Hezbollah are to blame. https://buff.ly/31CpWqT

Iraqi soldiers at the K-1 base, which was struck by rockets on Dec. 27.

Was U.S. Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran?

Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events.

nytimes.com

1:15 PM - Feb 6, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

44 people are talking about this

U.S. officials insisted to the Times that they have “solid evidence” showing that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, but they have not released any of this evidence to the public or to Iraqi officials.

“We have requested the American side to share with us any information, any evidence, but they have not sent us any information,” Lt. Gen. Muhammad al-Bayati, chief of staff for former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, told the Times.

Ilan Goldenberg, Middle East security director at the Center for a New American Security think tank, tweeted that the U.S. Congress “must ask questions about this and get the intel.”

Responsible Statecraft managing editor Benjamin Armbruster agreed.

“Congress needs to investigate ASAP,” Armbruster tweeted.

no lnx an 120

Reporter stumps GOP lawmaker by asking him to cite where in the US Constitution it says socialists ‘either go to prison or are shot’

Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story February 2, 2020

The Montana Republican Party is facing another scandal over the use of violence to settle political disputes.

“A Billings Republican legislator said Saturday he believes the U.S. Constitution calls for the shooting or jailing of those who identify as socialists,” the Billings Gazette reports.

At a gathering of the state party on Friday, State Rep. Rodney Garcia reportedly said the Constitution requires jailing or shooting socialists during a Q & A with former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

“You know, Montana’s a great state,” Zinke replied.

“We have to do something,” Garcia urged.

On Saturday, Garcia was asked about his remarks.

“So actually in the Constitution of the United States (if) they are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot,” Garcia claimed.

The newspaper noted, “Garcia could not to point to where in the Constitution it says socialists could be shot or jailed.”

In 2017, Greg Gianforte attacked reporter Ben Jacobs for asking a question about health care. He was caught lying to investigators, but was not arrested for obstruction of justice by Sheriff Brian Gootkin, who contributed to Gianforte’s campaign.

npr mktwatch trump guy kudlow claims tax cut paid for itself, BS goes back to RR, deficit always goes up

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/07/11/how-tax-cuts-get-paid-for/

a year and a half ago, Congress passed one of the biggest tax cuts in history. Speaking at a CNBC event this week, Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said this:

“I would argue strongly that the corporate tax cut has already been paid for and roughly two-thirds of the overall tax cut has been paid for.”

Back when the Republican tax plan was moving through Congress, proponents said it would “pay for itself.” We know it takes time for changes in the tax code to work their way through the economy, but we wanted to dig into that phrase “paid for.”

“So the thing about ‘paid for’ is that you’ve taken a verb ‘pay’ and you’ve gotten rid of all of the arguments,” said Jessica Rett, an associate professor of linguistics from UCLA. “We’re used to it in a sentence like, ‘Kai paid Jessica $10 for the beer.’ … When you say, ‘Kai paid Jessica $10 for the beer,’ you know exactly how much, and who is doing the paying, and who is receiving the paying. But if I just say, “The beer was paid for,” you just interpret the sentence as meaning, ‘OK, well, the beer was the thing that was paid for, and I’m just gonna have to assume that someone paid someone some amount,” she said.

Let’s take another look at what Larry Kudlow said:

“I would argue strongly that the corporate tax cut has already been paid for and roughly two-thirds of the overall tax cut has been paid for.”

In this case, “because there’s so many arguments missing, you’re not giving me any information about who’s paying for what. We tend to interpret it as meaning something like it’s self-funded,” Rett said.

So are these tax cuts being “paid for” like someone paying for a beer?

“These tax cuts are not being — I’m afraid to use the words now after this linguist — but they’re not being ‘paid for,'” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C. “There’s simply no evidence that the tax cut paid for itself or even paid for two-thirds of itself.”

The broader question though, is who pays for tax cuts?

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act included some provisions that lowered taxes and some that raised taxes. Gleckman said if you look at the net effect, you find that it reduced taxes by around $1.5 trillion. That means to “pay for” the tax cuts, someone has to pay the government $1.5 trillion.

“The only way you’re going to get this money, the only way you’re going to, if you will, ‘pay for’ this bill is through economic growth, which hasn’t happened, or through borrowing,” Gleckman said. “And if you borrow the money, you’ll eventually have to pay it back. And the people who are going to pay it back are going to be future generations who are going to pay higher taxes or receive fewer government benefits. That’s all there is.”

There is still a lot we do not know about the long-term impact of this tax law, but there is some historical context that’s helpful here. President Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1981, and President George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001.

“Every time, the proponents of those tax cuts argued that they would pay for themselves, and every time, the deficit went up after the tax cuts were enacted and in fact went up a lot,” Gleckman said.

So the next time you hear someone say a tax cut will “pay for itself” or that a tax cut has been “paid for,” come on back to marketplace.org and read this again.

1119 an

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: ‘I’ve been called’ to run for office — but ‘I don’t like being called a liar’

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

Huckabee Sanders may get a home in the governor's mansion, despite her well-documented lies.

fox News erroneously reported that Obama’s ‘PC meetings’ were ‘political correctness’ meetings

Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-cost-of-the-gops-degradation-could-be-the-death-of-the-party-itself/

no lnx

The cost of the GOP’s degradation could be the death of the party itself

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 6, 2019

Pollster and author Stanley Greenberg has written a book about the death of the Republican Party titled, “R.I.P. G.O.P.” Stephanie Mencimer wrote a review of it in the latest edition of the Washington Monthly. Noting that the author focused a whole chapter on J. D. Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy—which suggests that the challenges faced by people from his community were the result of “poor life choices that bore little relationship to larger economic or political forces”—Mencimer summarizes Greenberg’s point with this.

What bothers Greenberg most about Hillbilly Elegy is that many of Vance’s Republican enthusiasts (though not Vance himself) have concluded from the book that nothing can be done about the social collapse. Their takeaway, he says, is that “government activism is ineffective and counterproductive.” That crabbed view of government, Greenberg notes, has restricted Republicans’ ability to do much for the very voters who helped put Donald Trump in the White House. Once they were in charge, he notes, Republicans’ most significant policy initiative aimed at the working class was to add work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps. “Is that really all they have to offer working people?” Greenberg asks. “What an insult.”

This meager gruel is what helped fuel the blue wave election in 2018, Greenberg says. Republicans lost dramatically all across the industrial Midwest and the Rust Belt because it turned out that the non-evangelical working class “wanted more from Republicans than this anti-government trope.”

“Republicans would do well to unlearn the lessons of Hillbilly Elegy,” he concludes, if they want to remain relevant.

Mencimer is right to suggest that Republicans don’t seem interested in remaining relevant when it comes to policy. She echoes what Zach Roth suggested when he wrote that, at some point, the GOP decided that “being outnumbered didn’t have to mean losing.” Instead, they zeroed in on things like obstruction, voter suppression, and gerrymandering. More recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has demonstrated that he is content with undermining Congress while stacking the courts with extremists in an attempt to bypass the majority of voters.

But both Greenberg and Mencimer fail to address what Zak Cheney-Rice captured in an article titled, “A Non-Racist Conservative Movement Would Kill the Republican Party.” He focused on pieces from Ross Douthat and Timothy P. Carney, which articulated the same theme: “American conservatism has a racism problem,and conservatives who care must build a movement that is unwelcoming to racists.” Cheney-Rice points out the issue both Mencimer and Greenberg missed.

[I]t’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists….In any case, the GOP hasn’t been able to convince most voters that corporate welfare, reduced protections for marginalized people, and diminished health-care options for all but the most financially secure are good things on their own terms, without using racism to sweeten the deal.

It was during the Nixon administration that a massive political realignment began. The so-called “party of Lincoln” launched its Southern Strategy following the passage of civil rights laws. As Cheney-Rice noted, “The mid-century black exodus from the GOP was no fluke or paranoid manifestation. It was a response to sustained antagonism toward their rights by Republicans.”

A critical part of this movement for Republicans was to become what David Roberts called the “post-truth party.”

Republicans thus talk about “taxes” and “spending” and “regulation” in the abstract, since Americans oppose them in the abstract even as they support their specific manifestations. They talk about cutting the deficit even as they slash taxes on the rich and launch unfunded wars. They talk about free markets even as they subsidize fossil fuels. They talk about American exceptionalism even as they protect fossil-fuel incumbents and fight research and infrastructure investments.

In short, Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. They’ve realized that their rhetoric doesn’t have to bear any connection to their policy agenda.

As Cheney-Rice articulated, the success of their “post-truth politics” depended on “using racism to sweeten the deal.” Meanwhile, the Cold War provided cover for their military interventionism all around the globe.

All of that came to a screeching halt near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. The “global war on terror” had become the substitute for the Cold War and resulted in the country being mired in two wars. Post-truth politics were destroyed by the Great Recession. The country responded by electing the country’s first African American president.

As I have often stated, that was the point at which the Republican Party faced a crucial question. Should they double-down on post-truth politics or re-evaluate their agenda? In many ways, they did neither. Instead, they launched their plan to obstruct anything Obama and the Democrats tried to do andbecame the “post-policy party.” Other than continue to support tax cuts for the wealthy, they pretty much abandoned the rest of the conservative agenda and zeroed in on simply being against anything Democrats supported. They didn’t, however, abandon racism as their cover.

In order to justify their total obstruction against Obama—even during the height of the Great Recession—narratives flourished about how the president was not really American, didn’t love his country, hated white people, and was probably a secret Muslim. Right-wing media carried the ball on most of those accusations, while Republican politicians simply looked the other way. That is what made John McCain’s moment of moral clarity stand out. On the other hand, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump launched himself onto the national political stage by embracing birtherism. His eventual campaign was a hodgepodge of policy proposals, which he has mostly abandoned, while the racism remains.

As a result, the conservative agenda at this point was summarized pretty well by Cheney-Rice.

[T]he implementation of conservative policies means that migrant children are dying in cages, black voters are being purged from voter rolls by the thousands, Native lands are being plundered for oil infrastructure, and black mothers are losing their lives and babies because adequate health care is out of reach.

That is precisely why Mitch McConnell is happy to embrace the idea of being the “grim reaper.” He has no policy agenda, which is the ultimate conclusion for a party that has been built of the idea that “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.”

When it comes to the possible demise of the GOP, I don’t think that it is possible to predict what happens next because there are simply too many possibilities to consider. But it is nevertheless important to be clear about what brought us to this point. Heading towards the moment that white people become a minority in this country, the Republicans have positioned themselves such that, if they abandon racism, they have nothing.

mma 919

no lnx

Right-wing media lash out after Walmart announces newest firearm policy

Special PROGRAMS

GUNS & PUBLIC SAFETY

....

Dana Loesch

Dana-Loesch-MMFA-Tag.png

83 COMMENTS

0 SHARES

Pro-gun pundit Dana Loesch offers a “light” analogy for mass shootings: “It’s like somebody craps their pants and everyone else gets the diaper”

08/05/19 3:25 PM EDT

After losing NRA spokesperson job, Dana Loesch goes on Fox to falsely claim only 1% of Americans want stronger gun laws

06/27/19 1:09 PM EDT

NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch employs lies in expressing opposition to bill to ban people convicted of a violent hate crime from buying a gun

06/12/19 11:10 AM EDT

Defending Trump's lie about Alabama and Dorian is peak Sean Hannity

Fox News' Howard Kurtz attacks the media for covering Trump's repeated lies about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/confirmed-trump-lies-to-reporters-more-often-than-he-lies-to-any-other-group

no lnx

Confirmed: Trump lies to reporters more often than he lies to any other group

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos September 6, 2019

Press advocates scored an important legal victory this week when a U.S. District Court judge ordered the White House to reinstate media credentials to reporter Brian Karem, whose access had been stripped away by Donald Trump’s team after a dust-up during a Rose Garden ceremony in July. There, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka called Karem a “punk.” Announcing that the White House hadn’t provided Karem with due process when it stripped him of his credentials, the ruling marked the second time the White House has tried and failed to give a reporter the boot. (CNN’s Jim Acosta was the previous target.)

That’s the good news. The bad news? Karem is returning to what has largely become a useless White House beat. Permanently stuck in reactive mode as they respond to Trump’s catalog of bizarre and untrue pronouncements, journalists have largely become spectators at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What’s left for the White House press corps to do often resembles a journalistic joke. The daily press briefings have been effectively cancelled, which means White House reporters have extremely limited access to officials who are willing to answer even the simplest questions about the administration’s policies and agenda. Meanwhile, the so-called White House sprays, where reporters are marched into a room and encouraged to shout questions at Trump (who then lies about everything), are relatively pointless. And that goes for the ritual of yelling questions at Trump while he stands near the whirling blades of a Marine One helicopter on the White House grounds as well.

In both cases, Trump simply uses reporters as props so they’ll record his avalanche of lies and then air those lies on a televised loop all day. The so-calledChopper Talk sessions in particular allow Trump to simply bluster and ramble through questions that clearly stump him. And because the sessions are strangely covered as breaking news, Trump’s lies are instantly amplified by the press, often without reporters providing proper context for them. The Marine One shoutfests “are terrible for reporters,” one White House reporter recently conceded to Politico. “It is impossible to hear, have a substantive dialogue, ask a follow-up question or do any serious pressing of the president. It is a fucking circus.”

Now comes confirmation that Trump spends more time lying to reporters in those gaggle settings than he does to any other group of people that he regularly interacts with in public. And yes, there’s something deeply ironic and disturbing about the fact that Trump lies to reporters more than anyone else, yet they’re the one group that won’t accurately label him a liar. The truth is that the press has never figured out how to cover a president who’s a pathological liar, and I suspect they never will. And when I say “figured out,” I’m really saying the press has never summoned the institutional courage necessary for the task.

Tracking every lie (aka “falsehood”) that Trump told between July 8 and Aug. 18, CNN concluded that heaveraged nearly eight fabrications every day. The biggest whoppers during that period were that China is paying for the trade war tariffs (they’re not), which Trump repeated 10 times, and that Democrats want to eliminate all immigration laws concerning America’s borders (they don’t), which Trump claimed 14 different times.

What was especially telling from the CNN research was the forum where Trump told the most lies during that six-week stretch. “The top venue, with 94 false claims, was his exchanges with reporters,” CNN reported. The venue that featured the second-highest number of Trump lies was the political rallies that he holds.

Why so many lies told directly to the faces of reporters? Because Trump in recent weeks has spent lots of time talking to journalists, hosting various Chopper Talk sessions that ranged from 17 minutes to 33 minutes in duration. And when Trump talks a lot, he lies a lot—period. “There is a strong correlation between how much Trump talks and how many false claims he makes,” CNN noted diplomatically.

CNN’s findings confirm recently released research that showed Trump much prefers granting reporters “access” while questions are yelled in a chaotic setting. According to the data compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project at Towson University, the shouting sessions make up 60% of Trump’s interactions with reporters, compared to just 17% of Barack Obama’s. To date, Trump has stopped more than 80 times for Q&A shout sessions while departing from or returning to the White House aboard Marine One, or on the tarmac before getting on or off Air Force One.

The White House has pointed to these shout sessions as proof that Trump’s delivering all kinds of access. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham recently bragged that Trump is “so accessible” that she doesn’t “know what any of the press could complain about.” It turns out what they could complain about is Trump using access he grants to the press to lie to them nonstop.

The CNN confirmation of Trump lying most often to reporters arrived the same week he unveiled perhaps the most ridiculous and moronic lie of his presidency—or least of the past month. That’s when Trump’s White House took a Sharpie marker to an official government map of the projected course of Hurricane Dorian, and enlarged the path’s possible cone to include Alabama. It was a pathetic and childish attempt to bolster his earlier, reckless assertion that Alabama was ever in danger from the storm, a claim that the National Weather Service aggressively debunked.

Trump lies about everything. Always. And that’s especially true when he grants access to reporters.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/patriotism-truth-and-fascism-donald-trump-is-creating-a-subjective-reality/

no lnx

Patriotism, truth and fascism: Donald Trump is creating a subjective reality

Written byChauncey DeVega / Salon September 3, 2019

At some point in high school, Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary and communications director Stephanie Grisham must have read George Orwell’s “1984.” Instead of understanding Orwell’s book as a warning about totalitarianism, however, Grisham took it as a “how to” guide.

This is from a profile of Grisham, published last week in the Washington Post:

Does Grisham think Trump ever lies? After all, as of Aug. 5, The Washington Post Fact Checker had documented 12,019 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his presidency.

“No,” she responds without hesitation. “I don’t think they’re lies. .?.?. I think the president communicates in a way that some people, especially the media, aren’t necessarily comfortable with. A lot of times they take him so literally. I know people will roll their eyes if I say he was just kidding or was speaking in hypotheticals, but sometimes he is. What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country.”

Despite the thousands of documented lies Trump has told since becoming president, his media sycophants at Fox News and elsewhere continue to claim that he is an honest and truthful person. Because they are authoritarians who are comfortable with their leaders lying to them, Trump’s voters and other Republicans also believe that he is honest.

Grisham’s recent comments to the Post are also another example of a very dangerous overlap between Donald Trump’s subjective reality, politics and truth. When Grisham says, “What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country,” she is asserting that patriotism — always a subjective and normative quality — is a litmus test for the truth. Given his egomania and narcissism, Trump certainly agrees with her. Objective reality is to be made secondary, if not wholly replaced and usurped by, the whims of a mercurial, unstable authoritarian.

The real world is swallowed up by TrumpWorld; Trump’s critics and other detractors are then excluded from reality itself — which in turn legitimates their silencing by any means available.

In total, Trump’s lies, and the media and political machine that disseminates and sustains them, are antithetical to democracy. This is not a precondition for fascism. It is fascism in action.

Moreover, those people and organizations who aid, abet and enforce his lies are also enemies of a good and humane society. Philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of this in her 1971 essay “Lying in Politics”:

[T]he historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life …. [I]t is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.

The Washington Post’s profile of Stephanie Grisham also reveals the worldview and collective character of the Trump regime and those people willing to serve it. In Grisham’s comments about her job as press secretary and communications director there is no mention of a commitment to public service, the common good or the well-being of the American people. Loyalty to Donald Trump is all that matters.The framers of the United States Constitution rejected the divine right of kings and queens and the idea of a hereditary nobility in America. Donald Trump is the human exemplar of why the framers put safeguards in the Constitution to remove such an authoritarian.

Donald Trump’s lies are a tool. They help him to assault the rule of law, cut away at democracy, profit from corruption and greed, normalize his illegitimate regime, and stay in power by distracting the American people and the news media from his political agenda, which presents a dire threat to the existence of America’s multiracial democracy.

Donald Trump’s lies represent another type of threat as well. Philosopher Henry Giroux demonstrates in his new book “American Nightmare” how Trump and his movement imperil the American people’s relationship to history and reality:

History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for any fascist system. This is particularly true today given the deep ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply worn into Trumpism’s rhetoric of retribution, intolerance, and demonization; its mix of schlock pageantry, coercion, violence, and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism and racial agitation.

Keeping historical memory alive is a form of resistance because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to power, oneself, others, and the large community. It also functions “to give witness to the truth of the past so that the politics of today is vibrantly democratic.” Historical memory matters because it offers a form of moral witnessing, and serves as a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. The conditions leading to fascism do not exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral awakening necessary to successfully counter authoritarianism in the United States today.

What can good Americans and other people of conscience do to survive and eventually triumph over Donald Trump and his movement’s full-spectrum assault on democracy and empirical reality?

First, they must vote in overwhelming numbers for the Democratic candidate for president — whoever that may be — in 2020. Democratic voters (and liberals and progressives more generally) must reject purity tests and unite behind their party’s presidential nominee. Supporting the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump and the Republican Party must be the overriding principle in 2020. Already imperiled, the future of the United States is at literal risk if Donald Trump is re-elected.

Good Americans and other people of conscience must also make a personal moral accounting. They need to ask themselves, “What am I doing in my day-to-day life to resist Donald Trump’s fascist movement?” Yes, sustained collective action is critical if the American people are to beat back this national and global crisis. But individuals must also stop waiting for other people to save them. Personal inaction is not a viable option. Passivity is complicity.

As others have suggested, all Americans — and all people around the world who are living through this global right-wing authoritarian moment — should maintain a journal or use some other means to document how the world around them is changing. Trumpism and similar movements are assaulting the very nature of reality itself. The Age of Trump is both a moral and political crisis that gains momentum and wins final power by shattering norms and creating a type of malignant reality and state of moral inversion. By documenting these changes, individuals can stay grounded and not be swept away by the lies and corrupting influence of Trump and his movement.

The personal must be the political, if Donald Trump and his version of American fascism are to be defeated. People of conscience should cease all communications with their relatives, friends, and other people in their lives who support Donald Trump and his movement. If that is not an option they should not discuss politics with anyone who supports Donald Trump. These people are willing members of a political cult. Trumpists cannot be freed until they choose to free themselves. Good Americans and other people of conscience should instead spend their energy supporting candidates and causes who are working to remove Donald Trump from office, blunting the harm he and his movement are doing in the present, and preparing to rehabilitate American democracy once Trump and other Republicans are removed from office.

You are not crazy. Trump’s defenders and other enablers accuse his critics of suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Such accusations are acts of projection. In reality, it is Trump and his supporters and enablers who are politically deranged, wallowing in a state of moral inversion, lost to malignant reality and mass political psychosis. They are waging a war on reality and truth, here in America and around the world.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/exclusive-disinformation-is-catalyzing-the-global-spread-of-authoritarianism/

no lnx

Disinformation is catalyzing the spread of authoritarianism worldwide

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

Written by Joshua Holland August 31, 2019

There’s a segment of the American left that believes we’re in no position to be outraged over Russia’s multifaceted campaign to swing the 2016 election to Trump because the U.S. has meddled in its share of elections in other countries. Setting aside the fact that this is a prime example of thetu quoque fallacy, it ignores the specific context of that intervention. The Kremlin didn’t help elect a generic Republican who is sympathetic to their interests–they worked on behalf of a clownish and corrupt narcissist who has no clue whatsoever about how to govern and has emboldened an ethno-nationalist movement that’s ripping the country apart.

But that argument also fails to grasp that this isn’t just about us. As I wrote for The Nation in 2017, long before Trump descended on that gaudy golden escalator to announce his candidacy with a rant about Mexico sending us their rapists, Russia had honed its tactics in Estonia, followed soon after by attempts, with varying degrees of success, to disrupt the domestic politics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Bosnia and Macedonia.

While those efforts were on behalf of politicians and parties that were seen as advancing the Kremlin’s interests, and weren’t strictly ideological, in most cases they resulted in support for far-right ethno-nationalists.

More recently, Russia appears to have assisted the Yes campaign leading up to the UK’s Brexit referendum and is alleged to have offered financial and other assistance to a whole string of far-right, anti-immigrant parties across Western Europe.

But just as this isn’t about the U.S. alone, it also isn’t about Russia. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, researchers have “discovered numerous copycats, particularly on the far right. Those groups often echo Kremlin talking points, making it difficult to discern the lines between Russian propaganda, far-right disinformation and genuine political debate.”

Last month, The Washington Post reported that, “as reporters, propaganda experts, and government officials ponder where the next plot to manipulate an election using social media will emerge, one country on the map appears to be blinking red: the Philippines.”

If that comes as a surprise, consider that Filipinos spend on average 10 hours a day online, that almost everyone older than 13 uses social media, and that Facebook is accessible on smartphones without paying data charges. The Philippines is a place where troll armies duke it out across the country and where an increasingly sophisticated web of public relations firms and social media contractors is emerging.

The disinformation industry in the country got a jump start when President Rodrigo Duterte employed a so-called keyboard army of paid trolls and supportive volunteers to help pave his way to an election victory in 2016.

In Brazil, another clownish demagogue whom nobody thought would win, Jair Bolsonaro, has given his countrymen tacit permission to torch the Amazon. He, too, can probably thank disinformation campaigns on social media for his unlikely victory.

As Zack Beauchamp wrote for Vox shortly after Brazil’s election:

At the inauguration of Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters began a surprising chant. They weren’t cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms.

“Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” the crowd yelled. “WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!”

They were crediting the platforms with their man’s victory, and they aren’t entirely wrong. During the campaign, a conservative pro-business interest groupfunded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook). False and damaging information about Bolsonaro’s left-wing opponent, including fake news mocked up to look like neutral fact-checks, spread like wildfire in the runup to the October 8 vote. This deluge, according to one Brazilian expert, played a role in Bolsonaro’s victory.

The glee Bolsonaro’s supporters exhibited points to a troubling development, one familiar to many Americans: Social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies.

The reality is that the true agendas of far-right “populists” tend to be quite unpopular. Around the world, they seem to have grasped that in order to claim and then hold onto power, they have to not only demonize their political opponents, but also discredit democratic institutions–especially the independent press–and their best tool for doing so is with coordinated disinformation campaigns disseminated largely through social media.

In this, they have a structural advantage over those who remain invested in pluralistic democracy. It is anathema to most of them to fight fire with fire–to stoop to using similar tactics–and as we know, a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots.

Unless this asymmetry is addressed in some fashion–and it’s not an easy nut to crack–historians may look back at the early 21st century and conclude that this was the time when it became apparent that liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the internet and it’s free-wheeling information infrastructure.

AN 819

...He isn’t interested in having us accept that there were airports in this country 130 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, nor that a man born over two hundred years ago is currently advocating for civil rights. He’s interested in having us give up on the idea that details, accuracy, and history are of any consequence at all. For without these to check against, to hold up as a mirror, no one — least of all he — is accountable.

“His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant,” Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, says of the president, “yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions.”

Trump’s words are indeed at odds with the truth. Just as often they are at odds with meaning. Are the incoherent tangles that come out of his mouth in lieu of sentences the best he can do? I used to think so, but I’ve come to agree with writer Lindy West that this too is purposeful, that “Trump has weaponized nonsense.” By turning language into something jumbled and befuddling, he’s commandeered the very tool we use to think

...

frank Walton 819 an

At its core, Donald Trump’s love is filtered through fascism and authoritarianism. His form of tainted love rests upon moral inversion, a state of being in which truth is replaced by lies, empirical reality itself is usurped, and the evil and immoral are transformed into the good and the noble. As Hannah Arendt warned in her landmark book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

In this malignant reality, people who are in thrall to Donald Trump (or the other ignominious fascist and authoritarian leaders whom he adores and imitates) do not know what right and wrong are anymore. When these distinctions are pointed out, Trump’s supporters double down on their investment in the Great Leader and “the Movement,” focusing their rage and violence against the political truth-teller.

Donald Trump’s love is exclusive rather than inclusive, narrow rather than broad. It is focused inward on the in-group as a way of legitimating violence and meanness towards the out-group. Trump’s love is not a celebration of the best of humanity but is itself inhumane.

They have become an authoritarian cult. Maybe they already were after the days of George W. Bush and decades of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, the rest of Faux Snooze, Sinclair, Newsmax, Breitbart and RT. They don’t flinch at his crazed, inhumane, and racist actions because they support his inhumane and racist actions. They like it. They think every little time the media has a bovine birth over his latest nutball action like trying to buy Greenland like it’s on sale at Walmart is great. He’s just trolling the media, and also “pwning the libs,”, ha ha! He called the prime minister of Denmark “nasty”? Just like Meghan Markle and Elizabeth Warren? Fine. He also said London’s Mayor Saddiq Khan was a “Nasty guy” and a “total loser” but since he’s a dude, that makes it fine.

Jake Tapper laughs in Pence’s face: ‘We don’t have the cleanest air and water in the world’

Aldous Pennyfarthing / Daily Kos

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/10-incredibly-fake-facts-trump-supporters-believe-are-true/

Americans, divided and polarized as they are, live in two distinct worlds. In one world, the earth is not flat, climate change is real and Bill and Hillary aren’t pimping kids out in the basement of a pizza restaurant.

The other world is devoid of reason, evidence and pretty much any type of historical facts. Despite the fact that Trump voters have been fleeced by the biggest con man in the world, they continue to devour the lies he sells on a silver platter. When it comes to facts, Trump supporters aren’t head over heels in love with them. After all, Trump’s rise came as a result of playing to uninformed and angry people’s primal and worst sensibilities. They’re right and the entire world is wrong, because that’s what their cult leader told them, and who needs Google anyway?

Here are 10 incredibly fake facts that Trump supporters believe are true.

1. Trump is a devoted Christian.

The thrice-married, pu$$y-grabbing Trump is actually quite the exemplary Christian, at least in the minds of his supporters. They are so convinced of this fake fact that they welcomed Trump at Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University this past weekend, where the president was given an honorary doctorate.

2. The economy is improving because of Trump.

If there’s anything Trump does better than filing for Chapter 11, it’s taking credit for things other people have done. Part-time First Lady Melania Trump stole a speech from Michelle Obama, so it only seems fitting that the Donald do it as well. Now, even though he hasn’t signed a single piece of economic legislation and all economic data is just a continuation of President Obama’s efforts, Trump seems to have no issue taking credit for all of the positive economic news. And despite the fact that Trump had been in office for a whopping two weeks, Fox News gave Trump full credit for a positive jobs report in January.

3. ‘Millions voted illegally’ (without a single shred of proof).

Not too long ago, a poll found that 55 percent of Trump supporters believe his daft conspiracy theory that the only reason he lost the popular vote is because “millions voted illegally” for Hillary Clinton. Ignorance is bliss, right?

4. Immigration is off the rails and illegal immigrants are all violentcriminals.

Trump played to the racist tendencies of working-class whites when he declared that Mexicans were criminals and rapists, except for some. He also took a page from Richard Nixon’s handbook and touted law and order for the silent majority. But here’s the thing for folks who reside in Realitytown, USA: net migration from Mexico is basically zero and stats show that undocumented immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. But facts are not how you Make America Great Again!

5. Trump should have the power to overturn judicial rulings.

Utterly clueless when it comes to the U.S. Constitution (except for the Second Amendment), 51 percent of Trump supporters think the Executive Branch should have the power to overrule the Judicial Branch. This came after Trump was overruled in his efforts to impose a Muslim travel ban.

6. Trumpcare is great while Obamacare is awful.

Okay, this one is especially heinous. During Trump’s presidential campaign, he talked constantly about how easy it would be to gut Obamacare and impose a version of his own that would cover everyone. Here are the facts:

Around 24 million people will lose their health insurance—many of them his most vocal supporters
Premiums, especially for Americans 50 and older, will increase dramatically.
States can opt-out of protecting people with pre-existing conditions.
Coverage will get worse.
Medicaid will be gutted.

Trumpcare is stealing from the poor to give to the rich, but his supporters don’t mind being screwed by their dear leader.

7. Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Ah yes, the birther question. The very thing that catapulted a washed-up reality TV host to political fame and fortune. Trump had been accusing President Obama of not being born in America for years, which seems to have resonated with his supporters: 59 percent of Trump supporters didn’t think Obama was born in the United States, while just a mere 23 percent said he was.

8. There’s a war on gun owners.

Despite the fact that gun ownership ballooned under President Obama and his sensible gun legislation failed miserably in the NRA-owned Republican Congress, Trump supporters believed there was a major “war” on guns. The biggest (and stupidest) conspiracy was the one involving Jade Helm, when right-wingers thought a military exercise was actually a secret ploy by Obama to declare martial law and seize all the guns.

9. All the investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia are bogus.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that continues to pile up regarding Trump’s ties to Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, his supporters will hear nothing of it. They love Russia and think CNN and every other major news outlet is fake news that hates America. Bear in mind, all of this seems to be leading up to impeachment. But yeah, nothing to see here.

10. Trump is honest and trustworthy.

This may be the greatest fake fact of fake facts: Trump is honest and trustworthy. Despite the fact that nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is a brazen lie that can be disproved in a New York minute, his supporters think he’s honest. That’s just a special kind of ignorance you can’t fix. While some of his supporters have since seen the light of day, a majority of them still trust him despite all the explanations of his lies the media makes.

In short, it may just take Trump throwing puppies into a firepit for a majority of his supporters to recognize him for the lying con man that he is. Let’s certainly hope not, as that may not be out of the realm of possibility.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-do-we-pry-apart-the-true-and-compelling-from-the-false-and-toxic/

When false and malicious speech roils the body politic, when racism and violence surge, the right and role of freedom of speech in society comes into crisis. People rightly begin to wonder what are the limits, what should be the rules. It is a complicated issue, and resolving it requires care about the exact problems targeted and solutions proposed. Otherwise the risk to free speech is real.

Propaganda from Russian-funded troll farms (boosted by Facebook data breaches) might have contributed to the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union and aided the United States’ election of Donald Trump as president. Conspiracy theories spread by alternative news outlets or over social media sometimes lead to outbreaks of violence. Politicians exploit the mainstream news media’s commitment to balance, to covering newsworthy public statements and their need for viewers or readers by making baseless, sensational claims.

In On Liberty(1859), John Stuart Mill offers the most compelling defence of freedom of speech, conscience and autonomy ever written. Mill argues that the only reason to restrict speech is to prevent harm to others, such as with hate speech and incitement to violence. Otherwise, all speech must be protected. Even if we know a view is false, Mill says, it is wrong to suppress it. We avoid prejudice and dogmatism, and achieve understanding, through freely discussing and defending what we believe against contrary claims.

Today, a growing number of people see these views as naive. Mill’s arguments are better suited to those who still believe in the open marketplace of ideas, where free and rational debate is the best way to settle all disputes about truth and falsity. Who could possibly believe we live in such a world anymore? Instead, what we have is a Wild West of partisanship and manipulation, where social media gurus exploit research in behavioural psychology to compel users to affirm and echo absurd claims. We have a world where people live in cognitive bubbles of the like-minded and share one another’s biases and prejudices. According to this savvy view, our brave new world is too prone to propaganda and conspiracy-mongering to rely on Mill’s optimism about free speech. To do so is to risk abetting the rise of fascist and absolutist tendencies.

In his book How Fascism Works (2018), the American philosopher Jason Stanley cites the Russian television network RT, which presents all sorts of misleading and slanted views. If Mill is right, claims Stanley, then RT and such propaganda outfits ‘should be the paradigm of knowledge production’ because they force us to scrutinise their claims. But this is a reductio ad absurdum of Mill’s argument. Similarly, Alexis Papazoglou in The New Republic questions whether Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister turned Facebook’s new vice president of global affairs and communication, will be led astray by his appreciation of Mill’s On Liberty. ‘Mill seemed to believe that an open, free debate meant the truth would usually prevail, whereas under censorship, truth could end up being accidentally suppressed, along with falsehood,’ writes Papazoglou. ‘It’s a view that seems a bit archaic in the age of an online marketplace of memes and clickbait, where false stories tend to spread faster and wider than their true counterpoints.’

When important and false beliefs and theories gain traction in public conversation, Mill’s protection of speech can be frustrating. But there is nothing new about ‘fake news’, whether in Mill’s age of sensationalist newspapers or in our age of digital media. Nonetheless to seek a solution in restricting speech is foolish and counterproductive – it lends credibility to the illiberal forces you, paradoxically, seek to silence. It also betrays an elitism about engaging with those of different opinions and a cynicism about affording your fellow citizens the freedom to muddle through the morass on their own. If we want to live in a liberal democratic society, rational engagement is the only solution on offer. Rather than restricting speech, we should look to supplement Mill’s view with effective tools for dealing with bad actors and with beliefs that, although false, seem compelling to some.

Fake news and propaganda are certainly problems, as they were in Mill’s day, but the problems they raise are more serious than the falsity of their claims. After all, they are not unique in saying false things, as the latest newspaper corrections will tell you. More importantly, they involve bad actors: people and organisations who intentionally pass off false views as the truth, and hide their nature and motives. (Think Russian troll farms.) Anyone who knows that they are dealing with bad actors – people trying to mislead – ignores them, and justifiably so. It’s not worth your time to consider the claim of someone you know is trying to deceive you.

There is nothing in Mill that demands that we engage any and all false views. After all, there are too many out there and so people have to be selective. Transparency is key, helping people know with whom, or what, they are dealing. Transparency helps filter out noise and fosters accountability, so that bad actors – those who hide their identity for the purpose of misleading others – are eliminated.

Mill’s critics fail to see the truth that is mixed in with the false views that they wish to restrict, and that makes those views compelling. RT, for instance, has covered many issues, such as the US financial crisis, economic inequality and imperialism more accurately than mainstream news channels. RT also includes informed sources who are ignored by other outlets. The channel might be biased toward demeaning the US and fomenting division, but it often pursues this agenda by speaking truths that are not covered in mainstream US media. Informed news-watchers know to view RT and all news sources with skepticism, and there is no reason not to extend the same respect to the entire viewing public, unless you presume you are a better judge of what to believe than your fellow citizens.

Mill rightly thought that the typical case wasn’t one of views that are false, but views that have a mixture of true and false. It would be far more effective to try to engage with the truth in views we despise than to try to ban them for their alleged falsity. The Canadian psychologist and YouTube sensation Jordan Peterson, for example, says things that are false, misogynistic and illiberal, but one possible reason for his following is that he recognises and speaks to a deficit of meaning and values in many young men’s lives. Here, the right approach is to pry apart the true and compelling from the false and toxic, through reasoned consideration. This way, following Mill’s path, presents a better chance of winning over those who are lost to views we despise. It also helps us improve our own understanding, as Mill wisely suggests.

David V Johnson

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/conservative-jonah-goldbergs-fraudulent-claim-that-fascism-is-really-a-left-wing-phenomenon-will-not-die-more-than-a-decade-later/

Jonah Goldberg just keeps inspiring people—whether he intends to or not.

Take Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro,for example. Earlier this week, after visiting a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Bolsonaro was asked whether heagreed with comments made by his foreign minister claiming that the Nazis of Germany were “leftists.”

He did: “There is no doubt, right?” he said to reporters. He added that the appearance of theword “socialist”in the Nazis’ official party name proved it.

The museum he had just visited, however, isclear about the matter, telling visitors at its website that the German Nazi party arose out of “radical right-wing groups” in Europe.

Where would Bolsonaro get such ideas? He didn’t credit anyone, but the ultimate lineage of this idea really belongs to Goldberg. Perhaps, secondarily and more contemporarily, he’s been absorbing the derivative work of Dinesh d’Souza.

....

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-wind-turbines-cancer-2633591489.html

many lnx

Trump Falsely Claims Noise From Wind Turbines Causes Cancer

Olivia Rosane Apr. 03, 2019 12:08PM EST POPULAR

At a National Republican Congressional Committee event Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took his war on wind power to the next level.

"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 per cent in value," Trump said, as The Independent reported. "And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay? Rerrrr rerrrr!"

Watch the clip below:

The cancer claim, as Jonathan Chait pointed out in New York Magazine, is not true. There has been opposition to wind turbines on the basis of long-standing beliefs that low-frequency sound can disturb sleep, trigger anxiety and cause nausea and other health problems, The Atlantic explained. but no scientific experiments have verified these claims.

"Cancer is not caused by noises of any kind," Chait wrote.

Social media was quick to counter Trump's remarks, The Huffington Post reported. Wired columnist Maryn McKenna took the opportunity to link to a study published in March that found no connection between wind turbine noise and heart attack or stroke. Researchers had conducted the study because of claims that wind turbine noise was more annoying than noise from traffic.

During his remarks Tuesday, Trump repeated claims he has made about wind turbines before, that they reduce property values and harm birds.

"And of course, it's like a graveyard for birds," he said Tuesday, as The Washington Post reported. "If you love birds, you'd never want to walk under a windmill."

Wind turbines do kill birds, but at a much lesser rate than other forms of power. A 2009 study cited by Chait found that fossil-fuel plants killed nearly 15 times the number of birds as wind turbines. So why does Trump hate wind turbines so much?

The Washington Post's Philip Bump wrote that it dated back to Trump's fight against a wind farm that had been scheduled to go up off the coast of Aberdeenshire in Scotland, where he had bought land to start a gulf course in 2006. Trump sued to stop the farm, but was not successful. He also initiated a public relations campaign against Scottish politicians backing the project and against wind power itself, tweeting any negative coverage he could find. As part of that blitz, he did retweet a story in 2012 claiming that wind power had negative health impacts, though no such impacts have been confirmed by scientists. Tuesday likely marks the first time he has claimed wind power causes cancer, Bump said.

Chait observed that Trump is selective in his health concerns when it comes to energy.

A power source that does cause many health problems, including cancer, is coal, an extremely dirty fuel Trump loves and has attempted to bolster, with almost no success. Aside from costing more to produce than other sources of power, and in addition to enormous air pollution side effects, coal also emits greenhouse gases in large amounts. Though this, of course, is another aspect of science Trump rejects.

Bump also noted that Trump's anti-wind stance dovetailed neatly with Republican policy.

"As climate change became a sharply polarized issue, Trump was prepared for the fight thanks to his battle over that wind farm near his golf course in Scotland," Bump wrote.

===

RU w S

State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

March 19, 20191

FEATURING BRYANT WELCH - Millions of Americans have spent the last two years in a prolonged state of anxiety over the state of our nation. Donald Trump's Presidency has been

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/republicans-are-claiming-that-poverty-no-longer-exists-heres-why-thats-ridiculous/

chapman

For the longest time, one of the big talking points from Republicans was that government anti-poverty programs failed at their primary goal, merely trapping people in dependence on the government. “The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won,” said President Ronald Reagan in an address to Congress. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) took it as fact, telling a constituent in 2017, “Our poverty rates are about the same as when we started this war on poverty.”

It’s a compelling talking point — it’s just completely wrong. In the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson enacted the broad package of programs referred to as the “war on poverty,” including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal housing programs, the poverty rate stood at 19 percent. In 2017, when Ryan had that exchange, the poverty rate stood at 13.5 percent, and it has never gone above 15.2 percent at any time since Johnson’s reforms. That might even be understating things a little, because the supplemental poverty rate — a more accurate calculation of poverty that accounts for transfer payments and the cost of living — has fallen from 26 percent to 14.3 percent during the 60s, meaning we’ve cut the poverty rate almost in half.

Now, however, Republicans in the Trump White House seem to be taking the exact opposite argument as Reagan and Ryan. In their reasoning, we should cut government assistance programs because poverty has already been solved!

“President Johnson’s War on Poverty, based on 1963 standards of material hardship, is largely over and has been a success,” said this year’s report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “However, victory was not achieved by making people self-sufficient, as President Johnson envisioned, but rather through increased government transfers.” The answer, says the report, is to scale back social programs by adding increasingly restrictive work requirements to weed out people who aren’t sufficiently deserving of federal and state aid.

First of all, the claim that poverty has been eliminated is itself incredibly dubious. The Council of Economic Advisers uses something called the Full-Income Poverty Measure, which measures consumption as well as income, to show that the “real” poverty rate has actually declined from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 2.3 percent in 2017. The problem with this measure is that an ever-increasing number of households finance consumption through debt, and most people who go into debt would not consider themselves out of poverty no matter how much they are consuming. Indeed, by the White House’s measure, poverty was lower during the financial crisis and recession of 2008 than they did during the 1990s tech boom, because people consumed more!

A recent economic study at the University of Michigan found that the “consumption poverty” rate does not correlate as well with the percent of households struggling to afford food, housing, or medical care, as the traditional poverty rate does.

Second of all, the Trump administration’s conclusion doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. If anti-poverty programs have all but eliminated poverty, why would scaling back these programs benefit anyone? It is similar to the logic that parents shouldn’t have to vaccinate their kids because we have eliminated childhood epidemics.

Moreover, study after study has shown that the sort of “work requirements” Trump’s advisers are pushing do not work — some programs have seen their enrollment decline slightly after adding work requirements, but the rules don’t make people more self-sufficient and barely affect employment or household income. Part of the reason is that many people on welfare already work, they just aren’t paid enough to feed their families.

The notion that poverty has already been solved, much like the notion that racism has already been solved, makes for a great justification to allow Republicans to attack the safety net. But it isn’t true, and telling poor people they aren’t really in poverty is not a substitute for addressing social problems.

alt fact post truth:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/john-bolton-threatens-iran-over-debunked-pursuit-of-nuclear-weapons/255032/

no lnx twit

As Iranians this week mark the 40th anniversary of their country’s 1979 revolution, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton declared in a message to Iranian leaders on Monday that he doesn’t think they will “have many more anniversaries to enjoy”—a comment that was immediately perceived as a direct threat of war.

In a video posted to the White House’s official Twitter page on Monday, Bolton echoed false assertions and repeatedly debunked claims by the Trump that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and described the Iranian government as the “central banker of international terrorism.”

Responding to Bolton’s video, Sen. Chris Murphy warned in a tweet on Tuesday that Trump’s hawkish national security adviser is knowingly lying to build momentum for a U.S. military attack on Iran....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/donald-trump-is-the-perfect-republican-a-party-built-on-lies-has-found-a-liar-to-lead-them/

wow, story/inventory

It’s hard to put your finger on the foundational lie of the modern Republican Party, there are so many contenders. But I would date it back to Ronald Reagan and the lie of supply side economics. Remember that whopper? Even George Bush the First called it “voodoo economics” before he embraced it. The idea that lowering taxes would raise revenue was as close to a perfect Republican lie as there ever was. It simultaneously lined the pockets of the wealthy, “starved the beast” of government (in the immortal words of Grover Norquist), and laid the groundwork to attack the so-called “entitlements” of Social Security and Medicare as the culprits when the deficit inevitably blew up. That the arguments for lowering taxes were spurious if not entirely fact free was just icing on the cake.

The only thing Republicans have learned from Donald Trump is that they no longer have to lie strategically. They don’t need a rationale behind a lie. Trump has taught them that all lies, all the time is the way to go. They didn’t even bother trying to defend the Trump/Ryan tax cuts of 2017 with lies about increased revenues and lowered deficits. They just sat back and threw money at their rich donors and let Trump sign the tax cuts into law, and then of course immediately went after Social Security and Medicare for blowing up the deficit.

Origin

The phrase was attributed by journalist Ron Suskind to an unnamed official in the George W. Bush Administration who used it to denigrate a critic of the administration's policies as someone who based their judgements on facts.^[2] In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine, Suskind wrote:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.^[3] [SOME ^ARE ^BUILDING ^MONUMENTS, ^SOME ^ARE ^JOTTING ^DOWN ^NOTES]

^Suskind, ^Ron ⁽¹⁷ ^October ^2004). ^"Faith, ^Certainty ^and ^the ^Presidency ^of ^George ^W. ^Bush". ^The ^New ^York ^Times ^Magazine. ^ISSN ^0028-7822.

The source of the quotation was later identified as Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove,^[4] although Rove has denied saying it.^[5]

Evaluation

Though some on the left side of the United States political spectrum considered it as a badge of honor,^[2][6] the term and the piece of writing where it was revealed to the public were not perceived as significant by conservatives.^[7][8] It was given a second life by growth of the so-called post-truth political culture.^[9][10][11]

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower considered the manner in which "the senior Bush aide derisively dismissed criticism from what he called "the reality based community" as demonstration of the "arrogance that swept the Bush White House".^[12] International Relations scholar Fred Halliday wrote that the phrase reality-based community (in contrast to faith-based community) was "a term of disparagement in the Bush Administration for those who did not share their international goals and aspirations".^[2] According to liberal media critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen, "Many on the left adopted the term. 'Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community,' their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left's self-description."^[13]

References

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Poole, Steven (2007). *Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality*. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 9780802143051
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community#cite_ref-Halliday_2-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community#cite_ref-Halliday_2-2) Halliday, Fred (2010). *Shocked and Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language*. I.B.Tauris. p. 306. ISBN 978-0-85-771875-4.
:{Jump up:(style="background-color:initial;user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}::{^:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Suskind, Ron (17 October 2004). "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush". The New York Times Magazine. ISSN 0028-7822.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Engelhardt, Tom (19 June 2014). "Karl Rove Unintentionally Predicted the Current Chaos in Iraq". Mother Jones.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Schonfeld, Zach (8 September 2017). "The Curious Case of a Supposed Karl Rove Quote Used on The National's New Album 'Sleep Well Beast:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Newsweek.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Zelizer, Julian E. (2010). *The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment*. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691149011
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Limbaugh, David (2007). *Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party*. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, p. 337. ISBN 9781596980174
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Bruce Bartlett (November 26, 2012). Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong, The American Conservative.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Damon Linker (January 27, 2016). The left vs. the reality-based community, TheWeek.com.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Andersen, Kurt (September 2017). How America Lost Its Mind: The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, The Atlantic.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Pennycook, Alastair (2017). *Posthumanist Applied Linguistics*. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 9781138209244
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2008). *Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower*. New York: Basic Books, p. 137. ISBN 0465002528
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Rosen, Jay (20 December 2006). "The Retreat from Empiricism and Ron Suskind's Intellectual Scoop". The Huffington Post.

External links

"The Reality Based Community", a blog by Mark Kleiman

rare fox sanity:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fox-news-viewers-melt-down-after-shep-smith-blows-latest-hillary-conspiracy-theory

uranium one

The president of Trinity Washington University harshly criticized President Trump's aide Kellyanne Conway, who graduated from the university in 1989.

Patricia McGuire accused Conway of "facilitating the manipulation of facts" and encouraging "grave injustice" by supporting Trump's policies, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

“Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway, Trinity Class of 1989, has played a large role in facilitating the manipulation of facts and encouraging the grave injustice being perpetrated by the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants among many other issues,” McGuire wrote, according to the newspaper.

Kellyanne Conway Invents Terrorist Attack to Justify Muslim Ban

HEADLINESFEB 03, 2017

H02 kellyanne

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway is facing widespread criticism after she attempted to justify President Trump’s executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. by inventing a terrorist attack that never happened. This is Conway speaking to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

Kellyanne Conway: "I bet it’s brand-new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. Most people don’t know that, because it didn’t get covered."

The Washington Post reports there was no terrorist attack carried out in Bowling Green, Kentucky, by Iraqis or anyone else. There were two Iraqi men living in Bowling Green who were arrested in 2011 on charges of having attempted to send money and weapons to al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Washington Post also reports the Obama administration never imposed a ban on Iraqi resettlement, contrary to Conway’s claims. The Obama administration did implement a more extensive screening procedure for Iraqi refugees after the 2011 arrests.

White House Falsely Claims Iran Attacked U.S. Ship

HEADLINESFEB 03, 2017

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed Thursday that Iran attacked a U.S. naval vessel—which, if it were true, would constitute an act of war. In fact, Spicer was referring to a Houthi rebel attack against a Saudi ship off the coast of Yemen on Monday. This is Sean Spicer.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer: "I think General Flynn was really clear yesterday that Iran has violated the joint resolution, that Iran’s additional hostile actions that it took against our Navy vessel are ones that we are very clear are not going to sit by and take."

This false claim comes after National Security Adviser Michael Flynn condemned Iran’s recent ballistic missile test launch and said the U.S. was putting Iran "on notice." This morning, President Trump tweeted, "Iran is playing with fire–they don’t appreciate how 'kind' President Obama was to them. Not me!" Many experts, as well as Iran’s Foreign Ministry, say the missile test does not violate the terms of a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution. The test also does not violate the terms of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal between Iran, the U.S. and other nations. The White House is expected to impose additional sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities over the missile test.

neut dispute wiki]

"Alternative facts" is a phrase used by Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017,^[1][2][3][4] in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance at Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer "utter[ed] a provable falsehood", Conway said "Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and ... our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that."^[5][6] Todd responded by saying "Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods."

Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" to describe what are widely regarded as falsehoods was mocked on social media and sharply criticized by Dan Rather, Jill Abramson, and the Public Relations Society of America. The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian; by Thursday, January 26, 2017, sales of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased by 9,500 percent, becoming the number one best seller on Amazon.com.^[7][8]

[hide]

Background

On January 21, 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held his first press briefing. He accused the media of deliberately underestimating the size of the crowd for President Trump's inaugural ceremony and stated that the ceremony had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe."^[9] According to all available data, Spicer's allegations were false.^[10][11][12] Aerial images showed that the turnout for Trump's inauguration was lower than the turnout for the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Spicer claimed that 420,000 people rode the DC Metro on inauguration day 2017, compared to 317,000 in 2013. It is "unclear where his 420,000 figure... comes from" or what time periods he was comparing. Actual ridership figures between midnight and 11 AM were 193,000 in 2017, 317,000 in 2013.^[13][14] Full-day ridership was 570,557 in 2017, 782,000 in 2013.^[15]

During the week following Conway's comments, she discussed "alternative facts", substituting the phrases "alternative information" and "incomplete information".^[18] Two days after the Todd interview she defended Trump's travel restrictions by referring to a nonexistent "Bowling Green Massacre" and by falsely claiming that President Obama in 2011 had "banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months". Her misstatements were described as having "taken 'alternative facts' to a new level".^[19]Spicer also gave incorrect information about the use of white ground coverings during the inauguration. He stated that they were used for the first time during the Trump inauguration and were to blame for a visual effect that made the audience look smaller. The white ground coverings, however, had been used in 2013 when Obama was sworn in for the second term.^[16] Spicer took no questions from the media at the press briefing.^[9] Trump's campaign strategist and counselor, Kellyanne Conway, defended Spicer's statements, telling NBC's Chuck Todd that the press secretary, simply, was giving "alternative facts", and that Trump's crowd numbers could not be proved nor quantified.^[4][17]

The phrase "alternative facts" was noted for its similarity to a phrase used in Trump's 1987 book, Trump: The Art of the Deal.^[20][21][22] In that book, "truthful hyperbole" was described as "an innocent form of exaggeration—and... a very effective form of promotion." The book claimed that "people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular." The ghostwriter of the book, Tony Schwartz, said he coined that phrase and claimed that Trump "loved it".^[23][24]

Reaction

Spicer's press conference and Conway's follow-up comments drew quick reactions on social media. Journalist Dan Rather posted a scathing criticism of the incoming U.S. Presidential administration on his Facebook page.^[25][26] Rather wrote:

These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

When you have a spokesperson for the president of the United States wrap up a lie in the Orwellian phrase "alternative facts"...

When you have a press secretary in his first appearance before the White House reporters threaten, bully, lie, and then walk out of the briefing room without the cojones to answer a single question...^[27]

he concluded,

Facts and the truth are not partisan. They are the bedrock of our democracy. And you are either with them, with us, with our Constitution, our history, and the future of our nation, or you are against it. Everyone must answer that question.^[27]

The New York Times responded with a fact check of statements made during Spicer's press conference.^[28] This included a side by side photographic comparison of the crowds from Obama's 2009 inauguration and that of Trump.

According to The Guardian, Breitbart News defended Conway's use of "alternative facts" by arguing that it is "a harmless, and accurate, term in a legal setting, where each side of a dispute will lay out its own version of the facts for the court to decide," but noted themselves that "[a] search of several online legal dictionaries, however, did not yield any results for the term."^[29]

Journalist and former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson characterized Conway's comments about alternative facts as "Orwellian newspeak", and said "'Alternative facts' are just lies".^[30]

The Merriam-Webster dictionary website reported that lookups for the word "fact" spiked after Conway used the phrase "alternative facts".^[31] They also got involved by tweeting about it: "A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality." The tweet included a link to their article^[31] about Conway's use of the term.^[32][33][34]

Following Conway's Meet the Press interview and the viral response on social media in which "alternative facts" was compared to newspeak, a term from George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, sales of the book increased by more than 9,500 percent,^[8] rising to the number one best-selling book on Amazon.com. Media outlets ascribed the renewed interest in the novel to Conway's remarks.^{[8][35][36][37][38]} Penguin, the book's publisher, ordered a 75,000 unit reprint to meet demand.^{[39][40][37][38][41]}

On January 24, 2017, the Public Relations Society of America, a public relations trade group, put out a statement that said "Encouraging and perpetuating the use of alternative facts by a high-profile spokesperson reflects poorly on all communications professionals."^[42][43] Robert Stoker from George Washington University cautioned that the term "alternative facts" can and should be distinguished from falsehoods.^[44]

Correction by Spicer

On January 23, Spicer corrected his statements concerning the WMATA ridership levels, stating that he had been relying on statistics "given to him". He stood by his widely-disputed claim that the inauguration was the most-viewed, stating he also included online viewership in addition to in-person and television in his figures.^[45][46]

alt facts post-truth

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: ‘I’ve been called’ to run for office — but ‘I don’t like being called a liar’

Defending Trump's lie about Alabama and Dorian is peak Sean Hannity

Fox News' Howard Kurtz attacks the media for covering Trump's repeated lies about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian

Jake Tapper laughs in Pence’s face: ‘We don’t have the cleanest air and water in the world’

===

State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

Origin

Evaluation

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Contents

Background

Reaction

Correction by Spicer

References