critical thinking media lit

12/17

oops see other literacy crit think educ

no merri

see uber1

see reductionism

see CRT BS

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AN 9 25

Citing state policy on tenure, elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the cost of living, Florida faculty laid out their frustrations in a recent survey.

In a Faculty in the South survey conducted by various conferences of the American Association of University Professors, 31% of Florida respondents said they have applied for a job outside of Florida since 2023. That number was 25% among all survey respondents in the South.

The same, 31% of Florida respondents, said they plan to seek employment in another state during the next hiring cycle.

“The governor of Florida threatens at every turn to take funding away so administration at colleges don’t stand up to him or board of education. I no longer have any motivation or creativity to make courses better,” a tenured professor at a public community college wrote.

The survey focused on policy affecting employment, including whether faculty would recommend working in their state to up-and-coming academics, and trends in applications for faculty positions. It included nearly 200 responses from Florida faculty among its nearly 4,000 responses across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

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The survey concluded with an open-ended question asking faculty to provide examples of how “attacks on higher education are directly impacting your work.” It did not report respondents’ identities beyond basic demographics like gender, race, tenure status, years of experience, and type of institution they teach at.

‘Walking on egg shells’

“Students report any classroom discussion they don’t like directly to the Governor’s office. Everyone is afraid all the time,” one woman teaching at a public four-year school wrote. “I have stopped teaching books that might be in any way controversial. I don’t open up general discussion in class but ask only direct questions that will elicit non-controversial answers. I need health insurance so I can’t just quit.”

The state scanning course materials for disfavored viewpoints was a widespread stressor for many faculty.

Florida DOGE to ‘deep dive’ into state universities, ‘prune’ ‘ideological study stuff’

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“Most of the courses I’ve taught for decades now violate state and university mandates,” a man teaching at a Florida tier-one research university said.

As of earlier this year, Florida institutions’ general education courses no longer contained “indoctrinating concepts,” State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues proclaimed in January.

Florida universities have conducted a review, required by a 2022 law, of general education courses to ensure that they do not “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics.”

“I’m continually worried that the content of my clases [sic] will be flagged as “DEI” because I am a historian of the Caribbean, a region mostly populated by non-white people,” one professor said.

One women’s studies professor described the effect as “Constant anxiety, walking on egg shells trying to anticipate what would be used against me/us.”

More than a third, 34%, of Florida respondents said administrators have questioned syllabi or curricula choices for their courses. Among all states surveyed, half as many, 17%, indicated administrators questioned their curricula.

One professor said that since the state and federal government have made illegal “a wide range of Constitutionally protected components of speech and expression,” “I must break the law in order to tell the truth. Because I’m hired to tell the truth, and because I’m much more committed to the truth than to the law, I break the law. This means I am expecting to be arrested in front of a classroom any day, for actions that are illegal only as a result of the right-wing fad of the most recent decade.”

Nearly three in four, 71%, of faculty in Florida who were surveyed said they would not encourage a graduate student to seek employment in Florida.

“I am going to take early retirement despite a great job and salary. The threats are real and I am exhausted, between fighting this and fighting AI and poorly prepared, lazy, unethical students,” a tenured professor at a four-year public university wrote.

Higher education funding cuts have been the subject of nationwide political debate, including Florida State University reporting that it lost $100 million in federal grants, although $83 million of that has since been reinstated, the school’s president said last week.

About one-in-10, 11%, said they have had a federal contract ended by the Trump administration.

“The loss of vital federal grants has removed opportunities from me and my colleagues,” one professor wrote. “Attacks on LGBTQ students, immigrants, and diversity have also made it difficult to recruit promising graduate students or to guarantee their health and safety. Florida colleges being forced to remove diversity languages has destroyed years of valuable work, overturned an incredible general education curriculum, taken power and governance away from faculty, and wasted a lot of valuable time.”

Tenure troubles

Since 2023, professors in Florida with tenure have been subject to post-tenure review, graded on standards crafted by university trustees relating to research performance, teaching, service, and compliance with state laws and university policies.

Of the nearly-one-third who recently applied for an out-of-state job, tenure and DEI issues, academic freedom, the political climate, and cost of living were among the most common concerns.

Respondents said the number of applications for coworkers’ positions, as well as the quality of applicants, have decreased.

“Our department is trying to improve, but we have had several failed searches in recent years because candidates don’t want to move to Florida because of the broad political climate and the fact that tenure protections functionally no longer exist here,” a tenured public university professor said.

Some faculty said they have not experienced problems with “attacks on higher education,” one stating, “I haven’t felt any — Florida is great!.” Another said, “They’re not, and freedom in the classroom still persists, and I am at a public university in… wait for it… FLORIDA…”

“I find that I’m having to spend more time explaining to students why they need to use evidence to support their views and why clear arguments are important,” a professor at a private institution wrote.

One professor complained that “our board of trustees stacked with heritage foundation members, our president was forced out and replaced by a republican politician.” Course materials face heightened scrutiny, this professor added.

“The climate of persecution, retaliation, and ideological imposition makes it impossible to teach my discipline accurately or well without opening oneself to disciplinary measures,” that professor said. “While New College got a lot of headlines, similar invasions of public universities are happening with no national press, leaving those of us who work here isolated and vulnerable to attack.”

‘Academic freedom is on life support,’ say professors surveyed on tenure, censorship

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Gov. Ron DeSantis orchestrated a shake-up of the University of West Florida Board of Trustees in a more conservative light earlier this year and that institution is now led by a former GOP lawmaker.

Results for the survey were collected throughout August and more than 60% of respondents said they are tenured. Last year’s iteration of the survey featured responses from about 350 Florida professors.

“There is a lower threshold of critical thinking because everyone is fearful about what is ‘allowed’ vs. ‘banned’ by law. The fear and the self-censorship is widespread. Our administration, now saddled with a governor-imposed, unqualified hire as a President, is understandably more cautious rather than vocal about protecting academic freedom,” one professor wrote.

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AN 1 25

J. Dylan Sandifer is now a sociology professor at the University of the District of Columbia, but Sandifer didn't grow up in the U.S. capitol. Sandier was raised in East Texas and had a strict evangelical fundamentalist upbringing — and now rejects that ideology.

In a biting think piece published by The New Republic on January 13, Sandifer emphasizes that one of most troubling characteristics of far-right evangelical Christian fundamentalists is their disdain for "critical thinking." And that disdain, Sandifer warns, poses a threat to democracy itself.

"Growing up in the evangelical church in the piney woods of East Texas, the world felt circumscribed by an ever-present fear — not just of sin but of ideas that might challenge the worldview handed down to those of us in the pews," Sandifer explains. "Everything outside the Christian framework — including secular music, television, and books — was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex, but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas."

READ MORE:['Utterly inadequate': Conservative warns Trump 'major war' is looming — and he’s not ready

The "evangelical distrust of intellectual inquiry," Sandifer observes, "has found a powerful ally in American right-wing politics" — going back to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr.'s alliance with President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.

"The rise of Jerry Falwell Sr.'s Moral Majority and its embrace by the Reagan campaign provided organizational structure to these fears, helping translate religious anxieties about intellectual corruption into political action," the sociology professor observes. "Building on the foundation laid during the Reagan Administration, figures like Pat Robertson continued to leverage this partnership in the 1990s through organizations like the Christian Coalition of America."

Sandifer adds, "They capitalized on fears of moral decline to mobilize voters and influence policy, solidifying evangelical influence within the Republican Party."

With President-elect Donald Trump's encouragement, Sandifer warns, the "alliance between evangelical Christianity and conservative politics" has "fostered a cultural paranoia that seeks to limit the range of acceptable ideas."

READ MORE:[Revealed: Allies are grilling career intel staff to ensure total loyalty to Trump

"In an era of rising authoritarianism and deepening social division," the sociology profess writes, "our capacity to think critically about ideas rather than fear them may well determine whether democracy survives. The question isn't whether we can protect ourselves from ideas, but whether we can develop the intellectual resources to evaluate ideas thoughtfully."

READ MORE:['It is tremendous': Kremlin insiders explain how Trump is already helping advance Putin’s goals

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1 24

Over the last two decades, and in particular over the last five years, there has been a growing scientific interest in conspiracy theories and people who believe in them. Although, some may think belief in such stories is linked to intelligence, research is beginning to show that how people think could be more important.

Scientists agree that having a measure of skepticism about official accounts of events is healthy and important, but conspiracy theorising can lead to dangerous consequences for the individual and for society.

Some conspiracy theories, for example the QAnon conspiracy, can be considered a minority belief, with a 2021 YouGov poll showing that 8% of those polled in the UK endorsed this conspiracy theory. However, some beliefs are more widespread. A 2018 survey of people from around Europe found 60% of British participants endorsed at least one conspiracy theory. So, who are the people who are more susceptible to conspiracy theorising?

There is a dramatically growing body of research endeavouring to understand this question. First, let’s re-examine those assumptions about who engages with conspiracy theories.

People with high education levels, such as doctors and nurses, have been reported to propagate conspiracy theories. So it’s not just about intelligence – education won’t necessarily make you immune.

Critical thinking

Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories. The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.

One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.

Conspiracy theory belief seems to be linked to thinking style.

What you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as “I enjoy problems that require hard thinking” were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs. It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.

Similarly, a 2022 study across 45 countries used a cognitive reflection test, which measured engagement in analytical thinking in three questions. It found that participants who engaged in the labour intensive thinking style were less likely to endorse COVID 19 conspiracy theories.

Critical thinking is a valuable skill, particularly within education, and has been shown to buffer susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs. This is probably because this more arduous thinking style allows people time to identify inconsistencies in theories and look to additional resources to verify information.

Thinking style is not the same as intelligence

A 2021 meta-analysis study indicates that an intuitive thinking style is unrelated to intelligence. So, even really smart people could be susceptible to conspiracy beliefs – if they are more inclined to revert to faster, intuitive thinking styles.

Research shows that belief in conspiracy theories is predicted by cognitive biases that come from a reliance on mental shortcuts when processing information. First, conspiracy beliefs seem to be predicted by the flawed belief that big events must have big consequences.

This is known in psychology as proportionality bias. It is difficult to accept that events which have such world-changing consequences (for example, the death of a president or the COVID-19 outbreak) can really be caused by comparably “small” causes (for example, a lone gunman or a virus). This is how thinking styles reliant on gut feelings and intuition can lead people to endorse conspiracy theories.

Another example of intuitive thinking styles influencing conspiracy beliefs is the conjunction fallacy. A conjunction fallacy is the erroneous belief that the likelihood of two independent events occurring together is higher than the probability of the events occurring alone. Have a try at the Linda Problem:

*Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?

a) Linda is a bank teller.

b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The most probable is a) Linda is a bank teller as, statistically, the probably probability of one event occurring is always higher than the combination. However, research shows that higher conjunction fallacy errors are associated with stronger conspiracy beliefs. So people prone to conspiratorial thinking would be more likely to say b.

Exposure to conspiracy beliefs have also consistently been shown to increase people’s susceptibility to them, even if they don’t realise that they have had a change in belief.

It may sound concerning that anyone could be susceptible to conspiracy beliefs. However, these studies are helping researchers find interventions which can increase analytical and critical thinking styles and so buffer against susceptibility to such beliefs. A 2023 review of 25 different studies found these types of interventions were a promising tool to tackle the dangerous consequences of conspiracy beliefs.

The more we understand about the psychology behind conspiracy theories, the better equipped we are to tackle them.

Darel Cookson, Lecturer in Psychology, *Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ref

The efficacy of interventions in reducing belief in conspiracy theories: A systematic review | PLOS ONE

abstract

Conspiracy beliefs have become a topic of increasing interest among behavioural researchers. While holding conspiracy beliefs has been associated with several detrimental social, personal, and health consequences, little research has been dedicated to systematically reviewing the methods that could reduce conspiracy beliefs. We conducted a systematic review to identify and assess interventions that have sought to counter conspiracy beliefs.

Out of 25 studies (total N = 7179), we found that while the majority of interventions were ineffective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs, several interventions were particularly effective. Interventions that fostered an analytical mindset or taught critical thinking skills were found to be the most effective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs. Our findings are important as we develop future research to combat conspiracy beliefs.

...

implications for research / practice / design

This review identified a number of directions for future research. Firstly, we recommend that future studies on conspiracy belief interventions focus on using longitudinal designs. Understanding the effects of these interventions beyond their immediate changes is important in terms of identifying how effective they are at challenging conspiracy beliefs. Second, we recommend that future studies be conducted with non-western populations, with more of a focus on cross-cultural sampling. Conspiracy beliefs may often be specific to cultural context, as such we recommend that research be expanded beyond British and American samples.

In terms of practical implications for challenging conspiracy beliefs, we recommend that those with an interest in reducing the misinformation that conspiracy theories spread should do the following:

Avoid appealing to emotions and affect: Interventions that manipulated the emotional state of participants, or appealed to feelings of empathy had small effects in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs.

2.Counterarguments are not effective: Counterarguments against specific conspiracy beliefs that are given after participants have been exposed to a conspiracy theory tend not to be particularly effective.}:

Prevention is the best cure: Interventions that provided counterarguments for conspiracy theories were most effective when the counterargument came before the participants were exposed to the particular conspiracy theories that the study focused on. The findings suggest it is more difficult to challenge conspiracy beliefs once participants have started to believe in them. If participants have been taught why certain conspiracy theories are implausible before they have been exposed to conspiratorial media they are much more resistant to conspiracy beliefs.

An analytical mindset and critical thinking skills are the most effective means of challenging conspiracy beliefs: Participants who were primed to have an analytical mindset were less likely to have conspiracy beliefs than controls. Furthermore, when interventions moved beyond putting participants in an analytical mindset, and actually explicitly taught them how to evaluate conspiracy beliefs using specific critical thinking skills, they were much less likely to have conspiracy beliefs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this review sought to investigate how effective current interventions are at changing conspiracy beliefs. We found that overall, the majority of current conspiracy interventions are ineffective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs. Despite this, we have identified several promising interventions that may be fruitful to pursue in future studies. We propose that a focus on inoculation-based and critical thinking interventions will bear more promising results for future research, though further efforts are needed to reduce participant burden and more easily implement these interventions in the real world.

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an 11 22

The Arizona Republican Party’s nominee for governor, **Kari Lake**, is telling supporters there’s no reason for schools to spend so much time teaching science, math, and history. If elected she would recreate public schools into factories producing young adults who can immediately enter the workforce without the benefit of understanding basic information necessary in a democratic society. In North Carolina, the dominionist Lt. Governor wants to ban the teaching of science and history in elementary schools. And a **Fox News** host this week claimed that social studies – classes that teach history, culture, geography, political science, philosophy, and psychology – is a fake subject, “made up by progressives.”

That Fox News host is **Pete Hegseth**, who Donald Trump, when he was president, wanted to nominate to head the Veterans Administration. Hegseth may be best-known, however, for once bragging on Fox News that he hadn’t washed his hands in over a decade.

“Germs are not a real thing,” Hegseth said. “I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.”

“Everything about the confines of my classroom was created by progressives 100 years ago,” Hegseth told a live audience this week. “You mentioned the rows. You mentioned that approach – the bell ringing.God being removed of course, lunch breaks, lunch breaks, different subjects, Social Studies.”

That’s when Hegseth got agitated.

“The idea we’re not going to study civics, history, philosophy, theology, we’re going to create psychology and social studies and split it all up as if we can dissect human nature and through ascientific method which they’ve invented.”.

“That’s right, create more perfectible human beings by controlling how they think and what they think, all created by progressives.”

Hegseth thinks taxpayer-funded public schools should teach everything through the “lens” of God, or, more specifically, his God

“Did you take social studies? I took social studies. The progressives made it up it – it’s, it’s a made-up conglomerate of subjects meant to silo the way that we think as opposed to basing all of wisdom in God’s wisdom, in His word, and it all makes sense, looking at it through that lens.”

[twt]

social Studies, of course, includes civics and history, and philosophy. In fact, the National Council for the Social Studies offers a definition for social studies:

“Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities topromote civic competence,” which Hegseth appears to object to.

“Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences.”

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”

Hegseth is not alone in wanting to reduce what children learn.

Republican Kari Lake, Arizona’s GOP nominee for governor and a former TV news reporter whose entire education was in public schools, now thinks school children don’t need to learn as much as they are currently when it comes to science, math, and history.

“I believe we are at a prime opportunity to completely re-envision how our government schools are run, because everyone’s eyes are open,” Lake told supporters at an event while campaigning with far-right white Christian nationalist U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

“And who says we have to have this many hours of science, this many of math and history? We can change that up,” said Lake about an entire state’s public school system that already has been “ranked worst across the 50 United States of America,” according to a report in Arizona’s KGUN 9 News.

“What does it mean to have a high school diploma? It should mean that you know some of the basics, and you also have some ability to go out and make a living. Our schools have our kids for 13 years from K through 12 and at the end of 13 years, we should have some competent adults going into the world who can make a living because there are jobs out there.”

[twt vid patriot takes]

notice how Lake doesn’t say, “public schools,” but“government schools,” a term many on the right use to demonize public schools, expanding their belief that anything the government does is wrong, bad, or a waste of tax dollars.

Lake also sounds like she’s suggesting high school graduates are not able to get jobs because they have spent too much time learning about science, math, and history.

Then there’s far right Christian dominionist Republican Lt. Governor of North Carolina **Mark Robinson**, who is another extremist attacking education.

Robinson made national headlines after calling LGBTQ people “filth.”

In August MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones wrote that Robinson “may well be the most bigoted official in the United States with the least name recognition.”

Calling him “a full-on extremist,” Jones writes that Robinson And “reportedly has a new, ludicrous belief to share with the masses: Science and history shouldn’t be taught to students until they reach sixth grade.”

“First through fifth grades ‘don’t need to be teaching social studies,’ he wrote, according to local NBC affiliate WRAL-TV, which obtained an advanced copy of his upcoming book,” Jones adds, reporting that Robinson wrote: “We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.”

There’s more to Robinson’s extremist ideas on education.

Get rid of it. Or, specifically, Jones writes, Robinson has ” called for the elimination of the state’s board of education.”

“Robinson said flatly what most fact-averse conservatives won’t admit about their education crusade,” Jones continues. “They fear accurate history lessons that could inevitably lead to discussions about systemic disparities. And they fear discussions about science, which may undermine the fundamentalist Christian beliefs at the heart of the conservative movement.”

Jones sums up this entire approach to public education from the right.

“Robinson’s reported ideas about education showcase the logical endpoint of the Republican Party’s assault on lessons about social inequality: an eagerness to keep children stupid.”

From Bill Rieken to Everyone:

The February 2022 issue of Scientific American has a paper on how to teach students to evaluate the news stories they read so they won't be fooled by propaganda. In today's profit-driven media industry there is a need for media literacy education more than ever. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford University researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schoolkids-are-falling-victim-to-disinformation-and-conspiracy-fantasies/?fbclid=IwAR2WmWLgrZJXLlA-xIzpySf_Biz70PHwN7pI_d01cPvwUeQpPCmgXgPYrgM

...middle school outside of Seattle last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children insisted that these conspiracy fantasies were true. Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the issue. “Most high schools probably do some teaching to prevent plagiarism, but I think that’s about it.”

Children, it turns out, are ripe targets for fake news. Age 14 is when kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas, according to a study published in September 2021 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Many teens also have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford University researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story. The researchers also found that less than 20 percent of high schoolers seriously questioned spurious claims in social media, such as a Facebook post that said images of strange-looking flowers, supposedly near the site of a nuclear power plant accident in Japan, proved that dangerous radiation levels persisted in the area. When college students in the survey looked at a Twitter post touting a poll favoring gun control, more than two thirds failed to note that the liberal antigun groups behind the poll could have influenced the data.

Disinformation campaigns often directly go after young users, steering them toward misleading content. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which offers personalized suggestions about what users should watch next, is skewed to recommend videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what the viewer started with. For instance, when researchers searched for videos using the phrase “lunar eclipse,” they were steered to a video suggesting that Earth is flat.YouTube is one of the most popular social media site among teens: After Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, spent time searching for videos on YouTube and observed what the algorithm told her to watch next, she suggested that it was “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”....

Some programs, such as Schneider’s Stony Brook program and the nonprofit, Washington, D.C.–based News Literacy Project,teach students to discern the quality of the information in part by learning how responsible journalism works. They study how journalists pursue news, how to distinguish between different kinds of information and how to judge evidence behind reported stories. The goal, Schneider wrote in a 2007 article for Nieman Reports, is to shape students into “consumers who could differentiate between raw, unmediated information coursing through the Internet and independent, verified journalism.”

Yet some media literacy scholars doubt the efficacy of these approaches. Hobbs, for instance, wrote a 2010 paper arguing that these methods glorify journalism, ignore its many problems and do little to instill critical thinking skills. “All that focus on the ideals of journalism is mere propaganda if it is blind to the realities of contemporary journalism, where partisan politics and smear fests are the surest way to build audiences,” she stated.

Other approaches teach students methods for evaluating the credibility of news and information sources, in part by determining the goals and incentives of those sources. They teach students to ask: Who created the content and why? And what do other sources say? But these methods are relatively new and have not been widely studied....

Kathleen Hall Jamieson has a good "how to debunk COVID misinformation" that can be generalized to fake news. She builds a list of trusted websites that she can use to refute false claims.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-debunk-misinformation-about-covid-vaccines-and-masks/

...quipped with a few tools, we can each become part of a larger misinformation-fighting system—as I like to call it, a science defense system. To see the power of such a role, consider the limitations of the first line of defense against online deception: the willingness of platforms to block it. Even when this happens, there is a lag between the appearance of harmful content, its detection and its removal. Take the 26-minute viral video “Plandemic” that appeared online last May. Despite efforts by the major platforms to remove it, within weeks that video managed to reach millions with dangerously false claims (example: certain flu vaccines contain the coronavirus, and wearing a mask activates it). Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, when one platform bans a piece of content, the purveyors of deception simply repost it on another one or share it in invitation-only corners of a platform or in private groups. Last March even as Facebook was clamping down on misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID, a Politico report on thousands of posts found that the supposedly interdicted content was still on the platform, surviving and spreading harm.

Fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org (which I co-founded in 2003) provide a second barrier in the science defense system. Facebook surfaces the work of many of these groups when a user searches for content that has been flagged for containing misinformation. In a 2015 study, Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga, both then at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found that this kind of corrective juxtapositioning can reduce users’ misperceptions. Later, in a 2018 study, Bode and Vraga found that corrections offered by someone’s contacts on a simulated social media platform also reduced misperceptions. That conclusion led them to recommend that when it comes to emerging health issues, knowledgeable people online should employ material from appropriate health sources to “refute false or misleading health information clearly, simply, and with evidence.” A team of medical doctors at CriticaScience is pioneering this form of online engagement. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, my FactCheck.org colleagues and I are seeking to develop new ways to arm the public against COVID-related deception.

When misinformation circumvents blocking, fact-checking and response by online interlocutors—as it too often does—the last line of defense is real-world relationships: family, friends and office buddies. Enlisting in a science defense system requires a commitment to make health-promoting practices the norm in one’s community, a willingness to bookmark and turn to public health and fact-checking sites for knowledge about COVID and vaccination, a few premises about the nature and limits of scientific claims, a set of realistic goals, and a strategy for depoliticizing the science if the situation requires it.

Every layer in the model—blocking on platforms, fact-checking, online engagement and creation of a science-friendly community—has limitations. Each additional layer of defense, however, slows the advance of deceptions that, to appropriate a truism, will otherwise get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And in the case of COVID-19, there are at least two areas where the benefits are so great that they are worthy of concentrated attention: masking and vaccination....

As psychological reactance theory predicts, injunctions are more likely to elicit counterargument than acceptance; as the proverb tells us, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. An effective science defender will listen to a person’s reasons for not masking or vaccinating and share counterevidence without questioning their competence, good will or intelligence.

“The Battle Between The Masked And The Masked-Nots Unveils Political Rifts,” an NPR headline noted last May. Because mask avoidance has for some become a sign of commitment to conservative politics, the artful science advocate will marshal instances in which those of like ideological bent have championed the behavior, as former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did in 2020 and as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie did in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, explaining how getting infected with COVID-19 led him to conclude, as the headline said, “I Should Have Worn a Mask.” Conversion narratives like Christie’s or, on the vaccination front, like that of physician Eugenia South (“I’m a Black doctor who didn’t trust the Covid vaccine. Here’s what changed my mind”) can be powerful. My co-authors and I saw that power in action in our study of how people reacted to environmental activist Mark Lynas’s explanation of why he once opposed but now favors genetically modified crops. The people exposed to his conversion account were significantly more likely to change their attitudes about genetically modified crops than those who were presented only with his arguments about their benefits.

5 CONSIDER BEFORE YOU “LIKE”

When we click a “like” button on social media, we signal that the content is both acceptable and accepted. By sharing, we invest it with our credibility. Not only do the thumbs-up icon and the retweet symbol serve as signals of community approval, but they also invite our friends to join us in reinforcing the sentiments of our in-group. This process of signaling agreement is agnostic about whether it is used to spread science or viral deception (VD).

In a fashion analogous to that of the original VD, venereal disease, viral deception is contagious and socially transmitted. So, as the editors of Scientific American recommended in September 2019, “Before you click ‘like,’ hit ‘pause.’ ” If the message is VD, quarantine it. If the science comes from a reliable source and is consistent with what you see on the Web sites of the CDC or the National Institutes of Health, give it a boost by clicking “send,” “like” and “share....

like color-blind is crypto racism, crt is crypto crit think?

wow literally strict fr

an 11 21

after Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's gubernatorial race Tuesday, the GOP appears eager to take his bigotry-infused "education" strategy nationwide. "The Republican swings in Virginia and New Jersey show the efficacy of a new model of conservative politics: appealing to suburban voters by promising greater parental control of schools," the Washington Post reports Thursday morning. It's a clever strategy.

If the public knew what the GOP demands actually were — banning classic books like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" or "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood — most parents would not be on board. Few people want to be a Nazi book burner! But the GOP is repackaging this deeply fascist love of censorship in a friendlier frame of "parental rights." They got lucky that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, blundered in the campaign's closing weeks when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," instead of mounting a robust defense of free speech and teaching the truth about slavery and segregation in history classes.

So what, exactly, are kids learning?

Republicans use scare terms like "critical race theory," and liberals try to draw attention to the lists of books Republicans are trying to ban, mainly for suggesting racism is bad or that LGBTQ people exist. It's extremely important for the left to focus on how this supposed fight over "education" is really a proxy fight over the right's rejection of equality for LGBTQ people and people of color.

But there's another aspect to this fight that has been less discussed: How the GOP war on schools is instigated, organized, and funded by right-wing religious groups whose true agenda is opposing the rights of children.

Conservatives, especially the Christian right, have long taken a dim view of raising kids who can think for themselves. Their view is children should be "trained" to be obedient and submissive. Under the guise of "parents' rights," the Christian right is mainstreaming their hostility to the very idea that children have a right to an education. In this case, the right of a child to have a proper education that teaches critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.

As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her recent deep dive into the history of corporal punishment in evangelical circles, the movement of "biblical parenting" started in 1970, when Christian right activist James Dobson published his book "Dare to Discipline," which advanced a belief in "the enforced submission of children to absolute authority." Soon there was a cottage industry of similar books, all of which promoted "the complete subjection of the child's will," usually through relentlessly beating kids (which is minimized through the cutesy word "spanking"). Children, in the Christian right view, are not to be educated — they are to be "trained." This philosophy of child-rearing was accompanied by a movement to impose their anti-child ideology on society and government. Unfortunately, this particular political goal of the Christian right gets far less coverage than their war on reproductive rights, their anti-LGBTQ activism, or their white supremacy. This lack of attention may, in fact, be a reason they've been wildly successful. As Lavin notes, hitting children "is outlawed completely in63 countries," but "legal in all fifty states." Laws allowing parents to take kids out of school to be "home schooled" are notoriously lax, and there's been a great deal of headway in redirecting kids out of schools and into religious "charter schools" that embrace the training-not-education approach. Donald Trump's Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, a far-right fundamentalist who has spent decades trying to destroy the public education system. It's why the U.S. is the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It should be unsurprising, then, that the religious right groups who have long opposed children's rights are behind this newly sprung nationwide attack on public schools.

Religious right stalwarts like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation have been central to planning and unhatching this scheme to use the scare term "critical race theory" to stir up outrage at schools for teaching the truth about racism in history and literature classes. Also central to the effort, as reported by NBC News, is the International Organization for the Family, which has, like the Family Research Council, been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Under its original name, the World Congress of Families, the International Organization for the Family promoted not just a deeply authoritarian and patriarchal view of the family, but also white nationalism. As explained at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Through its ideology of the so-called "natural family," WCF promotes a strict view of family, one based exclusively on the marriage of one heterosexual man to one heterosexual woman and their biological children, to the exclusion of many different types of families. Closely tied to this ideology is an adherence to strict binary gender roles, in which men serve as the heads of households and women as their helpmates and the bearer of children. Only this type of family, they contend, can quell the "demographic winter," the idea that European populations, especially, are in decline because of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, women in the workplace, and a variety of other things that deviate from the "natural family."

There's no way to really untangle all these different far-right views from each other. Forcing children into submission and preventing them from developing critical thinking skills is seen as crucial for raising them to be compliant adults who will unquestioningly adopt this patriarchal and racist view of family formation and purpose. One can see why schools teaching the book "Beloved" was flagged by far-right activists as a threat. Not only does the book humanize the victims of white supremacy, it also raises important questions about the rights of children and the meaning of self-determination. Indeed, even the concept of "raising questions" alarms the Christian right. In their view, children are not to think for themselves but to passively accept the instructions of elders.

Unfortunately, one reason the Christian right has a lot of success smuggling their radical views into mainstream politics is they, as happened in Virginia, often reframe it as a matter of "parental rights."

Most parents reject the religious right's extremist views on extinguishing a child's autonomy, to be clear. But most parents believe that they should have some control over their child's life, including over their education, health care, and disciplinary matters. They aren't even really wrong about this. Children's rights are always in contention with the need to keep children safe and to socialize them properly. Knowing the exact right mix of autonomy and discipline is a nuanced and tough question. The problem, however, is the reframing this as a matter of "parents' rights" distracts from the real issue, which is the war being waged on children'srights.

Children have a right to learn the truth about American history and to learn critical thinking skills. Children have a right to be exposed to great works of literature and art, and to expand their horizons. Children have a right to a robust health education, which includes information about sexuality and sexual orientation so that they can grow into healthy adults, instead of being hobbled with shame for having normal human impulses. All this chitter-chatter about "parents' rights" — by design — is hiding the fact that many of these rights of children are under very real threat right now

Failure to understand the deeply radical nature of the Christian right ideology fueling this school board movement leaves Democrats unequipped to fight back. We saw this with the McAuliffe campaign, which fumbled early on with the "parents' rights" framing, and only too late in the campaign realized they could reframe the matter — correctly, mind you — as a deeply racist attempt to censor books. Democrats need to highlight how profoundly anti-child the GOP attack on school boards is and defend both the right of children to learn and the right of educators to teach.

Most people don't want kids to grow up without learning to think for themselves. Democrats can win this fight — but first, they must understand what they're truly up against.

bsf:

I attended a panel on information literacy at the Young Rhetoricians Conference this week and learned about an evaluating sources approach that is rooted in social justice (a more equitable alternative to CRAAP and SIFT). It's called ACT UP and was developed by Dawn Stahura at Salem State. Here's a link if you want to learn more! The librarians who gave the presentation requested that we acknowledge Dawn Stahura if we use any part of her excellent work.

Texas’ divisive bill restricting how students learn about current events, history, and racism passed by Senate

Kate McGee The Texas Tribune

May 22, 2021

After hours of passionate debate about how Texas teachers can instruct school children about America's history of subjugating people of color, the state Senate early Saturday morning advanced a new version of a

// antifa concept?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/republicans-fact-free/

The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, has lately been making a fetish of something called "critical race theory" (CRT). This has prompted academics to defend it. It's not a radical political ideology, they say. It's merely a form of critical inquiry. It is not the boogeyman it's being made out to be. There's nothing to fear.

I understand the need to defend critical race theory. Colleges and universities are beset on one hand by Republican fascists accusing scholars of indoctrinating students, on the other by anti-left liberals accusing the same of hostility toward freedom of speech. Meanwhile, administrations act more like corporations that privilege efficiency over research and teaching. It's enough to think CRT is an appropriate hill to die on.

This, however, overlooks the larger dynamic at work. The more you defend CRT as an ideologically neutral mode of seeing and thinking about the world, the more the propagandists are going to do what they do best, which is terrifying the ignorant. More importantly, CRT defenders are not seeing the true nature of their opponents. From the authoritarian perspective, modes of seeing and thinking about the world are never ideologically neutral because once you learn to see and think about the world on your own, you don't need authoritarian leaders to tell you what to see and think.

I risk making them seem like cartoons. I risk making people who treasure "traditional" and "conservative" and "Judeo-Christian" values look like they yippy-skippied over the Enlightenment on their way from the Spanish Inquisition to the 21st-century America. But it's worth the risk given that most respectable white people, in my opinion, tend to overestimate the societal effects of liberal arts education. Critical thinking is so uncontroversial among respectable white people as to be barely worth mentioning. The authoritarians, however, see it quite clearly for what it is—an existential threat.

This is why the particulars of critical race theory don't matter.1 (You don't care about the particulars when you're fighting for survival!) This is also why explaining those particulars to people who seem to fear them won't change their minds if you don't also take into account that explaining the particulars of critical race theory can itself be seen as intolerable aggression. What most of them fear is loss of social control. What most fear is loss of authority. Where you see an individual merely muddling through life the best she can, coming to the best conclusions she can, most of them see an individual whose ideological aggression is so monstrous as to justify any response.

Respectable white people look at the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, and marvel at the fact that Americans consuming its propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. I think what they misunderstand is lying isn't a bug. It's a feature. Facts are available to individuals to see and think about on their own, free and independent of authorities licensed to say what individuals see and think. Facts, therefore, are aligned politically with perceived enemies. A rationalresponse to facts is nonstop lying. So "alternate facts" are not a result of authoritarian politics. They are a first principle.

Critical race theory is not a political ideology, but it may as well be to the world of the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale. It might as well be because anything that teaches individuals to see and think about facts independent and free of groupthink compromises the integrity of the authoritarian's grip on the group. Case in point is Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Republican believes the former president tried bringing down the republic. She is factually correct. For the "crime" of seeing and thinking about the world on her own, she's now being punished. The House Republicans are poised to purge her from the House conference leadership.The Republicans are not individualists. They are collectivists enforcing groupthink.

Respectable white people marvel at the fact that Americans consuming right-wing propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. As a consequence, they do not take it seriously. People who insist on inhabiting a fact-free world are not just ignorant—not when democracy depends on the ability of individuals to associate and organize themselves for the purpose of self-rule. When huge numbers of people inhabit a fact-free world, and collectivist leaders police the integrity of that groupthink, they threaten not only democracy's ability to function minimally, but its survival. Liz Cheney is now being reassimilated into the collective. Democracy itself faces the very same fate. Do not marvel at these people and their fact-free world. Regard them as the danger they are.

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Laura Ingraham mocks young climate activists

On the April 22 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham focused her monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. Her final point was targeted at young activists who are calling for urgent and bold action -- and she took specific aim at Greta Thunberg and a Mexican climate justice activist named Xiye Bastida.

Ingraham suggested that today’s youths are being “indoctrinated intocritical climate theory just like critical race theory.” Not to be outdone by Carlson, Ingraham introduced the clip of Bastida talking about the role of justice in developing climate solutions like this: “What happens when you mix open-borders madness, critical race theory, and climate paranoia all together in one big bowl? You get this." vid]

ingraham’s callous attacks on climate and youth activists are not new. She received significant blowback in 2019 for comments she made about Thunberg and in 2018 for mocking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.

The biggest problem with Fox’s “War on Earth Day'' is that it is not limited to once a year. Daily Fox assaults erode public acceptance of climate science and the need for urgent and bold action on climate change. Far from being a news outlet, the outlet is a key cog in the right-wing disinformation machine and climate obstruction is one of its main goals. mma 521

aha, critical thinking is systems thinking, ~ nihilism or authoritarian, which is radically reductionist: aha: 2 sep big pict analysis see gt recession as root; (also effect); inequality

see salon, wa mo connects dots

aha critical thinking is systems thinking, it is the antidote to nihilism and authoritarianism, which is radically reductionist

aha: someone said alt right is search for uncastrated father; jordan p gives rules; muslim kids in french ghettos get radicalized, so do cuck in parent's basements who can't be pick up artists and wohl of wall street. [matrix 4 guy does sys analysis:darwin/ invis hand meritocrisy leaves losers to blame themselves, not structural forces.

520 aha; strange how much grift around god, guns, patriotism, televangelist, NRA, hype/ fear good for fundraising cf direct mail funding fr vigurie

aha: fraud often targets older ppl who might be less web savvy, but it's also easier to scare them; conservatives in general are easier to trigge re threat; if in an info silo/bubble easier to scare and harder for them to get better/~ info

think piece

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gop-history/

...A few minutes later, President and First Lady Biden arrived at the rotunda to pay their respects. MSNBC and CNN were there. OnFox, Laura Ingraham briefly acknowledged the Bidens' presencebut spent most of her airtime not honoring the slain policeman but trashing Dr. Anthony Fauci and beginning a story about homicides in Chicago with the phrase, "The BLM-fueled crime wave…" Black Lives Matter, you see, is just one more manifestation of the imaginary socialist plot to take over America. No wonder their viewers think the world's aflame, a cynical awful place where progressives plotting evil lurk at every corner pizzeria.

By the way, Officer Sicknick, a 12-year veteran of the force, was a Trump voter in 2016, although *The Washington Post* reports, "Those who encountered Sicknick said his political views did not align neatly with one political party." He was against impeachment but supported gun control.

There hasn't been an official explanation yet as to exactly how Sicknick died but he was attacked and killed while resisting the crazed crowd brainwashed by Trump

...Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to buy into the GOP's big con because, you know, unity. Every time truths are spoken that Republicans don't like, they claim that it's for sure dividing the country further.

So brazen are the attempts at manipulation of truth whether present or past, that in the last months of his term, President Trump and his sycophantic crew appointed a Presidential Advisory 1776 Committee, charged with creating "a definitive chronicle of the American founding." The report partly was a response to The New York Times' award-winning 1619 Project, charting the history of slavery in the United States and our continuing record of racial discrimination.

With little regard for the facts and not a single professional historian on the panel (but with plenty of conservative activists and educators), and with time quickly running out for the Trump White House, it was decided to release their findings on the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, months before the report was supposed to be completed and just two days before the Biden inauguration—timing that was either a stroke of haste, pure ignorance or malign spite—you make the call.

In any case, much of what the commission had to say was lost in the shuffle of last-minute Trump pardons and inauguration news but as per Sarah Ruiz-Grossman at The Huffington Post:

The 45-page report reads in places like a right-wing manifesto: It makes excuses for slavery and the Three-fifths Compromise that declared slaves counted as less than full humans. It decries socialism and "identity politics," celebrates the right to bear arms and calls the anti-abortion movement one of the nation's "great reforms…"

"The Trump commission's report also rails against socialism as leading people down a "dangerous path" of wealth redistribution and cites '"anti-Communism" and "the Pro-Life Movement"— or anti-abortion movement — as some of the "great reforms" of the country's history."

The report compares progressivism to fascism, seeking to "centralize power under the management of so-called experts." There are twice as many references to Christianity as of racism, no footnotes or citations, and not a single mention of Indigenous people, especially not the notion that upon our arrival, ninety percent of them quickly were wiped out by disease, murder, forced relocation, and other assorted territorial encroachments.

Many wondered what President Biden would do with the report. It didn't take long to find out. Within minutes of his swearing-in, an executive order wiped out the 1776 Committee. And shortly after, all evidence of its existence, including the panel's preposterous report, was removed from the White House website.

Via his Department of Education, the new president should lead an effort figuring out how to restore civics classes and revive the history curriculum that once taught young Americans how to be thoughtful, participating citizens by learning their past. This also should help them develop the kind of critical thinking that, when presented with the facts, responds with skepticism and debate but not in the belief of every crackpot version of reality that beckons to them from their televisions, radios and laptops. As we've seen, such an alternative truth—the real fake news as it were—can only lead to the violent end of American democracy.

For a party that used to preach responsibility and reason, the Republicans have devolved into an asylum for the proponents and hangers on of screwball revisionism fraudulent theories and the vicious overthrow of government. Don't know much about history but I do know that if the GOP have their way there will be little room for rational solutions that can help us...

HNN

...Trump's speech at his recent White House Conference on American History slandered both history teachers and historians whose writings foregrounded the role of racial and class conflict in American history. Without evidence, he accused teachers of promoting a "twisted web of lies in our schools," indoctrinating their students in a version of our nation's history that led them to hate America. This was, he claimed "a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words." Referring to the mostly non-violent nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against racist police violence as "left-wing mobs" fomenting "violence and anarchy," Trump again without evidence charged that this "left wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left wing indoctrination in our schools." The first source of this alleged indoctrination named by Trump was the late Howard Zinn, author of the best-selling APeople's History of the United States (1980), whom he depicts not as a historian but as a propagandist: " Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history."

This presidential tirade against history teachers and Howard Zinn demonstrates Trump's ignorance of both. American history teachers in our nation's schools do not indoctrinate their students; they educate them via state mandated curricula and textbooks that are at least as respectful of the Founders of our republic as any mainstream politician, and promote democratic citizenship not mob violence. Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is a work of history not propaganda. Zinn's book does stress the role of racial and class conflict and militarism in the American past, and so is considered too radical to be adopted as an official textbook by most school districts.

Trump gets the reality of school history education completely backwards. Far from being radical or so provocative as to seed leftist mob violence, most history instruction is actually too conservative, so lacking in controversy that it too often leaves students bored. This is why innovative teachers bring Zinn's work into schools, aiming not to indoctrinate but to engage students in authentic historical thought via debates contrasting select chapters from Zinn's iconoclastic history with their official, conventional US history textbooks. There are in Howard Zinn's papers at NYU hundreds of letters from high school students and teachers attesting that history came to life in their classrooms when they used the competing interpretations offered by Zinn and their textbooks to argue about Columbus' bravery as an explorer vs. the brutality of his conquests, Andrew Jackson's democratic politics vs. his responsibility for the Trail of Tears, whether the Mexican American war was an unjust US war of aggression, whether the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end World War II, and other important, thought provoking debates about American history.

Trump's charge that Zinn makes students feel "ashamed" of their history is false. Zinn had no interest in fostering shame, but rather wrote his People's Historyto promote critical thinking, especially about class, racial, and gender inequality and war-making in America. Zinn sought to arouse in his readers a quality Trump is famed for lacking, empathy, for the oppressed. Or as Zinn put it, "in a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners." Zinn so admired people's protest movements in their struggles for a more just and democratic America that his People's History valorized those movements. In fact, the book offered dramatic accounts of Americans resisting oppression, a narrative that was at times inspiring, promoting not shame but pride in this ongoing and unfinished struggle for social justice.

It is absurd to think that the president read Zinn's 688 page People's History before knocking it or that he would do so now to see how wrong he is about Zinn. But he could get to know Zinn better without reading a thing.

Zinn's People's History inspired theater events and then a movie, The People Speak, in which famed actors such as Danny Glover, Marissa Tomei, Viggo Mortensen and many others read the words of great American dissenters, from Frederick Douglass to Emma Goldman, to Martin Luther King, Jr. This movie, when aired on the History Channel, attracted some nine million viewers, leaving reviewers impressed with the eloquence of America's radical social activists. Those speeches, and the protest music sung by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, and John Legend fostered greater understanding of the role of dissent in the American past. Had this movie been screened at the White House Conference on American History, Trump's talk about Zinn making students feel ashamed of their history would have been refuted right before his eyes.

Like Howard Zinn, the best history teachers recognize that if students are to be prepared for democratic citizenship, they must learn to think critically about the world, and confront the reality that, as James Baldwin put it, "American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." Serious study of our nation's past involves understanding not only America's inspiring democratic ideals but its failures to live up to them, and studying the historical struggles on behalf of those ideals. This kind of a critical reckoning with historical reality is far more accurate, humane, and truer to our democratic faith than the flag waving, propagandistic version of the American past touted at the White House Conference on American history.

Robert Cohen is a professor of social studies education and history at NYU, author of Howard Zinn's Southern Diary: Civil Rights, Sit-Ins, and Black Women's Student Activism, and coauthor with Sonia Murrow of Rethinking America's Past: Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond (in press).

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/howard-zinn-trump/

https://mediamanipulation.org/

via terry

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/liberal-journalism-faces-an-uphill-visibility-battle-as-gop-backs-more-propaganda-outlets/

A new report highlights the decline in liberal journalism outlets over the last 15 years with more than 25% of America's newspaper publications and news communities slowly becoming "news deserts" amid the rise of right-wing publications.

A report titled, "The Expanding News Desert," released by the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media which revealed statistics about the decline in publications and the disappearance of nearly half of the journalists in the United States. According to the report, thousands of communities are now being described as "news deserts" as paid politically-charged journalism attempts to take centerstage.

Another issue that contributes to the war on journalism is the fast-paced production of algorithmically generated content. In 2019, the Lansing State Journal became aware of a website called, The Lansing Sun. At first glance, the website looked like a typical news outlet, but a closer look revealed that the site was, in fact, part of a network of sites baring only the appearance of an actual community news outlet.

Additional reports expounded on Columbia University's Tow Center's reporting of "at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories."

By August of 2019, the network of pseudo news outlets had expanded to more than 1,200 websites. In fact, The New York Times recently revealed a former journalist by the name of Brian Timpone was behind the rise of the "pay-for-play" network which fuels the spread of right-wing propaganda.

"Employees at the Illinois Opportunity Project, a conservative advocacy group, requested dozens of articles about specific Republican politicians in Illinois. The group has paid $441,000 to Mr. Timpone's companies, according to the nonprofit's tax records." - The New York Times

According to one report, the ongoing scheme further perpetuates the war on "the entire concept of media literacy."

"The scheme takes advantage of how profit-chasing has blown up the entire concept of 'media literacy.' When your local paper's website is as larded up with spammy-looking ad crud as an illegal Monday Night Football stream, these spare sites cannot possibly look any less 'real.' And as newspapers die and people get more and more of their news from social media, fewer people recognize which news 'brands' are supposed to be 'trustworthy.'

As these types of platforms continue to rise, American journalism is at stake.

===

****

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/red-pills-and-radicalization-heres-how-conspiracism-is-overwhelming-us/

america is drowning in conspiracy theories: QAnon cultists are taking over the Republican Party, the occupant of the Oval Office praises them in press conferences, rational COVID-19 pandemic measures are met with armed protests and raging open defiance, and Proud Boys and militiamen are bringing violence to liberal cities while armed vigilantes riled up about nonexistent “antifa arsonists” harass strangers and journalists in fire-stricken rural areas.

So I wrote a book about it. More importantly, it’s a book intended not just to document and explain the phenomenon, but to also be a guide for finding our way out of the morass. It’s titled Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us, out this week from Prometheus Books. Here’s an excerpt.

[The following excerpt is from Chapter Seven, “Chaos By Design,” which describes how and why people are effectively radicalized online by conspiracism and its attendant disinformation. It seemed especially appropriate for the current moment.]

It may be the most notorious Google search in history: “black on white crime.” That was the search that sent Dylann Roof down the path that led him to murder nine black parishioners inside a Charleston, South Carolina, church one evening in June 2015. he described this path in a post on the white supremacist website he had created.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there.From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

Roof actually has provided a kind of map of radicalization online. As information scientist Michael Caulfield explains, this whole process is actually produced by a kind ofself-contained data spiral that’s based to a large extent on “curation”—that is, the way we collect web materials into our own spaces and annotate them. That curation creates a data feedback for the algorithm that then directly affects what you see. Curations, he warns, can warp reality because of the resulting feedback loop: they “don’t protect us from opposing views, but often bring us to more radical views.”

Caulfield observes that “black on white crime” is a data void—that is, it’s not a term used by social scientists or reputable news organizations, “which is why the white nationalist site Council of Conservative Citizens came up in those results.That site has since gone away, but what it was was a running catalog of cases where black men had murdered (usually) white women. In other words, it’s yet another curation, even more radical and toxic than the one that got you there. And then the process begins again.”

Noble explains that the framing a person brings to his or her Internet experience shapes what kinds of results they see on a search engine, or a video recommendation, or a social media news feed. “In the case of Dylann Roof’s alleged Google searches,” she writes, “his very framing of the problems of race relations in the U.S. through an inquiry such as ‘black on white crime’ reveals how search results belie any ability to intercede in the framing of a question itself. In this case, answers from conservative organizations and cloaked websites that present news from a right-wing, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish perspective are nothing more than propaganda to foment racial hatred.”

The key to this process of radicalization is its incremental nature: people undergoing it don’t recognize what is happening to them, since each step feels normal initially. This is in fact precisely by design by the organizations and ideologues who are trying to recruit people into their conspiracy theories, which are ultimately about belief systems and political movements.

A onetime “red-pilled” conspiracy theorist named Matt described how he became trapped in a curated spiral like this for Kelly Weill ofThe Daily Beast. It began when he innocently watched a video of Bill Maher and Ben Affleck discussing Islam, and at its completion, thealgorithm recommended several much more extreme videosattacking Islam, including some produced by Infowars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. One video led to the next and the next.

“Delve into [Watson’s] channel and start finding his anti-immigration stuff which often in turn leads people to become more sympathetic to ethno-nationalist politics,” Matt said. “This sort of indirectly sent me down a path to moving way more to the right politically as it led me to discover other people with similar far-right views.”

Now twenty, Matt has since exited the ideology and built an anonymous Internet presence where he argues with his ex-brethren on the right.

“I think YouTube certainly played a role in my shift to the right because through the recommendations I got,” he said, “it led me to discover other content that was very much right of center, and this only got progressively worse over time, leading me to discover more sinister content.”

“The thing to remember about this algorithmic–human grooming hybrid is that the gradualness of it—the step-by-step nature of it—is a feature for the groomers, not a bug,” says Caulfield. “I imagine if the first page Roof had encountered on the CCC page had sported a Nazi flag and a big banner saying ‘Kill All Jews,’ he’d have hit the back button, and maybe the world might be different. (Maybe.) But the curation/search spiral brings you to that point step by step. In the center of the spiral you probably still have enough good sense to not read stuff by Nazis, at least knowingly. By the time you get to the edges, not so much.”

Peter Neumann, of the U.K.’s Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, identifies six steps on the ladder of extremist belief. “The first two of these processes deal with the consequences of being exposed to extremist content,” he writes. “No single item of extremist propaganda is guaranteed to transform people into terrorists. Rather, in most cases, online radicalization results from individuals being immersed in extremist content for extended periods of time, the amplified effects of graphic images and video, and the resulting emotional desensitization.”

Beheading videos, photos of corpses, suicides, and mass murders, all these things are part of these first two steps in the immersion process. Neumann calls this mortality salience—material intended to create an overpowering sense of one’s own vulnerability to death, as well as to heighten the viewer’s moral outrage.

The next two steps are also key to the process—namely, immersion in extremist forums, where deviant and extremist views are normalized, and online disinhibition, wherein people lose their normal inhibitions about violence because of their relative anonymity online. “Some of the participants get so worked up that they declare themselves ready to be terrorists,” notes psychologist Marc Sageman. “Since this process takes place at home, often in the parental home, it facilitates the emergence of homegrown radicalization, worldwide.”

The final stages occur when online role-playing occurs—the kind in which new recruits more or less practice their ideology in gaming situations, often in the context ofmodern video games. The participants project themselves into their gaming avatars, giving themselves traits that they usually do not possess in real life. After a while, this divide becomes noticeable and drives further radicalization: “[A]fter recognizing the gap between their avatar’s mobilization and their own physical mobilization, many online participants begin taking steps to reconcile the gap,” observe researchers Jaret Brachmann and Alex Levine. This is when they take the last step: using the Internet to connect directly to terrorist infrastructures that then begin to mobilize them.

Caulfield believes one of the keys to preventing this kind of radicalization lies in establishing “digital literacy” programs wherein young people new to the Internet can learn how to confront, cope with, and overcome the challenges they will be forced to navigate there. And it all begins with the curation process, how we accumulate the materials for our personal spaces.

“So, the idea here is that you might start in a relatively benign space with some kind of ideological meaning, and then someone uses this term ‘black on white crime,’” Caulfield says. “It’s probably a stretch to call the Google search results a curation, but you can think of it along the same lines. You put in a term, and Google is going to show you the most relevant, not necessarily the best, but the most relevant results for that term.And now you have a set of things that are in front of you. Now, on each of those pages, because you picked ‘black on white crime,’ if you click into that page that has ‘black on white crime,’ there are going to be other phrases on there.”

Even people with normal levels of skepticism can find themselves drawn inside. “So you go, and you do the Google search, and you’re like, ‘You know what? I can’t trust this page. I’m going to be a good info-literacy person, and what I’m going to do is, I’m going to just check that these crimes really happened.’ OK, so what do you do? You pull these crimes and what you find is that these crimes did happen, and the pages they’re going to are more white supremacists talking about how these are actually black on white hate crimes. And now they’re mentioning more things, and they’re mentioning more terms, and they’re mentioning changes in law that now make it easier for black people to kill white people.

“So you’re like ‘Oh, well, I’ve got to Google this change in the law.’ But who’s talking about this thing that’s broadly made up, or it’s a heavy misinterpretation of something? Well, again it’s white … So you keep going deeper and deeper, and every time you’re pulling out something to investigate on that page, it’s pulling you into another site, and that other site of course is covering a bunch of other events and terms and so forth. And you end up going deeper and deeper into it.”

Caulfield argues that educators need to help their students develop better informational literacy, including learning how to recognize when they are being recruited into a radical belief system or cult or are being manipulated for either financial or political motivations.

“My contention is that the students are practicing info-literacy as they’ve learned it,” he says. “And as a matter of fact, this approach to researching online is what they have learned from a fairly early age in terms of how to approach sources and information on the web.

“I think a lot of academics and teachers would say, ‘but that’s not what we’re teaching,’” he adds. “Let’s just put that whole argument aside because it doesn’t matter. Whatever we’re teaching, these are the lessons they take away from it. So they are practicing info-literacy as learned, and through either chance or through engineering or through fate, whatever it is, these techniques plug really well into radicalization.”

Sometimes the people who fall down the rabbit holes and are recruited into communities organized around conspiracy theories would have ended up in a similar situation regardless. But people are also being actively recruited for a combination of political, ideological, and financial/economic motivations. And they are being actively deceived.

“We are all targets of disinformation, meant to erode our trust in democracy and divide us,” warns University of Washington information scientist Kate Starbird.

She came to this stark conclusion while conducting a study at the University of Washington involving the evolution of the discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement on social media—and found herself walking into the unexpected realization, supported both by data and a raft of real-world evidence, that the whole discussion was being manipulated, and not for the better. The more the team examined the evidence, the clearer it became that this manipulation was intended to fuel internal social strife among the American public.

The study quickly morphed into a scientific examination of disinformation—that is, information that’s intended to confuse and distort, whether accurate or not—which exists on all sides of the political spectrum. One of their key studies focused on Twitter to see how bad information immediately follows major crisis-type events such as mass shootings and how those rumors “muddy the waters” around the event, even for people who were physically present, and in particular how such rumors can permanently alter the public’s perception of the event itself and its causes.

Consider exhibit A: the nearly instantaneous claims by Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists that the Las Vegas mass shooting of October 1, 2017, was a false flag event and the ensuing swirl of confusion around it, which eventually permanently obscured the public’s understanding that the man who perpetrated it was unhinged and at least partially motivated by far-right conspiracy theories about guns. Police investigators avoided the evidence that this had been the case as well.

The chief reason we perceive stories, whether real or not, as “true” depends in large part on our unconscious cognitive biases, Starbird says—that is, when our preexisting beliefs are confirmed along the way. We’ve seen how these biases can be targeted by technology companies. Well-equipped political organizations can manipulate disinformation in much the same way.

“If it makes you feel outraged against the other side, probably someone is manipulating you,” she warns.

The main wellspring of the disinformation Starbird dealt with in her study was Russia and its “troll farms” that introduced industrial-strength data pollution into the American discourse via social media during the 2016 election campaign and afterward. However, she says that the disinformation can be, and often is, run by anyone sophisticated enough to understand its essential principles. These include white nationalists, a number of conspiracy-oriented campaigns involving vaccines and other health-related conspiracies, and in recent years, QAnon.

The strategy, she says, is not just consistent, but frighteningly sophisticated and nuanced. “One of these goals is to ‘sow division,’ to put pressure on the fault lines in our society,” she explained in her findings. “A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. . . . Russian agents did not create political division in the United States, but they were working to encourage it.”

These outside organizational entities make full use of a preexisting media ecosystem featuring “news” outlets that claim to be “fair” and “independent,” but which are in fact only propaganda organizations, nearly all of them right-wing. As Starbird explained in one of her studies:

This alternative media ecosystem has challenged the traditional authority of journalists, both directly and indirectly. . . . Its development has been accompanied by a decreased reliance on and an increased distrust of mainstream media, with the latter partially motivated by a perception of widespread ethical violations and corruption [METOO?] within mainstream media. . . . Indeed, many view these alternative news sites as more authentic and truthful than mainstream media, and these effects are compounding—as research has found that exposure to online media correlates with distrust of mainstream media.

False information renders democratic discourse, which relies on factual accuracy, impossible, and as Starbird notes, “with the loss of commonly-held standards regarding information mediation and theabsence of easily decipherable credibility cues, this ecosystem has become vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and propaganda.”

Because it’s actually a fairly closed, self-contained, and narrow ecosystem, it becomes a real echo chamber, with stories being repeated among the various “independent” news sites, even if they seem not to show up on the major networks (Fox being the most common exception). After a while, the repetition acts as a kind of confirmation for the stories—if people keep seeing different versions of the same headlines, they’ll start thinking the information has been confirmed by a “variety” of sources.

“The tactics of disinformation can be used by anyone,” Starbird says. “The Internet seems to facilitate access towards targets of different kinds, and we are definitely seeing disinformation from multiple sets of actors, including from the U.S., including foreign actors and domestic actors as well. There’s a certain flavor of Russian disinformation that is perhaps different from some others, but the tactics are known and they are easily learned and portable.”

Unwinding the relationship between authoritarian governments like Russia—which has been promoting far-right political movements around the world, particularly in Europe—and white nationalists trying to “red-pill” vulnerable young people is complicated. “There are some movements, particularly these far-right movements, whose disinformation aligns neatly with Russian disinformation as well,” Starbird observes.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The current manifestation of the far right or alt-right or whatever we want to call it, the information systems and some of the mechanisms for information flow all seem to have Russian disinformation integrated into them. It’s hard to know what’s cause and what’s effect, but they seem to be intertwined. In a similar way, we can see far left ecosystems around things like Syria and Venezuela are integrated with Russian disinformation as well… . We don’t know how causal that is versus opportunistic.”

trms

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/too-much-right-sees-conservative-base-marks-n1237637

the conservative group called We Build the Wall presented donors with a relatively straightforward idea: it would collect private donations and use the money to build barriers along the U.S./Mexico border. On the surface, the pitch was effective: the outfit raised $25 million for the venture, and donors were assured that every penny would go toward wall construction.

nicholas 2010 update bk

2/3 kids prefer social interaction online vs f2f

The Shallows

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-august-10-2020/

sean parker admit addiction engr in from git?

affects us even when we don't use (we think about use or try to suppress use)

~ crit think: req slow thinking thru a larger context

rn: info --> __ -->intell --> wisdom

// slot machine, unpred reward

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370598

2010

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption -- and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Chronic Distraction

Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate....

recent 720 medium art'l on info overload related?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/experts-explain-the-**4-main-psychological-factors-that-drive-trumps-rabid-fan-base/**

no lnx

a looming question in today’s political climate is: Why do Donald Trump’s devotees continue to support him despite the carnage of his well-documented failures? Although we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that is surging and not contained, Trump seems to maintain a base support of 35% to 40%. What are the psychological factors that influence or underpin his supporters’ attraction to him? And might this provide some perspective on how to change these supporters’ minds?

Multiple psychological factors seem to influence and explain his supporters. We have divided these factors into four major categories: Rebelliousness and Chaos; Shared Irrationality; Fear; and Safety and Order.

Rebelliousness and Chaos [DISRUPTOR? BROWNSHIRTS HOODLUMS?]

Some Trump supporters have a strong desire for rebelliousness and chaos, and view Trump as the perfect vehicle for achieving their personal goals. These supporters tend to become “anti-establishment and anti-government,” even when it is against their best interest. Many are unhappy with their station in life and believe chaos in the political system will bring them important gains. They seek immediate and sweeping changes and believe a rebellious attitude and rebellious behavior are what is necessary. They would rather have chaos, even dangerously or regressively so, than the status quo.

These supporters believe in Trump’s professed anger and rebelliousness, while often ignoring the content of the issues at hand. Trump’s talk of“draining the swamp” [SHORTHAND FOR DESTROY DC POWER PPL? NEWT CALLED DISEASE?] and of eschewing “political correctness” is attractive to them. They react emotionally and irrationally in embracing Trump’s decisions to create chaos, such as by sending federal troops into American cities to provoke hostile conflict with protestors. They enjoy and thrive upon Trump disavowing norms, rules, and laws. Rebelliousness and chaos can be a major psychological influence, but it can have serious negative consequences such as undermining the chance for real change.

Shared Irrationality

The Dunning-Kruger effect. Some people are under-informed and misinformed and are completely unaware of their lack of information. They tend to overestimate their level of knowledge and hold onto that position. They develop “illusory superiority” from their inability to recognize their true lack of knowledge. In other words, some people think they know more than they do and hold firmly to their opinions. These people are resistant to change their political thinking because they believe they are the knowledgeable ones. Trump and some of his supporters have this psychological phenomenon in common; they are unable to remedy their own limitations of knowledge and their inaccurate thinking.[QANON?]

Magical thinking.This is the belief that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can bring about effects in the world. Or, similarly, that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can cause something to happen. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s internal, personal experience and the external physical world. This often emerges from an inability to distinguish fully between emotions and logical thoughts. Relying totally on emotion or “gut reactions” results in magical thinking. Trump engages in magical thinking almost constantly. This is especially dangerous regarding the pandemic: “It will disappear very quickly,” “We have it under control,” “We may have some embers or some ashes…” Many supporters engage in magical thinking and are encouraged and validated by Trump, leading them to align strongly with him.

Obsession with celebrity. Some people are obsessed with celebrities and reality television. Trump entertains them and amuses them. Some supporters are always waiting to see what outrageous thing he says or does next. These supporters are happy as long as they are being entertained by him. They act as if life is a “game” or a “show” that is somehow disconnected from the difficult realities of everyday life, but it is not.

Shared omnipotence. This is a fantasy based in childhood experiences during our earliest years–due to our complete dependency upon parenting persons–that if one can find the “right” leader, then everyone can live harmoniously together forever. While this dynamic is often seen in romantic relationships, especially during the early infatuation period, this exact same dynamic can be seen in political relationships as well. In this case, some people believe that Trump is the “right” leader who can take them to a place of harmony and never-ending happiness and success. This is an infantile fantasy that is unrealistic and unachievable because it is not rooted in the real world of adult life. Even so, a childhood fantasy can be intense and not easily given up.

Fear

Brain reactivity to threats. Research shows that some people have an exaggerated fear response to threats. When presented with specific perceived threats–immigrants, democrats, protestors, socialism–conservatives’ brains light up in activity and experience a need to seek safety. Trump actively encourages his supporters to experience exaggerated fear responses, such that their brains remain energized.

Fear mongering. Terror management theory explains why fear mongering works. When people are reminded of their mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they reflexively defend those who share their world view and their natural and ethnic identity. Tribal identification is an outgrowth of fear mongering. Racism and bigotry are related to fear. Trump appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists and murderers.” This fear mongering by Trump is aimed at supporters who are vulnerable to racist and bigoted thinking because it fits with their world view. Another major fear among Trump supporters is falling behind financially and losing the economic capacity to control their lives and protect themselves. A third major fear among Trump supporters is of socialism and believing that capitalism is being threatened and even destroyed. Trump is very adept at focusing on these specific fears among his supporters, using key words and names to trigger and stoke their emotional concerns NEWT]. Trump supporters believe that he is capable of protecting them from their fears. And when they feel protected, they overlook his offensive and outlandish behavior.

Conspiracy theories. Certain people are attracted to conspiracy theories because of their vulnerable personalities and even by mental illness. Life is complex and perplexing and at times dangerous. It is not simple or safe. Research shows that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. A conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem much more straightforward and controllable. Fantasies that remove fear and doubt can be especially attractive, even if they are unrealistic and irrational. People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of critical thinking. Trump has voiced many conspiracy theories: Spygate, Obamagate, Deep state, Trump Tower wiretapping, and others.

Security and Order

Social dominance orientation. People who score high on social dominance orientation prefer an established societal hierarchy. They are attracted to Trump because he promotes and normalizes the belief that high-status people and groups should be dominant over low-status people and groups. Trump’s clear distinction between groups on top of society (Whites) and those “losers” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks, and Latinos) is a classic social dominance view. Individuals who are high on social dominance orientation are typically domineering, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. As such, these individuals have an attraction to authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism. Several traits characterize authoritarianism: deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups, a hierarchical view of the world, and the belief that the world is dangerous and threatening. Some people believe in having an authoritarian leader because they feel protected and safe by a strong, powerful presence. Trump’s authoritarian leanings are highly attractive to these supporters. Interestingly, research studies have shown the joint power of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation to predict far-right-wing voting in the United States and Europe.

How To Change Supporters’ Minds

cdv

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/matrix-4-writer-breaks-down-the-clash-between-trumps-right-wing-revolution-and-the-democrats-wishful-thinking/

Matrix 4’ writer breaks down the clash between Trump’s right-wing revolution and the Democrats’ ‘wishful thinking’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 3, 2020

The American people are in pain. There have been days of protest and civil unrest in many American cities following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day.

This article was originally published at Salon

These convulsions in the American body politic are not just the result of one more murder of an unarmed, surrendered black man by a white cop, televised before the world like a New Age lynching. America’s problems are vast.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people in the United States, with the total number of cases now approaching 2 million. Donald Trump and his administration have responded with malevolent indifference. These deaths are but another entry in a social Darwinist ledger where the “useless eaters” are being left to die for “capitalism” — and in service to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Now the American people are struggling through a second Great Depression, in which tens of millions cannot pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families. Republicans have only offered a pittance for ordinary people amid this global economic disaster — a onetime payment of $1,200 — while giving big corporations and the richest citizens trillions of dollars of the American people’s money.

Overall, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong in this country and this society, which elevated a racial authoritarian demagogue and avatar of corruption to the presidency. Many Americans feel ashamed by how their country now appears before the world. There is great potential for positive change in America, but to this point no great hero or leader has emerged. That vacuum is what makes Trump’s power so great. Even though he lacks a great mass movement after the model of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, he commands cult-like followers who will carry out his every wish.

Trump is an authoritarian and neofascist, who only knows how to destroy and not create. He is not a unifier but a divider. Like other leaders of that ilk, Trump uses violence, chaos and pain as a primary means of expanding and securing power.

For Trump and the Republican Party, America’s pain is a target of opportunity for their gangster capitalist agenda.

Trump has used “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violent threats by his followers and enforcers against prominent Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has also targeted nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and “liberals” in general with violent threats.

Trump has made reference to “Second Amendment solutions” as a way of inspiring right-wing militias and other paramilitaries to attack his perceived enemies. As seen with his recent declaration of “MAGA Night,” Trump would like to mobilizes white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists as his street hooligan enforcers.

Trump has urged his armed followers to threaten or perhaps overturn the governments of Democratic-led states and cities if they do not bow to his will by ending public health measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. To some extent, they have been successful: The Michigan state legislature was recently forced into recess by such threats of violence.

This week, Trump has threatened to invoke a 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act to crush the protests and civil unrest which has burst forth in response to the killing of George Floyd. This is one more step in Trump’s effort to create an autocratic pseudo-democracy where he rules indefinitely. Martial law would be the most efficient way for Donald Trump to use a “state of emergency” — his personal Reichstag-fire moment — as a way to end America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy, just as surely as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his on the throat of George Floyd.

In a recent article for the Intercept, Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon — also the co-writer of the forthcoming “Matrix” sequel — warns that the United States is careening towards ethnic violence, civil war and self-destruction under Donald Trump. The “most important and troubling symptom,” he writes, is the rising atmosphere of conflict “meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization.” Hemon continues:

As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful. …

For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.

When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.

In our recent conversation, Hemon warned that Donald Trump and the far right are engaged in revolutionary politics where compromise is not possible because they are preparing for armed conflict, while Joe Biden and the Democrats are only worried about the normative strategy and tactics of electoral democracy. Hemon also described Trump as leading a death cult organized around white supremacy and the related existential insecurities of the white men who are attracted to such politics. Like other death cults, Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die in his name, believing it will lead to personal rebirth and glory.

Hemon also shared details on a proposed project he developed with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell in 2017, about a United States ruined by Trump-like demagogues, civil war, environmental disasters and — believe it or not — a pandemic. As usual, our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So many people are in a state of terror and fear right now. From my perspective they should have been afraid at least four years ago in response to Trump. Why were so many people in denial about the dire dangers of Donald Trump and what he represents? Why are they so late in realizing the reality of the situation? It was all so obvious.

The fight is not over. This moment with Trump, the other members of the global right-wing and the virus is going to have consequences across many areas of our lives. We are struggling just to stay alive right now. There are going to be severe consequences from all the forces coming together that no one can quite predict.

The virus allows Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians to accelerate a total reconfiguration of their respective societies. Such leaders are not fighting the virus so much as they are fighting to radically change society to serve their far-right agenda. That goal and agenda is not always visible to many people.

Donald Trump keeps saying that he is a “war president.” That claim is being misinterpreted by most observers in the mainstream news media. What Trump really means is that he is an authoritarian and the rule of law does not apply to him. Trump is able to hide his true intent because hefloods the zone with chaos, distractions and lies. In most important ways, Donald Trump is open about his plans.

This is part of a strategy. The global right and its leaders want to make everything meaningless. They want people to “fish in murky waters,” as the saying goes back in my home of Yugoslavia. One headline by itself would stand out and the public would understand the danger. People either understand the entirety and wholeness of this dangerous situation or they choose not to. If the public cannot see the big picture, they will also not be able to see how the smaller parts fit together as a whole. It all seems like one isolated series of events after another. For those who cannot see the big picture, it is a maelstrom and they lack perspective to make sense of it all.

Another element of Trump’s authoritarianism — and this is why the mainstream media is still unable to effectively grapple with this crisis — are the threats against reporters and journalists, where he calls them “fake news” and “human scum”. Journalists have also been attacked and killed in America under Trump.

There is an inability to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe. Before the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, the catastrophe of war was so huge that people were too fearful to imagine what was happening because that would have meant — as turned out to be the case — that their entire way of life, the very structure of life, would be destroyed. If the people in Bosnia or the former Yugoslavia were then to have acknowledged or understood the magnitude of the catastrophe it would have meant making choices about changing their lives. This would have helped them to keep their agency. But too many of them waited, therefore losing their agency, and the catastrophe of the civil war and ethnic cleansing made the decision for them.//AGW

This is a frightening proposition to a lot of people. That meant, in case of their war, they would have to get up and leave their lives and not take much for themselves. And so one finds oneself in a situation where you see that there is a catastrophe unfolding and say, “But what am I going to do now?”

Difficult decisions must be made. And it’s terrible. It is a horrible proposition. People start negotiating with reality to avoid the catastrophe and the real possibility of death. In this country at present that looks like, “Maybe it’s not that bad? Maybe Biden is going to fix it? Maybe somehow Trump is going to turn presidential all of a sudden? Maybe the Republicans actually do love this country? Maybe I should wait to see what happens, and decide in a month?”

With Trumpism the news media has to change the entire way in which they interpret and engage with reality. The American news media, for the most part, cannot do it. They cannot make that pivot. The rules are different with an authoritarian such as Donald Trump.

At the same time, the advantage of Trump and his movement is that they do not care about reality or the truth. They are a death cult. They are not afraid to die. The Trumpists and Republicans are excited and motivated by the possibility of remaking reality itself, because they are in revolutionary mode. The Democrats and everyone else are, by comparison, trying to find a magical way to retain the status quo. Which, even if the status quo was somehow good enough, is now impossible to salvage. The American right’s, and the global right’s, revolutionary process is far too advanced at this point.

What guidance would you give the average person about maintaining perspective and reorienting themselves to this new reality?

People are struggling with the logistics of life, just staying on the surface and not drowning. Given the circumstances with the economy and the state of the world I would not blame anyone for that. But there has been this longstanding notion that America is a stable society. It is a country with its own deep tradition of checks and balances. In America, however deep the social injustice and inequality, the future was something that could be reasonably anticipated. Even if things were bad, there was a sense of continuity and predictability.

But what is happening now with COVID is that people in the United States simply do not know what is going to happen in a month. The future has become unpredictable. In America, people are now negotiating reality. Having to figure out reality and what is true or not on a basic level is a shocking change for many people in America and some other parts of the world. People are now thinking of the “future” in terms of months and not three or 10 or 30 years in the future. With this disruption in even being able to plan for the future, it takes agency away and gives it to other people and individuals. Someone else is now deciding your fate. Meanwhile, the people on the right have guns and think that they are some type of liberation force. They think they are the ones with the agency and freedom. Being on the left puts you in a position of not having agency in the United States at present.

One person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. The global right wing has purpose. They have got the guns. They are highly ideological and committed. There is a core group of the global right-wing extremists who are committed to “accelerationism,” destroying society in order to create their own new world.

The right wing is in revolutionary mode because part of every nationalist movement or discourse is a myth of some kind of sacrifice or rebirth in blood and sacrifice. That logic justifies all of their wars and mass killing. Donald Trump has no ideology or understanding of political theory and philosophy. But Trump does have an instinctive understanding of nationalism.

He just said the other day, “Our doctors are at war.” It’s a war that is part of the rebirth of the nation.

Donald Trump and the right wing are in revolutionary mode, but there are so many observers who believe that they are just stupid and insane. These outsiders do not really understand what is happening. They dismiss what the right wing is doing as some type of farce or joke when it is deadly serious.

Revolutionary political parties do not need many supporters or members to succeed. Obsessing over how many people do or do not support Donald Trump is an error. Numbers are not the absolute measure of his strength. The true measure of Trump’s strength is how many people are willing to die for him. How many people in America and Europe are willing to die for a leftist cause? Donald Trump has stormtroopers. We don’t have stormtroopers. It is that simple. The Democrats are so afraid of anyone who even appears that they might just be a tiny bit radical. Even something like national health care is treated as too radical. The Democrats are not preparing for a fight; they’re preparing for a vote. Those are not the same things. It is not enough. And it is probably useless in the long run, when the Democrats are up against a revolutionary right-wing movement.

The other part of the equation is the people who are willing to kill for Donald Trump and his movement. Moreover, Trump’s supporters have been killing their “enemies” here in the United States through mass shootings and other violence. Those murders, assaults and other violence have been a feature of Trump’s regime. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media has not been consistently reporting on it because such outcomes are now normalized.

A large number of people who are willing to die for Donald Trump are also willing to kill for him. These Trump supporters are willing to sacrifice their previous morality and to be reborn through an act of blood and sacrifice in service to him. The military is very important here. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia it came down to who controlled the military. In the United States, people on the left are saying, “Well, if it really gets that bad, the military will intervene and save us.” We are at a point where people on the left in the United States are hoping for military intervention — as though that’s a good thing. What will the United States military do? I don’t know.

The Democrats really believe they can just vote Trump out of office. They are not properly organizing for all possibilities and in response to what the right wing is doing.

We hope that Biden will get elected and then somehow we’ll return to some status quo from before and pre-Trump democracy will be restored in some way. That’s just wishful thinking. Totally wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the right wing and the Republicans are preparing for a showdown.

Trump and the broader right are now saying that people should sacrifice themselves for “the economy” by dying from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, those who should die are the elderly and others who are vulnerable to the disease. This is social Darwinism. It is fascistic. That logic should be abhorrent but there has been little outrage from the American people.

I don’t know what could constitute enough outrage and opposition. There has to be change at the end. Otherwise it is just yelling at the wind. Moreover, what is needed now to counter Trump and his movement is more than just objections — it must be a vision and an alternative plan. There must also be a movement that is created out of that rage and anger in order to follow through on the necessary work and struggle.

Being angry is a precondition, I suppose, for some kind of radical or at least committed action. But it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There is plenty of outrage. What is lacking is a framework for what to do with that outrage. Democrats are afraid of that outrage. Whatever happens with Trump and the 2020 election, and afterwards, the United States is going to be radically different than before. The question becomes, who wins? Trump and the revolutionary right wing, or the left and the Democrats?

Suppose Joe Biden and the Democrats win. Who in their sane mind thinks that will lead to a radical correction to the country? Who really believes that Donald Trump and his enforcers are just going to drop their weapons and go home? That is not going to happen. The United States is heading towards a conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved politically. I believe that it may have to be resolved extra-politically.

I initially accepted the fact that some people voted for Trump in 2016 because they are straight-ticket Republican voters. I think that is a horrible decision, but I can understand it on a certain level. But to continue to support Trump at present given the authoritarianism, corruption, white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction and malevolent negligence is to be complicit. Trump’s supporters are now active agents of fascism. I have suggested in my writing and interviews that people of conscience and other good people should not interact in any way with Trump supporters, even if they are members of the family. How have you made such decisions?

I agree. Trump’s supporters are participating in a project that directly impacts my life, my family and the people I love in a very negative and dangerous way. We are past the point of understanding with Trump and his supporters. That moment was gone a long time ago. Any intelligent, active citizen understands the consequences of their actions. The whole idea that somehow these white people voted for Donald Trump while not meaning to be racist is just nonsense. If they somehow did not know that Donald Trump is a racist, then it is their responsibility to find out. Now it is evident because Trump is a rabid white supremacist who is aligned with the worst racist elements in the country. To support Donald Trump is to be complicit with white supremacy. It is to actively support a white supremacist project.

I do not talk to Donald Trump’s supporters. They are my enemies. I want them to go away and not be anywhere near me. I do not want to “unite” with such people in this country. I do not care if they live in the same country as me. Donald Trump’s supporters are my enemies and I want them gone from my life. And that’s a hard thing to say. Countries break up over such things. This is imaginable in this country now. And what is imaginable is possible.

You have written about the ethnic conflict and civil war in Yugoslavia and your fears of how such a thing is now on the horizon in the United States. How are people — especially young men — seduced and radicalized into committing such acts of violence?

It is empowering. It flatters their masculine power. Nationalism and fascism are always masculine political projects.This is why misogyny is always an aspect of any kind of nationalism. Fascism and nationalism also empowers old men. And in the context of white male supremacy, the advances of people of color and women were imagined as somehow disempowering white men. These white men became disgruntled. They lost jobs. But the problem with that white male anger is that it ignores that black and brown people lost their jobs too from deindustrialization, neoliberalism, globalization and related forces. The anger and sense of loss and feeling that they do not have agency was compensated for by uniting behind Donald Trump.

I always took Trump seriously. He was always capable of reaching this point. It’s not that he’s exceptional. It is rather that the conditions were right for Trump to win the presidency because he embodies this vulgar, blatant misogyny, sexism and arrogance. His psychopathic characteristics exactly match the fantasies of fascism.

There is another aspect of Donald Trump’s popularity among his followers. There is something terribly reassuring to a certain type of person that one can be stupid and lazy and so openly unpleasant and still become president of the United States. By comparison Barack Obama had to be a saint. He had to be perfect, Harvard-educated and wise. But Trump’s white supporters hated him intensely. Trump restores a certain type of faith in white supremacy for his supporters because someone as stupid and bad and lazy and evil as Trump can become president of the United States. Trump’s supporters now know that the worst of them can still be president. That must be terribly reassuring.

Donald Trump’s narcissism and other mental pathologies exactly match the collective pathology of white nationalists. Trump is a natural-born white supremacist because in any other context he is an idiot and a psychopath.

You are one of the co-writers of “The Matrix 4.” The Age of Trump, and now this pandemic and associated economic collapse is a surreal living nightmare. Could you have sat down and made up such a story? Would it even be believable?

With the same writers I worked with on “The Matrix 4,” we developed a spec script in December of 2017. The premise of the project was the disintegration of the United States and what happened afterward, as seen through the lives of several characters over 25 or so years of time in the story. Anything imaginable is possible. In our story there was a pandemic, environmental collapse, random violence, militias and rogue governors of different states.

I am sure people are writing science fiction stories based in this current moment, and his gets us back to politics in this moment and the power of imagination. I believe that many people cannot accept what is happening and are in denial because they lack imagination. They cannot make sense of the headlines because their minds eliminate so many possibilities about what is happening in the world right now — and what will happen in the future.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/yale-philosopher-and-author-of-how-fascism-works-explains-why-the-pandemic-offers-trump-a-dangerous-opportunity-to-rule-by-decree/

an 520 cdv stanley

...It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me.

Who is Trump’s real audience? What other ways is he signaling his intent to them?

This goes back to the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The friend-enemy distinction is at the heart of fascist ideology.By summoning the logic of the friend-enemy distinction during a war or other type of dire emergency, then all actions by the leader or ruler are justified. The truth does not matter when you are fighting an enemy. There is no democratic way of dealing with the enemy or resolving the crisis or emergency. Science is not a solution. One must use any means available, be it fair or not fair. That’s what the friend-enemy distinction does. Again, it is Social Darwinism. Kill or be killed.

The anti-lockdown “protests” have featured armed right-wing paramilitaries and militias. What is their role in failing democracies and the emergence of fascism and authoritarianism?

Fascism involves the typed of paramilitary forces we have seen in Michigan and elsewhere during Trump’s time in office, and before as well.Trump has constantly called for his supporters to use force against their and his “enemies.” Trump is trying to organize armed paramilitary groups on his behalf if there is a contested 2020 presidential election or some other outcome he does not like.

Trump’s paramilitary forces are making violent threats against Democratic elected officials and other lawmakers. The armed militia that tried to take over the Michigan state capitol building by blocking the governor’s door is an example of such a threat.

Right now, we are seeing how many men with guns can be called out on to the street by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States military is controlled by civilians. But with Trump’s paramilitary forces and other armed groups, he can give them orders and then claim some type of plausible deniability. These types of armed militias and paramilitaries are given license to act by Donald Trump and other authoritarians.

The official leaders in a full-on authoritarian regime or failing democracy then deny responsibility for the violence. The history of fascism repeatedly shows that leaders such as Donald Trump inspire these militias and paramilitaries to act, and then Trump can say, “No, that violence and those groups have nothing to do with me. They’re not the government. Those are some random people on the street!”

What is the role of higher education in resisting fascism and authoritarianism, especially during this emergency?

One must locate the attack on colleges and universities within an international perspective. If you look at the other countries which are under the control of far-right leaders, such as Brazil, India or Hungary, they all have featured incredible attacks on universities and other sites of higher education and learning. Academic freedom has been overturned. Schools have been defunded. Universities and their professors, staff and students have been targets of right-wing violence. In these regimes, universities are being attacked for supposedly being hotbeds of left-wing ideology.

In the United States such attacks are being mainstreamed by the right wing, in terms of attacking colleges and universities by slurring them as sites of “cultural Marxism.”

In terms of dismantling resistance to fascism, how does that work?

If we cannot physically gather together it makes it harder to resist. Universities are sites of resistance, which is why they are always targeted by fascists and authoritarians. Universities are places for free speech, questioning the government and engaging with challenging ideas about the relationship between power and society.

What happens when there is an educational system which does not teach critical thinking and engaged citizenship? What types of citizens are being produced by such an educational system?

Those citizens will not be democratic, capable of understanding, nurturing, participating in and protecting a healthy democracy. Democratic citizens criticize the powerful. That is what they do.

The goal of these authoritarians and right-wingers in the United States is to reduce and replace critical thinking that is taught and learned in the humanities and social sciences with just a “great books” curriculum and job training. Any other type of education and thinking is to be vilified as “cultural Marxism.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-anti-intellectualism-didnt-come-from-nowhere-the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all

no lnx

Trump’s anti-intellectualism didn’t come from nowhere — the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all

Written by The Washington Monthly April 24, 2020

Donald Trump recently created a stir by retweeting a call by a Republican politician to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. The reason: Fauci had the temerity to contradict the president on scientific facts. Then, whether out of fear or a willful suspension of intellect, the president’s coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx proclaimed that Trump has been “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data”—in contradiction to the avalanche of lies Trump puts out in his daily propaganda rallies masquerading as pandemic briefings.

Yet these are but surface examples of an ongoing tension between experts and Trumpists.It is a dynamic that has been at play since the very beginning of the administration: the war between experts and propagandists, between actual facts and “alternative facts.” Driving it is a wave of anti-intellectualism growing in America. And now, in this era of pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives are at stake. So, too, is the nation’s credibility. Given Donald Trump’s relentless antipathy toward truth and expertise, the outlook doesn’t look promising.

As the novel coronavirus rampaged across the country, a storm broke out in the White House over how to respond. Rather than taking dramatic actions early on to curtail the spread of the virus and prepare states and hospitals to meet the coming surge, the administration reverted to its profound anti-intellectualism, all in a bid to deflect its own failure in protecting American lives.

Disturbingly, Trump promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychlorine to tackle the virus, despite the fact that it hasn’t gone through the proper testing and approval process. After hearing about a country doctor in upstate New York who claimed to have treated patients for the disease with a cocktail of hydroxychlorine and other drugs with positive results, the president ran with it as a magic bullet. “I’ll tell you what, what do you have to lose?” he said. A just-released Veterans Administration study shows not only no benefit from use of hydroxychlorine, but there were more deaths among patients given the drug.Then, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro asserted that studies have showed the drug to have “clear therapeutic efficacy” in treating Covid-19 patients. Asked his qualifications for making such a claim, Navarro told CNN, “I’m a social scientist.” Others also trumpeting the medicine include the president’s usual Fox News chorus, led by Sean Hannity, and Rudolf Giuliani. This has had real impact: the White House directed health officials to put the anti-malarial medication ahead of other efforts to combat the outbreak. The federal government has since stockpiled 29 million pills.

Scientists, however, are counseling caution. “In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” said Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist. American Medical Association President Patrice Harris added: “You could lose your life. It’s unproven.” Axios reported a major blow-up in the situation room at one point between Navarro and a skeptical Fauci, who has confided to colleagues that Trump “almost always” ignores the advice he gives him before the daily press briefings.

Trump’s own CDC issued a statement on April 7 saying, “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” Medical experts are cautioning it will take a minimum of 12 to 18 months to come up with a vaccine.

In the meantime, Trump is putting the public health at even greater risk by propagating lies and misinformation. As of this writing, the coronavirus has claimed more than 47,000 American lives. Fatalities far surpass those in China, a nation with four times our population. And the rate of confirmed cases is growing faster in the United States than in all of Western Europe. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts some 67,000 Americans could die by August. Right now, one American dies of coronavirus every 45 seconds.

How many more will die depends on who is calling the shots: experts or hacks.

The Trump administration’s attitude toward science can only be described as contemptuous.There has been an 85 percent turnover of federal agency senior executives,and President Trump has failed to appoint anyone to nearly half of the federal scientific leadership positions. More often than not, Trump appointees are unqualified and ideologically driven.

Trump’s disdain for science comes with grievous consequences.He was alerted by the intelligence community of an emerging pandemic in January. Still, the president squandered more than two months before treating the issue seriously. That came after he disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic team and defunded a $200 million USAID program for detecting virus outbreaks overseas. Simply put, the president rid the government of some of its best resources to prepare for and respond to this kind of emergency. These actions come on top of the administration’s measures to marginalize science and fact-based research, including denying climate change.

But Trumpism did not come out of nowhere. Undergirding the president’s war on expertise is a recurrent strain of anti-intellectualism in America’s social and political DNA. As the late writer Isaac Asimov observed, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Trump panders to rightwing populists’ contempt for empirical facts and expert knowledge. Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has named science as one of his so-called Four Corners of Deceit, which also include government, academia and media. The coronavirus, Limbaugh said, “appears far less deadly” than the flu, but the government and the mainstream news media “keep promoting panic.”

The evangelical movement, a bedrock of Trump’s base, promotes an anti-science culture that rejects critical thinking.Pro-Trump Pentecostal preacher Rodney Howard-Browne has called his followers to attend church services in defiance of social distancing restrictions, dismissing coronavirus as a “phantom plague.”

Of course, it’s no surprise that anti-intellectualism also extends into the halls of Congress, where a sitting congressman declared a few years ago that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” and where the chairman of a Senate environmental committee brought a snowball into the chamber to prove that climate change is a hoax.

The coronavirus is not a hoax. It’s a mega-killer. A month after President Trump assured everyone that it would “go away,” more than 850,000 Americans have tested positive and the U.S. leads the world in the number of Covid-19-related deaths. Now, with his call over the weekend to “liberate” states imposing shelter-in-place orders, and red-state governors taking a care-free approach to social distancing, the risk of these numbers burgeoning out of control becomes very real.

Perhaps reality will sink in as the body count rises. Statistics, after all, are stubborn things. No amount of bluster, bluffing, and bullshit by the president and his enablers can obfuscate or contradict them. If there was ever a moment when it should be clear to voters why the nation needs a return to policies based on facts, knowledge, and science, this is it.

https://theconversation.com/4-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-disinformation-130767

theconv 320

4 ways to protect yourself from disinformation

Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University

As the 2020 elections near and disinformation campaigns ramp up, an expert on media literacy offers advice you can use to develop habits to exert more conscious control over your news intake.

https://www.mediamatters.org/chris-cillizza/amusing-ourselves-death-news-media-and-publics-desire-be-entertained-vs-its-need-be

Lessons from Neil Postman’s magnum opus ahead of this year’s elections

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY

PUBLISHED 02/18/20 7:40 AM EST

It’s been 35 years since Neil Postman’s oracular Amusing Ourselves to Death warned of what happens when politics becomes more about entertainment than substance.

Though cable news was in its infancy when Amusing Ourselves to Death was published -- just five years after CNN’s launch and 11 years before Fox News would come into existence -- cable’s eventual rise to ubiquity would have dire consequences for the world. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter,” wrote Postman, “but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” On how this plays out in TV news, he wrote:

No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters' invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this--the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials--all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis.

Postman died in 2003, but his prophetic work lives on with a number of his annoyances becoming industry standards within political media. (For example, one passage in the book remarked on the unfortunate focus on style over substance in the 1984 presidential debates.) If he viewed the election of “a former Hollywood movie actor” to the presidency to be a logical outcome for a world in which we are primarily informed via entertainment-driven media, the election of a reality TV game show host surely wouldn't have come as too much of a shock to him these years later.

The press will continue to operate as part of the entertainment business in the run-up to this year’s election. Here’s why.

It’s easy to find scapegoats for flawed journalism. In the wake of the 2016 election, many media outlets seemed all too eager to blame the misinformed public on internet hoaxes emanating from Macedonia or Russian influence campaigns. The truth is that editorial decisions made by many of these same media companies were geared to appeal to our desire to be entertained more than our need to be informed. Scandal quenched the thirst for entertainment much more effectively than policy coverage ever could, and in Donald Trump, American media outlets found themselves a politician light on policy but with a natural flair for the dramatic.

In April 2017, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy profile of CNN President Jeff Zucker. In it, one paragraph about on-air panels devolving into shouting matches stands out as emblematic of the current media landscape.

CNN’s Last-Supper-size panels have become a hallmark of its political coverage. Many of the network’s most memorable moments during the campaign were protracted emotional face-offs among paid partisans.

…

As pure TV spectacle, arguments like this were reminiscent of the head-to-head battles pioneered a decade ago by ESPN’s daytime talk shows like “First Take,” which pitted sports pundits against one another in loud disagreements about the topic of the day. This was not a coincidence. Zucker is a big sports fan and from the early days of the campaign had spoken at editorial meetings about wanting to incorporate elements of ESPN’s programming into CNN’s election coverage. “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way,” he told me.

It’s no wonder that Zucker hired Chris Cillizza, an embodiment of everything Postman warned against, to join him at CNN. The two of them share an understanding that news is about entertainment over education. Zucker, it should be noted, came from the world of entertainment where he ran NBC Universal and personally lobbied to land *The Apprentice* at the network.

It’s an attitude that was shared by Les Moonves, the disgraced former CBS executive chairman and CEO, who called Trump’s run for president in 2016 a “circus” but also said, “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.”

The natural result of this approach is a world in which journalists celebrate meaningless moments while ignoring the substance of any given event or action. For instance, in November, a Reuters report referred to the Trump impeachment hearings as “consequential, but dull,” while NBC lamented that they “lacked the pizazz necessary to capture public attention.” And earlier this month, CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell gushed over Trump’s distraction-laden State of the Union address, tweeting that he was “a master showman at his best.” This, of course, told us absolutely nothing about the content of his speech.

Politico recapped the speech in a video highlighting what it termed were “made-for-TV moments.”

Journalism cannot serve its role as an institutional check on the powerful if it is driven by a need to maximize profit. The press can’t be afraid to be boring, but changes in the industry’s economic landscape over the past 20 years show what happens if it can’t keep our attention. It’s for that reason that there are several Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who’ve left the profession for different and more stable industries while Cillizza pulls paychecks for writing articles about “The mystery of Donald Trump's 'photoshopped' tan-face picture” and “8 very good things that happened to Donald Trump this week.”

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued that as society shifted to rely on TV news for information and entertainment, we risked becoming a “trivial culture” like the dystopia described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, warning that “the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Restoring the press as an institutional check on the powerful will be a team effort, and it’s important to start now.

The Jeff Zuckers of the world aren’t about to abandon their politics-as-entertainment approach to journalism anytime soon, especially if nothing changes about industry incentives.

In 2016, media coverage of Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton skewed heavily in favor of horse race reporting -- coverage of who is winning and why. According to a study by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, horse race coverage made up a stunning 42% of news reports. Controversies made up 17% of coverage, with policy taking up just 10%. Even more worrying is that in that small portion of policy reporting, a large chunk focused on Trump’s immigration proposals -- almost certainly as the result of the inflammatory way in which he presented radical and unrealistic proposals like banning Muslims from entering the U.S. or building a southern border wall at zero cost to taxpayers.

“Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage--four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position,” the reports authors note.

Mainstream journalists covered the 2016 presidential election like a soap opera, not like a competition between two competing visions for the country. It’s hard to believe that this year’s coverage will be any different.

https://theconversation.com/as-democratic-primaries-near-educators-can-teach-hope-to-a-polarized-citizenry-130742

With the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary approaching many Americans are making their choice, although there are those who are still struggling with who to vote for.

Elections often inspire hope, but that hope can quickly turn to political despair when candidates fall short of voters’ expectations.

As a philosopher who specializes in citizenship education and political theory, I believe that political hope can be taught in schools and colleges. As I argue in my new open-access book, hope can lay a pathway to help citizens make good choices at the ballot box and sustain political engagement well after the polls close.

Despair in democracy

A recent study published in the Journal of Democracy found that across the globe citizens have “become more cynical” about the value of a democratic system and “less hopeful” of their ability to influence public policy.

In the United States, people are disenchanted with democracy for many reasons. Some felt former President Barack Obama fell short of meeting his bold promises, from offering more retirement account options for the poor to providing universal health care. Similarly, while Trump was regarded as a “savior” figure in some communities, some of his supporters now find their expectations were not met.

A much larger reason for being frustrated is that, as scholar Wendy Brown points out, economic ideologies have made many Americans less inclined to pursue what is in the common good. A shift toward self-interest also moves people away from democratic behavior. It contributes to distrust of fellow citizens, and it could bring cynicism about the effectiveness of democratic government.

Teaching political hope

Rather than despair, my research shows that our presidential election season is an opportunity for educators, parents and community leaders to open up inquiry. Here are a few things they can do to develop more hopeful citizens.

Help students explore real social and political problems to better understand citizens’ struggles and needs both in the past and today. Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month, for example, could be used as opportunities to showcase the hopeful endeavors of leaders and everyday citizens who fight for civil rights and against the political despair of the times.
Challenge growing citizens to see that genuine political hope is a call to ongoing collective work. Programs such as the Freechild Institute and the Mikva Challenge provide a model for how to mobilize students to act to improve their communities. In these programs, young people are encouraged to identify problems and are supported in expressing their views about them. Students can learn how to imagine better futures and take steps toward it.
Reaffirm the value of shared political governance. An example of such mentoring comes from a school in Minneapolis where students became concerned that one school had a large playground while another one, next to it, had very little playground facilities. Instead of harboring hostile feelings, students took positive actions. They surveyed students of both schools and gathered evidence on the impact of the inequality. They also worked with the school administrations and the local press to voice their concerns. In the end, students put forward a proposal that was fairer toward everyone. In the process, students learned how to listen, collaborate and build trust – something all citizens should learn.

Expressing dissent

Teachers can also help their students understand the relationship between hope and dissent. When citizens focus on the improved future they hope for, they may become frustrated with how things are now.

For example, after a gunman killed 17 students at a high school in Parkland, Florida, students from that school and across the U.S. staged widespread protests demanding safer schools.

Some educators helped students learn how to not only express dissatisfaction, but help others understand it. Some teachers, for example, helped students describe the problems and experience of gun violence by creating press packets. Parents aided children in constructing messages to share with legislators.

Students learned how to put forward solutions to be discussed and tested. Members of the school newspaper were guest editors of a U.S. edition of The Guardian a British newspaper, which outlined their vision for change.

Questioning power structures

Educators can cultivate critical thinking. This is not just the deep thinking that most of us expect in all classes. It is thinking that interrogates power structures, identifies injustice and asserts principles of democracy.

Following the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, some educators, for example, helped students understand the history of racism in order to better critique policing injustice today and describe an America where black lives matter. When students learn this history, their critiques of the present and their vision for the future are better informed.

Tell a story

Finally, educators can nurture imagination and support students in constructing stories about improved ways of living. Stories show examples of how to take action and why it’s worthwhile to do so.

Storytelling also includes listening to the needs of others. Learning how to pay attention to the lives of others can improve citizens’ visions for the future.

As Americans head to the polls, universities and schools can help voters and youth shape and respond to the election. They can help budding citizens identify candidates who listen to the needs of voters and craft stories of a desirable future. These are stories that don’t depend on the candidate as the hero, but rather are inclusive and inspiring calls to collective work to improve our society.

Such efforts can sustain the hope of voters, transition those emotions into collective action and revive democracy well beyond 2020.

ref1

https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-danger-of-deconsolidation-the-democratic-disconnect/

PM --> MTA dir dl: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/FoaMounk-27-3.pdf

The citizens of wealthy, established democracies are less satisfied with their governments than they have been at any time since opinion polling began. Most scholars have interpreted this as a sign of dissatisfaction with particular governments rather than with the political system as a whole. Drawing on recent public opinion data, we suggest that this optimistic interpretation is no longer plausible. Across a wide sample of countries in North America and Western Europe, citizens of mature democracies have become markedly less satisfied with their form of government and surprisingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. A serious democratic disconnect has emerged. If it widens even further, it may begin to challenge the stability of seemingly consolidated democracies.

ref2

https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Democracys-Discontent-and-Civic-Learning

Democracy's Discontent and Civic Learning

Multiple Perspectives

Edited by:

Charles S. White, :{Social Science Education Consortium:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

A volume in the series: International Social Studies Forum: The Series. Editor(s): Richard A. Diem, University of Texas - San Antonio. Jeff Passe, Cal Poly Pomona.

Published 2018

Around the globe, democracy is under assault. For a dozen years, global freedom has followed a downward slope, according to Freedom House. Once viewed as the world’s model of freedom, the United States has slipped in world ratings of democracy. For a rising portion of the world’s population, faith in democracy is flagging. At the same time, a wave of nationalism and xenophobia is rising in the West, questioning democracy’s ability to meet the needs of its citizens.

The contributors to this volume examine democracy’s discontent from a variety of perspectives. What forces have produced the extreme partisanship and polarization roiling America’s civic life and politics? How has today’s populist movement challenged democratic norms and institutions? What role has social media played in democracy’s discontent and its defense? How do we overcome persistent racism in the face of emboldened White supremacist and anti-immigrant agitation?

ref3

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

book

Undoing the Demos

Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

By Wendy Brown

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures

summary

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.

Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

ref4

https://www.worldcat.org/title/distrust-american-style-diversity-and-the-crisis-of-public-confidence/oclc/495254779?referer=di&ht=edition

Distrust, American style : diversity and the crisis of public confidence

Author:	Sheila Suess Kennedy
Publisher:	Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 2009. ucsc has

Author:

Sheila Suess Kennedy

Publisher:

Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 2009.

ucsc has

ref 5

https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-for-Dissent-Citizenship-Education-and-Political-Activism/Stitzlein/p/book/9781612052298

Teaching for Dissent

Citizenship Education and Political Activism, 1st Edition

By Sarah Marie Stitzlein

Routledge

208 pages

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-is-mentally-ill-but-our-real-sickness-runs-much-deeper/

no lnx

Trump is mentally ill — but our real sickness runs much deeper

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 1, 2020

Sick societies normalize the aberrant and abhorrent behavior of their leaders and other elites. This behavior in turn becomes a type of pathology the infects the general public.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Last week, Dr. Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and editor of the bestselling book”The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” told Salon that Nancy Pelosi could have Donald Trump involuntarily evaluated, because he may be a threat to public safety:

As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not…. Anyone can call 911 to report someone who seems dangerous, and family members are the most typical ones to do so. But so can coworkers, and even passersby on the street. The law dictates who can determine right to treatment, or civil commitment, and in all 50 U.S. states this includes a psychiatrist.

The advantage of a coworker starting this process is that a court can mandate a mental capacity evaluation before the dangerous person returns to work. The committing physician is preferably the patient’s treater, but does not have to be.

Predictably, Lee’s suggestion became the outrage of the day across the right-wing disinformation echo chamber. But she is clearly not alone in her concerns about Donald Trump.

Lee is one of many hundreds of prominent mental health experts, historians, attorneys, and other professionals who since 2016 have tried to sound the alarm about the dire threat that Donald Trump and his regime represent to America and the world.

Is it legal at this time to commit Donald Trump to a mental institution? The answer is no. But is Trump a threat to the United States and the world? The answer to that is absolutely yes.

The abundance of public evidence suggests that President Trump is mentally unwell.

Will the Republican Party and its followers place the good of the country over partisan fealty and an addiction to (white) power? Of course not.

Lee and other mental health professionals’ repeated warnings about Trump’s state of mind and behavior should, of course, be of great public concern. But such warnings no longer cause public panic and mass action — and never did. That fact carries ominous implications for the present and future of America.

Last week on Twitter, journalist Aaron Rupar summarized this disturbing state of affairs:

The President of the United States has, today alone, retweeted 2 QAnon fan accounts, a Pizzagate account, an account that compared his following to a cult, and an account that described Obama as “Satan’s Muslim Scum.” And this insanity isn’t even a blip on the news radar.

The Age of Trump is also a symptom of a much deeper and larger societal problem. It is a function of what philosopherHenry Giroux describes as a “disimagination machine”:

I argue that the politics of disimagination refers to images, and I would argue institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation, that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. The “disimagination machine” is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture, and a public pedagogy that functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue: put simply, to become critically informed citizens of the world….

The rise of the Tea Party and the renewal of the culture wars have resulted in a Republican Party which is now considered the party of anti-science. Similarly, right-wing politicians, media, talk show hosts and other conservative pundits loudly and widely spread the message that a culture of questioning is antithetical to the American way of life.

It is strange yet somehow predictable that this nadir in American history was so presciently described by political journalist Fletcher Knebel in his 1965 thriller “Night of Camp David: What if the President of the United States Went Stark-Raving Mad?”

Knebel’s book offers a scenario where the protagonist reflects on the nation’s predicament:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/joker-a-harsh-indictment-of-neoliberalism-and-gangster-capitalism/

no lnx

...

Neoliberalism as a form of gangster capitalism sells the lie that destroying the Commons, the social safety net, social democracy and a sense of shared human obligation— and cutting taxes on the rich — will somehow create economic growth, prosperity and “freedom” for all people. After several decades of failed experiments, such economic and social policies have been disproved. In reality, neoliberalism is “socialism” and “welfare” for the richest individuals and largest corporations — and “survival of the fittest” for everyone else.

To maintain control of a public that is often despondent, suffering, at times near rebellion but also cowed by learned helplessness – neoliberal policymakers and other elites use the punitive and punishing power of the state to quell dissent.

Precarious economic circumstances also help to suppress resistance and even the act of imagining alternative, more democratic political possibilities and outcomes. Mass media, schools, and other agents of political socialization have convinced many Americans (and other people around the world) that consumerism, capitalism and democracy are the same thing. People who live in societies dominated by neoliberalism and gangster capitalism are told that they are ultimately responsible for their own suffering and lack of success, even as income and wealth inequality soar, life chances are truncated, and meritocracy is exposed as a sham.

But perhaps the greatest power of neoliberalism and gangster capitalism is the control they assert over people’s emotional lives. Neoliberal elites must create emotionally self-regulating subjects if “the system” is to remain stable and not collapse into chaos. Achieving that goal is advanced through various means, including “narco-capitalism” and the dopamine hits delivered by the internet and social media, whose success is predicated on loneliness and social atomization. The technology of “mindfulness” also does the work of enforcing neoliberalism’s need for emotionally self-regulating subjects.

...

... Phoenix’s Joker character rejects that order of things. Indeed, he rejects the entire regime of training and discipline demanded by neoliberalism.

In their new book “Manufacturing Happy Citizens,” Edgar Cabanas and Eve Illouz explain the role of “happiness scientists” in enforcing neoliberalism’s power over its subjects:

Questioning the existing state of affairs, defamiliarizing the familiar, and inquiring in the processes, meanings and practices that shape our identities and everyday behaviour are fundamental endeavours of social critical thinking…."

That happiness scientists have often been belligerent towards critical social thinking is no secret, calling it negative, deceptive, and even dishonest. These scientists believe that we should get rid of this kind of negativity because it only fuels pointless and fruitless claims for social and political change.

https://theconversation.com/too-many-people-think-satirical-news-is-real-121666

https://theconversation.com/what-orwells-1984-tells-us-about-todays-world-70-years-after-it-was-published-116940

...Orwell’s telescreen was based in the technologies of television pioneered prior to World War II and could hardly be seen as science fiction. In the 1930s Germany had a working videophone system in place, and television programs were already being broadcast in parts of the United States, Great Britain and France.

Past, present and future

The dominant reading of “1984” has been that it was a dire prediction of what could be. In the words of Italian essayist Umberto Eco, “at least three-quarters of what Orwell narrates is not negative utopia, but history.”

Additionally, scholars have also remarked how clearly “1984” describes the present.

In 1949, when the novel was written, Americans watched on average four and a half hours of television a day; in 2009, almost twice that. In 2017, television watching was slightly down, to eight hours, more time than we spent asleep.

In the U.S. the information transmitted over television screens came to constitute a dominant portion of people’s social and psychological lives.

‘1984’ as present day

In the year 1984, however, there was much self-congratulatory coverage in the U.S. that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. But media studies scholar Mark Miller argued how the famous slogan from the book, “Big Brother Is Watching You” had been turned to “Big Brother is you, watching” television.

Miller argued that television in the United States teaches a different kind of conformity than that portrayed in the novel. In the novel, the telescreen is used to produce conformity to the Party. In Miller’s argument, television produces conformity to a system of rapacious consumption – through advertising as well as a focus on the rich and famous. It also promotes endless productivity, through messages regarding the meaning of success and the virtues of hard work.

...

What Orwell’s ‘1984’ tells us about today’s world, 70 years after it was published

Stephen Groening, University of Washington

In the year 1984, there was self-congratulatory coverage that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. However, an expert argues that the technologies described in the novel are here and watching us.

henry g wicked smart:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/

The ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe.They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.

Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Chris Hedges is right to argue that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined.He is worth quoting at length:

The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. We no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate; an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as “Russiagate” or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise.Puffed up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.

Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, and render invisible important social issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in “No Name in the Street” that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

...

https://www.projectcensored.org/

peter philips

https://www.projectcensored.org/how-mainstream-media-evolved-into-corporate-media-a-project-censored-history/

new bk out this summer mickey huff co-

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-april-12-2019/

40 states have bills?!

boykin hijacking of ML

https://www.projectcensored.org/has-media-literacy-been-hijacked/

Nolan Higdon and Ben Boyington

“What are they doing here?” The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and NewsGuard were listed as exhibitors at the 2019 International Critical Media Literacy Conference (ICMLC) in Savannah, Georgia, last month. NewsGuard is a for-profit venture aimed at tackling fake news through a browser extension (already on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome) that rates a news outlet’s trustworthiness based on crowd-sourcing. NAMLE is the largest media literacy organization in the United States. Both share a dependence on corporate funding. :{NAMLE:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: is currently collaborating with Google and others on MediaWise, a “research-based curriculum to be taught in classrooms and a teen-led fact-checking initiative.” :{NewsGuard,:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: a project started by Steven Brill, founder of theAmerican Lawyer magazine, and Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of theWall Street Journal, relies on investment from corporations and foundations. Critical scholars are typically suspicious of the conflicts of interest that result from corporate funding. Thus, NAMLE and NewsGuard’s presence at ICMLC, which is partially due to the inclusive nature of ICMLC, was surprising as it was indicative of a larger effort to hijack media literacy in the United States.

NAMLE defines media literacy as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication.” :{Renee Hobbs:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a founder and oft-cited media literacy authority, argues that those who oppose industry funding do so because they “believe that all funds come with strings attached,” such as a corporatist ideology that removes an “anti-media” perspective from the classroom. Conversely, :{Hobbs:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: claims that those who receive such funding “are delighted” that media industries are helping to spread media literacy.

Critical scholars, in contrast, contend that to ignore the funding is to ignore how corporate co-optation impacts educator content. According to Steven :{Funk, Douglas Kellner, and Jeff Share:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, funding is a significant detail when analyzing “the ways media tend to position viewers, users, and audiences to read and negotiate meanings about race, class, gender, and the multiple identity markers that privilege dominant groups.” Media scholar :{Zoë Druick :(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:argues that “Media companies have aggressively sought out the classroom,” to implement a form of “media education [that] has long been associated with (neo)colonial[ism].” Historically, :{UNESCO:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and the Ford Foundation, the latter of which was funneling money for :{Central Intelligence Agency:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: (CIA) programs at the time, have developed media literacy content to normalize the tools and technology of corporate donors under the auspices that they are a “solution to a pressing educational ‘state of emergency.’” Today, :{Facebook:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, :{Google:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, :{Nickelodeon:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, and other tech companies are vying for control over the American conception of media literacy. :{Critical scholars:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: argue that such monies transform education from a public investment to a form of corporate hegemony.

Hobbs counters the critical perspective by arguing that to recognize, discuss, and analyze the power dynamics of identity and ideology while promoting democracy is tantamount to an educator pushing their “political agendas onto students, offering their critique of capitalism as gospel and orchestrating student ‘voice’ in a mandated form of ‘service learning,’ coercively enrolling students into a political action project, telling them what to think instead of encouraging them to think for themselves.”

Her argument feeds on prevalent anti-educator rhetoric, in which educators at all levels are accused of indoctrinating students. It is also intellectually bankrupt to assert that a fact-based analysis and discussion of capitalism’s impact on media is a political agenda; that analyzing power in media is tantamount to rejecting capitalism; or that having students participate in a project where they are given space to criticize media amounts to ideological hegemony. Nevertheless, Hobbs’s myopic assessment of critical pedagogy has become dogma among media literacy educators. :{A 2016 paper:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in the Journal of Children and Media lauded the media industry’s role in education, noting that “without industry collaboration, the work of media scholars presents a missed opportunity to ensure that children are better protected and empowered…” Sadly, scholars’ adherence to industry interests has become so normalized that adherents have conflated their ideology with objective truth. In fact, media scholar Bill Yousman demonstrated that media literacy educators are so fearful of engaging in or facing critical analysis that they dismiss and avoid the word :{“critical”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: when it appears in media literacy discourses.

The debates between media scholars were largely missing from mainstream discourses until the 2016 US presidential election. Other countries, including :{Canada, Great Britain, Australia:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, and several :{Asian nations:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, began offering media education decades ago, but the United States still has no mandated national media education standards. After concern over fake news and voter manipulation exploded in 2016, US legislators began working on new laws. More than :{40 bills:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in :{over half of the states:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: have been passed, but most are vague and toothless, offering media literacy as an elective (read: optional) and presenting little to no specifics on what media literacy is or should be.

Which kind of media literacy will be implemented? One that teaches students to adopt, normalize, and accept the power dynamics and ubiquity of digital media as a part of some exercise in empowerment? Or one that teaches students to recognize and analyze power dynamics in media as a way to create a more equitable society? Major issues such as :{brain hacking:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, :{massive data collection:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, :{micro-targeting:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, :{screen addiction:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, and :{privacy:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: will be addressed or ignored based on how we answer. The results can be catastrophic for democracy, decorum, and truth. Right now, it appears that NAMLE and NewsGuard’s corporatist ideology is leading the way.

NewsGuard has brought together former employees of media heavyweights such as Reuters,theWall Street Journal, and Huffington Post with members of the political class and intelligence community on their :{advisory board:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, creating a corporate entity that serves as a government proxy to shape media literacy. They offer colored emblems for users on their browser: green for true and red for false. Ironically, even shamefully, while their platform derides and red-labels some smaller :{news sites:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, it leaves Fox News with a green light, meaning that in their opinion it “:{maintains basic standards of credibility and transparency:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.” In fact, the only news they guard is the fake news from Fox. Educators should proceed with caution in regard to these seemingly simple solutions.

NAMLE’s :{mission statement:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: promises “empowered media participation,” but its actions empower the tech-industry and surveillance state. They collaborate with Google, which works with the federal government to collect and analyze user data, serving the enormous government surveillance :{apparatus:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. It is naïve to think that Google can empower users, while simultaneously exploiting them as part of a 1984-style dystopia. Corporate funding of scholars and educational institutions and organizations results in the hijacking of academia: fearing loss of funding and prestige, many scholars laud rather than challenge the status quo. Consider :{Hobbs’s assertion:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: that “the media industry has been a significant player in advancing the media literacy competencies.” But the infiltration goes beyond funding: in 2015, NAMLE hosted Brooke Oberwetter, a manager of external affairs at Facebook, at its :{annual conference:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, where she informed “parents, teachers, and young people about the tools, settings, and resources available on Facebook [to] help keep people safe.” This rings especially false in light of :{recent reports:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: that Facebook actively targeted online game-playing children and their parents in a scheme to collect thousands of dollars.

Educators are busy, and NAMLE and NewsGuard offer what appears to be a quick fix. However, magic-bullet thinking does not provide meaningful or lasting solutions. Too often, educators buy “canned curriculum” without deep vetting; we even design curriculum to address mandated standards without considering that the goal should be to foster student agency, not just prepare them for higher education or a job. This is backwards: Students’ “college and career readiness” will follow from lessons that promote their agency. Educators ranging from administrators and curriculum designers to classroom teachers can “unpack” and deconstruct standards critically even as they work to meet them. The acritical approach is exactly the wrong tack because it leaves students accepting rather than addressing power inequities.

The 2019 ICMLC proudly offered a platform for critically-minded media scholars to connect with one another and grow efforts to empower mediated citizens, but the presence of NAMLE and NewsGuard was unsettling. NAMLE offered free content in the exhibitors area for educators, but did not send an official representative. NewsGuard, for its part, had emailed several attendees in advance, asking for meetings to “inform” educators of their content and design. These meetings turned out to be a form of direct marketing, rather than an instance of critical discourse in keeping with the purpose of the event.

The presence of these organizations at ICMLC and their increased profile in national media literacy discourse signifies the hijacking of media literacy by corporatist ideologues. We can perhaps agree that there is a problem presented by contemporary technology, education, and media, but a remedy created with the same technology and by the very media companies that are at the core of the problem is indistinguishable from offering free Budweisers at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Critical media literacy offers a much more robust and promising pedagogy to preserve democratic values and mitigate or eliminate the anti-democratic forces threatening them than anything that corporate ideology and its acolytes can offer.

Nolan Higdon, Ed.D., is a lecturer of Media Studies and History at California State University, East Bay and University of San Francisco. He is co-author with Mickey Huff of :{*United States of Distraction*:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (City Lights, 2019). He sits on the boards of the Media Freedom Foundation, Action Coalition for Media Education, and :{Northwest Alliance For Alternative Media And Education:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. He is a co-founding member of the :{Global Critical Media Literacy Project:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and co-host of the :{Along The Line Podcast:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.

Ben Boyington, M.Ed., teaches media, English, film, and history at the high school and college levels, emphasizing student agency and empowerment. He is vice president of the :{Action Coalition for Media Education:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and coordinator of the :{Global Critical Media Literacy Project:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:; he also sits on the board of the Media Freedom Foundation. His research into the 1:1 screen initiative is published in :{*Media Education for a Digital Generation*:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: (Routledge, 2016).

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/republicans-cant-tell-difference-between-honesty-and-truth-and-theyre-putting-us

mostly privacy

https://www.alternet.org/orwell-knew-heres-why-we-willingly-buy-screens-are-used-against-us

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-our-brains-are-best-defense-against-foreign-election-interference

...However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale.

Old goals, new techniques

More than 2,400 years ago, the Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu made it an axiom of war that it’s best to “subdue the enemy without fighting.” Using information – or disinformation, or propaganda – as a weapon can be one way to destabilize a population and disable the target country. In 1984 a former KGB agent who defected to the West discussed this as a long-term process and more or less predicted what’s happening in the U.S. now.

The Russians created false social media accounts to simulate political activists – such as @TEN_GOP, which purported to be associated with the Tennessee Republican Party. Just that one account attracted more than 100,000 followers. The goal was to distribute propaganda, such as captioned photos, posters or short animated graphics, purposely designed to enrage and engage these accounts’ followers. Those people would then pass the information along through their own personal social networks.

Starting from seeds planted by Russian fakers, including some who claimed to be U.S. citizens, those ideas grew and flourished through amplification by real people. Unfortunately, whether originating from Russia or elsewhere, fake information and conspiracy theories can form the basis for discussion at major partisan media outlets....

http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/six-logical-fallacies-youll-hear-this-election-season-and-how-to-beat-them

”Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. Bill Gates called this book by the late professor of international health and TED talk superstar Rosling, “One of the most important books I’ve ever read―an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” The book looks at how and why we make cognitive mistakes that skew our perception of the world, serving as an indispensable wake-up call in the age poisoned by claims of “Fake News” and rampant misinformation.

propaganda

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-february-8-2018/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/books/how-propaganda-works-is-a-timely-reminder-for-a-post-truth-age.html

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler argued that effective propaganda appeals “to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning ability”; relies on “stereotyped formulas,” repeated over and over again, to drum ideas into the minds of the masses; and uses simple “love or hate, right or wrong” formulations to assail the enemy while making “intentionally biased and one-sided” arguments.

Although propaganda has usually been associated with totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the scholar Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, reminds us in his latest book that propaganda can also pose a grave danger to democracies. The subject couldn’t be more relevant, given the profusion of fake news and misinformation on the web today; a public with a voracious appetite for scandal and entertainment, coupled with media outlets obsessed with ratings and clicks; Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and next year’s European elections; and a president-elect who has stoked the fears and grievances of supporters, and who frequently lies, flip-flops and sows confusion by tweet.

In this newly released paperback edition of “How Propaganda Works,” Mr. Stanley analyzes modern propaganda — its operation, techniques and fallout. His prose can eddy into annoying academic-ese, but the reader who can get past the repetitions and jargon will find that this book provides valuable insights into an important and timely subject.

...

Read all about The Trust Protocol and The Trust Project and its partners (the The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica and La Stampa, and The Washington Post) at the following links:

The Verge: Facebook adds trust indicators to news articles in an effort to identify real journalism

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16658538/facebook-trust-indicators-fake-news-trust-project

CNN Tech: Facebook, Google, Twitter to fight fake news with ‘trust indicators’

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/tech-trust-indicators/index.html

CHE

Commentary

FAKE NEWSis a real problem. A recent study by the Stanford History Education Group concluded that most American high-school and college students are unable to distinguish real from fake information when evaluating online sources. The Stanford researchers described these results as "bleak" and "a threat to democracy."

The findings come as no surprise to me. As an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, I teach a first-year writing course required of all incoming students. Those whom I welcome into my classroom each semester are bright. But many have never received any training in how to evaluate information or make credible arguments.

Although largely unacknowledged, teachers of required first-year composition courses now find themselves positioned as our society's first line of defense against fake news.

Humanities courses have traditionally been the vehicle by which college students learn critical literacy. However, a number of trends over the past two decades -- including the rising popularity of preprofessional majors, the restructuring of general-education requirements to require less exposure to the humanities, and job-market anxieties -- have resulted in fewer students' passing through these courses.

Policies permitting students to place out of humanities requirements through high-school AP coursework have also meant that fewer students are exposed to college-level classes where critical literacy is taught. And when students do sign up for a humanities course, their professors often don't have enough time to spend on the nitty-gritty work of helping them learn to critically assess sources. Instructors who work in the publish-or-perish environment of research universities have even less time.

Required composition courses therefore have often assumed the function of teaching students how to think critically about topics and how to evaluate sources. Because freshman-comp courses aren't "content" based, and because composition teachers are hired to teach, not publish, we have more time to do this painstaking, one-on-one work.

Teaching critical reasoning is not as simple as it might sound. Most students don't fully understand that if they want to make a claim about something -- let's say, for instance, they want to argue that Obamacare is inefficient and hurts people -- they have to research it to find out what experts in the field have said. As I meet with students about their initial research, I will frequently hear them say something like, "I found a blog by a girl named Kelly who says that now she has to pay more for health care than she did before Obamacare." Or, "I found a website called Focus on the Family that says Obamacare forces people to pay for contraception." This moment happens every semester with many of my students, even at an institution like USC, which recruits high-performing students from across the country.

So this is a large part of what I do in my "writing course": I teach students how to distinguish between news and propaganda. I teach them about blogs and anecdotal evidence and sponsored content and peer-reviewed articles, and I help them see that not all the links they click on are equally valid sources of information. This comes as a great revelation to many of them. I teach them that Kelly's website doesn't work as evidence, and that Focus on the Family has a political agenda that makes it imperative to double-check the claims the group makes. Eventually students learn this and become pretty good at it.

It takes time and effort for students to write multiple drafts, and for me to correct their work. At USC, one-on-one conferences with the instructors are an integral part of the first-year writing course. For every paper I assign (four or five a semester), I meet with each student for a 20-minute conference. This is the kind of intensive work it takes to walk students through the basics of how to make legitimately sourced arguments. Being critical is hard work.

Writing teachers are our country's first line of defense against a post-fact culture. But perhaps one reason we find ourselves in a critical-reasoning desert today is because writing teachers are also, uniformly, among the most undervalued and overworked sector of the academic community. Composition teachers have always been the proverbial poor relations in the university family. Required "freshman comp" courses date back to the post-Civil War period. The courses originally fulfilled weeding and surveillance functions, ensuring that graduates could write error-free expository prose. Today freshman comp retains its stigma of being a "service" or skills-based course, a finishing school preparing students for the real academic labor of the upper-level arts and sciences.

Composition's lack of cultural capital and status is reflected in the fact that so many of its instructors are adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty members. My university's program offers its instructors, who work outside the tenure track, job security and full access to health and retirement benefits. That is not the case, however, for many of the more than 70 percent of composition instructors nationwide who qualify as "contingent."

The age of the internet and social media -- and of fake news -- is such a new development that we have not yet come to terms with how best to educate students and citizens on how to successfully navigate it. The infrastructure is in place. Now is the time to invest in college-composition programs and give them the resources and recognition they deserve as guardians of civic literacy.