Rhetoric

belated/ not needed?

see PR

819 bak has much new stuff

420 capt

SEE THREE

SEE VIOLENT RHET, ELIMINATIONALIST

see god terms

in the name of

see hate america

SEE RE-CLAIM TERM

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:REALLY GOOD ANALYSIS

AN 10 25

A grim-faced President Donald J. Trump looks out at the reader, under the headline “LAW AND ORDER.” Graffiti pictured in the corner of the White House Facebook post reads “Death to ICE.” Beneath that, a photo of protesters, choking on tear gas. And underneath it all, a smaller headline: “President Trump Deploys 2,000 National Guard After ICE Agents Attacked, No Mercy for Lawless Riots and Looters.”

The official communication from the White House appeared on Facebook in June 2025, after Trump sent in troops to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles. Visually, it is melodramatic, almost campy, resembling a TV promotion.

The post is not an outlier.

In the Trump administration, White House social media posts often blur the lines between politics and entertainment, and between reality and illusion.

The White House has released AI images of Trump as the Pope, as Superman and as a Star Wars Jedi, ready to do battle with “Radical Left Lunatics” who would bring “Murderers, Drug Lords … & well-known MS-13 Gang Members” into the country.

Most recently, on the weekend of the No Kings protests, both Trump and the White House released a video of the president wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet, from which he dispenses feces onto a crowd of protesters below.

Underpinning it all is a calculated political strategy: an appeal to Trump’s political base – largely white, working-class, rural or small-town, evangelical and culturally conservative.

As scholars who study communication in politics and the media, we believe the White House’s rhetoric and style is part of a broader global change often found in countries experiencing increased polarization and democratic backsliding.

White House style

In the past, national leaders generally favored a professional tone, whether on social or traditional media. Their language was neutral and polished, laced with political jargon.

While populist political communication has become more common along with the proliferation of social media, the communication norms are further altered in Trump White House social media posts.

They are partisan, theatrical and exaggerated. Their tone is almost circuslike. The process of governing is portrayed as a reality TV show, in which political roles are performed with little regard for real-world consequences. Vivid color schemes and stylized imagery convert political messaging into visual spectacle. The language is colloquial, down-to-earth.

Just as other influencers in a variety of domains might create an emotional bond by tailoring social media messages, content, products and services to the needs and likes of individual customers, the White House tailors its content to the beliefs, language and worldview of Trump’s political base.

In doing so, the White House echoes a broad, growing trend in political communication, portraying Trump as “a champion of the people” and using direct and informal communication that appeals to fear and resentment.

Trump White House social media makes no effort to promote social unity or constructive dialogue, or reduce polarization – and often heightens it. Undocumented immigrants, for example, are often portrayed as inherently evil. White House social media amplifies dramatic, emotionally charged content.

In one video, Trump recites a poem about a kind woman who takes in a snake, a stand-in for an immigrant who in reality is a dangerous serpent. “Instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite,” Trump recites.

Talking to the base

While some scholars have called the White House social media style “amateurish,” that hasn’t resulted in change.

The lack of response to negative feedback is partially explained by the strategic goal of these communications: to appeal to the frustrations of Trump’s deeply disaffected political base, which seems to revel in the White House social media style.

Scholars identify a large number of these voters as “the precariat,” a group whose once-stable, union-protected jobs have been outsourced or replaced with low-wage, insecure service work. These workers, many former Democrats, can no longer count on a regular paycheck, benefits or work they can identify with.

As a result, they are more likely to support political candidates whom they believe will respond to their economic instability.

In addition, many of these voters blame a breakdown in what they perceive as the racial pecking order for a loss of social status, especially when compared with more highly educated workers. Many of these workers distrust the media and other elite institutions they feel have failed them. Research shows that they are highly receptive to messages that confirm their grievances and that many regard Trump as their champion.

Trump and the White House social media play to this audience.

On social media, the president is free to violate norms that anger his critics but have little effect on his supporters, who view the current political system as flawed. One example: A White House Valentine’s Day communication that said “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.”

In addition, Trump and the White House social media use the president’s status as a celebrity, coupled with comedy and spectacle, to immunize the administration from fallout, even among some of its critics.

Trump’s exaggerated gestures, over-the-top language, his lampooning of opponents and his use of caricature to ridicule whole categories of people – including Democrats, the disabled, Muslims, Mexicans and women – is read by his political base as a playful and entertaining take down of political correctness. It may form a sturdy pillar of his support.

But prioritizing entertainment over facts has long-term significance.

Trump’s communication strategies are already setting a global precedent, encouraging other politicians to adopt similar theatrical and polarizing tactics that distort or deny facts.

These methods may energize some audiences but risk alienating others. Informed political engagement is reduced, and democratic backsliding is increasingly a reality.

Although the communication style of the White House is playful and irreverent, it has a serious goal: the diffusion of ideological messages whose intent is to create a sense of strength and righteousness among its supporters.

In simple terms, this is propaganda designed to persuade citizens that the government is strong, its enemies evil and that fellow citizens – “real Americans” – think the same way.

Scholars observe that the White House projection of the often comical images of authority echoes the visual style of authoritarian governments. Both seek to be seen as in control of the social and political order and thereby to discourage dissent.

The chief difference between the two is that in a deeply polarized democracy such as the U.S., citizens interpret these displays of authority in sharply different ways: They build opposition among Trump opponents but support among supporters.

The rising intolerance that results erodes social cohesion, undermines support for democratic norms and weakens trust in institutions. And that opens the door to democratic backsliding.

Andrew Rojecki, Professor of Communication, University of Illinois Chicago and Tanja Aitamurto, Associate Professor of Communication, *University of Illinois Chicago

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

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rww July 31, 2024

Ali Alexander offers some advice to the Trump campaign: “YOU HAVE TO GET NATIVIST, RACIST, NATIONALIST, AND CATHOLIC! TO WIN!”

AHA EFFORTS TO RE-CLAIM ---NATIONALIST BUT 1ST FOR RACISM? // THEY ARE GONNA CALL US BAD NAMES/RACIST NO MATTER WHat we do so we might as well own it/ do what we like/ push back on pc woke attacks?

aha blends light and dark metaphor, god/good  light in conflict w/ satan end times armageddon

you act for god, and he will protect you from harm from evil one(s)

jan 6 trump called his troops to fight like hell for him/dark dems who stole power

spiritual battle gets us that bit closer to real violence

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/gird-your-loins-for-battle-put-on-the-full-armor-of-god-desantis-running-as-a-biblical-anti-lgbtq-warrior/

Florida Republican **Governor Ron DeSantis** appears to be using the “Don’t Say Gay“ legislation he signed into law with barely any notice Monday as the new flag of his bible-based anti-LGBTQ re-election campaign.

“Gird your loins for battle. We are going to fight. You put on the full armor of God,” the Florida Republican running for re-election says in a video posted to social media this week, with the state flag behind him and a poster reading, “Keep FloridaFree.”

“You take a stand against the Left’s schemes. Yeah, you’re gonna face flaming arrows, but if you stand for truth, you and we will prevail.”

Former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski weighed in, saying: “Desantis gets sexual and biblical on the campaign trail.”

The full biblical reference makes DeSantis’ remarks even more disturbing. They come from Ephesians 6:11-18, which mentions the devil and the spiritual forces of evil, It reads in part:

“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be ableto stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.… In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of theevil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is thewordof God.”

Watch:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-incendiary-language-ive-documented-12-kinds-of-communication-that-lead-to-acts-of-violence-the-president-has-used-them-all

no lnx

trump’s incendiary language: I’ve documented 12 kinds of communication that lead to acts of violence. The president has used them all

Written by Helio Fred Garcia / Salon June 22, 2020

Donald Trump’s tweet the week before last that the 75-year old man who was shoved to the ground by police in Buffalo and wound up in the intensive care unit “could be an ANTIFA provocateur” was just one latest example of Trump’s use of language to demonize others.

His call a week earlier that “when the looting starts the shooting starts” not merely glorifies violence, as Twitter noted. It predictably creates conditions that lead to violence.

It is all part of a predictable pattern. I am a communication and leadership professor and have spent the last 18 months carefully studying Trump’s language in preparing for a forthcoming book. I have documented12 kinds of communication that have historically preceded acts of violence against groups, critics or rivals — and that have led to civil unrest. Trump uses all 12 forms. These include:

Dehumanizing a group: He dehumanizes groups: Mexicans, Muslims, migrants. He calls them animals and says their presence among us is an “infestation.”

Demonizing a rival or critic: He tells four congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from; all are American citizens, and three were born in this country. He says those congresswomen are not capable of loving America. He refutes the legitimacy of a sitting president, and says the speaker of the House wants terrorists, drug kingpins and human traffickers to enter the country to wreak havoc.

Severely exaggerating risk: He inflates a relatively harmless event — a scraggly group of impoverished migrants walking thousands of miles to seek legal asylum — and calls it a “caravan” or an “invasion,” funded by mysterious sources, infiltrated by dangerous people, worthy of mobilizing the military.

Trump’s call for mobilizing the active duty military to respond to civil unrest is an escalation of this third form of language that provokes violence.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide defines “dangerous speech” as speech that, under the right conditions, can influence people to accept, condone and commit violence against members of a group. Trump’s language has that effect.

After Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans rapists, drug dealers and the cause of many American problems including crime, hate crimes against people perceived to be Latino surged.

After he called for a “total and complete ban of Muslims entering the United States,” hate crimes against people perceived to be Muslim or Arab surged.

As he persisted, earlier this year, in calling COVID-19 the “China virus,” hate crimes against people perceived to be Asian surged.

And as he was allowed to get away with it, Trump escalated his rhetoric. He began, pre-campaign, conditionally: If Barack Obama wasn’t born in this country, he could not be president. It moved to the outright declarative: He asserted, falsely, that Rep. Ilhan Omar has praised al-Qaida. In fact, she has denounced them her entire career

A few weeks ago, he escalated further: He retweeted a video of the head of Cowboys for Trump, who happens to be an elected official, saying “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

With his escalation of language, the violence also escalated. During the campaign it took the form mostly of hate crimes.

But all that changed in the run up to the 2018 midterm elections, when it provoked acts and attempted acts of terrorism.

In early October 2018, Trump was using some form of “invader,” invasion,” “criminal,” “animal” or “killer” between eight and 10 times per rally. By late October it had escalated to more than 30 times. These were further amplified by his tweets. His words were then amplified further in the media and social media, and then took off in the white supremacist ecosystem that became an echo chamber.

He said that George Soros was funding the “caravan” that constituted an “invasion” at the border. Within two days, more than 2 million Twitter accounts reaching 275 million people mentioned both Soros and “caravan” together. So did Facebook accounts reaching 99 million.

That same week, in late October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter committed an act of terror in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding two. Six days before the shooting he posted, “I have noticed a change in people saying ‘illegals’ that now say ‘invaders.’ I like this.” He took up the Soros conspiracy, and he named synagogues that he said were funding a refugee agency that was involved in the “invasion.” Two hours before the shooting, he posted that this agency “likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw the optics. I’m going in.”

That same week a Trump supporter sent a mail bomb to Soros’ home, and other bombs to a dozen Trump critics. The New Zealand mosque shooter and the El Paso Walmart shooter both invoked Trump and invasions in their manifestos.

So what can engaged citizens, civic leaders, journalists and public officials do?

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First, they need to see the pattern and to name it.

Second, they need to name the foreseeable consequences of such language: It creates the very social conditions that can lead people to accept, condone and commit violence against members of a group, a rival or a critic.

Third, they need to unambiguously call on Trump, or any other leader who uses such language, to stop. And to make clear that they hold that leader accountable for the violent consequences of such language.

We saw just this when former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, finally broke his silence. Speaking of his successor, current Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Mattis said, “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.'”

Speaking of the president, Mattis said, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

Gen. Mattis has shown us the way. Now it’s up to the rest of us.

the MAN of action, is a man of few words, straight-shooter, actions speak louder than words; unaccustomed as i am to public speaking, b/c gossipy women talk too much.

appeasement wwii chamberlain vs hitler vs churchill; abandon principles = weak = sin

KB:  jaw jaw is better than war war

but talk predisposes rational enemy willing to compomise (vs defeat evial/ crazy via manly force)

620

aha:  us vs them enemy: we are the reasonable rational people, within accepted norms, but THEY are dangerous, deranged, cannot be reasoned with so MUST be met with FORCE, strict father must punish mis-behavior; [fundamentalist they are evil? end time armageddon?]

RANGE:

alarmist is irrationally worried about an issue, worst case will get some policy enacted that will increase friction/cost/bureaucracy

activist, same as above but is ACTIVE in street or politics, so can increase cost/damage

extremist sorta tied with militant, but latter ominous suggestion of force?  well doth do, but hard to picture Pelosi busting out AR 15?

easy slide over to terrorism (eco economic)

fascist one man alone can fix the (single?) threat/problem

takes immediate swift unilateral Executive order action

aha: do nothing congress was an actual thing, commented on (repeatedly?) by Maddow in comparison on recent GOP led senate (recall mtg right after BO where (openly vs leaked?) declared we will pass nothing even if we favor it); so lack of any gov't action that could help ppl is blamed on dems;  plus a MAN of action will get it done whatever it takes, HARD vs soft dems/fems

@realDonaldTrump

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier [FREUDIAN TYPO?] from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership,  yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/fox-news-removes-unethical-digitally-altered-images-of-police-brutality-protests-in-seattle

ok he was there, but a week before?

no lnx pix twt

fox News removes ‘unethical’ digitally altered images of police brutality protests in Seattle

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1288386304 Tallinn, Estonia - 01/18/2019: Fox News website homepage. Fox News channel logo visible through a magnifying glass.

Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon June 16, 2020

Fox News over the weekend removed misleading images from stories about protests against police brutality in Seattle from its website after it was revealed they had been digitally altered in a manner which made the scene appear dangerous.

The Seattle Times published a report Friday calling out multiple images from Fox News coverage of the police-free “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) in the city.

One photo illustration appearing on the Fox News homepage showed a masked man with an assault rifle and tactical vest standing in front of a sign reading, “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.” The outlet did not originally disclose that the photo of the scene and the photo of the armed man had been spliced together using two different photos, which were taken more than a week apart.

The original photo, from Getty Images, shows the armed man in front of a car.

He was digitally placed in front of the entrance sign.

The same image of the man appeared in at least one other image on Fox News’ website, in front of a smashed retail storefront. According to The Times, it was also a combination of multiple images.

“It is definitely Photoshopped,” freelance photographer David Ryder, who took the original photo and published it through Getty images, told the outlet. “To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”

Conservatives, including President Donald Trump, have attempted to sculpt the CHAZ storyline into a political flashpoint. Protesters converted the area into a street festival after police, who teargassed demonstrators, left the precinct in an effort to de-escalate tensions.

Trump tweeted Thursday that “Radical Left Governor [J]ay Inslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped [sic] IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!”

The mayor told the president, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”

Fox News on Friday used a photo of a man running through an urban inferno as a banner image for a group of stories about Seattle under the headline, “CRAZY TOWN || Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol anarchists’ autonomous zone, shake down businesses: cops.”

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The photo was unaltered, but it was an AP photo taken May 30 in St. Paul, Minn. Fox News later removed it.

The articles did not notify readers that the photos were altered, and it remains unclear who was responsible for the decision to do so. A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment.

In an emailed statement, a Fox News spokeswoman told The Times: “We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront, both of which were taken this week in Seattle’s autonomous zone.”

However, that statement itself was inaccurate. While the gunman was photographed that week — June 10 — the smashed storefront images were first published by Getty on May 30.

Fox News fully apologized Saturday in an editor’s note accompanying its CHAZ coverage, acknowledging that it “did not clearly delineate” the photo illustrations, which it labeled a “collage.” The site also apologized for falsely attributing the shot of the Minneapolis fire. “Fox News regrets these errors,” the note said.

Talent at the conservative network have attempted to use the Seattle protests as a political wedge issue. For example, primetime host Tucker Carlson accused the people in the zone of advocating segregation.

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The network also reported an anecdotal claim from Seattle Assistant Chief of Police Deanna Nollette.

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“We’ve heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area,” Nollette said. “This is the crime of extortion.”

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Police Chief Carmen Best later corrected that statement.

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“We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring,” she said, indicating the reports had come from rumors spread on social media.

Though the Seattle protests have at times been home to contentious scenes of unrest — including a cop filmed forcibly removing his partner’s knee from someone’s neck and a man filmed driving into a crowd of protesters and shooting a black man — the CHAZ street scene has been almost entirely peaceful, featuring musical and visual artists, free street food, concerts and movies.

Best said she did not think the officers should have abandoned the precinct, a move which she claims has led to longer 911 response times.

Trump called demonstrators “domestic terrorists” over the weekend and threatened federal action unless local officials “take back” the area. He also falsely claimed that antifa forces had taken over the city.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership,  yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

256K

1:47 PM - Jun 14, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

121K people are talking about this

“City officials have not interacted with ‘armed antifa militants’ at this site,” a city spokesperson told CNN.

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420

trump twt support TP covid protests, // ingraham

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/governor-warns-trump-against-encouraging-supporters-to-disobey-the-law-on-lockdowns-words-can-be-fatal/

no lnx

Governor warns Trump against encouraging supporters to ‘disobey the law’ on lockdowns: ‘Words can be fatal’

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story April 18, 2020

On Friday’s edition of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) tore into President Donald Trump for his comments that Democratic states should be “liberated” from lockdown orders.

“Governor, you called the president’s tweets saying liberate Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia, ‘dangerous’, ‘unhinged,'” said Cooper. “You just heard him … I’m wondering what your reaction is.”

“Extreme disappointment, and frankly anger, because we’ve lost over 500 people in my state, and we know — there’s saying in automobile safety, that speed kills. Well, words can be fatal too.”

“When you have a president of the United States openly, willfully, maliciously trying to encourage people not to abide by the law in these states — these orders are the law of these states — president of the United States willfully trying to inspire people to disobey and violate the law with potentially fatal consequences, is irresponsible, no other way to look at it,” continued Inslee. “And what is doubly enraging to us, both Republicans and Democrats, the day before this president put out very clear guidelines based on substantial epidemiological evidence of his experts Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx that had a lot of reason to it, saying we have to wrestle this virus down significantly before we let off pressure of social distancing.”

“His own physicians saying this, his own guidelines that we’re pretty consistent with in state approaches, Republicans and Democrats,” added Inslee. “The next day, to say you should ignore that, is an outrage.”

Watch below:

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-distort-sen-schumers-remarks-erase-very-real-threat-anti-abortion

Following comments from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) regarding an upcoming Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, right-wing media rushed to paint abortion rights advocates as dangerous while ignoring the very real threat of anti-abortion violence -- and right-wing media’s own role in stoking it.

On March 4, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo, a case about a law in Louisiana that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. During an abortion rights rally in front of the Supreme Court in support of overturning the law, Schumer, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Schumer’s comments called out President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for potentially rolling back reproductive rights. After right-wing media and conservative figures -- including Chief Justice John Roberts -- condemned Schumer’s remarks as “threats” against the two justices, the Senate minority leader clarified that he was talking about “political consequences” and not referring to acts of violence. Schumer explained that Republicans were “busy manufacturing outrage over these comments” and didn’t actually believe their claims against him.

Following Schumer’s initial comments, however, some in right-wing media took the opportunity to dishonestly condemn abortion rights advocates as violent, saying Schumer was speaking in front of a “mob” and “sending a dog whistle to crazies out there.” Such reactions served as another attempt by right-wing media to paint Democrats and abortion rights advocates as “extreme” on abortion and ignored their own role in perpetuating anti-abortion violence.

Here are right-wing media’s nonsensical reactions to Schumer’s comments:

• On Fox & Friends, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said, “Look, he was in front of a crowd. They were fanatically committed to the maximum opportunity to kill children, and they were all revved up, he was revved up, and he got carried away. And what he said was pure demagoguery -- it was totally irresponsible and dangerous."

• Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitanoclaimed Schumer was trying to show that the justices could be “intimidated by a mob outside of the courthouse” and the senator “might actually be sending a dog whistle to crazies out there.”

• Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion Students for Life of America and Fox News guest:

• Fox & Friendsalso allowed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) a platform to falsely assert that Schumer’s comments were because he “wants the Supreme Court to uphold unlimited abortion on demand in every circumstance with no limitations whatsoever.” According to Cruz, “Where Senate Democrats are right now, they are so angry that they're willing to try to get what they want through threats and through really naked intimidation.”

• Washington Examinercontributor Kimberly Ross:

• Conservative radio host and former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch told Fox & Friends that Schumer “focused the rage of the mob” against the two justices. She also said that “this is irresponsible, it’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and I think that they’ve seen the consequences of their rhetoric before,” referencing the 2017 attack on the Republican congressional baseball team.

• BlazeTV’s Allie Beth Stuckey:

• On America’s Newsroom, Fox News guest anchor Julie Banderas and contributor Andy McCarthy both called the rally of abortion rights advocates a “mob,” with McCarthy claiming that “the mob is out there, and Schumer is agitating them because it works, that's the reason they do it.”

• Townhall’s Guy Benson:

• On Hannity, Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett said Schumer’s comments are “especially dangerous, as the chief justice pointed out, because it's in front of a crowd that's already angry and enraged in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. It could easily and tragically be misinterpreted by some, triggering or provoking or encouraging violence.”

• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh:

• Conservative author and Trump pardon recipient Dinesh D'Souza asserted on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle that Schumer’s remarks demonstrated “how deranged our politics, particularly around the pro-life issue, have become.” D’Souza dismissed the Louisiana law at issue in June v. Russo, saying it is “a very moderate law,” and “if that causes Schumer to go into such a paroxysm of rage, you can just imagine the craziness that we’re in for as the court begins to shift and as landmark decisions do come into question,” referring to the court’s potential to undermine or overturn Roe v. Wade.

Right-wing media are ignoring the reality of anti-abortion violence -- and their role in perpetuating it

Right-wing media’s reactions to Schumer’s comments ignore the very real and ongoing threat of anti-abortion violence in the United States and right-wing media’s role in stoking it.

Eleven people have died as a result of anti-abortion violence in the U.S. since 1993. Numerous others have been injured, and still more have found themselves and even their families targeted with personalized harassment from abortion opponents. And the trend has intensified in recent years, showing little sign of abating. In May 2019, the National Abortion Federation (NAF) released a report that analyzed violence, intimidation, and harassment of abortion providers from the previous year. According to the report, NAF abortion providers and clinics encountered 21,252 incidents of hate emails and internet harassment, 1,135 incidents of trespassing, and 1,388 harassing calls or hate mail in 2018. Abortion providers also told NAF that they received 57 threats of harm or death threats and were subjected to 15 cases of assault and battery that year.

Some right-wing media outlets have also helped fan the flames of resentment against abortion providers, patients, and clinics. In 2009, an anti-abortion extremist murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller while he was attending church with his family. Before Tiller's assassination, former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had openly bullied Tiller on his program numerous times. According to Rolling Stone, “O’Reilly had waged an unflagging war against Tiller that did just about everything short of urging his followers to murder him.” O’Reilly repeatedly called the doctor “Tiller the baby killer” and said there was a “special place in hell for this guy.” At one point, O’Reilly said, “And if I could get my hands on Tiller – well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech. But despicable? Oh, my God. Oh, it doesn't get worse. Does it get worse? No." After Tiller’s assassination, O’Reilly claimed he only “reported accurately” on Tiller and wasn’t responsible for the provider’s murder.

In 2015, an anti-abortion extremist who killed three and injured nine at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood reportedly offered the phrase “no more baby parts” as an explanation for his actions. His comment seemingly referred to an oft-repeated right-wing media talking point based on deceptive undercover videos from the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress. The New Republic reported on the admitted shooter’s penchant for right-wing media such as Fox News and Infowars, saying it shaped his paranoid and conspiratorial views about abortion and Planned Parenthood and may have influenced his actions.

Right-wing media have also amplified sensationalized anti-abortion rhetoric and misinformation. In 2019, Fox News aggressively pushed the malicious lie that Democratic support for abortion access amounted to “infanticide.” A Media Matters study of how abortion is discussed on prime-time cable news programs explained that the network fueled the right-wing media talking point by relentlessly echoing this inaccurate claim.

Why is this really happening?

Rather than expressing legitimate concerns about pro-choice violence -- itself an “absurd lie,” as abortion clinic escort Lauren Rankin wrote for New York magazine -- right-wing media’s outrage over Schumer’s comments serves only as dishonest political fodder for the 2020 election cycle. Once again, right-wing media have latched onto a non-story to bash Democratic support for abortion as “extreme” and to demonize those that advocate for abortion access. Indeed, right-wing media and abortion opponents already harassed and attempted to stigmatize some of the speakers from the rally on social media. Rather than pointing fingers, right-wing media should examine the power and danger of their own rhetoric on abortion.

==

aha: depressing that our best tool, name and shame gets perverted: "bad faith" the term can be weaponized / co-opted like "fake news"  (one can use the charge in bad faith, in fact Barr did)

==

aha: grn blk death: see energy poverty

started as tinfoil ag 21 ? but has been percolating to lomborg and then stanley kurtz (pseudo-academic); also variant in the fed

it's jiu jitsu mirror reverse crypto: the right really cares about poor ppl, not just corp shills  or party ideologue robots

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-the-terrifying-truth-about-trumps-hysterical-nuremberg-style-state-of-the-union/

==

FALLBACK

aha 1119

1) it's not real

2) it's real but just natural variation (sunspots, medieval ice age...)

3) it's real and human caused, but too expensive to fix (wreck economy)

3a) Lomborg: more efficient to do Y  (or do evil in the guise/name of green: frack, nuke)

3b: wheeler many decades out, 3rd world clean water (ignores that coal poisons am water/kids, coal ash, arsenic...)

sparked by wheeler BS, 4/5th phase of fallback?

crypto/mirror/ green blk death variant?

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/09/18/fossil-fuels-spin-investors-messaging

 Kate Yoder, Grist. This story originally appeared in Grist. It is republished here as part of DeSmog's partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Forget “climate change” and “global warming”: Environmental advocates are increasingly using phrases that emphasize the urgency of our planetary pickle, such as “climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” and “existential threat.”

But do-gooders aren’t the only ones with savvy messaging techniques. Over the years, fossil fuel companies have poured millions into sowing doubt about climate science and burnishing their public image. Now, fossil fuel companies are reckoning with a different communications challenge: convincing their investors that the future of oil and gas companies is bright … or at least bright enough.

It may seem like a tough sell. After all, keeping warming limited to 2 degrees Celsius means phasing out the very commodity Big Oil is known for. A survey of European fund managers earlier this year found that 86 percent want oil companies to adopt policies in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement, and 24 percent think these companies should wind down their business and return money to shareholders.

More pressing threats are looming over the U.S. shale industry, which uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) to extract oil from rocks. Some 26 oil and gas producers in the United States have filed for bankruptcy so far this year, and shale stocks are hovering near rock bottom. Even as the country’s oil production booms, shale companies have been dealing with big issues, both fiscal and technical, and investors are getting disenchanted.

In the face of these challenges, oil and gas companies are changing the way they talk to investors and the public. Based on an analysis of transcripts from the earnings calls of 40 public shale companies in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal and financial research firm Sentieo Inc. concluded that “fracking’s buzzwords have changed significantly” in the past four years, moving from a vocabulary of growth to one that promises to rein in spending.

“Ramping up” production is out; delivering on “free cash flow” is in. Translation: Companies are trying to reassure investors by bringing in more money than they spend, with the possibility of using the profit for stock buybacks or paying dividends. Not coincidentally, terms like “buyback” and “dividend” are also on the rise in earnings calls.

Oil companies have also shifted their vocabulary in recent years. They’ve begun using the phrase “climate change” less often in their corporate social responsibility reports, according to a paper published last year by Sylvia Jaworska, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Reading, who analyzed nearly 300 corporate responsibility reports from BP, Exxon, and others from 2000 to 2013.

And when they did mention our overheating planet, oil companies used increasingly passive language. Back in 2007, when the use of “climate change” peaked in the corporate social responsibility reports, it frequently appeared next to “combat.” In more recent years, the few times that “climate” did show up, it often showed up near the word “risks” (more in the “threat to business” sense than the “threat to humans” sense, as Quartz pointed out).

Perhaps the fossil fuel industry’s greatest linguistic accomplishment? That our lexicon has come to normalize the role these polluting fuels play in our lives. For example, we talk about “hybrid” or “electric” cars, while gas-powered cars are just … cars.

If we want to build momentum for a low-carbon world, we need to make the harmful aspects of fossil fuels explicit in the language we use, argued Matthew Hoffman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, in an article in The Conversation earlier this summer. That means saying things like “dirty, gas-powered cars; polluting, coal-fired electricity; unsustainable, oil-dependent agriculture.”

As for “freedom gas”? That’s definitely a no-go.

==

thru looking glass? mirror crypto?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/16/attorney-general-barr-accuses-democrats-using-oversight-powers-try-cripple-executive-branch/

wapo no lnx

Attorney General Barr accuses Democrats of ‘war’ on Trump in speech decried as partisan

Attorney General William P. Barr described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

By

Hannah Knowles

November 16, 2019

:{

}:

Attorney General William P. Barr accused Democrats on Friday of using their oversight powers to sabotage the executive branch, criticizing the “resistance” to President Trump and what he called a broader erosion in the commander in chief’s rightful authority.

:{

}:

The Trump appointee described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has played a key role in the administration’s efforts to seat record numbers of right-leaning federal judges.

:{

}:

“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” Barr told his audience of lawyers at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

To critics, the speech was overly partisan and even “authoritarian.” It prompted some calls for Barr’s impeachment from lawyers and legal scholars, many of whom believe his views of presidential power are too expansive. Barr says the Constitution’s creators envisioned a strong executive.

His speech came amid a newly public, high-stakes phase of Democrat-led investigations into the White House, as impeachment hearings examine whether Trump abused his office to secure a foreign country’s probe of his political rival. Barr recently declined Trump’s request that he hold a news conference defending Trump in the inquiry by saying the president broke no laws in a call to Ukraine’s president, individuals familiar with the situation told The Washington Post....

==

too late?

c de  v

:{

}:

Donald Trump and his spokespeople continue to engage instochastic terrorism. The most recent example: Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., perhaps Trump’s most avid congressional defender, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Monday that journalists are “assassins.”

Trump and his Republican Party are continuing their campaign to keep nonwhite people and other likely Democratic supporters from voting. This is part of a broader effort to undermine the human and civil rights of nonwhite people in America and around the world.

Public opinion polls and other research show that Donald Trump’s political cult remains extremely loyal to him. Fox News and other parts of the right-wing propaganda machine continue to distort reality in the president’s favor. Trump himself has now told almost 14,000 public lies. Trump’s hate-filled rallies continue to draw thousands of supporters, people who are being primed for political violence by the president’s rhetoric and other behavior.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-language-of-tyrants-columnist-explains-why-trump-is-suddenly-freaking-out-about-impeachment/

no lnx

‘The language of tyrants’: Columnist explains why Trump is suddenly ‘freaking out about impeachment’

Written by Alex Henderson October 25, 2019

Donald Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to play hardball politics, but most of his predecessors — for all the heated policy debates that occurred in the past — at least viewed their political rivals as the loyal opposition. Trump, however, often resorts to attacks that are beyond insulting: they dehumanize his opponents. And that dehumanization, journalist Susan B. Glasser emphasizes in her most recent column for The New Yorker, is more typical of a dictator or authoritarian than a U.S. president.

Glasser cites an October 23 tweet as an example of Trump’s authoritarian mindset. The president posted, “The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!”

Using terms like “human scum,” “dogs” and “enemies of the people,” Glasser notes, is typical of Trump — who often resorts to using “the language of tyrants and those who aspire to be tyrants.” And Glasser cites some examples of other political leaders known for that type of rhetoric.

“Hitler called his enemies human scum, and so did Stalin,” Glasser explains. “In recent years, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as ‘the Trump of South America,’ denounced refugees as ‘the scum of humanity’ — and the Russian president Vladimir Putin denounced Sergei Skripal, the former spy recently poisoned by Russian agents in Britain, as a disloyal ‘scumbag.’”

Glasser continues, “The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump says he has a ‘love affair,’ executed his uncle after a show trial in which he was called ‘despicable human scum…. worse than a dog.’ Kim’s regime, it should be noted, also called Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, who differed with the president on the subject of North Korea, a ‘bloodsucker’ and ‘human scum.’”

Trump, according to Glasser, has been especially inflammatory in recent weeks because he is now facing an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives. And as Trump has begun “freaking out about impeachment,” Glasser writes, his use of dehumanizing language is one way to bully fellow Republicans into submission.

“Trump is adjusting to a new political reality, one that is taking shape in a secure conference room on Capitol Hill,” Glasser observes. “And it is a dangerous one for him: he now faces the very real possibility of impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, and just in time for the start of the 2020 election year.”

Glasser wraps up her column by stressing that Trump is right about one thing: Never Trump Republicans are in short supply in Congress these days.

“His internal enemies in the Republican Party are weak and few in number — for now,” Glasser explains. “One thing missing from all the Republican complaints about impeachment this week, however, was a robust defense of what Trump actually did. And that, in the end, is exactly what the Senate jurors will ultimately have to make up their minds about.”

==

kurds fight over land, which seems noble ie for homes, but also tribal/primitive? land --> sand, which children play in

Cody Fenwick

‘Absolutely no respect for human life’: Trump compares Turkish assault on Kurds to two kids fighting in a parking lot

==

many graphs

https://medium.com/swlh/analyzing-trumps-tweets-5368528d2c90

quite good

...All of these attacks can be placed into 6 main buckets. These include accusations of weakness, stupidity, failure, illegitimacy, corruption or fear-based attacks. Some examples are below.

1 — Weakness— ie. low, old, lightweight, losing, losers, ridiculous, poor, pathetic

eg. “The U.S. has pathetically weak and ineffective Immigration Laws that the Democrats refuse to help us fix.”

2 — Stupidity— ie. dopey, incompetent, clueless, moron

eg. “Paul Begala, the dopey @CNN flunky and head of the Pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC, has knowingly committed fraud in his first ad against me.”

3 — Failure — ie. failing, failed, disaster

eg. “No wonder the @nytimes is failing — who can believe what they write after the false, malicious & libelous story they did on me.”

4 — Illegitimacy⁵ — ie. fake, false, biased, hoax, haters, unfair, a joke, rigged

eg. “Wow, sleepy eyes @chucktodd is at it again. He is do [sic] totally biased.”

5 — Corrupt — ie crooked

e.g “Big story out that the FBI ignored tens of thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails, many of which are REALLY BAD”

6 — Fear — ie. enemy, threat, radical

eg. “Many of the Syrian rebels are radical jihadi Islamists who are murdering Christians”

==

cf rhet

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-attacks-congresswoman-tlaib-for-suggesting-democrats-jail-lawbreaking-white-house-officials/

...Trump is off and tweeting on Sunday morning, turning his ire on Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) after she admitted that Democrats are considering detaining White House officials who are refusing to comply with subpoenas.

According to a report from The Hill, Tlaib, “revealed in a new interview that House Democrats have discussed jailing allies of the president who do not comply with congressional subpoenas, an escalation of the House’s efforts to force White House compliance with an impeachment inquiry.”

==

How the New Climate Denial Is Like the Old Climate Denial

Both are excuses for inaction.

MEEHAN CRIST

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

There has been a subtle shift recently in the rhetoric of many conservative pundits and politicians around climate change. For decades, the common refrain has been flat-out denial—either that climate change is not happening, or that any change is not caused by human activity. Which is why viewers might have been surprised to see Tucker Carlson of Fox News nodding along thoughtfully on January 6 as climate scientist Judith Curry, a controversial figure in climate science, explained, “Yes it’s warming and yes humans contribute to it. Everybody agrees with that, and I’m in the 98 percent [of scientists who agree]. It’s when you get down to the details that there’s genuine disagreement.” Carlson immediately turns to the camera and moots a multi-part series: “What do we know? What don’t we know?”

This rhetorical stance—yes, climate change is real, and yes, human activity is implicated, but we don’t know how much human activity is to blame—is fast becoming the go-to position for conservatives. In confirmation hearings last week, Senator Ed Markey asked Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, if he agrees with Trump that global warming is a “hoax.” Pruitt replied that he does not. But later, under questioning by Senator Bernie Sanders, Pruitt refused to say how much change is caused by human activity. He would say only that the “climate is changing, and human activity contributes to that in some manner.” When pressed by Sanders on whether he agreed with 97 percent of scientists who have published in peer-reviewed journals that human activity is “the fundamental reason we are seeing climate change,” Pruitt equivocated. “I believe the ability to measure with precision the degree of human activity’s impact on the climate is subject to more debate.

-

The key phrases in Pruitt’s testimony are “in some manner” and “with precision.” These allow Pruitt to acknowledge climate change is happening while moving uncertainty downstream, into the “details.”

This rhetoric is out of step with the latest science. The most recent IPCC report expresses 95 percent confidence that humans are the main cause of most global warming observed since the 1950s. According to one paper summarized on NASA’s Global Climate Change website, “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” The list of scientists and agencies in agreement goes on and on.

Some conservatives have introduced uncertainty by suggesting climate change might be driven by “natural” global cycles. But according to Maureen Raymo of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, we know why climate changes naturally, and non-human activity can’t explain the rapid changes observed in the past century. “The Ice Ages happen due to subtle changes in the sun-earth distance that unfold over thousands of years, and which can lead to sometimes rapid climate change, when thresholds are crossed.” These cycles are still happening, but “the same factors that cause these huge Ice Age swings could not possibly be invoked to explain the warming we now see.” In fact, Raymo said, “left to its own devices, right now Mother Nature would be making the climate colder.”

The planet has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century. “You can quibble about tiny bits,” said Raymo, “but the vast majority of what we observe is that it’s because we’ve been combusting fossil fuels.”

As Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Principal Investigator for the GISS ModelE Earth System Model, put it, “In science, nothing is ever known perfectly. Is there remaining uncertainty in the exact value of gravity? Yes. But to something like the fourth decimal place. It doesn’t matter. So the question is: Is the remaining uncertainty relevant to any policy decision anyone would want to make? And the answer is: no.”

Uncertainty has proved a reliable tool to manipulate public perception of climate change and stall political action. In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists released The Climate Deception Dossiers, which describes a 1998 memo from the American Petroleum Institute that, according to the dossiers, “mapped out a multifaceted deception strategy for the fossil-fuel industry that continues to this day—outlining plans to reach the media, the public, and policy makers with a message emphasizing ‘uncertainties’ in climate science.” The UCS authors write that the memo (included in the report) states “victory” would be achieved “when ‘average citizens’ and the media were convinced of uncertainties in climate science despite overwhelming evidence of the impact of human-caused global warming and nearly unanimous agreement about it in the scientific community.”

Another “victory” listed on the API memo’s bullet-point list would be when, “those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.”

The new climate-denial rhetoric dovetails with longstanding tactics used by conservatives and fossil fuel companies to sow doubt about climate change, even as they publicly recognize its reality. In a 2006 Letter from ExxonMobil Vice President of Public Affairs Ken Cohen to the Royal Society, the corporation acknowledged that “the use of fossil fuels is a ‘major source’ of carbon dioxide emissions” and tied emissions to climate change: “Given the important role fossil fuels play in providing energy for the global economy, the issues of global economic development, future energy supply, and climate change are closely linked.” This past November, ExxonMobil even endorsed the Paris Agreement in a carefully-worded statement that balanced the need to reduce global emissions with the statement that, “access to affordable and reliable energy is critical to economic growth and improved standards of living worldwide.” Despite this acknowledgement, ExxonMobil has, since November, launched a suite of massive extraction projects in Nigeria, Mozambique, Liberia and Texas.

In his recent confirmation hearings, Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and newly-minted U.S. Secretary of State, carefully avoided making any of the links that ExxonMobil’s own scientists had made by the early 1980s between fossil fuels, rising greenhouse gases, and the ability of those gases to affect climate “in potentially destructive ways.” When asked to explain his “personal view” of climate change by Senator Tom Udall, Tillerson would say only that “after 20 years as an engineer and a scientist,” he had concluded “the risk of climate change does exist,” and “the consequences could be serious enough that action should be taken.” Senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then pointedly asked, “Do you believe that human activity, based on science, is contributing?” Tillerson dodged again, saying only, “The increase in greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect is very limited.”

Tillerson can make statements like these because climate research is ongoing, and climate models are inherently imprecise. According to Schmidt, “To say that science isn’t settled on things people are still researching is totally irrelevant. Does the earth orbit the sun? There’s no substantial ambiguity about the answer to that question, despite the fact that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of scientists working on gravity. There are lots of interesting things about gravity, it’s just that thatis not one of them. There are lots of interesting things about climate change, and adaptation, and interactions between air pollution and clouds, but they’re just not relevant to the question, which is: Is what’s going on related to humans? And the answer is: Yes, it is.”

When Tillerson was pushed by Senator Tim Kaine to admit ExxonMobil’s “history with the issue of climate change,” including the oil giant’s well-documented practice of funding work to discredit climate science and delay political action, he stonewalled until Kaine finally asked, “Are you not answering because you don’t know, or because you don’t want to?” To which Tillerson replied, “A little of both.”

There has been a flurry of recent Republican efforts to stall action on climate policy, including a pair of bills just introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives. Bill H.R. 861, introduced by Representative Matt Gaetz, proposes “to terminate the EPA.” This bill may not even get a vote, but as The New York Timesreported earlier this week, Pruitt “has a blueprint to repeal climate change rules, cut staffing levels, close regional offices and permanently weaken the agency’s regulatory authority.”

Meanwhile, Bill H.R. 673, introduced by Representative Blaine Luetkmeyer, proposes to “prohibit United States contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Green Climate Fund.” It’s also no secret that many Republicans want to halt funding for the UN FCCC, the international treaty system of 195 nations that produced the Paris Agreement. As the Republican party platform stated in the run-up to the presidential election: “We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.”

On February 8, a cohort of old-guard Republicans came out in favor of a carbon tax, which they call a “conservative approach to climate change.” Rather than setting limits on emissions (as with cap-and-trade), a carbon tax would put a higher price on fossil fuel emissions and leave it to the market to curb emissions. This approach may be appealing to some voters, because as the tax slowly increases consumers receive increasing rebates. While this approach at least acknowledges that human use of fossil fuels is contributing to climate change, many experts argue this would not be a meaningful restriction, given the convulsive climate changes already under way.

In September 2016, carbon-dioxide levels in the air crossed the dreaded 400 ppm threshold, and we are not likely to dip back below that level in our lifetimes. Crossing this red line signals an irrevocable shift toward an increasingly unrecognizable planet (the last time the planet’s air was consistently above 400 ppm was 16 million years ago, and the planet looked a lot different). In just the past few months, we have seen record-breaking global temperatures and a stunning decline in sea ice. A slab of ice bigger than Long Island is poised to crack off the Antarctic’s Larsen C ice shelf and the climate-stabilizing flow of the Gulf Stream, which has decreased by 20 percent  in the last 50 years, may be accelerating toward full shut-down. According to the Pentagon’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, climate change will cause catastrophic changes to Earth’s ecosystems and wreak havoc on human populations, including famine, mass migration, and war. A carbon tax may be too little, too late, but even it would be preferable to rhetoric that fails to acknowledge scientific consensus on climate change.

The recent shift in conservative rhetoric exploits legitimate scientific uncertainty that most scientists agree is irrelevant to crafting responsible climate policy. Despite overwhelming evidence, many conservatives are still willing to ignore scientific consensus and stall political action. But offering evidence that this rhetoric is out of step with science may not, in fact, matter when it comes to public perception. When the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology published a press release on February 5, alleging that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “manipulated climate records,” scientists and journalists rushed to correct the statement and demonstrate how it was based on faulty information. But the damage was already done; uncertainty about NOAA and their data are now a part of the public dialogue around climate change.

==

https://www.amazon.com/Troubled-Rhetoric-Communication-Climate-Change/dp/1138841188

The Troubled Rhetoric and Communication of Climate Change: The argumentative situation (Routledge Studies in Environmental Communication and Media) 1st Edition

by Philip Eubanks (Author)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/26/rhetoric-reaction-climate-change/

the rhetoric of reaction to climate change

Futility and the Fourth Climate Change Report.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

November 26, 2018 at 5:01 a.m. PST

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts

...Before I answer that, let’s remember two important facts about President Trump. The first is that he has recently tweeted about climate change:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?

106K

4:23 PM - Nov 21, 2018

Twitter ds info and privacy

112K people are talking about this

The second thing to remember is that Trump does not know a lot about, you know, most areas of public policy. On Sunday, The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta related the following anecdote:

Trump also is often not versed in the particulars of the federal budget.

Chief of Staff John F. Kelly has told others about watching television with Trump and asking the president how much the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns. Trump guessed $5 million, according to people who were told the story by Kelly, startling the chief of staff. Kelly responded that he made less than $200,000. The president suggested he get a large raise and noted the number of stars on his uniform.

So no, do not expect an actual response from the Trump White House when the president believes that “the climate will change back again.

I would also not expect a particularly vigorous reaction from the congressional wing of the GOP either. For one thing, the midterm elections wiped out a lot of moderate Republicans, who are the GOP officials willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real and require some responses. As the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer noted earlier this month, “The 2018 midterm election dramatically shrank the small group of House Republicans who have painted themselves as moderates on climate change."

For another thing, I can already anticipate the reaction, because this is not the first report to make this point this fall. These kind of warnings seem to be issued on a regular basis, almost as if there is something that warrants concern.

Albert Hirschman wrote a great and depressing book titled “The Rhetoric of Reaction” in which he detailed three tropes of argumentation that reactionaries deploy in response to proposals for progressive action.

The “perversity thesis” is the argument that any willful action to address the problem will have counterproductive effects. To see that in action with respect to climate change, see the conservative response to this story about proposed geoengineering.

The “jeopardy thesis” warns that any action taken will sacrifice hard-won gains. That has been the standard GOP response to climate change, which is that any response is not worth risking U.S. living standards (doing nothing, on the other hand, seems guaranteed to threaten U.S. living standards)....

3?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067476868X?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=067476868X

with engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.

Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used:

(1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended;

(2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever―will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo;

(3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments.

He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray.

Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts. For those who aspire to the genuine dialogue that characterizes a truly democratic society, Hirschman points out that both types of rhetoric function, in effect, as contraptions designed to make debate impossible. In the process, his book makes an original contribution to democratic thought.

The Rhetoric of Reaction is a delightful handbook for all discussions of public affairs, the welfare state, and the history of social, economic, and political thought, whether conducted by ordinary citizens or academics After Trump’s digital director Dan Scavino tweeted out a link to the story with the comment, “Sounds about right. COUP!” Trump responded with, “A despicable human being!”...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-unleashes-his-twisted-2020-strategy-of-grievance-and-racism/

no lnx

Trump unleashes his twisted 2020 strategy of grievance and racism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019

36

Having only lost Minnesota by 1.5 percentage points in 2016, the Trump campaign has made it clear that they think they can win the state in 2020. That’s what Thursday night’s rally in Minneapolis was all about. Peter Nichols wrote about the strategy.

One Republican operative close to the White House, speaking anonymously to discuss campaign strategy, told me that Trump is convinced of the old political adage “The race will hinge on turnout.” If he can mobilize and excite his base voters, they’ll show up in force, much as they did in 2016, impeachment be damned…

“His message is so edgy, and his core support is so intense and enthusiastic, and the rallies are so unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era,” the strategist told me. “Arithmetically speaking, this election is about jacking up turnout of your own supporters on the theory that no one on their side of the ball excites them the way Trump excites us,” he said, referring to the Democrats.

If that’s the plan, then we can look at Thursday night’s speech to see how Trump plans to excite his supporters in order to get them to show up in force.

As Nichols pointed out, the first half of Trump’s speech was all about his personal grievances. He mocked FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, said that Joe Biden was “only considered a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass,” called Ilhan Omar an “American-hating socialist,” and referred to congressional Democrats as “sick” for pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Then Trump engaged in his second strategy for exciting his voters: racism. Because Minnesota is home to the largest concentration of Somalis in the country, they became his target.

Same old playbook: racism https://t.co/4OuUA1Hvya

— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) October 11, 2019

He then went on to say that “we will alwaysprotect American families first” and that hadn’t happened in Minnesota. He said that he would not “allow a violent ideology to take root in our country on our shores” like had happened in Europe.Equating the Somali community in Minnesota with a “violent ideology” is not only a racist lie, it is the same kind of rhetoric that inspired the gunman in El Paso.

This is, however, merely a repeat of what Trump did in 2016 when he visited Minnesota two days before the election and told the crowd that they had “suffered enough” as a result of “filthy refugee vetting” that had allowed an influx of Somalis into the state.

When it comes to this part of Trump’s strategy, Elad Nehorai, who describes himself as a “proud progressive Orthodox Jew,” put it best. He wrote that “This is the kind of hate rally seen in authoritarian and fascist countries. We Jews have seen this before, as have countless other minorities. This is the powerful hurting the vulnerable to empower themselves.” Senator Amy Klobuchar echoed that statement.

The President just attacked Somali Americans in his rally in Minnesota. Immigrants and refugees have helped make our state a wonderful place to live and work — which is far more than this President has done. Stop using immigrants and refugees as political pawns!

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) October 11, 2019

I have often been proud to point out that, when it comes to the economy, my home state of Minnesota consistently performs better than the national average. One of the reasons why is because of the very immigrant community the president attacked. Here is the data from the Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis.

With high levels of labor force participation and employment, African immigrants brought in $2.5 billion in earnings during 2015. These households paid $419 million in federal taxes and $222 million in state and local taxes, leaving African immigrants an estimated $1.8 billion in spending power. Despite its relatively small size, the African immigrant population makes significant contributions to the Minnesota economy.

At the end of his speech on Thursday night, Trump threw out a couple of lines about health care and a promise to end childhood cancer. But as Nichols wrote, “he read those parts without any particular vocal affect, perhaps because he doesn’t truly believe they’re the way to win.” It could also be because he doesn’t really give a shit about things like health care. In the end, the plan is to excite his base of supporters with a combination of grievance and racism, because that is exactly what excites him. But the truth is, that’s all he’s got.

==

some fissures on kurds/isis and ukraine but

Any resistance there may have been to Donald Trump's worst impulses inside the White House has gone by the wayside. This week, The Washington Post reported that administration officials, fearing retaliation or diminishing influence, have all but given up trying to temper the president's authoritarian instincts.

Effectively, a nation governed by Trump's worst impulses is one governed by Fox News. Media Matters' Matt Gertz highlighted the various ways Fox News has influenced domestic and foreign policy, as well as the Justice Department investigations.

Additionally, Trump and White House officials are now parroting the network's language regarding impeachment, calling the inquiry led by House Democrats a "coup." Impeachment, by definition, is not a "coup." It is the legal process laid out in the Constitution for holding a president accountable for alleged crimes.

However, the urgency of this language is extremely dangerous. In just the past several years, we have seen several violent attacks or attempted attacks carried out in some part due to right-wing media's increasingly urgent anti-immigrant rhetoric about an "invasion" or a "great replacement." However, as Gertz pointed out, this "has not given Trump pause as he continues to amp up his rhetoric, nor has it led Fox to reflect on the influence its programming has on the most powerful person in the world."

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/columnist-debunks-the-nefarious-right-wing-myth-that-were-a-republic-not-a-democracy/

rhet scam

==

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/forest-service-weighs-plan-to-lay-waste-to-tens-of-thousands-of-acres-of-old-growth-trees/

no lnx

Forest Service weighs plan to lay waste to tens of thousands of acres of old-growth trees

Written by David Cay Johnston / DC Report August 15, 2019

The evil genius of the people Donald Trump brought into our government so America could become a polluter’s paradise is really something to behold.

The latest Team Trump move would turn our national forests into polluter playgrounds. Companies that want to mow down old-growth trees so they can get at pockets of oil, coal or uranium are about to get pretty much everything they’ve always dreamed about. And roadless areas are marked for new roads extending miles into wilderness areas.

The way it’s being done is, in a perverse sort of way, admirably clever.

They call their plan to re-interpret how the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act applies to our national forests “streamlining” to make government more efficient. Their abuse of language is working, too. Many of the more than 29,000 people and organizations that have filed comments on the proposal embrace the Trumpian language.

Few of the comments I reviewed pushed back on “streamlining.” The proposal is better described as “steamrolling” the National Environmental Policy Act, the first federal law to require consideration of Earth and its bounty in governmental decisions.

Forestry, farming and other groups that favor the new policy refer to it as a plan to “modernize how” government complies with the law.

Powerful is the advantage of setting the agenda and with it thelanguage of debate.

You, fellow citizens and owners of our government, now have until Aug. 26 to tell our hired help in the White House and the Forest Service what you think or forever suffer the consequences of idly standing by. Stand up for America’s natural resources.

Virtually No Public Review

The Trump administration, by its own estimate, wants to exempt 93% of forest service decisions from public review.

Currently, about 60% or perhaps 70% of these decisions are left to the discretion of agency professionals and managers without public comment for review. That’s entirely reasonable. A well-functioning government agency can’t be running off to get public input every time its managers want to put up a new sign for a parking lot, replace the toilets at a trailhead or change the color and fabric of ranger uniforms.

The issue is where to draw the line. Let’s look at the clear-cutting of forests, which has a devastating effect on birds, mammals and other wildlife, can cause severe soil erosion that may wipe out salmon runs and even bury houses in mudslides.

Using agency discretion should the Forest Service be allowed to let loggers clear cut a small hillside before pests ruin the wood? What about 500 acres? How about 7,300 acres?

What the Trumpers want is freedom to clear up to 7,300 acres of our forest lands under rules that could hide the action from the public until the deed is done or at least well underway. That is 11.4 square miles or half the size of Manhattan.

That’s just one example of the mischief that would be allowed under the proposed new rules.

One-Day Notice

There would still have to be notices published in the Forest Service’s quarterly Schedule of Proposed Action or SOPA reports.  Under the proposed rules, however, officials could authorize logging the day after SOPA comes out, giving loggers three months to cut before anyone not in the forest or noticing an increase in logging trucks would be clued in.

SOPA reports have long been designed to help hide Forest Service plans, a subtle but valuable benefit of the timber industry. Team Trump wants to tilt the existing rules almost entirely to the benefit of its industrial allies.

Go to the SOPA web page and notice that it is not a single report you could breeze through, perhaps using a Control F search for a keyword.

Instead you must click one-by-one on each of 176 forests, grasslands, prairies or recreational areas. Then you must navigate your way through 10 quarterly SOPA reports since Trump took office, each of which may go on for page after page in dense bureaucratese.

Just look at the SOPAs for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which lists numerous actions like those here.

Rube Goldberg may be dead, but his progeny seem to have found plenty of related work helping make ridiculously complex what should be simple interactions between us and our government.

What happens to forests and the like matters because they provide us with a rich bounty of life and wealth. Natural forests have many kinds of trees and other plants providing food and shelter to a robust array of animals. Clear cut lands are deserts with little life. When Farmer McGregor levels a woodlot to grow carrots he’s not helping Peter Rabbit, he’s killing whole families of rabbits by destroying their natural food sources.

What of wetlands? They are nature’s filters, storm barriers and nurseries and crucial to some forests. Fill marshes and swamps in and the populations of birds, fish and amphibians decline. When there are not enough wetlands to harbor young life that grows up to move on to rivers, lakes and the ocean there are other consequences. Sharks, for example, finding too few fish to sustain their numbers start looking at beachgoers as their next dinner.

The proposed new Forest Service “regulations are designed to dramatically reduce public involvement in federal land management decisions,” Susan Jane Brown of the Western Environmental Law Center in Oregon wrote in a memo detailing the issues.

Logging and mining will likely increase, but “without the benefit of scientific input.”

Team Trump justifies reducing disclosures and radically reducing when the American people can comment to increase efficiency. Since it’s our government – we own it – this is really a ploy to make government a power unto itself, part of the overall Trump desire to replace a government that derives its powers from the consent of the people to a power onto itself.

He has mused at least six times in public about being “president for life” and he often refers to how he wants to rule over what Trump calls “my people.”

==

rww 819  overlap god and devil terms with invasion metaphor (see also infested and vermin lately baltimore cummings)

...One place where the intersection between these two perceived identities becomes more tangible is the allusion often made to Soros as a “billionaire globalist” or the leader of a “globalist movement.” The term “globalist” is used by anti-Semites as shorthand for the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy for power and control. This idea of a global conspiracy has its roots in the Middle Ages, where paranoia about wealthy Jews began to become more prevalent, and the continued thread of this harmful trope can be traced to the 20:{th:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: century myth of Judeo-Bolshevism.

Another aspect of these conspiracies is the suggestion that Jews are conspiring to weaken the state where they reside in order to heighten their own influence. This, specifically, is a common assertion when it comes to Soros’s treatment in the U.S. and Hungary. Soros has been known to lobby for the humane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, especially after Hungary’s controversial treatment of asylum seekers in 2014. This has lead the Right to cast Soros as radically pro-immigration, with some asserting that he is trying to destabilize Europe and the U.S. by allowing dangerous migrants to enter.

In 2018, Donald Trump and others accused Soros of being the “mastermind” behind the migrant “caravan” that trekked from Central America to the U.S. Southern border in 2018. This narrative of Soros as a global mastermind and promoter of non-white immigration “replacing” white Europeans or Americans was cited by the**suspected shooter in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.** The gunman had posted shortly before the massacre about his fears of “white genocide” by these migrant “invaders.”

During the migrant caravan controversy in the U.S., many right-wing commentators suggested that the migrants were being paid by Soros to come to the U.S., echoing similar accusations by right-wing politicians and media in both the U.S. and Hungary that Soros pays protesters to create chaos. By portraying protesters as “Soros agents,” right-wing leaders hope to undermine the legitimacy of protests.

The term “Soros agent” has been used to describe a plethora of people, including Hungary’s first black parliament member, Olivio Kocsis-Cake; the former chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz; and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. In 2018, the government of Hungary published a list of over 200 “Soros mercenaries,” which included human rights advocates, journalists, teachers and professors. By portraying these people as members of a foreign conspiracy to control local politics, right-wing political leaders seek not only to dismiss their critics but also to intimidate those who are working for change.

These anti-Semitic critiques of Soros are not limited to Hungary and the U.S.; Austria’s vice chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the far-Right FPÖ party described the Soros-funded Central European University as a “Wanderuniversität” or “Wandering University.” The “wandering Jew” is an image that has its origins in the medieval era and was co-opted by the Nazis in the mid-20th century to promote violence and hatred against the Jewish people....

https://theconversation.com/the-rhetorical-trick-trump-used-on-the-squad-and-how-it-could-affect-the-vote-120565

Trump’s tweets calling on four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “corrupt” countries they came from sparked the controversy he undoubtedly wanted, as did his subsequent attack on one, Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota.

The chant “Send her back,” a variation on the 2016 Trump supporters’ chant about Hillary Clinton, “Lock her up,” resounded through a recent political rally.

These slights reveal Trump’s fondness for a rhetorical device called synecdoche.

Difficult to pronounce but easy to define, synecdoche comes from the Greek synekdokhe, which means “an understanding one with another.” It substitutes a part for the whole, using that one part to represent the whole.

The title of the television series “Suits,” in which formal clothes represent scheming lawyers, nicely illustrates the idea. When people say “wheels” for cars, “boots on the ground” for occupying soldiers or “Ol’ Blue Eyes” for Frank Sinatra, they’re using synecdoche.

In the president’s case, he wants to make “The Squad” represent the Democratic Party. Trump thinks his chances for reelection will improve if people see these four women every time they hear the word “Democrat.”

Synecdoche Squad: from left, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)"):}: :{[AP/J. Scott Applewhite

FDR gets away with it

If Trump’s use of this strategy feels familiar, that’s because synecdoche happens during every election. I notice these things, because I’m a scholar of political rhetoric.

Presidential candidates are themselves synecdoche. They represent their whole party. If they’re popular enough, they create what’s called a “coattail effect.” People vote for the entire party because of one person, its leader. The reverse can be true as well: A poor candidate, like Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, can drag down the entire party.

In 2018, Democrats sought to attach the president to every single Republican in a swing district, while Republicans demonized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a way to tarnish all Democrats.

Trump’s tweets twist the usual strategy by aiming his synecdoche at House members. This is rare for a president.

One prior example is Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 reelection campaign. Seeking an unprecedented third term as war raged in Europe and Asia, Roosevelt, a Democrat, faced a formidable opponent in businessman Wendell Willkie.

New to electoral politics and an outsider, Willkie exuded charisma. He criticized Roosevelt’s economic record, but shared his concern for national defense. Unlike many Republicans of the era, Willkie was no isolationist.

Roosevelt did not want to attack Willkie; the president admired the Republican liberal. Instead, he found his Republican foils in the the crusty old House minority leader, Joseph Martin; in Bruce Barton, an advertising executive turned politician; and in Hamilton Fish III, a strident, conservative isolationist.

“Martin, Barton and Fish” – the chant became a staple at FDR’s campaign rallies, as he detailed their opposition to every New Deal reform and national defense measure. When FDR got away with that synecdoche, Willkie later said, “I knew I was licked.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt making his final campaign speech in 1940, asking for a third term.:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)"):}: :{[AP

Democratic nominee becomes irrelevant

Roosevelt could control the political narrative because, as president of the United States, he was the nation’s chief storyteller, the keeper of national myths.

That’s the power of the president. Because of it, presidents can influence perceptions of political reality. This is what Trump is attempting to do as he enters the 2020 presidential campaign.

He wants to define the Democratic Party to his advantage. And, as David Brooks recently wrote in The New York Times, the president has a “vested interest in keeping the progressives atop the Democratic Party.”

If these four women represent Democrats – much as a representative serves as a proxy in Congress – then Trump’s synecdoche suggests that the Democrats are only these progressive women of color.

By identifying his opponents as the party of leftists, women and minorities, Trump thinks he can secure crucial white working-class votes.

If this strategy works, the Democratic nominee in the 2020 election becomes irrelevant. That leader, like Willkie, would no longer be the face of the party.

The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, explained this strategy after Trump’s attack on Maryland Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings.

“Whenever the members of Congress like [Rashida] Tlaib or [Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez] or Cummings are the focus, that means the focus is not on [Kamala] Harris or Joe Biden. Every time people go crazy, it’s still cemented in some people’s minds that these people are maybe the modern Democratic Party,” Giuliani told the Washington Post.

As Richard Nixon did with his divisive “Southern Strategy” in 1968 that exploited white racial animus in the South, Trump’s “Squad Strategy” offers the promise of victory through polarization of the electorate. “They” are not like “us.”

Could it backfire?

Yet 2020 is not 1940 or 1968. Heightening racial tensions with synecdoche is now a risky choice.

For one thing, the nation no longer looks like it did in 1968. The white working-class part of the electorate has been shrinking. More people identify with the Squad than ever before.

By attacking representatives Ocasio Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib, Trump may encourage women, minorities and those who like this foursome to head to the polls.

As important, an incumbent president’s greatest advantage is, well, incumbency. Only 10 U.S. presidents have failed to win reelection, because the office itself and people’s respect for it is a significant electoral advantage.

But if President Trump squanders that respect through racially divisive strategies like his attacks on the Squad, Representative Cummings and Baltimore, it could cost him in 2020.

Americans may no longer see Trump as a part for the nation’s whole.

:{

• Democratic Party
• Republican Party
• Richard Nixon
• Donald Trump
• Nancy Pelosi

}:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/texas-border-militiaman-is-now-a-federal-fugitive-vowing-to-make-himself-a-martyr/

no lnx vid

Texas border militiaman is now a federal fugitive vowing to make himself a martyr

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos July 30, 2019

A Texas militiaman who led a border-watch operation and was later convicted in 2015 on federal weapons charges has announced that he is becoming a fugitive after a warrant was issued for his arrest—and is vowing that he won’t be captured again.

Kevin Lyndel “KC” Massey, a 53-year-old from Quinlan, is the subject of a Federal Marshals Service warrant issued last week naming him “Most Wanted,” and warning that he is “armed and dangerous,” and moreover “has reportedly made threats to kill law enforcement that attempt to arrest him.”

It appears he intends to make himself a martyr to the “Patriot” cause in the mold of LaVoy Finicum, the Utah man shot in January 2016 by Oregon State Patrol officers after he refused arrest related to the armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

On his Facebook page, Massey posted a warning:

KC is done playing the game of unconstitutional courts that already cost him 3+ years in federal prison for not even violating the law as written. The judge said in his statement, that the conviction was based on court precedent not on the written letter of the law. The feds continued to subject KC to theirtyranny after release from prison, while serving a double jeopardy sentence of 3 years probation. KC is NOT going to allow himself to be kidnapped again. Death before dishonor!

Massey was arrested in 2015 by federal agents at the Mexico border, where he had been involved in an ongoing effort by a group of “Patriot” militiamen to prevent crossings by would-be immigrants at the Rio Grande. The group—who called their operation “Camp Lonestar”—was among the first such militias to actually detain border crossers with wrist ties and hold them for detention by Border Patrol.

The first arrest at the camp occurred when a participant named John Frederick Forrester, also a convicted felon, had an encounter in the brush with a Border Patrol officer that drew the agent’s gunfire. When more federal agents arrived to pursue a tip that Forrester was not the only armed felon in the camp, they found Massey—who had a 2003 conviction on his record—also in possession of a gun.

Massey had become the chief media spokesman for Camp Lonestar, which had begun operating initially under a veil of secrecy. As is inevitably the case with such operations, rather than actually clamping down on illegal crossings, the group’s presence actually just complicated an already difficult situation. It also fairly dripped with conspiracist paranoia.

Camp Lonestar was particularly notable for its harassment and detention of would-be border-crossers. In one video, the militiamen could be seen rounding up a group of immigrants and holding them for Border Patrol. Massey posted an explanation on Facebook afterwards: “Sorry we had to ‘Detain’ them,” he wrote in a comment. “[B]ut they were wore out and just fell down and gave up while the other 7-8 ran like gazelles!”

As the post explained, the militiamen detained the people—described as Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican—after they encountered a group of about 11 border crossers, most of whom took off through the brush. The three men they kept were “ziptied, debriefed,and given water,” and U.S. Border Patrol officers eventually arrived and took them away.

“WE DO NOT AIM TO DETAIN, we would much rather send them back into the river into Mexico and dissuade them and the cartel from crossing on the property we patrol,” the post explained. “All encounters were conducted in a humanitarian, professional fashion. Stay vigilant. Thank you for your support.”

But behind the guise of humanitarian treatment was a not-so-subtle smirking contempt. “One of the guys pissed himself!” remarked Massey. Another chimed in, “Dude pissed himself bad.”

Massey, the camp’s “commanding officer,” had appeared in numerous videos posted on Facebook and elsewhere that showed the activities involved in Camp Lonestar.They also featured their rationalizations for harassing people at the border: “I’m not anti-immigration,” he told reporters. “I have no problem with immigrants. I have a problem withterrorists. I have a problem with people who are coming to this country to hurt my fellow Americans and to destroy my fellow Americans’ property and livelihood.”

After Massey’s arrest, Camp Lonestar largely crumbled apart and ceased operation. The landowner whose property they operated from, Cuban “Rusty” Monsees, later told reporters that the experience “wasn’t that great.” “They jeopardized my safety and some other people’s safety by what they were doing,” Monsees said.

Massey pleaded guilty in September 2015 to the federal weapons charges and served three years in prison. After his release, he remained on parole, but continued to claim that he had been unjustly prosecuted. The conditions of that parole appear to have led him eventually to revolt, which in turn brought the most recent warrant for his arrest.

One of Massey’s supporters penned a blog post suggesting that Massey was now following Finicum’s example of deliberate martyrdom:

One thing I do know, like LaVoy, he will live to his last day out in the open, not in a cage…I don’t know about anyone else reading this but I don’t want another good patriot killed because thegovernment didn’t want their dirty secrets revealed or the “virus” known as the Constitution spreading.  I refuse to lose another good friend.  I will do everything in my power to keep that from happening.

Commenters on Facebook not only supported this view, but suggested that Massey’s case might inspire a larger revolt. “10s of thousands doing the same thing only way this stops is if any and allmoron parasites and workers for them are removed every attempt they make to steal lifes time or propertythey should at no time ever be allowed past to do it to another,” one of them wrote.

Another suggested that a team armed militiamen should intervene on Massey’s behalf, saying that “a team of solid mother fuckers need to grow a pairand hear his story and decide if they will help if not he will be killed in cold bloodor put in prison its that simple a facebook set of balls will do nothing,” he wrote.

==

aha "agenda" means  secret (long term) plan to do evil, get control tyranny that takes our freedom sovereignty liberty etc thus conspiracy theory

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/fox-news-host-accuses-rashida-tlaib-of-having-a-hamas-agenda/

no lnx

Fox News host accuses Rashida Tlaib of having a ‘Hamas agenda’

Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon July 30, 2019

“Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth has accused Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., of having a “Hamas agenda” following her criticisms of Israel.

Fellow Fox News colleague Sean Hannity began a segment of his eponymous primetime show Monday by denouncing the so-called “squad” of four liberal Democratic congresswomen, which in addition to Tlaib includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The group has recently found itself the target of racist Twitter attacks from President Donald Trump.

“Nobody in the Democratic team of hopefuls for 2020 is talking about Nancy Pelosi’s policies,” Hannity told his viewers. “They’re adopting ‘the squad’s’ policies.”

Hannity continued by engaging his colleague Hegseth over the accusations of “radicalism” and “virulent anti-Semitism” he levied against “the squad” earlier in the segment.

“Pete: To me they’re going to help in the end, because it seems like everybody is afraid of them. And they’re soradical and so extreme, and frankly a number of them are quite bigoted,” Hannity told Hegseth. “And I don’t think it’s going to work very well to call America a garbage country; or compare the concentration camps in Nazi Germany to the treatment we’re giving people in facilities down at the border; or to say that Israel has hypnotized the world, and we want to boycott Israel just the way we boycotted the Nazis. I don’t think that’s going to fly.”

==

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eg redefinition of terms, hijack/distory founding docs:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-trump-administration-is-abolishing-the-very-idea-of-human-rights-as-a-part-of-american-identity/

no lnx

The Trump administration is abolishing the very idea of human rights as a part of the American identity

Written by Karen J. Greenberg / Tom Dispatch July 25, 2019

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.

This article originally appeared on Tom Dispatch.

Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily in today’s America. In place of Hansel and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.

Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border, the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.

This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt: the reality of those children locked in cages, deprived of the most basic needs, and brazenly abused by the administration he works for has been an essential part of the Trump team’s determination to abandon human rights more generally. That willingness to leave children unprotected is part of a far larger message, not merely an unfortunate byproduct of ill-thought out and clumsy actions by an overwhelmed border police force.

Children in Detention Camps

The story of the children at the border is indeed gruesome. The United States has long had migrants pushing at its southern border, often in larger numbers than at present. In fact, since the 1980s, the numbers crossing that border exceeded one million in 19 different years. While the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to estimate that current immigration rates are on track to exceed one million by September, many other experts don’t think it will even happen this year.

What’s genuinely new with the current border crossings is the number of children among the migrants. According to Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan’s sobering recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the presence of such children has risen 72% in recent years. Some even come “unaccompanied.” Others belong to migrant families. And while last month the government officially stopped its cruel policy of separating families, leaving many of those children (even toddlers and babies) alone in custody, Vox reports that “at any given time, for the past several weeks, more than 2,000 children have been held in the custody of U.S. Border Patrol without their parents.”

The conditions in the camps, strewn along the U.S. borderlands from Arizona to Texas, are shameful and fall most harshly on those very children. A recent Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, issued in redacted form just days before the July 4th holiday celebrating the birth of this country as a beacon of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” described the staggering squalor and danger at such confinement facilities. There, children were often deprived of changes of clothes, beds, hot meals, toothbrushes, soap, showers, even adequate medical attention. Other eyewitness accounts have provided graphic details on the nature and scale of the deprivation, showing us children in soiled diapers, living with the stench of urine, sleeping on concrete floors, many weeping. On the somewhat more civilized floor of the Senate, members were told of children sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, and of the spoiled food at the camps.

Add to this the emotional toll that family separations have wrought on thousands of young people, as a new report issued by the House of Representatives Oversight Committee reveals and as others have documented. An El Paso immigration lawyer visiting one facility, for instance, described seeing a young boy who had scratched his own face until it bled. There are first-hand accounts by visitors to the camps of children trying to choke themselves with the lanyards from their own identification cards and others who dreamed about escaping by jumping out of windows high above the ground.

No wonder at least seven children have died while in such circumstances and many more are suffering from lice, scabies, chickenpox and other afflictions. Yet when doctors from the American Association of Pediatricians traveled to the camps to offer their help, their services were refused. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, herself a pediatrician, has labeled the situation of the migrants “appalling” and noted that “several U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is prohibited by international law.” Others have been less circumspect, explicitly comparing the treatment of the children to torture.

It’s hard not to assume that, however overwhelmed CBP may be, at least some of this treatment is intentional. Why else turn away doctors offering help or refuse supplies of donated aid sent by worried citizens? Why arrest a humanitarian aid volunteer who gave food and water to two ill and desperate undocumented Central American migrants and tried to get them medical help? The administration acknowledges that the overall situation is dire, but its officials on the spot have basically thrown up their hands, complaining that they have been “overwhelmed” by the situation they created, are “not trained to separate children,” and are powerless to address the problem of scarce resources.

While those on the ground have claimed helplessness in the face of the challenge, the rest of the administration refuses even to admit to the appalling conditions. (“They are run beautifully,” said President Trump of the border facilities, blaming the Democrats for any problems there.) Instead, top officials have repeatedly called the disgracefully unacceptable acceptable. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who bore responsibility for creating much of the mess, assured Congress that the children were “well taken care of,” claiming that “we have the highest standards.” Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed her words. “The children,” he insisted, “are well cared for. In fact, they get better care than a lot of American kids do.”

In court, Department of Justice lawyer Sarah Fabian refused to admit that the absence of soap, a toothbrush, a bed, and sleep constituted unsafe and unsanitary conditions, the legal standards applying to the detention of migrant children. The U.S. Border Patrol chief for the El Paso region callously remarked, “Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers for those in custody. Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts, with diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks.” Vice President Mike Pence highlighted the refusal to acknowledge reality recently by calling the two camps he visited, neither solely for children, but one housing families, examples of “compassionate care… care that every American would be proud of.”

Really? In whose world are filth, disease, and persistent emotional cruelty acceptable? In what America is the brutal incarceration of children not a violation of founding principles? In what America is rejecting the advances in protections that have been a hallmark of U.S. and international policy since the Second World War standard operating procedure? Since when do American officials just throw up their hands and declare defeat (as a kind of victory of cruelty) rather than muster their best talents, energies, and resources to confront such a problem? The answer, of course, is in Donald Trump’s America. And don’t for a moment think that this is just a matter of the piling up of unintended consequences. It’s not.

A Declaration of Inhuman Rights

Recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered some insights into the mindset of such an administration when it comes to the country’s longstanding embrace of the very idea of human rights. Soon after July 4th, he announced the creation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights at the State Department. Its purpose, he claimed, was to rethink the spread of human rights protections as a part of American foreign policy. The very idea of rights, Pompeo insisted, had spun out of control. “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral compass,” he said, wagging his finger at 70 years of history. “‘Rights talk’ has become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.”

Rather than expand rights further, he explained, the country would do well to return to (his idea of) the context of the founding fathers and explore just what they really meant in their classic writings. Essential to his goal, experts suggested, was rolling back abortion rights. A remarkable number of the commission members were, in fact, known for their anti-abortion positions and this should have surprised no one, since the State Department had already withdrawn all health assistance from international organizations that offer abortion counseling and care. In doing so, it expanded what, in prior Republican administrations, were more modest restrictions on abortion-related care. Striking as such a global anti-abortion-rights position might be, however, Pompeo’s urge seems far grander. His goal is evidently to unilaterally reject the evolution of human rights that has prominently defined the country since the post-World War Two era, and that has been an essential piece of American democratic rhetoric since its founding.

To begin the process, Pompeo promptly misappropriated the very language of the Declaration of Independence to promote an agenda explicitly calling for the removal of rights. “My hope,” he announced, “is that the Commission on Unalienable Rights will ground our understanding of human rights in a manner that will both inform and better protect essential freedoms — and underscore how central these ideas are not only to Americans, but to all of humanity.” As the rest of his comments showed, he was invoking the freedom to deprive others, exclude others, and cause hardship for others. Placed alongside the border realities, it was a testament to the administration’s determination to erase rights from the nation’s identity. Putting a fine point on his goals, Pompeo added that, in his view, human rights and democracy were distinctly in opposition to each other. As he pungently put it, “Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”

Pompeo’s attempt to recast the founders’ intent in the context of today’s cruelty may be the most full-throated articulation to date of what this administration has been up to. The ongoing mistreatment of children at the border, a story that has lasted for well over a year, suggests that the spirit of Pompeo’s Declaration of Inhuman Rights has long been on the agenda. He had one thing right, however: those border camps do seem to belong to another place and time, one that preceded the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another document he invoked, intending to reshape American adherence to it.

The New Status Quo

This is hardly the first time the Trump administration has revealed its cynicism over democracy. Redefining the very purpose of “liberal democracy,” as I wrote more than a year ago, had been part of its mission since the beginning. In its first 18 months, the administration removed the language of democracy from the mission statements of many of its departments, including the phrase “nation of immigrants” from that of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Still, after two and a half years of reorienting the executive branch of government away from equal protection under the law, the equal right to vote, and a respect for the very idea of welcoming immigrants, Pompeo’s “commission” may be the most brazen conceptual act yet when it comes to erasing the language of human rights from the country’s identity.

It’s in this still-developing context that the migrant children crisis should be understood. It should be seen as a graphic version of the insistence of this administration on changing the very meaning of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the modern age. For Pompeo (as for his president), the evolution of the country towards more rights for more people is nothing but a mark of shame. How far back would he take us? To before the Civil War?

No wonder, on learning each day’s news from the border, it’s easy to feel we’ve entered a dismal fairy tale from an age of ogres and witches, where the forces of evil and ill will have taken charge and the prospect of saving helpless children seems as irretrievably long gone as those crumbs eaten by the birds following Hansel and Gretel on their grim journey into the witch’s lair. Attacking the most vulnerable among us — infants, toddlers, young children, teens — leaves little room for doubt. This administration is determined to undo the country’s commitment to human rights and so change its identity in a way that should concern us all.

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note mirroring contortions (good news is a ways since it show that critige of right is getting thru to ppl; a variant of whataboutism?

https://cei.org/AGclimatescheme

Law Enforcement for Rent (note series, gov't etc)

How Special Interests Fund Climate Policy through State Attorneys General

Christopher C. Horner • August 28, 2018

Author’s Note

This paper is based on documents obtained over two and a half years fromopen records requests and, in some cases, subsequent litigation. Due to the volume of records, not all cited records are included in the body of this paper. Key documents are provided in the paper’s appendix, which can be accessed at CEI.org. The complete collection of documents cited in this paper is available at ClimateLitigationWatch.org, a project of the nonprofit public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight. 

Executive Summary

This paper details an extensive and elaborate campaign using electivelaw enforcement offices, in coordination with major donors and activist pressure groups, to attain a policy agenda that failed through the democratic process. The plan is revealed in emails and other public records obtained during two and a half years of requests under state open records laws. Most are being released now for the first time. Many were obtained only by court order in the face of a determined and coordinated resistance that one deputy attorney general foresaw, expressing early concerns over “an affirmative obligation to always litigate” requests looking into the effort.The paper details how donor-financed governance has expanded into dangerous and likely unconstitutional territory: state attorney general (AG) offices.

The plan traces back to 2012 when activists agreed to seek “a single sympathetic attorney general” to assist their cause. AGs began subpoenaing private parties’ records in service of a campaign of litigation against opponents of their climate policy agenda. The public records date to a July 2015 email in which Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists confided the group’s involvement with AGs.

Those  public  records  reveal  the  following:(a) donors introduced plaintiffs’ lawyers to AG offices (OAGs), 

(b) a slideshow tour by plaintiffs’ lawyers recruiting OAGs to the effort, and 

(c) senior attorneys from OAGs flying in—some at taxpayer expense and others on the donors’ tab, which had been run through a pressure group— for a briefing with “prospective funders” about “potential state causes of action against major carbon producers.” One presenter described this briefing as a“secret meeting.”It was secret enough that one AG litigated to withhold the agenda— under implausible claims of privilege—for a year and a half before being compelled by a court to release the lineup for what turned out to have been an AG-assisted fundraiser.

Those public records reveal the anatomy of what began as  an  “informal  coalition”  of  AGs  to use the legal system in pursuit of anovertly political agenda in coordination  with  activists  and plaintiffs’ lawyers. That coalition disbanded under open records and media scrutiny, but it has now reconstituted through a program by which donors fund, privately hire, and place investigators and prosecutors in AG offices. It uses a nonprofit organization to pass the funding through and to provide the OAGs with a network of “pro bono” attorneys and public relations services. In return, OAGs provide office space to the privately hired prosecutors; agree they are there to “advanc[e] progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions”; and provide regular reports about their work.

Led and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this scheme hires “Research Fellows,” which it  then  places  as  activist  “Special Assistant Attorneys General.” All of the participating OAGs had to promise that this work would not get done but for this private funding. All OAGs also certified they are not violating the law by accepting privately funded prosecutors. At best, as several OAGs tacitly admit, this unprecedented arrangement operates in a gray area with neither prohibition nor authority. One state where the scheme is arguably illegal is New York, where disgraced former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had a leading and organizing role at every stage of the campaign this paper describes.

The New York OAG openly boasted to a donor that its “need” for privately funded prosecutors was driven in part by the “significant strain on staff resources” that had been caused by its “non- litigation advocacy”—that described as its having “led” the resistance to the Trump administration. Importantly, the NYOAG also cited its campaign “building models for two different types of common law cases to seek compensation” from industries for supposedly having caused global warming; moreover, it “needs additional attorney resources to assist with this project.”On these bases and with a claim to having statutory authority to enter the unprecedented arrangement—a claim which on its face appears to be an invention—the NYOAG was awarded not one but two privately underwritten prosecutors.

This is the most dangerous example of a modus operandi we have found: it uses nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors can support elected officials to, in turn, use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors. It also uses resources that legislatures will not provide and that donors cannot legally provide directly. The budget for climate policy work alone is in the tens of millions of dollars per year.

Across various levels of government—including mayors and governors—the bulk of this  money is budgeted for pass-through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and off-the-books consultants, report writers, and public relations (PR) firms that are hired through an NGO. The NGO takes a percentage as  its  fee  (up  to  24  percent in some cases). Another component involves privately hiring and then placing in-house, non- official personnel as advisors when they are  actually employed by a donor’s group.

The extension of this billion-dollar per year climate industry to privately fund AG investigations sets a dangerous precedent. It represents private interests commandeering the state’s police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda and to hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process’s rejection of a political agenda.

As a subsequent report will affirm, this model of using nonprofit groups as cutouts for donors   to finance elected officials’ activism is, in fact, widely adopted generally by the axisof donors, elected officials, and NGOs and by the climate litigation industryspecifically. The de facto law enforcement for hire by private interests raises concerns beyond mere political opportunism, obvious appearances of impropriety, or even compliant 501(c)3s that seeminglyrent out their tax-exempt status on behalf ofactivist donors.

The use of this approach by AGs carries legal, ethical, and constitutionalimplications, as well as for the integrity of law enforcement and the constitutional policy process. The public–private partnership of law enforcement for hire revealed in this report, in which the partnership uses public office to expend resources not appropriated or approved by their legislatures, raises significant constitutional and other legal issues—as well as ethics concerns—and should be the subject of prompt and serious legislative oversight.

Introduction

BEFORE YOU GASP, PLEASE NOTE that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”1 So wrote Dan Carol, a senior aide to California Governor Jerry Brown(D), on October 3, 2017, to his colleagues and staff members for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) and Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) regarding charitable foundation spending that promotes their climate policy agenda (see Figure 1). This figure dwarfs spending in opposition to that agenda—efforts to portray matters otherwise notwithstanding.2

Carol offered this sum to make his case that $50 million per year is reasonable to ask so donors can privately underwrite an off-the-books network of “support functions” for a handful of governors’ climate policy advocacy.

In further support of his position, Carol attached a “draft agenda, presentation slides, and budget worksheet.”Those items are among a large cache of public records that were obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), along with other public policy groups, and that detail and propose the exploitation of a “plethora of funder interest” in secretly bankrolling the public office holders’ use of their positions to take a more aggressive role concerning climate politics and policy.

This years-long campaign by substantial, left-leaning donors revealed in Carol’s email correspondence and in other emails produced under state open records laws has now expanded into dangerous and likely unconstitutional territory. Led and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this scheme centers

..[long]

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rhet --> policy

note drop eco econ and go straight up terror (// iran republican guard):

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/dangerous-republican-resolution-suggests-that-all-forms-of-political-dissent-could-soon-be-considered-terrorism/

no lnx

Dangerous Republican resolution suggests that all forms of political dissent could soon be considered terrorism

Written by Urie Dvorozniak / Salon July 23, 2019

Last week, Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz  of Texas introduced a resolution to designate “antifa,” which the Anti-Defamation League defines as “a loose collection of groups, networks, and individuals who believe in active, aggressive opposition to far right-wing movements,” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

In fact, antifa is a constellation of many different activist groupings, with no official leader or clear hierarchy. As the New York Times has noted, its membership count is “impossible to know.” That didn’t stop the two Republican senators from claiming that “Antifa are terrorists, violent masked bullies who ‘fight fascism’ with actual fascism, protected by Liberal privilege.”

Senator Ted Cruz

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@SenTedCruz

Antifa is a terrorist organization composed of hateful, intolerant radicals who pursue their extreme agenda through aggressive violence. Time and time again their actions have demonstrated that their central purpose is to inflict harm on those who oppose their views.

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1:02 PM - Jul 18, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

23.5K people are talking about this

Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” traces its ideological roots to 1920s and 1930s Germany and supposes that if people had opposed the Nazi Party more aggressively, Adolf Hitler might never have come to power. The ADL reports that many people who act within antifa are anarchist or very left-wing, but that “since Trump’s election, some people with more mainstream political backgrounds have also joined their ranks.”

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In their resolution, Cruz and Cassidy reference the “violent demonstrations” on June 29 in Portland, Oregon, where writer right-wing Alex Ngo was assaulted while covering an antifa protest against the “far-right nationalist” group known as the Proud Boys.

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After the incident, Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat who is also the police commissioner of the city.

Ted Cruz

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@tedcruz

To federal law enforcement:  investigate & bring legal action against a Mayor who has, for political reasons, ordered his police officers to let citizens be attacked by domestic terrorists.  https://tinyurl.com/y2udrv5d  https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212511966441473 …

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Under Fire for Not Stopping Antifa Protests

Wheeler's hands-off policy when it comes to Antifa came under scrutiny on Saturday after journalist Ngo was assaulted by masked assailants.

breitbart.com

Ted Cruz

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@tedcruz

To law enforcement:  find & prosecute these violent felons. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212299914952704 …...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-they-hate-america-became-republicans-ugly-new-attack/

no lnx

How ‘they hate America’ became Republicans’ ugly new attack

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / The Washington Monthly July 22, 2019

In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in order to harass the people he had identified as enemies. This is how his domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, described the strategy.  :

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan adopted a different dog whistle.

At a campaign rally in 1976, Ronald Reagan introduced the welfare queeninto the public conversation about poverty. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

Who the beneficiary of policy is perceived to be is of material consequence to how it is designed. For the past forty years, U.S. welfare policy has been designed around Reagan’s mythical welfare queen—with very real consequences for the actual families urgently needing support.

All of those arguments are still with us. For example, in 1992, George H.W. Bush attempted to scare white Americans into believing that if we elected Dukakis, there would be black rapists running amok in the country. Mitt Romney reprised Reagan’s argument in the 2012 election by talking about all of “those people” who wanted “free stuff.” Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by talking about Mexican criminals and rapists.

But with the election of this country’s first African-American president, Republicans needed a new dog whistle.We saw that emerge when Rudy Giuliani first questioned President Obama’s patriotism and claimed that he didn’t love America.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me.He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

That one caught on like wildfire, leading Obama to give the most important speech of his presidency.

I recount that history because, with Trump’s latest attack on the Squad, the focus has mostly been on his statements that they should “go back” to their own countries. But preceding that suggestion is always a claim that they “hate America.” Here is the president at the rally in North Carolina that spawned the “send her back” chants.

I have a suggestion for thehate-filled extremists who areconstantly trying to tear our country down— they never have anything good to say — that’s why I say, “Hey, if they don’t like it, they can leave.” Let them leave. Let them leave! They’re always telling us how to run it, how to do this — you know what? If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it. I don’t know. And now watch, I’ll go back tonight — “Oh, sir, that was so controversial. Sir.” No, I’m just saying it’s their choice. They can come back when they want. But you know, they don’t love our country. I think in some cases theyhateour country. And they’re so angry.

While counseling the president to “knock it down a notch,” Senator Lindsey Graham said that the four congresswomen of color are “a bunch of communists” who “hate our country.”Andrew McCarthy writes that if “go back” to your own country was based solely on ethnic roots, it would be racist. But, he asks, “Is it ‘racist’ to tell people who have contempt for the country—who abhor the common culture that makes us American—that they ought to go back to where they came from?” The correct response is “yes,” because it is also racist to assume that when people of color challenge this country to live up to our ideals, they are showing contempt for the country and our common culture.

We saw something similar when black athletes took a knee to protest police brutality. Rather than focus on the issue they were attempting to highlight, Trump and his enablers accused them of beingunpatriotic, which turned into accusations that, as millionaires, they weren’t appreciative enough of what this country has done for them.

Of course, none of that recognizes that the president himself has called this country “stupid,” “weak,” and “pathetic.” But then, in the world of Donald Trump and his enablers, white men get to make the rules and the rest of us are required to submit and be grateful.

That is the racist underbelly of the equally racist “go back to where you came from” narrative that is all the rage on the right these days. It has taken hold because people of color are gaining positions of power and prestige that other forms of racism were meant to deny. Whenever black people rise to the top of their fields in politics, business, or sports and fight for those who would come behind them, they are be told that they “hate America.”

Leanard Pitts has a response to that charge.

You, like them, take for granted that America is your house, a white house where you make the rules, you set the standards and the rest of us live only by your sufferance…

But this has never been just your house, Donald, grandson of a German immigrant. It belongs to all of us, to every Yup’ik in Kwethluk, every Cuban in Miami, every black boy in Compton, every Muslim in Dearborn. We get to criticize it, we get to love it, we get to fight with it, we get to fight for it, because we built it. And we do not need your permission…

But for all their cowardice, for all your cynicism, for all the fear some white people hold, you can count on the fact that the rest of us will not be denied, deterred or defeated. You are nothing we have not seen before. And still we rise.

In the truest sense of patriotism, that is exactly how Representative Ilhan Omar responded to the “send her back” chants in North Carolina last week.

Ilhan Omar

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@IlhanMN

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

-Maya Angelou https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/1151639430194532353 …

Jon Favreau

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@jonfavs

The crowd at Trump’s rally chanting “send her back” after the President viciously and dishonestly attacked Ilhan Omar is one of the most chilling and horrifying things I’ve ever seen in politics.

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no lnx

The frightening undercurrent running through all of Trump’s talk

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-frightening-undercurrent-running-through-all-of-trumps-talk/

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos July 21, 2019

Many observers, with good cause, have decried Donald Trump’s vicious attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar and her fellow progressive congresswomen of color and the frightening chants—“Send her home!”—his fanatical followers in North Carolina started up all on their own, responding to Trump’s vituperation about Omar, as nakedly racist, not to mention dangerous. Many have remarked on the fascism dripping from every word, and suggested that what we saw Wednesday in Greenville was a new Nuremberg, Trump’s feeble denials notwithstanding.

If anyone needed further evidence that Trump is now America’s eliminationist-in-chief, the frenzied crowd delivered it in spades.

But listen carefully to the language being used by Trump and his defenders to rationalize their words. It is language with a very familiar ring: The language of community defense and purification, driving from the body politic any foreign—and therefore innately toxic—presence or influence. The language of heroic willingness to sever the Gordian knot and do “what needs to be done” to protect the community, or in this case the nation, or indeed Western civilization itself.

It is the language of hate crimes, used by their perpetrators to rationalize their deeds.

Even before the chant, it was fascinating to watch Trump’s defenders in the wake of the nakedly eliminationist “go back where they came from” tweets that inspired the chant. There was Sen. Lindsay Graham, justifying the tweets to the hosts on Fox & Friends by suggesting that people like these members of Congress deserve to be ejected from the country: “We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists … they’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America.”

And then there was U.S. Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who tweeted on Monday along similar lines: “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals.” (Special hypocrisy note: Daines employed a noted white nationalist named Taylor Rose as a campaign field organizer in Montana in his 2014 Senate campaign.)

Listen to the words Trump used in Greenville to attack Rep. Omar just before the chant broke out:

I mean think of that one, and she looks down with contempt on the hardworking American, saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country. And obviously and importantly, Omar has a history of launching vicious antisemitic screeds.

After the chant, he continued with similar language in attacking Omar’s colleague, Rep. Rita Tlaib:

And Tlaib also used the F word to describe the presidency and your president. That’s not nice, even for me. She was describing the President of the United States and the presidency with the big fat vicious, the way she said it, vicious F-word. That’s not somebody that loves our country.

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This is how violence against both nonwhites and political dissenters has been justified by the mainstream American Right for centuries: If you disagree, you hate the country, and thus deserve ejection or elimination. This is why “go back where you came from” is a favorite phrase both of hate-crimes perpetrators and violent right-wing thugs like the Proud Boys.

Yet this was presented as a rational explanation by Trump’s defenders: “The president clarified in there what he was talking about: a love of the country. And if you don’t love the country, leave the country,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told the press.

New York Post columnist Sohrab Ahmari hated the chants but then embraced the underlying sentiments:

Needless to say, the “send-her-back” chants are gross. But again, with remarks like these, and many other of the kind, she has signaled radical hostility to her adopted homeland and the West — i.e., a total departure from the political community.

Beneath the pseudo-logical veneer, there is a frightening undercurrent running through all of this talk.

The problem is much deeper than the naked discrimination and intolerance on display: This is language that will be used to justify violence. It will almost certainly inspire a fresh wave of racial sectarian violence in the form of hate crimes and right-wing extremist domestic terrorism, because it is the very same language that is used by the perpetrators of these crimes to justify their acts.

The criminologists and social scientists who study hate crimes have parsed the motivations behind such acts into four different but related kinds: thrill-seeking, “defensive,” retributive (or revenge crimes), and “mission” crimes (perpetrated by committed ideologues intent on striking a blow on behalf of their cause).

By far the largest of these categories is the “defensive” kind of motive, in which perpetrators see themselves as heroes who are out to save their communities and the nation as well. One study found that this category of motive had become dominant in hate crimes after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—and that hate crimes were likely to spike when “when a particular group is regarded as representing a danger to the dominant group’s prestige, wealth, or power.”

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“Dylann Roof [who murdered nine parishioners at a black church in Charleston, S.C, in June 2015] thought he was saving the world,” said Heidi Beirich, Intelligence Project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They’ve come to believe they’re saviors of the white race. … I’m doing this to protect my race.”

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In “defensive” hate crimes, perpetrators see themselves as heroic protectors of their communities: their neighborhoods, their workplace, their religion, their country, their race. These “defenders’ often target specific victims, justifying their crimes as necessary to fend off perceived threats. Particular events such as the arrival or a Muslim or a black family in a previously all-white neighborhood can act as the spark for such crimes.

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Both while in the act and afterward, especially when caught and charged with bias crimes, these perpetrators defend themselves by using the language of community defense. They show little to no remorse for their crimes, and usually insist that they are acting on the unspoken wishes of the majority of people in the community, which is too afraid to act. Even non-defender types of perpetrators—particularly “mission” and retributive criminals—employ this kind of rhetoric to explain their actions.

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“They honestly believe that what they’re doing has some sort of communal assent,” says Brian Levin, who leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

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This is where the role played by Donald Trump becomes crucial: Rather than acting as a lever to discourage such acts, Trump clearly has encouraged them with both his rhetoric and his actions. This has led to what has been called the “Trump Effect,” in which outbreaks of bigoted crimes and incidents are directly linked to the president’s outbursts in speeches and on Twitter.

This effect was first marked in the month immediately following Trump’s election in November 2016. Levin’s team as CSUSB assembled hate-crimes data from 38 jurisdictions and found the effect was unmistakable: “racial hate crime according to FBI data surged during November 2016, and in particular on the day after the election, rising from 10 to 27. Our analysis of the same FBI data set further revealed November was the worst month—with 735 hate crimes—since 2007 and the worst November going back to 1992, when systemic national record keeping began. Further, we found that hate crimes more than doubled, from 17 to 42, the day after the election and that a 72 percent average daily spike occurred in the two weeks following the election compared to before.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded a similar phenomenon:

To the contrary, in the first 34 days after the election, the SPLC documented 1,094 bias-related incidents and found that 37% of them directly referenced Trump, his campaign slogans or his notorious comments about sexual assault. Not every incident met the definition of a hate crime, but many did. The FBI later confirmed the sharp uptick in reported hate crimes in the fourth quarter of 2016. Researchers have shown that reported hate crimes following Trump’s election made up the second largest surge since the FBI began collecting data in 1992 (trailing only the increase after the 9/11 terror attacks).

Another study found that not only is there a demonstrable “Trump Effect” arising from his rhetoric, the effect is substantially broadened and deepened by the fact of his winning the 2016 election:

Using time series analysis, we show that Donald Trump’s election in November of 2016 was associated with a statistically significant surge in reported hate crimes across the United States, even when controlling for alternative explanations. Further, by using panel regression techniques, we show that counties that voted for President Trump by the widest margins in the presidential election also experienced the largest increases in reported hate crimes. … We hypothesize that it was not just Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric throughout the political campaign that caused hate crimes to increase. Rather, we argue that it was Trump’s subsequent election as President of the United States that validated this rhetoric in the eyes of perpetrators and fueled the hate crime surge.

More pointedly, there has been a sharp spike in hate crimes (226 percent) in counties where Trump has held his political rallies, which feature his frequently eliminationist and threatening speeches. As its authors note, “Recent research also shows that reading or hearing Trump’s statements of bias against particular groups makes people more likely to write offensive things about the groups he targets.”

All this bodes ill for the coming 2020 presidential campaign. If Trump continues to wage his culture war against nonwhites and the liberals who defend them, the Trump Effect is certain to surge along with it—and so will the hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism that ride in its wake.

===

war metaphor agw

:{

}:

https://grist.org/article/the-war-on-climate-the-climate-fight-are-we-approaching-the-problem-all-wrong/

==

==

aha: the invisible hand (not God, but His replacement?)in theory deprives the bad cobbler of income and forces him to make better shoes faster and cheaper or find something else more productive (read profitable).  So we all benefit by getting good cheap shoes.  Our individual self-sh acts get transmuted alchemically into the greater good.  But depends on rational choice and adequate (honest, not ad ad/hype)  information and education.

This is said to eliminate "waste" and promote efficiency, which becomes a god term to justify/rational-ize decisions that may be immoral(see Grapes of Wrath debate between farmers and banker men on who rightfully owns land, the ppl who work it or those with a piece of paper and numbers).

We get rid of anything deemed surplus (because of "opportunity cost": we could be doing something else with the money or space).  Computers made supply lines "just-in-time" but in Japan the whole car industry stopped when a single part not avaialbe b/c of a typhoon in Singapore or somesuch.

Related to austerity, when you beat up on lazy undeserving poor safety netin the nameof tough, hard-headed rational reallocation of resources (usually to the rich). eg it's more efficient to put an ankle monitor on a prisoner so you do not have to pay for room, board, guard and godforbid medical treatment.  so pvt co charges fees that get ppl BACK in jail.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-the-race-baiting-invective-of-rush-limbaugh-on-the-obama-presidency-led-to-trump/

no lnx

How the race-baiting invective of Rush Limbaugh on the Obama presidency led to Trump

Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh

written by Robin Lindley / History News Network July 8, 2019

252

Ultimately, the right wing needs white racial anxiety. In fact, it cannot survive without it.

Ian Reifowitz, The Tribalization of Politics

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America—the first African American to attain this exalted office. Hundreds of thousands crowded the National Mall during the ceremony to wish the new president well.

However, rather than offering the president words of encouragement and congratulations, voices from the far right almost immediately expressed the hope that President Obama would fail and serve no more than one term. He had inherited a faltering economy, a war, a country still divided by race and other vexing issues, while the right-wing media labeled him as anti-American and unpatriotic, as a black president who would please his constituents of color to the detriment of white citizens.

Popular far-right talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was one of the most vociferous voices, and was the one with the largest audience. He uttered unceasing, racially-charged attacks on President Obama virtually every day of his two terms in office.

Historian Ian Reifowitz examines Limbaugh’s hateful invective and American political polarization in his new book, The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Ig Publishing).

To better understand the attacks on President Obama, Professor Reifowitz took on the daunting task of analyzing the transcripts of Limbaugh’s radio shows and associated materials from the Obama years. As a result, Professor Reifowitz has documented the manifold instances of Limbaugh’s hateful race-baiting and “othering” of the president. And Limbaugh has profited greatly as a leader in sparking white fear of racial peril.

The book traces the election of Donald Trump and the recent rise in white supremacist activity to the incendiary language of racism that the right-wing relies on to win politically. Historian Keri Leigh Merritt commented that The Tribalization of Politics is “is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how the US has reached its lowest point in race relations since the Civil Rights Movement.”

Professor Reifowitz teaches history at Empire State College of the State University of New York. His other books include Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846-1919, and Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. He has published a number of academic articles in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Nationalities Papers, and East European Quarterly, among others. Professor Reifowitz is also a contributing editor at Daily Kos, and his articles have appeared in the Daily News, Newsday, The New Republic, In These Times, Truthout, Huffington Post, and others. His awards include the 2009 Susan H. Turben Award for Scholarly Excellence, and the 2014 S.U.N.Y. Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities.

Professor Reifowitz graciously responded to a series of questions in an email exchange on his work and his new book.

Robin Lindley: You’re a historian specializing in the modern history of the United States. How did you decide to study history, and then to focus on the American past?

Professor Reifowitz: I’ve always, since I was in college (too many years ago) been interested in multiethnic societies, and specifically how they work to create ‘national’ bonds across lines of ethnicity to bind together their diverse population.

My graduate study, which led to my first book and other early academic publications, focused on Austria-Hungary. That state tried and failed to create strong enough national bonds, i.e., bonds based on citizenship in and loyalty to a common state, that would have allowed it to survive World War I and the overthrow of the Habsburg dynasty. Even while pursuing that research, I’d also been reading and thinking about another multiethnic society, the one we live in, that faces some of the same issues (thankfully, we don’t have to rely on a monarchy as the foundation of our unity).

Eventually, my passion for understanding how unity and diversity were playing out today drove me to begin writing and researching the contemporary U.S. I published a couple of articles in The New Republic, and later in other outlets, and began to read more deeply and develop my ideas further. Then along came Barack Obama. I wrote my previous book, Obama’s America, in which I examined his conception of American national identity, one that incorporates pluralism and inclusiveness into a strong, unifying vision of national community that, one would hope, Americans of every background could adopt.

Robin Lindley: How did you come to write about Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric in the Obama Era? Did the project grow out of your past research for Obama’s America?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: To continue the story from above, one section of Obama’s America examined critics (mostly on the right, but a few to Obama’s left) who criticized Obama’s vision of American national identity. I had spent some pages examining Rush Limbaugh’s rhetoric from the first couple of years of Obama’s presidency, and that had energized me (albeit with a sort of dark energy, compared to the more uplifting work of looking at Obama’s writings and speeches).

Then, in the summer of 2015, the idea came to me for another book, and I thought: why not do a comprehensive, close examination of everything Limbaugh said about the Obama presidency. I put together a proposal, started the work in late 2015 and kept up the research until Obama left office, and then started writing. In the meantime, of course, Trump had emerged and been elected. Trump’s campaign and then victory helped me decide to focus the book on Limbaugh’s race-baiting, both in order to document it in a comprehensive way for people, and to draw parallels between what he was doing—playing and preying on white anxiety—and what Trump did in his campaign (and, to be sure, for years beforehand, starting with his own incendiary, racist rhetoric about the Central Park Five and right up to him claiming the mantle of birther-in-chief).

Robin Lindley: You address our current political “tribalization” by focusing on Limbaugh’s rhetoric. In your view, what is tribalization, and how does it affect our politics now?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll give you the definition I used in the book’s introduction rather than come up with something off the top of my head.

“Tribalization refers to a transformation much more profound than merely convincing Americans to be partisans who vote based on a shared set of policy preferences. It means cleaving America in two, and, in the case of Limbaugh, creating a conservative tribe animated somewhat by political ideology, but more so by racial and cultural resentment that feeds a hatred of the opposing tribe.”

Robin Lindley: This new Limbaugh project had to be daunting and possibly distasteful to you in view of your past research on President Obama and your favorable view of his efforts to unite our diverse nation. How did you feel as you put your book together?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: Well, I did mention above that I felt a different kind of passion motivating me on this project compared to the Obama book. But I have to admit that, once I got deep into the research, there were times when I wished I hadn’t committed to the project. There were plenty of times that I didn’t want to read through another word of Limbaugh.

I guess my stubborn streak helped. I wasn’t going to abandon a project that I’d already invested so much time and energy in, and certainly wasn’t going to do so because Limbaugh’s rhetoric was hard to stomach. I hoped I was doing something important, that could make some connections that would help people better understand where our politics has gone in the past few years.

Robin Lindley: What was your research process for your new book?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I went to RushLimbaugh.com and read through the transcripts for every show he did during the eight years Barack Obama was president, which he thoughtfully published free of charge. To be honest, if the transcripts didn’t exist, I don’t know that I could have done the research by listening to the audio recordings. That might have been too much. Thankfully I didn’t have to find out.

I also read secondary sources on contemporary politics, in particular on matters of race and identity. After I started focusing on the connections between Limbaugh and Trump, I read political science scholarship on public opinion in 2016, which documented how white anxiety and resentment correlated with votes for Trump both in the primary and general election, and I incorporated that information into my analysis.

Robin Lindley: What did you learn about Limbaugh’s origins?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I read some about his rhetoric in early years, how he had used racist language even before making his turn toward talking full-time about politics in the 1980s. But the focus of the book is on what he said about Obama, which spoke for itself. To clarify, I don’t care if he actually believes what he’s saying, because the effect his words have is the same whether he’s just a cynical opportunist or a true believer. I’m not especially interested in his motivations.

Robin Lindley: How did you come to focus on Limbaugh in your book. You see Limbaugh as a major force in dividing the US during the Obama era, but other potent Obama detractors included the current president, Senator Mitch McConnell and much of the Republican Party, Fox News, the Tea Party, and others. How would you weigh Limbaugh’s influence, if possible?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: My background, in terms of the kind of work I do, focuses on analyzing political rhetoric. Limbaugh was the person whose rhetoric I chose to examine because he broadcasts about two hundred shows a year, so there would be essentially no important issue relating to the Obama presidency that he would not address. Plus, he had thelargest radio audience in the country throughout all eight years Obama was president (and decades before as well, and even in the years since up through the most recent month).

I used him as a case study—where the biggest part stands in for the whole of the right-wing media. The transcripts helped as well, as it would be impossible to read every word broadcast on, say, Fox. This way, I had a closed, yet comprehensive, set of data to use as my source base.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining your process. Do you see Limbaugh as an ally of white supremacist organizations such as theKu Klux Klan and the American Nazis?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: His show helps push sanitized versions of some of their ideas into the mainstream. The views he expresses are not the same as the views of the KKK or American Nazis, buthe taps into some of the same hate and fear that they do. I don’t think that makes him an ally, but more like an enabler.

Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh view Senator Obama before he was elected in 2008?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I didn’t look at the pre-inauguration rhetoric in a comprehensive way, but from what I saw nothing changed on Election Day.

Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh usually describe President Obama?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: You want the whole book in a nutshell? Here’s a brief summary from the book:

“While Obama was president, Limbaugh constantly, almost daily, talked about him using a technique that scholars call “racial priming”—in other words, he race-baited. The host aimed to convince his audience that Obama was some kind of anti-white, anti-American, radical, Marxist, black nationalist, and possibly a secret Muslim to boot. This was neither a bug nor a supporting element of Limbaugh’s presentation, but instead stood as a central feature deployed strategically in order to accomplish a very specific task, a task reflected in the title of this book. The tribalization of politics is exactly what Limbaugh set out to achieve.”

I’ll add: “[Limbaugh] portrayed him in a way designed to exacerbate white racial anxiety about a black president, or depicted him as a foreign “other,” outside the bounds of traditional Americanness.”

Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh exploit Islamophobia and the fear of immigrants to attack President Obama?

Professor Ian Reifowitz:  He repeatedly sought to portray Obama as some kind of “secret Muslim” or somehow more sympathetic to Muslims—even terrorists—than to Christians and/or the interests of the United States. On immigrants, I’ll give you the following example:

“On July 1, 2015, two weeks after Trump’s infamous comments [made during his announcement that he was running for president] about Mexican immigrants being rapists and bringing drugs into the United States, a woman named Kathryn Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by Jose Inez Garcia Zarate [an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record].

“. . . On the campaign trail, Trump pounced, and Limbaugh followed suit a few days later. On July 7, in comments designed to inflame white racial resentment, the host claimed thatSteinle’s name would “never be as well-known as Trayvon Martin,”and that the president would not deliver the eulogy at her funeral, even though Obama had not delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Martin or any other citizen killed by police. Obama did, however, speak at the memorial service for the five Dallas police officers murdered a year later….Limbaugh speculated that the president did not care about Steinle’s murder, and blamed it on the administration’s immigration policies, which were “coming home to roost”—this was a phrase uttered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright that was discussed so often on Limbaugh’s show. The host again talked about Obama hating America and wanting to alter its “composition” in order to change “the face of the country.”

Limbaugh attacked the president over Steinle on three more shows over the next week. On July 15, 2015, the host contrasted Obama not having contacted the Steinle family to his having written letters to forty-six felons whose sentences he commuted, and to his outreach to the family of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Limbaugh’s point was to remind his listeners that Obama cared more about prisoners (read: black and Hispanic people) and black people killed by cops than a white woman who was murdered by someone here illegally. If there’s one segment that both encapsulates Limbaugh’s tribalizing history of the Obama presidency, and shows how his race-baiting rhetoric set the way for the rise of Trump, this was it.

Robin Lindley: How did President Obama respond to Limbaugh’s attacks, particularly in terms of dealing with claims that he was pro-Muslim, anti-police, and anti-white? 

Professor Ian Reifowitz: He basically ignored them, but I did not examine Obama’s responses comprehensively.

Robin Lindley: Limbaugh attacked President Obama almost daily during his eight years in office. For Limbaugh, it seems that the ideals of equality, tolerance, democracy, community, and serving the common good are anathema and, indeed, anti-American. What is your sense of Limbaugh’s view of these ideals?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: He would pay lip service to most of those ideals in the abstract, while attacking Obama and other liberals for seeking to change the traditional definition of them to something involving retribution and reparations that would take from whites and give to non-whites. He would turn any criticism of racial inequality in America back around and argue that the problem of racism in America stemmed from people overexaggerating it. [// chemo-PHOBIA]

For example, on July 25, 2013, Limbaugh “accused “the left” of wanting “race problems” to remain unsolved, and in fact wanting to make them worse. Why? Because “too many people make money off of racial strife, and therefore they’re always going to promote it.” [whereas trump GOP wants to run on immigration in 2020]Here’s a quote from May 26, 2010, about Obama and liberals in general: “everything’s about race. Everything is about skin color to these people, or however they classify people, however they seek to group them, whatever, they’re victims.” This is how he viewed racism in America.

Robin Lindley: Beyond Limbaugh, what are some things that you learned about the massive right-wing media misinformation machine?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I didn’t do too much with them, because they do generally move in lockstep. I did note in the book that in the summer of 2018, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham on Fox News echoed Trump’s language of white anxiety regarding immigration and demographic changes. Limbaugh had spoken similarly as well during the Obama presidency, which I documented in greater depth.

Robin Lindley: Were there any particular findings that surprised you as you researched and wrote your book?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: Nothing really surprised me in terms of ideology, Rush pretty much delivered exactly what I expected when I started the research. I was already pretty familiar with his bile. However, when I came across Limbaugh’s comments connecting Tiger Woods and his sex-related scandals involving white women to Obama—which suggested that the president might be involved in something analogous based on little more than the fact that both were multiracial guys with a similar skin tone—that was something beyond even what I had expected. There were also a few times, at least until I got used to it, when I was surprised by how baldly Limbaugh just lied about facts and statistics, in particular regarding the economy. Either he really didn’t understand them, which is not likely to be true because he didn’t manipulate them to make President Trump look bad—only President Obama—or he just thought lying was the right thing for him to do.

Robin Lindley: Limbaugh wasn’t new to exploiting race to divide Americans. In fact, that’s been a Republican strategy for decades. What did you find about how Republicans use race to their political advantage?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I wrote this in the book: “As journalist Dylan Matthews noted in an article entitled “Donald Trump Has Every Reason to Keep White People Thinking About Race,” a vast corpus of social science research indicates that “even very mild messages or cues that touch on race can alter political opinions,” and added that “priming white people to so much as think about race, even subconsciously, pushes them toward racially regressive views.”

Robin Lindley: What do you see as Limbaugh’s role in the election of President Donald Trump?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll share an example from the book, with some data, that demonstrates the role Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric played in paving the way for Trump:

“Public opinion research data suggests that exactly this kind of rhetoric helped move some whites who had previously voted for Obama into Trump’s column by 2016—most Obama-Trump voters expressed high levels of anger toward non-whites and foreigners. It might be hard to imagine Obama voters being bigoted, but John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck found that significant numbers of whites who voted for Obama in 2012 expressed varying degrees of white racial resentment while also overwhelmingly embracing liberal positions on issues such as taxation and the existence of climate change. It might be surprising, but about 25% of those whites who found interracial couples unacceptable nonetheless voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. The country’s racial climate during Obama’s second term contributed to this phenomenon of racially resentful white Obama voters shifting to Trump, as [according to Zack Beauchamp at Vox] Black Lives Matter and Ferguson “kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.” Limbaugh took full advantage of that climate, and his race-baiting helped pave the way for Trump.”

Robin Lindley: What has Limbaugh been doing since Trump’s election? Does he continue to blame President Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton for problems the nation faces.

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ve stayed away from Limbaugh to some degree, just to give myself a break. But he’s still a huge media figure. He’s done exactly what I expected, which is the same thing he did once Trump became the presumptive nominee.He’s been a huge Trump backer and has continued to use rhetoric aimed at ginning up white anxiety, to make sure those anxious whites keep on remembering who their (false) champion is.I did check to see what Limbaugh said about Tiger Woods recently, now that Trump has embraced him, and in fact Limbaugh has done a 180, offering nothing but praise for how been Tiger has been a friend to Trump. However, while discussing Tiger and Trump, Limbaugh made sure to remind his audience that Obama is still the one to blame for exacerbating racial tensions in America. He certainly doesn’t blame Trump—or himself, for that matter. None of those things qualify as a surprise.

Robin Lindley: What are some good ways to counter the hateful and inaccurate rhetoric of Limbaugh and his fellow extremists in the right-wing media?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll leave folks with the concluding paragraphs of the book, which are as close as I get to offering a prescription going forward regarding how to counter the Limbaugh/Trump vision of America:

“White racial identity has been the foundation of the single most destructive form of identity politics over the course of American history. In colonial times, slave-owners raised the status of white indentured servants—many of whom had developed close relationships with the enslaved African Americans alongside whom they worked—transforming these “plain white folks” into equal citizens and telling them that they were superior to blacks, who were thus undeserving of freedom. Why did they do this? Because the slave-owning elites had one fear above all: a white-black coalition of the masses that would unite to overthrow them. Similarly, after emancipation, the Southern economic elites made sure to bind poor whites to them through the race-based advantages conferred by Jim Crow, all in the name of thwarting that same white-black, class-based political partnership.

“In this century, some working- and even middle-class whites, especially those without a college degree, have been drowning economically in a way they have not since the Great Depression. For many, whatever privilege comes with being white is not enough to keep them afloat. They are angry, afraid, and looking for a scapegoat. Limbaugh has been only too happy to oblige. He has absolutely no interest in helping the country figure out how to deal in a productive way with the white anxiety that arises from demographic change. He is interested in one thing, and one thing only: exacerbating this phenomenon in order to keep separate whites and Americans of color who do share common economic interests. That is how Republicans win elections.[recall he was nearly RNC chair]

Limbaugh’s divisive approach, in that specific regard, is a carbon copy of the approach taken by the nineteenth century Southern white elites. The more he can get working, and middle-class whites toidentify with their racial identity—their tribe—above their economic interests, the better he will be able to prevent the multiracial, progressive coalition assembled by President Obama from growing strong enough to defeat Limbaugh/Trump-style conservatism once and for all. Ultimately, the right-wing needs white racial anxiety. In fact, it cannot survive without it.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those powerful words. What are you working on now?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: Right now? How about a nap? I’m still teaching full time, so I’ll be spending time thinking about a new project over the coming months.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your thoughtful comments Professor Reifowitz and congratulations on your fascinating new book, “The Tribalization of Politics.”

==

==

djt trump twitter algorithm?

is djt following gingrith language memo, or has he just absorbed by assmosis? too much fox news?

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/is-donald-trump-the-modern-day-earl-long-a-political-scientist-details-the-history-of-weaponizing-childish-nicknames/

HNN

Is Donald Trump the modern day Earl Long?

A three-time Louisiana governor, Long mastered the art of political ridicule seven decades ago by weaponizing nicknames. The hilarious names Long pinned on his rivals, and the rollicking stories he told about them, riveted audiences bored by puffed-up rhetoric.

While Long’s stunts may be remembered as silly hijinks, there was a sly, often deadly serious, purpose to his technique. He used it to get voters to laugh at his foes and to put them on the defensive – a place politicians never want to be. Tucked within Long’s jests were razor-sharp attacks aimed at exploiting opposition weaknesses – hidden swords inside a pea-patch cloak.

When New Orleans Mayor deLesseps S. Morrison ran for governor against Long in 1956, the wily Long took aim. He called the mayor “Della Soups” and said he’s “the only man that can talk out of both sides of his mouth, whistle, and strut all at once.”

Long scoffed that the impeccable Morrison was “slick as a peeled onion” and imitated him powdering his face and hiding his bald spot with a toupee (or, as Long called it, a “tuppy”). Sporting suspenders, baggy pants and a rumpled, sweat-soaked shirt, the rustic Long assured his hard-scrabble, plain-folk audiences that if you put one of Morrison’s silk suits on “Uncle Earl”––the nickname he gave himself––it would look like “socks on a rooster.”

Earl, the younger brother of the more famous Long, Huey­­––himself no slouch when it came to clever attacks––pestered a range of state politicians. He branded his former lieutenant governor, an on-and-off ally, “Big Bad Bill Dodd,” a name that stayed with him forever. Long also called Dodd “the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Louisiana politics.”Another target was “psalm-singing” Jimmie Davis, a former governor who was an accomplished singer-songwriter.

Long went after rivals many ways. In his last gubernatorial campaign, he soft-soaped opponent Fred Preaus, a well-known car dealer, calling him “a fine man.” Then Long explained that if he needed a car, he’d do business with Preaus. But, he added, “if I needed two cars, I wouldn’t do business with him. He couldn’t handle a deal that big.” Long won the race.

The tactic of nicknaming political opposition has survived the modern age of electronic media. Donald Trump is the new master of the game – delighting supporters, mortifying adversaries.

In the 2016 election, Trump deployed nicknames against every threat. Remember “Low Energy Jeb Bush” and “Liddle Marco” Rubio? Then there was “Crooked Hillary,” the label that drove the Clinton camp crazy.

When it came to “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, Trump made a point of adding, “You have to spell it right––L-Y-I-N-apostrophe.” Twisting the knife, he went on: “The bible held high, then he puts it down and he lies.”

You could almost hear Uncle Earl holler out that punchline, he lies!

Trump has unsheathed new names for 2020. There is “Sleepy, Creepy” Joe Biden and “Crazy Bernie” Sanders. “Pocahontas,” the sobriquet Trump slapped on Elizabeth Warren, was so troublesome that she got a DNA test to prove Native American heritage.

Trump has gone after others, as well. The Democratic Senate leader is “Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer. The Meet the Press moderator is “Seepy Eyes” Chuck Todd. The former FBI director is “Leakin’ James Comey.” Perhaps funniest––but surely most dangerous––is “Rocket Man,” North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop has called Trump’s capacity to wipe out critics with pejorative nicknames a “dangerous linguistic power.” He also complains that an otherwise “hyper-vigilant” press oddly views this Trumpian tactic an “amusing distraction.”

Nonetheless, Trump’s enemies have tried to beat him at his own game. Only recently, one Democrat tagged him “Con Don.” Over the last few years, we’ve heard “Cheatin’ Don,” “Traitor Trump,” “Agent Orange,” “Captain Chaos,” “Dangerous Donald,” “Hair Hitler,” “King Leer” and “Benedict Donald.” So far, none of these nicknames have stuck.

Today’s distended crop of Democratic presidential candidates will keep trying to stamp Trump with a lethal nickname that will stick. But, can any of them do it? Should they even try? After all, there’s not an Earl Long in the bunch.

==

aha:

horo-show sez left is source of violence (note slippage of black bloc wackos burning some trash or breaking windows are violent) whereas actual acts of violence eg by trump whipping up hate to press that gets them shoved/hit?

more aha: rt conflates verbal violence and actual, eg  sec of def nom said ok for son to use baseball bat on mom b/c she yelled/nagged him for 3 hrs, thus self-defense

// slippage of eco- --> econ terror; rt calls left "extremists" and angry thus irrational, they seem to be the ones to consistently and constantly "lose it" plus violence is the trad perogative of men and power.  plus if left tyranny is real threat to freedom and liberty, violence is justified/necessary

eg

United States isn’t the only English-speaking country where politicians can be loose cannons: in the U.K., Conservative MP Mark Field has been suspended from his position as a Foreign Office minister following a physical attack on a female Greenpeace activist.

In a video that has been posted on the Guardian’s website, Field can be seeing grabbing the protester by the neck at a June 20 dinner at London’s Mansion House and physically removing her from the event — and she can be heard saying, “It’s a peaceful protest.” Greenpeace activists disrupted the dinner in order to draw attention to the climate change crisis.

burgess sp give them an argument

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-june-3-2019/

==

an 519

no lx

Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s most effective rhetorical weapons — and why they could get him reelected

written by Alex Henderson May 31, 2019

The 2018 election results in the United States demonstrated that Democrats have an abundance of positions that can work in their favor, from universal health care to protecting Social Security and Medicare to calling for middle class tax cuts. But Democrats have a formidable adversary in President Donald Trump because he knows his base, knows it well and knows how to work it. Democrats enjoyed an impressive net gain of 40 seats in the House of Representatives in 2018, but Trump’s aggressive stumping on behalf of Republican candidates helped the GOP slightly increase its majority in the U.S. Senate and win key gubernatorial races in Georgia and Florida.

Trump is a loose cannon, but he is a master of soundbites and a master of messaging — and he stands a good chance of being reelected in 2020 despite the fact that Democrats are strong on issues like health care and middle class tax cuts. Rhetorically, the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee — whether it’s Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris  of California or someone else — will need to engage in verbal guerrilla warfare and fierce messaging in order to overcome Trump’s ability to whip the GOP base into a frenzy. And Democrats who underestimate Trump’s rhetorical powers do so at their own peril.

Here are some examples of themes and rhetoric Trump is likely to use to flog Democrats going into 2020.

1. Sleepy Joe and Crazy Bernie

Trump’s name-calling seems incredibly childish and silly to his critics, who have often accused him of being a 72-year-old man (73 on June 14) who sounds like he’s taunting  classmates in middle school. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. While Trump  has street smarts and knows how to diminish his opponents — which means that he will be using names like “Sleepy Joe” for Biden and “Crazy Bernie” for Sanders a lot this year. The idea is to paint Biden as lethargic and Sanders as extreme and radical. Truth be told, Sanders isn’t nearly as far to the left as Trump would have us believe: he’s essentially a New Deal liberal who believes in capitalism with a strong social safety. Sanders isn’t really anti-capitalist — he’s against crony capitalism. But if Trump repeats his “Crazy Bernie” rhetoric enough, it could convince swing voters that Sanders is a dangerous extremist.

Biden, meanwhile, will need to appear as aggressive, forceful and focused as possible in order to keeping Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” rhetoric from sticking.

So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews. Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the “audience” was so smiley and nice. Very strange, and now we have @donnabrazile?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2019

Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe. I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign. It will be nasty – you will be dealing with people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2019

2. Claims that Democrats want to steal your guns and repeal the 2nd Amendment

Wanting to regulate the sale of firearms is a far cry from wanting to abolish the 2nd Amendment, but going into 2020, Trump will most certainly try to paint Democrats as the party that hates the 2nd Amendment and can’t wait to confiscate your guns. In the past, Democratic candidates have been mocked by other Democratic candidates for posing for photos while holding their hunting rifles. But if one of Trump’s 2020 messages is that I and I alone can protect your 2nd Amendment rights, Democrats will need to explain their positions and explain them well.

THE SECOND AMENDMENT WILL NEVER BE REPEALED! As much as Democrats would like to see this happen, and despite the words yesterday of former Supreme Court Justice Stevens, NO WAY. We need more Republicans in 2018 and must ALWAYS hold the Supreme Court!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2018

3. Trump will denounce Democrats as ‘sore losers’

Challenging Trump on his policies and investigating him via the House of Representatives is not the same as refusing to accept the 2016 election results. When Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump in November 2016, Democrats accepted the election results — and President Barack Obama tried to make the transition as smooth as possible even though his efforts, sadly, were in vain. But perception can become reality at a Trump event, and Trump has repeatedly denounced Democrats as “sore losers” who cannot accept the fact that Clinton lost to him. On March 4, Trump revisited that theme when he tweeted that if Democrats continue to investigate him, they will “continue to look like sore losers who didn’t accept the WILL OF THE PEOPLE in the last election.”

“Now that the Dems are going to try & switch from Collusion to some other reason, it makes them continue to look like sore losers who didn’t accept the WILL OF THE PEOPLE in the last election – they will do anything to get rid of the President.” @AriFleischer It will never work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2019

4. ‘No collusion, no obstruction, total exoneration’

Ever since special counsel Robert Mueller delivered his final report for the Russia investigation to Attorney General William Barr, Trump has been repeating his mantra “no collusion, no obstruction, total exoneration” —which wasn’t what Mueller said. The special counsel’s report said that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians, although questionable, didn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy — and Mueller made no judgement of either guilt or innocence on obstruction of justice but rather, laid out the evidence for others to evaluate going forward. Mueller, speaking publicly on May 29, stated that his work in the Russia investigation is over and done with; now, it’s up to others to read his report and decide what to do with the information.

So no, Mueller’s report wasn’t a total vindication of Trump. But the president realizes that if he repeats his “no collusion, no obstruction, total exoneration” soundbite often enough, many people will believe it. Trump is great at finding soundbites and working them to death, and being redundant is not a liability for the president — he views it as an asset.

No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2019

5. Trump claims that U.S. economy is better than ever

Trump obviously realizes that many Americans, like himself, have short attention spans. Democrats are much better at nuance, but when so many Americans respond instinctively to soundbites — not nuance or intricate details — Democrats are fighting an uphill battle. Trump has repeatedly congratulated himself for the United States’ low unemployment rates of 2018 and 2019, but the devil is in the details: the country was recovering significantly from the Great Recession when Obama was still president — and not all Americans have been feeling the recovery. But when Trump stresses that “our economy is better than it has been in many decades” and tries to take credit for it, his base is going to buy into it — even if they’re still struggling.

Our economy is better than it has been in many decades. Businesses are coming back to America like never before. Chrysler, as an example, is leaving Mexico and coming back to the USA. Unemployment is nearing record lows. We are on the right track!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2018

The Economy is soooo good, perhaps the best in our country’s history (remember, it’s the economy stupid!), that the Democrats are flailing & lying like CRAZY! Phony books, articles and T.V. “hits” like no other pol has had to endure-and they are losing big. Very dishonest people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2018....

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 Department of Energy, US policy will support the export of American energy products such as liquefied natural gas as “molecules of US freedom” to the rest of the world.

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519 AHA: THE SOLUTION IS REPAIR THE COMMONS (including rhet. langexpertise ~ agnotology

wicked smart henry g

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 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.”

...

Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and most of the Republican Party in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public is addicted to extreme violence and shock, which allow them to drown in overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Unsurprisingly, education in the larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance that now plays a central role in the formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted the ideologies, policies and institutions that are crucial to a substantive and thriving democracy.

I am not talking about the kind of anti-intellectualism that has a long history in the United States. I am pointing to a more lethal form of ignorance fueled by a manufactured type of illiteracy that is often ignored. What I am referring to is a mode of illiteracy that is both a scourge and a political tool power designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right to state that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.” Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest.

Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. And so it goes. The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

The writer and social critic Gore Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia. The title should be extended to the United States of Amnesia and Willful Illiteracy. Illiteracy no longer simply marks populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is about what it means not to be able to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment and critical agency.

In this instance, manufactured illiteracy has become a form of political repression that discourages a culture of questioning, renders agency inoperable as an act of intervention, and restages power as a mode of domination. Illiteracy serves to depoliticize people because it reproduces conditions that make it difficult for individuals to develop informed judgments, analyze complex relationships and draw upon a range of sources to understand how power works and how they might be able to shape the forces that bear down on their lives.

Think about the defunding of public education or the assault on truth and civic literacy by the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Jair Bolsonaro administration in Brazil. Illiteracy provides the foundation for being governed, not how to govern. It is precisely this mode of illiteracy that now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, propaganda machines and the need for instant gratification. This mode of manufactured illiteracy and education has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship.

It is important to recognize that the rise of this new mode of illiteracy is not simply about the failure of public and higher education to create critical and active citizens; it is about a society that eliminates those public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. Literacy is dangerous to tyrants because they recognize that it is not only about learning critical competencies and an essential step towards agency, it is also the precondition for intervening in the world by being able to critique common-sense assumptions that legitimate apparatuses of persuasion and power. In the absence of a culture of literacy, the preconditions disappear for confronting not only the crisis of memory, ethics and agency but also the crisis of democracy itself.

At a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich and major tech companies, the educative force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and consumption that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others. Think of the power of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as an anti-democratic disimagination machine, especially in its ability to influence the Trump presidency.

The era of post-truth is in reality a period of crisis which, as Antonio Gramsci observed, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics of disposability and social sorting while exaggerating a culture of fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.

I want to argue that any viable attempt at developing a radical politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy and what I have termed public pedagogy, or more precisely the educational force of the wider culture, as central not only to politics but also to the creation of subjects capable of becoming individual and social agents willing to struggle against injustices and fight to reclaim and develop those institutions crucial to the functioning and promises of a substantive democracy. One place to begin to think through such a project is by addressing the meaning and role of pedagogy as part of the broader struggle for economic justice and practice of freedom.

The reach of pedagogy extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, the expanding digital screen culture, and alternative old and new media outlets. Accordingly, pedagogy is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives. Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using media establishments and public and higher education to reproduce the corporate-driven culture of neoliberalism. In addition, they are waging an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, public schools, unions, feminist organizations and social services, among others, all the while undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.

As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative media to health care centers — there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a “failed sociality” — a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice.

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khj grad crs

https://www.c-span.org/video/?459639-1/depth-kathleen-hall-jamieson

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/a-historian-of-rhetoric-details-the-genius-of-trumps-strategic-and-instrumental-lies/

So Donald Trump has told 10,000-plus lies, or “misstatements,” since taking office as president. So what? All those lies, and what sense have we made of them? That’s the first question that really matters: What sense can we make of an avalanche of lies designed to overwhelm our capacity to make sense of anything? The second question is also important: What can we do about them?

One thing should be clear: The media shouldn’t be repeating them, giving Trump’s lies more life. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they’re doing, according to a recent Media Matters study, which  found that major media outlets routinely amplified Trump’s false claims on their Twitter accounts — 19 times a day, on average. The study period ran from Jan. 26 to Feb. 15 of this year, and it ...did not dispute that misinformation.

• That means the outlets amplified false or misleading Trump claims without disputing them 407 times over the three weeks of the study, an average of 19 times a day.

So, that’s what we shouldn’t be doing. But what to do instead? That should be informed by knowledge and understanding — first about the nature of Trump’s lies themselves, and then, more broadly about how they function and what they’re intended to do.

We can make a start in two ways: First, by looking more closely at Trump’s most frequent lies and considering how we might build on our knowledge of them, to cover all his lies more responsibly; second, by considering what academic researchers have found, which can help inform and direct us moving forward. Beyond that, however, the real work lies in coming to grips with Trump’s use of rhetoric, and the threat that poses to democracy and the institutions and values on which it depends.

Plumbing the depths of the “Bottomless Pinocchios”

Trump’s most frequently repeated falsehoods are those the Washington Post now identifies as “bottomless Pinocchios.” Most frequent of all is his claim that his “big, beautiful wall” is already being built — a false claim repeated 160 times. This top-rated lie is all the more remarkable given how recent it is. The original “Three Pinocchios” for the claim came only on April 5 of last year.  Trump’s only other false claims that come close are his overstating the impact of trade deficits (147 times), claiming his tax cut was the biggest in history (143 times), and claiming that the U.S. economy has never been stronger (134 times). The cut-off for bottomless Pinocchios is 20 repetitions, and the bottom two — at 22 repetitions each — are falsely claiming to cut the cost of the F-35 jet and wildly exaggerating the costs of illegal immigration, which is quite likely a net benefit to the country.

A better sense can be gained by grouping the bottomless Pinocchios by subject matter, which give us the following set of totals:

• 505 lies about immigration
• 402 lies about Trump’s economic accomplishments
• 143 lies about exaggerated military spending
• 127 lies about Trump himself being persecuted

It’s hardly an accident, or a surprise, that the top two subjects of Trump’s lies revolve around the so-called issues that made him president — his racist appeals to fears and hatred of immigration and his bogus claims of brilliant business success — exposed as never before in the recent New York Times tax record exposé. The fact that these two subjects represent 5% and 4%, respectively, of Trump’s 10,000 lies only underscores the value of simply keeping track.

Grouping Trump’s false claims under broad categories this way  highlights the false attacks he’s mounting against others, as well as the false glory he’s trying to claim for himself. Given that journalists all know that he’s lying by now, this should be the minimal standard for telling the truth about what he’s doing — rather than simply reporting his lies as if they were true, and then belatedly or half-heartedly fact-checking them, This is step one: Stop doing everything wrong, as the Media Matters study reports we are doing now.

Scratching the surface: Lessons from academics

In a note at the end of their story, Post fact-checkers pointed to three examples of academics using their fact-checking data for important purposes. In December of 2017, UC Santa Barbara psychologist Bella DePaulo reported (in the Post and Psychology Today) that Trump lied a lot more, and a lot more viciously, than most people do.

In her earlier work, she had found that most lies are either self-serving, or meant to flatter others — with the former about twice as common. Only around 1 to 2% of lies were defined as cruel. Trump, in contrast told 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind lies, and fully 50% of his lies were cruel.

In addition DePaulo wrote, Trump’s lies “often served several purposes simultaneously (for example, sometimes they were both self-serving and cruel).” This last point echoes something noted above: One bottomless Pinocchio may fit into two different categories of lies, serving to advance two different agendas. Trump’s use of lies to serve multiple purposes should surely be a central focus of attention moving forward.

In May 2018, Tali Sharot of University College London and Neil Garrett of Princeton addressed the i**ncreased pace of Trump’s lying**, from about five false claims a day during his first 100 days to nine a day from March 1 to May 1, 2018. They pointed to their own research as well as other studies showing that “our response to our own acts of dishonesty is strong at first, but over time decreases,” a process they dubbed, “emotional adaption.” They also cited other research showing that “individuals adapt not only to their own dishonesty but also to that of others,” and pointed to other evidence that Trump’s dishonesty hadn’t diminished his support.

If anything, these findings are cautious or understated, given how Trump’s pace of lying has continued to skyrocket. The Post itself recently reported, “All told, the president racked up 171 false or misleading claims in just three days,April 25-27. That’s more than he made in any single month in the first five months of his presidency.” Trump’s escalation of lying deserves focused attention as well — and we’ll touch on it again below.

Finally, research by Sophie Van Der Zee of Erasmus University and her colleagues “foundsubstantial linguistic differences between factually correct and incorrect [Trump] tweets and developed a quantitative mode” which couldpredict the veracity of Trump tweets with 73% overall accuracy. As they explained, “Lying can cause behavioral change [in language use] because it is cognitively demanding, elicits emotions, and increases attempted behavioral control.”

Van Der Zee’s research is very important; here’s why. The success of this method strongly suggests that a) Trump knows that many of his false statements are lies— an enduring subject of debate — and b) he responds to his own lying, at last subconsciously, much as other liars do.

These are interesting findings, but they only scratch the surface of what’s going on. To make sense of the larger picture of what Trump is doing, and the even more urgent question of what we should do about it, we need to look beyond the wall of Trump’s 10,000 lies to the larger landscape around them.

Trump’s lies as rhetoric

To place Trump lies in a larger context, I turned to two experts whose focus is much broader. Because such a prodigious liar can’t be fully understood without considering the full range of his rhetorical expression, I first turned to Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric, whose book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” (table of contents here) will be published in early 2020.

And because Trump’s demagoguery itself needs further explanation and context, I also turned to Elizabeth Mika, a contributor to the “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” to help make sense of the social psychodynamics involved — not just in Trump’s behavior, bur more generally.

“It’s important to realize thatlies are marketing for Trump,” Mercieca said. “He isn’t concerned about whether or not a statement is true or false. Veracity isn’t important at all. He is concerned with shaping our understanding, with framing.”

This is a  fact that’s widely recognized, but seldom seems to sink in — as witnessed by how pervasively the media continues to propagate Trump’s lies, even when recognizing them as such.

“Everyone quotes the ‘truthful hyperbole’ thing from his book [“The Art of the Deal”], but Trump didn’t even write that,” Mercieca continued. “Tony Swartz said that he made it up on Trump’s behalf because it acknowledged, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ I think that’s about right. Trump doesn’t even care that it’s a lie. It’s just a means to an end. Trump is a very strategic and instrumental communicator.”

The evidence from Van Der Zee’s study arguably suggests, let us note, that  Trump actually does care, at some level, but it’s simply not part of his conscious calculation.

“Trump’s lies fall into different categories, such as hyperbole and humbug, like P.T. Barnum,” Mercieca said (see her own account of Barnum’s multi-layer humbug here), “but also more menacing categories of speech that border on authoritarianism. Trump proclaims his truth as the one and only truth and asks his audiences to deny their own perception of reality. It’s a pre-Cartesian view of truth — ‘truth’ is no longer what we perceive (I think, therefore I am), but what Trump says is true.

“Folks who call it a form of ‘gaslighting’ are correct,” Mercieca went on. “Trump’s constant blizzard of lies denies us the possibility of knowing. It’s its own epistemology. And if that doesn’t frighten you, the constant barrage of lies are authoritarian — they are used to prevent him from being held accountable for his words and actions.”

But the lies don’t just work in isolation, she noted:

The lies serve in conjunction with his otherrhetorical strategiesto attract attention, control the national dialogue, and distract our attention. I write about how he routinely usesad hominem attacks, ad baculum threats of force, reification (treating people as objects), ad populum (appealing to the wisdom of the crowd), American exceptionalism, and paralipsis (I’m not saying, I’m just saying). The lies are part of all of those strategies. He lies when he attacks, he lies when he praises, he lies and lies and lies. There is no truth that matters.

It’s this kind of framing of Trump’s lies that’s been so dramatically and tragically absent from virtually all mainstream media coverage. What I wrote earlier about categorizing Trump’s lies ties in directly here. Mercieca’s rhetorical distinctions suggest further ways of refining how we categorize Trump’s lies: ad hominem attacks against groups and individuals, for example, or categories of who is being threatened or treated as an object. We also need to use these categories to critique Trump’s rhetoric holistically — not just keep track of his blatantly false statements, but also the threats, promises and postures that serve as their oxygen.

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https://tyt.com/stories/4vZLCHuQrYE4uKagy0oyMA/55ZimtgirWgUh9ZgMSPirI

no lnx

TYT Investigates

‘Put Them All in a Gas Chamber,’ Said Border Militia Member: Report

By: Ken Klippenstein  May 6, 2019  3 comments

“Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them,” a border militia member in New Mexico is alleged to have said of border migrants that the group had been monitoring.

“We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber,” the militia member, Armando Gonzalez, is also alleged to have said. Gonzalez did not respond to multiple requests for comment by TYT.

The disturbing comments appear in an April 24 police report containing allegations by a former member of the militia group. The former member, Steven Brant, contacted the Sunland Park Police Department to notify them of what he called “terroristic threats” he had witnessed by the group. The report was produced by the Sunland Park Police Department and was obtained by TYT through a public records request.

On April 18, the border militia, which calls itself the United Constitutional Patriots (UCP), sparked national outrage after reportedly detaining about 200 border migrants, including several children, at gunpoint. After video surfaced appearing to show UCP impersonating Border Patrol — a federal offense — the FBI arrested UCP’s leader, Larry Mitchell Hopkins.

Although the police report obtained by TYT does not mention UCP by name, Daniel Carranco, Sunland Park City Clerk, confirmed to TYT that UCP is the group referenced.

The police report is an interview of a militia member named Steven Brant who told police he went by the codename “Viper.” On April 23, an article in The New York Times about UCP mentions both Gonzalez and quoting a “balaclava-clad militia member who gave his name only as Viper.” Brant did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TYT.

Judging from the article, Brant seemed an ardent supporter of UCP’s agenda prior to his decision to contact the Sunland Park PD.

“We’re here to protect Americans from the illegals violating our sovereignty,” Brant told the Times, espousing a commong talking point among Trump supporters.

“It’s my God-given right to be here," he said. "The guys in Washington say one thing about not wanting us on the ground but no one from the Border Patrol here has ever told me they don’t want our help."

Indeed, the report suggests that UCP enjoys the support of Border Patrol, stating that Brant “was a part of the group who was assisting Border Patrol with observation of subjects crossing the border illegally.”

Asked to confirm the Sunland Park PD claim that UCP was assisting, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official did not respond directly. The official told TYT, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not endorse or condone private groups or organizations taking enforcement matters into their own hands. Interference by civilians in law enforcement matters could have public safety and legal consequences for all parties involved. Border Security operations are complex and require highly trained professionals with adequate resources to protect the country.”

However, the official also noted that “Border Patrol welcomes assistance from the community and encourages anyone who witnesses or suspects illegal activity to call.”

So why did Brant become disillusioned?

According to the police report, on the night of April 24, Brant and other UCP members had been monitoring the border when they observed several people crossing. Brant told police that another member, identified as Armando Delgado Gonzalez, then handed him a handgun and ran to his vehicle and grabbed an AR-15.

An internal police report obtained by TYT includes a militia member's account of what another member said about killing undocumented immigrants.(Image: Screengrab of Sunland Park, NM, internal police report.)

Brant said he gave Gonzalez back his gun and told him to put the weapons away since they were only to observe and report activity. Brant said Gonzalez then became upset and made the remarks about Hitler and gassing their detainees.

Brant told police that he was going to start a new group “that followed the law.”

Although Gonzalez did not respond to TYT's requests for comment, the Times article includes several quotes from him about his motives.

“If you ask me this is all about politics,” Gonzalez told the Times. “The Democrats want illegal immigration because that means more votes for them.”

“But I took an oath to protect my country and what’s happening on the border is an invasion threatening our people,” Gonzalez said. “These men [UCP] are patriots and I'm proud to stand alongside them.”

According to the Times, Gonzalez identified himself as an Army veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ken Klippenstein is a senior investigative reporter for TYT. He can be reached securely via Signal at 202-510-1268, on Twitter @kenklippenstein or via email: kenklippenstein@tytnetwork.com.

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new cointelpro blk extremists

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-fbi-appears-to-be-engaged-in-a-modern-day-version-of-cointelpro-aclu-racial-justice-program-deputy-director/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/watch-beto-orourke-slams-trumps-rhetoric-as-something-we-mightve-expected-to-hear-in-nazi-germany/

“What other country on the face of the planet does that kind of thing?”

2020 Democratic presidential candidate **Beto O’Rourke** was questioned by a reporter Thursday night after he told an audience that some of **President Donald Trump**‘s comments echo the rhetoric of Nazi Germany’s “Third Reich.”

Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur reports O’Rourke had told participants at the Sioux City, Iowa town hall that Trump’s policy of separating migrant families at the Southern border “follows the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals but as animals and an infestation.... O’Rourke, a former U.S. Congressman from Texas, added, “I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich. I would not expect it in the United States of America.”

His comments drew “heavy applause” from the college crowd, Bloomberg notes.

O’Rourke stood by his remarks criticizing the President when the reporter challenged him.

“Calling human beings an infestation is something that we might’ve expected to hear in Nazi Germany,” O’Rourke explained. “Describing immigrants, who have a track record of committing violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans as rapists and criminals. Seeking to ban all Muslims — all people of one religion, what other country on the face of the planet does that kind of thing?”

The former Texas Congressman who raised $9.4 million in just 18 days, was not quite finished.

“Putting kids in cages. Saying that neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists are very fine people,” he added, evoking Trump’s remarks in 2017 that there were “very fine people” in the pro- and anti-white nationalism marches in Charlottesville, Virginia.

...

In Iowa, @BetoORourke says the president’s rhetoric on migrants and calls to ban Muslims sound more like the Third Reich than the USA.

Asked about the comparison after the rally, he emphatically stood by it.

Watch the exchange here

==ref

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/in-iowa-o-rourke-says-some-trump-rhetoric-echoes-nazi-germany

no lnx

In Iowa, O'Rourke Says Some Trump Rhetoric Echoes Nazi Germany

By Sahil Kapur

April 4, 2019, 7:51 PM PDT Updated on April 4, 2019, 8:59 PM PDT

He slams the administration for separating families at border

The former congressman spoke to crowd at a college in Iowa

Beto O’Rourke

Beto O’Rourke Photographer: Joshua Lott/Bloomberg

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Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke told a crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, that some of President Donald Trump’s inflammatory remarks echo the rhetoric of Nazi Germany’s “Third Reich.”

He said the administration’s policy of separating families who cross the Mexican border unlawfully “follows the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals but as animals and an infestation.

“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich. I would not expect it in the United States of America,” O’Rourke said Thursday, drawing heavy applause from the young crowd at Morningside College.

At a White House event in May 2018, Trump ripped into undocumented immigrants and said “these aren’t people, these are animals.” He later said he was referring to MS-13 gang members. The same month, he tweeted that Democrats “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.”

Embedded video

Sahil Kapur

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@sahilkapur

In Iowa, @BetoORourke says the president’s rhetoric on migrants and calls to ban Muslims sound more like the Third Reich than the USA.

Asked about the comparison after the rally, he emphatically stood by it.

Watch the exchange here ??

14.1K

7:30 PM - Apr 4, 2019

5,028 people are talking about this

Asked about the charged comparison by a reporter after the town hall, O’Rourke stood by it and cited Trump’s calls to ban Muslims and his remark at the dawn of his presidential campaign that Mexico was sending rapists to the U.S.

Read More: O’Rourke Matches Sanders Pace in 2020 Democratic Fundraising

“Calling human beings an infestation is something that we might’ve expected to hear in Nazi Germany,” the former Texas congressman said. “Describing immigrants, who have a track record of committing violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans as rapists and criminals. Seeking to ban all Muslims -- all people of one religion, what other country on the face of the planet does that kind of thing?”

“Putting kids in cages. Saying that neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists are very fine people,” he added, evoking Trump’s remarks in 2017 that there were “very fine people” in the pro- and anti-white nationalism marches in Charlottesville, Virginia.

O’Rourke’s comparison on Thursday night came in response to a question about how he would take on Trump if he’s the 2020 Democratic nominee.

He said he would seek to “pull this country together around the work that’s ahead.” He vowed to jettison the “pettiness and meanness and personal attacks,” arguing that Democrats may lose if they try to match Trump’s approach because Trump is too “gifted” at that style of campaigning.

The Texan’s blistering critique of the president came as the large and diverse field of Democratic contenders — which grew to 16 on Thursday with the entry of Ohio Representative Tim Ryan — look for ways to distinguish themselves. And the front-runner in most surveys, former Vice President Joe Biden, has yet to announce his plans.

O’Rourke, who’s polling near the top of the pack, recently announced that he had raised $9.4 million over the first 18 days of his campaign.

MSNBC host Christ Hayes unleashed on conservative columnist Matt Mackowiak Thursday evening on Twitter for defending some of President Donald Trump’s worst and most vile rhetoric.

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The back-and-forth began when Mackowiak tweeted a story from The Washington Free Beacon about presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who recently compared Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border to that of the Nazis.

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“He then went on to call asylum-seekers animals and an infestation,” explained O’Rourke. “Now we would not be surprised if in the Third Reich other human beings were described as an infestation, as a cockroach or a pest that you would want to kill.”

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“The reckless candidate continues his recklessness,” Mackowiak said of O’Rourke.

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But Hayes disagreed.

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“He noted that talking about immigrants as an ‘infestation’ and ‘animals’ is Nazi language, and in that he is 100% correct,” the MSNBC host tweeted. “The recklessness lies with the president using those vile, dehumanizing terms, not with the person pointing that out.”

Mackowiak responded: “What word would you use to describe 4,000 apprehensions every day?”

And that’s when Hayes became truly outraged.

“[OF] HUMAN BEINGS?!!! OF CHILDREN? I would never ever ever EVER under any circumstances refer to it as an ‘infestation,’ because that is a word that describes vermin,” Hayes wrote. Asked whether “invasion” was appropriate, he said: “They don’t have weapons, and are not militants of any kind so fo course invasion is definitely not appropriate. It is a humanitarian crisis, yes.”

He added: “Calling a group of people an “infestation,” comparing them to rats or vermin or cockroaches has been deployed as justification for genocide time and time again. This is just a plain historical fact.”

The exchange ended with this:

Matt Mackowiak

@MattMackowiak

• 17h

Let's be clear. I don't call it an infestation or call them animals.

But by now we should all know that comparing anything to the Nazis is unwise.

Chris Hayes

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@chrislhayes

I know you don't and wouldn't! I think the comparison is often hyperbolic and maybe unwise, but this is a case, imho, where it's apt.

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4:00 PM - Apr 4, 2019 · Manhattan, NY

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Mackowiak’s last point here is particularly revealing and alarming. He is, it seems, more concerned and offended by the analogy Trump’s critic’s make of his administration to the Third Reich than he is of the analogy and metaphor the president makes comparing immigrants to animals and an infestation. In addition to Hayes’ astute points about the relative accuracy of each analogy, there’s a more fundamental point to be made: one of the comparisons is used to critique the powerful ruling party in the U.S. government, while the other is used to attack and demonize a vulnerable and frequently abused population. The fact that Mackowiak finds one of these analogies “unwise” while offering little condemnation of the other is particularly telling.

==

AOC good on twitter comeback (tho fox drives her #'s down? 3/19)

EJ ACW

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has quickly become a powerful voice in the Democratic Party, and a new video showing a speech she delivered in a hearing on the importance of environmental protection and the threat of climate change makes clear why....“One year ago, I was waitressing in a taco shop in downtown Manhattan. I just got health insurance for the first time a month ago,” she said. “This is not an elitist issue — this is a quality of life issue.”

She continued: “You want to tell people that their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint whose kid’s — their blood is ascending in lead levels. Their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist. You’re telling them, that those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos? People are dying! They are dying! And the response across the other side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment five minutes before a hearing in a markup? This is serious! This should not be a partisan issue.”

==

only boo's in sotu ~ aoc US will never go socialist!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/here-is-a-recent-history-of-republicans-attacking-democrats-as-socialists-and-why-it-will-only-get-worse-in-the-months-ahead/

no lx twit

During his 2019 State of the Union address earlier this month, President Donald Trump declared, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” It was crude, cheap political theater designed to rally his far-right base, but Trump is hardly alone when it comes to using the word “socialist” to terrorize American voters—and hysterically attacking Democrats as “socialists” is likely to become even more prevalent in the months ahead.

Equating liberalism with socialism is nothing new. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s critics often attacked the New Deal as “socialism” even though, truth be told, his reforms were designed to save capitalism from itself. Even the fiercely anti-communist President Richard Nixon understood that in the 1970s, supporting elements of the New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. If anything, Nixon was so terrified of communism that he accepted a certain amount of “socialism” in order to avoid it. But the Republican Party of 2019 is so extreme that any belief at all in a social safety net is likely to be attacked as socialist.

On February 17, the New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported that according toRep. Tom Emmer, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), fear-mongering over “socialism” will be a prominent tool in the GOP playbook in 2020.Stolberg tweeted, “NEW: Inside look at the 2020 GOP playbook: Paint Democrats as socialists, baby-killers and anti-Semites. ‘Socialism is the greatest vulnerability by far that the House Democrats have,’ the NRCC chairman told me.”

Responding to Stolberg on Twitter, Democratic operative Ronald A. Klain (who served as Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff) posted, “Republicans calling Democrats ‘socialists’ is not a new playbook—it’s their ONLY playbook. Jack Kemp called Al Gore a ‘socialist’ in their 1996 debate. The GOP called Obama’s economic plans ‘socialist.’ They called the ACA ‘socialism.’ DO NOT BE SCARED, DEMOCRATS!”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg

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@SherylNYT

NEW: Inside look at the 2020 GOP playbook: Paint Democrats as socialists, baby-killers and anti-Semites. “Socialism is the greatest vulnerability by far that the House Democrats have,”  the NRCC chairman told me. https://nyti.ms/2Ef6Tc5

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1:49 PM - Feb 17, 2019

Some Republicans have seized on actions by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, center left, and Rashida Tlaib, right, to cast them as radical or anti-Semitic.

Republicans Hope to Sway Voters With Labels That Demonize Democrats

With 21 months until Election Day 2020, Republicans are trying to paint Democrats as left-wing radicals on the economy, abortion and Israel.

nytimes.com

1,583 people are talking about this

Ronald Klain

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@RonaldKlain

Republicans calling Democrats "socialists" is not a new playbook -- it's their ONLY playbook.  Jack Kemp called Al Gore a "socialist" in their 1996 debate.  The GOP called Obama's economic plans "socialist."  They called the ACA "socialism."

DO NOT BE SCARED, DEMOCRATS!

Sheryl Gay Stolberg

?

@SherylNYT

NEW: Inside look at the 2020 GOP playbook: Paint Democrats as socialists, baby-killers and anti-Semites. “Socialism is the greatest vulnerability by far that the House Democrats have,”  the NRCC chairman told me. https://nyti.ms/2Ef6Tc5

3,552

5:21 AM - Feb 18, 2019

In 2018, many Republican candidates used the word “socialist” in the hope of frightening voters into supporting them. One was Sen. Ted Cruz, who stressed, “I am not remotely afraid to debate left-wing liberal socialists.” Texas Rep. Chip Roy compared his Democratic opponent, Joseph Kopser, to Karl Marx, and former Texas Rep. Pete Sessions insisted that Democratic challenger Collin Allred had “socialist ideas”—although it didn’t work for Sessions, who was voted out of office and lost his seat to Allred.

How well anti-socialist rhetoric will or won’t work for Republicans in the months to come depends a lot on the state, the area or the district where they’re running. Some Democrats or allies of Democrats were victorious in 2018 despite calling themselves “democratic socialists”—or perhaps even because of it, including Sen. Bernie Sanders in Vermont, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Queens and the Bronx, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan. Context is crucial: Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are, in reality, FDR/LBJ capitalists who believe in a strong social safety net. But Republicans will distort their views, using them to terrorize their gullible voters.

Republicans have repeatedly used the word “socialist” to demonize the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, even though it’s “universal health care via the private sector” model was influenced by the Heritage Foundation, Richard Nixon and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Modern-day Republicans will even attack GOP ideas as “socialist” when they believe it’s expedient.

In May 2018, right-wing author Paul Gottfried wrote a piece for the American Conservative that was highly critical of Democrats yet lambasted Republicans for tossing the word “socialist” around so carelessly. Gottfried is no fan of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s liberal/progressive policies but stressed that it’s silly to think she fits the definition of “orthodox Marxism.”

Gottfried wrote, “The U.S. is hardly on its way to becoming Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, whatever the complaints one hears on Fox News. But we could easily slip into an up-to-date version of ‘antifascist’ Germany or Sweden.”

Agree or disagree with Gottfried’s criticisms of Warren—at least he’s intellectually honest enough to admit that she looks to Germany and Sweden for political inspiration, not Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela.

But Gottfried is a 77-year-old paleoconservative intellectual, not a Republican running for office in 2019 or 2020—and even if they know it’s disingenuous, that won’t stop Republicans from calling their opponents “socialists.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has denounced opponents of Trump’s proposed U.S./Mexico border wall as “socialists who prefer open borders,” and he will mindlessly repeat that over and over if he thinks it will save him from a GOP primary challenge next year.

The Democratic victories of 2018 ranged from hardcore liberals like Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib to centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona. If Sinema were from the U.K., she would probably fit right in with the Conservative Party and run as a Tory. But in a July 23, 2018 press release attacking Sinema, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) tried to paint Sinema as an example of the Democratic Party’s “full embrace of socialism”—which is idiotic. Full socialism is called communism, and Democrats are hardly promoting discredited Marxist-Leninist ideas such as abolition of all private property.

But this is the type of nonsense that the GOP is promoting in the Trump era, and it will only get worse as the 2020 presidential election draws closer.

what are can tell us about t rhet

https://theconversation.com/what-aristotle-can-teach-us-about-trumps-rhetoric-107761

From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats to Ronald Reagan’s reputation as the “great communicator” to Barack Obama’s soaring oratory to Donald Trump’s Twitter use, styles of presidential communication have varied over time.

But what is similar across all presidents is their ability to create persuasive messages that resonate with large segments of the U.S. population.

Whatever your opinion about Donald Trump, he is highly effective at doing this. The question is why, and how does he do it?

As someone who teaches rhetoric and communication, I am interested in how people connect with an audience and why a message resonates with one audience but falls flat with another. Whether intentional or not, Trump is using rhetorical strategies that have been around for more than 2,000 years.

What makes something persuasive?

There have been many definitions of rhetoric over the past two millennia, but at its most basic level it is the practice and study of persuasive communication. It was first developed in ancient Greece, and arose from the need for people to defend themselves in law courts – a brand new invention at the time.

One of the world’s most influential thinkers in this regard was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 B.C.

Aristotle was a student of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote about philosophy, poetry, music, biology, zoology, economics and other topics. He also famously wrote about rhetoric and came up with an elaborate and detailed system for understanding both what is persuasive and how to create persuasive messages.

To Aristotle, there were three main elements that all work together to create a persuasive message: a person’s use of logic and reasoning, their credibility and their use of emotional appeals.

Aristotle wished that everyone could be persuaded with detailed logical arguments – what he called “logos.” However, that approach is often tedious, and, frankly, Aristotle felt most people weren’t smart enough to understand them anyway. Facts, documents, reasoning, data and so forth are all important, but those alone won’t win the day. So, he claimed, we need two other things – and this is where Trump excels: credibility and emotion.

Trump: The credible leader

Aristotle argues that someone’s credibility – or “ethos” – is one of the elements that people find most persuasive.

However, he also said credibility is not a universal trait or feature. For example, a degree from Princeton gives you credibility only to someone else who has heard of Princeton, understands its cultural cachet and respects what it represents. The Princeton degree itself doesn’t give you credibility; it’s the perception of the degree by someone else that’s important.

Aristotle also said that an important feature of credibility is to appear to have the audience’s best interest in mind by sharing and affirming their desires and prejudices, and understanding and amplifying their cultural values. In politics, the person who does the best job of this will get your vote.

So when Trump states that climate change is a hoax or that the “news media is the enemy of the American people,” what makes that effective for certain audiences has nothing to do with the truthfulness of those statements.

Instead, it’s because he’s channeling and then reflecting the values and grievances of his audience back to them. The closer he gets to hitting the sweet spot of that specific audience, the more they like him and find him credible.

Very often, politicians “evolve” or “pivot” from a position that has earned them intense loyalty from a small group to a position they think will resonate with a larger group in order to get more supporters. This works for some people. But that’s not Trump’s strategy.

Instead, he goes all-in with his core supporters, establishing stronger bonds and identifying more closely with that group than someone with a more moderate message would. This also creates extremes on both sides: passionate supporters and intense detractors.

President Trump the communicator, then, has a laser focus on one particular segment of the population. He doesn’t mind if you don’t agree with him because he’s not talking to you anyway. His strategy is to continue nurturing his credibility with core supporters.

Trump: The emotional leader

Peppering your credibility with emotional appeals – what Aristotle calls “pathos” – is particularly effective. As Aristotle once wrote, “The hearer always sympathizes with one who speaks emotionally, even though he really says nothing.”

Anger, for example, is an emotion that a speaker can provoke in an audience by using real or perceived slights. In Book 2 of his “On Rhetoric,” Aristotle writes that anger is an “impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight.” He details how an audience will channel their “great resentment” and revel in the “pleasure” of their expectation of “revenge” against those who have wronged them.

In another passage, he writes, “people who are afflicted by sickness or poverty or love or thirst or any other unsatisfied desires are prone to anger and easily roused: especially against those who slight their present distress.”

Using slights to channel and rouse anger is a near daily strategy that Trump has used against the FBI, the news media, the Mueller investigation and other perceived enemies.

Anger over the slighting of one’s “present distress” also helps explain why, for example, Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment was such a rallying cry for Republicans. They didn’t like being dissed.

Trump’s language style

A speaker’s style of language is also important. Trump is very effective with this, too.

Aristotle recommended that a speaker should first identify feelings that their audience already holds, and then use vivid language that resonates with that specific audience to intensify those emotions. Trump has repeatedly put this tactic to work, particularly at his rallies.

For example, Trump regularly invokes a familiar adversary, Hillary Clinton, at his rallies. By drawing on his audience’s known animosity toward her and encouraging them in the “lock her up” chant, calling for her to be jailed and describing her election night loss as “her funeral,” he is using an aggressive style of language that reflects and heightens the preexisting emotions of his audience.

The downside is that the more he uses language that is strongly incompatible with other groups, the more they dislike him. But that seems to be something Trump embraces, which only gives him even more credibility with his supporters.

Whether this approach is a smart electoral strategy in the future remains to be seen.

==

Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. In the novel, “newspeak” is language twisted to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people to think critically and freely.

Donald Trump’s unapologetic bigoted language made headlines again Thursday when it was reported he told lawmakers working on a new immigration policy that the United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti. Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great (White) Again,” Trump’s overt racist remarks reinforce echoes of white supremacy reminiscent of fascist dictators in the 1930s.

His remarks about accepting people from Norway smack of an appeal to the sordid discourse of racial purity. There is much more at work here than a politics of incivility. Behind Trump’s use of vulgarity and his disparagement of countries that are poor and non-white lies the terrifying discourse of white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability. This is a vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only faceless and voiceless, but excess, redundant and subject to expulsion. The endpoint of the language of disposability is a form of social death, or even worse.

As authoritarianism gains strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled, along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible.

Words that speak to the truth to reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to judge, think critically and hold dominant power accountable. Notions of virtue, honour, respect and compassion are policed, and those who advocate them are punished.

I think it’s fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction in the United States. Under Trump, language is undergoing a shift: It now treats dissent, critical media coverage and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.”

The Trump administration, in fact, views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” Trump has repeated this view of the media so often that almost a third of Americans now believe it and support government-imposed restrictions on the media, according to a Poynter survey.

Thought crimes and fake news

Trump’s cries of “fake news” work incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable. Reason, standards of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth, according to Trump, because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. Orwell’s “thought crimes” are Trump’s “fake news.” Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” is Trump’s “Ministry of Fake News.”

[twit]

Donald J. Trump

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@realDonaldTrump

I’ve had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!

145K

T--

The notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power, particularly his attacks on judges, courts and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty.

For Trump, intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing.

One consequence is the myriad practices by which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, wilfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.

Under Trump, the language of civic literacy and democracy has become unmoored from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific evidence, and is now being reconfigured and tied to pageantry, political theatre and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism.

One consequence, as language begins to function as a tool of state repression, is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear and injustices proliferate.

Fascism starts with words

What is crucial to remember here, as authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political spectacle are disturbingly similar to earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.

Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty was normalized through the proliferation of strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization.

As German historians such as Richard J. Evans andVictor Klempererhave made clear, dictators like Adolf Hitler did more than simply corrupt the language of a civilized society, they also banned words.

Soon afterwards, the Nazis banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights.

The end point was an all-embracing discourse of disposability — the emergence of concentration camps and genocide fuelled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing.

Echoes of the formative stages of such actions are upon us now. An American-style neo-fascism appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.

==

https://medium.com/s/story/maga-the-power-of-four-words-4e9269add4e9

no lnx

How MAGA Worked Magic

A deep dive into one of the most powerful political slogans in U.S. history

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

— Rudyard Kipling

I am not in any way endorsing the Donald J. Trump presidency, nor am I valorizing the content of his message. Rather, I am valorizing the form of the message. I’m interested in the power of words.

I cannot remember Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign slogan. It might have been “I’m with her.” I saw that a lot, but I’m not sure if it was official.

Donald J. Trump’s slogan, in contrast, is seared into my mind. There were times when I blinked and I could see it in the darkness of my eyelids. Okay, that’s a lie, but you get what I mean. It is perhaps the most powerful and memorable political slogan ever.

Why? Because it is a syntactical and semantic masterpiece. Just four words convey a powerful and, of course, frightening message—one that starts inclusively and ends with a divisive challenge.

I’m not claiming four words caused one of the greatest electoral upsets in history, but the slogan has been used and adapted to the point of ubiquity. It underpinned the entire campaign. It was all over the news, like a barbed leitmotif.

It is perhaps the most powerful and memorable political slogan ever.

The words are often referred to with the acronym MAGA. The distinctive red baseball cap so pervasive during Trump’s campaign has become a contested symbol of contemporary America. Even rap royalty has been caught up in the polarizing storm.

Kanye West, who has seemingly embraced Trump, describes his Trump-autographed MAGA hat as his “Superman cape.” The four words embroidered on it represent “good and making America whole again.”

Four Words

Whatever you think of Trump and his election campaign, these four words underpinned an extraordinary campaign that defeated everything Washington could throw at it. Word by word, here is why it is so powerful:

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Make

This is a directive verb addressed directly to the beholder. It also empowers, implying that you can verb something together, verb something to happen. (You can/will) make America great again.

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America

This places you in the bigger picture of the nation, which is greater than the sum of its people. You are an American, you are part of it, and you can do something.

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Great

This is a superlative, and the least interesting of the four words. But it’s equally important. You can be part of something that is great. Great also means powerful—but without the negative connotations that can come with that term.

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Again

This is the crux of the whole sentence and of Trump’s campaign, delivered right at the end. Again is a shrill dog whistle that everybody hears, but especially white social conservatives of any party.

The implications are, of course, that America was great back in the day, but is no longer. Perhaps it stopped being great under Bill Clinton or maybe George W. Bush; it was certainly no longer great under Obama’s administration.

The word ‘again’ is the contentious part. It is implicitly combative, and it invites a with-us-or-against-us reaction.

But remember the three preceding words—especially that directive verb. America can be fixed, and you can fix it. You can do this by supporting Donald Trump.

The word again is the contentious part. It is implicitly combative, and it invites a with-us-or-against-us reaction. If you question whether America was ever great or assert that it is great now, you are getting locked into a long argument.

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My friend, a behavioral economist, observed that the power of Trump’s slogan lies in how it communicates a sense of loss:

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“One thing that struck me, from a behavioural economics perspective, is Trump relies on people feeling they’ve lost something […] The ‘again’ is powerful. It communicates a sense of loss. People are more risk averse when they’re winning. But when they’re losing, they do some pretty crazy s*** trying to get it back.”

Trump was simultaneously the reckless risk and the guy who made people believe they had nothing to lose.

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I just Googled Hillary’s slogan. It was “Stronger Together.” That’s not bad, but it’s not compelling—it doesn’t cut into the psyche like “Make America Great Again” does.

“Stronger Together” is not a directive. There’s no verb, no superlative—merely a comparative adjective. There’s nothing above and beyond the readers of the words, like America is above and beyond together. The slogan is not a challenge like Trump’s is, and as a result, it’s not as powerful. Trump’s slogan hit his adversaries like four landed punches.

Trump registered “Make America Great Again” only six days after the defeat of Mitt Romney in November 2012. Photo: Gage Skidmore via flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

The $325 Slogan

Trump had conceived of “Make America Great Again” as early as Nov. 7, 2012, when Mitt Romney lost his race against President Obama. Phrases like “We will make America great” and “Make America great” popped up but felt like a slight on the country’s past.

With the addition of again, Trump had what he was looking for. He immediately trademarked the four words for a $325 registration fee.

The long-sighted application paid off. When GOP rivals started to use the phrase in their own speeches, Trump’s team sent them cease-and-desist letters. The phrase has become plastered across a vast plethora of merchandise—official and unofficial—from bumper stickers to swimsuits.

Federal Commission filings show that Trump’s team spent more money on making MAGA hats than on polling, campaign consultants, staff, or even television advertisements.

With the addition of again, Trump had what he was looking for. He immediately trademarked the four words for a $325 registration fee.

The bite-sized slogan was copied. “It was knocked off 10 to one,” Trump told the Washington Post, but he reasoned that every time somebody buys counterfeit MAGA merchandise, “that’s an advertisement. It meant jobs. It meant industry, and meant military strength. It meant taking care of our veterans. It meant so much.”

The phrase also has a distinctly American ring. Where “Keep Calm and Carry On” embodies an English quaintness and bashful stoicism, “Make America Great Again” has a go-forth boldness.

Like “Keep Calm and Carry On,” MAGA has been appropriated—often subverted—to form thousands of phrases adorning T-shirts and coffee mugs, from “Make America Green Again” to “Make Metallica Great Again.”

Again and Again

Here’s the twist: “Make America Great Again” doesn’t come from Trump.

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Ronald Reagan was first. In 1980, Reagan exploited the perception that America had slid into decline throughout the 1970s. Reagan’s leadership revolutionized the Republican party by embracing economic liberalism and social conservatism. Photo: Fotosearch/Getty Images

It’s not a new slogan. In fact, it’s pretty old. Ronald Reagan used a variation of it in 1980: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s America struggled with the stagflation crisis while the Soviet Union consolidated its power by invading Afghanistan. The embarrassment of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 made people feel like the U.S. was losing its foreign clout.

Bill Clinton also used the slogan in 1992 as a response to the recession of the late 1980s that lasted into the ’90s: “Together, Let’s Make America Great Again.” Clinton’s version is softer with together added to the start. It’s an invitation, not an imperative. This version also fits with Clinton’s triangulation strategy of appeasing moderate Republicans.

Trump’s slogan is more visceral. Truncating it to the four words without the universal adverb together or the inclusive transitive verb let’s makes it more of a directive, more a direct address to the voter alone, more of a challenge.

Of course, context is important: America was out of the latest recession by 2016, so why was it “failing to be great”? Part of the genius of the four words is that again has different meanings for different people.

To converted rust-belt Democrats, again might hark back to industrial America; to Southern state conservatives, again could refer to the era before the Civil Rights Act of 1964; to Wall Street traders, again may recall the financial boom days of Reagan’s presidency.

Trump has never been crystal clear about the meaning, only suggesting that America was great under Reagan’s presidency. It’s interesting that the subjectivity of the phrase galvanizes so many people.

The flip side is that it’s a covenant, a deal. If Trump can’t deliver great—whatever that means—chances are voters will punish him in future elections.

I don’t want to cheapen the gravity of the situation, of everything at stake in politics. But considering the power of language is important. Words shape feeling, words can melt hearts, words can ultimately kill. Use them wisely.

Go to the profile of Steven Gambardella

WRITTEN BY

Steven Gambardella

I write about history, art and philosophy and how these subjects can help you in business and life.

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Trump supporters are proud of their absolute faith in him. You see it in the way they beam proudly when they tell reporters that they’d support him no matter what he does. Now that’s unconditional love!

We have mixed feelings about absolute faith and unconditional love. Sometimes we regard them as the highest virtues. Sometimes we think such commitment is pretty dangerous. Unconditional? Would you still love a partner who turned into an ax murderer?

On the receiving end, absolute faith and unconditional love are pretty handy. Gaining that kind of unconditional respect means you can do no wrong, which frees you to do all the wrong you want.

So if you’re into that sort of thing, here’s all it takes to get it. And if you’re not into that sort of thing, here’s what to watch out for.

1. Target people who can’t stand uncertainty: Go for the hungry, anxious, eager to believe; people who have had their fill of uncertainty and can’t stand anymore.
2. Target people who don’t notice the downside of absolute faith: These are people who get all dewy eyed when thinking about faith, the kind who either ignore a faith they regard as wrong-headed or will tell you that wrong-headed faith is not really faith.
3. Get their guard down: You’ll want people who see you as the answer to their prayers, people who want to align with you for a boost in their morale, status and prospects. Charm them. Listen to them and feed them whatever will satisfy them. The hungry are the easiest to eat.
4. Make bold, vague statements that speak directly to them. (Trump’s “Make America Great” is a great example.) Great how? Your targets can fill in whatever comes to mind. Likewise, you can court someone personally with a line like, “Wow, I can really tell that you’ve got talent for understanding what’s going on!” Bold, flattering, vague. Suckers line right up.
5. Include them in your “winner’s circle” with talk about the idiots "out there": Nothing wins faith like disparaging others. You see it at rallies where the speaker riles the audience by ridiculing everyone outside your circle. You can hear it in the way people flirt by confiding in you (yes you, because you’re wonderful!).
6. Speak as though you are the absolute final, neutral judge of reality. Don’t ever qualify what you say; it’s not your opinion, it’s truth. That will annoy careful thinkers. but they’re not your targets. It will win gullible thinkers, but only if they agree with you already. They’ll agree with you if you’re sufficiently vague (see #4).
7. Dog whistle: Keep your pandering to your targets and your attacks on others under the radar, so you can always deny them if challenged.
8. Make it easy to align with you, costly to break with you: Don’t ask your targets to make sacrifices. Once you’ve hooked them they’ll make all sorts of sacrifices. Make all of their first encounters with you self-affirming fun for them and make the alternative, not aligning with you, seem like nothing but a hassle.
9. Appear invincible: Your targets want to believe you, so make it easy for them. Prove you are right, absolutely and always (by your “authoritative” standards). Remember, there is absolutely nothing that can’t be mocked, attacked or vilified. It’s easy. Just pick apart anything that suggests you’re wrong.
10. Heads you win, tails you lose: Any good news affirms that you’re right. Any bad news affirms you’re the victim of persecution.
11. Avenge tenfold: Be savage. Be relentless. Don’t let anyone get away with saying anything bad about you. Make sure that anyone who tries has at least 10 times more bad things said about them. Gaslight like crazy.
12. Police morality as though you’re a crusader for reality: Above all you are always the morality police. If you hate immorality in others, the gullible will believe that you must be morally pure.

What’s nice about these rules is that it doesn’t matter what you know or think. Following them frees you from careful thought. That’s the beauty of it! You can apply these to win absolute faith and unconditional love from the gullible in support of anything. It doesn’t matter whether you offer anything for them to have faith in, since your targets are the kind who have faith in faith. Remember, they consider it a relief to no longer have to keep an eye on things—a relief from dreaded uncertainty.Jeremy Sherman is a decision theorist studying how life deals with dilemmas from the origins of life to everyday and political life.

https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/454/gopac.html

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used at intraining sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."

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That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

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This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.

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While the list could be the size of the latest "College Edition" dictionary, we have attempted to keep it small enough to be readily useful yet large enough to be broadly functional. The list is divided into two sections: Optimistic Pos[i]tive Governing words and phrases to help describe your vision for the future of your community (your message) and Contrasting words to help you clearly define the policies and record of your opponent and the Democratic party.

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Please let us know if you have any other suggestions or additions. We would also like to know how you use the list. Call us at GOPAC or write with your suggestions and comments. We may include them in the next tape mailing so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.

Optimistic Positive Governing Words

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Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the pos[i]tive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

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share, change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, active(ly), we/us/our, candid(ly), humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, principle(d), unique, duty, precious, premise, care(ing), tough, listen, learn, help, lead, vision, success, empower(ment), citizen, activist, mobilize, conflict, light, dream, freedom, peace, rights, pioneer, proud/pride, building, preserve, pro-(issue): flag, children, environment; reform, workfare, eliminate good-time in prison, strength, choice/choose, fair, protect, confident, incentive, hard work, initiative, common sense, passionate

Contrasting Words

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Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

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decay, failure (fail) collapse(ing) deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, "compassion" is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocricy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor...) bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage.

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