god devil terms

---

see rhetoric

see violent rhet

merri ok

SEE DOWN DEVIL...

SEE GOOD UP LIGHT

see in the name of

remember: a god term is one that we are expected to sacrifice for, but a devil term we must KILL for?!

GOD GOOD : free freedom liberty democracy

DEVIL EVIL: socialist communist terroristIslam extremist activist agenda collectivist elite tyranny

eco --> econ terror --> black extremist, islamic extremist

see reform effic streamline

see demon subhuman

contested god terms constitution freedom liberty etc patriot

---

see emotion anger fear

see rhet god devil term, anti-commie

see hype (nb fighting words/ god/ devil terms lead to violence w/o explicitly calling for it)

see us vs them enemy, polarization

NOTE RUBIO MILLER7 26 INT;L LEFT WING TERROR CONF, CUBA COMMIE

NSPM 7 ANTI-TRAD FAM? ANTI-CAPITALISM?

kinda globalist throwbACK?

rww

07/29/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Ali Alexander wants to "bring back book burning."

Finally, Chad Connelly claims that those promoting socialism "are really angry, wealthy elites" who seek to divide society: "It's godless. It's secular. It's anti-American. It's anti-freedom. It's anti-God."

LEFT LUNATICS ANGRY THUS IRRATIONAL THIS FORCE NEEDED

---

maralago: property is god term, life liberty [odd equation?]

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-built-pretext-january-6-what-its-doing-now-scarier

Right-wing news outlets have a rage-based business model, converting unhinged rants to readers and revenues. But there are few precedents, in intensity or duration, for the frenzy that has consumed Fox News and other bastions of the MAGA media since the FBI carried out a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday.Their incendiary commentary, which posits that a criminal probe into the former president is intrinsically corrupt and part of an attack on his voters, is courting a paroxysm of political violence.

The FBI executed a warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge, reportedly seeking classified material that Trump illegally removed from the White House at the end of his term. Pundits on the right could be trying to lower the temperature by telling their audiences that there’s much we don’t know yet; a legal process is playing out; and Trump, like any American, is subject to the rule of law.

Instead, Fox and other right-wing outlets describe the search as “the worst attack on this republic in modern history,” part of a “preemptive coup” to prevent Trump’s reelection, and a sign the country is now a “tyranny.” They say the FBI is acting like “the East German Stasi in the Cold War” and the Nazi “Gestapo,” and call its agents part of a “lawless criminal organization:(style="background-color:#ff6600ff"):}::{” that “planted evidence,” bugged Trump’s bedroom, and may be planning his “assassination.”

And they are quick to tell their viewers that they should fear their own persecution in the wake of the search. According to right-wing outlets, “the real target of this investigation is you” and its perpetrators are “trying to show all of us that we'll be destroyed if we fight them” because they are “at war with the American people.”

“If this is what they're able to do to the former president of the United States, think about what they could do to you, to anybody in America,” warned Lara Trump, Fox contributor and Trump’s daughter-in-law.

That paranoia is everywhere within the right-wing bubble, and some are calling for direct action in response. On Fox, Jesse Watters suggested that “honest Americans” would respond to the search by getting “out on the streets” against the “corrupt government.” According to the network’s Will Cain, a “permanent national split” – in other words, another civil war – may be needed to rectify the situation. The militia-linked radio host Pete Santilli, meanwhile, argued that it may be necessary for MAGA supporters to “arm up and surround Mar-a-Lago to protect it, toprotect life, liberty, and property.”

What might someone do if they are ensconced in the right-wing media bubble, trust these personalities, take their views seriously, and come to believe their claims that federal agents are Nazis waging war on the American public and threatening their own safety and the safety of their families? How far might they go?

This is not an idle question – extremism researchers are sounding the alarm about the prospect of pro-Trump violence. On Wednesday, Vice reported that “far-right extremists on pro-Donald Trump message boards and social networks are making violent, antisemitic threats” against the judge who reportedly signed off on the search warrant. FoxNews.com reported the same day that “FBI agents, as well as U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray, are experiencing an uptick in death threats” following the search.

“The posts on these pro-Trump forums tonight are as violent as I've seen them since before January 6th. Maybe even more so,” NBC News’ Ben Collins reported on Monday night.

Collins’ comment in particular points to the risks Fox and its brethren are courting. We’ve seen over the years that when the right-wing media riles up its audience enough, the consequences can be dire. When they spent weeks after the 2020 election championing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud and warning their audiences that they would lose their country if his lies were not vindicated, the result was a violent mob of thousands Trump had summoned to Washington, D.C., storming the U.S. Capitol, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers, and threatening the continuation of our democratic system.

What conservative pundits appear to have learned from that deadly debacle is that they will face no consequences for inciting mob violence. No one seems to have lost their job or their audience for unduly inflaming their viewers. They correctly assume that they are under no restraints as they stoke fear and rage to turn profits and bolster the political power of the Republican Party so it can carry out its goals of cutting taxes for rich people and banning abortion. And that means that they may be pushing the country once more toward the precipice.

---

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:

---

mashey 2012 heartland bs:

NEGATIVE:

2,160 EPA (except OK during Bush administration when fending off CA)

1,476 activis (-t or –m, as in environmental, anti-smoking; some are OK)

1,474 California

880 alarm: 556 alarmist, 94 alarmism, 51 alarming 405 IRS-3E 10

761 renewable

719 environmentalist (except “free-market” or “common-sense” ones)

599 ethanol406

470IPCC

352 Gore (Al) also appears in cartoons, such as Z.2006.07-14.

333 wind farm407

277 wind power

216 myth (as in global warming real, or radiation bad, or solar/wind useful)

209 CAFÉ (standards, or generally, anything that improves fuel economy)

209 solar power

201 lobby (anti-smoker, anti-technology, anti-market, environmentalist.)

If fossil or tobacco lobbies exist, E&CN does not mention those.

199 Obama (Barack)

188 wind turbine

174 Greenpeace

135 junk science (conflation of poor science with mainstream), IRS-3E

124 extremis (-ists, m, as in environmental)408

117 McCain (John, as in McCain-Lieberman bill)

104 Schwarzenegger (usually)

103 Hansen(James, of NASA GISS)

101 fraud (and –ulent, as in scientific, solar, fraudulent data) IRS-3E

100 World Wildlife Fund, WWF

99 so-called (as in greenhouse gases, renewable sources, etc)

94 propaganda (as in alarmist, green, anti-pollution)

94 solar energy

63eco-imperialism

59 sustainability

57 eco-terror: 31 ecoterrorist (conflated with environmentalism)

70 inconvenient (as in An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore)

69 hockey (as in hockey stick temperature graph)

59 mongers (as in scaremongers,fear-mongers) IRS-3E

47 solar panel

44 corrupt (and –ion, as of science in thinking AGW real) IRS-3E

42 GISS (NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies)

35 Waxman (Henry, D-CA)

35 Markey (Edward, D-MA)

25 indoctrinate, indoctrination (as in An Inconvenient Truth)

22 Rachel Carson 409

22 nonsmoker or non-smoker

19 NCAR (flawed, institutionally committed to alarmism)

18 CFL (bad, since deemed major source of mercury)

11 carbon cartel

10 Michael Mann

7 crony, cronyism (as in IPCC or crony capitalism for renewables)

5 anti-smoker lobby

4 warmist(not so common, apparently Heartland message is “alarmist”)

---

Positive(or acceptable as ~zero risk) including public figures

1,444 Nuclear (power) very positive, no risks

1,070 Bush (George, mostly good, except when did not go far enough)

941 mercury (mostly OK in fish/ elsewhere, except CFLs, geothermal))

935 coal – very positive

830 chemical (any concerns are overblown)

266 radiation – not ever really a problem

627 satellite (as in UAH satellite results showing no warming), §Y.1

560 experts (mostly positive, as in “experts say,” “experts agree”)

528 ozone (OK at ground level)

436 DDT (No problems.)

412 drill (as for oil)

369 pesticide

318 asbestos (no problem, except asbestos litigation is bad)

281 analyst (-s) of which 113 are “analysts” as in “all analysts agree,” etc.

236 Crichton (Michael) - of which 41 are “Crichton is right”

234herbicide

175 drought (generally not a problem, nothing to do with AGW)

140 sound science (as practiced by Heartland, Milloy, Singer, etc.)

410

136 smog (what’s bad are costly smog standards)

140 grassroots (as in become grassroots activist for sound science…)

133arsenic (generally OK,since mostly natural)

130 plastic

128 UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville, satellites) §Y.1

110 Inhofe (James, Senator, R-OK)

110 market environment (-alist, -alism, usually free-market environmental)

106dioxin

103 common-senseenvironment (-alist or –alism)

69 frack

67 smoker (having deleted 20 nonsmoker)

55 realist, realism (as in climate realists, not alarmists)

44 secondhand (smoke) (OK, no threat)

40NIPCC

28 acid rain

---

aha: a couple COPS have broken down on 1st vs 3rd climate justice/debt/reparations?

//?

BS myth china india 3rd w must go 1st:

standard BS excuse for US action is that more polluting, developing world puts out more ghg and will not cut back, thus it's pointless b/c emissions will go up whatever we do PLUS it will give them an economic advantage over US; reductionistic b/c it ignore the 100 year headstart we had (in both development and pollution, and they don't have the money to act agressively b/c their ppl are poor/hungry; US largely abandoned green R&D that could save them (and we could still lead/sell to the world]

sparked by

Statements of Support

Heather Reams, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) Executive Director: “CRES applauds US Rep. John Curtis (R-UT) and the 51 other House Republicans who today announced the creation of the Conservative Climate Caucus and looks forward to working with Members and staff on its agenda. The climate is changing and to address it, our country needs a commonsense approach that works by reducing energy prices, not energy choices;

shrinking our emissions, not our economy; and,

exporting American innovation, not American jobs. Despite what fringe activists and their Capitol Hill champions say, overregulatingAmerica will not lower emissions globally.This caucus understands that climate change is a global issue.Today, 85 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions occur outside of the United States – a share that will increase to 90 percent by the end of the next decade. This means that U.S. climate and energy policy must foster innovation and commercialization pathways that work forIndianaas well as for India. Achieving emissions-reduction solutions are possible with the leadership demonstrated by the creation this caucus today.”

Rich Powell, ClearPath Executive Director: “Republicans haverealsolutions for climate change – ones that are technologically realistic, economically feasible, and politically sustainable. Over the past decade, conservatives have institutionalized big, bold goals anchored by clean energy breakthroughsas the best approach to solving the climate challenge. Higher taxes and more regulations won’t solve it – and this Conservative Climate Caucus will continue advancing solutions that strengthen the American economy, and reduce global carbon emissions.”

---

rhet analysis god/devil terms: "uncrtainty" ~ related to chaos? maybe has implicit notion that we are gonna get rid of dems who pass regs or just the regs themselves? or more benignly acknowledges electoral shifts;

or: those naive dems will pass some ill-thought out reg but reality will intervene and we clear eyed rational/realist gop will be forced to fix/reverse/ "reform" regs

a devil term for regulations // stability ~ crisis/chaos

---

https://www.api.org/news-policy-and-issues/blog/2022/03/01/voters-to-biden-us-gas-oil-strengthens-global-security

news: President Joe Biden delivers hisState of the Union address tonight. Americans will be listening closely to how he defines our security challenges and charts the path ahead. While it’s unclear what lies ahead as Russia invades Ukraine, we know one thing for sure: American energy is a positive force in difficult times, helping to provide stability for ourselves and our allies in Europe. Indeed, because of their commitment to technology and innovation, America’s natural gas and oil producers are able to use the vast abundance of energy right under our feet.

Perspective: According to one estimateby the International Energy Agency (IEA), nearly half of all energy used globally in 2040 will come from natural gas and oil – even if all 196 nations party to the Paris Climate Agreement meet their emissions reduction goals. Whileinnovationsare well underway to meet a lower-carbon future, the fact is that we’ll need more of these critical resources – not less – as the world’s population hits a projected 9 billion people by midcentury.

The Big Question: So the important consideration is where that natural gas and oil gets produced: Here in America, which requires operators to meet environmental standards and safety laws [HALLIBURTON DR GAG 2005 YOU BASTARD] that are among the most stringent on the planet? Or, should production shift overseas to nations which may have fewer environmental protections and regulatory oversight?

Here At Home: The answer is obvious and voters agree, according to new polling by Morning Consult on behalf of API:

90 percent of voters support the U.S. developing its own domestic sources of energy rather than relying on other regions of the world (Democrats 92%; Independents 86%; Republicans 90%).
85 percent believe producing natural gas and oil here in the U.S. helps America maintain a leadership role during a period of global uncertainty (Democrats 82%; Independents 78%; Republicans 91%).
85 percent believe that producing natural gas and oil here in the U.S. could help lower energy costs for American consumers and small businesses (Democrats 81%; Independents 80%; Republicans 90%).
84 percent agree that producing natural gas and oil here in the U.S. helps make our country and allies more secure against actions by other countries such as Russia (Democrats 83%; Independents 78%; Republicans 88%).

30,000-Foot View: With global supplies disrupted, America has the energy abundance and the expertise to sustain reliable supply in the decades ahead and is currently working full throttle to enhance energy security for our allies abroad. As President Biden enters the House Chamber this evening, few things are more paramount than increasing energysecurity at home and abroad. Taking actions to restrict U.S. natural gas and oil are steps in the wrong direction.

Action Items: Here are several actions America’s natural gas and oil producers hope that the President will take in tonight’s State of the Union speech:

Emphasize Energy Security and LNG Infrastructure: As Russia escalated threats against our European allies late last year, the U.S. overtook Australia and Qatar as the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter. Experts predict America will surpass all other nations in creating the most LNG capacity by year’s end. And for a period in January, American LNG shipments to Europe overtook Russian natural gas pipeline deliveries for the first time ever. America’s allies agree: LNG is an energy security game-changer – and the administration should take actions to ensure supply and build infrastructure. Absent restrictions and polices to curtail production, the U.S. can do even more to help Europe. The administration can move faster in authorizing additional LNG exports and should ensure LNG facilities here have the flexibility to increase export volumes if needed. It should also ease barriers that block U.S. support for overseas natural gas infrastructure projects.
Reduce Permitting Uncertainty: News last week that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had voted along partisan lines to significantly increase regulatory barriers for approving natural gas pipelines could have a direct impact on America’s response to the current geopolitical situation. FERC’s decision inserts more uncertainty into the approval process at exactly the time operators need clarity. Unfortunately, FERC is not alone in issuing restrictive policies. In an op-ed in The Hill, Ellen R. Wald, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, detailed the many restrictive actions the administration has put in place at the same time they’ve asked oil producers to increase production: “Oil prices are high enough that companies should be producing more and planning for growth, but they are not,” Wald wrote. “The White House should be working to alleviate producers’ concerns about … the permitting process and other regulatory issues so that producers can feel confident investing profits in future oil production. After all, more supply means more reasonable prices. This is perhaps the quickest way to lessen pain at the gasoline pump.”
Reject Protectionist Policies: Americans are struggling with inflation and rising energy bills. And instituting an export ban on LNG, as 10 Senators asked President Biden to implement is not a solution. Increasing LNG exports are not to blame for higher domestic costs. (For example, an Energy Information Administration report cited pipeline restrictions in New England as a key factor in local price increases.) Only about 10% of U.S. natural gas is sent overseas as LNG. And when exports grew the most, in 2019, domestic natural gas prices not only didn’t rise, but fell to three-year lows. Department of Energy studies under the Obama and Trump administrations concluded that rising LNG exports have a negligible impact on domestic prices. Amid high inflation, global instability and a worsening European energy crisis, the most important move federal policymakers can make is to signal that America is well-positioned to provide stability amid any supply disruption – and can do so without increasing costs at home. Hopefully, President Biden will continue to reject export bans that would undermine energy security.
Promote American Energy Leadership: Over the previous decade, as the benefits of the Shale Revolution were realized and policies were put in place to allow natural gas and oil development, America gained our energy independence and became a net exporter of natural gas and oil. And as the world emerges from the economic chaos and disruption caused by the pandemic, America is again the world’s top producer of natural gas and oil. However, a dip in production has meant a return to being a slight net importer in crude and refined products. The path to restoring energy dominance is in avoiding policies that restrict future investment or hinder supply. Last weekend’s decision by the Interior Department to freeze certain new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters is a great example. President Biden should announce its reversal tonight. Imperiling lease sales threatens supply and discourages the kinds of investments that enables energy leadership and lower, stable consumer costs. The President should also ensure the completion of the next five-year offshore leasing program, which should be in place July 1, 2022. President Biden should move forward with a new plan to head off another massive restriction on American energy production.

What They’re [HUH?] Saying: “We commend the administration’s focus on addressing climate change and share the goal of reducing emissions across the economy, but we cannot let that objective detract from the clear and present need for continued responsible investment in oil and natural gas development. Recent developments illustrate the importance of the government working collaboratively with industry to ensure U.S. energy and economic security, as well as that of our allies in Europe and around the world. Now more than ever, the administration should speak clearly and without equivocation that the United States will be a reliable producer and supplier of oil and natural gas to our allies around the world both now and in the future.” –API President and CEO Mike Sommers

About The Author

Lem Smith is API’s vice president for Federal Relations.Lem joined API in February 2020 as vice president for Upstream Policy & Industry Operations. He previously served as a principal at Squire Patton Boggs, an international law and public-policy firm, where he advised private and public sector clients on federal and multi-state policy matters and provided counsel on communications strategies, campaign affairs and crises management. Previously, Lem was director, U.S. Government & Regulatory Affairs at Encana,and responsible for all aspects of U.S. government relations and regulatory policy matters at the state and federal levels. Prior to that, Lem was director of Government Relations for Kerr-McGee Corporation. Lem began his career on Capitol Hill, working for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker (Mississippi) and the late U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood (Georgia), where he negotiated key member priorities within the 2005 Energy Policy Act (EPAct). Lem is a graduate of the University of Mississippi.

---

gubmint tyrant thus violence justified, the job /duty of a man/real patriot [witze delaware qanon: "muscular patriotism"

aha a real man merkin fights to the death rather than surrender (loss of freedom) and become someone's bitch, but the good xian woman knows her place and happily submits to husband, he has dominion over her; in wrestling winner pins defeated down, not unlike rape? winner comes out on top, "you're going down" is taunt/challenge/prediction

12 21 see all https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/conservative/

Some of you will be familiar with DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. DARVO describes the behavior of psychological abusers when they are being held accountable for their behavior.Donald Trump and his supporters clearly exhibit DARVO habits. Rather than accept blame for anything they do, they turn around and accuse those blaming them of creating the problem. Victimized Bully Syndrome (VBS), as I'm describing it, though, is slightly different from DARVO. With DARVO the abusive behavior comes first and DARVO only emerges if the attacker is asked to take responsibility. But with VBS the cries of being victims come first and are used to justify the underlying bullying behaviors. The bully under VBS is always already acting in self-defense.

Take this example: In a recent interview with Fox News, Dr. Mehmet Oz, candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania suggested that Americans had been victimized by President Biden's "one-size-fits-all" COVID-19 "rules that limit our freedom." According to Oz, U.S. citizens "want government to get out of their way to stop scaring them into submission."

If we set aside the sheer stupidity of a doctor suggesting that we need "as many different approaches as possible" to the pandemic, the critical takeaway is Oz's claim that Biden's policy is designed to victimize the public by scaring them, taking away their freedoms, and destroying their dignity. According to this logic, refusing to wear a mask, get vaccinated, or support public health policy is a valid defense, rather than bullying behavior that puts everyone in peril.

---

winner loser

UP come out on top, dominate gold trophy light = life

DOWN beaten down, down in the dumps about defeat = death = dark

---

we must keep the homeland pure, immaculate, virginal vs dark invasion/infection

critics denounce Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick's 'invasion' rhetoric on immigration

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dan-patrick/

---

===

2 stories at war at fossil fuel ceo:

note god devil terms

https://gizmodo.com/republicans-slobbered-all-over-themselves-to-apologize-1847959116

ref 3 gizmodo bAD CODE NO LNX

gop have a, shall we say,...relationship. But that relationship went from snuggly to downright NSFW on Thursday at a hearing ostensibly about...The House Oversight Committee welcomed executives from four fossil companies and two trade groups as well as a pipeline welder to probe decades of campaigns to confuse the public. There’s plenty of fodder. The past few years have seen...$59,956 in oil and gas money in the 2020 election cycle) said, thanking the company for increasing production. “I want to thank those companies that are actually increasing production,” Jordan later added.

“These companies beingvillainized,” said Rep. Jody Hice (recipient of $5,000 from the oil and gas industry in 2020, which talk about getting your money’s worth). Hice did not ask a question.

“It’s just people who don’t have anything better to do than type on their keyboards,” Rep. Byron Donalds ($18,110 from oil and gas interests so far this cycle) said of climate activists before turning to the oil CEOs. “Let’s be very clear, you need anapology. What I witnessed today isrank intimidation by the chair of this committee. ... It is disgusting, it is absolutely disgusting. Somebody better call Merrick Garland, tell him to get in here, and watch the intimidation that came from this very panel today. It’s not about defending Big Oil. ... I’m sorry for you. And I’m sorry for the people in our country who have to witness shenanigans like this.”

“While this committee may not like you because you’re executives, because your companies have been successful, I just want to apologize for the decorum. Because thank you for what you’ve done,” said Rep. Yvette Herrell ($115,126 from the industry she was overseeing, making her the second-biggest oil and gas recipient in the House so far this cycle). “There are people here who believe in you. Thank you. ... In fact, I would just submit tosaving anybody who has gotten a vaccination or who is going to get one, thank you to the oil and gas industry because I would bet that almost every single one of the syringes has been touched by a petroleum product. ... I just want to thank all of you for being here today.”

“You guys all have a good story to tell. Don’t be afraid to tell people how much cleaner things are than in the past. It doesn’t do any good for you any good to get allwokeon us,” Rep. Glenn Grothman ($30,576 from oil and gas in 2020 and $3,570 so far this year.)

“It’s been very shameful how the other side wants to demonize ouroil and gas industry. I’m very proud of our oil and gas industry, the innovators that adopt new tech, provide a higher standard of living, and jobs throughout our country,” saidRep. Bob Gibbs, the $28,558 oil and gas man in 2020. He later added, “I’m disappointed the chair failed to recognize that and demonize them on that.”

“I apologize to our witnesses that were called and asked to take part in this today,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, who has so far received $11,400 from oil and gas interests and raked in $237,375 in 2018. (2020 data was unavailable.)

“There is a moral case to be made for the fossil fuel industry and fossil fuels as a whole,” Rep. Pat Fallon, who has taken in $5,600 in oil and gas money. “If we want more abundant and inexpensive and cleaner energy—which we all should do—these witnesses here should be the ones that we are supporting and applauding and not demonizing.”

“These very important energy companies and the [American] Petroleum Institute understand you’ve got yourself here, you’ve seen the attitude of the folks on the left of this committee. When you get asked this morning that, aren’t you embarrassed, that’s really an irrational question to ask CEOs about their company,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, the receiver of $27,253 in oil and gas money in 2020.

“My, my, my. Good lord help us to be protected from this threat from within. American patriots are so done with career politiciansand Democratic socialist insanity... We are nauseated by thecontinuous attacks on working Americans and American industry. This entire debacle of a hearing today of why my colleagues across the aisle will lose their majority status very soon,” Rep. Clay Higgins predicted. (Higgins has received $10,426 in fossil fuel cash so far this cycle and $40,773 in 2020.)

“Did President Biden or anyone from the White House apologize to you?” Rep. James Comer, who received $18,500 in fossil fuel cash in 2020, asked the welder Republicans invited. (For the record, he did not....

a United Nations report out this week warns the world as a whole is facing a “production gap,” with more fossil fuels on tap to be produced than is compatible with a safe climate. Other reports have warned that new fossil fuel exploration must stop next year, emissions must fall at unprecedented rates over the next decade, and that cutting fossil fuel production and use is the most surefire way to do that. The reason we’re at this precipice is because the fossil fuel industry pursued a misinformation campaign while further entrenching their product with the global economy, fully aware that it would cause major climate damage.

It is also because Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) have blocked climate action, and have maintained a grip on power in no small part thanks to millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry. The industry has directed roughly 85% of its donations in 2020 to Republicans, and is on track to do the same this year (and has done the same in past years, too). Those same Republicans who apologized to the industry and thanked it on Thursday.

Anyways, this is all very cool and very legal.

---

note politics no longer about legislation [cf guy said i have no legis staff just PR, // cawthorne] but attacking libs/dems score pts in media eg talk radio and soc med

an 621 ah

no lnx twt

When Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, the progressive Democrat expected to have frequent policy differences not only with Republicans, but also, with centrists in her own party. However, attacks on Omar from the far right — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and pundits at Fox News — go way beyond policy disagreements, painting her as fundamentally anti-American and an outright enemy of the United States. And on June 9, Omar tweeted a racist, threatening message her office received following a tweet by Boebert and the June 7 publication of an anti-Omar article by Houston Keene on Fox News' website.

In a June 8 tweet, Boebert — a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy cult — described Omar as an "honorary member of Hamas" and one of the "terrorist [NOTE SUBS COMMIE-] sympathizers in Congress." Members of QAnon were among the violent extremists involved in the January 6 insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol Building.

In her June 9 tweet, Omar — who is a Muslim and is originally from Somalia — noted that it isn't unusual for her to be "inundated with death threats." And she cited the call that she tweeted as a prime example. That racist caller can be heard saying, "Muslims are terrorists. And she is a raghead n*****. And every anti-American communist piece of shit that works for her, I hope you get what's fucking coming for you."

Omar tweeted that calls like the one she posted are "incited directly by articles like this" — a reference to Keene's article for Fox News' website — and "far-right politicians like" Boebert.

TW: Every time I speak out on human rights I am inundated with death threats. Here is one we just got. “Muslims ar… https://t.co/tKLay3dwdl

— Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan Omar) 1623286390.0

This is incited directly by articles like this and far right politicians like this. And it is enabled by a politic… https://t.co/6Ogf2nXnMX

— Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan Omar) 1623286456.0

Here are some reactions to the racist, threatening call Omar's office received:

@IlhanMN Its really ironic since Boebert is literally a terrorist sympathizer (if not directly involved) when it co… https://t.co/RBMVTRqWyJ

— AnarchyPunished2:ElectricBoogaloo (@AnarchyPunished2:ElectricBoogaloo) 1623287545.0...

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Marjorie Taylor Greene says Nancy Pelosi's COVID policies are 'exactly' like the Holocaust

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/marjorie-taylor-greene-2653074645/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/right-wing-language/

m semrau

Right-wing operatives have recently mounted a campaign against the idea and practice of "wokeness." The word has the pretense of a neutral reference, but is increasingly used to debase and belittle the underlying meaning of anti-racism and anti-bigotry. Similar rhetorical tactics have a long history in conservatism, as they allow the GOP to obscure policy objectives, while simultaneously evoking negative and positive emotions. Overall, the GOP benefits from imprecise language soaked with connotation. Unfortunately, journalists and some liberals keep falling for it.

In the case of "woke" and "wokeness," conservatives are undermining a positive idea with derisive figurative language. Consider a converse example, in which the Republicans advanced an ugly principle through positive framing: waterboarding. It was described as "enhanced interrogation" by conservatives, and that was repeated by the press corps. However, if you actually describe what's involved in waterboarding—making a person temporarily experience drowning—Americans respond with repulsion. Conservatives knew this, so they chose to be evasive. "Enhanced interrogation" is more palatable than both "torture" and "simulated drowning."

Language can be exploited to great political effect. Words convey meaning two ways. By denotations, the actual real-world reference of a given word or phrase. And by connotations, the feelings they evoke. The GOP systematically uses language that obscures denotation and advances connotation. The case of "wokeness" is not so different from "enhanced interrogation," but, in this case, the underlying denotation—awareness of social injustice—is good whereas the connotations are unfortunately negative. As they did with "enhanced interrogation," conservatives are using figurative language to obscure deeper principles and create a fog of feeling, rather than reason.

The GOP's use of such language—figurative, imprecise, but laden with connotation—gained prominence in their backlash to the civil rights movement. After a certain point, it was of little benefit to conservatives to explicitly state they were opposed to equal rights for Black Americans, so they adopted fuzzy terms. This strategy was famously outlined by the late Lee Atwater, a chief architect of modern GOP rhetoric:

You start out in 1954 by saying, '[n-word], [n-word], [n-word].' By 1968 you can't say '[n-word]'—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … 'We want to cut this' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "[n-word], [n-word]."

Here, Atwater specifically argued that, to advance racism, conservatives should embrace abstractions, given that racial slurs no longer confer electoral success. This tradition of linguistic manipulation continues to pervade our discourse. From "illegal alien" to "states' rights" to "politically correct" to now "woke," the Republicans have perfected the art of language devoid of concrete specifics, but charged with big feels.

That language has this power presents a challenge for journalists. Reporting should be informative and neutral. Yet with increasing frequency, the press corps uncritically adopts whatever linguistic frame has currency. The result, predictably, is neither informative nor neutral. What do Republicans actually mean when they criticize "wokeness?" It's unclear. Yet journalists repeat their rants without clarification.

Consider what "woke" actually denotes. The origin of the expression is unknown, but references to "staying woke" in African-American English can be traced back to Lead Belly's recording of "Scottsboro Boys," a song about young Black men who were falsely accused of rape. Recently, "woke" gained prominence during the 2014 Ferguson protests when it was used to signal awareness of anti-Black racism. "Woke" then proliferated online where its meaning broadened to describe anyone who was aware of systemic racism. Finally, the meaning shifted to encompass an awareness of bigotry in general. Now, lexicographers define "woke" as "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."

While the current use of "woke" arose from African-American English, "awake" as a metaphor for awareness has deep cross-cultural roots. Wakefulness as revelation is referenced throughout both Buddhism and Christianity as well as in the work of poets and playwrights. It is, in fact, the same metaphor underlying the "Age of Reason"—or the Enlightenment—such that Kant wrote, "Enlightenment is the release of man from a state of bondage. … Have the courage to use your own understanding!" "Wokeness" was present in American political movements long before BLM. Republicans—proud descendants of Abraham Lincoln—might be interested to learn that an early anti-slavery faction within their own party called themselves "The Wide Awakes."

So, what "wokeness" denotes is overwhelmingly positive: awareness of bigotry and concomitant opposition. Yet, recently, as conservatives have co-opted it, the term has become derisive. "Woke" people are unserious. You're allowed to roll your eyes at them, because they are sensitive and sanctimonious. In this sense, "woke" has unfortunately become a dysphemism. Whereas euphemismssoften underlying meaning (the dead "passed away," for instance, or the woman is "with child"), dysphemisms do the opposite (the dead "croaked', for instance, or the woman got "knocked up"). DEVIL DEMON TERM

What's denoted by "woke" has been eclipsed by connotations. When we hear "woke" now, we do not think of its history as a metaphor for awareness. We certainly do not think of the Enlightenment. We think of pious scolds. And then, perhaps unwittingly, we transfer this pejorative connotation to the underlying principles of social justice.

We can't expect rhetorical honesty from the GOP, but we can ask more of the press corps that reports on conservatives' use of "woke." When reporters repeat the GOP's derision of "wokeness" without explaining the underlying denotation of the word, they are serving as a conduit of conservative propaganda. Such reporting is neither informative nor neutral. The meaning of what's said is, at best, obscure and imprecise. Failure to report the underlying meaning allows the negative connotations to prevail.

So, if an elected official claims "wokeness" is bad, journalists should ask them what they mean! Journalists could ask, for example: "Is anti-racism bad? What about anti-bigotry in general?" If they refuse to define what they intend when they deride "wokeness," journalists should do it for them by citing the dictionary definition.

We are in an existential battle. The forces of bigotry are strong, and, in many ways, our electoral system allows them to flourish. However, the evidence is clear: the actual principle of "wokeness"—the broad "awareness of social injustice"—is increasingly popular. We cannot let conservative rhetorical manipulations muddy this fact.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

A Jailhouse Wedding

In interviews, Carrillo's siblings describe a brother who suffered from years of severe mental health problems and didn't get the support and medical treatment he needed from the Air Force. “I could see his pain," Carrillo's sister, Ruby, said.

Over two hours of interviews, Carrillo himself did not attribute any of his actions to mental illness. Instead, he forthrightly proclaimed his support for the Boogaloo Bois and repeatedly challenged what he views as misconceptions about the group.

“I just want to say, the Boogaloo movement, you know, there's a lot in the paper that I feel like people don't understand," he said. “And that is the Boogaloo movement, it's all inclusive. It includes everyone. It's not a thing about race. It's about people that love freedom, liberty, and they're unhappy with the level of control that the government takes over our lives. So it's just a movement, it's a thought about freedom. It's just a complete love for freedom."

Meanwhile, as Carrillo sits in jail awaiting trial, his political evolution continues. In a letter he wrote to reporters in October, he referred to Joe Biden as a man who “sniffs kids," echoing QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that falsely accuses the Democratic Party of running a Satan-worshipping child sex-trafficking ring.

Carrillo's defense lawyers declined to comment.

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note rhet, note always defensive, it's kraken that is coup

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/prepare-for-war-gop-official-pushes-dangerous-conspiracy-theories-over-election-outcome/

It has been three days since the Electoral College confirmed President-elect Joe Biden's victory, but an overwhelming number of Republicans are still refusing to accept the outcome of the election. Propaganda articles and infotainment videos on conspiracy theories are still circulating as Trump supporters continue their fight to "stop the steal."

Now, an article published by the Seattle Times highlights another problem with the spread of misinformation. The writer notes that it is one thing when dangerous falsehoods come from unknown websites that lack credibility, but some of the latest threats are coming from members of the Republican Party.

According to the publication, on Monday, Rep. Robert J. Sutherland, a representative of the 39th legislative district of Eastern Snohomish County along with Skagit County, took to Facebook with a number of dangerous claims about the election.

In multiple posts, he referenced reports and claims from right-wing influencers and propaganda sites as he said,"prepare for war. Joe Biden is not now, nor will ever be my President. Am I a sore loser? No. I'm pro-America and anti-communist. Joe Biden is a bought and paid for Communist China puppet. Stay tuned, big things happening soon at the Federal level."

In a series of other Facebook posts and discussions, Sutherland also insisted that he supported the idea of going to war over the so-called "coup against the sitting president."

"Is the 'coup' against the sitting President the start of a second 'Civil War' here in the USA?" Sutherland asked as he noted his support of Trump possibly using the military to maintain his presidential power.

"What good and decent person [xian crusade? deus vult?] would not conduct a war to defend Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of happiness, their families, their neighbors?" Sutherland asked.

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building on gubmint base?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-cult/

kos

while the arrival of vaccine doses is finally bringing some hopeful news about the pandemic, the state of U.S. democracy continues to be at an historic low point fueled by the complicity of the Republican Party.

The past week has included a rash of threats against public servants trying to fulfill their duties and uphold their oaths of office. Nowhere was that more evident on Monday than in Michigan where the Capitol building was shut down to everyone but the 16 electors and others essential to certifying the state's Electoral College vote after credible threats of violence emerged. Each elector was provided with a police escort, but the atmosphere was so toxic, one elector ultimately decided to wear a bullet-proof vest to faithfully cast her vote for the state's rightful winner, Joe Biden.

The situation in Michigan followed on a week in which a so-called "enemies" list of state and federal officials who weren't sufficiently loyal to Donald Trumpsurfaced on the internet, according to the Washington Post. The list included the officials' home addresses along with photos of them covered by red targets and hashtags such as #remembertheirfaces and #NoQuarterForTraitors.

That sentiment bled into a weekend of protests turned violent from Washington State to Washington D.C., with four people stabbed and another shot in Olympia while a series of altercations broke out in D.C.

And it's not just public officials who are being targeted. The Georgia GOP election official who warned earlier this month that someone would wind up getting killed if Republicans didn't speak up outlined instances in which random citizens are getting caught in the crossfire.

"We have people stalking outside of our elections offices in Cobb County," said Gabriel Sterling last Thursday. "We've had a warehouse manager, he was simply taking trash out to the dumpster, and he had somebody follow him with a camera telling him he's going to prison."

Hate crimes spiked across the country following Trump's 2017 defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville as "very fine people." But Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino, told the Post threats targeting government officials increased last year and were then exacerbated by the onset of coronavirus restrictions.

"The direction of the threats and intimidation against state and local officials took an eerie turn in the last couple of years and accelerated during the pandemic because aggrieved people are interacting with their government at the local level — in public health and elections," Levin said. "And those officials are the very ones labeled as legitimate targets for aggressions on cable news, social media and particularly by the president."

Following the spate of violent threats, the question becomes who will even want to serve in these positions anymore?

"There is an ugliness and cruelty in our national rhetoric that is reaching a fevered pitch here at home, and that should worry us all," said Diana Lachiondo, a local Idaho health official who was forced to flee a meeting last week about pandemic restrictions when menacing protesters showed up at her home [12 yo kid?] . Lachiondo, who recently lost reelection, added, "I'm out. ... I've got a light at the end of the tunnel here. But who is going to want to run in the future? Do you need to live in a gated community to feel like you're safe? That is my concern going forward . . . what does this mean for our democracy?"

One of her colleagues, physician Ted Epperly, agreed the problem isn't going away anytime soon. "I think it'll take a lot of healing, quite frankly, to get us back to working together as a society," he told the Post. "I'm sure people will write about this for years to come," he added. "What happened? What happened here in this country? Who are we as people?"

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Trump plan for mass death is unfolding before our eyes

Cody Fenwick

On Friday, the COVID Tracking Project reported that the number of positive coronavirus infections in the last day had reached 170,000, the highest record ever and a number tha...

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aha yikes herd idiocy is all we have left when freeDUMB rules, plus // w/ darwin libtard reductionist BS

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aha: scotus attack on unions is 2x whammy ~ moderation; McConn ct packing :he's amplifying polarization, whih will cripple self-correction of sys, increase instability --> crises/sys fail; moderation = DEMOC?! maybe not 2x whammy so much as cascade fail?

an 1120

The core of the Republican Party strength is concentrated in the 27 Right to Work states.As discussed in a previous article, Right to Work laws are designed to weaken unions by cutting their revenue and membership. Unions represent just 7.5% of the workforce in right to work states but almost 16% in "fair share" states. The 27 "right to work" states account for 83% of the currently seated Republican Senators and 70% of their Representatives. In 2016, Trump carried 25 of the 27 these states.

JUDICIAL BRANCH – Anti-Union/Pro Business Judges Dominate the Supreme Court and Appellate Courts

The Republican Party has worked for a long time to ensure that the federal court system is dominated by conservative, pro-business/anti-union judges over the long term. Indeed, Republicans basically packed the court system when Senate Majority Leader McConnell refused to allow the Senate to vote on 105 judicial vacancies during the Obama administration which were later filled by Trump appointees.

Supreme Court. The Supreme Court now has 6 Republican appointed justices and 3 Democratic Justices. Each of the three Trump appointees had a proven anti-union/pro-corporate bias before being nominated.

Amy Coney Barrett. During her term on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett ruled in favor of corporate interest more than 75% of the time. She ruled that corporations are entitled to set job requirements that exclude older workers and that they may segregate workers at different locations by race. She has also expressed support for striking the entire Affordable Care Act which would deprive health insurance for 20 million people and end protections for 100 million people with pre-existing conditions.

Neil Gorsuch. During his term on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch repeatedly ruled against workers and in favor of corporations. For example, Gorsuch dissented from a majority ruling upholding a National Labor Relations Board decision that an employer must give full back pay to workers it illegally fired for union activity. Gorsuch dissented in cases in which the circuit court majority supported pro-worker NLRB decisions stating that the NLRB exceeded the scope of its authority. However, Gorsuch made no such dissent when the court ruled in favor of NLRB decisions that supported management.

Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh served on the extremely important US District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This court is second only to the Supreme Court in terms of prestige and power because it has jurisdiction over Congress and most federal regulations and agencies. The People for the American Way compiled a list of rulings showing that Kavanaugh consistently ruled against workers and for corporations during his 12½ years on the DC Circuit Court. Examples include Kavanaugh's opinions that would "entirely eviscerate collective bargaining;" his support for corporations seeking criminal citations for lawful union protests; and support for corporations that failed to protect workers health and safety.

Other Federal Courts. In almost 4 years Trump and the Republican Senate have appointed 24% of all active federal judges (194 of 792). There are 35 more nominations currently pending. Trump has appointed 30% of all active federal appeals court judges (54 of 179). This is more than any other president over the last 40 years. Overall, Republican appointees now account for 54% of all federal circuit court judges. The circuit courts are especially powerful because they function as final arbiter for the vast majority of cases since the Supreme Court accepts fewer than 2% of the 7-8,000 cases filed with it annually. These courts ultimately determine what the federal government can and cannot regulate – this is especially important to unions in relation to the right to organize and collectively bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions as well as the relative power of unions and corporations....

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aha: i got that this was transactional before, but now i see also extraction/extortion; capitalism, he is ultimate / apotheosis of me vs we.

grifter libtards decry gubmint but 1st to line up to suck off taxpyer resouces/ buffer/commons

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/donald-trump-hunger-games-meme/

truscott 4

Remember this number: $3.

That's how much Trump charged the federal government for a glass of water in April of 2018 when he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to the Washington Post, Trump's company also charged the government "$13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements," over the two days he held meetings with Abe at the resort. But one day, Trump was scheduled to meet with Abe without aides and advisers, with no meal service or cocktails or any other celebratory nonsense. Just the two leaders, alone in a room, talking. According to the Post, the bill for that day contained a line item reading, "Bilateral meeting. Water. $3.00 each."

Donald Trump has been paid "at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government," since taking office, according to official documents obtained by the Post. Trump has made more than 280 visits to his own hotels and golf clubs over the last four years, and the payments covered costs for "hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides." according to the Post.

And water. A total of six bucks for water, no charge being too small to make it onto a bill to the government for a payment going straight into the pocket of the man who owns the Trump Organization and everything it comprises, including his resort in Palm Beach.

It's apparently a good part of what the Trump base likes about him — his appetites, his pure, unadulterated, money-grubbing-right-down-to-$3-for-water greed. Trump has wanted more his entire life. He wants more money, of course. He has spent a lifetime in pursuit of more money, and then some more, and more and more. He borrowed so much money in pursuit of even more money that it drove him into bankruptcy, several bankruptcies in fact. Today, as president, he is said to be in debt for nearly $1 billion to banks and other lenders, a debt that will come due within the next few years, according to the New York Times and other reports.

Trump wants more fame, a drive that started off with mentions in gossip columns like the New York Post's "Page Six," during the years he was coming into his own as a builder in New York City. He used to call gossip columnists and plant items about himself, posing as a PR person, and then he would call the columnists the next day and comment on their mention of him in order to gain yet another column inch or two in the tabloids. Some said he ran for president back in 2016 to "burnish his brand," to achieve even more fame and use it to make even more money. Since he became president, he has been relentless in his pursuit of attention, tweeting at all hours, criticizing cable networks who don't give him enough coverage, calling in to shows like "Fox & Friends" and "Hannity" both to reward them for the coverage they've already given him, and to get more coverage.

He wants more women, from wife No. 1, Ivana, when he was just starting out, to wife No. 2, Marla Maples, after he jettisoned Ivana, and now wife No. 3, Melania, who replaced No. 2 when he determined she had a few too many miles on her. And then there were all the women in between, in and among his marriages, the women he groped on airplanes and at bars and during parties, the women he (allegedly) raped in places like a Bergdorf's dressing room or a hotel room or a bathroom during a party, the women whose mouths he forced his tongue down, the women he pushed up against walls and pressed himself against, the women whose bodies he commented on in offices or across rooms, the women whose skirts he put his hand up at restaurant tables, the women whose breasts he grabbed at tennis tournaments and beauty pageants, the women whose rear ends he grabbed in green rooms before television show tapings, the women he dragged behind curtains at New Year's Eve parties and forcibly kissed and groped. All of those women. Trump wanted their bodies and their mouths and he took them without asking permission because he was Donald Trump, and he took what he wanted.

He wanted more golf, so he played more golf more frequently than any president before him. He wanted so much golf that he went around the world buying and building his own golf courses, and then he played them, because he owned them, and because he owned the golf carts, as president he could charge the government for his own Secret Service agents. He could even charge the government for the hotel rooms the agents stayed in while they protected him. He charged the government $17,000 a month for a cottage at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, which the Secret Service had to rent month after month just in case he had a mind to play a round of golf.

Trump wants more adulation, more love from the "base," and when he feels he isn't getting enough, he tweets. There aren't enough hours in the day for Donald Trump. He was up at 3 a.m. this week, tweeting about the Supreme Court, the court to which he has appointed three arch-conservative justices, yelling at them for their recent decisions allowing mail-in votes to be counted after Election Day, because of course, he wants more votes. He's been up at 3 a.m. tweeting before, taunting a Miss Universe contestant for a "sex tape," taunting CNN as "low rated," bragging about his debate performance, yelling at polls that show him losing.

And now Trump is making his final campaign swing through the "battleground states," feeding the insatiable need of his base for more of himself. "Four more years" has become "12 more years." Somehow Trump is owed more years of the presidency because "they" took two or three years away from him during the Russia investigation, because "they" spied on his 2016 campaign, because "they" don't deserve to win. The red-hat-wearing mobs of un-masked fans at his rallies want more of the America they think Trump is bringing back to them. It's an America that is more white, has more guns, has more churches, more of "us," less of "them."

That's what they like about him. They want it all, the same way he does. That's what opposition to affirmative action has always been. They don't want some of the college admissions, they want them all. That's what Shelby County v. Holder was about, that's what voter IDs and all the restrictive rules about voting by mail are about. They want all the votes.

For the Trump base, making America great again means making America ours again, but he's going to make sure he puts it on their tab, right there with $3 for water and $546 for rooms and $50 for decorative palm trees for table decorations and $1,005.60 for 26 servings of Patron and Don Julio tequila, 22 Chopin vodkas, and six glasses of Woodford Reserve bourbon consumed by White House staffers at the Mar-a-Lago bar. It's going to cost us more than votes to get our country back. We're going to be paying for Trump's insatiable greed long after he's gone. More than 228,000 of us have already paid with our lives. If the Friday totals keep up — 98,500 new cases and more than 900 dead — a half million of us may perish by the time Trump walks out of the White House for the last time.

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aha, no accident this is most pronounced on youtube? post-literate, video enflames emotiions more than print, bypass brain, plus algo amplification:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/are-fox-news-viewers-racist/

It's no secret that U.S. politics has become highly polarized.

Even so, there are probably few living Americans who ever witnessed anything that quite compares with this fall's first presidential debate.

Was it really the case that the nation could do no better than a verbal food fight, with two candidates hurling fourth-grade insults and talking past each other?

To us, the discordant debate was just one more symptom of the nation's fraying civic discourse, which, in a recent study, we were able to show extends to the words we use to talk about politics.

Earlier this year, we started constructing a data set that consists of all of the viewer comments on YouTube videos posted by four television networks — MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and One America News Network — that target slices of the political spectrum. Together, the data set contains over 85 million comments on over 200,000 videos from 6.5 million viewers since 2014.

We studied whether there are distinct variants of English written in the comments sections, akin to the distinction between British English and American English.

Using machine learning methods, we found these permutations do exist. Moreover, we can rank them in terms of the "left-ness" and the "right-ness." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical demonstration of quantifiable linguistic differences in news audiences.

Our second finding, however, was even more unexpected.

Our machine learning translation system found that words with vastly different meanings, like "KKK" and "BLM," were used in the exact same contexts depending on the YouTube channel being analyzed.

The company a word keeps

When translating two different languages — say, Spanish and English — automated translation systems like Google Translate begin with a large training set of texts in both languages. The system then applies machine learning methods to become better at translating.

Over the years, this technology has become increasingly accurate, thanks to two key insights.

The first dates back to the 1950s, when linguist John Rupert Firth came up with the aphorism "You shall know a word by the company it keeps."

To modern machine translation systems, the "company" a word keeps is its "context," or the words surrounding it. For example, the English word "grape" occurs in contexts such as "grape juice" and "grape vine," while the equivalent word in Spanish, uva, occurs in the same contexts — jugo de uva, vid de uva — in Spanish sentences.

The second important discovery came rather recently. A 2013 study found a way to identify — and thereby link — a word's context in one language to its context in another. Modern machine translation depends heavily on this process.

What we have done is to use this type of translation in an entirely new way: to translate English to English.

When "Trumptards" become "snowflakes"

That may sound bizarre. Why translate English to English?

Well, consider American English and British English. Many words are the same in both languages. Yet there can be subtle differences. For instance, "apartment" in American English may translate into "flat" in British English.

For the purposes of our study, we labeled the language used in each network's comment section "MSNBC-English," "CNN-English," "Fox-English" and "OneAmerica-English." After analyzing the comments, our translation algorithms uncovered two different patterns of "misaligned words" — terms that aren't identical across the comment sections but are used in the same contexts.

One type was similar to "flat" and "apartment," in the sense that both are describing ostensibly the same thing. However, the word pairs we uncovered have different intonations. For example, we found that what one community calls "Pelosi," the other one calls "Pelousy"; and "Trump" in one news-language translates into "Drumpf" in another.

A second — and deeper — kind of misalignment occurred when the two words refer to two fundamentally different things.

For example, we found that in CNN-English, "KKK" — the abbreviation for the Ku Klux Klan — is translated by our algorithm to "BLM" — shorthand for Black Lives Matter — in Fox-English. The algorithm is basically finding that the comments made by one community about KKK are very much like the comments made by the other about BLM. While the belief systems of the KKK and BLM are about as different as can be, depending on the comment section, they seem to each represent something similarly ominous and threatening.

CNN-English and Fox-English are not the only two languages displaying these types of misalignments. The conservative end of the spectrum itself breaks into two languages.For example, "mask" in Fox-English translates to "muzzle" in OneAmerica-English, reflecting the differing attitudes across these subcommunities.

There seems to be a mirrorlike duality at play. "Conservatism" becomes "liberalism," "red" is translated to "blue," while "Cooper" is converted into "Hannity."

There's also no lack of what can only be called childish name-calling.

"Trumptards" in CNN-English translates to "snowflakes" in Fox-English; "Trumpty" in CNN-English translates to "Obummer" in Fox-English; and "republicunts" in CNN-English translates to "democraps" in Fox-English.

Uncharted territory

Linguists have long emphasized how effective communication among people with different beliefs requires common ground. Our findings show that the way we talk about political issues is becoming more divergent; depending on who's writing, a common word can be imbued with an entirely different meaning.

We wonder: How far are we from the point of no return when these linguistic differences begin to erode the common ground needed for productive communication?

Have echo chambers on social media exacerbated political polarization to the point where these linguistic misalignments have become ingrained in political discourse?

When will "democracy" in one language variant stop translating into "democracy" in the other?

Mark Kamlet, University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University; Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Project Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tom Mitchell, Founders University Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University

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aha: both putin meddling and trump is trying to undermine confidence in system // tobacco FF corps denial to sow doubt?!

who broke America: RR, grover, gingrich koch libtards, beck limbaugh, jbs larouche, everyone who has been systematically attacking govt so now we have gubmint wackos xian ammon bundy but also wolverines saying tax = theft, traitors FEMA camps jade helm bill gates microchips in the vax.

an 1020 cdv

tim snyder yale:

...I think your word "fear," though, is very well taken. But I'd push that out in a different direction.

:{:{}:

Fear is also an important concept here. Trump is running for reelection based on fear – much more so than in 2016. In 2016, it was a mix. Trump and his campaign were talking about infrastructure. They were trying to go to the left of the Democrats on some issues. Whereas in 2020, it's now just pure fear. A fear that Black people are going to rape white women in the suburbs, and they are going to burn down the cities. The pandemic is either Black people's fault or it is a conspiracy, or it is not really happening. Fear is being consciously created and then manipulated. The Democrats are really running against a Reichstag Fire. The Democrats are not really running against a political party and Donald Trump's campaign.

...

What do we know about the connections between a humane society and authoritarianism?

There is a strong connection. In my new book "Our Malady" I explore this.

For example, on an individual level, when you can't talk, you do not have freedom of speech. When you can't move, you do not have freedom of assembly. When you do not think that you are going to have a future, then freedom is no longer a meaningful concept.

If you cannot afford health care, you're afraid. If you're ashamed to talk about health care, you're less free. If you're aware of that the access to health care is going to be competitive and somebody who's less sick than you might come ahead of you because they have better insurance and better connections or whatever it might be, then you are less free. Pandemic or not, it all creates a situation where there is not an unnecessary reservoir of anxiety and fear. And that totally unnecessary reservoir of anxiety and fear can be directed to other places.

The talent that Donald Trump has is to either generate that anxiety or to take the anxiety and fear that already exists in America and to direct it in the ways that he wants to. Authoritarianism works through taking abuse and trauma and pushing it in other directions.

Donald Trump understands that he cannot win a free and fair election.Trump knows that the pandemic and the economic downturn can give him the sources of energy that he just might be able to use to stay in power some other way than an election. Donald Trump is in "the worse, the better" territory now, because he understands abuse, pain, trauma, fear and related things. Evil understands evil. Trump understands that the more anxiety and fear is out there, the larger the chances he must somehow turn the election in his direction and then pick up the pieces.

Election Day is imminent. How do you respond to those critics who would say that, "You were talking about a Reichstag Fire! It didn't happen! You are an alarmist. Hysterical! None of that happened!" What would you tell such people?

Obviously, we are in a slow-motion Reichstag Fire right now. That is what is happening. Donald Trump is not as skilled as Hitler. He doesn't work as hard as Hitler. He doesn't have the same level of confidence as Hitler, but he's clearly looking for that Reichstag Fire emergency. Trump tried to make Black Lives Matter into that emergency. "Antifascists" and "thugs" and "law and order" and so on is part of that effort. Donald Trump keeps trying to make the Reichstag Fire work.

If Trump is not successful, then that is a credit to the people who are resisting. Donald Trump is not involved in a political campaign; it is emergency politics in the constant search of an emergency. Whether Trump and his allies can line up the emergency politics with the emergency, I do not know. But that is all that Trump and his allies have got on their side — and it all they are going to have through to Election Day.

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aha: who broke America: RR, gramms, gingrich---> REPAIR THE COMMONS

RR: fairness doctrine kill --> Rush, Fox anti-trust --> FANG 1 plus 2 --> Qanon

gubmint useless/wasteful if not evil --> aGENDA 21, 2 santas , militias boogaloo

student debt

libtard financialization, militarization, criminalization War on Drugs

death squads MS13

CU, cheney

graham OIRA tozzi DQA, DEREG PVT

xian

gang of 5 manafort, atwater

wise use

risk assess

vigurie direct mail

yaf/leadership inst?

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RW has PR advantage b/c of four simpleinterlocking isms: xian, free mkt, anti-commie, pro-milita

trump pays lip service to xian (uses them, but pvtly despises as suckers, // to KIA/vets USSR putin bounty; pretends to be capitalist but repeated fails, subsidies avoids taxes (also for suckers); massive corp socialism in CARES? kush covid grifter?

VP buys god loves capitalism?

OMG INTERLOCK STORY DOVETAIL, property and wealth are sacred? thus kyle mom standing O

sparked by

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/mike-pence-is-a-reminder-that-destructive-leaders-are-symptoms-of-an-anti-democratic-status-quo/

norm s

If President Trump dies from the coronavirus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans largely due to his deliberate negligence, the man replacing him will be no less dangerous. While Mike Pence has eluded tough media scrutiny -- in part because he exhibits such a low-key style in contrast to Trump -- the pair has been a good fit for an administration that exemplifies the partnership of religious fundamentalism and corporate power.

The vice president, a former Indiana talk-show host who went on to become a six-term congressman and then governor, has described himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order." But he remains at cross-purposes with the biblical admonition (Matthew 6:24) that "you cannot serve both God and money." Whether Pence has truly served God is a subjective matter, but his massive service to money—big money—is incontrovertible.

Pence ranks high as a Christian soldier marching in lockstep with Trump on all major policy issues, a process that routinely puts business interests ahead of human lives. Whatever his personal piety might be, the results of Pence's fidelity to right-wing agendas have further consolidated a de facto coalition of those seeking ever-lower taxes on wealth and corporations; denial of LGBTQ rights; a ban on abortion and severe restrictions on other reproductive rights; voter suppression and barriers to voting by people of color; obstruction of healthcare for low-income people; and on and on.

Pence embodies the political alliance of very conservative evangelical forces with anti-regulatory forces of corporatism. In the arenas of elections and governance, that coalition is the present-day Republican Party, dedicated to imposing the edicts of religious dogma, rolling back democratic reforms and serving the rich at the expense of everyone else.

"As vice president, Mike Pence is doing everything in his power to control people's bodies," the Planned Parenthood Action Fund declares. Meanwhile, those who are inclined toward racism or outright believers in white supremacy are bolstered. And Wall Street has never had a better friend in Washington.

Pence's most consequential role during 44 months as vice president has been as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Since late February, he has functioned—in effect—as Trump's willing executioner, standing by and blowing smoke while Trump obfuscated and lied as the death toll kept mounting.

"The truth is that we've made great progress over the past four months," Pence proclaimed in a mid-June statement, "and it's a testament to the leadership of President Trump." Pence charged that "the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections"—but "such panic is overblown."

To underscore his full devotion to Lord Trump's downplaying of the virus, the vice president concluded with a blame-the-messenger flourish: "The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success. We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering."

Pence's June 16 statement made its way into the Wall Street Journal as a prominent op-ed piece whistling past Covid graveyards. "It was so clearly wrong back then and has turned out to be so clearly wrong since that I hope there's some part of him that's embarrassed," Ashish Jha, the head of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said in late summer. "I had already been seeing data for a good week that things were really heading in the wrong direction." The Washington Post editorial board immediately responded with a denunciation under the headline "Mike Pence Is a Case Study in Irresponsibility."

No one with any discernment would associate Trump with religiosity because he held up a Bible at a photo op. But the other half of the ticket is a very different matter. Days after the November 2016 election, Jeremy Scahill wrote that Trump is "a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors."

Scahill quoted an author of books on far-right fundamentalism, Jeff Sharlet, who said that "when they speak of business, they're speaking not of something separate from God, but they're speaking of what, in Mike Pence's circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained."

What does all this mean for progressives? The case of Mike Pence should be an ongoing urgent reminder that—as toxic and truly evil as Donald Trump is—the current president is a product and poisonous symptom of an inherently unjust and anti-democratic status quo.

Instead of focusing our rage on the persona of one destructive leader, we should remember that corporate domination provides an endless supply of destructive leaders.While they come and go, the system of corporate power remains—and we must replace that system with genuine democracy.

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boz omg /aha yikes: two robots meld: LLC corp and algorithm / AI: // danny h

https://mainebeacon.com/anonymous-maine-news-site-tied-to-conservative-pac-funded-network/

at first glance, Maine Business Daily seems like some kind of local corporate newsletter, combining niche industry reports, localized data summaries, and press releases from regional Maine Chambers of Commerce. The earliest articles on the site date back to spring 2018 and the vast majority of the articles are attributed to anonymous bylines “Maine Business Daily reports” or “Local Labs News Service.”

However, nestled amid the banal business reporting are two recent stories on the allegations that Democratic Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who is mounting a challenge to U.S. Senator Susan Collins, violated campaign finance rules. Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine GOP, is quoted heavily in the posts, which are attributed to West Virginia-based freelance journalist Kyla Asbury (and are the only stories on Maine Business Daily that have an actual name as a byline).

The publication and promotion of these pieces raised some flags for Maine readers, with one Reddit user writing “I’ve never heard of Maine Business Daily, but two of the top three articles in their ‘public policy’ section right now are political articles about Sara Gideon that have nothing to do with policy.”

Screenshot of a portion of the Maine Business Daily website featuring stories on House Speaker Sara Gideon.

Maine Business Daily’s “About” section also provides scant information about who is operating the site, though it does note that part of its mission is to “inspire productive discussion among policy makers, business leaders and the public.”

The Maine State Chamber of Commerce told Beacon that, despite the reposting of local chamber releases, it is not affiliated with the website.

The homepage of Maine Business Daily includes a link to theMetro Business Network, which lists 30 other state-based sites as part of its organization. According to its website, the Metro Business Network “provides a fresh take on business news. Launching in all 50 states plus DC, we aim to cover news from Fortune 500’s to SMB’s on Main Steet [sic].”

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow with Media Matters for America who specializes in conservative media infrastructure, says that these kinds of networks have flourished amid the decline of local news.

“As local newspapers get wiped out or bought out by big chains and reporters get laid off and chains try to seek efficiencies, you see a void around local news and these news networks try to fill that void,” Gertz said. “A lot of sites are providing information about local events that previously you would get from local newspaper, so you come for information about a local event and if you end up with some sort of ideological screed about the terrors of government, it’s a win for them.”

The Metro Business web

The Metro Business Network sites are uniform in appearance and content. The same stories appear across the entire network, with each “Education” page filled with versions of this story: “Graduates earn 91 degrees, certificates from the University of Maine at Machias” and each “Public Policy” section has a regional version of this one: “Maine ranks 3rd for rental car tax rates, study finds.”

Gertz said the content is likely being generated by an algorithm, which provides “a way to mass produce seemingly local content almost with no overhead, because you are paying no reporters to write stories but you can pump out a huge amount of stuff.”

Buried amid the posts, however, are partisan landmines such as this op-ed that appeared on numerous publications in the network, “Next Step in Dismantling Obamacare: Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB),” that concludes: “This is America. Rationing is for commies. Repeal IPAB now!” The column is written by notorious fake pollster and right wing conspiracy theorist Dean Chambers.

Other articles are more subtle, such as this Illinois news story arguing against the local minimum wage increase.

Anonymous news with a worldview

The website’s privacy policy states that Maine Business Daily and these other business news sites are operated by theDelaware-based Locality Labs, LLC, which, according to an April 2018 investigation by the Chicago Tribune, is owned by the conservative Chicago-based media entrepreneur Brian Timpone.

“A firm of Timpone’s called Journatic once used database mining and low-cost freelance writers to create hyperlocal news stories for the Tribune until complaints emergedof plagiarism and faked bylines,” the Tribune reported. That firm is “now known as Locality Labs.”

An earlier piece published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2016 revealed that Locality Labs, or Local Labs as it is often called, is part of a web of content creators, online and print publications run by Timpone and his cohorts that were accused of electioneering due to their coverage of and connection to candidates and political action committees. Some of Timpone’s news ventures received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from theLiberty Principles PAC, whose objective is to “support candidates for state and local offices who are committed to the economic liberty policy agenda.”

Ashbury, who authored the two stories on Gideon, has bylines published on other Locality Labs-owned sites, including the Cook County Record, West Virginia Record, and Legal Newsline — the website of which explains that its coverage is focused on how state court rulings impact the “legal landscape for corporate executives.”

Asbury’s LinkedIn profile says that for the past year she has worked as a freelance writer for a company called Interactive Content Services. The 2018 Tribune article said that another Trimpone-owned firm Newsinator “has a history of doing paid political work and offers marketing services to companies under the name Interactive Content Services.”...

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9/20 "weaponize": ok i have used the term myself for rw taking something good/true/benign and pervert/evil it for political gain, going on offense in an unfair way

but now they are mirroring/co-opting our term, just like Fake News, an applying it to any (scientifc evidence, in this case wildfires, maybe the most in your face of AGW, eg Australia, amazon rainforest

this may be extension of thoughts and prayers now is not the time in our grief over mass shootings we cannot be rational in our decision (to increase gun control regulations)

how sleazy is the left that they would use the lives of children and grief of parents to score political points

not so much a myth as a tactic; note it also gets to play on some sort of xian piety, mass shooting is mindless act of crazy gunman, part of god's plan? we are calm strong contemplative ppl of faith, must no yeild to irrational lefties

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aha 3 forks marg mead

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aha/yikes: the ppl's tools PROPS ~ corps hijacked by them; jiu jitsu? asset/buffer flips to liability/vulnerability?

note gun to head soda tax, juul fail on local prop b/c of bad PR at inopportune moment? prop 37 beat by last minute TV ads?

relentless ads on roku "free" tv:

an 1020 also lyft and doordash

Expert: Uber-funded ballot measure in California would create 'permanent underclass of workers'

Nicole Karlis

Those who took high school civics may recall that our democracies lives on fractions. A majority vote — one-half plus one — is what it takes to pass a bill in most legislative bodies.

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aha/DOH: trump is VERBAL in insult nickname demonization diminish the weak [fashy] in tweets and i guess speak to press; but visual (escalator ride [down? should have known ; god deigns to descend and be among the little ppl?), trump tower gold; Kremlin eagles crest and soldier door reveal; RNC convention = TV, fireworks (patriotic, war?) craves North Korea parade

9/20 aha, fash-y, strong man acting alone: trump loves signing things foto op with fawning followers (he leaches gravitas, assent/ applause from them) maybe experts who look like they know what they're doing, but congress deadlocked/polarysys (in pocket of corps that want to continue extract $ HMO] and does not want to ACT, just make it look like he HAS many eg neglected but typical: gop beat up bad 2018 blue wave on pre-existing conds, to trump pretends to defend AT THE SAME TIME still trying to kill ACA that actually provides; also visual, reality TV apprentice-like

trump mocked for finally releasing ‘health care plan’ — which is really a ‘toothless’ executive order

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 25, 2020

For at least four years President Donald Trump has been promising the American people a health care plan. He famously sat for the “60 Minutes” cameras just days after the…

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-breaks-out-all-tools-denier-playbook-downplay-climate-changes-role-western-wildfires

fox breaks out all the tools in the denier playbook to downplay climate change's role in western wildfires

09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Climate denial, conspiracy theories, and misleading information -- Fox recycles old arguments year after year in wildfire coverage

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Ignoring the clear scientific links between the climate crisis and this year’s apocalyptic wildfires on the West Coast, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business has downplayed and denied the role of climate change in these devastating fires, deflecting from climate science while pushing President Donald Trump’s perennial claim that forest mismanagement is to blame. At least two Fox programs have even falsely suggested that an organized campaign of arson is responsible for igniting the fires in the Pacific Northwest -- a harmful conspiracy theory that has also quickly spread across social media platforms.

Fox shows are following a playbook that they have used with other major fire disasters linked to climate change, including last year’s catastrophic bushfires in Australia and previous catastrophic fires in California.

The goal of Fox’s coverage is always the same: deflect from the scientific reality of climate change and paint Democratic policies as the true culprits in worsening the wildfires.

Deny and downplay the climate crisis

Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson is leading the network on denying the indisputable connection between climate change and the catastrophic fires burning on the West Coast. On three recent episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host and his guests spread dangerous disinformation about the fires.

On September 10, Carlson claimed that “there’s no evidence” climate change contributed to the western wildfires, instead arguing that state regulations and energy grid mismanagement were the real problems responsible for the blazes. Carlson took this a step further on September 11, when he called climate change “systemic racism in the sky” and stated with a straight face that “there is not a single scientist on Earth who knows whether or by how much these fires may have been, quote, ‘exacerbated’ by warmer temperatures caused by climate change.”

To top it off, Carlson invited Marc Morano-- perhaps the most notorious climate denier in the U.S. -- on the September 15 edition of his show to falsely claim that these fires are “not unprecedented” and that it’s really just “climate ambulance-chasing at its core” and “weaponizing weather events” to link them to climate change.

:{:{}:

The exact same line of “weaponizing weather” was used on an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight last year to dismiss climate connections during the Amazon fires. During a segment discussing those fires in August 2019, climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi claimed that “if humans are causing climate change, it's very, very slight,” and said that any attempts to pin the Amazon fires on climate change was “weaponization of the weather.”

Carlson’s climate-denying rants fly in the face of well-established scientific evidence that climate change is both prolonging the fire season and intensifying the size and scale of the fires. Climate scientists have also called these wildfires “unprecedented” and linked a climate-fueled drought to conditions worsening the fires.

Additionally, Carlson’s claim that “not a single scientist” can link the fires to climate change is also demonstrably false -- and taken laughably out of context. Climate scientist Daniel Swain addressed this point on Twitter, noting that his featured quote from Carlson’s show was “fundamentally misrepresenting climate scientists' public statements on wildfires and climate change”:

Carlson is no stranger to peddling dangerous climate misinformation. Just last year, he invited Moranoto hype a silly, debunked document that claims clouds are responsible for global warming. In March 2019, he stated without evidence that if climate change is affecting natural disasters, “it might be making them in some ways better too.” (Earlier that same month, the Fox host also baselessly accused undocumented immigrants of killing more people in the U.S. than climate change.)

In addition to outright denial, the network has regularly downplayed the connection between climate and the catastrophic fires. A Media Matters study from 2018 found that Fox ran only two segments on California’s wildfires in November of that year that mentioned climate; both of those segments downplayed the role of climate change.

In recent days, Fox shows have attempted to downplay climate’s role by politicizing the climate argument and purposely shifting blame for the fires to other issues. Neil Cavuto did just this on the September 10 edition of Fox Business’ Cavuto: Coast to Coast:

On the September 14 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, correspondent John Roberts provided cover for Trump’s outright denial of climate change by calling it a “glaring difference of opinion” with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Later on in the show, Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt attempted to pass off Trump’s clear climate denial as a problem for both sides of the political aisle, calling his response an example of “why people hate our system, because when bad things happen, the two parties want to pick and choose what’s to blame. … Instead, what they hear is politicians picking and choosing the things they like from the menu.”

This strategy of partisan obfuscation also has precedent on Fox: During California’s 2019 fire season, Fox & Friends responded to Newsom criticizing Trump’s assault on climate action by bringing a talk show host with no background in science, Mike Slater, to explain why “liberal policies are really to blame” for that year’s massive wildfires in California.

Jumping to blame “forest management” practices for the fires, while generally ignoring the role of climate change

On the September 14 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cal Fire Assistant Deputy Director Daniel Berlant dropped a rare example of climate truth on Fox:

DANIEL BERLANT (CAL FIRE): In California, there really is no debate that our fire seasons are getting longer. We are seeing larger fires and more explosive fires. In fact, on average right now, our fire season is on average 75 days longer than they were just four decades ago. And so, you know, we can debate all we want, but I can tell you here on the ground, we are seeing fires that are incredibly destructive and incredibly fast moving.

But right after this segment, guest host Sandra Smith interviewed Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) to downplay climate’s role in the fires and instead promote “sound scientific management” of forests and his Trillion Trees Act, which climate scientists say is absolutely not a way of solving climate change, as the best solutions to worsening wildfires.

Poor forest management has played a role in California wildfires along with climate change and the expansion of people moving into the wildlife-urban interface, which “has increased the likelihood that wildfires will threaten structures and people.” But from watching coverage of the fires in numerous Fox segments, one would probably come away with the idea that it’s been only California’s forest management policies driving the worsening fires.

The jump by Fox to assign blame to the state for poor forest management as a tactic to downplay climate change goes back to at least 2018, when Trump first blamed California’s forestry policies while touring the aftermath of the deadly Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. At the time, Trump’s response was parroted by Fox News host Sean Hannity, who stated that he was “right” to blame California wildfires on poor forest management, and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, who on her radio show cherry-picked a BBC article to claim that “Trump was right” about wildfires and forest management.

Neither of these segments mentioned climate change. Even worse, Ingraham glossed over the major mentions of climate in the BBC article, which specifically stated that “many experts point out that climate change has made things worse” in relation to those fires.

This framing of the fires by zeroing-in entirely on forest management doesn’t hold up to what climate science is saying -- especially this year. Fire scientists have said that “climate change, not forest management, is a driving factor behind the state’s fires becoming worse and more deadly.” Wildfire expert Stefan Doerr has also stated, “The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires,” and he specifically noted hotter, drier, and windier conditions with climate change “has now created a tinderbox of vegetation.” Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe also pointed out on Twitter that it’s a myth to suggest that “the only reason wildfires are burning more area is because of poor forest management.”

Fox’s attempts to cast blame solely on the state’s leadership for poor forest management also fall flat when you consider that the federal government owns the majority of land out west -- in California, 57% is owned by the federal government, while the state government only owns 3%.

The network’s discussion of forest management hit a high point during midday of September 14, when Trump visited California and once again blamed forest management for the wildfires, ignoring climate change. In one example on the September 14 edition of Outnumbered Overtime, Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz called Trump “absolutely right” and blamed the wildfires primarily on a lack of clearing brush, saying “Democrats have been the biggest impediment to doing so.” Later on The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld stated that forest management is “the problem in California. It's not climate change. It’s forest management.”

Other examples abound. On two separate occasions in the past week, Fox Business’ Varney & Co. hosted conservative talk radio host Larry Elder to talk up poor forest management. On the September 8 edition, he agreed with Trump’s comments and said, “You can’t do a whole lot about the weather but you can do something about the fuel that these fires feed upon that makes these fires so intense and so serious.” Again on the September 14 edition, he repeated that forest management is the biggest issue in fighting the fires and said that “Donald Trump does not believe in climate change alarmism.”

On Fox News, Environmental Progress president and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on the September 10 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk up the role of poor forest management at the expense of climate change, claiming that the media’s climate coverage of the fires “has been really irresponsible.” He largely dismissed climate change again on the September 14 edition of Fox News @ Night, when he falsely stated that saturated wood fuel “is driving the intensity of these fires. It's not climate change.”

Later that night on Hannity, host Sean Hannity again made forest management the focal point of blame for the fires, calling it “an important piece of the puzzle.”

Advancing the dangerous arson conspiracy theory

While the conspiracy theory that arson is behind the wildfires has not yet been as pervasive on Fox News as it was in January, when the network’s prime-time hosts pushed the debunked idea that arson was driving the Australian wildfires, it has already been pushed by at least two of Fox News’ shows covering the West Coast fires.

As Media Matters reported on September 14:

During the month of September, record wildfires made worse by climate change have raged across California, Oregon, and Washington. As the fires have spread and officials have tried to contain them, a conspiracy theory claiming that “antifa” has been behind the wildfires has spread across major social media platforms. In reality, as NBC News noted, incidents like “lightning, faulty or knocked-down power lines and accidents” have been reported as the cause of many of the fires. Authorities, including the FBI, have been forced to rebut the false “antifa“ claim as people have refused to evacuate and militia groups are getting active.

The use of focus on arson as a counter-narrative to climate change follows the exact same playbook used during Australia's deadly wildfires from late 2019 into early 2020, when Murdoch-owned media and other right wing outlets peddled false claims that arsonists were to blame for the historic blazes, and not climate change. However, this talking point was debunked; as one study found, only a handful of blazes out of 11,000 were deliberately set. Notably, the arson conspiracy theory now not only distracts from the climate crisis, but is also an attempt to vilify activists protesting police brutality. For right-wing media, this false narrative is the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone.

....

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aha: values /freedom/liberty trinity (taught/enforced by strict fr vs godless commies and hippies

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Aha: this is an extension of pinko prof brainwashing and campus conserv student silencing b/c of PC cancel culture; gin up hype in front of election (TP kirk bloody revenge coming for your kids?! also reaction to BLM for end of systemic racism.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/loving-your-country-is-not-the-same-as-loving-trump-how-the-right-makes-a-mockery-of-us-patriotism

on September 17, in a speech delivered at the National Archives Museum, President Trump announced he was signing an executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, aimed at promoting what he called a “patriotic” and “pro-America” education. The announcement was a direct attack on the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that explores the legacy of slavery in the United States. For Trump, teaching critical race studies is akin to committing child abuse “in the truest sense of those words.”

“Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and souls,” Trump announced. He accused the left of destroying children’s love of their country by teaching the facts of its history — facts, he claimed, wrongly “rewrite” American history as founded on oppression rather than freedom. He’s demanded that schools “teach American exceptionalism” and said that schools are teaching students to “hate their own country.”

This was just the latest show of Trump’s blatant conflation of racism with patriotismand it served as yet another example of how Trump has turned patriotism into a self-serving performance free of any connection to facts. From the start, Trump has attempted to define patriotism not as loving the country, but rather as loving Trump. All we need to do is remember that the same man who dodged military service spent over $2.5 million on a Fourth of July military parade designed to be primarily a celebration of himself.

Before analyzing the damage Trump has done to U.S. patriotism, let me be blunt: “loving” your country is stupid. Patriotism, when it is nothing more than blind adoration of a country, is idiotic at best and fascist at worst. Countries don’t need to be loved; they need to be built, critiqued, developed and improved. They need to be held to the highest ideals and they need to face their shortcomings so that they can strive to be better. The relationship citizens have to their nations may always include some affect, but real support for a nation thrives when citizens emote less and reflect and engage more. So, when patriotism is synonymous with loving your country, it is always, already a bad idea. but setting aside the question of whether it even makes sense to debate who does or doesn’t love their country, there seems little doubt that the time has come to push back on the way that the right has conflated loving the United States with loving Trump....

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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

bot line chaotic makes him weak/played

president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

:{:{}:

There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

:{:{}:

Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

:{:{}:

He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

:{:{}:

When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line. These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump....

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AHA: schiff impeach oversight is MODERATION checks and balance = diversity

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/experts-who-warned-trumpism-could-destroy-us-democracy-in-2018-are-even-more-worried-now-we-werent-alarmist-enough/

alex h

When Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die,” was released in January 2018, critics of the Harvard University political science professors described them as alarmists. The book had a dire warning: the United States’ liberal democracy was in danger because of Trumpism. But two years later, Levitsky and Ziblatt have not backed down from that message — in fact, they are now saying that they should have been more worried in 2018.

Levitsky told HuffPost, “Joe Scarborough ridiculed it on TV, saying, ‘These guys are alarmists.’ It turns out we weren’t alarmist enough.”

Scarborough, the Never Trump conservative who hosts MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” is no fan of President Donald Trump — who he bashes consistently. But when “How Democracies Die” came out, Scarborough argued that the United States’ democracy was robust enough to withstand Trump’s train wreck of a presidency. Scarborough, in a March 15, 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, argued that American democracy was much stronger than Trump’s chaotic administration.

Journalist Travis Waldron, in HuffPost, notes that Levitsky and Ziblatt aren’t the only “political scholars” or “political leaders” who are “warning that 2020 is a referendum not just on Trump, but on the nation’s democratic experiment as a whole.” But Levitsky fears that too many Americans aren’t as worried as they need to be.

"People are getting killed over politics,” Levitsky told HuffPost. “There’s questions about whether the election will be free. Law enforcement bodies are being manipulated to protect allies of the president and go after rivals of the president. Things are happening on various fronts, and we’re not putting it all together and realizing that our democracy is on the line.”

Liberal democracies don’t necessarily come to power because of an armed coup d’etat or golpe de estado: in some cases, authoritarians are voted into office and gradually undermine a country’s checks and balances. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an obvious example. And Waldron cites Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as an example of a far-right authoritarian who was elected in a liberal democracy, warning that democracy in the U.S. is also in danger.

“Republicans in Congress have done whatever they can to protect Trump,” Waldron explains. “They blocked his removal from office after House Democrats impeached him and have kept administration officials from facing consequences for shirking their oversight duties.Without those checks, Trump has proceeded to do whatever he wants: fire inspectors general, attack the judiciary, violate laws and profit off his own office.”

Levitsky told HuffPost, “U.S. democracy has proven weaker and more vulnerable than I thought.”

Amy Erica Smith, a political science professor at Iowa State University, warns that some countries pretend to be democratic and have elections but are actually authoritarian states — or as she calls them, “hybrid regimes.”

“The number one defining feature of a hybrid regime is that the incumbent is using ― and I’ll say ‘his’ because almost always ‘his’ ― all of the benefits that come from office to get himself reelected in an unfair way,” Smith told HuffPost.

Waldron points to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian President Viktor Orbán as examples of authoritarians who pretend to hold fair elections and argues that Trump is trying to do the same type of thing in the U.S. “through his efforts to undermine the U.S. Postal Service and discredit the election as fraudulent before it even takes place — an admittedly odd tactic for a leader already in power…. Trump’s attacks on democracy are in effect thefinal shattering of the idea of American exceptionalism.”

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aha: fox is a corp, and like all psychopathic robots, its function is maximize profit which means max ratings [instant quant fdbk] which means max activation of trumpistas via red meat; this is in conflict w/ mission/function of jrnlism, straight news provides cover/fig leaf; successful red meat hypes fear and anger, and includes energizes the RW trump story/schemas of victimization. murdoch war crimes on AGW amd covid?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/media-critic-fox-news-is-bigger-than-trump-if-he-fights-the-network-hell-lose

do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.

Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.

In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.

Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?

It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does,which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.

Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?

Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.

That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.

You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?

There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.

That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?

Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.

One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out.

I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.

You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?

I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.

And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.

I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.

It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.

This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.

The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?

Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.

As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.

Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.

In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?

They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?

Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.

But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.

He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.

Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it? ...[much more]

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aha/sum/analysis 9/5/20

anarchism is a real actual historical thing, but often mischaracterized; latest incarnation blends with Antifa, which basically says we cannot afford to give the streets/public space to brownshirts, alt rt/ militias, and we must be prepared to meet the force/violence they explicitly want and have come equipped for [note f/u portland guy killed, he said defend AA friends/allies, ~ // kyle self-defense]; we cannot depend on the police to stop their violence, because they are allies, and the police also use force/violence against AA POC peaceful protesters; Black Bloc says power never gives up power voluntarily; people and their rights do not matter, but OUR property must be protected at all costs (AA lives have no value/importance); BB says we will impose [a transaction?] cost, if you ignore the will of the ppl, it will COST you in terms of property damage [if you lock us in ghetto/poverty/ lower working service gig economy class, we will destroy your stuff/ability to do biz/make more $

ARSON metaphorical: anger /rage physical manifestation, // trump 2016 hand grenade the system is rigged against us, so let's blow it up/burn it down (if we cannot benefit, neither can you]; most good sized/ rowdy protests will have garbage set on fire, this inevitably portrayed by rw fox news as VIOLENCE; next level is smash windows, next level is loot; kyle R responded to militia facebook post to protect property (gas station/ car dealer/repiar?) he was initially reported to be a property/biz [small biz entre hero backbone meritocrisy] defending his property / stand your ground mcCloskey suburb heroes rnc for gun brandish; --> thugs on a plane foment riots as coup to get rid of trump [add to long list of failled attempts, impeach, fake covid ...]

all get conflated into enemy mob who hate america/western civ: anarchist = socialist = communist = violent left-wing extremist = thug = AA= paid protester = soros/jew

is this product of being baffled/ ~ to intersectionality?

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WHEELER BS FIX EJ: BUT FREE MKT FUNDAMENTALISM IS THE CAUSE NOT THE CURE

one upon a time, LBJ was able to harness the pressure of CRM, and maybe 60's ctr-culture, and perhaps the martyrdom of JFK, MLK and RFK to jam thru civil rights and voter rights acts, as well the the Great Society, oft wrongly seen as a failure; it did affirmative/ active programs that gave poor ppl money, education, job training...[RR cut housing 80? rick p WITH pod 920)

Later affirm action lost in ct? Bakke? UC? 187? RR attack mythical welfare queen, so direct assistance became taboo [BC did welfare reform, 3 strikes superpredators?]

But must at least be seen to do something for inner city POC, so we get opportunity/empowerment zone, tax breaks for real estate dev in crappy parts of town;

so not giving cash to poor ppl, but only a tax/break incentive to competent rich white guys, then the benefits will tricke down on poor ppl. // urban renewal? gentrification? sports stadiums?

NOW 920 Wheeler needs cover because the massive EPA rollback on regs clearly hurt POC, especially kids, so extends paul driessen Green blk death energy poverty BS or maybe more generally and slightly less cynically, cut red tape will allow economy to thrive, blk ppl will get some of that $, and can then afford to move away from toxins?

...“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by experts as a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice....

===

[[[cascade update:

404

an 920

the coronavirus pandemic has only made the opioid epidemic worse

The Conversation September 3, 2020

by Elizabeth Chiarello, Saint Louis University COVID-19 has overshadowed the U.S. opioid crisis, but that doesn’t mean opioid addiction has gone away. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid crisis has…

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cascade / compound/ interacting factors

Hurricane Laura worsens already inhumane ICE conditions

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

Detained people already suffer dangerous conditions while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, including inhumane living arrangements, medical mistreatment or no treatment at all, and systemic patterns of abuse. The novel coronavirus pandemic has only piled…

cascade interactions: AGW --> drought --> bark beetle = fuel --> fire --> move infected ppl into confined large shelter and pollutes air /aggravates lungs --> infections

820 ew ]]]

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STORY (btw left/commie infidels who do not believe this story of Am exceptionalism hate america/freedom and want destroy/supplant it}:

see strict fr

see god/devil terms

cf 4 horse dovetail ism pattern match experiment vs phobias; --> coherent story?

aha 820 entrepreneur as CONCEPT/GOD TERM: sparked by rnc convention: entre is also a GOD term, ties into Yankee ingenuity/ am exceptionalism sil valley garage mystique: affirms meritocrisy [sic] that racism will fix itself when AA POC start small biz that expand (cain godfather pizza 999 RIP?] overlooking the fact that redlining by gov't and banks deprived of capital for decades; but of course you have to get rid of burdensome regulation/red tape that stiffle [when in fact corps/amazon will use data to steal your idea/product and crush you or buy you out. small biz and gig economy means own boss thus in control thus = freedom --> fix for INEQUALITY THUS RACISM

but of course to be an entre you must have skills/a good education but socialist dems want to trap poor kids in failing public/gov't schools to serve big corrupt union bosses, so devos waNts FREEDOM TO CHOOSE/SHOP voucher/charter b/c free mkt will create better schools [vs suck/extract from big part of public budget/ schools are the COMMONS THAT MADE DEMOC AND PROSPERITY POSSIBLE; --> scam online virtual classes [jail the blk girl who refuses pointless jumpthruhoop fill in the blanck

aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery

commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)

control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses

order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/

no lnx twt

RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault

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Once Upon a Time the pilgrims were being discriminated against [by a Prot?] King geo III, so like good entrpreneur/pioneer/explorers they sailed to New World discovered by Columbus to bring God to America; friends w/ Nat Am first thxgiving, Boston Tea Party no Tax w/o rep, Lexington Minutemen militia w/ musket beat dumb/dainty Redcoats, Dec Indep, Sacred Const by Founding fathers all men created equal, gave th gift of democ/freedom/light to world,

undergd railroad, civil war for states rights (freedom from gubmint tyranny; rebs underdogs fought well but beat (by industrial/banker?) north, emanc proc freed slaves, reconciliation, all americans.

Railroads, robber barons fixed by trustbuster Teddy; we stayed out of endless pointless Eur wars, till WWI (WW promised to keep out in ca,pign) now war to make world sagfe for democ? war to end all wars [jail/deport reds who said war for capital/bosses via espionage act]. Yanks won war, no L of N but after Gt Depression we won WWII [UN? boo] became superpower vs USSR; Reagan thatcher won the cold war, socialism forever discredited, some tyrants manage to hold on Cuba and even export to S Am Chavez and Central Am [guate coup 1954, Iran year before]; MLK > Malcolm/panthers fixes racism; Contras beat by Ollie and Reagan; End of History, Free Mkt fundamentalism Ayn Rand Greenspan. tax and spend liberal dems cripple our economy with regulations to solve non-existent problems like asbestos, carcinogens, AGW [Heartland says hoax, reverse engineer, Agenda 21 comie one world plot to take our freedom]

unions are corrupt and hinder economy; teachers unions control dems and trap our/POC kids in failing schools; a few bad cops shot AA men, but look they shoot each other all the time selling drugs; Blue Lives matter, Biden and KH want to get rid of cops, so no protection so you need a GUN.[also to fight off gov't tyrannt like woam dem gov of Mich who takes away your Const freedom by forcing you to wear a mask, worst kind of nanny state;

Biden son corrupt, sol us out to ChiCom who sent covid virus, which djt quickly took action by shutting border // caravan/muslim; he created prosperity by rolling back regulations and gave massive tax cut to the job creators; the lazy/dumb/sinful deserve to be poor; [opportunity zone actually real estate scam for rich?]

but now the godless commies have come back for your guns, and the gov't will destroy your white quality of life suburbs by rezoning low quality apts (which bring low quality POC criminals/gangster] who will make you unsafe and drive down the value of your house/property/equit/ retirement nest egg.

trump the strong man/strict fr will protect us from godless irrational muslim extremeist jihadi terrorists, the brown horde at southern border WALL and from antifa extrmeisty terrorists who want to loot and burn even small biz of POC entre.

dems will let crims out of jail. invite MS13 into suburbs, coddle anarchists/antifa; trump will send in the tough guys to restore law and order/control, put those ppl back in their place [and deploy at polls to ensure not rigged/cheating]

BLM is identity politics, put me at head of line give me a handout i do not deserve b/c i'm lazy; worst form is reparations for sin of slavery [nikki h at UN tyrants defy us and then demand $, a lot of it that we could use to build our country MAGA]

trump master negotiator will make better deal (nafta the worst deal in the history of the world don jr rnc], NATO pay fair share we will not be chumps to freeloaders.

this story has to explain how we lost power/prestige/leadership/prospeirty and how we will get it back

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aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery

commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)

control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses

order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/

no lnx twt

RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 25, 2020 Commentary

The first night of the Republican National Convention featured a diverse lineup that defended President Donald Trump from charges of racism, even as other speakers sought to stoke racial fears and push conspiracy theories.

The convention, largely consisting of a mix of live and pre-taped speeches before an empty auditorium, appeared to take place in an alternate reality where Trump had successfully beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, and where the protests, violence and racial division seen during Trump’s presidency would only get worse Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected. It was a wildly dishonest night, with the New York Times fact-checking team counting at least 30 false and misleading claims.

“This one half-night of Republican programming so far has been exponentially more dishonest than the entire four nights of the Democratic convention,” wrote CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.

While Republicans insisted that their convention would be optimistic, and headliners like former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina delivered speeches on the promise of America that could have taken place under any other Republican president, the tone of the night was dark and the theme was racial fear-mongering.

The night kicked off with a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who described Trump as a “bodyguard of Western civilization” — a common white nationalist dog whistle — who is defending America against a “vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches and values.”

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio gave a speech riddled with falsehoods accusing Democrats of stoking “crime, violence, and mob rule.” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s most loyal followers in Congress, bizarrely warned that Democrats will “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.”

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who threatened Black Lives Matter supporters with guns, delivered a gloomy, downbeat chat accusing “radical Democrats” of trying to destroy the suburbs.

“They are not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning,” Patricia McCloskey said. “This forced rezoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighborhoods.

“These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you,” she added. “So make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

These divisive speeches were interspersed between people of color who insisted that neither Trump, the Republican Party nor the nation had a problem with racism.

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Former NFL player Herschel Walker — who once played for the New Jersey Generals, a long-gone USFL team owned by Trump — said it “hurt my soul” to hear people call Trump “racist,” noting their long friendship. Haley, speaking of her own experience as the daughter of Indian immigrants, said that “America is not a racist country” but a “work in progress.”

Scott, the night’s keynote speaker, [heh appt by nikki] delivered a powerful speech on the promise of America and his own experiences with racism. Scott urged viewers to “not look simply at what the candidates say” before listing a number of remarks made by Biden to suggest that he, and not Trump, would ignore minority communities. Scott repeatedly insisted that Biden wants to turn the U.S. into a “socialist utopia,” which would be news to Biden and the progressive primary challenges who repeatedly criticized him for being too conservative.

But while the headliners tried to ignore the division stoked by Trump since long before he launched his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, stole the show with stunningly dark and loud diatribes that prompted viewers to question whether cocaine was involved.

Guilfoyle, who earns $180,000 per year from the Trump campaign, shouted an amped-up speech into the empty auditorium comparing Democrats to socialistsin Cuba and Venezuela. Guilfoyle, who was formerly married to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, claimed that Democrats (including her ex-husband, apparently) had turned California into a “land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”

“They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she warned. “They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.”

“Biden, Harris and the rest of the socialists will fundamentally change this nation,” she continued. “They want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty, and will selfishly send your jobs back to China while they get rich. They will defund, dismantle and destroy America’s law enforcement. When you are in trouble and need police, don’t count on the Democrats.”

Donald Trump Jr. gave a speech touting his father’s response to the pandemic, albeit one that was entirely detached from reality.

He claimed that the president had “acted quickly,” even though Trump spent the crucial early weeks downplaying the threat, and that the administration had delivered supplies to “hospitals that needed them most,” even though the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general found rampant shortages of vital supplies. Six months into the pandemic, such equipment remains in short supply.

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The night also featured segments in which Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has repeatedly been found ineffective in treating the coronavirus, and a video that touted Trump’s “rapid policy changes” in the face of the pandemic.

MSNBC broke away from the broadcast to fact-check the claims.

“To say that 170,000 souls lost in our country up to now is a success by any measure is fantasy,” Dr. Vin Gupta, a disease expert at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said during the segment. “It’s disrespectful to the families who lost loved ones, to frontline clinicians who put their lives at risk. It’s just fantasy. It’s propaganda.”

During another segment, Trump spoke with a group of Americans who had been freed from overseas prisons, including pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested by Turkey during President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s purge following an unsuccessful coup attempt.

“To me, President Erdogan was very good,” Trump told the pastor, who was detained for two years.

Though all of the major news networks break away during portions of the convention for analysis and ads, Fox News host Sean Hannity warned his viewers that “the media won’t cover large parts of the RNC that we’ll be showing.”

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Twitter users couldn’t help but notice that Fox News actually aired fewer segments from the convention than CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted his complaints at Fox News.

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“Can’t believe I have to watch the convention on @CNN,” he wrote. “Unbelievable.”

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tentative nodes: asymmetry and projection:

aha: I try to stay away from pop psych, but trump seems to obviously be doing projection i know i am but what are you? so biden and hunter are corrupt etc etcv, massive voter fraud by dems poc...but triggering the libs means pushing their PC buttons, perhaps saying shit you don't mean/beleive; but here's the projection part: conservative are hard-wired to be afraid, and fox stock in trade is to stoke fear and hatred of dems, but triggering wants to portray the DEMS as FEARFUL (or just naive?)

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

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

aha wall grift: fear involved b/c we ned protective barrier to keep THEM POC mex rapists out; but wife in Hamptons said about WINNING which means have money and pref fame; LOSERS deserve their fate, not smart hardworking thus moral, thus do anything /crime to not be in lower cat;

stock market supposed to be ultra smart # guys making rational decisions, but often said driven by two base emotions: fear and greed.

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[[ aha: anez bolivia evang // bolsonaro re-assert rightful place above uppity indigenous?

has doing god's will earned him "magical authority? see below

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/

john s eb

there’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself. Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.

How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about. All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contradiction at all.

“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.” The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense, because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft

when political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done.A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.

They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, orcommits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand.And make no mistake: this is a religious identity. These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”[ // reverse discrimination]

If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.” When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion. His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.

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has doing god's will earned him "magical authority? ends justify the means? see above

mis-spoke? made up extreme exec priv or somesuch? invokes article II? or somesuch?that chosen onewas a goof/joke? tho rw in bolivia ~ evo m claims she is restoring xian thus doing god's will? reasserts hier over indig prez

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/former-dhs-staff-trump-claimed-magical-authorities-to-break-the-law/

no lnx

no lnx twt text

Former DHS staff: Trump claimed ‘magical authorities’ to break the law...]]

LOIO

8/20 orphan, sparked by? // amplify? accelerate?proliferates geometrically/ [kids say, exponentially [ incorrectly for increase = rate on increase increases?

aha 820 spark 2 is "streisand effect" hydra-head whackamole on de-platform; it's a network resilience effect

eg Qanon:

https://www.axios.com/qanons-2020-resurgence-41759d2b-7d08-4d6e-bad0-d2a63b6285ad.html

aug 4

strange realities of 2020 have perfectly played to the kind of fear QAnon thrives on, driving record online interest in the conspiracy theory.

Why it matters: QAnon is not just one fringe conspiracy theory — it's a sprawling network of falsehoods that's seeping into the mainstream. Its growing influence is sowing fear and confusion around some of today's most important issues, such as election integrity and the coronavirus pandemic.

Catch up quick: QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that alleges the "deep state" is engaged in a global fight to take down President Trump.

QAnon rose out of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory and has grown into a decentralized network that analyzes cryptic prophecies dropped in remote online forums by "Q," who claims, without ever offering evidence, to be a Trump administration official with high-level clearance.
Q maintains President Trump is secretly fighting a child-selling cabal in the U.S., though the conspiracy has spiraled to cover a vast array of claims, from JFK Jr. having faked his death to help Trump behind the scenes to the coronavirus being a hoax or a biological weapon engineered in either case by sinister elites.

By the numbers: Conspiracy theories tied to QAnon are growing more popular.

There was more than 10 times as much Google search interest in QAnon in mid-July than in mid-January, according to Google Trends data.
QAnon pages and groups on Facebook had nearly 10 times more likes at the end of last month than they did last July, according to data tracked by the Atlantic Council and shared with Axios.
There has been a 190% increase in the daily average number of tweets with popular QAnon hashtags since March as compared to the seven months prior,according to data from GroupSense provided to Axios.

Parts of the mainstream Republican party have latched on, helping drive its conspiracy theories mainstream.

11 QAnon supporters are now 2020 Republican Congressional nominees.
President Trump himself has retweeted QAnon followers at least 90 times since the pandemic began, and others in Trump's inner circle have also shared Q content.

Between the lines: For all its twisty logic and branching details, Qanon is premised on a simple narrative of the good working to vanquish the evil, who are responsible for all the world's ills. There are very real concerns that may be driving more people to that narrative.

2020's battered economy has spurred wide-ranging anxiety and uncertainty.
Child trafficking, central to QAnon, has seen greater visibility, with the Jeffrey Epstein saga working as "gasoline poured onto QAnon embers, springing the theory back to life at a moment when some believers were suffering doubts," said Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Center for Civic Media.
Coronavirus has funneled what might otherwise be disparate conspiracy theories about cover-ups and global vaccine schemes into the grand unified theory offered by QAnon.

QAnon could pose real-world danger as it grows, scholars and analysts worry.

Experts are particularly concerned it could undermine faith in democracy, with recent Q posts questioning vote-by-mail and election integrity.
The web of misinformation expanding from within QAnon "definitely has real teeth," said Bryce Webster-Jacobsen of cyber intelligence firm GroupSense.

What to watch: Tech giants are starting to crack down on QAnon, but policies around it are inconsistent and may in some cases be easily dodged.

Twitter recently shut down 7,000 Q-related accounts. It expects broader policy changes to limit the reach of another 150,000 accounts, per NBC News.
Facebook removed five pages, 20 accounts, and six groups associated with QAnon for violating its content manipulation policies in May.
TikTok blocked several hashtags related to QAnon last month from its search results, although some of the videos that originally had the hashtags may still be available on the platform.

Yes, but: Studies have shown that users are more likely to seek out bad information when a Big Tech platform flags it as false.

"There's sort of this censorship backfire that happens, and people start becoming outraged that [a video is] being taken down and then sharing it more and more and more," said Zarine Kharazian, assistant editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.[// STREISAND EFFECT?!

Meanwhile: New platforms such as Parler and TheDonald.win are giving the conspiracy theory places to spread unchecked.

On Parler, which has attracted conservatives, Webster-Jacobsen said there are 10,000 to 15,000 new posts every day with the hashtags #QAnon or #WWG1WGA — which stands for the Q catchphrase "where we go one, we go all."

The bottom line: Trust in U.S. institutions is dangerously low, which creates a ripe environment for big-tent conspiracies such as QAnon.

"In some senses, the QAnon conspiracy is a deeply comfortable one: the idea that pedophile alien lizard people led by Hillary Clinton are running everything is more comfortable than the truth that no one has their hand firmly on the tiller,” Zuckerman say

[[ child molesters:

doh pizzagate/qanon

oddly // voter fraud, the gop decry it but only ones doing it.

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aha: anti-semitism is root of conspiracy (right behind masons and the Bavarian Illuinati see idiot Am bk), blood libel xian babies drink blood; 60 min ripoff To Catch a Predator basically sting, proto Reality TV? also Internet new scary thing; child molesters routinely killed in prison by murderers and rapists? Maybe since the list of RW and televangelists crimes and sins so long, they have to prove THEY enemy Dems/infidels are worse. lack of proof is proof [meadows on voter fraud]

Roman catholic fail; oddly both a reaL THING and a delusion? // urban legend, a new thing we fear; helicopter parents?

"gym" jordan

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west wing: ~ pension plan only way to end career in in DC is a live boy or a dead woman; [don't lick the pages]

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Epstein showed off 14-year-old victim to Trump at Mar-a-Lago: lawsuit

Brad Reed / Raw StoryAugust 17, 2020

A new lawsuit claims that late alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein brought one of his victims to see President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort when she was just 14 years…[el moz pref 12 yo]

7/20? trump wishes female enabler well

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/rachel-maddow-details-the-disturbing-new-ruling-against-trumps-labor-secretary-in-the-case-of-an-alleged-billionaire-child-molester/

https://www.newsweek.com/jim-jordan-dennis-hastert-ohio-state-alleged-sexual-abuse-bill-maher-1472204

no lnx pix

U.S.

Bill Maher Compares GOP Congressman Jim Jordan to Dennis Hastert Amid Sex Abuse allegations...]]

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aha/doh see novels! = STORY

BLM 1619 Project invite a questioning of am exceptionalism/chosen by God to spread freedom vs colonial/racist/PIC

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-evangelicalism-is-in-decline-and-qanon-could-take-its-place/

Remember the “Left Behind” series [story], about how the Rapture would whisk away all devout right-wing Christians before Jesus Christ unleashed the apocalypse on the unbelievers? Purity rings? Jesus Camp? Breathless stories about “girls gone mild,” giving up sex and tank tops for the Lord? A federal health official who believed that women who had premarital sex couldn’t feel love? Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on the “pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way”?

There can be no doubt that the heyday of Christian fundamentalism in America was the George W. Bush administration. Conservatives craved reassurance that they were defenders of “morality”, despite supporting an indefensible invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. These claims to moral superiority over liberals mainly came in the form of policing hymen status, harassing women at abortion clinics and claiming a right to Christian forgiveness (for yourself) whencaught with prostitutes or soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms.

White evangelicals still hold considerable political power, which is why Donald Trump occasionally tries to get photographed fondling a Bible in ways he vainly hopes are convincing. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are still under serious threat, as the Christian right has made major inroads into the federal judiciary.

Perversely, however, the cultural power of white evangelicals is clearly fading, both in terms of numbers and relevance, and that process started long before Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr.’s namewas ever associated with a “pool boy.” Bibles have been largely replaced with Pepe the Frog memes. Public prayer has given way, among right-wingers, to chants of “Lock her up.” You hardly hear anyone on Fox News these days talking up premarital abstinence anymore. They’re too busy arguing that it’s no big deal that Trump has routinely cheated on his wives, or that it’s “pearl-clutching” to be angry that he has bragged about committing sexual assault.

white evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.

Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.

QAnon has grown rapidly since it first emerged in 2017, morphing from an online conspiracy theory to anexplosive political and cultural phenomenon, one that can probably be considered a cult — although it lacks leaders in any conventional sense. While there hasn’t been systematic research into how many Americans are QAnoners, an NBC News study earlier this month discovered that QAnon accounts on Facebook have more than 3 million followers.

An estimated 20 QAnon adherents are running for congressional office this year. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just won a primary race for the Republican nomination in a Georgia district that is nearly certain to go red in November, in a landslide that suggests, at the very least, that her wacky beliefs didn’t scare off Republican voters. While some Republicans have publicly expressed reservations about Greene — who has apparently made racist comments and used sexist slurs — Donald Trump just called her a “future Republican Star”.

It’s a measure of our bizarre political climate that the Trump campaign sees QAnon as the future, but it’s hardly a surprise. Trump hasn’t been shy about courting QAnon followers, frequently retweeting its adherents (while later suggesting he doesn’t know much about it). But this public endorsement of a QAnon candidate brings the public embrace of the movement to the next level. Now Trump’s campaign is publicly attacking at least one Republican congressman who committed the sin of criticizing QAnon, with Trump’s deputy communications director arguing that the “real” conspiracy theory is the Russian collusion story. (That’s actually true, even if Team Trump has the story upside down.)

As ridiculous as all of this is — in the real world, Trump has wished accused child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “well,” and has shown no particular interest in the issue — the rise of QAnon as a more secular replacement for evangelical Christianity makes a lot of sense.

By claiming to pursue a crusade against the sexual abuse of children, QAnon gives its adherents a feeling of self-righteousness, one that allows them to ignore the reality that they support a deeply immoral and sociopathic president who is bragging about his efforts to steal the November election, and whose malicious mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed our economy and led to 166,000 deaths and millions of damaged lives. It lets them construct a story where they’re the good guys who oppose sexual exploitation, when in fact they are fiercely loyal to a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by two dozen women.

Evangelical Christianity played the same role for conservatives in the pre-Trump years, letting them feel holy and moral despite openly backing politicians who promoted immoral policies. But it came with a bunch of downsides, like being made to feel guilty for premarital sex, divorce or even (as Falwell Jr. found out) drinking and partying. With QAnon, you get to sleep in on Sunday and have all the sex you like, without giving up that pious assertion of moral superiority or the presumption of secret knowledge.

QAnon even swipes a central tactic from the Christian right: Focusing its concern on imaginary threats to children, while ignoring the very real threat to children (and everyone else) posed by their beliefs and actions.

With the Christian right, it’s all about melodramatic appeals that abortion supposedly “kills babies,” rhetoric that allows them to feel righteous while they undermine the services — social welfare, health care, housing and education — that allow parents to raise actual living children in safe, healthy environments.

QAnon claims to be fighting for children, but the child sex-trafficking victims they speak for are exclusively in their heads. In fact, QAnoners not only ignore the real cases of sex trafficking that exist, which have nothing to do with their conspiracy theory, but get in the way of activists who fight the real problemby clogging up phone lines, confusing their fundraising efforts, and interfering with social media campaigns.And they certainly don’t give a damn about the real-life children that Donald Trump separated from their parents and stuffed in cages along the border.

Embracing ridiculous beliefs, whether in the Rapture or in Pizzagate, seems to be a part of American right-wing DNA, perhaps because wild fantasies are the only way they can distract themselves from the real evil they do in the world.In light of that, the rise of QAnon makes sense. It’s the perfect mechanism, in Trump’s America, for conservatives to tell themselves a story about how they’renoble warriors for truth and justice in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re not.Hardly anyone likes to face the genuinely bad things they’ve done, and QAnon provides Trump-loving conservatives a fable to justify all their dreadful choices.

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aha? turner dis a compensatory fable for powerlessness (ppl will not buy racism/ anti-semite) but a fantasy about triggering a cascade effect, notion that popularity of their ideas/power is latent and must be catalyzed [cataclysm? = orgasmic climax? an orgy of violence when others/they will be put in their lower place or obliterated but also a blueprint. who is the hero? takes action/command in the name of? by right of?]

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aha /yikes

does a factual basis for a bigger lie disable fact check capability eg this on twitter? rhet: note slippage : the flag and bible are sacred (and conflated, see dovetails) but they are objects/property, but their destruction is violence, destruction/desecration; thus the enemy is evil, irrational, cannot be reasoned with so force is essential; plus kirk sez war on US/XIAN by new bogeyman (who are btw the old one, commies extremist/radicals)

escalator, activ meas WT/WE as crossover

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/

no lnx twt

how Trump is once again colluding with Russia

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020

Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.

---

DOUBT CORROLLORY: DELAY IS A WIN SEE FALLBACKS:

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...)

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see lomborg shuffle (clintel covid fight covid not carbon) ALSO SHILLENBERGER

820 aha: this is variant last stage of fallback strategy: 1) not real 2) real but not anthro 3) agw but too expensive to fix (wreck gnp) 4: we can afford to fix it, but we must be smart/targeted w/ $ 4a we cvan't really afford to fix big global warming, but we can do smaller green humanitarian stuff [WHEELER CLEAN WATER IN 3RD WORLD] that will make some ppl's lives better and might let us move incrementally to fix climate [and BTW the worst effect/chaos in in far future if ever]

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evil crypto because to promotes denial IN THE NAME OF humanitarianism/ EJ when in fact poor POC in 3rd world will bhe hit 1st and worst, and have least ability to cope and made least contribution to the problem

---

aha-ish: Bannon promoted djt as disruptor, the system is sick/rigged so he will blow it up and give us something better; he will fight your enemies (the chinese, the godless commies/boomers, drain the swamp, restore American prode/dominance [coal mfg]; relatd to throw the bums out they are all crooks? What do trumpistas think the swamp is? they atre fine with crony capitalism b/c bizmen are tough minded, numbers-based tough realists who will bwe efficient and stop wasting our tax money on losers/POC lazy welfare queens. so we should not be surprised when system crashes, because trump ppl know nothing, and are grifter rent-seekers. all they know about gov't is how to leech off it and dump their messes on it. short term / self-ish thinking: how do I/the books look good for next qtr (or for trump the next news cycle, which is 12 hours?!)

as someone else recently observed (burn dwn hs gingrich?) gop has built in political/rhet advantage b/c willing to crash the system to maintain power. (gives them leverage in negot? BUT lost votes in gov't shutdowns?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-derangement-syndrome-those-of-us-who-warned-america-that-fascism-was-coming-were-called-hysterical-alarmists-we-were-right-all-along/

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy....

no lnx

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

Such truth-telling patriots were called “hysterical” and “alarmist,” or told they were “out of touch” and overly “bitter” about Hillary Clinton’s defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that ” the institutions were strong” and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton’s grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and “endless war,” and to speak for the “white working class”.

Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a “businessman” and a “pragmatist” eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was “brash” and “unconventional,” but America’s political institutions were strong.

The stenographers of current events and the other hope-peddlers, with their horse-race journalism, false equivalence “both-sides-ism” and obsession with meaningless controversies would not let themselves see the truth of Trump’s danger or that of his neo-fascist movement. To admit the truth about Trump would mean that the old habits of writing and thinking about American politics are obsolete. Moreover, such an admission would demand speaking truth to power in a way that many members of the mainstream news media, specifically, are too afraid to, for both professional and personal reasons.

Republicans and other members of the Trump movement used “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to bully their critics into silence. The American right celebrated drinking “liberal tears” and loved the way Trump’s victory had made Democrats and so-called progressives go “crazy.”[// to the fed art'l that mollie h etc do not defend djt cos can't but own the libs/ hit bogey[wo]men]

Trump Derangement Syndrome is weaponized language in the same vein as the myth of the “liberal media.” Both lies put Democrats and the mainstream news media on the defense. While the American right and the Republican Party (and now Trump’s neo-fascist movement) drag the issue-space further and further to the right — and have done so for decades — the “liberal media” tries to find an imaginary balance by presenting right-wing extremism as somehow a “reasonable” alternative point of view.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump’s wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and “Dominionists” — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.

Of course, it was not Donald Trump’s most vocal critics who were “deranged” but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as “hysterical” and “alarmist” have warned about for more than five years.

Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote??? [// muslim ban "whAT'S GOIng on" = agenda/ deep state]

That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump’s threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: “In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination.” This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.

Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian’s playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:

Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election. What will happen in November – it’s a mess. I want a result much more than you… I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.

This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.

Trump’s most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants’ efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.

Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump’s national terrordome.

Trump’s own personal secret police force along with his civilian “watchdogs,” may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.

Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others withtreasoncharges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton’s recent book includes details of Trump’s lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his “enemies” in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.

Donald Trump, has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.

In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts. [also he can be prosecuted, just today info DA new charges?]

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in a 2017 essay at The Washington Post:

The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.

Now what to do?

In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.

That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.

In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be “free and fair” and when Trump’s machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and theAmerican people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.

Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.

If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans mUst vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.

If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and “business as usual” — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people’s uprising look like a PTA meeting.

Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.

On this point,Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People,” wrote last Thursday on Twitter:

Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven’t been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don’t hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because “America.”

To watch American democracy, fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy. SYSTEM CRASH economy, health care sys?!

---

aha rw pundits have an almost perfect record of being wrong [cleese Tetlock 284?], yet somehow paul Ehrlich gets to be poster boy punching bag for inaccurate prediction (did not help he lost long bet). Club of Rome? greens get tarred with that brush.

common ploy / complaint is that left is rooting for catastrophe (motive? if capitalist system crashes we get to build a better one? We hate America and thus want it to fail for pure spite?

related to alarmist Alare Scare chemophobia, manly stoic clear-eyes scientists and engineers are not scared b/c they see reality and are masters of the physical universe. eg nuclear power

Relates to to American Exceptionalism: we are not bound by rules/history, if we run out of X we'll just use Y (or as in peak oil, frack our way out).

---

example

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https://www.nationalreview.com/**2017/04/**judicial-watch-lawsuit-seeks-obama-white-house-records-controversial-global-warming/

former scientist at the NOAA has exposed a shoddy report on global warming. Judicial Watch is suing to learn more.

:{:{}:

following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watchfiled a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”}:

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

aha: is Q an interdisc hub? // anti-mask? [vax, militia?] alt rt boogaloo? already had it as amplify/accelerate

aha: gop/rt busted so many times for dark $/corruption that it needs whatabout so soros = kochs and actblue = dark $/scam

plus they need to neutralize blm demand for justice, and it's a scam than racism not real

note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs

=---

6/20

https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced

no lnx many pix

A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.

The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.

A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.

@OneVoiceUS

The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.”

The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.

The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1

Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.

4chan ActBlue claim

The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.

The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by trollMilo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.

Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim

On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue(Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.

Candace Owens ActBlue claim

Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence toQAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.

Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).

The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”

Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim

These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.

---

720

aha: trump utter fail on covid. numbers scary and undeniable (tho they try to suppress by route to DHS, swat secret police];

BLM not really subsiding, and they need it a bogeyman so trump can do Nixonian Law and Order scam; cruel irony/paradox is trump/libtards unable or unwilling to govern, so crash/crisis then gives cover for I alone am strong man who can deal with these commie degenerates who hate aMerica. [tho so far just kick blame to states [tho kemp under the bus on covid mask lawsuit?]

yes i am a vulgar bigot, but look at the stock mkt! and corp tax cut, dereg] but he can't depend on corp dark money to buy election [esp if zuck cuts ads] thus he needs the economy to re-open, which means he needs schools open (for child care?) so willing to kill kids?! no rallies (basis of ego boost, proof of popularity/thus legit // inaug crowd BS, pix of trumpistas will be on TV and soc med]

one of 4 horses, related to all but esp militarization, esp on climate refugee; note sublethal used on nat aM dapl remote ppl of color now pepperball explodes to head of activist, press lost eye? state of exception/margin periphery comes to Portland

yikes primary 7/20 portland secret police

combo of militarization and criminalization (of undoc immigrant, periphery, then sanctuary city, BLM ACTIVIST AND PRESS SUB-LETHAL WEAPONS)

why did portland get hit 1st by secret police vs seattle autonomous zone?

Washington enacted a measure in June 2019 in favor of sanctuary cities, similar to California and Oregon laws which are among the strongest statewide mandates in the nation.^[186]

Seattle^[187]

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aha: the original and most durable conspiracy theory? anything not white, male and xian is suspect/inferior? i forgot anti-sem in phobia ~ PC intersectional

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-donald-trump-will-try-to-scapegoat-george-soros-to-win-re-election/

no lnx twt

How Donald Trump will try to scapegoat George Soros to win re-election

Written by The Conversation July 16, 2020

by Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, McMaster University

When future scholars write the history of the administration of Donald Trump, he may end up being called — among many other things — the conspiracy theorist president. Trump famously began his ascent to power with the false and racist “birther” claim that Barack Obama was not really an American.

Trump and his followers have also legitimized bizarre conspiracy theories against Hungarian American financier and philanthropist George Soros. It now appears continued attacks toward Soros will be a part of the president’s re-election campaign.

Soros has been a punching bag for authoritarians, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists around the world since 1992, when he became famous as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” by making more than US$1 billion by “shorting” the British pound.

Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros barely survived the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Living in New York City since 1956, he has combined a long career as a successful capitalist while doing philanthropy under the banner of his Open Society Foundations.

Anti-Semitic attacks

Attacks on Soros have circulated on the margins of mainstream politics for years, tinged with anti-Semitism and fuelled by half-truths and outright lies. Russia has always been at the heart of anti-Soros propaganda, and it’s now joined by China in promoting attacks, distortions and lies. Over the last few years, these conspiracies have entered mainstream debate in Hungary, Poland, Brazil and the United States.

The Trump movement attempted to scapegoat Soros as part of its Make America Great Again rhetoric. Trump supporters accused Soros, among other things, of supporting the caravan of migrants attempting to enter the United States from Central America, being behind the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination (a falsehood Trump himself tweeted about) and promoting an elitist globalist agenda that undermined American jobs and culture.

Most incredibly, in recent weeks Soros has been accused of paying Black Lives Matter protesters who demonstrated across the United States after the police killing of George Floyd.

Trump has major liabilities in his quest for re-election: his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his polarizing opposition to protesters after the Floyd killing and the decline of the U.S. economy since the outbreak of COVID-19. Loss of support among suburban white women, members of the military elite and moderate Republicans are now a threat to his electoral prospects.

Attacking Soros part of the plan

Attacking China, stoking nationalist resentments, uncritically defending the police, claiming economic competence and bashing Joe Biden will be Trump’s major electoral strategy. But Republican attacks on Soros are also likely to circulate widely until the election.

Soros is a perfect foil to try to convince people that Trump stands for the average American. What better scapegoat than a wealthy, uber-liberal currency speculator who helped fund Obama and Hillary Clinton, supports abortion, gay and trans rights and gives generously to the electoral campaigns of liberal public defenders and prosecutors? In Trumpist rhetoric, Soros is soft on crime and promotes the values of cultural liberalism and global elites over the average American. [HE'S ALSO THE WHATABOUTISM CORP OLIGARCH FOR KOCH BOROS; I'M NOT CORRUPT YOU'RE CORRUPT KNEE-JERK REFLEXIVE ST'D MOVE

Soros’s history of supporting Palestinian rights and calling for a negotiated peace settlement created an opportunity for the White House to exploit. Rhetoric about big finance linked to a “globalist” Jewish philanthropist understandably concerns Jewish voters and others opposed to anti-Semitism, but anti-Soros rhetoric can unify evangelical Christian Zionists, pro-Israel Republicans, interventionist neo-conservatives and far-right extremists.

Attacking Soros is also part of a Trumpist appeal to conservative Black voters, now being led Candace Owens, a young media figure and Republican activist.

Owens spreads paranoia

Prone to gaffes that expose her ignorance about history and politics, Owens has gained a massive online presence among far right-wing Trump supporters by directly challenging the mainstream Democratic Party narrative on racism, police violence and poverty in America. She’s also attacked George Floyd’s character. What’s more, Owens has spread anti-Soros paranoia online, giving it a cooler, hipper and younger flavour.

The core of the Trumpist scapegoating of Soros is an attempt to blame Soros for the Black Lives Matter protests and calls for defunding the police. The lie that Soros is paying for the protests that have swept through the United States and is promoting riots is deeply corrosive to American democracy.

Conspiracy theories work best when lies, exaggerations and paranoia are linked to real things in the world that can be distorted by spin. Soros’s recent pledge of US$220 million to support civil rights and racial equality groups like Black Voters Matter will add fuel to extremist fire.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson will play a major role in all this. During a recent segment on his show, former Missouri governor Eric Greitens attempted to link Soros to anti-police violence and made reference to a “George Soros-funded prosecutor” involved in the case of the couple in St. Louis who stood in front of their house with guns while anti-racism protesters marched on their street.

None of this is likely to save Trump from going down to an electoral defeat in November. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the role of billionaires like Soros in politics and economic life, the divisiveness of anti-Soros paranoia will take years to repair.

The Conversation

Neil McLaughlin, Professor of Sociology, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, PhD Candidate in Sociology,, McMaster University

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

---

aha pseudo-populism trashes expertise (of science and gubmint), free mkt says all gov't inept, the only real expert is pvt biz/accounting consultant, which lead to more hollowing out: mck wants to keep all data propietary so can sell to mult gov't agy, HENCE EXTRACTION

death spiral, pro pub 720:

Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers, with government officials charged with making final decisions, it can be hard to identify the firm’s responsibility for any given decision. But the firm’s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government (a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden). Today, that increasingly means that if you examine the government’s response to the pandemic, you’re likely to find McKinsey’s fingerprints.

===

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aha recall that someone desmog? said plastic is the next big revenue stream for frack/fossil fuels, so must be defended and blk ppl get cancer collateral damage?

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https://theintercept.com/2020/06/25/environmental-activists-charged-terrorizing-louisiana-formosa/

TWO LEADERS OF the long-running fight for environmental justice in Louisiana turned themselves in to police in Baton Rouge Thursday morning. The activists, who work in a part of the state known as “Cancer Alley,” faced charges of “terrorizing” related to a nonviolent protest action. Civil liberties attorneys are calling the charges a dramatic escalation of a yearslong effort by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to criminalize efforts to halt the expansion of polluting facilities in the state — part of a nationwide trend of cracking down on dissent around climate change issues.

:{:{}:

The accusations against the activists, Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh, stem from a seemingly innocuous activist stunt carried out in December, the day after a festival designed to draw attention to the environmental misdeeds of Formosa Plastics. The Taiwanese petrochemical company plans to build a massive plastics manufacturing complex in a largely Black Louisiana community that has already suffered health problems linked to local industry. In October, Formosa agreed to a $50 million settlement for dumping pollutants, including the small pellets that form the building blocks for plastic products known as nurdles, into Texas’s Lavaca Bay — the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by private citizens.

with a key environmental permit still pending for Formosa in Louisiana, the action — dubbed “Nurdlefest” — was meant to pressure the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to scrutinize the company’s record. Boxes of the plastic pellets, used as evidence in the Texas case, were carted to the front of the agency, where around 75 people gathered in the rain.

What apparently terrorized community members, however, was a container of the pellets that appeared on the porch of an oil and gas lobbyist, with a detailed note attached, explaining what they were and their Texas origin. “We have delivered this package of nurdles as a reminder – Louisiana does not need anymore pollution, plastics or otherwise,” the letter said. “We demand that LDEQ DENY Formosa’s air emissions permit application.”

:{:{[ltr doc Letter Included in "Nurdles" Package Sent by Louisiana Activists]:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}: }:

1220

flynn in dc stop steal jeircho maga attacks deep state

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1220 an hunter

sow doubt disinfo

...

In this particular case, however, (most) House Republicans do not sincerely intend to win. But neither would they feel chagrined if their actions further provoked the sort of far-right violence seen in Washington, D.C., this weekend—the very public suggestion that non-Republican rule can simply no longer be tolerated by the unwashed masses, and that their non-Republican opponents should begin contemplating their own safety if they intend to continue thwarting Republican demands. That is the goal behind nearly all of this nonsense: to delegitimize; to put the stochastic notion in public heads that if The Base suffers a setback in its ambitions, it can only be because The Base was conspired against.It was conspired against by theurban, and the globalists, and the socialists.

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aha const is a god term, ironically used to overturn legal biden election:

https://boingboing.net/2020/11/19/trump-campaign-legal-clown-car-is-an-elite-strike-force-team-says-advisor-jenna-ellis.html

Trump campaign legal advisor Jenna Ellis TWT says the Trump campaign's legal team, which no longer includes any major law firms, but does include America's hairdripping mayor Rudy Giuliani, "is an elite strike force team."

Jenna Ellis: "This is an elite strike force team on behalf of the president and the campaign to make sure that our constitution is protected."

Can you lose your law license for making statements like that? Asking for America.

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convention commie apocalypse

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/kimberly-guilfoyles-rnc-speech-was-6-minutes-of-sheer-hell-ill-never-get-back-gop-strategist/

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/kimberly-guilfoyle-2020-rnc-speech-transcript

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (00:05)

Good evening, America. I’m Kimberly Guilfoyle. I speak to you tonight as amother, a former prosecutor, a Latina, and a proud American, and yes, a proud supporter of President Donald J. Trump. Why? He is the President who delivers for America. He built the greatest economy the world has ever known, for the strivers, the working class, and middle class. As Commander in Chief, he always puts America first. President Trump is the law and order President.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (00:41)

Now, Presidential leadership is not guaranteed. It is a choice. Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Socialistswill fundamentally change this nation. They wantopen borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty, and will selfishly send your jobs back to China while they get rich. They will defund, dismantle, and destroy America’s law enforcement. When you are in trouble and need police, don’t count on the Democrats.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (01:14)

As a first-generation American, I know how dangerous their Socialist agenda is. My mother, Mercedes, was a special education teacher from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. My father, also an immigrant, came to this nation in pursuit of the American Dream. Now, I consider it my duty to fight to protect that dream. Rioters must not be allowed to destroy our cities. Human sex drug traffickers should not be allowed to cross our border. The same Socialist policies which destroyedplaces likeCuba and Venezuela must not take root in our cities and our schools.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (01:58)

If you want to see the Socialist Biden/Harris future for our country, just take a look at California. It is a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation, and immaculate environment, and the Democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes. In President Trump’s America, we light things up. We don’t dim them down. We build things up, we don’t burn them down. We kneel in prayer and we stand for our flag.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (02:42)

This election is a battlefor the soul of America. Your choice is clear. Do you support the cancel culture? Thecosmopolitan elites of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden, who blame America first? Do you think America is to blame? Or, do you believe in American greatness? Believe in yourself? In President Trump? In individual and personal responsibility? They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want toenslave youto theweak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (03:44)

From the beginning, when President Trump spoke about making American Great Again, he was speaking about thatshining city on a hill and restoring thebeacon of light that once shined so bright. His promise was to put America first and he has. When President Trump cut middle class taxes, putting tens of thousands of dollars back in the pockets of working class Americans, that beacon began to flicker once again. When President Trump commanded the defeat of ISIS,took out al-Baghdadi and Soleimani and paved the way for peace in the Middle East, that beacon started to glow. When he negotiated historic trade deals with Canada, Mexico, Japan, and China, bringing back thousands of manufacturing jobs to America, that beacon shined bright once again for the world to see.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (04:45)

America, it’s all on the line. President Trump believes in you. He emancipates and lifts you up to live your American Dream. You are capable. You are qualified. You are powerful and you have the ability to choose your life and determine your destiny. Don’t let the Democrats take you for granted. Don’t let them step on you.Don’t let them destroy your families, your lives, and your future. Don’t let them kill future generations because they told you and brainwashed you and fed you lies that you weren’t good enough.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: (05:25)

Like my parents, you can achieve your American Dream. You can be that shining example to the world. Manifest and be the change in this country that you dream, that you hope, that you believe in. Stand foran American President who is fearless, who believes in you, and who loves this country and will fight for her.President Trump is the leader who will rebuild the promise of America and ensure that every citizen can realize their American Dream. Ladies and gentlemen, leaders and fighters for freedom and liberty and the American Dream, thebest is yet to come!

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https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-antifa-and-black-lives-matter-thugs-are-going-be-clubbing-people-suburbs

Roger Stone: Antifa and Black Lives Matter “thugs” are going to be “clubbing” people in the suburbs to suppress voting

09/18/20 4:25 PM EDT

roger Stone continues to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare martial law

09/18/20 1:26 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-continues-lay-groundwork-trump-declare-martial-law

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/warning-left-wing-coup-trumpist-media-prep-their-audience-election-unrest

no lnx many

Warning of a left-wing coup, Trumpist media prep their audience for election unrest

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 09/18/20 10:25 AM EDT

Trump

Molly Butler / Media Matters

Nearly 5 million people were watching on Tuesday night as a Fox News host who claims that white supremacy is a hoax and a former speechwriter for President Donald Trump who was fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference spun out a wild-eyed conspiracy theory portraying mail-in voting as a sinister Democratic cabal’s coup attempt.

Tucker Carlson opened the segment by telling his viewers that Democrats were promoting mail-in voting not as a way to boost safe turnout during a pandemic, but because “they want the uncertainty over the outcome of the election, so they can manipulate the results.” His guest, Revolver News’ Darren Beattie, then explained that “a very specific type of coup called the color revolution” is “unfolding before our eyes.”

A color revolution, Beattie explained, is “a regime change model favored by many in our national security apparatus, particularly against Eastern European countries to overthrow target regimes that they don't like.” (They were actually peaceful protests that toppled despots in places previously dominated by the Soviet Union.) And now, he claimed, that model is being applied to the United States, with “color revolution professionals” deliberately generating election fraud in order “to use lawfare in order to overturn the 2020 election.”

Right-wing media figures generally push a baseline level of apocalyptic rhetoric about the purported predations of progressives. But Trumpist media have reached a dangerous fever pitch over the last week or so, even by that standard. With polls showing Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden following the party conventions and the election only weeks away, commentators like Carlson are preparing their audiences to treat a Trump defeat as a left-wing coup -- and encouraging the president toward an authoritarian response.

Their deranged statements are fed by -- and fuel -- the president’s own unhinged remarks. Trump has portrayed himself as “saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.” He describes his political opposition as supporters of “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “left-wing cultural revolution” so dangerous that he has even endorsed extrajudicial executions.And all the while, he’s been openly claiming that he could not possibly lose a fairly held election, and that any defeat would be the result of a Democratic election fraud conspiracy.

Carlson’s show is the most prominent vehicle fearmongering about a Democratic coup, but it is not the only one. A new special from The Blaze TV’s Glenn Beck is titled “CIVIL WAR: The Way America Could End in 2020,” and it details how “the Left is grooming us for an Eastern European-style color revolution this election.” His complex plot sprawls over three chalkboards and features mail-in voting as a vector for “something dangerous happening in November if we don’t act now.” (Beck praised Carlson during the program for the way he has been “putting the puzzle pieces together.”) The Trumpist publication The Federalist has offered up a similar “coup” theory.

The right-wing “coup” talk is the natural result of their demagoguery and dehumanization of the political opposition. Months ago, Trumpist media figures began warning that civilization itself was on the ballot in the fall, with Trump standing as the only thing preventing the left from making America “unrecognizable.” That type of rhetoric has only escalated, producing ever-more-inflammatory claims about what Trump’s defeat might mean to the safety and security of his supporters.

Over the last week or so alone:

Carlson described Black Lives Matter as “poison” that “we have to fight” because “if we’re going to survive as a country, we must defeat this.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn explained that he bought a gun in case “100 or 200 people bent on violence” show up in his suburb.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham and the pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan baselessly attributed the massive western wildfires to left-wing arsonists, blasting false rumors circulating on social media to millions of viewers and listeners.

Fox contributor Dan Bongino claimed that “we're watching the greatest nation in the history of sentient beings collapse in front of our face.”

Fox host Sean Hannity said that U.S. cities have become “war zones” and that there is a “war on police now.”

And Charlie Kirk, a frequent Fox guest and head of the Trumpist youth group Turning Point USA, warned on his podcast that if Trump loses, leftists seeking “bloodthirsty revenge” will “come for us all. They will come for your children.”

Some are taking their hatred of the left to lawless, authoritarian conclusions.

Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, said during an appearance earlier this month on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network that if Trump were to lose (illegitimately as a result of voter fraud, of course), he should try to retain power by having federal agents seize purportedly tainted ballots, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.

Fox’s Mark Levin,meanwhile, has also urged Trump to consider invoking the Insurrection Act -- but he argued that it would be needed if he wins. “He will have to use it to put down the enemy,” Levin explained on his radio show last week.

“The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter, and the enemy is anybody that is going to use rioting, arson, looting, violence against our country to try to overthrow our country,” he added. “Those are traitors. That's treasonous.”

Extremist violent rhetoric is nothing new for right-wing media. Glenn Beck made it a staple of Fox News during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before the midterm elections, Fox warned its audience members that they needed to vote for Republicans to protect themselves from being killed by Democratic mobs.

But this sort of demagoguery can come with a heavy price. Beck’s rhetoric inspired an attempted domestic terror attack against one of his regular targets that ended with a firefight with law enforcement. And in the days before the 2018 midterm elections, a Trump superfan sent bombs to leftist leaders whom Fox commentators had attacked.

There’s still six weeks to go before the election. How will this spate of violent rhetoric end?

IN THIS ARTICLE

Voter Fraud and Suppression

Voter Suppression

Fox News fuels Trump’s dangerous Portland “law and order” strategy

07/21/20 3:52 PM EDT

Desperate Trumpists say civilization is on the ballot as Biden lead grows

06/24/20 11:06 AM EDT

How Tucker Carlson became the Fox host Trump listens to the most

07/08/20

---

i forgot God is a God term

an 820

...That is particularly true as the president seems to have simultaneously launched an initiative to suggest that Biden is against the Bible and God. For example, during a “telerally” with Pennsylvania voters on Sunday, Trump said, “Joe Biden, the radical Democrats are against fracking, they’re against guns, and they’re against the Bible, essentially, they’re against God.”Here is what he said in Ohio on Thursday

note density of god terms, polarization and high stakes:

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-covid-19-lockdowns-are-attempt-establish-global-world-government

LIMBAUGH (HOST): I just ran across something, and it breaks my -- it breaks heart. It really does, even though it doesn’t surprise me. USA Today is running an op-ed piece today by somebody I’ve never heard of. It’s some guy named David Rothkopf, R-o-t-h-k-o-p-f. Never heard of him, doesn’t matter. It’s an op-ed piece. It’s not a news story, but it will probably be a news story before long.

And here is the headline: “America’s National Greatness Myths Are Shattering. Can They Survive? Should They Survive?” National greatness myths. So, you see, here’s another column, another op-ed piece from the left which has no respect whatsoever for this country, no understanding of the greatness, of theexceptionalism, of the uniqueness, of the blessed nature of this country. And it’s not hard to understand those things if they’re ever explained to you.

If people who understand how this country came to be can explain it to people, they will be in awe of it. It is a magical, wonderful story about how this country became something no other country ever has, about how this country was the first in human history to embody, acknowledge, and promote the concept of human liberty as that which comes first in any society. It comes before a government. It comes before government power. This country embodied the idea that a Constitution should limit what government can do to people, not limit the people.

The fact that this country established and acknowledged that by virtue of our holy creation that we have certain unalienable rights, which means they can’t be taken away by anybody. That’s what inalienable means. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, those three things were acknowledged to be the natural state of the human being in the United States and everywhere. Never before in history had that been done.

Most people in this world from the beginning of time have lived under tyranny, have lived under bondage, have lived under dictatorship, have lived in poverty, have never known the standard of living this country made possible. The greatness of this country’s not a myth. The greatness of this country is very specific. There's [[are]] specific reasons, specific explanations for it. It’s just heartbreaking that they haven’t been taught in almost 50 years.

We’ve lost two generations to the public education system, which then enables some dummkopf like this guy to write a piece saying America’s national greatness myths are shattering.Should they survive, can they survive? Here’s the subhead. “Rather than restore some idealized, jingoistic version of who we are, let’s use this painful moment of self-doubt to remake the reality of America.”

Speak for yourself, buddy. We who love this country have zero self-doubt about it. None. “Let’s use this painful moment of self-doubt to remake the reality -” how about we use this painful moment of self-doubt to vanquish the American left, tovanquish communism and socialism, which has never worked anywhere? How about we use this painful moment to teach more and more Americans the truth about their great and wonderful and God-blessed country?

“Live long enough and you can see the rise and fall of myths in real time. It does not take statues being pulled from their pedestals to reveal the fragility of the conjured history upon which so much of society depends. … The world is not, we are reminded, as we believed it was. Not only is that unsettling, it forces us to ask, what else about our bedrock beliefs about life may someday turn to quicksand? National myths can crash in an instant.”

[[National myths can crash in an instant.]] National myths are not crashing. National myths are not collapsing of their own weight of immorality and falsehood. National myths don’t exist. What’s happening is that America’s greatness is being disassembled right in front of our eyes. America’s history is being erased right in front of our eyes. Everything about America is being substantially destroyed, from oureconomy to our liberty and freedom, to our Constitution. And it is done at the urging, at the bequest of, with the support of the Democrat Party of the United States of America.

This -- none of this could be happening of its own. It couldn't -- this is not happening because a majority of the American people want this. That’s what makes this so outrageous. We are being ruled and governed here by a really small minority who are using the power of fear and intimidation and economic destruction — that is key.

Once you take people’s money away from them, you own them. Once you take people’s ability to earn a living and you become the provider, you own them. That’s the first thing they did, was shut down this nation’s economy. Now they’re trying to get it shut down again under bogus COVID-19 numbers.

“America’s National Greatness Myths Are Shattering. Can They Survive?” They damn well better survive or the world is not gonna be the place — you know in Italy right now, do you know how much money Italy is losing a day? Italy is losing $115 million a day in the hotel business alone. Do you know why? Because nobody from the United States is traveling or anywhere else. COVID-19 has [[it]] shut down[[.]] -- now, in the past it’s been, shall we say, fashionable to rip America as the biggest and the baddest, theUnited Nations rips America, other people rip America.

But at the end of the day, everybody needed America. Every nation on Earth’s economy needs America. But our economy has been shut down. We got 44 million people out of work. We’ve got in Chicago alone 4,400 businesses which have been shut down and are said never to reopen again. And that’s one city. In Rome and throughout Italy, they’re losing $115 million a day via tourism. There isn’t any. They miss the United States.

The world depends on it. This is another thing that is by design in all of this. You take out the United States of America and you take out the United States economy, and you have set up your precious globalism and world governmentbecause you are creating worldwide poverty and thus worldwide need. And when you, the global government or whoever you are, become the provider to those in need, guess who you own?

But none of this could be happening if it weren’t for the fact that the United States is under assault and being taken down on the basis of a pack of lies. That our great history is nothing but a bunch of lies, that our history is nothing but a bunch of myths. How in the world can anyone with any kind of intellect at all look at the United States, see its role that it played in the establishment of human liberty and freedom, and want no part of it?

Well, obviously people to whom human liberty and freedom are a problem. To communists and socialists, human liberty and freedom, free choice, that’s a problem. The state becomes the repository of all freedom. The state determines who can do what, when, where, why. The state determines who has what. The state determines who gets what.

But how in the world can this -- I ask myself how in the world can otherwise intellectually qualified people not value the concept of individual liberty and freedom? And yet people who are leading this anti-American movement are of exactly that frame of mind, that somehow individual liberty and freedom pose the threat,pose the problem to the ongoing future.

---

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.”

:{:{}:

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.

:{:{}:

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

:{:{}:

“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.”

:{:{}:

Police Chief Carmen Best later corrected that statement.

:{:{}:

“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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fox 720

Op Vulcan

sr pol advisor

good strong begin to see good strong pos results on that focus, continue? congrats

congrats on ms 13 op, one of the largest jul 15 largest soulless barbarians hacked to death 2 girls in NY, now facing death penalty, 1st time ever int'l terrorism, a contrast taking out criminal gangs and terrorists w/ rec speed force and focus record focus liberal mayor, crazy mayor lawless mayhem un radical left, unleash violence and mayhem,public safety that's the choice;

Dobbs: it is a stark choice no more emblematic than portland wheeler pristine city being savaged antifa, BLM and other activists and street criminals 6 straight weeks nowhere else cits do not want to ruffle feather and get that major out of town, nowhere else, at least take night off

i suspect strong and growing silent majority in this cty ready to clear house of leftist mayors

am: silent tortuous violence electoral wave crash over of defund police, abolish law enforcement, force sanctuary cities down the throats, appoint social just prosecutorswho won't even enforce the law; choice never more clear, even tho lib mayors refuse request, refuse our generous hands, we will make major announcement next week prez use authority of fed gov't to come to rescue of long-suffering cits ; to rescue,

lou: if citizens do not req, accept violence at the level they are you and i know how it will be painted, fed, crush city despite disavowal

mom and dad and cits of all walks of life manhattan, chicago, atlanta ...they support police, they feds to fullest extent ,want gang members behind bars, killers, murderer, support for robust federal support, keep city, family community safe; right to walk w/o stray bullet, put kids to sleep at night w/o worry homes broken into or windows smashed; social justice prosecutors will make much more diff, but thisprez will never waver in his duty to protect the am ppl;

dobbs: isn't role for DOJ NYc mayor De Blasio cognitive diss/ [sm: "very unwell" ] , trash city every day, strips police of billion $, throw citizens to wolves; anti-crime unit disbanded by socialist mayor,

SM: I assure you DOJ ...safety, peace and order in our city. Every day thousands ICE ...every day go to work, put dangerous criminals behind bars reduced crime for the 1st time for lowest level decades, did by fed law,[guns offenders, felons carrying weapons behind bars] put X in jail

Sanctuary cities releasing violent criminals get them off street and we will get them back home = jail

Let’s never forget Obama /Biden for 8 straight years unimpeded, let MS 13 in,unleashed on our communities, never apologized to families..schools, senseless violence , not Pol/part issue, ___normal good ppl], ppl have to live in fear of violence

Dobbs: why not DOJ investigate BLM not nonprofit get $ directly from Dems party gets tax deductible $ ]= tax $, drivers it back to BLM} he dodges question no time to make speech

we will not allow radical marxist orgs deprive Ams bl white, liberal be they POC of rights to be safe

Dobbs: Marxist lives matter , you’d think they’d make motto

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/experts-fear-trump-supporters-will-be-dangerous-if-he-loses-the-last-gasp-of-a-dying-party/

The United States has a long history of bitter, divisive presidential elections being followed by gracious concession speeches. But Journalist Andrew Feinberg, in an article published by The Independent on July 7, examines the possibility of far-right violence if Donald Trump loses to Joe Biden in November.

“Even by the hardball standards of American presidential politics,” Feinberg explains, “Trump’s reelection bid stands out in history as the sole example of an incumbent president who is pushing his supporters to view a loss as the end of the republic rather than the end of his political career. This unprecedented strategy is raising concerns among experts on extremism and authoritarianism, and even veterans of Republican politics who say it is likely to result in violence should Trump lose in November.”

Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to play hardball during his reelection campaign. President Richard Nixon, in 1972, slammed Democratic nominee George McGovern unmercifully and was reelected by a landslide. Had Nixon lost to McGovern, however, he would have no doubt congratulated him and moved on; for all his corruption and ruthlessness, Nixon knew when to quit. But as Feinberg points out in his article, Trump’s rhetoric has been historically over-the-top.

“While speaking last Friday at the foot of Mt. Rushmore as part of an official, taxpayer-funded celebration of American independence,” Feinberg notes, “Trump characterized the anti-racist protest movement that has swept the country in recent weeks as ‘a new far-left fascism’ and a ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ that is ‘designed to overthrow the American Revolution’ and ‘would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery and progress.’"

Feinberg adds that on July 4, the day after his Mt. Rushmore speech, Trump gave a White House speech in which he railed against “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters” and asserted that defeating them in November would be akin to “the process of defeating” the United States’ enemies during World War II.

Brian Klaas, a politics professor at Universal College London in the U.K., told The Independent he “would be surprised if there is not at least some sporadic low-level violence around the election” if Trump loses.

Klaas warned, “In modern American history, there has never been a major mainstream political figure who has argued that his opponents are not legitimate.” And the things that worry Klaas about the hardcore MAGA bass, he told The Independent, include the “high concentration of weapons among Donald Trump’s supporters” and the “steady diet of information that tells them that they are the last defense for America against some conspiracy against them.”

According to Klaas, “People who have really worked themselves up in this vortex of disinformation… and have really gone down the rabbit hole…. may take Trump’s tweets literally and say, ‘OK, they’re my enemies. They’re committing treason, they’re part of the Deep State, and it’s time to be a patriot and stand up against them.’ That would be very, very dangerous.”

Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, who was a Tea Party favorite befor he became a Never Trumper, also fears the possibility of violence from the far right if Trump loses. Walsh, interviewed by The Independent, described Trumpism as “the last gasp of a dying party” that will become “even more desperate” if Democrats retake the White House and the Senate in November.

“They will engage in violence,” Walsh warned. “They will engage in trying to stop the machinery of government from even working.”

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https://theconversation.com/how-did-white-become-a-metaphor-for-all-things-good-140674

Shortly after George Floyd’s death, one of my friends texted me that Floyd wasn’t necessarily a bad person, but, pointing to his prior stints in prison, added that “he wasn’t lily-white either.”

Soon thereafter, I read an article in The New York Times written by Chad Sanders in which he noted his agent canceled a meeting with him because he was observing a “Blackout Day” in recognition of the Black men and women who have been brutalized and killed.

In the first example, white represents purity and morality. In the other, black represents nothingness or absence – similar to the use of “black hole” as a metaphor.

These types of linguistic metaphors – pervasive in speech – have been a focus of my research.

There are “brighter days ahead” after “dark times.” We want to be whitelisted and not blacklisted for jobs. Black hats are the bad hackers and white hats the good ones. White lies make stretching the truth okay, while we don’t want to receive a black mark on our records. In picture books, good people, angels and Gods dress in white, but the villains, devils and the Grim Reaper dress in black.

Of course, there are exceptions: We prefer to be “in the black” versus “in the red” in financial statements. But for the most part, the delineation is remarkably consistent.

How do such linguistic metaphors get formed? And do they perpetuate racism?

Processing a complicated world

One theory, proposed by cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, is that metaphors are a cognitive tool allowing people to comprehend what they cannot see, taste, hear, smell or touch. They help people understand difficult, abstract concepts through simpler, more tangible, paradigms.

These metaphors get formed as people gain experience in the physical world. For instance, the abstract concept of power is connected to the concrete concept of height – perhaps because, as children, we saw adults as taller and more powerful. Then, as adults, we continue to implicitly associate height with power. It isn’t just tall buildings or tall people. In multiple studies, participants judged symbols representing people or groups to be more powerful if they simply appeared at a higher position on a page than other symbols.

My research with fellow behavioral scientists Luca Cian and Norbert Schwarz found that vertical position also has an implicit association with emotionality and rationality.

If something is at the top of a page or a screen, we tend to perceive it as more rational, whereas if something is at the bottom, it appears more emotional. One reason may be that we metaphorically tend to connect the heart with emotion and the head with logic, and, in the physical world, our heads are actually higher than our hearts.

Infusing color with meaning

In a similar vein, fresh snow and clean water are white or transparent, whereas sullied water turns brown and then black. It is also bright and relatively safer during the day, but dark and more dangerous at night. While observing all of this, we start forming conceptual metaphors – or subconscious connections – between color and goodness.

Experiments have documented the existence of this relationship.

In one paper, for example, psychologists Brian Meier, Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore showed that the color white is implicitly connected with morality, and the color black with immorality.

In another study, they asked participants to evaluate words as positive or negative. The words were shown in black or white font on a computer screen with a program measuring the speed of the classification.

Participants evaluated words with a positive meaning like “active,” “baby,” “clean” and “kiss” faster when they were shown in a white rather than black font. On the other hand, they classified words with a negative meaning – terms like “crooked,” “diseased,” “foolish” and “ugly” – faster when they appeared in black.

A sample of words used in the experiment by Meier, Robinson and Clore. Aradhna Krishna, CC BY-SA

These studies have been replicated, and the same findings emerge, indicating that they’re not a fluke: The perceptual-conceptual links between color and goodness are ingrained in people.

The race factor

Could something as simple as the color-goodness relationship drive racial prejudice?

In the color-goodness studies above, black and white colors were connected with good and bad. Implicit race bias tests, on the other hand, look for a connection between Black and white faces and goodness.

There is a subtle but important difference here. The implicit bias race test detects prejudice towards Black people. So besides skin color, it also picks up reactions to other differences in appearance – from hair to facial structure – along with any animosity one may have previously harbored. Still, the color-goodness association is clearly a factor in racial prejudice.

Can these conceptual metaphors – so ingrained in our everyday speech – be upended? What if we wrote that something was as pure as the blackest eyes; as rich as the darkest hair; or as sophisticated as a black dress?

What if Gods and heroes were dressed in black and villains in white?

What if, as Muhammad Ali pointed out in a 1971 interview, we had vanilla devil’s food cake and dark-chocolate angel cake?

Metaphors aren’t ironclad. It’s possible to consciously change the way we write, draw, design costumes – and, yes, bake. Over time, perhaps this could gradually erode some of our implicit biases.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/conservatives-think-they-control-the-concept-of-freedom-but-progressives-have-a-deeper-richer-tradition

free mkt FUNDAMENTALISM:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-time-to-reject-the-gods-of-commerce-america-is-a-society-not-an-economy/

david m

The “economy” does not exist. Human beings do. What nearly everyone understands, except Republican officials and economists on television, is that there is no singular, shared experience within one large-scale economic system. Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old woman with a developmental disability, who worked as a grocery clerk at a satellite store of Giant Food — a chain throughout three states — died from the coronavirus infection she contracted when earning her final paycheck. That check was for $20.64. She worked without a facial mask, and lived in an entirely different universe than Nick Bertram, Giant’s CEO, who collects a salary in the high six figures.

The majority of Americans have less than $500 in savings. They simply do not experience the same “economy” as Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, a Republican who described Americans dying as a result of “opening the economy” as the “lesser of two evils.” Hollingsworth is the 12th-richest member of Congress, with a net worth of $50.1 million, most of it coming from his father — the “silent partner” in Hollingsworth’s investment firm.

Americans as disparate as Trey Hollingsworth and Leilani Jordan, whose death the congressman would presumably regard as collateral damage, might not share an economy in any substantive sense, but they do share a society.

The ideological disease that cripples the United States is the belief that society does not exist beyond its commercial activity. President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that “the business of America is business,” while Joel Millman, a formerreporter for the Wall Street Journal, once wrote, “America is not a nation … America is a market.”

Millman was making a neutral, analytical observation, but a similar thesis has guided America’s long succession of disastrous policy decisions that treat the “economy” — meaning profits for corporations and their owners or shareholders — as sacred. An entire set of religious assumptions follow, most significantly that people like Jordan are martyrs for the God of profit. Their deaths are acceptable losses in the name of God and country, which mutate together into the bloodless idol of commerce.

Human sacrifices at the altar of the idol have become almost commonplace. Millions of children of color in the inner cities develop asthma and suffer from other respiratory problems because they breathe heavily polluted air; 26,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance; public health experts have concluded that poverty — and the lack of robust social services — causes tens of thousands of deaths a year.

The fatalities caused by environmental injustice, denial of health care and outright deprivation never provoke widespread scrutiny because, unlike the daily stock market report or reports of marginal GDP growth rates, they are largely out of sight and out of mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the United States to confront its market-based theology. Americans now must consider whether their country is anything more than an engine of commerce, and whether human life has value separate from a financial calculus. For the first time in most of our lifetimes, the question of priorities is direct and implicates almost everyone....

Jeez doh i forgot PC?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-the-data-that-proves-americans-who-rage-against-political-correctness-are-the-most-xenophobic-and-most-likely-to-vote-trump-in-2020

no lnx

Here’s the data that shows Americans who rage against political correctness are the most xenophobic — and most likely to vote Trump

Written by Samuel L. Perry / Religion Dispatches March 24, 2020

Admittedly, Trump’s initial references to “the Chinese Virus” earlier in March seemed rather ad-hoc. Though clearly xenophobic in context and implication, it seemed that Trump was casually parroting the language of other far-Right commentators like Charlie Kirk. Within the past week, however, Trump has ramped up his labeling campaign, often going out of his way to refer to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus” in Twitter storms and White House press briefings.

Two key strategies likely drive Trump’s efforts here. Both involve distracting Americans from his own administration’s failings at dealing with the coronavirus earlier on. The first is simply to blame China, laying responsibility for America’s situation solely at their feet. The fact that a Chinese propaganda director recently suggested the virus may have originated with American soldiers who brought it to China provided the perfect (and tacitly justifiable) motivation for Trump to remind the world forcefully and repeatedly where the virus originated.

:{:{}:

The second factor also involves distraction from Trump’s failings, but one in which “China” is only incidental. They are merely a stand-in for all “dangerous outsiders.” By repeatedly and brazenly referring to “the Chinese Virus,” and provoking a media backlash against the xenophobic implications of his language, Trump wishes to remind his base who our internal threats are: politically correct liberals who care more about defending foreigners than they do the American people.

Though Trump has previously raged against political correctness explicitly, and indeed, campaigned on it in 2016, when it comes to this recent COVID-19 labeling campaign, other far-Right thought-leaders have been doing this for him. For example, in a March 14th interview on Fox News, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Anyone who complains that it’s racist or xenophobic to call this virus the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan virus is a politically correct fool, and they ought not to be listened to about anything.”

And March 20th, Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Glenn Beck: “The worst thing in this pandemic virus outside of the actual illness itself of course is the political [sic] correct media still, still peddling garbage that hurts the American people.” Quoting an ABC News reporter, O’Reilly said in a whiny, mocking voice, “A lot of people think it’s racist if you call it the Chinese Virus. …It’s sickening.”

But survey data confirm that white Americans—like President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, Bill O’Reilly, or their followers—who attack politically correct language as the enemy are in fact the most likely to hold racist or xenophobic views. In a nationally representative survey fielded in February 2020, we asked Americans to indicate how much they agreed with statements about using politically correct language. We also asked Americans for their views on refugees from the Middle East and America’s control over its Southern border.

In the first figure [left], we see that, as Americans’ agreement with the statement “Too many people are easily offended these days over language” increases, the more likely they are to believe that the federal government should do more to secure the Southern border and that Middle Eastern refugees pose a terrorist threat.

In the second figure [below, right], we see a similar trend, but in the opposite direction. The more strongly Americans disagree with the statement “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” the more likely they are to hold xenophobic views about refugees from the Middle East and to want stricter border control.

In sum: both figures show that white Americans who voice the strongest opinions against politically correct language also hold the strongest anti-immigrant attitudes.

Just as important, they are also the group most likely to plan on voting Trump in 2020.

[no graf]

The last figure [left] shows the percentage of white Americans who indicate they plan on voting Trump in 2020 by their level of agreement with our two statements regarding politically correct language. Nearly 80% of white Americans who strongly disagree that “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” or who strongly agree that “Too many people are easily offended these days over language,” intend to vote for Trump in November.

Seen in light of these data, Trump’s dual strategy is clear. By unapologetically referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus,” Trump is first able to signal to his white base that he too is disdainful of scheming, disease-ridden outsiders. But he can also intentionally provoke a backlash against his hurtful and xenophobic language, which he and his followers can dismiss as leftist “political correctness.” Trump shores up support against both a perceived external threat (immigrants) and an internal threat (liberals) with a single dangerous and offensive swipe.

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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)

carter page calls for reparations for rw scotus v schumer price to pay

a kind of mirroring?

aha: grn blk death: see energy poverty

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Creating a New Market for Coal in the Push to Mine ‘Critical Minerals’ for National Security

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corruption it's also a devil term; djt needed to defend from it, so he i'm not a puppet 'd joe hunter biden --> ukraine (also bizarro mirror on server)

“Do So. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage.

“And the reason why this was such a good strategy is because we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. And so all the Indians went out and voted, and the difference on the 18-35-year-old turnout is like 40%, and that swung the election by about 6% – which is all we needed!”

Again, Nix was selling his company’s expertise in promoting cynicism and apathy to suppress turnout among the opposition. But this campaign was even more manipulative: enlisting young Afro-Caribbeans in what pretended to be an authentic youth movement, secretly designed to manipulate them into surrendering their votes. This is what ‘compliance’ means in psychological warfare: achieving the desired behavioural effect from a ‘hostile audience’.

Asked for comment on the Do-So campaign, Nix responded in an email earlier today, writing, “The objective of this campaign was to highlight and protest against political corruption.There is nothing unlawful or illegal about assisting with this activity. SCL / CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary.”

Nix’s closing comments in his summer 2016 pitch were tantalising: “We’ve got an in-house intelligence team, so we can do full intelligence protection… Opposition don’t hack your emails and everything else. And we're pretty good at getting intelligence too… You know what? We do a lot of counter operations.You can spend $10 million on an election.Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”

Beneath the veneer, this seems to have been some of the work Alexander Nix was most proud of. This is how he pitched his company around the world, just as he was finally starting to work for Trump. This is the man who the Mercers and Steve Bannon enlisted to help them reshape the American political mind.

when a

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driver on trump seal pardon? war crimes 2x called them warriors ~ deep state?! (rudy is a warrior, not acting on my djt behalf, indep go-getter)

, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer (no relation to the white nationalist of the same name) was forced outafter losing a power struggle with Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been aggressively lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in the cases of multiple convicted war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been accused of war crimes during a 2017 deployment to Iraq. Hegseth devoted numerous Fox & Friends segments to their causes, repeatedly hosted their family members and lawyers to ask the president for pardons, and privately urged the president to do so.⁠

Gallagher was acquitted in July on charges related to the murder of a teenage prisoner of war, but was demoted after being convicted of posing for photos with the body. While Trump pardoned the Navy SEAL and restored his rank, Navy officials subsequently sought to convene a review board to remove Gallagher from his elite unit and strip him of his Trident pin. This process reportedly continued even after Trump tweeted his disapproval of the move.

Following several attacks from Hegseth on Spencer and the Navy during the course of Sunday morning’s Fox & Friends broadcast, Trump announced his displeasure with the Navy and Spencer’s termination on Twitter.

new odd blend? not odd? 4 dovetail?

In April, Trump selected Jim Bridenstine, a Republican Congress member from Oklahoma who hedged on humanity’s role in rising temperatures, to lead NASA. Kathleen Hartnett White, a member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, withdrew her nomination to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality in Febr

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inhofe says we must not impeach b/c danger to national security, so mebbe also god term?

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)

Hannah Knowles

November 16, 2019

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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.

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“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....

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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.

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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.”

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Fox News chyron: “Hannity sources: Disastrous day for Dems in their secret Soviet-style impeachment attempt”

10/17/19 9:27 PM

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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.”

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!”...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-contributor-calls-homeless-people-los-angeles-zombies

mma 819

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The homeless crisis is growing in America's second largest city: Los Angeles, California.

LISA BOOTHE (GUEST CO-HOST): Well, Fox News contributor Emily Compagno recently visited the appalling conditions on the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Wow, look at that.

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): How can that be allowed? She joins us right now with part two of her investigation. Why does it look like that out there?

BOOTHE: I mean, that is just crazy.

EMILY COMPAGNO (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): It is. Thank you so much for having me this morning. We're about to find out, as we saw in part one of our series, homelessness, mental illness, drug abuse, and rat infestation have brought the Skid Row area of Los Angeles to a crisis point.

...

DOOCY: "They come there to die."

COMPAGNO: I know. How sad is that? No one throws away people like Los Angeles. What was so striking to me about being down there is that it's not just squalor. It's not just poverty. It is so much worse than that. And it's not people sitting there lucid and asking for help with signs. These are zombies. These are absolute drug addicts with mental illnesses. And in talking to the law enforcement consultancy on Joseph, I was struck by how hamstringed they are. How much these policies have crippled and made the entire situation worse.

KILMEADE: Because these people are also dangerous to civilians who are just trying to go about their lives, to families. Because look where they're set up. And the law enforcement, it's no longer a misdemeanor to do a lot of these things. So law enforcement says I really can't do anything. So I'm not even going to go there anymore.

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note slippage:

Since the 2010 FBI assessment was written, the specter of environmental extremism has been trotted out by both law enforcement and energy-industry security teams to describe a wide variety of grassroots groups opposed to the continued extraction of fossil fuels. In 2011, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP ) published a report [4] titled, “Environmental Criminal Extremismand Canada’s Energy Sector.” The RCMP warned that environmental extremism posed a “clear and present criminal threat” to the energy industry. While both the FBI and RCMP reports make an effort to distinguish between lawful protest and criminal activity, they often conflate the two – in the RCMP report the terms “violence” and “direct action” are used interchangeably – and suggest opposition to the energy industry will lead to extremism. (The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division declined to answer questions about the 2010 bulletin.)

===

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 the language 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 20th 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 thesuspected 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....

---

pompeo hu rights redefines god terms? cf MLK natural rights

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/not-a-straight-white-male-us-religious-conservatives-are-coming-for-you/

no lnx

Not a straight white male? US religious conservatives are coming for you

CPAC is hosted by the American Conservative Union. Image via Wikimedia Commons / Michael Vadon.

Written by OpenDemocracy.Net August 4, 2019

by Jessica Stern, Yifat Susskind

Any schoolchild in the United States knows that the US Declaration of Independenceguarantees individuals’ rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Now, imagine what these principles mean for right-wingers and religious fundamentalists: where “life” refers to fetuses; “liberty” includes the prerogative to discriminate against LGBTIQ people; and “the pursuit of happiness” is reserved for straight, white patriarchs.

For more nightmare fuel, look no further than the new government body that Secretary of StateMike Pompeo announced earlier this month: The Commission on Unalienable Rights. For the uninitiated: this project’s name might sound progressive, but it’s most definitely not.

Everything we’ve heard about this Commission is full of coded language that’s about as subtle as a brick through a window. This isn’t business as usual – even for the Trump administration. It represents an acceleration of a longstanding fundamentalist agenda.

According to its statement of intent, the Commission is needed as human rights “discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights”.

In case you’re wondering how to distinguish “natural” rights, they’re the ones bestowed by God (at least according to Pompeo’s commissioners). One of them, Peter Berkowitz, argues that Christianity is the source of all human rights. Another, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, sees marriage equality for LGBTIQ people as a sign of the “End Times”.

In typical fundamentalist fashion, this project seeks to impose the same interpretation of law and rights used for generations to uphold slavery, genocide, categorical disenfranchisement, marital rape, domestic violence, and the criminalisation of LGBTIQ lives. Turning the clock back 200 years: this is how Pompeo proposes to make America great again.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, theSecretary of State attacks “politicians and bureaucrats [who have created] new rights”, and thus “blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments”. He also asserts that “rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups”.

But people whose rights are in danger because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other real or perceived identity are not “interest groups”. We are the majority of the world. And we’ve fought for generations to ensure that human rights frameworks are truly inclusive of all people. Now, this Commission wants to undo our gains.

The Commission chair, former US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon, says it will “work at the level of principle, not policy”. This should set off alarm bells. Policies, after all, can be reversed. But principles set the parameters of what kinds of policies are even possible. That’s their real aim: to circumscribe the range of acceptable ideas, scale back hard-won universal rights, and thus limit our possibilities.

We expect they’ll start with foreign policy, taking a page from a tried-and-true playbook. For decades, what American ultra-conservatives couldn’t get away with at home, they’ve exported abroad – through such heinous policies as the so-called Global Gag Rule, and the Helms Amendment, for instance, which have limited women’s access to safe abortion services around the world.

And once these right-wing policies are established – and legitimated – in foreign policy, they’re brought home to roost. Recently, a US court of appeals ruled that Trump’s Domestic Gag Rule can go into effect (further limiting abortion access here as well).

As the directors of international organisations for women and LGBTIQ people, OutRight Action International, and MADRE, we’re working to create a world of human rights and gender justice, where all people live free from violence and discrimination.

This work threatens the aims of ultra-conservatives, whose worldview depends on women being subservient within societies and LGBTIQ people disappearing altogether.

Their frontal assault is against abortion and the rights of LGBTIQ people, but that’s only their opening salvo. Unless you are part of the narrow demographic of rich, white men deemed to have rights in 1776, they’re coming for you too. In fact, their ideology threatens the vast majority of people – which is one reason it must be justified as “natural” and God-given.

The right’s concerted attack on reproductive rights and LGBTIQ people reflects the centrality of gender as a system for asserting the control and domination they seek. They target us because we’re upending that system. But allying feminist and LGBTIQ rights movements is more than a mutual defense pact: it’s a strategy to defeat the right.

Just last month, our organisations won a major victory after a year-long campaign around a pending international treaty on crimes against humanity. We ensured that this draft treaty dropped an outdated definition of gender, affirming the rights of all people.

In that campaign, we saw many of the same attacks that are now embedded in Pompeo’s new Commission – including claims that we were assaulting the ‘natural order’ and that our advocacy threatened traditional conceptions of rights.

One right-wing organisation C-FAM even claimed that our victory represented an attack by homosexual men on “our mothers and our sisters and our daughters”. That might seem a strange charge against an effort led jointly by LGBTIQ and women’s organisations, but they see the threat represented by our unified efforts and seek to drive a wedge between us.

One of the greatest successes of human rights advocates over generations is this: When our own governments and constitutions fail us, we can turn to international human rights to seek justice and reparation. We can share our testimonies about the abuses we’ve endured and, perhaps most importantly, change the global conversation. In doing so, we’ve influenced policies and practices at home and around the world.

Attacks on human rights, gender protections, and the multilateral system are a transparent attempt to close down that channel of progressive change-making. But by aligning our efforts as women’s and LGBTIQ rights organisations, and making common cause with other progressive movements, we can face down this latest assault.

Right-wingers are not coming after us because we’re weak. They’re coming after us because they’re afraid, we’re strong, and we know how to take them on.

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.”

aha

i'm noticing that alt rt, authoritarian, RW are profoundly anti-femin; recall lakoff strict father vs nurturing (mom?)

also homophobe; fag used to be ultimate insult, bit in alt rt, it's cuck (cuckservative, from cuckhold, a man so clueless. spineless, weak that he can't prevent his (property) woman from being taken by force or taken away (attracted) by a more virile alpha male. a previous and milder version was a squish, some one soft, not definite, not hard-line, hard core, a limp dick or wrist, can't get it up to get her done. Proof of alpha male is aggression, and status (money demo'd /reflected by possessions) and power.

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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

@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

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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

@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

@tedcruz

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

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11:10 PM - Jun 29, 2019

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Cruz and Cassidy also point to antifa activists occupying the areas outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, as well as posting the personal information of ICE officials online.

But the Republican senators’ resolution is little more than a political stunt.

Cruz and Cassidy’s resolution, which is entirely non-binding, won’t actually change U.S. law — because there is no existing law to change. The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism as criminal activity that appears intended to “intimidate or coerce” civilians or influence government policy using violent methods. But, domestic terrorism is not a specific crime under U.S. law. Labeling a group as domestic terrorists give federal law enforcement broader powers to conduct investigations of other crimes, but does not itself define any criminal activities. criminal make. Furthermore, since antifa isn’t a singular group, as mentioned above, its definition under this resolution is unclear.

The designation of what “groups” are called terrorist, domestic terrorist or hate groups is extremely loose. For instance, the Pulse Nightclub shooter was charged with terrorism, while the Ku Klux Klan is legally considered a “hate group,” not a domestic terror organization. And while the federal government keeps a list of foreign terrorist groups, there is no public list of domestic terrorist groups.

Some outlets have thought it worthy to equate the confrontational tactics of antifa to political violence on the far-right. But as the ADL has pointed out, “To date, there have been no Antifa related murders,” yet “right-wing extremists” have “ murdered hundreds of people in this country over the last ten years alone.”

Just last week, James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi, was sentenced to life in prison plus 419 years for the violent assault he committed during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyerand injuring several others.

Free speech activists have expressed concerns that the Cruz-Cassidy resolution could set a precedent for more groups to be labeled domestic terrorist organizations. As National Observer reporter Caroline Orr noted, Cruz’s resolution uses the terms “antifa” and “left-wing activists” interchangeably. Most dangerously, it suggests that all manner of dissent could be considered terrorism.

Cruz’s move looks to be a transparent attempt to saddle congressional Democrats with a divisive political debate, declaring themselves either against antifa or in support of it, invariably alienating some of the party’s supporters ahead of a critical presidential election.

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mma 719

Inspired by a Fox & Friends segment attacking Baltimore congressional Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and likening conditions in the city to the southern border, President Trump lashed out on Saturday, calling Baltimore a "rodent infested mess." On Sunday, Fox rushed to defend Trump. This racist mess followed Fox News inspiring (and then defending) Trump's racist statements towards Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar.

Shortly after Trump's twitter rant, CNN host Victor Blackwell gave an emotional response on air, pointing out that Trump only used this type of "infestation" language when attacking minorities. The Baltimore Sunpublished a powerful editorial titled "Better to have a few rats than to be one."

There is one thing that the media must cover in relation to Trump's twitter rant. Jared Kushner operates as a slumlord in Baltimore. As ProPublica has reported: "Tenants in more than a dozen Baltimore-area rental complexes complain about a property owner who they say leaves their homes in disrepair, humiliates late-paying renters and often sues them when they try to move out. Few of them know that their landlord is the president’s son-in-law"

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aha: right cries foul and says that they are victims/silenced by devil terms anti-fem, homophobe, racist etc, but look how this is baked in/constant:

wow, anti-fem at the start w ERA schalfly, IWF, TP constant tight up to gamergate/ red pill?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/

no lnx

How southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trump

written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019

“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.

But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.

In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.

The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”

“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.

So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event.

In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.

Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.

This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”

The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/from-ghettos-to-concentration-camps-the-battle-over-words/

HNN

"What’s in a name?,” Juliet famously asks in Act II of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For Juliet, the answer is perfectly obvious: nothing. It should not matter that her sweetheart Romeo is a Montague and she a Capulet, feuding families in the strife-riven city of medieval Verona. “Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet assures Romeo. He could cease to be a Montague, he could cease even to be Romeo, and he would remain her beloved. “O! Be some other name: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Juliet’s answer is difficult to square not only with the ultimate fate of the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s play but also with the controversies that frequently attend the application to someone or some thing of a highly charged label. We tend to think we have minimized the scope of disagreement when we boil a debate down to semantics. The reality is that so many of our cultural arguments manifest as arguments over words, over what they mean, how they are used, and who gets to define them.

The past week has offered yet another reminder of this truth. On Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fiery left-wing freshman Democrat from New York, blasted the Trump administration on Twitter for creating “concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.” Her description of immigration detention centers as “concentration camps” precipitated a riposte from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who, likewise in a tweet, scolded Ocasio-Cortez for betraying the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust with her choice of words. The days since have seen further sharp exchanges on this issue, as politicians from opposing sides of the aisle, op-ed columnists, Jewish organizations, cable news journalists, and, of course, the Twitterati on the right and the left have weighed in on whether the “concentration camp” designation is appropriate or misplaced.

This is far from the first time the usage of a term with Holocaust associations has provoked a backlash. Some of the same arguments that are now being made to rebut the labeling of detention facilities as “concentration camps” were trotted out in the past to resist the naming of segregated African American neighborhoods as “ghettos.” In 1964, the American Jewish intellectual Marie Syrkin wrote, “In the immediate as well as historic experience of the Jews the ghetto is not a metaphor; it is a concrete entity with walls, stormtroopers, and no exit save the gas chamber.” Syrkin penned this jab at the transference of the word “ghetto” from Jews to African Americans at a time when the black referent for the term was only beginning to become mainstream. Yet, nearly three decades later, the American Jewish author Melvin Jules Bukiet expressed the same pique. In April 1993, on the eve of the gala opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Bukiet published an editorial in the Washington Postthat was bitingly critical of the museum, which he judged a well-intentioned but insidious attempt to absorb the Holocaust melting-pot style into a vocabulary of American politics and culture and to sap it of its Jewish specificity. “Something similar,” he wrote, “has also begun to happen with other elements of the Jewish tradition. Take the word ‘ghetto,’ which is commonly used as a synonym for slum. A ghetto is a an enclosed, preferably walled-in, domain within a city, and despite the invisible walls around Harlem, there is no barbed wire across 125th Street and there are no guard towers.”

Both of these attempts to limit the word “ghetto” to its Holocaust meaning skipped over the fact that, prior to the Holocaust, the term had a long history of being used to refer to both coercive and non-coercive Jewish quarters. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. The ghettos of the early modern Italian peninsula were compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish spaces, and while they were kept under round-the-clock surveillance, there was no “barbed wire,” which had yet to be invented; nor were there “guard towers” (which may have been a feature of some Nazi concentration camps, but were likewise absent in Nazi ghettos). Even after the original mandatory ghettos disappeared with the legal emancipation of Western and Central European Jews, the term “ghetto” was resurrected near the turn of the twentieth century to refer to densely packed but voluntary Jewish immigrant neighborhoods such as London’s East End, New York’s Lower East Side, and Chicago’s Near West Side. Moreover, over the course of the nineteenth century, “ghetto” came increasingly to be used especially by Jews as a metaphor for an old-world, traditional Jewish society and mentality believed to be disappearing.

One argument that has been made on the left to defend Ocasio-Cortez — which she herself has now adopted — is that the term “concentration camp” also has a history that predates (and coincides with) the Holocaust. It first became prominent during the Second Boer War from 1900 to 1902, when it was applied to the internment camps established by the British in South Africa. Later, in the 1940s, it was widely used in discussing the American internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. The difficulty with this argument is that it is clear that Ocasio-Cortez intended to mobilize memory of the Holocaust by appropriating a term that, since 1945 at least, has become indelibly associated with the destruction of European Jewry. The day before her tweet that went viral, she posted an Instragram video where, in addition to using the word “concentration camps,” she invoked the slogan “Never Again,” which is commonly used to refer to the importance of remembering the Holocaust. By 1945, the term “ghetto” was sufficiently venerable and versatile in its signifying capacity that efforts to reserve it for the Holocaust were unsuccessful. The label “concentration camp” did not have a similarly long history of changing and contested meanings. While academics may continue to employ the term to designate the general phenomenon of camps in which people not guilty of a crime are interned by the state, in the popular lexicon today, “concentration camps” cannot be used without effectively conjuring the Holocaust.

...

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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 mean and power. plus if left tyranny is real threat to freedom and liberty, violence is justified/necessary

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.

NB 2 attacks both on women

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sovereignty, free freedom liberty prosperity = $

scary generic: agenda, narrative

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/how-socialism-became-the-newest-word-for-anything-a-republican-lawmaker-doesnt-like/

no lnx

Daily Kos June 19, 2019

Appearing on far-right Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Senate Majority Leader and college-educated deep sea turtle Mitch McConnell piped up with a rather peculiar claim: Granting statehood to Puerto Rico and/or the District of Columbia would be tantamount to “full-bore socialism.”

“They plan to make the District of Columbia a state, that’d give them two new Democratic senators. Puerto Rico a state, that’d give them two more new Democratic senators. And as a former Supreme Court clerk yourself, you’ve surely noticed that they plan to expand the Supreme Court.“So this is full-bore socialism on the march in the House.”

The notion that granting a U.S. territory statehood by the same mechanisms provided by the Constitution to do exactly that is now not just socialism but the considerably more dangerous full-bore socialism is a perplexing claim, to say the least, until you remember that literally every Republican argument is premised, at heart, on refusing to understand what words mean.

Let us take a trip down memory lane, to the gauzy sepia-toned days of George Bush the Younger and the foundation of this very site. Do you remember those days? In the days of Clinton-then-Bush, there was an orchestrated and relentless effort to make the word liberal into a dirty word. Politicians warned of liberal policies and liberal machinations; the catch-all insult directed toward any Democratic candidate running for any office is that they were a liberal who associated with liberals and promoted liberal ideas and the liberals were coming to your children’s schools to teach them liberal things and feed them liberal lunches and tell them to disrespect their parents.

It was borne from the Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz efforts to worditize our discourse into short, insulting phrases directed at whatever Republicans did not like, an extremely successful, if unabashedly propaganda-based, method of controlling the national narrative. It is why, to this day, Republican lawmakers refer to “Democrat policies” instead of “Democratic policies,” et cetera, making each one of them sound borderline illiterate. It is how death panels became a thing. And it had at least the effect of turning “progressive” into a new (old) word by which the left and center-left identified themselves in attempts to sidestep the entire mess.

Today “liberal” is largely, if not entirely explicably, redeemed. It may have been because eight years of a scandal-free and generally well-run Obama presidency made frothing Republican panic about the word seem embarrassing; it may have been because Republican voices had squeezed the word for regular outrage-fodder so long over so much that there was no more juice to give. And so socialism it is. Everything is now not liberalism, but socialism. Everything.

Adding a state via U.S. Constitution? Socialism. Burger undercooked? Socialism. Amazon delivery late? Socialism. Basic expressions of compassion? Not just socialism, but mega-socialism. It is the new word for anything, anywhere that a prominent Republican believes an audience should be alarmed about, and it will be used in any context and without hesitation. The word does not mean what its definition declares it to mean; it has been repurposed to mean “contrary to Republican edicts.”

But this is largely how all modern Republican rhetoric is crafted, which may be the reason CNN’s Crossfire and similar shows became nonsensical shout-fests devoid of information and increasingly dismissive of expert voices. It is almost certainly a core reason behind replacement of those shows with, at this point, omnipresent panels of loudmouth partisan nonsense-spewers presented as the highest and only truly proper form of political debate. It is a dumbening of everything, a reduction of all debates on all subjects to a notecard-friendly list of dismissive insults that can be launched at a naysayer while still projecting a my colleague sense of authoritative decorum.

Latch on a word; craft ever-more-elaborate conspiracies for which the word can now be used as shorthand; wait for the less decorum-obsessed underbelly of the movement to ratchet up each conspiracy until the mere uttering of the word is enough to send Fox-watching base voters into pavlovian sweats.

Sharia.

Madrassa.

Death panels.

Sanctuary cities.

Socialism.

None of the words mean, to the conservative base, what the rest of the planet has long agreed the words mean. They are stand-ins signifying which broad conspiracy the speaker intends the audience to imagine, as the players dance through the rest of their remarks. Bigotry against Muslim Americans is not proper, political tacticians agree. But if the base just happens to believe that something called sharia is threatening to break upon our shores, dismantling laws and Christianity alike via some mechanism that can not even be explained, much less stopped, now that will evoke the same necessary emotions without the speaker getting unnecessarily mired in figures or details. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a shared, primal conspiracy theory is worth ten times as much.

We are now at the point where shorthand words used for longform conspiracies represent the near-entirety of conservative debate; from Fox News to Mitch McConnell’s dramatic warning against adding another state, absolutely anything that a Republican with power doesn’t like is now “socialism” because it simply is, that’s why. It doesn’t have to make sense, and it certainly does not have to square with the actual, non-conspiratorial meaning of the word. There are socialist countries trying to spread socialist concepts like affordable insulin and every non-Republican is in thrall to this socialist agenda whether they identify as socialist or not, proposing socialist policies and demanding socialist road improvements and socialist tax rates and socialist regulations against swindling consumers and socialist demands that meat be inspected for salmonella contamination and socialists are coming to your town and to your children’s schools to indoctrinate them on socialist texts like the socialist Constitution that allows socialists to add Too Many States These Days.

Whether it is a sign that our political discourse has become hopelessly and irretrievably stupid or a momentary artifact that we will all feel damn embarrassed about twenty years down the line is unknowable. But I have my suspicions.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/here-are-7-wild-bizarre-and-pathetic-moments-from-trumps-campaign-launch/

no lnx

Here are 7 wild, bizarre and pathetic moments from Trump’s ‘campaign launch’

written by Cody Fenwick June 19, 2019

1.1K

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump held a rally that was billed as the official launch his re-election campaign — though he has never really stopped holding campaign rallies.

As expected, the president ranted, lied, and engaged in the raucous attacks that are central to his connection with Republican voters. Some of it was actually just sad, such as his continued obsession with Hillary Clinton.

Here are seven of the wildest, disturbing and pathetic moments from the rally:

He said Democrats “want to destroy our country as we know it.”

Trump casually accuses Democrats of “want[ing] to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” pic.twitter.com/4K79KlbEeR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 19, 2019

If Democrats win in 2020, “they would shut down your free speech,” Trump said.

Lindsay Graham and Marco Rubio look uncomfortable listening on while Trump makes insane accusations about Democrats pic.twitter.com/kfJwEnxAhK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 19, 2019

Democrats have proposed nothing along these lines at all. Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly talked about overhauling libel laws to make it easier to go after his critics, and multiple reports suggest he has tried to use the power of the presidency to punish media outlets who give him unfavorable coverage.

He continued to make up lies about and attack Hillary Clinton — who isn’t running.

Trump accuses Clinton of not only deleting emails but having “acid washed” them. He says “acid washed” repeatedly.

Acid-washing emails is not a thing. Her team used a free software program called BleachBit, which does not involve bleach, nor acid, nor washing.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 19, 2019

President Trump taking shots at Hillary Clinton still now almost three years after they faced off. He says while her calling his supporters “deplorable” was bad he thought her saying his supporters were “irredeemable” was worse.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) June 19, 2019

4. After saying Democrats would go after their enemies with the law, Trump suggested Attorney General Bill Barr might still go after Hillary Clinton.

Trump insinuates that William Barr may still prosecute Hillary Clinton for her emails pic.twitter.com/rkb50ZVANa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 19, 2019

Trump continued to deny that the tariffs he imposes, which are just import taxes, are actually taxes on Americans.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that the tariffs cost the typical American household $414 in 2018. That is estimated to increase to $831 per household this year. https://t.co/QjN6z1XRrI

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) June 19, 2019

They just are. This isn’t even slightly controversial.

Trump claimed he was “officially” launching his campaign, and much of the media bought into this lie. But it made no sense.

President Trump tells crowd he is officially launching campaign.

Note: Trump filed the paperwork with the Federal Election Commission the day he was inaugurated to run for president in 2020.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) June 19, 2019

Trump rolled out one of his favorite and most absurd lies: that he was responsible for legislation that was passed under President Barack Obama.

“We passed VA Choice,” Trump says twice. “They’d been trying to get that passed, also, for…44 years.” It was a McCain-Sanders bill passed under Obama in 2014. #FactsFirst

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 19, 2019

https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18683676/trump-campaign-reelection-speech-orlando-polls

...Trump’s speech kicking off his reelection campaign Tuesday made clear how he thinks he can win: through scorched-earth negativity and the politics of resentment.

Speaking in Orlando, Florida — and mostly reading from prepared remarks rather than improvising — Trump launched attack after attack on familiar hate figures: Democrats, the “fake news,” the Mueller investigators, and, of course, Hillary Clinton.

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage and want to destroy you, and they want to destroy our country as we know it,” Trump said.

The speech actually opened on a positive note. Trump thanked his supporters, said he’s restored “government by and for the people,” and bragged about the economy’s performance.

Then, just about five minutes in, things took a turn.

“2016 was not nearly another four-year election. This was a defining moment in American history,” Trump said. Then in a mocking tone, he gestured toward the members of the media present and said: “Ask them, right there.” In case anyone missed his meaning, he added: “By the way, that is a lot of fake news back there.”

Chants of “CNN sucks” resounded among the crowd.

Soon afterward, Trump trashed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation (“an illegal attempt to overturn the results of the election”), “crooked” Hillary, and the Democrats (“depraved,” “unhinged,” “radical,” “extreme,” “dangerous”).[GINGRICH ?]

A Democratic win in 2020, in Trump’s telling, wouldn’t be an ordinary political outcome. It would be the end of the world.

“They would shut down your free speech and use the power of the law to punish their opponents,” he asserted. “They would strip Americans of their constitutional rights while flooding the country with illegal immigrants.”

Saudi Arabia May Execute Teenager for His Protests — Including When He Was 10

IN 2011, as Arab Spring protests swept across the Middle East, demonstrations also kicked off in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Members of the kingdom’s repressed Shiite minority took to the streets, calling for equal rights and a fairer distribution of oil revenues. The protesters included a group of around 30 kids on bicycles. As a videoreleased last week by CNN shows, those children were led by a smiling 10-year-old in flip-flops named Murtaja Qureiris.

“The people demand human rights!” the young boy can be seen shouting through a megaphone.

Here’s the problem: Demanding human rights in Saudi Arabia lands you in prison. Even if you’re a kid.

Three years later, in September 2014, 13-year-old Murtaja was arrested while on his way to neighboring Bahrain with his family.

“At the time,” reports CNN, “he was considered by lawyers and activists to be the youngest known political prisoner in Saudi Arabia.

Over the past four years, say human rights groups, this teenager has been subjected to torture and intimidation, as well as a spell in solitary confinement. He has been denied access to a lawyer while interrogators try to get him to confess to the trumped-up charges against him. These include “participating in anti-government protests, attending the funeral of his brother Ali Qureiris who was killed in a protest in 2011, joining a ‘terrorist organization,’ throwing Molotov cocktails at a police station, and firing at security forces,” according to Amnesty International.

Last week, we learned that Saudi prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for 18-year-old Murtaja, who is being tried in an anti-terror court. CNN reports that the prosecutors want to “impose the harshest form of the death penalty, which may include crucifixion or dismemberment after execution.”

Got that? The unelected government of a close ally of the United States is planning on brutally executing an 18-year-old member of a minority group, for crimes allegedly committed when he was 10 years old.

Let me repeat: Ten. Years. Old.

We shouldn’t forget the person who is primarily responsible for this outrage: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS. Since his father installed him in power, the violent crushing of political dissent has escalated. According to the CIA, MBS ordered the horrific murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He is also behind the targeting of three Arab activists in Norway, Canada, and the United States.

Much has (rightly) been made of the crown prince’s shocking record on extrajudicial killings. But what of the growing number of judicially sanctioned killings inside of Saudi Arabia on his watch? The planned execution of Murtaja Qureiris may be the most horrendous act yet.

“There should be no doubt that the Saudi Arabian authorities are ready to go to any length to crack down on dissent against their own citizens, including by resorting to the death penalty for men who were merely boys at the time of their arrest,” says Lynn Maalouf, Middle East research director at Amnesty International.

The Gulf kingdom is one of the world’s top executioners and, according to Maalouf, Saudi authorities have “a chilling track record of using the death penalty as a weapon to crush political dissent and punish anti-government protesters — including children — from the country’s persecuted Shi’a minority.”

The majority of the country, and the ruling family, are from a strict school of Sunni Islam called Salafism. In April, 37 people were executed in a single day — the biggest mass execution in the kingdom since 2016 — and the vast majority of them were believed to be Shiites. Three of them, according to human rights group Reprieve, were “minors at the time of their alleged offences.” Such executions, as both Reprieve and Amnesty International have noted, are a brazen violation of international human rights law.

Another three Saudi Shiites — Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon, and Abdullah al-Zaher — who were also below the age of 18 at the time of their alleged crimes, are still on death row and could be executed at anytime.

It isn’t just Shiites, either. MBS has also targeted Sunni clerics who have failed to fall into line. There have been reports that the belligerent and thin-skinned crown prince plans on executing three high-profile Saudi religious scholars — Salman al-Odah, Awad al-Qarni, and Ali al-Omari — all of whom have been held on multiple charges of “terrorism.” 62-year-old Odah is famous in the Arab world for his relatively progressive views on Islam and homosexuality and his 2007 denunciation of Osama bin Laden. His actual “crime”? Tweeting a prayer for reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and its Gulf rival, the Emirate of Qatar. (Full disclosure: I host two TV shows for Qatar-funded Al Jazeera English.)

Supporters of MBS often try and argue that these executions are the product of decisions made in court, not in the royal palace. This is a laughable defense. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. There is no independent judiciary. As CNN reports, “The death penalty can only be enforced by order of King Salman or his authorized representative. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is frequently characterized as the King’s deputy.”

Forget MBS the reformer; meet MBS the executioner. The fact that he has been embraced closely by everyone from Donald Trump to Emmanuel Macron to Theresa May should be a source of shame for those of us living in the West. To quote former Obama-era National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor, MBS is “Kim Jong Un with oil money.”

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/06/10/rod-schoonover-trump-attempted-suppress-state-dept-analyst-testimony-climate-crisis

The Trump administration issued one of its most blatant attacks on climate science this past week when it tried to stop a State Department employee from testifying on the climate crisis, reports showed on Saturday.

As the Washington Post reported, intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover's testimony was submitted to the White House for approval ahead of his planned appearance before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His remarks focused on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis.

The Trump administration refused to approve the testimony for entry into the congressional record, noting that the data Schoonover planned to present—drawing from top government scientists' research and peer-reviewed scientific reports—did not align with the executive branch's views.

[pix]

National Security Council advisers wrote a number of comments on Schoonover's draft, saying the testimony was “not objective.”

The testimony “includes lots of climate alarm propaganda that is not science at all,” wrote William Happer,a senior member of the National Security Council who has sought to create a federal task force to challenge the consensus reached by 97 percentof peer-reviewed climate scientists who say humans are contributing to the climate crisis.

“I am embarrassed to have this go out on behalf of the executive branch of the federal government,” Happer added, noting a particular objection to Schoonover's use of the term “tipping point” in reference to possible devastating, irreversible effects of the climate crisis.

“'Tipping points' is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” Happer wrote.

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Related: Get the background from DeSmog on climate science denier William Happer, and read: Physicist William Happer, the 'Unmoored' Climate Science Denier Heading a White House Climate Probe

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Schoonover was ultimately permitted to testify before the committee, but his testimony was not submitted into the record because, the Office of Legislative Affairs said, it did not “jibe” with the Trump administration's views on the climate.

President Donald Trump and many of his appointeesdenythat human activity like the extraction of fossil fuels are contributing to the warming of the globe, which scientists warn is already causing extreme weather events like hurricanes and wildfires, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers. As Schoonover mentioned in his testimony, the last five years have been the warmest on record according to NASA.

Although Schoonover was able to testify, climate action advocates decried the White House's attempt to stifle the information he eventually shared with the committee.

“Any attempt to suppress information on the security risks of climate change threatens to leave the American public vulnerable and unsafe,” Francesco Femia, chief executive of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, told the Post.

...

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519

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.He is worth quoting at length:

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

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

...

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

no lnx

TYT Investigates

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

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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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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/29/headlines/at_nra_convention_trump_ends_ratification_process_for_arms_treaty

Indianapolis, President Trump told the annual convention of the National Rifle Association on Friday he’s seeking to cancel U.S. support for the Arms Trade Treaty, an international agreement that limits weapons sales that fuel destructive conflicts. During his annual address to the NRA, Trump signed a document asking the Senate to reject ratification of the treaty.

President Donald Trump: “This treaty threatened your subjugate—and you know exactly what’s going on here—your rights and your constitutional and international rules and restrictions and regulations. Under my administration, we willnever surrender American sovereignty to anyone.”

giroux

...

Such anti-public intellectuals create what William Black has called a “criminogenic environment” that spreads disease and fraud in the interest of bolstering the interests, profits and values of the super wealthy.(23) There is more at work here than carpet bombing the culture with lies, deceptions and euphemisms. Language in this case does more than obfuscate or promote propaganda. It creates framing mechanisms, cultural ecosystems and cultures of cruelty, while closing down the spaces for dialogue, critique and thoughtfulness. At its worst, it engages in the dual processes of demonization and distraction. The rhetoric of demonization takes many forms: for example, calling firefighters, teachers, and other public servants greedy because they want to hold onto their paltry benefits. It labels students as irresponsible because of the large debts they are forced to incur as states cut back funding to higher education (this, too, is part of a broader effort by conservatives to hollow out the social state). Poor people are insulted and humiliated because they are forced to live on food stamps, lack decent health care and collect unemployment benefits because there are no decent jobs available. Poor minorities are now subject to overt racism in the right-wing media and outright violence in the larger society.

Anti-public intellectuals rail against public goods and public values; they undermine collective bonds and view social responsibility as a pathology, while touting the virtues of a survival-of-the-fittest notion of individual responsibility. Fox News and its embarrassingly blowhard pundits tell the American people that Gov. Scott Walker’s victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin recall election was a fatal blow against unions, while in reality “his win signals less a loss for the unions than a loss for our democracy in this post-Citizens United era, when elections can be bought with the help of a few billionaires.”(24) How else to explain that Tea Party favorite Walker raised over $30.5 million during the election – more than seven times Barrett’s reported $3.9 million – largely from 13 out-of-state billionaires?(25) This was corporate money enlisted for use in a pedagogical blitz designed to carpet bomb voters with the rhetoric of distraction and incivility.

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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/

Janine Jackson interviewed Nusrat Choudhury about FBI targeting of black activists for the April 12, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In the summer of 2017, as demonstrations roiled St. Louis, Missouri, in response to the acquittal of yet another police officer who killed yet another black person, the FBI issued an intelligence assessment that purported to designate a new domestic terror threat: “Black Identity Extremists.” And they predicted that

"perceptions of unjust treatment of African Americans and the perceived unchallenged illegitimate actions of law enforcement will inspire premeditated attacks against law enforcement.

Does that sound like a bizarre and dangerously imprecise targeting of people of color engaged in righteous and constitutionally protected protest? It sure does.

But as we discussed at the time with our next guest, a tool in the hands of the country’s most powerful law enforcement need not be precise to be used to do tremendous damage.

Nusrat Choudhury is deputy director of theACLU**Racial Justice Program. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nusrat Choudhury.

NC: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ:When we spoke with you in the fall of 2017, the FBI Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit had just issued this weird and disturbing threat assessment, with this new fabricated category of “Black Identity Extremists.” And the ACLU and other groups were working to see just what they were doing—how was this being used? And the FBI wasn’t all that keen for the sunshine. What has happened, or not happened, since then, such that now the ACLU, along with the Center for Media Justice, have filed a lawsuit against the FBI?

NC: As you said, we requested, under the Freedom of Information Act, records about what appears to be a highly disturbing surveillance program, targeting a fictitious threat of so-called “Black Identity Extremists,” which we and civil rights groups, black-led organizations, black activists and even members of Congress have said raises a red flag that there may be racial profiling and the targeting of black protesters for their First Amendment–protected activity.

After sending that Freedom of Information Act request, what we got back from the FBI were two letters, refusing to even search for certain categories of records that we had requested, and a number of documents, several hundred pages of highly redacted FBI emails, in response to one of the three categories of requested records.

And the FBI, to the extent that it has disclosed any information, hasn’t explained why it’s keeping that information secret with any reliable justifications. So we don’t really know what else is even out there, as well as information from the emails that they’ve redacted.

And this refusal to search is barring the public from getting the information that we need to find out how this surveillance program, targeting this fictitious group that even some law enforcement have said doesn’t exist, is operating and impacting people on the ground.

And that’s why we need a lawsuit. And we the ACLU are standing with our partners at the Center for Media Justice to demand information on behalf of ourselves and the public.

JJ: You’re describing it as a surveillance program. I was going to ask, what sorts of activities do we think that this designation is trying to justify, or is trying to encourage? I mean, it sounds like it could be almost anything. Once you’ve designated something a domestic terrorist threat, it sort of greenlights all kinds of activities, mightn’t it?

NC: The FBI appears to be engaged in a modern-day version of COINTELPRO, and many of us remember, COINTELPRO took place in the last century, in the ’50s and ’60s, targeting covert activities against civil rights leaders and black people who had the courage to protest racial discrimination and to advocate for full equality and racial equity in this country. It looks like it’s version 2.0.

And when we look at this document, this FBI intelligence assessment, from August 2017 that creates this label of “Black Identity Extremists,” it’s based on nothing; there’s no credible evidence that such a movement or group even exists.

But what that report shows is that the FBI is looking at First Amendment–protected activity to determine who is a so-called “Black Identity Extremist.” That report shows a focus at the FBI on social media activity, on the online search terms that people use, and what kind of internet content a person may like, as well as their associations with certain groups.

A lot of that activity is protected by the First Amendment. And this is precisely why the Center for Media Justice and the ACLU are concerned that this creation of this label was simply to justify surveillance of black people who are protesting police violence and state-sanctioned violence against black people.

JJ: Yeah, even, I think, law enforcement—a former FBI agent, I seem to remember, giving a quote saying, basically, “It’s just black people who scare them”; they’re just working backwards from that.

There’s so many levels to this, but to imagine that various groups would only be fighting back against police racist brutality if they were part of a unified ideological project, and an inherently violent ideological project, that outrage at racist policing is not a motivation that anyone with eyes could have…. I mean, even if you thought that was their sincere belief, that would reflect a lack of intelligence that’s so painful it’s almost unbearable. But that would be the idea, that all of these groups must somehow be linked in an ideological project, otherwise, why would they be engaged in this resistance?

NC: And the assessment itself, this FBI report that creates this label of a “Black Identity Extremist” boogeyman, if you look at the text of it, it’s talking about these six incidents of violence or threatened violence against police. And it doesn’t even link them and, in points, actually says that some of the people involved in these incidents have divergent views.

So it’s circular logic; it undermines itself. There’s really no basis; former law enforcement have criticized it as being a flawed intelligence product. And even current law enforcement, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, has called on the FBI to withdraw this assessment, because it is so faulty, and they’ve asked to eliminate the “Black Identity Extremist” threat classification. That means something, when even law enforcement are looking at this and saying, “This doesn’t make sense.”

Members of Congress have also articulated a concern that it looks like it’s directed at people who are protesting police killing of black people, and that includes the Movement for Black Lives.

And this is why this effort, through the lawsuit and through advocacy, to get information about this surveillance program, this effort by the ACLU and the Center for Media Justice, is so important. Racial justice in this country comes about when people protest, and black people have been critical to these movements that have brought about a better protection and realization of rights to equality and fairness that has benefited all of us.

So these modern-day protest movements are critical to realizing the full potential of American democracy and promises to equality and racial justice. Those movements should not be surveilled. The law enforcement resources of this country should be directed towards real threats to public safety, not for targeting people because of their race and their protected beliefs.

JJ:Just finally, we’re talking about it as though it’s a potential tool, or as though it’s something that is on paper. We have to recognize that just the existence of this designation is already having a real effect on the ground, and putting folks in danger.

NC: Absolutely. When the FBI disseminates an intelligence assessment, and this one was disseminated to at least 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, when it does that, it risks inciting police fear of black people, particularly black activists. That is the real, tangible result. And despite the calls by members of Congress, as well as the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, to withdraw this flawed intelligence product, the FBI hasn’t done that. And so we have no reason to believe that that kind of incitement and harassment at the local and state level isn’t already happening.

JJ:We’ve been speaking with Nusrat Choudhury; she’s deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program. You can find more information on their work and on this lawsuit online at ACLU.org. Nusrat Choudhury, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NC: Thank you for having me.

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see newt gop gopac memo language key mechanism of control

luntz

death panel, death tax, climate change

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https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/454/gopac.html

Published: January 27, 2012

Words Gingrich Governed By

During his years in Congress, Newt Gingrich emerged as one of Washington’s most aggressive practitioners of slash-and-burn politics. He believed, and preached, that harsh language could win elections.

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https://fair.org/home/language-a-key-mechanism-of-control/

Since winning control of Congress, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) has constantly complained about “destructive” and “negative” coverage from the “liberal elite media.”

For example, when asked on Nightline (11/29/94) about his reference to the Clintons as “counter-culture McGoverniks,” he first insisted that he had been misquoted—”I used the term McGovernite, not McGovernik—it was one of those things that the Times picked up and therefore it’s now history” (actually, at least four different newspapers—including the New York Times—quoted Gingrich in their November 10 editions as calling the Clintons “counter-culture McGoverniks”)—and then blamed the media for selective reporting:

I didn’t say that to attack the president, I was asked an analytic question. But because I am now the next speaker, I am learning that everything I say has to be worded carefully and thought through at a level that I’ve never experienced before in my life.

In fact, the new speaker of the House—who once described his goal as “reshaping the entire nation through the news media” (New York Times, 12/14/94)—has given a great deal of thought to the media and how to manipulate them. One Newtonian axiom is “fights make news” (Boston Globe, 11/20/94). Another skill he has taught to Republican candidates through his political organization, GOPAC, is how to create a “shield issue” to deflect criticism:

“A shield issue is just, you know, your opponent is going to attack you as lacking compassion,” a GOPAC training tape advises. “You better find a good compassion issue where, you know, you show up in the local paper holding a baby in the neonatal center, and all you’re trying to do is shield yourself from the inevitable attack.”

But the clearest expression of Gingrich’s philosophy of media came in a GOPAC memo entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Distributed to GOP candidates across the country, the memo’s list of words for Democrats and words for Republicans was endorsed by Gingrich in a cover letter: “The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.” Next time you hear Gingrich complain about media focusing on the negative, refer back to these lists.

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 in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates, we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.” 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.

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….

Contrasting Words

Often we search hard for words to help us 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.

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… hypocrisy… radical… threaten… devour… waste… corruption… incompetent… permissive attitudes… 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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Optimistic Positive Governing Words

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 positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

share…change… opportunity… legacy… challenge… control… truth… moral… courage… reform… prosperity… crusade… movement… children… family… debate… compete… active(ly)[BUT NOT -IST]…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

N — Newt Gingrich had an urgent warning for conservatives: Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House, was out to destroy America.

It was April 1988, a month before Mr. Gingrich, an up-and-coming Republican congressman, shocked colleagues by pressing ethics charges against the powerful Mr. Wright. Now, he was singling out the speaker as a major obstacle in a coming “civil war” with liberals.

“This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars,” Mr. Gingrich said, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation. He branded Mr. Wright as part of “the hard left,” whose members, he warned, “will try by chameleon-like actions to destroy our country.”

The brutal civil war Mr. Gingrich predicted did indeed come to pass, during a nearly decade-long conflict in which ethics charges were the primary weapon. Mr. Gingrich lodged a complaint against Mr. Wright, which cost the Democratic speaker his job. Democrats, in turn, bombarded Mr. Gingrich with accusations of ethical impropriety, which led to a $300,000 fine and a reprimand for bringing discredit to the House.

Mr. Gingrich, Democrats and Republicans here agree, emerged as one of Washington’s most aggressive practitioners of slash-and-burn politics; many fault him for erasing whatever civility once existed in the capital. He believed, and preached, that harsh language could win elections; in 1990, the political action committee he ran, Gopac, instructed Republican candidates to learn to “speak like Newt,” and offered a list of words to describe Democrats — like decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy, pathetic, corrupt and shame.

Words Gingrich Governed By JAN. 27, 2012

The Republican Presidential Field

ON POLITICS

Gingrich Insurgency Tests Party's Old Guard JAN. 26, 2012

Those same qualities are now on display as Mr. Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, turns his caustic tongue against Republicans and Democrats alike. He has tried to cut down Mitt Romney as promoting “pious baloney,” branded President Obama “the food stamp president” and mocked him for living on “Planet Obama.” He has gone after the “elite media” as well, denouncing the “destructive, vicious, negative nature” of those whose questions he does not like.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gingrich, whose spokesman did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment for this article, promotes himself as an elder Republican statesman, often reminding voters that as House speaker, he worked with a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to balance the budget and overhaul the welfare system.

But he neglects to mention that he also presided over Mr. Clinton’s impeachment (which later provoked charges of hypocrisy, because the case concerned Mr. Clinton’s adulterous behavior while Mr. Gingrich himself was having an extramarital affair) or that his bombastic style helped cost him his speakership; he stepped down in 1999.

Mr. Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls makes leading Republicans nervous; one, Bob Dole of Kansas, the former Senate majority leader, endorsed Mr. Romney on Thursday, saying Mr. Gingrich “loved picking a fight.” And his history of combat with Democrats — “the enemy of normal Americans,” Mr. Gingrich once called them — leads people in both parties to wonder if he could work in a bipartisan way.

“Government is dysfunctional because the presidency and Congress no longer have the ability to compromise, and I put Newt at the heart of that,” said Mickey Edwards, a Republican former congressman from Oklahoma who served in leadership alongside Mr. Gingrich, and who is neutral in the Republican primary.

“When he was in the House,” Mr. Edwards added, “he had some temptation to work across party lines because he wanted to be considered an equal with Bill Clinton. But I think if you were in a position where Newt had the upper hand as president, his style would not be to find a way to compromise, but to turn up the heat on Democrats.”

Ethics as a Weapon

Mr. Gingrich arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1979, as a freshman Republican from Georgia, having already made ethics an issue in his first political campaigns.

Once in Washington, Mr. Gingrich found an obvious target: Representative Charles C. Diggs, a Michigan Democrat and founder of the Congressional Black Caucus who had been convicted of taking kickbacks from staff members but re-elected while awaiting sentencing. Most newcomers to Congress would have remained silent on a delicate matter involving a senior member. But Mr. Gingrich led the charge to expel Mr. Diggs, confiding to one close colleague that it was a “gutsy thing to do,” because he risked accusations of racism. The House eventually censured Mr. Diggs, and he quit in disgrace.

Over time, Mr. Gingrich sought to make ethics his signature issue, an effort aimed mostly at Democrats.

Photo

Mr. Gingrich himself had challenged other lawmakers on ethics issues, including Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker. Credit Mark Graham for The New York Times

He pushed for, and won, harsher punishment for two lawmakers, one a Republican and one a Democrat, who were accused of sexual misconduct. He railed against Democrats over a disputed election in Indiana, accusing them of stealing the seat, and maneuvered quietly behind the scenes to orchestrate the work of the so-called Gang of Seven, which in the early 1990s created a ruckus over lawmakers’ overdrafts at the private House bank and other Congressional perks. He called for the censure of Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat, over ethical breaches involving the use of his office to help a male prostitute. Mr. Frank received a lesser reprimand instead.

“Newt,” Mr. Frank says today, “is the single most influential factor in replacing the politics in which you accepted the bona fides of your opponents and disagreed with them civilly with the politics of insisting that your opponents are bad people.”

Mr. Gingrich has said he was on a mission to “repair the integrity of the House,” but critics are skeptical. Fred Wertheimer, then the head of Common Cause, says Mr. Gingrich saw ethics charges as “a vehicle for destroying the House as an institution and taking over what was left.”

But Steven M. Gillon, a University of Oklahoma historian who has written a book about Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Clinton, offers another explanation. Southern Republicans in the post-civil rights era often used race as a wedge issue, Mr. Gillon said. But Mr. Gingrich, a one-time Rockefeller Republican who embraced integration, needed a different line of attack. “He needed to find a wedge that would undermine the moral credibility of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Gillon said, adding, “He could use ethics as sort of a bludgeon, and that’s what he did.”

Empty House, Big Microphone

Mr. Gingrich’s arrival in Congress coincided with the rise of C-Span, the cable channel that televised House proceedings, and he figured out early on how to combine his gift for oratory with the power of the camera. Night after night, he would lambaste Democrats, speaking in an empty House chamber after the day’s legislative business was done. Mr. Gingrich would needle Democrats, challenging them to come forward and defend themselves. No one did, because no one was there.

Things came to a head in May 1984, on a day when the chamber was full. Mr. Gingrich had been pounding a group of Democrats over a letter they had written to Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan leader, accusing them of spreading “communist propaganda.” Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the House speaker, let loose.

“You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their Americanism,” he roared, wagging his forefinger at Mr. Gingrich, “and it’s the lowest thing I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

It was a rare breach of decorum; Mr. Gingrich had gotten the better of Mr. O’Neill. House rules forbid personal insults, so Mr. O’Neill’s words were “taken down”— stricken from the record, a rare rebuke and a turning point, many here say, in relations between Republicans and Democrats.

“That was the moment he became a real star,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a professor at Claremont McKenna College, who has written extensively about Mr. Gingrich and polarization in Congress. “It was David taking on Goliath.”

Some Republicans were uneasy. Among them was Trent Lott of Mississippi, then the Republican whip. Mr. Lott had called for Mr. O’Neill’s remarks to be stricken. Even so, he says he was uncomfortable with Mr. Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners rhetorical style.

“Newt was willing to tear up the system to get the majority,” Mr. Lott, who supports Mitt Romney, said in an interview last year, before Mr. Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls. “It got to be a really negative pit over there, but that was probably the beginnings of the Republicans being able to take control.”

A Fight Becomes a War

August 1987 was a “decisive moment” for Mr. Gingrich, he wrote in his 1998 mea culpa book, “Lessons Learned the Hard Way.” It was when he began to view his fight with Democrats as a civil war. “One culture or the other,” he wrote, “would have to go.”

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By this time, Mr. Gingrich had already taken charge of Gopac, a once-sleepy political action committee dedicated to electing Republicans. Mr. Gingrich pumped it up into a fund-raising machine and a training organization in which Republican candidates were given step-by-step information on how to run for office. He produced seminars and a series of cassette tapes; today hundreds, if not thousands, of Republican officeholders in states around the country can recall riding around in their cars listening to Mr. Gingrich’s formula for winning.

Mr. Edwards, the former Republican congressman, described the tapes as “all about how to demonize the opposition, how to use invective and scary language,” adding: “It wasn’t that he trained them to have a better understanding of foreign policy, or economic policy. They were techniques in how to wage a nasty partisan war against your opponent.”

By August 1987, that opponent, for Mr. Gingrich at least, was Mr. Wright, the House speaker, whom he viewed as covering for the corrupt Democratic Party.

Mr. Gingrich spent more than a year making speeches against Mr. Wright, branding him “the least ethical speaker of the 20th century.” The charge that finally stuck involved a vanity book, “Reflections of a Public Man,” that Mr. Wright sold in bulk to lobbyists and supporters, under an unusual agreement for him to receive 55% of the royalties. (Years later, Mr. Gingrich would come under attack for his own book deal.)

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The House Ethics Committee found “reason to believe” that Mr. Wright had violated House rules in 69 instances; seeking to avoid a drawn out disciplinary hearing, he resigned in June 1989, giving Mr. Gingrich his biggest Democratic scalp.

“He was as partisan as Newt was partisan,” Wilma Goldstein, a former Republican National Committee official who worked closely with Mr. Gingrich, said of Mr. Wright. “So Newt just decided, ‘By God, if we’re going to take them down, let’s start at the top.’ ”

But again, some Republicans were uncomfortable. Mr. Gingrich, by then the Republican whip, was clearly angling to replace the House Republican leader, Robert H. Michel, viewed by many in his party as too accommodating to Democrats. Mr. Michel, now 88, recalls warning Mr. Gingrich that what goes around comes around.

“I would say, ‘Newt, these fellows over there are not our enemy, they’re our political adversaries,’ ” Mr. Michel said. He reminded him that Democrats and Republicans often traded places in leadership. “That could happen to you,” Mr. Michel recalled saying. “If you don’t treat them with respect, boy, the next time around, they have a chance to really put the shivs to you.”

Time for Payback

Mr. Michel, it turned out, was right.

Mr. Gingrich climbed his way to the speakership in January 1995, and once he got there vowed to take the high road. He had spent years labeling Democrats as “counterculture” proponents of the “liberal welfare state,” and in 1994 went so far as to suggest the case of Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother who murdered her two sons, was evidence of “how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things” by electing Republicans.

But once in power, he pledged to work cooperatively with Mr. Clinton, explaining that being in the majority freed him to be more conciliatory. “In the minority,” he said then, “it’s like the defense in football. You’re in a different position. You have to be more combative.”

It was too late. Democrats were already bombarding him with ethics charges. During his bid for re-election, Mr. Gingrich’s opponent filed a complaint accusing him of using a college course, “Renewing American Civilization,” to promote a partisan agenda, improperly mixing Gopac money with public funds.

And once he won, Mr. Gingrich came under withering criticism for a $4.5 million book advance from HarperCollins, whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, had business pending before the Congress. Under pressure, Mr. Gingrich turned down the advance. (His defense was that unlike Mr. Wright, he was writing “a real book.”)

Over the course of two years, more than 80 charges — ranging from alleged tax violations to complaints that he used Gopac money to finance one of his own campaigns — were filed against Mr. Gingrich with the House Ethics Committee. The convoluted inquiry consumed official Washington, with Democrats saying he was getting what he deserved and Republicans calling it a political vendetta.

“Yes, he filed ethics charges against Speaker Wright, and I would concede that it wasn’t just because Newt was out to clean up Congress,” said Dan Meyer, a former Gingrich aide. “I think he used it as a partisan tactic, but the scale of the response was way out of proportion.”

In the end, nearly all of the charges were dismissed. But the ethics committee did find that Mr. Gingrich had used tax-exempt money to promote Republican goals, and given the panel inaccurate information for its inquiry.

Mr. Gingrich formally apologized, conceding he had brought discredit on the House. He had always regarded himself as a “transformative figure” who would change the course of history, but on Jan. 21, 1997, he made history in another way.

The House voted 395-28 to reprimand him and fine him $300,000, making him the first speaker ever disciplined for unethical cond

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/fk-capitalism-report-shows-democratic-socialists-of-america-are-on-the-rise-in-iowa/

Although President Donald Trump has been using the word “socialist” to tar and feather the Democratic Party and rally his base, “socialist” is a label that most Democrats reject. Nonetheless, there has been a lot of discussion of “socialism” and what it does or doesn’t mean—and an article written by Elaine Godfrey and published in the Atlantic on Friday takes a close look at the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in, of all places, Iowa.

Iowa is much more of a swing state than its deeply Republican neighbor to the west, Nebraska. President Barack Obama won Iowa in both 2008 and 2012, while Trump carried the midwestern state in 2016. Iowa, Godfrey acknowledges, seems an unlikely place for the DSA to be making inroads, yet she notes that Iowa native Caroline Schoonover heads a DSA chapter that “has about 160 members” and “didn’t exist before” 2016. In fact, Godfrey writes, “none of Iowa’s DSA groups did.”

For her article, Godfrey interviewed Schoonover and other DSA activists in Iowa and found that they were motivated by issues like “climbing rents and high student-loan debt” and have concluded that “the cause of their financial woes is capitalism.” Their “solution,” Godfrey writes, is to “replace” capitalism “with something else.”

There are some caveats in Godfrey’s article, however. DSA members in Iowa, she writes, don’t necessarily have an across-the-board view of exactly what “socialism” means—and “under the DSA umbrella,” she says, “one can expect to find all types of political philosophies, including Marxists, Leninists, communists and even libertarian socialists.”

But if all of these DSA members have something in common, according to Godfrey, it is that “socialism, to them, means a fairer world—one where every person is born with a guaranteed right to things like health care and education.”

A few members of the Democratic Party who were elected in the 2018 midterms openly identify with the term “socialist,” including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who has been a member of the DSA. And her ally, Sen. Bernie Sanders, describes himself as a “democratic socialist.” But as Godfrey points out in her article, most Democrats don’t identify as socialists—even liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren has described herself as “capitalist to my bones.” And the DSA members that Godfrey spoke to in Iowa consider themselves to be quite separate from the Democratic Party.

Schoonover, for example, told Godfrey, “We don’t talk about Bernie. He’s not a factor in our organizing at all…. We’re not a Bernie Sanders fan club just waiting for our chance to finally knock doors for him.”

Godfrey shows a contrast between Warren’s liberalism and DSA members. Warren is vehemently critical of crony capitalism and abuses in the banking sector but doesn’t consider capitalism itself to be the problem. And in contrast to Warren’s “capitalist to my bones” comment, Godfrey quotes Iowa-based DSA activist Rob Shaw as saying, without hesitation, “Fuck capitalism.”

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together at last

Pentagon agreed to buy nearly $900,000 in jet fuel from the conservative university owned by Jerry Falwell Jr., just months after President Donald Trump took office.

The Department of Defense signed the contract with Freedom Aviation, which is wholly owned by Liberty University, on May 9, 2017, and had since purchased more than $400,000 in turbine fuel from the same company, reported The Daily Beast.

Falwell endorsed Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination early in 2016, as his candidacy gained momentum during the primary process, and has been one of the president’s more outspoken supporters, sometimes placing him at odds with other evangelical leaders.

Freedom Aviation owns six planes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, and maintains them at the university’s flight school at the Lynchburg, Virginia, campus.

The company provides charter flights to the public, and Falwell travels on the aircraft for his private use.

The Trump campaign paid Freedom Aviation more than $19,000 in air travel expenses about a week after Falwell endorsed the former reality TV star.

Neither Freedom nor C&C Aviation, another university-owned company, had ever won a federal fuel contract before Trump was elected president.

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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.

Addressing the charge that environmental concerns are “elitist,” she dispatched with the attack quickly.

“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.”

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Pence claims ‘freedom’ ended slavery in ‘historically dubious’ CPAC speech

written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams March 2, 2019

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday said that “freedom” ended slavery and defeated Hitler—a claim that was derided as historically inaccurate by critics. Speaking in front of a packed house…

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday said that “freedom” ended slavery and defeated Hitler—a claim that was derided as historically inaccurate by critics.

Speaking in front of a packed house at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),Pence said that “freedom”—an apparent stand-in for capitalism—was the reason for the major global and American victories of the past two centuries.

“It was a freedom, not socialism, that ended slavery, won two world wars, and stands today as the beacon of hope for all the world,” Pence declared....

atlantic coppins

...But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.

When I ask him how he views his legacy, Gingrich takes me on a tour of a Western world gripped by crisis. In Washington, chaos reigns as institutional authority crumbles. Throughout America, right-wing Trumpites and left-wing resisters are treating midterm races like calamitous fronts in a civil war that must be won at all costs. And in Europe, populist revolts are wreaking havoc in capitals across the Continent.

Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe. But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. He’s gleeful.

“The old order is dying,” he tells me. “Almost everywhere you have freedom, you have a very deep discontent that the system isn’t working.”

And that’s a good thing? I ask.

“It’s essential,” he says, “if you want Western civilization to survive.”

On june 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republican sat a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College.

But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta.

The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan.The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too hostile to the old guard’s cherished sense of decorum. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs.

Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.”

For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and begandelivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.

As his profile grew, Gingrich took aim at the moderates in his own party—calling Bob Dole the “tax collector for the welfare state”—and baited Democratic leaders with all manner of epithet and insult: pro-communist, un-American, tyrannical. In 1984, one of his floor speeches prompted a red-faced eruption from Speaker Tip O’Neill, who said of Gingrich’s attacks, “It’s the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress!” The episode landed them both on the nightly news, and Gingrich, knowing the score, declared victory. “I am now a famous person,” he gloated to The Washington Post. [sounds like bannon]

It’s hard to overstate just how radical these actions were at the time.Although Congress had been a volatile place during periods of American history—with fistfights and canings and representatives bellowing violent threats at one another—by the middle of the 20th century, lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions. Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. “Most members still believed in the idea that the Framers had in mind,” says Thomas Mann, a scholar who studies Congress. “They believed in genuine deliberation and compromise … and they had institutional loyalty.”

This ethos was perhaps best embodied by Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable World War II veteran known around Washington for his aversion to swearing—doggone it and by Jiminy were fixtures of his vocabulary—as well as his penchant for carpooling and golfing with Democratic colleagues. Michel was no liberal, but he believed that the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders—pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible.

Gingrich was unimpressed by Michel’s conciliatory approach. “He represented a culture which had been defeated consistently,” he recalls. More important, Gingrich intuited that the old dynamics that had produced public servants like Michel were crumbling. Tectonic shifts in American politics—particularly around issues of race and civil rights—had triggered an ideological sorting between the two parties. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (two groups that had been well represented in Congress) were beginning to vanish, and with them, the cross-party partnerships that had fostered cooperation.

This polarization didn’t originate with Gingrich, but he took advantage of it, as he set out to circumvent the old power structures and build his own. Rather than letting the party bosses in Washington decide which candidates deserved institutional support, he took control of a group called gopac and used it to recruit and train an army of mini-Newts to run for office.

Gingrich hustled to keep his cause—and himself—in the press. “If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” he told one reporter. His secret to capturing headlines was simple, he explained to supporters: “The No. 1 fact about the news media is they love fights … When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.” TRUMP

Effective as these tactics were in the short term, they had a corrosive effect on the way Congress operated. “Gradually, it went from legislating, to the weaponization of legislating, to the permanent campaign, to the permanent war,” Mann says. “It’s like he took a wrecking ball to the most powerful and influential legislature in the world.”

But Gingrich looks back with pride on the transformations he set in motion. “Noise became a proxy for status,” he tells me. And no one was noisier than Newt.

we are in the petting zoo, examining the goats, when Gingrich decides to tell me about the moment he first glimpsed his destiny as one of history’s great men.

It was 1958, and he was 15 years old. His family was visiting Verdun, a small city in northeastern France where 300,000 people had been killed during World War I. The battlefield was still scarred by cannon fire, and young Newt spent the day wandering around, taking in the details. He found a rusted helmet on the ground, saw the ossuary where the bones of dead soldiers were piled high. “I realized countries can die,” he says—and he decided it would be up to him to make sure that America didn’t.

This is an important scene in the Newt Gingrich creation myth, and he has turned to it repeatedly over the years to satisfy journalists and biographers searching for a “Rosebud” moment. But the rest of Gingrich’s childhood may be just as instructive. His mother struggled with manic depression, and spent much of her adult life in a fog of medication. His stepfather was a brooding, violent man who showed little affection for “Newtie,” the pudgy, flat-footed, bookish boy his wife had foisted upon him. Gingrich moved around a lot and had few friends his age; he spent more time alone in his room reading books about dinosaurs than he did playing with the neighborhood kids.

But this is not the stuff Gingrich likes to talk about. When asked, he describes his childhood as ordinary, even “idyllic,” allowing only glimpses of the full picture when you press him for details. Those family picnics at the zoo that he has been reminiscing about all day? They weren’t with his parents, it turns out, but his aunts, who were looking for ways to make their lonely nephew happy.

“People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz,” Gingrich once told a reporter.

It was in Verdun that Gingrich found an identity, a sense of purpose. “I decided then that I basically had three jobs,” he tells me. “Figure out what we had to do to survive”—the we here being proponents of Western civilization, the threats being vague and unspecified—“figure out how to explain it so that the American people would give us permission, and figure out how to implement it once they gave us permission. That’s what I’ve done since August of ’58.”

The next year, Gingrich turned in a 180-page term paper about the balance of global power, and announced to his teacher that his family was moving to Georgia, where he planned to start a Republican Party in the then–heavily Democratic state and get himself elected to Congress.

Gingrich immersed himself in war histories and dystopian fiction and books about techno-futurism—and as the years went on, he became fixated on the idea that he was a world-historic hero. He has described himself as a “transformational figure” and “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times.” To one reporter, he declared, “I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it.” To another, he said, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”

As Gingrich tells me about his epiphany in Verdun, a man in a baseball cap approaches us in full fanboy mode. “Newt Gingrich!” he exclaims. “Good to see you, man. I love you on Fox.”

“Thank you,” Gingrich replies. “Please keep watching.”

This has been happening all day—fans coming up to request selfies, or to shake his hand, or to thank him for his work in “draining the swamp.” It’s a reminder that to a certain swath of America, Gingrich is not some washed-up partisan hack; he’s a towering statesman, a visionary hero, the man he set out to be.

After the superfan leaves, I make a passing observation about how many admirers Gingrich has at the zoo.

“I think you’d be surprised,” he tells me, his voice dripping with condescension. “You get outside of Washington and New York and there are an amazing number of people like this who show up.”

By 1988, gingrich’s plan to conquer Congress via sabotage was well under way. As his national profile had risen, so too had his influence within the Republican caucus—his original quorum of 12 disciples having expanded to dozens of sharp-elbowed House conservatives who looked to him for guidance.

Gingrich encouraged them to go after their enemies with catchy, alliterative nicknames—“Daffy Dukakis,” “the loony left”—and schooled them in the art of partisan blood sport. Through gopac, he sent out cassette tapes and memos to Republican candidates across the country who wanted to “speak like Newt,” providing them with carefully honed attack lines and creating, quite literally, a new vocabulary for a generation of conservatives.One memo, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” included a list of recommended words to use in describing Democrats: sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt.

“People started asking, ‘Who’s the meanest, nastiest son of a bitch we can get to fight back?’ And, of course, that was Newt Gingrich.”

The goal was to reframe the boring policy debates in Washington as a national battle between good and evil,white hats versus black—a fight for the very soul of America. Through this prism, any news story could be turned into a wedge. Woody Allen had an affair with his partner’s adoptive daughter? “It fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly,” Gingrich declared. A deranged South Carolina woman murdered her two children? A symptom of a “sick” society, Gingrich intoned—and “the only way you can get change is to vote Republican.”

Gingrich was not above mining the darkest reaches of the right-wing fever swamps for material. When Vince Foster, a staffer in the Clinton White House, committed suicide, Gingrich publicly flirted with fringe conspiracy theories that suggested he had been assassinated. “He took these things that were confined to the margins of the conservative movement and mainstreamed them,” says David Brock, who worked as a conservative journalist at the time, covering the various Clinton scandals, before later becoming a Democratic operative. “What I think he saw was the potential for using them to throw sand in the gears of Clinton’s ability to govern.”

Despite his growing grassroots following, Gingrich remained unpopular among a certain contingent of congressional Republicans, who were scandalized by his tactics. But that started to change when Democrats elected Texas Congressman Jim Wright as speaker. Whereas Tip O’Neill had been known for working across party lines, Wright came off as gruff and power-hungry—and his efforts to sideline the Republican minority enraged even many of the GOP’s mild-mannered moderates. “People started asking, ‘Who’s the meanest, nastiest son of a bitch we can get to fight back?’ ” recalls Mickey Edwards, a Republican who was then representing Oklahoma in the House. “And, of course, that was Newt Gingrich.”

Gingrich unleashed a smear campaign aimed at taking Wright down. He reportedly circulated unsupported rumors about a scandal involving a teenage congressional page, and tried to tie Wright to shady foreign-lobbying practices. Finally, one allegation gained traction—that Wright had used $60,000 in book royalties to evade limits on outside income. Watergate, this was not. But it was enough to force Wright’s resignation, and hand Gingrich the scalp he so craved.

The episode cemented Gingrich’s status as the de facto leader of the GOP in Washington. Heading into the 1994 midterms, he rallied Republicans around the idea of turning Election Day into a national referendum. On September 27, more than 300 candidates gathered outside the Capitol to sign the “Contract With America,” a document of Gingrich’s creation that outlined 10 bills Republicans promised to pass if they took control of the House.

“Today, on these steps, we offer this contract as a first step towards renewing American civilization,” Gingrich proclaimed. MAGA

While candidates fanned out across the country to campaign on the contract, Gingrich and his fellow Republican leaders in Congress held fast to their strategy of gridlock. As Election Day approached, they maneuvered to block every piece of legislation they could—even those that might ordinarily have received bipartisan support, like a lobbying-reform bill—on the theory that voters would blame Democrats for the paralysis.

Pundits, aghast at the brazenness of the strategy, predicted backlash from voters—but few seemed to notice. Even some Republicans were surprised by what they were getting away with.Bill Kristol, then a GOP strategist, marveled at the success of his party’s “principled obstructionism.” An up-and-coming senator named Mitch McConnell was quoted crowing that opposing the Democrats’ agenda “gives gridlock a good name.” When the 103rd Congress adjourned in October, The Washington Post declared it “perhaps the worst Congress” in 50 years.

Yet Gingrich’s plan worked. By the time voters went to the polls, exit surveys revealed widespread frustration with Congress and a deep appetite for change. Republicans achieved one of the most sweeping electoral victories in modern American history. They picked up 54 seats in the House and seized state legislatures and governorships across the country; for the first time in 40 years, the GOP took control of both houses of Congress.

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