normalizing

wow really belated, did i think fad or do i have it somewhere else, it's authoritarianism? but also jrnl fail

SEE FASCISM

preservation of norms?

9 24 sanewashing

this started out with mainstream press (for $) pretending that trump breaking norms was ok; 2 23 update/broaden to mainstreaming of fringe ideas like white supremacy tucker and civil war/secession MTG

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no lnx

The danger of getting used to the unthinkable

:

Thom Hartmann June 18, 2025

It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.

This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.

Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”

But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it.

Let’s not forget:

— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.

— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour” of Congress.

— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Elon Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.

— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily churn.

— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them.

— When Trump praised Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded fast.

— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having co-written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Benjamin Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it.

— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”

This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence... and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it). As the historian Robert Paxton wrote:

“To resist seemed pointless … finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

:{“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter...

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”}:

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without engaging in politics.

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows…

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

Sound familiar?

Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead, it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave COVID and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicles in The New York Times:

“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”

When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

But there is a path forward.

The antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”

We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say, “That’s just Trump being Trump.” We say: “That’s fascist rhetoric.”

When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize.

When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of vengeance, we don’t wait and see. We fight back now.

When armed federal agents hide their identification and their faces the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off our streets, we call them out.

History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.

This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.

If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

Don’t get used to fascism.

Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.

NOW READ: White House has insiders convinced Trump is unfit for job: whistleblower

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alternet-Home | Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump

Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump

D. Earl Stephens

September 15, 2024.

We have a complete madman running for the President of the United States, and it would be about damn time our national media started reporting it this way.

We are just over seven weeks from a landmark election that will determine America’s standing in the world, and her ability to protect the rights, welfare and lives of her citizens.

With all of this on the line, we have bitterly learned that we can no longer count on the fourth estate.

It’s a terrible thing. They have catastrophically failed us like never before.

We have been forced to wait helplessly, and wonder if these incompetent, ponderous idiots will ever stop ignoring what is so clearly right in front of our tired eyes: a dangerous maniac backed by a massive propaganda network that disgracefully fills his dark, billowing sails, allowing him to rumble unchecked and uncovered across the American countryside, taking a blowtorch to the truth, dead aim on our vote and our election workers, and repeating insane, dangerous and racist conspiracy theories that assault our senses, and could well result in the death of our democracy and many of our citizens.

That run-on sentence has never needed writing more, because while I typed it, our media continued to massively underreport, and even disgracefully normalize its chilling message.

This is NOT OK, people.

We must demand that our collective media FINALLY removes their blinders and their heads from their asses and starts reporting on what WE KNOW they have been seeing and hearing from the 300-lb. sack of dirt, and his revolting followers in Congress who swoon at his fat, little feet to provide him cover.

Donald J. Trump means America harm, goddamnit, and he is getting sicker and crazier by the minute.

So tell me: At what point does this become the only thing worth leading every major media outlet in this country????

At its core, the mission of the working press is cut and dry and pretty easily executed: Reporters and news departments are assigned to cover various beats and report out to the American people about what is happening in their coverage areas. The press has the privilege of being where we too often can’t, so that they can tell us what has transpired on the football field, or the court room, or a theater of war, or the school board meeting, or on the election trail …

We depend on them to be our eyes and ears, to describe as vividly as possible what is happening where they are. We depend on them to provide this information to the editorial leaders in their respective newsrooms, who are tasked with processing it all and giving it the weight and “play” it deserves.

We depend on their news sense and professionalism to understand what is important and what isn't.

We depend on them to be accurate and credible, because without those two things, they are done, and we all suffer for it.

Again, it really isn’t that difficult a job to carry out, but man, is it monumentally important.

Well, right now our incompetent and potentially bought-off media is making a complete and utter mess of things, and only a damn fool would rate their coverage of this election as even remotely accurate and credible.

It’s an absolute disgrace is what it is.

The Republican candidate for president is a complete madman. A racist. Unhinged.

Even the slightest amount of fact-checking and casual observation would confirm this.

So WHY isn’t it being reported this way????

We are in the middle of a national emergency, and I am going to continue to use my small but sturdy platform built on years in the newspaper business to ask just one more time:

What the hell is going on in our nation’s newsrooms? WHAT can they possibly be covering that is more important than the most serious internal threat to America since the Civil War?

We must ALL keeping asking these questions until we get a damn answer. Our safety and our democracy depend on it.

The guy they are normalizing is a slovenly, dirty old man incapable of cogently reciting even the most basic political policy. That should be the very least we expect from a candidate — even policy that was written FOR HIM like Project 2025.

The guy they are bucking up as some legitimate candidate often forgets where he is, and confuses people all the time. He talks up murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and talks down leaders — even American presidents — who have stood with us for decades.

This is what traitors do.

He doesn't understand or respect NATO, geopolitical affairs, or even American history. And he damn sure doesn’t understand the economy. Trump’s hotel and casino businesses have declared bankruptcy SIX times. He couldn’t even sell steaks, for crying out loud. So listen to me, you media suckers, and take this note:

Trump inherited a perfectly good economy from Barack Obama in 2016, who brought us back from the brink after Republican George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, and left it smoldering in flames by the time he finally exited the scene by taking a torch to our Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Were any you watching this????? Seriously, WERE YOU????

Look, just because he SAYS he built a great economy during his repulsive four years in the White House does not make it so. Why not do some real reporting, and look into that?

He often gives answers to even the easiest questions as if he were auditioning to be the star of some deranged carnival. Here’s but one answer of hundreds like this, he offered up about providing affordable child care last week:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.

We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.

I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about.

We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.

Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

Well? That’s a direct quote right there.

Time and again, you sanitize all this crap as if it were your job to listen to the nuclear-grade bullshit he spits out about God knows what, and twist yourself in a pretzel trying to explain to your readers what you think he was trying to say.

That is NOT your job, you fools. Your job is to simply report word for word what he said. And if it doesn’t make any sense, well you better damn well report it that way.

And what about Tuesday night’s debate? That one should have mercifully ended his career forever. He was so overmatched, so insane and so revolting, that the very least one of his gross lackeys could have done was lasso him and use a two-ton winch to drag him off the stage.

Instead, the aforementioned Rubio called it “a big win” for his master.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”

Both of these feeble men warned us of the dangers of Trump in 2016. Now they disgracefully run cover for him. Is this no longer worth a mention? Can they ever be trusted again?

Here’s what your headline should have been after that debate:

TRUMP AGAIN PROVES HIMSELF COMPLETELY UNFIT FOR LEADERSHIP

I didn’t see that one anywhere. Why? What debate were you watching?

His despicable attack on Haitian-Americans right now, is no different than his attack on Asian-Americans four years ago, or his attack on Mexican-Americans four years before that. And what about his lifelong attacks on Black Americans, including the repulsive “birther issue” he created in the dark pit that doubles as his filthy mind to attack Obama?

He is the literal definition of a bigot. Why won’t you call him that? Does accuracy scare you?

His is a mountain of steaming hate — the throttle between his addled brain and filthy mouth is now completely burned out and inoperable. He’s the racist drunk at the end of the bar screaming into his empty shot glass and trying to make all his miserable problems everybody else’s.

He’s a convicted felon, admitted woman-abuser, and is charged with violently attacking the United States of America.

There is literally nothing he won’t do to win this election.

NOTHING.

Do any of you doubt he will will continue to incite violence when he loses on November 5th? Do any of you doubt that were he to win he would order his orcs to exact revenge on anybody and everybody he deems disloyal, including you? Do any of you have any doubt he will spread all manner of lies and hate between now and election day that will further muddy the waters of our once unassailably honest election system?

Any doubt at all?

Why aren’t you reporting it then? Why aren’t you giving this the urgency the potential end of our country as we know it demands? People’s lives are on the line, you blithering idiots.

This is the biggest story you will ever cover and you are blowing it so catastrophically I literally shake every time I am forced to address it.

You are cowards, you are worthless, and you have failed in your quest to uphold your most basic responsibility to the public: accurately and credibly reporting the truth.

The end of America is potentially here, and you are either too damn stupid to know it, or worse: complicit in its demise.

Those are the facts, and it would be about damn time you started paying attention to them.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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MMA

Trump pushed replacement theory during the debate. Mainstream media fact checks sanitized it.

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 09/11/24

As presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debated, Trump claimed that “illegal immigrants” are “coming in” while Democrats are “trying to get them to vote.”

While some news outlets fact-checked the remark, The New York Times tepidly noted just that the conspiracy theory “lacks evidence,” and the Times and other outlets failed to highlight the extreme origins of the lie that Democrats are trying to replace white people with politically supportive nonwhite immigrants, otherwise known as the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

The failure to highlight this context is another instance of the media “sanewashing” Trump’s remarks.

• ## Trump pushed replacement theory during the presidential debate

• • During the presidential debate Donald Trump claimed, “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” Trump made the remark in response to a question about whether he lost the 2020 election. ABC, [9/10/24]

• • Claiming immigrants are being imported into America in order to vote in elections is a part of the white nationalist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” The theory alleges that nonwhite immigrants are “replacing” the votes of white Americans in order to undermine white interests, and that Democrats are supporting this effort. Media Matters, [3/4/24]

• ## Mainstream media failed to link Trump’s comments to the far-right conspiracy theory

• • The New York Times claimed Trump’s response “lacks evidence” and failed to mention his comment was an offshoot of “great replacement” beliefs, even though the paper has previously reported on the conspiracy theory.Instead, the Times focused only on the lie about noncitizen voting, writing, “In recent months, Trump and other Republicans have frequently made the false claim that there’s a major crisis of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections.” The Times had previously thoroughly reported on great replacement theory, and in particular former Fox host and Trump ally Tucker Carlson’s role in “stok[ing] white fear” and mainstreaming what the paper called a “racist conspiracy theory.” The New York Times, [9/10/24, 4/30/22]

• • Other outlets also succeeded in calling out Trump’s lie about noncitizen voting but failed to highlight its link to replacement theory. NPR, The Washington Post, NBC News, and MSNBC all highlighted the slim likelihood of migrants voting in the election, but stopped short of highlighting the claim’s racist origins. NPR, [9/11/24; The Washington Post, 9/11/24, 9/11/24; NBC News, 9/10/24; MSNBC, 9/11/24]

• • Some in mainstream media ignored the response altogether and did not mention it in their online fact checks. ABC News, CBS News, and CNN ignored the former president’s remarks on migrants voting. ABC News, [9/11/24; CBS News, 9/11/24; CNN, 9/11/24]

• ## This failure follows a broader trend of mainstream media “sanewashing” Trump’s comments

• • The New Republic argued that mainstream media have been sanitizing Trump’s comments by simplifying and laundering them to seem like more mainstream political statements.Parker Molloy (who previously worked at Media Matters) highlighted several instances of sanewashing, including CNN simplifying a Trump social media rant and The New York Times ignoring Trump’s comment supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s misinformation on autism and failing to report on Trump’s spread of anti-trans conspiracy theories. The New Republic, [9/4/24]

• • Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop called the premise of sanewashing “persuasive” in his piece, titled “Is the press ‘sanewashing’ Trump?”Allsop also noted mainstream media are also downplaying Trump’s more violent and extreme comments on immigrant gangs and election misinformation: “If sanewashing the incoherent things Trump says is a problem, then so is failing to proportionately cover his all-too-coherent threats.” Columbia Journalism Review, [9/9/24]

• • Many mainstream media outlets recently sanewashed a speech Trump made to The Economic Club of New York, failing to inform audiences about his incoherent response to a question about child care policy. Media Matters, [9/10/24]

• • On MSNBC, Joy Reid highlighted the sanewashing impulses of the mainstream media, warning that Trump’s and Harris’s debate performances would be held to different standards. Reid: “His answers are sure to be sane-washed by much of the media immediately after the debate and in the days to come to ensure that he continues to be taken seriously by American voters.” MSNBC,*The Reid Out*, [9/9/24]

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see normalizing it’s baaaaaccck

an 9 24

Dangerously misleading': How the beltway media sanitizes Trump’s 'unhinged' rambling

Alex Henderson

September 04, 2024

Former President Donald Trump often accuses the mainstream media of pushing "fake news" when they give him any type of negative coverage. The mainstream media, Trump argues, are hopelessly biased against him. And Trump has, at times, even accused right-wing Fox News and Fox Business of being unfair to him in their coverage.

But journalist Parker Molloy has a totally different perspective.

In an article published by The New Republic on September 4, Molloy argues that many mainstream media reporters are guilty of "sanitizing" Trump in their coverage and downplaying just how "unhinged" his "incoherent ramblings" are.

READ MORE:Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools

Molloy previously addressed this topic in an article published by Media Matters on March 12, 2020. And the reporter believes the problem has "only worsened" since then.

"As Trump's statements grow increasingly unhinged in his old age," Molloy warns, "major news outlets continue to reframe his words, presenting a dangerously misleading picture to the public."

Molloy cites the New York Times' recent coverage of Trump's speech at Moms for Liberty's annual summit as an example.

"While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty," Molloy observes, "Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that 'your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation' — referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump 'charmed' this group of 'conservative moms,' the Times didn't even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen."

READ MORE:'Gender chasm': GOP panics over huge Harris lead among women as Trump chases 'bro vote'

Molloy emphasizes that reporters do their audience a disservice when they treat Trump like a normal politician and fail to adequately report the more "unhinged" things he says.

"This 'sanewashing' of Trump's statements isn't just poor journalism; it's a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy," Molloy argues. "By continually reframing Trump's incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president."

Molloy continues, "The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump's words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality."

READ MORE:'They all think you’re nuts': Latest Conway ad shows GOP voices in Trump’s head

*Read Parker Molloy's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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hannity normalizing

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-pushes-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-tie-her-national-divorce-america-debt

an 2 23

Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is warning thatRep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) statements about enacting a "national divorce" should not be written off as a mere "freak show."

In his latest essay at The Atlantic, Wehner argues that Greene is now too influential within the House Republican Partyto be written off or ignored as a crank.

"Greene is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security," argues Wehner. "She has become a confidante of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy."

In fact, Wehner believes that Greene speaks for a shockingly large number of ordinary Republican voters who have so come to hate sharing a country with people who don't agree with them politically that they want to secede and form a new nation.

"Greene and McCarthy -- one crazed, the other cowardly -- embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP," he argued. "Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous."

Wehner also noted the irony of members of the so-called Party of Lincoln hopping aboard the secession bandwagon.

"The Republican Party, forged a century and a half ago in the fight against secession, now finds the move worth contemplating," he notes.

Read the whole article at this link.

an ah 2 23

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) has set off yet another controversy — this time, by calling for GOP-dominated red states to secede from the union.

On Monday, February 20, the far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA congresswoman tweeted, "We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done."

Some conservative Republicans were quick to call Greene out for her secessionist fantasy, including Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and former Rep. Liz Cheney. Romney told the Salt Lake Tribune, "I think Abraham Lincoln dealt with that kind of insanity …. We're not going to divide the country. It's united we stand and divided we fall."

READ MORE: 'I will never leave that woman': Kevin McCarthy fuses to Marjorie Taylor Greene

Cheney, in a February 20 tweet, posted, "Let’s review some of the governing principles of America, @mtgreenee: Our country is governed by the Constitution. You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie."

But other Republicans have remained silent. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) considers Greene an ally, and many Republicans are terrified of the possibility of being called a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by former President Donald Trump and others in the far-right MAGA movement.

Greene is hardly the first Republican to make incendiary comments. But in an article published by The Hill on February 23, journalist Al Weaver stresses that she enjoys greater prominence in her party than GOP extremists of the past. Greene, Weaver notes, is a "key ally" of the House speaker, sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, and is a "possible" Donald Trump running mate if he wins the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Brian Rosenwald, a historian and scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told The Hill, "There have absolutely always been gadflies in both parties who were extremists who were kind of going places that no one was comfortable with. Having an extremist in Congress is not new. Having someone willing to say insane and incendiary things (is) not really new. What I think is new …. is that here’s someone saying these things and doing these things and being embraced by leadership."

READ MORE:'Freak show' Marjorie Taylor Greene represents a 'sick and dangerous' GOP sect

A Republican operative, interviewed on condition of anonymity, wasn’t especially troubled by Greene’s call for secession and dismissed it as a politician "just trying to stir the pot a bit."

But Rosenwald doesn't see it that way. In his view, Greene’s prominence in the GOP-controlled House shows a growing appetite for dangerous extremism in her party.

The Penn historian told The Hill, "This is the problem with how things getnormalized.… Part of the problem the Republican Party has had for probably 40-plus years is they roll their eyes at the fringe of the party. These are the people who are getting more and more popular with their base, and these are the people that are getting the attention and sort of setting the agenda."

READ MORE: Liz Cheney smacks down Marjorie Taylor Greene for advocating secession

Read The Hill’s full report at this link.

===

==

an 1 23  cdv

There is no such thing as "the liberal media."

That is language concocted by the Republican Party and right-wing consultants with the goal of bullying the American news media into being compliant and subservient to the "conservative" agenda.

And they were remarkably successful in achieving that goal.

Decades later it is now an accepted "fact" among America's political class, the general public, and the mainstream news media itself that there is such a thing as "liberal bias" in the news industry. The enduring myth of the "liberal media" is one of many examples of how the American right has successfully weaponized language with a propaganda campaign to shape the country's political terrain in their interests.

Republicans have marketed themselves as defenders of "freedom." In reality, they are authoritarians who support a range of policies that limit human and civil rights.

The Republican Party has created a brand that is based upon "family values." This is fiction. The policies and ideology of the modern GOP are centered upon gutting the social safety net and ending the county's already very weak and still developing social democracy. If they are successful in that agenda, the overall well-being of American families will be greatly diminished.

The "conservative" movement staunchly claims to be "pro-life." This is not true. Their policies and ideology have actually shortened the lives of the American people as seen with health care, gun violence, the global climate crisis and environment, the COVID pandemic, and social inequality more generally.

Former Rep. Newt Gingrich is one of the main architects of the strategy that allowed the Republican Party to win the language wars and the central role of the myth of "the liberal media" in that outcome. In 1995, the media watchdog group FAIR explained how:

*Since winning control of Congress, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) has constantly complained about "destructive" and "negative" coverage from the "liberal elite media."… 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…

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.*

In a widely cited 2003 essay at The Nation, media critic and author Eric Alterman said the following about the myth of "the liberal media":

*Move over to the mainstream publications and broadcasts often labeled "liberal," and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal dominance becomes. ….

I could go on, but the point is clear: Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match–either in size, ferocity or commitment–for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."

The right is working the refs. And it's working. Much of the public believes a useful but unsupportable myth about the so-called liberal media, and the media themselves have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop. :{As the economist/pundit Paul Krugman observes of Republican efforts to bully the media into accepting the party's Orwellian arguments about Social Security privatization: "The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla,much of the media–fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of 'balance'–won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown."

}:

In the real world of the right-wing media, the pundits are the conservatives' shock troops. Even the ones who constantly complain about alleged liberal control of the media cannot ignore the vast advantage their side enjoys when it comes to airing their views on television, in the opinion pages, on the radio and the Internet.*

In total, the mainstream news media is inherently "small c" conservative. As a social institution it prioritizes making money and is averse to change. As such, the American mainstream news media also serves an agenda-setting and boundary-enforcing function that sets limits on the "approved public discourse." In that role, liberal and progressives are routinely silenced out of deference to "conservative" and right-wing voices – however extreme the latter may be.

Because the mainstream news media are aligned with the powerful as a class, they prioritize having access to them in what is a parasitic and symbiotic relationship. In practice, this meant that access to the powerful — especially for DC beltway journalists — is more important than bold truth-telling and consistently speaking truth to power.The conservative nature of the American news media and its institutional bias towards "normalcy" helps to explain why it has been so unable to properly pivot and adapt to the realities of the Age of Trump, rising neofascism, and the country's ongoing democracy crisis. Thus, the continued habit of using obsolete norms such as "bothsideism," an overempahsis on "horserace coverage," an obsession with political personalities instead of systems and power, and an amplification of the controversy of the day instead of on fundamental issues.

One of the most dangerous examples of how the media has been conditioned by the right through the myth of "liberal bias" is how it is now helping to launder the reputations of several Trump regime members and other Republican fascists. In a very high-profile example of reputation laundering, The New York Times — which is routinely attacked by right-wing media for committing the "crime" of "liberal bias" (a baseless and absurd claim) — recently featured a guest opinion essay by former Trump regime advisor and propagandist**Kellyanne Conway**.Her Times op-ed contained Trump political pornography such as this:

*Donald J. Trump shocked the world in 2016 by winning the White House and becoming the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience. He upended the fiction of electability pushed by pundits, the news media and many political consultants, which arrogantly projects who will or will not win long before votes are cast. He focused instead on capturing a majority in the Electoral College, which is how a candidate does or does not win. Not unlike Barack Obama eight years earlier, Mr. Trump exposed the limits of Hillary Clinton's political inevitability and personal likability,connected directly with people, ran an outsider's campaign taking on the establishment, and tapped into the frustrations and aspirations of millions of Americans.

Some people have never gotten over it. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. There is no vaccine and no booster for it. Cosseted in their social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness, the afflicted disguise their hatred for Mr. Trump as a righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country. So desperate is the incessant cry to "get Trump!" that millions of otherwise pleasant and productive citizens have become naggingly less so. They ignore the shortcomings, failings and unpopularity of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and abide the casual misstatements of an administration that says the "border is secure," inflation is "transitory," "sanctions are intended to deter" Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraineand they will "shut down the virus." They've also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 and not in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.*

In her New York Times audition for a job on Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, Conway also wrote:

A popular sentiment these days is, "I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality." It is true that limiting the name-calling frees up time and space for persuasion and solutions. Still, it may not be possible to have one without the other. :{Mr. Trump would remind people that it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border;structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran's most powerful military commander;forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Mr. Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine.

}:

When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. Much like with the audio debate a few years ago "Do you hear 'Laurel' or 'Yanny'?," what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America's interests.

There were thousands of comments on the New York Times website in response to Conway's column and the publication's decision to allow her such a privileged platform. Based on a cursory review, a good many, if not most of these comments were negative. The Times even featured one such complaint in a letter to the editor:

A diversity of opinions and perspectives is a fantastic goal, and one reason I've been a longtime subscriber. Generally speaking, your opinion guest essays are well written and thoughtful and provide a point of view that makes one examine a topic with fresh eyes.

The opinion from Ms. Conway is not that.

Time and again she employs sloganeering to sling arrows at Democrats and non-Trumpists in an attempt to burnish the reputation of her former boss.

She continues to attempt to turn neighbor against neighbor by perpetuating the othering of Trump detractors and the denial of Mr. Trump's and her attacks on voting, democracy and simple decency.

Hers is not another "opinion"; it is carefully crafted and intentional spin to appeal to people's sense of grievance and to reaffirm the lies and misinformation they are so ready to believe.

Her inclusion in your paper diminishes the quality of debate, and galvanizes a person America would be better off forgetting.

Conway is representative of a larger pattern where such leading news media outlets as the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NBC and others are deciding to amplify and provide a platform for Trumpists, Republican-fascists, and other right-wing anti-democracy voices. They are doing this behind the cover of "fairness" and "balancing" when in reality such a decision is based on fear, profit-maximizing, and strategically positioning themselves to be in good favor with the Republican Party, "conservatives" and other anti-democratic forces as a type of insurance policy and security blanket for what promises to be a very perilous and unsettled future.

In an essay at Medium, journalist and author Wajahat Ali warns that "Even in the face of increased threats and a failed coup, too many journalists in mainstream media outlets will continue to pave the road toward fascism with their 'both sides' coverage." He continues, "Access journalism is a parasitic relationship.Some of these journalists are like small remoras, or shark suckers, who attach to sharks to get to their destination. If they were riding the shark in JAWS, they'd write an article blaming the townspeople for forcing the shark to eat them":

There's a class of journalists belonging to legacy outlets and corporate media who are incapable of shedding their antiquated, toxic skin and adapting to the changing political and cultural landscape where disinformation, white supremacist conspiracy theories, and right-wing stochastic terrorism is the norm. Instead, they chase the North Star, which isn't the truth, but rather access to power, ratings, and a path toward personal success….

Instead of bending the knee to right-wing intimidation, platforming their lies, mainstreaming their hate, and engaging in "both sides" nonsense to create the fiction of symmetry in an utterly asymmetrical reality, these political journalists need to be biased in favor of the truth and democracy.

Ultimately, the American mainstream news media needs to engage in a type of personal inventory and critical self-reflection about its role in democracy and failings (and successes) in the Age of Trump and beyond.In short, it must do better as it strives to live up to the ideals of the Fourth Estate in a democracy. A big step in that direction would be refusing to participate in the reputation laundering and rehabilitation of Trump's regime members and other neo-fascists and enemies of democracy in today's Republican Party and larger right-wing and "conservative" movement.

If the American mainstream news media does not do this necessary and hard work it is just contributing to its own legitimacy crisis and lack of trust among the American people, which in turn means aiding the Republican fascists and other enemies of a free press and democracy.

==

no lnx twt

Sunday shows are a relic of a lazy low-stakes era

Hunter and Daily Kos October 24, 2021

On one of the now unwatchable Sunday "news" shows, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd introduced a segment on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic by—I'm just kidding. It wasn't about the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a segment about the most favorite of all Sunday show segments, and indeed largely the only segment any of the Sunday shows ever do: How will This Thing, the major news of the day, Affect Mah Politics?

"The economy's inability to fully recover from the shock of COVID-19 is both an economic story and a political one," intoned Todd.

The economy's inability to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic is in large part due to anti-distancing, anti-mask, vaccine-skeptical, pro-virus-spreading policies from Republican politicians who have been using conservative frustration with safety measures as a rallying cry for their own careers, resulting in a new wave of overwhelmed hospitals and dead victims that was entirely preventable if sociopathic politicos had not turned pandemic crisis protocols into the latest spite-riddled "culture war."

"All those economic problems add up to a big political problem for the president. Is all of this his fault? Of course not, but it is now his responsibility. And he and fellow Democrats are in real danger of suffering some serious political consequences. Mr. Biden ran on a promise of a basic return to normal—or at least a path to normalcy. But with the midterm elections just over a year away—"

Stop. Just stop. Fine, we get it. We're doing this again. Republicans continue to get their constituents killed at elevated rates; let's now turn to our panel of experts to determine what the political implications of Republicans killing off their constituents will be for the Democrats who, uh, failed to convince them not to die to own the libs.

"Whadda think, Bob? Think all those surviving family members are gonna punish Democrats in the midterms?"

"I dunno, Steve, but between that and Americans quitting their dangerous bullshit pandemic poverty-wage jobs to look for better ones, there's real chaos out there on the streets. And it doesn't look good for anyone waiting for a Tickle-me-Elmo toy because the container ships are real backed up over on the left coast. And what if Republicans decide to start shooting constituents in the face? That'd look real bad for Joe Biden, who's run on a platform of not shooting people in the face."

And it ain't just that. Another of the Todd segments scraped up another entry in the "obsessively arch-right fascist Trump supporters still like Trump" press compulsion. Hey, the guy may have attempted to end our democracy through hoaxes and violence, but a bunch of Jesus-punchers think, if anything, that just makes him even more awesome.

We've been here before. This ain't new, andMatt Negrin, in particular, has brought all the necessary receipts and then some to show that Chuck Todd's Meet the Press, in particular, is a relentless promoter of Republican frames, one that uses the "panel" format to mix hard-right Republican strategists and figures in with neutral journalists while studiously avoiding Democratic guests. Most insipidly, Todd has been a prime rehabilitator for the Republican supporters of an election hoax that led to a violent insurrection.

[https://twitter.com/MattNegrin/status/1449747691639119873

Why? Is that "neutrality"? Is it "news"?

The problem with Meet the Press is the problem with all political journalism: It shouldn't exist. It's lazy. It's cheap, hackish, phone-it-in programming cobbled together because doing journalism is hard but talking about the "political implications" of any news story is easy. Ask how the ongoing mostly Republican-state COVID-19 crisis is affecting social programs and you'll have to do research to find out. Ask whether the stance of anti-mask politicians like Ron DeSantis is morally defensible and you'll have to expose your own moral convictions.

:{

}:

Ask how the widespread death and economic chaos will affect the political winds when whatever-the-next-election-is rolls around, though, and you don't need to know a damn thing. It's easy. It's trivial. Pick out whichever guests will most reliably say something "exciting" and you've got yourself a show.

"Hey, Trump campaign spokesguy Jason Miller, the price of chicken went up by ten cents over the last six months. How do you think that's gonna play among [spins wheel] Evangelical voters in [throws dart] Wyoming?"

"I think this is great news for Donald Trump, and I'd also like to mention here that Wyoming Evangelicals are also very worried about Joe Biden's surrender to the mole people that happened last Thursday but that nobody here is reporting. Also, Joe Biden eats children."

"Thanks, Jason, we'll have to leave it there."

Anyone can opine about politics. It requires no expertise. It requires little thought. On television, where nobody in front of or behind the cameras gives a particular damn whether or not a guest just lies outright to the nation because they'll already be three lies beyond that one before anyone else can get a word in edgewise, there is absolutely no penalty for being wrong. Or lying. Or undermining democracy. Or egging on violence. Or anything else.

The Sunday shows are the worst thing politics can be: no-stakes. It is all just a game, a little game among the wealthy professional class to fill time while questions of morality and decency are pooh-poohed as the naive domain of the common rabble. True political journalism covers democracy and fascism as neutral ideological combatants; considers death ancillary to poll numbers; judges economic policy based on the analysis of whoever has the most money to spend on analysis; considers false propaganda to be Reasonable, if it can be made Effective; and, above all, dodges all policy considerations in favor of meta-debate about which political figures will most have their images buffed or tarnished from the policy's defeat or acceptance.

Would it be economically wise to avoid a worldwide climate catastrophe that sinks Florida, burns much of the West to a cinder, causes widespread crop failures, and renders certain parts of the globe literally uninhabitable if the air conditioners fail? There's not even a question! Set aside every moral and environmental question, and you're still left with the unambiguous case that moving national energy policy toward less-polluting alternatives will save the country from unfathomable economic costs in the decades to come.

We're not going to get that conversation on Meet the Press, ever, because no non-journalist booked on Meet the Press knows a damn thing about it. We're not going to get the kind of hard-edged reporting that the profession idolizes in fictional stories but shudders with contempt at providing itself, reporting in which political figures are confronted about their astonishing ineptitude in managing this or any other of the existential issues of the day.

We will get an unending parade of professional know-nothings to discuss how Joe Manchin's posturing or Bernie Sanders' gruffness might bump off-year poll numbers in the span between now and the future crisis, because that's the sort of talk that allows charlatans who don't believe in anything to have opinions on everything.

I'm tired. We're all tired. These shows are astonishingly tired, shambling along like brainless zombies wandering past thickets of political violence, environmental cataclysm, mass disease, widespread government failure, and the alteration of the nation's democratic discourse into, literally, an arena of professional hoax-promotion. The old formats were designed for sleepier times when the nation could coast along, ineffective and only a little bit corrupt, with no wars that affected the Important People or economic tragedies that the Important People could not weather. Now that we have passed through decades of ambivalent puttering to come face-to-face with genuine crisis, we learn that none of the shows are built to grapple with crises. They were a child's toy, a little playground in which the powerful could snip playfully at each other on camera before going to eat in the same tony restaurants and golf at the same posh resorts. They were not meant to tackle true problems—only to provide small, timed skits showing what tackling problems might look like, according to the fictions of the day, while making sure that none of it ever truly solved anything or even moved the conversation forward.

Those are not the formats in which a nation can grapple with a pandemic that will likely kill a million of its citizens. It would be farcical in the case of, say, a predicted asteroid strike or supervolcano eruption. It would be rendered so grotesquely absurd, if God Himself were to saunter down with a message or if alien life punched a hole through dimensions to invite us to dinner, that it would pass only as low comedy. Nobody on these shows gives a damn if the nation falls or the atmosphere burns. It was only meant to be a club for idle banter, nothing bold enough as to even scrape the lines of are laws based on overt bigotries bad or just a cultural choice, the sort of vapid dorm room debates on "are seat belts good" or "does unleaded gas represent government tyranny" that nobody involved would give two shits about, on their way home from the studio.

Meet the Press found itself confronting an actual insurrection—and folded. It couldn't cope. It had no tools for the job. So Chuck Todd invited the insurrectionists onto the program and helped redeem even election hoaxes, party-backed propaganda and candidate-organized insurrection as a reasonable political choice to be made. Not because he or anyone else involved gave a particular damn either way, and not because they did not, but because there is no Sunday morning format that can handle violent insurrection except as fodder for the professional know-nothings to banter aimlessly about. It was never meant to have actual stakes. Nobody, in any of the network executive suites, even knows what such a thing would look like.

===

prolly neglected as term less used? but // tucker on mainstream white nat'lism great replacement

921 ME

Following former President Donald Trump's jaw-dropping remarks during the presidential debate with then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, the far-right group The Proud Boys garnered national attention they'd never experienced before.

However, that spotlight also had its drawbacks because it subsequently became an integral part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) review of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The investigation led to many members of the organization being charged with insurrection-related crimes. But now, the far-right group is reportedly taking a different approach to politics in hopes of making more subtle progress to bring its agenda to fruition.

Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, spent years following the all-male extremist group, according to NPR. So she was well aware of the adverse effect that would likely come from Trump's words when he told them to "stand back and stand by" during that presidential debate.

The not-so-subliminal order from the president only piqued the interest of more far-right extremists who became interested in learning more about the organization. Speaking to the publication, Miller shed light on the future of the extremist organization and the agenda they reportedly have going forward.

"In the aftermath of that, suddenly everyone was talking about who the Proud Boys were and people were submitting applications to join the group," said Miller.

While the organization is known for its aggressive, violent nature, Miller is warning that changes are coming and the group is strategizing on a different level. According to Miller, they have also shifted their focal points for political rallies.

"They're simply switching up their organizational style," said Miller. "Now they are organizing more at a local level, they're hosting local rallies, or they're joining into other rallies around political flashpoints like critical race theory or anti-masking."

In addition to the structural changes, the group is also hoping to bring its authoritarian values to the forefront. In short, the goal is to normalize fascism and embrace a form of hierarchical society where white males remain the predominant Americans in positions of power.

"What they want to do is normalize their brand of politics, which is one that is authoritarian, that wants to push the creation of a more hierarchical society where men, and white men, in particular, retain the most power," she said.

Miller's remarks follow repeated warnings from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about the possibility of a rise in domestic terrorism. Speaking about the motivational factors behind domestic terrorism bulletin, Michael Chertoff, a former DHS secretary under President George W. Bush's administration, said, "In my view, it is domestic terrorism mounted by right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi groups." He added, "We have to be candid and face what the real risk is."

===

===

see also primary election as ampl fdbk

aha note amplif;  big lie stop steal are ghost dance, magical thinking that will restore the dear leader to rightful place and //quanin banish the evil-doers?

sparked by:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/end-of-enlightenment/

common dr robt freeman

The Enlightenment was a time of intellectual ferment in the Western world following the Middle Ages. Its ideas gave birth to the modern world.

We know the Enlightenment from the names of its most brilliant expositors: Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and others. We know its ideas as the foundation of our social world: the social contract, the rule of reason, the rule of law, consent of the governed, natural rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and others.

The Republican agenda is a direct assault on all of that. It literally aims to return America to the pre-modern, pre-Enlightened darkness of the Middle Ages. If it succeeds, it will reverse more than three hundred years of human progress.

The most egregious of Republican assaults on the modern world is its rejection of Reason. Reason is the way we know what we know. It is not through revelations from God, or the pronouncements of priests or monarchs as had been the case before the Enlightenment.

Reason as a process for discovering Truth started in the Scientific Revolution around 1550. It was so powerful a way of knowing the physical world, the philosophers of the Enlightenment adopted it for knowing—and improving—the social world. It became the foundation of all subsequent Enlightenment thought, and all modern institutions.

The Republican broadside against Reason was on display in the first days of the Trump administration when Trump asserted that his inauguration crowd size was the largest in history. Presented with facts to the contrary, in photographic evidence, his assistant, Kellyanne Conway, proclaimed the existence of "alternative facts." It's been downhill since.

Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason. The Muslim invasion. The caravan bringing murderers, rapists, drugs, and disease. Democrats eating babies. A satanic cult of pedophiles running the "Deep State." A pandemic that would "disappear, like a miracle." The greatest economy in the history of the world. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head being canceled. Biden's hamburger ban. A rigged election. Massive voter fraud. Terrorists who were really just tourists handing out hugs and kisses. It never ends.

The Republican assault on Reason is an attack not just on truth itself, but on our very capacity to think at all. With their base, Republicans address not the neo-cortex—the thinking part of the brain—but the amygdala—the lizard-brain seat of fight-or-flight. The amygdala subordinates logic, facts, reason, and deliberation to deceit, conspiracy, hysteria, and fear.

It's easier to trigger hatred and fear than thinking and logic. That's why Republicans do it. That's why their base—and increasingly, their "leaders"—sound like zombies, like robots, like members of a cult when they're interviewed for the evening news. They are. They've been programmed to fear and hate and blame, and the reinforcement is unending, [feedback? amplif?] because, to work, it has to be. Otherwise, they become unprogrammed.

It doesn't matter that none of the endless effusion of lies ever turn out to be true or that they are routinely, repeatedly abandoned in favor of newer lies for the next news cycle. What matters is that the lies incite indignation, and that the dopamine high that follows gets its constant, programmed, ever-increasing reinforcement.

Trump's 35,000 documented lies are the embodiment of it all.It is a leprous, insidious disease, an inability to deal with reality, but literally the one by which Republicans define themselves. Glandular excretions are the Republican formula for generating voter turnout: inciting Pavlovian rage based on a torrential fantasmia of lurid lies. It works, but it is the living, suppurating antithesis of Reason.

Another Republican assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment is the attack on Democracy. It was John Locke who, in 1689, wrote that people who were able to think could not be bullied like ignorant people could. If government wanted thinking people's cooperation it could no longer rely on the medieval divine right of kings. It needed to obtain "the consent of the governed." This, of course, became a sacrament of the American political order.

The opening words of the Constitution are, "We the people of the United States…" That is not a paean to monarchy, or to dictatorship. It is a statement that the consent of the people—and only that consent—provides a government its legitimacy. But Republicans are working feverishly to overturn the consent of the governed, to destroy Democracy.

Their assault on the Capitol on January 6th was the most conspicuous effort to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States but it was not the first and will certainly not be the last.Republicans insist that their reason-denying mobs, their goons, their Brownshirts will tell the rest of us how we will be governed. No consent involved, only submission: ours. You can see this in their fevered efforts at voter suppression, explicitly preventing majority rule and the consent of the governed.

Republicans cannot win power on the strength of their ideas and policies. They lost the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Large majorities favor policies backed by Democrats. So, they need to destroy Democracy itself to gain power. To do that, they need to destroy Reason as the way we know what we know. That is the core, the essence, the modus operandi of the Republican enterprise.

Constitutionalism is a third Enlightenment ideal that Republicans are intent on destroying. A constitution defines how a country is to be governed. Before constitutions, it was autocracy that called the shots. Think of Louis XIV's notorious declaration: "I am the state." Decisions were made by caprice, by the rich and powerful, in their own interests, everyone else be damned. Constitutionalism embeds the Rule of Law—another Enlightenment ideal—into a society, making "equal treatment under the law" a modern treasure, however badly it may be realized.

Besides losing all of the branches of the federal government, Republicans failed over and over and over to persuade the judicial branch to sanction their usurpation of the Constitution. So, they resort to performative charades like the farcical ballot laundering farrago in Arizona to try to undo the Constitutionally-ordained process for the peaceful transfer of power. Now, they're taking it to other states. It will not end.

We could go on. Republicans want to destroy the social contract—another Enlightenment ideal—that says you get ahead on the basis of hard work. They insist, instead, that privilege should be based on race, with the best spots reserved for whites. This violates the Enlightenment ideal of equality for all.

Remember the opening words of the Declaration of Independence? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Pure Enlightenment. In the Republican world, however, like in Orwell's Animal Farm which was an allegory of the degradation of Soviet totalitarianism, all men are created equal, but some—whites—are more equal than others.

We should be clear. This is not about peripheral protests over policy preferences. It is a broadside against the foundation, the institutional undergirding of our civilization. It is an attempt to destroy the conceptual milieu that has survived for centuries and that, however flawed it may be, has delivered the greatest freedom, expansion of rights, material progress, and human opportunity the world has ever known.

The measure of our alarm should be that Republicans, with the help of a complicit media, have managed to normalize rampant public lying, the unrestrained desecration of Reason, are carrying out an open, unabashed attack on our democracy, are carrying out notorious, savage assaults on Constitutionalism, the Rule of Law, Equality, and more. Our nation is literally under attack by anti-Enlightenment zealots determined to tear it down and it's not at all clear that they will not succeed.

It is indicative that the Republican party's highest priest is a thrice-married pathological liar, an admitted sexual assaulter, a draft dodger, a six-time filer for bankruptcy, a man who inflicted hundreds of thousands of excess deaths on the country, was twice impeached, who lost two successive popular vote counts, and who then attempted to overthrow the government. Read that sentence again and think about its implication.

The Republican hero, the man they model themselves on, the one they want us to bow down to, is a failed business man, a failed reality TV star, a failed president, a career con man who is the most corrupt, certainly the most craven and creepy individual ever known to American politics. This is the best Republicans have to offer. That is who they are, and what they insist on inflicting on all the rest of us, our consent be damned.

The Enlightenment helped the world replace monarchy with republicanism, a world ruled by theology with a world of science, autocracy with the rule of law, aristocratic privilege with the equality of all men, and feudalism with capitalism. No matter how imperfectly it may have been realized, it was as noble a vision as human beings have ever devised. The two worlds are the difference between the "Dark Ages" that went before and the modern world. That is the Republicans' promise to America.

More regression. More destruction of beautiful ideals and noble institutions. More degradation of deserving people. More humiliation of undignified people, themselves being the examples. More carnage. More chaos. More slime spewed on everyone.

There's not a syllable of inspiring vision in anything they have to say, not a word of uplifting ideals in any of it. It is all pathetic self-victimization and a lust for vengeance against those who refuse to respect them. We must all be dragged into the sewer that spawned, that is, and that sustains Donald Trump. That is his and Republicans' retaliation against a people who once had the temerity to believe in majestic ideals, the audacity to strive for them, and who once imagined that they might even be worthy of them.

===

===

julie h fair

an 121

the media seem to have finally found the line they won't abide crossing. After both sides–ing the political situation for four years of Donald Trump, the storming of the Capitol by an armed rebellion incited by Trump himself has brought out swift and strong words [wapo op ed pix

...always bear the stigma of having contributed to the day's shameful events."

"Trump Caused the Assault on the Capitol. He Must Be Removed," declared the Washington Post editorial board (1/6/21). "Responsibility for this act of sedition lies squarely with the president, who has shown that his continued tenure in office poses a grave threat to US democracy," they wrote. "He should be removed." They continued:

The president is unfit to remain in office for the next 14 days. Every second he retains the vast powers of the presidency is a threat to public order and national security. Vice President Pence, who had to be whisked off the Senate floor for his own protection, should immediately gather the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, declaring that Mr. Trump is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

The Post deplored GOP lawmakers like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who continued to press their baseless attempt to overturn the election, and praised Mitch McConnell, who "to his lasting credit" did not join them, even if, as they noted, "almost all" GOP members "bear some blame for what occurred on Wednesday." The Republicans, the paper wrote, have an "overriding responsibility to the nation: stopping Mr. Trump and restoring faith in democracy."

It's a surprisingly forceful position. At the same time, imagine if the paper—and the rest of the establishment media—had taken the GOP's threat to democracy seriously before it reached the point of the president inciting an armed insurrection on Capitol Hill.Yesterday's events were the logical outcome of years of the GOP and Trump casting aside institutional rules and norms one by one with increasing boldness, as the press corps described this increasingly authoritarian behavior as "us[ing] all of the levers of his power" (FAIR.org, 10/15/20), and years of giving Trump and his allies space to make their bogus claims of election fraud (FAIR.org, 9/15/20). The media's long history of both sides–ing the issue of purported election fraud (Extra!, 11–12/08, 10/12; CounterSpin, 10/21/16) paved the way for Trump's mythology that has seduced a breathtakingly—and dangerously—large proportion of the public.

Imagine if corporate media didn't praise McConnell, Lindsey Graham or any other Republicans who propped up Trump's dangerous lies for so long, for finally turning on him. Do they really believe we could have gotten to this point if McConnell and the rest of the party hadn't gone along with Trump's dangerously escalating lies–not just for the last several weeks, but for the last four years? If you keep your foot on the gas as the car speeds toward a cliff, but jump out a few seconds before you reach the edge, do you really deserve "lasting credit" for that?

The real test of corporate media will be not whether they are able to forcefully condemn a president's seditious acts, but whether they go back to business as usual after Trump is gone, pretending that the GOP, a disturbing number of whose members in Congress still pushed to overturn the election after the armed insurrection, is a democratic party that can be counted on to restore faith in democracy. [pix op ed]

new York Times (1/5/20): "More than 150 Republican lawmakers have signed on to reject the votes of tens of millions of Americans."

The Times editorial board, while silent so far after the events of yesterday, did publish a fairly benign opinion the day before ("Trump Still Says He Won. What Happens Next?"—1/5/20), whose optimism clearly didn't take seriously the extensive planning underway in broad daylight on right-wing websites: "The Republican effort to derail Congress's electoral vote count on Wednesday will fail, and President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in at noon on January 20, as the Constitution commands."

The Times could only muster the courage to say that "there is a strong argument" for impeachment (linking to an op-ed they published on January 4) without actually making that argument themselves;the piece concluded by praising Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for resisting Trump's corrupt attempts at overturning the election results, and lamenting, "If only that weren't extraordinary in the Republican Party today."

What's missing so far is a mea culpa from the media for its own role in normalizing the GOP's long-term efforts to drag this country toward authoritarian rule—and their cynical enjoyment of the ratings bonanza provided by the enthralling spectacle of Trump's assault on democracy (FAIR.org, 3/1/16). Instead, we have the editor of Columbia Journalism Review (11/4/20) castigating the press for spending too much time in the past four years on Trump's "infinite faults," and not enough trying to understand Trump supporters (FAIR.org, 11/16/20).

Kudos to the Washington Post for finally calling for a political reckoning. Now it's time for you to call for a media reckoning.

===

aha #1 central sacred norm is leave when you lose; mcconn and gop saying he has right to law/ct is screen for pathology

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/dont-normalize-trump/

no lnx

Chauncey DeVega and Salon November 28, 2020

Is Donald Trump still attempting a coup with the intention of remaining in power indefinitely? Yes. "I quit" is a phrase that does not appear in theauthoritarian's handbook.

Trump has announced his coup in public, which is a major reason why most people are not taking it seriously.

The president has repeatedly stated that the 2020 presidential election is illegitimate, and should be disregarded because he is not the winner. Given that he is a compulsive liar, on that one matter Trump has been remarkably consistent. Moreover, he signaled as early as 2016 his intent to engage in a coup, and other extralegal or illegal efforts to subvert any election where he does not win.

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by more than 6 million votes, and has also received 306 votes to Trump's 232 in the Electoral College. Both outcomes are a mandate from the American people that the Age of Trump is over and its leader should be left on the ash-heap of history, a nightmare to be awakened from.

In response, Trump's agents and followers are staging public protests, filing lawsuits on Trump's behalf claiming that he lost because of "voter fraud," "fake ballots" and other conspiracies, They have threatened violence and an "uprising" against Biden and the Democrats. Trump has not conceded defeat and under legal pressure is now only begrudgingly offering assistance in the transition of power. He is creating an overall environment of political instability, putting his most stalwart loyalists in key national security positions. As befits a political strongman and neofascist, Trump continues punishing the American people by further damaging the nation's economy and literally killing thousands of people each day through a campaign of negligence and sabotage in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

As the Age of Trump shambles toward its conclusion, the United States has again shown itself to be far from exceptional. Trump's coup attempt has put the country and its democracy in a state of limbo and "zombie politics."

In a new essay at the New York Review of Books, Fintan O'Toole explains:

It is impossible not to think, in this in-between moment, of Antonio Gramsci: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Something is dying, but we do not yet know what. Is it the basic idea of majority rule or is it the most coherent attempt to destroy that idea since the secession of the Confederacy?Something is trying to be born, but we cannot yet say what it is either. Is it an American version of the "managed democracy" or "electoral autocracy" that is the most rapidly expanding political form around the world? Or is it a radically renewed republic that can finally deal with the unfinished business of its history? The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross. …

If Trump is eventually removed from the Oval Office, the study of revenge and immortal hate, not sober self-criticism, will be the response in Trumpworld. There will be no chastening, just a further injection of resentment and conspiracy-mongering.

This is zombie politics — the life-after-death of a former conservative party. And as Gothic stories tell us, it is very hard to kill the undead. One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state.

In response to these events, the American mainstream news media and the commentariat, for the most part, are continuing with the same errors in analysis and narrative that helped to elect Trump in 2016 and then normalized his assaults on democracy and the rule of law for the next four years.

They are mocking Trump's defeats in the courts and describing them as though they are sporting events with a running tally of wins and losses. It is assumed to be a fait accompli that Biden is taking office in January. Trump is said to be "flailing" and "throwing tantrums"; and his behavior is "pathetic" and "embarrassing." Trump's coup attempt is "disorganized," as are his supporters with their supposed "low morale."

The possibility that Trump and his agents could find some way to alter the vote count and the assigned electors in key states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan is treated as an absurdity: "The law" and "the courts" would never allow such an outcome.

This is a form of political comfort food or sugar high, feeding a desperate hunger from the mainstream news media, the political class and the American people for a return to normalcy. But on some basic level they must know that Trump's attacks on democracy are abnormal and very dangerous.

Denial helped to birth Trumpism; failure to confront that denial means Trumpism will continue in America long after the man himself is gone.

In reality, Donald Trump, his Republican Party and their allies are playing a different game, one entirely outside of "normal politics" and the "folk theories of democracy" that the Fourth Estate and many other political elites worship like a religion.

Donald Trump and his movement's real goal is to make invalid any future election where Republicans do not win.

The attacks on the 2020 election are also part of a strategy which has shown itself to be successful in the extreme. Republican voters are being conditioned to view the Biden administration as having no legal authority because Trump was "betrayed." The net effect will be to encourage political violence and other acts of resistance by Trump's supporters and other Republican voters.

In a new essay for Medium, Indi Samarajiva reflects on his experience with the attempted coup in Sri Lanka in 2018 and issues a warning:

The tragic thing which you do not understand — which you cannot understand — is that you've already lost. You cannot know exactly what — that's the nature of chaos — but know this. You will lose more than you can bear.

We lost our children, playing at church. We lost our friends, sitting down to brunch. Muslims lost their dignity and rights. Your Republicans have set forces into play they cannot possibly understand and certainly cannot control. And they don't even want to. To them, chaos is a ladder. …

What I can tell you — what anyone who's experienced this can tell you — is that it's going to be bad. I didn't know that churches and hotels would blow up on Easter Sunday, but I know now. I'm trying to tell you in advance. You've opened up a Pandora's box of instability. All kinds of demons come out.

I have lived through a coup. It felt like what you're feeling now. Like watching something stupid and just waiting for it to go away. But it doesn't go away. You can forget about it, but it doesn't go away.

There's a ticking bomb at the heart of your democracy now. Your government, the very idea of governance is fatally wounded. Chaos has been planted at its heart. I don't know what this chaos will grow into, but I can promise you this. It won't be good.

American democracy is very sick. The jubilance and celebration at Trump's apparent defeat on Election Day were highly premature. Biden's victory was a drug that temporarily masked the pain of a democracy in critical condition. The patient can live "normally" until the high of the drug wears off. The crash will be extreme and horrible, almost beyond imagination, because the underlying disease has not been addressed.

The truth of what Trump and his neofascist movement have revealed about America's failures and vulnerabilities must be confronted if that civic disease is to be purged from the country's body politic. The reckoning must also include an assessment of the character and behavior of the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump and continue to support him.

On these questions of healing and what comes next after the Age of Trump, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading historian of fascism, had this to say in a recent phone conversation:

We are going to need a lot of grassroots education to help people understand what nefarious influence they were under with Trump. One of the saddest truths is that these men despise the people who love them. They disdain them for giving them their power. Many of us have been amazed that with the pandemic it's been very obvious he doesn't care if they die. He truly doesn't care if you live or die. Helping people to see that will be important to getting them back to the cause of good government, government that cares about public welfare. That's very different than building bridges to forgive people and saying, "OK, well we'll just put your racism behind us." That's not at all what I advocate.

Ultimately, American neofascism as mainstreamed by Donald Trump and his followers is a slow-acting poison. Trump's coup attempt is one more sign that it is working.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-fact-checking-may-be-futile-against-trumps-black-hole-of-lies/

Donald Trump has publicly lied at least 20,000 times since taking office, according to the Washington Post. He does this in part because he has shown himself to be mentally unwell, if not a sociopath. But he also lies because he is a fascist authoritarian. For such leaders, lies are a way of assaulting reality and truth as a means of achieving unlimited power. These explanations are not discrete. They overlap with one another.

In a season of massive death, Donald Trump and his regime's lies about the coronavirus are a public health emergency – one which has killed at least 216,000 people in the United States.

Donald Trump and his regime's lies have also severely damaged America's prestige, alliances and global power. The country's enemies have also been emboldened by the Trump regime's lies and overall lack of consistency in foreign policy and principles.

Most important, Trump and his regime's policy of lying (in conjunction with wanton cruelty and other evil) has undermined American democracy. A common understanding of reality is the foundation of a health democracy. The Trump regime's lies and those of its agents are rotting that foundation.

In "The Death of Truth," Michiko Kakutani explains that the damage Trump has done to the country's institutions and foreign policy will take "years to repair."

"And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away," Kakutani writes.

Why is Donald Trump such a powerful and effective liar? Why has the mainstream American news media largely surrendered to his lies, and by doing so normalized them? Would more aggressive fact-checking have blunted Donald Trump and his regime's strategy of lying? What explains why the mainstream American news media as a whole refused — and for the most part, continues to refuse — to describe Donald Trump and his regime accurately as being fascist and authoritarian?

In an effort answer these questions, I recently spoke with Eric Alterman, a columnist at The Nation and the author of more than 10 books, including the bestseller "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News." His latest book is "Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie and Why Trump is Worse."

Why are there now so many more voices in the mainstream American news media who, several weeks from Election Day, are finally using language such as "fascism" and "authoritarianism" to describe Trump and his regime? This was obvious several years ago. Why the delay? What were they waiting for?

There are many disincentives to tell the truth about Donald Trump. The most obvious one is that he's the President of the United States and people consider it disrespectful to use certain words about the president, like "liar" and "racist" and "conman" and "conspiracy nut," even when they're true. It is worse in Washington D.C. to call someone a liar than for them to actually be a liar.

In Washington, that rule is part of how a person makes a living. Therefore, people in the news media have to show respect for the office of the presidency. The second reason is that the ideology of "journalistic objectivity" does not have a framework for determining what the truth is. It has no bias for truth. "Journalistic objectivity" says on the one hand, so-and-so said this; on the other hand, his opposition said that, and you, the reader, you, the viewer, you, the listener, it is up to you to decide what's true.

Donald Trump is an idiot in many ways, but he is a genius when it comes to media manipulation.

The Washington Post has now documented at least 25,000 or so lies by Donald Trump — and nothing has changed in his behavior. If anything, he has become more brazen.

I do not find fact-checking as done in that way to be very helpful, because Donald Trump is not being fact-checked as he says the lies. If a person reads the fact-checking article, they will learn what Trump said is not true. Trump's lie still has power because it is repeated by the president and circulated. Again, Donald Trump has been winning this battle against the mainstream news media every day and they still have not really caught up to his strategy. The New York Times still does not really know what to do about Donald Trump in this regard and others.

Is the reluctance, if not fear, of calling Donald Trump a liar a function of the corporate culture of American's mainstream news media? Are reporters and journalists afraid of being punished in terms of their careers if they tell the unpolished truth about Donald Trump?

I have a different idea of lying than most of the country's journalistic institutions do because they will almost never use the words "lie" or "liar" when it comes to the president or most politicians. Instead most in the mainstream news media will say, "We can't know his intent. We can't know what's in his heart." They assume that a lying politician may believe the nonsense that they are saying. My position is if a politician should know what is true and he does not, then he is lying.

I do not care what the excuse is. I don't care if Trump or some other politician thinks God is talking to him. I don't care if Trump is too disengaged from reality. I don't care if Trump is so much of a narcissist that he makes up stuff and he believes it. If it's the president's job to know something and he misinforms the country, then he's lying. Worry about his motivation some other time.

There has never been a historical moment in this country where a president, in this case Donald Trump, could be ignored because everyone knows he's so full of lies and nonsense.

Donald Trump might get reelected and destroy our democracy because so many in the mainstream news media are treating Donald Trump's lies and delusions as though it is all somehow normal.

Why has the White House press corps been so accommodating and enabling of Trump's lies? He also uses them as props for his fascist performances. Why do the members of the White House press corps not just walk about of the briefings or stand up and turn their backs to him?

They do not know how to do their job any other way. Their job is defined as getting whatever information is available at the White House. So even if it's lies, even if it's daily humiliation, the press corps has to go back the next day. Those reporters need to be on good terms with the people who are giving out the information — even if they're not giving out real or otherwise substantive information. It would be nice if the job of the White House press corps was to actually go out and find news, but that's not what they're there for. They're there as conduits for the White House....

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tillis and joni e repeating qanon stuff?! on covid

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/this-is-how-you-normalize-a-madman-scholars-and-press-watchdogs-urge-corporate-media-to-treat-trump-like-the-authoritarian-threat-he-is/

no lnx twt pix

This is how you normalize a madman': Scholars and press watchdogs urge corporate media to treat Trump like the authoritarian threat he is

Lisa Newcomb and Common Dreams September 25, 2020

Major news outlets failed the American people, critics say, when they chose to bury coverage of President Donald Trump's Wednesday comment that he would not commit to a peaceful transition of power—a statement watchdogs say demanded above-the-fold, front-page headlines that simply did not materialize.

"Newsroom leaders made a considered, intentional decision not to panic after Trump was elected," Dan Froomkin, editor of PressWatchers.org, wrote in a scathing rebuke of corporate media's apparent nonchalant attitude towards the president's rhetoric. "This was an epic, obvious mistake, and everything that has happened since was in some sense entirely predictable."

Froomkin continued, "They should have gone on a war footing—and by that I don't mean a partisan war against Trump, I mean a journalistic war against lies, ignorance, and intolerance."

Critics weighed in on the relative non-importance corporate news outlets assigned—in print and online—to Trump's latest suggestion that he may not cede the office of the presidency should he lose in November:

Some observers balked when Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, attempted to explain away the Times' decision to bury the news by citing print publication deadlines. One pointed to the late-evening news of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death last week, which was an above-the-fold feature in the next day's Times print edition.

Broadcast media also drew rebukes for its lack of emphasis on Trump's veiled threat at the democratic process.

"Wednesday's network evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC were no better," Eric Boehlert, founder and editor of PressRun wrote. "Not only did none of them lead with Trump's stunning proclamation, none of the broadcasts even reported on Trump's comments. This is how you normalize a madman. (CNN and MSNBC did a much better job covering the transfer-of-power story.)"

At PressWatchers.org, Froomkin explained how the dynamics in corporate newsrooms have led to complacency among journalists tasked with reporting on Trump's presidency:

One overarching problem is that our major newsrooms have simply gotten so corporate and even-keeled that our top editors value unflappability as a signal virtue. (OK, I admit I take this one a little personally, being a flappable person. A top Washington Post editor once called me "hysterical.") Flappable people don't rise through the ranks. Corporate people do.

Journalism to me is about crusading for the truth. But the notion that a serious, major news organization would pursue a crusade on behalf of its community is considered hippy shit by the people in charge these days. So is consistently standing up to a lawless con man. They've gotten used to printing lies. They barely squawk when Trump calls them the "enemy of the people." They have their algorithms, and they won't give them up no matter what. They just continue to "do the work."

So yeah, their news souls are dead. There, I said it.

Lawmakers and progressive advocates called out the dangerous threat to democracy uttered by the commander-in-chief—and the corporate media for treating it like any other day in Trump's scandal-laden presidency.

"Great (not) to watch journalists reporting Trump's latest direct attacks on the republic as if it's all just a regular press conference," longtime journalist Dan Gillmortweeted Wednesday. "Historians will see Big Journalism's business as usual in this emergency as one of the proximate causes of the American republic's death."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gave a speech Thursday denouncing Trump's declared refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power, saying: "This is not just an election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is an election between Donald Trump and democracy—and democracy must win."

Sanders also outlined steps necessary to prepare the American public and lawmakers for chaos of election night and beyond, calling on the news media specifically to "prepare the American people to understand there is no longer a single election day and that it is very possible that we may not know the results on November 3."

Froomkin pointed out that corporate media's opinion pages are more accurately depicting the real danger of Trump's recent rhetoric than front-page headlines.

"But as usual, to capture the real drama of what's going on, you have to go to the opinion writers—and the editorial cartoonists," he wrote, sharing a link to an op-ed by Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent.

"What really matters here is that Trump is making an actual declaration of intent," Sargent wrote, "not just to refuse to respect the outcome, but rather to try to cancel and override it, if he is able to get away with it."

Boehlert issued a more dire warning:

Trump isn't running for re-election in the sense he's hoping to accumulate more voter support than Biden. (His campaign keeps taking down ads in swing states.)Trump's running to maintain power. He's signaling that he'll refuse to give it up and will not accept his defeat as being legitimate. He's trying to steal an election. In reality, he doesn't care what the results are—he has no intention of abiding by the nation's will, and thinks he can count on the corrupt support of the GOP, the Department of Justice, and the United States Supreme Court to win his lawless battle in the days and weeks after the election.

*:{

}:*

"Our democracy is at stake," Boehlert concluded. "Trump is trying to steal an election, and the press should say so, every day until Election Day."

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david n

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/

...trump] refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:

• Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal, and has been from the start. His opening salvo in the campaign—the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race poll-wise and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans—labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease—was classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. This became more refined and pronounced over the course of his presidency, as when he attacked four women Democratic congressmembers of color: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave!”
• Trump’s palingenetic ultranationalism is his central theme. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidency and its neverending campaign, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”) That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis—that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but in the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
• Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
• Trump constantly proclaimed America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world during the 2016 campaign, and insists that this occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians.During his presidency, the crises varied according to Trump’s political needs—an immigrant caravan’s arrival on the border with Mexico was portrayed hysterically by Trump during the 2018 midterm elections as an existential threat, while this year, America is in grave danger (according to Trump and his fellow Republicans) from a largely imaginary “antifa threat.” The coronavirus pandemic that the world knows his incompetence allowed to kill 200,000 Americans—not so much.
• He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
• Trump’s contempt for weakness (another classic fascist trait) is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his mockery of a *New York Times reporter with a disability, and more recently to his decision not to attend a ceremony at a World War II gravesite near Paris because the American soldiers there who had died in the war were “losers” and “suckers.”*

Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference.

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims byFox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing punditthat the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normalthat they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them....

greenwald/fang

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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/the-normalization-of-trump-and-what-comes-after.html

The ‘Normalization’ of Trump, and What Comes After

By Charles Homans

Nov. 1, 2016

Early this year, when a string of primary victories established Donald Trump as a viable presidential candidate and making sense of him became a matter of some national urgency, one of the more incisive assessments came from Newt Gingrich. At a closed-door meeting of the Republican State Leadership Committee in February, Gingrich argued that Trump was not a conservative but rather an “American nationalist” — one whose success suggested he had found “a formula worthy of study.” He noted how Trump seemed bent on not just vanquishing his rivals but on eviscerating them. “He’s the grizzly bear in the room,” Gingrich said. “He’s not normal.”

There was a game-recognize-game aspect to this, coming from Gingrich, a genuinely eccentric politician who long ago sublimated his weirder tendencies into canny partisan street fighting. Trump, Gingrich said, needed to adapt similarly, tempering his instincts with the kind of restrained, hopeful messaging that might persuade a general-election audience. “If he and his team understand this,” Gingrich said, “I suspect they will evolve rapidly.”

It is difficult to remember now, not even half a year later, but for a moment this spring, after Trump cleared the Republican field, this was one of his opponents’ greatest fears: that Trump — aided by a Republican Party mindful of its future and a political media seeking balanced campaign narratives — would remake himself as a disciplined, moderate candidate, and voters would believe it. “My campaign is not going to let Donald Trump try to normalize himself,” Hillary Clinton vowed in May.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “normalize” as “to make normal; to bring or return to a normal or standard condition or state.” It’s a word, then, as nebulous and conditional as the idea of normalcy itself — and one whose many meanings have been debated throughout a campaign season of unusual self-scrutiny within America’s professional political class.

It was possible, in the early days of Trump’s probable nomination, to imagine his general-election campaign unfolding as a radical experiment, a test of the political system’s ability to coax a candidate who had shredded the country’s civic norms back toward the median. But Trump, of course, would not be coaxed — and still, his poll numbers were, until recently, only a few points shy of where Mitt Romney, a candidate who was normal to the point of abnormality, stood at the same junctures in 2012.

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Which has left us to consider a much darker question: whether our definition of “normal” politics has been irretrievably altered by Trump, rather than vice versa. “I think one of the greatest dangers of Donald Trump,” Stuart Stevens, Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in May, “is the idea that he might normalize a speech and an attitude that as a group in America we have decided is unacceptable.” Whether or not Trump loses on Tuesday, it’s likely that nearly half of American voters will have decided that what he represents isn’t so unacceptable after all.

The hand-wringing over Trump’s normalization began in earnest in the wake of the May 4 Indiana primary victory that drove the last of his serious Republican rivals from the race, which in retrospect was the moment his normalization became all but inevitable. The day after the primary, Vox’s David Roberts predicted that within the “whole superstructure of U.S. politics built around two balanced sides” — the media, consultants, parties and the like — “there will be a tidal pull to normalize this election, to make it Coca-Cola versus Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola versus sewer water.”

But since then, reporters have proved more blunt in their assessments of Trump, and many Republicans and conservative intellectuals more principled in their dissent, than the pessimists expected. The superstructure might not have fully escaped the gravitational forces that Roberts described, but it’s not clear how much it could have once Trump appeared to have sealed the nomination. Could journalists defensibly refuse to cover, or Republicans defensibly refuse to nominate, the clear winner of a plurality of the party’s primary votes?As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes commiserated with the conservative talk-radio host Charlie Sykes last month, Trump “has marched through all the normal institutions we have, and in some ways that can’t help but be normalizing.”

As this has become clearer, the arguments over how, and by whom, Trump was normalized have become backward-looking ones. The Republican strategist Rick Wilson recently tweeted a Times graphic showing that Trump had received an estimated $1.9 billion worth of free media coverage — nearly nine times what Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio each received and two and a half times what Clinton received — with the words: “Never forget. There was no movement. The media handed him this on a plate.”

Wilson’s not wrong. A Shorenstein Center survey of eight major print and broadcast outlets (including The Times) found that between June and December 2015, Trump received more than a third of all the coverage devoted to Republican presidential candidates — more than Bush and Rubio combined. If this reflects Trump’s status as, in the Shorenstein report’s words, “arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee,” it also reflects a self-interest that media executives have at times not even bothered to conceal. “The money’s rolling in, and this is fun,” Les Moonves, chairman of CBS, said in February. “It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” Perhaps no single person enabled, and benefited from, Trump’s political ascent more than the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who as head of NBC Entertainment greenlit “The Apprentice” and in his current role is reportedly anticipating $100 million in extra profits thanks to CNN’s wall-to-wall Trump coverage.

But then how do you explain Bernie Sanders? The Vermont senator won 22 states in the Democratic primary with less media coverage than either Bush or Rubio and more negative coverage than Trump. This year, the failings of the country’s elites, political and otherwise, unleashed in both parties forces that were beyond those elites’ control — but in only one party did they take the form of a political revolt that sanctions white nationalism, embraces conspiracism and openly considers armed resistance and extrajudicial imprisonment of its enemies. When Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, who once described Trump as “too bigoted and racist” to be president, impugns the patriotic bona fides of his opponent, Tammy Duckworth, by invoking her Asian ancestry, it’s absurd to pretend that these things came out of nowhere.

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Republican leaders own the blame for assembling the constituency and, yes, normalizing the values that made Trump’s nomination possible, and they will also own the responsibility for denormalizing Trumpism, for walking the country back from the ledge, after Nov. 8 — though how much chance they, or anybody, have of doing that is anybody’s guess.Paul Ryan, the House speaker, saw his support within his party recede overnight in October, after he dared to even slightly distance himself from Trump (without rescinding his endorsement); in one subsequent poll, 51 percent of Republicans deemed him a “weak leader.” Ryan had always implied that his endorsement of Trump had much to do with the prospects for advancing his own policy agenda in a policy-uninterested Trump administration. “We need to normalize these ideas,” he told The Washington Post earlier this year. History will probably remember him and his party for normalizing something else.

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jay rosen j school

Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer

A conflict in the journalist's code was created by a president wholly unfit for the job.

17 SEP 2017 

Most every journalist who covers Trump knows of these things: :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

1. He isn’t good at anything a president has to do. From the simplest, like pretending to help out in flood relief, to the hardest: making the call when all alternatives are bad. (We’re told he can be charming one-on-one. So maybe that’s his one skill.) :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

2. He doesn’t know anything about the issues with which he must cope. Nor does this seem to bother him. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

3. He doesn’t care to learn. It’s not like he’s getting better at the job, or scrambling to fill gaps in his knowledge. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

4. He has no views about public policy. Just a few brute prejudices, like if Obama did it, it was dumb. I do not say he lacks beliefs — and white supremacy may be one — but he has no positions. His political sky is blank. No stars to steer by. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

5. Nothing he says can be trusted. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

6. His “model” of leadership is the humiliation of others— and threat of same. No analyst unfamiliar with narcissistic personality types can hope to make sense of his actions in office. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

It’s not like items 1-6 have been kept secret. Journalists tell us about them all the time. Their code requires that. Simultaneously, however, they are called by their code to respect the voters’ choice, as well as the American presidency, of which they see themselves a vital part, as well as the beat, the job of White House reporting. The two parts of the code are in conflict. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

This is “normalization.” This is what “tonight he became president” is about. This is why he’s called “transactional,” why a turn to bipartisanship is right now being test-marketed by headline writers. This is why “deal-making” is said to be afoot when there is barely any evidence of a deal. :{:(style="background:0px 0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;outline:0px;box-sizing:border-box;display:inline-block"):}:

What they have to report brings ruin to what they have to respect. So they occasionally revise it into something they can respect: at least a littl

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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/drawing-false-equivalence-between-ilhan-omar-and-marjorie-taylor-greene-not

On  August 11, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) won her primary campaign for reelection in Minnesota’s heavily Democratic 5th Congressional District. On the same day, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, also prevailed in her congressional primary in Georgia, almost definitively securing her a spot in Congress from her Republican-majority district.

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The two could not be more different as political candidates -- Omar is the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, while Greene has long supported the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory -- yet reporters and news outlets are falling into the disingenuous trap of decrying their supposedly shared radicalism and drawing false equivalencies between their beliefs.

In doing so, news outlets are both normalizing the violence-linked QAnon conspiracy theory and helping to push a targeted smear campaign against Omar.

The idea that Greene is somehow the Ilhan Omar of the Republican Party — an idea the National Republican Congressional Committee communications director alluded to when asked about Greene — is not only unfounded, but also a deflection on the part of Republicans to avoid any accountability for Greene’s QAnon roots.

Who is Marjorie Taylor Greene and what is her connection to QAnon?

Greene ran as a Republican and won her runoff GOP primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, functionally securing her a seat in Congress. Greene is an outspoken QAnon supporter and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who, according to The Washington Post, “has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments.”

While some Republicans initially distanced themselves from Greene after reports of her QAnon support and other comments surfaced, many embraced her in the wake of the primary election. President Donald Trump enthusiastically praised Greene’s win on Twitter, calling her a “future Republican Star.”

An internal FBI memo published by Yahoo News in 2019 classified QAnon as a domestic terrorism threat because of its ties to violence. The memo explained that the conspiracy theory revolves around a supposedly high-level government official known as “Q” who “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring." These violent ties include a man who murdered his brother with a sword and another who threatened to kill YouTube employees.

Why the false equivalence?

In 2019, Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) publicly criticized Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called their comments worse than those of infamous white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who had recently been stripped of his committee assignments. Omar then tweeted, “It's all about the Benjamins baby,” in response to an article reporting that McCarthy was working to punish members of Congress critical of Israel. Omar later apologized for some of her phrasing and accidental use of anti-Semitic tropes while also doubling down on her criticism of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying group. 

A month later, Omar again drew controversy for her remarks about lobbying by AIPAC:

Some Jewish leaders said she then revived an old trope about divided loyalties among Jewish-Americans when she said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

She added, “I want to ask, ‘Why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the (National Rifle Association), or fossil fuel industries or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?’”

Omar’s critical stance gave rise to disingenuous attacks against her by right-wing media figures who claimed that her criticism of Israeli policies makes her horribly anti-Semitic.

Right-wing media outlets have now begun to compare Omar to Greene, falsely claiming that Greene is simply the Republican version of her.

What makes the comparison between the two women particularly outrageous is the fact that Politico unearthed hours of racist and anti-Muslim video rants from Greene’s Facebook, some of which specifically targeted Omar.

Greene described the election of Omar and Tlaib as “an Islamic invasion into our government offices” and called Omar “that woman out of Minnesota" who “has got to wear a head covering." She said, “If you want Islam and Sharia law, you stay over there in the Middle East. … You stay there, and you go to Mecca and do all your thing. And, you know what, you can have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.You stay over there. But in America, see, we’ve made it this great, great country. We don’t want it messed up."

In fact, following the AIPAC controversy, Greene traveled to Capitol Hill in 2019 and filmed herself attempting to confront Omar and Tlaib, who she falsely claimed are “illegitimate members of Congress because they took their congressional oaths of office on the Quran” (Greene said she wanted to make them retake their oath on the Bible). “She also said she wanted to tell them they ‘really should go back to the Middle East if they support Sharia.’”

Greene’s racist rants reportedly include a statement that Black people are being “held slaves to the Democratic Party.” She has also posted “an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that [liberal philanthropist George] Soros, a Holocaust survivor, collaborated with the Nazis” and secretly controls “every single Democrat politician.”

Despite ample evidence of Greene’s bigotry and racism, right-wing media are still comparing her politics to those of Omar.

Examples of right-wing media drawing false equivalencies

Right-wing media outlets are unapologetically comparing Omar and Greene, implying that they are both equally radical but on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

• The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro had a meltdown on the August 14 edition of his show over election coverage of Omar and Greene, claiming that Omar “is a radical anti-Semite who really, really, really hates Israel and says horrible things about the United States as well,” but the media cover her favorably compared to the way they report on Greene. “It’s worth covering Greene,” Shapiro continued, “but it’s also worth covering” how the media have treated Omar even though she has “said awful things beginning to end from the very moment that she entered Congress and actually well before.” Shapiro also concluded that Greene’s treatment is part of the “media double standard.”

• Prior to discussing this on his show, Shapiro had also tweeted a similar sentiment.

• ZeroHedge, a far-right conspiracy theory blog, posted an article both-sidesing Omar and Greene titled “‘Anti-Semite’ Ilhan Omar & ‘QAnon Believer’ Marjorie Taylor Greene Win Tuesday-Night Primaries.”

• On the August 12 edition of The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino, Fox News anchor Dana Perino made a further false equivalency between Omar and Greene as she displayed their photos while introducing a report on primary elections, saying, “Two of the most polarizing congressional candidates out there had a very good night.”

• On the August 12 edition of Fox News @ Night, conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey compared Omar to Greene, saying, “You know, it's hard not to see that characterization of both sides kind of being taken by their extremes, especially on the left when you've got a Democratic Party who for example won't denounce some of the things Ilhan Omar has said.” She concluded that “we have to resist though the fear that maybe both parties are gripped by the most extreme and, in some cases, the most bigoted parts of their party.”

• Fox contributor Doug Schoen published an op-ed on Fox News’ website claiming that while both elections “provide clear evidence of the ascendancy of fringe movements and candidates within both major parties,” Omar’s reelection is more dangerous than Greene’s primary win: “It is clear to me that Omar’s victory and the threat of the progressive movement overtaking the mainstream Democratic party poses a greater challenge to Joe Biden and the Democrats than Greene’s victory does to Donald Trump and the GOP.”

Even mainstream media are drawing comparisons

While often more subtle than right-wing media, some mainstream media reporters are just as guilty in comparing Omar and Greene. NBC News contributor Dave Wasserman irresponsibly compared Omar and Greene:

After Wasserman posted his tweet, National Republican Congressional Committee Communications Director Chris Pack quote-tweeted it, asking, “What's the (D)iffe(R)ence between the two?”

A number of mainstream media outlets categorized Omar and Greene together when reporting election results, describing them both as controversial without sufficient nuance.

• USA Today ran a piece headlined “Tuesday's primaries: Ilhan Omar fights for political survival and QAnon believer hopes to join the House,” calling them “the two biggest races to watch” for “some primary drama.”
• Politico grouped Omar and Greene together when reporting election night results, comparing the House resolution opposing anti-Semitism directed at Omar to future measures to be potentially taken against Greene.

Yet in a sign of how tight Trump’s grip is on the GOP, few Republicans — including those who campaigned against Greene — spoke out in the wake of her primary win. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), GOP Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Emmer of Minnesota had no comment on Wednesday.

A spokesperson to Emmer responded by invoking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came under fire for repeating Jewish tropes that many feel are anti-Semitic. Omar won her primary Tuesday night.

“Are Cheri Bustos and the DCCC going to support Ilhan Omar, given the concern House Democrats have expressed repeatedly with her racism and anti-Semitism?” NRCC spokesman Chris Pack said.

House Democrats responded to the Omar controversy last year by passing two resolutions decrying anti-Semitism, though the Minnesota Democrat wasn’t named in either measure.

McCarthy and GOP congressional leaders are hampered in how they can stop Greene by House rules and legal precedents. If Greene were to win in November, as expected, there’s no way the House can refuse to seat her, despite her incendiary comments.

Comparing Greene and Omar is not only incorrect, but normalizes QAnon

Falsely suggesting the politics and beliefs of Greene and Omar are equally “radical” is both dangerous and incorrect. Equating Omar’s critical stance on the Israeli occupation of Palestine with Greene’s well-documented support for QAnon, which is rooted in beliefs about Satan-worshipping pedophiles running the world, creates a dangerous normalization of the conspiracy theory at a time when she will be one of at least 20 QAnon supporters on the ballot in November.

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no lnx

Cultural Comment

What Normalization Means

By Hua Hsu

November 13, 2016

Racism sexism and the other hatreds and phobias on display in Donald Trumps movement didnt become normalized this year....

In the early two-thousands, I was assigned to profile an up-and-coming Atlanta rapper named Killer Mike, for the magazine Vibe. It wasn’t my idea, but I needed the money and he was touring with OutKast, so I figured that at least I’d get to see them live. I met him backstage at the amphitheatre, hoping to get enough material as quickly as possible, and then return to the show. But our conversation went everywhere: inequality, Nietzsche, union labor, Atlanta, drug dealing, his favorite books. Mike was luminous, pulsing with insight. At one point, he became deeply reverential about the power of hip-hop. People of a certain age, he noted, had grown up fearing that hip-hop would eventually get extinguished by the powers that be. But here it still was, bringing together two twenty-somethings who had taken radically different paths to this moment, in this dressing room, sipping a couple of OutKast’s beers. Hip-hop is so big, he said, that we would someday have a President who grew up listening to it. We talked for so long that he nearly missed his cameo verse on “The Whole World.” (Somehow, this all ended with me onstage during “Bombs Over Baghdad,” but that’s a story for another day.)

In the summer of 2008, I reached out to Mike again, while I was working on a piece for The Atlantic about Barack Obama’s candidacy. I asked Mike if he remembered what he had said a few years earlier. He did. But the hypothetical President he had in mind, he said, was some “cool white boy.” We laughed: the very premise of a black President was, just a few years earlier, unfathomable. It was normal to presume that someone who looked like him would never ascend to that seat.

“Normal” means different things to different people. In the wake of this week’s election results, there has been a lot of talk about the ways in which dangerous things come to be viewed as just another part of everyday life. Often, this process happens in the places where you least expect political events to transpire. It’s on the late-night talk show, when the comedian giggles as he tousles Donald Trump’s hair, signalling that this madman can take a joke; it’s in the life-style magazine that works to humanize him and those around him, suggesting that people with furniture dipped in gold are just like us; it’s in the conversations where one person dampens another’s alarmism by wondering, Have you ever actually seen a Klansman?

There’s been a lot of soul-searching this week, particularly within the media, about how beholden we’ve all become to our preferred silos of self-identification. Implicit in this is a desire to understand and reckon with the overwhelmingly white voting base that delivered the Electoral College to Trump. Rather than disavowing those with whom we disagree, this line of reasoning goes, we must understand them, and see the humanity in their anxieties about the economy or immigration or Black Lives Matter or isis. But in the rush to be radically empathetic, and reckon with another’s disaffection, a different kind of normalization occurs: We validate an identity politics that is often rooted in denying other people’s right to the same.

Americanness is a sponge, not an ethnicity; normalization is a key part of how it works. It resides in the way that we speak, in the ideas that get refined and reworked and encoded in ordinary words until they seem harmless enough. It’s the ability to fit things into a narrative that flatters our ability to reason. Normalization is the process through which wisdom becomes conventional and utopian ideals slam against questions of feasibility. And so we should remain suspicious of efforts to welcome Trumpism into the fold of mainstream American ideas, particularly when normalizing him suggests the privilege to pick and choose, to infer the existence of another’s decency and humanity, to laugh, and to think that, at the end of the day, we all just want the same thing.

Naturally, a lot of the conversation concerning Trump’s rise has been about television. The stakes for this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” seemed especially high, given not only the election but also the return of the occasionally incendiary comedian Dave Chappelle. And there were a few moments when the gravity of real life poked through the artifice: Kate McKinnon reprised Hillary Clinton, singing the late Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and doing it straight, not for laughs. Chappelle recalled, at the end of his monologue, the hope that he felt just days ago, as a black man welcomed to the White House. Chris Rock burst into a skit, as if to remind us that this was all fake. It felt good to laugh; it felt normal. And yet it was also hard to forget that Trump had appeared on this same show a year ago—that “Saturday Night Live” had traded on his clownishness for ratings, and made him seem acceptable. Increasingly, our everyday lives will require us to consider these questions of complicity, the broader consequences of what we choose to consume, read, or create.

What much of this debate obscures—and what Chappelle reminded us in one of the night’s best skits, about a group of friends watching the election returns—is who qualifies as “us.” Who, in newsrooms and on TV, decides what is normal? Normalization isn’t just a matter of human-interest stories and a faith in checks and balances. What we think of as normal shapes our field of vision; it tells a story of the world and its possibilities.

Racism, sexism, and the other hatreds and phobias lately on display didn’t become normalized this year. They’ve always been normal—for some of us. For those of us who long had to get used to these things, what is now being called normalization is merely a form of the resignation that attends life and its possibilities. How can it be otherwise? Some Americans are not born into the belief that the system is for them, and do not grow up with the promise that nothing is beyond reach, that anyone can become President. Why not reckon with this version of normal, too?

“HyperNormalisation,” the latest documentary by the British filmmaker Adam Curtis, takes on this question, painting a picture of a world increasingly dominated by the false reality put forth by corporations and politicians. Curtis invokes Alexei Yurchak, a theorist who lived under Soviet authoritarianism. Yurchak distilled the strange sensation of knowing that reality is being meted out to you according to someone else’s whims. “No one could imagine any alternative,” Curtis paraphrases. “You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.”

After 9/11, I remember talking to friends about “the new normal,” the way that feelings of shock just got absorbed into the inconveniences of ordinary life. I never want to forget how this week has felt. Let it be a lingering amphetamine, an engine, a reason to believe that everything matters. Sooner rather than later, the drama that currently hangs over every second will melt into air, and some semblance of normal life will return. Most of us will move forward; some will feel left behind. Eventually, the passions of this week might seem overheated. Our laws can be unwritten and then rewritten. Politicians come and go. This week is now a part of our history, a paragraph or a few pages that someone in the future will read as a string of actions. But the legacy of this moment—how we will be judged—remains to be written.

What was normal for the past eight years was virtually unthinkable a decade ago. Eventually, Killer Mike became a voice for working people and one of Bernie Sanders’s biggest supporters. We rise to meet circumstances that we may never have foreseen. This is the only thing that steadies me. I keep reminding myself that the true magnitude of this moment will not be felt until people who today are too young to vote come of age—people who will enter into life with a different vision of what was possible than those who came before. The Obama years weren’t fantasy, nor were they a perfect reality. But they were normal.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.”

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