Trump and the media at war, with the rightwing echo joining the forces of evil….
Before we get into political updates & articles on Trump and the media, let’s begin with our attempt to psychoanalyze the inexplicable. These excerpts show the first paragraph as the start & the second the end to why-trump-supporters-dont-mind
In his first 400 days in office, President Trump made more than 2,400 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. Yet a recent Gallup poll shows his approval ratings among Republicans at 82 percent. How do we square these two facts? Some supporters no doubt believe many of the falsehoods. Others may recognize the claims as falsehoods but tolerate them as a side effect of an off-the-cuff rhetorical style they admire. Or perhaps they have become desensitized to the dishonesty by the sheer volume of it. I suspect that there is an additional, underappreciated explanation for why Mr. Trump’s falsehoods have not generated more outrage among his supporters. Wittingly or not, Mr. Trump’s representatives have used a subtle psychological strategy to defend his falsehoods: They encourage people to reflect on how the falsehoods could have been true.
The problem wasn’t that people confused fact and fiction; virtually everyone recognized the claims as false. But when a falsehood resonated with people’s politics, asking them to imagine counterfactual situations in which it could have been true softened their moral judgments. A little imagination can apparently make a lie feel “truthy” enough to give the liar a bit of a pass. These results reveal a subtle hypocrisy in how we maintain our political views. We use different standards of honesty to judge falsehoods we find politically appealing versus unappealing. When judging a falsehood that maligns a favored politician, we ask, “Was it true?” and then condemn it if the answer is no. In contrast, when judging a falsehood that makes a favored politician look good, we are willing to ask, “Could it have been true?” and then weaken our condemnation if we can imagine the answer is yes. By using a lower ethical standard for lies we like, we leave ourselves vulnerable to influence by pundits and spin doctors. In this time of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” commentators worry that people with different political orientations base their judgments of right and wrong on entirely different perceptions of reality. My research suggests an additional concern: Even when partisans agree on the facts, they can come to different moral conclusions about the dishonesty of deviating from those facts. The result is more disagreement in an already politically polarized world. Blame the human ability to imagine what might have been.
Let’s now analyze the battle between Trump and the media. In order to discredit the media & legitimate journalism, Trump & his cohorts at Fox & the rest of the echo are gaslighting America. This article what-trump-really-means-when-h
One of the distinguishing traits of the troll-style politics that dominates Trump-era conservatism is the utter disregard for any values outside of winning at all costs and, perhaps even more importantly, defeating liberals. Decency, political norms and truth itself are all treated as acceptable casualties in the endless quest to fuck with the left. But while many of the excesses of the right seem new, the reality is that the Trumpian right is just the outgrowth from roots laid years, even decades ago, in the American right. The racism and sexism, the conspiracy theories, the harping about political correctness? All of it goes back decades and is only exploding out of control now because the right wing political infrastructure has let these foul ideologies and stupid ideas flourish for so long. Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to Donald Trump’s war on the media. All his lies and outrageous accusations can be traced directly back to decades of right-wing pundits and politicians encouraging conservative voters to believe that mainstream media sources have a “liberal bias” and are not to be trusted. Trump simply takes it to the next level, dispensing with the notion that truth and facts themselves are relevant and insisting that the validity of a news report depends entirely on how flattering he finds it.
“Fake news” started as a banal term, invented by Buzzfeed reporters, to describe fabricated stories that were being passed off by hoaxsters as real news reports. Soon, however, Trump, whose ego was bruised by hearing that fake news had helped elect him, started aggressively using the term “fake news” to demonize any news he disapproves of. Soon, the usage was picked up across the right, and now the term is almost exclusively used to mean news that is actually true, but which conservatives reject for ideological reasons. It’s particularly disconcerting to witness the way conservatives yell “fake news” at every unfavorable news story with an unmitigated glee. They know that cavalierly dismissing obviously factual stories as “fake” really aggravates liberals, and trolling the left is, for right-wingers circa 2018, an activity more pleasurable than sex. Calling obviously true news “fake news” is gaslighting, a form of manipulation where the manipulator tells blatant lies to the victim and, when called out, stands by the lies, often blaming the target’s supposed mental damage if the target insists that the truth is true. Gaslighting people, especially women, by calling them “crazy” for rejecting his lies is a favorite practice of Trump’s. He’s questioned the sanity of Mika Brzezinski, Megyn Kelly, Maureen Dowd and Bernie Sanders, among others, for the high crime of saying things about him that happened to be true.
“In authoritarian governments,” Brian Klaas writes in “The Despot’s Apprentice,” gaslighting “aims to force citizens to question their own sanity, rather than the government’s narrative. Winston’s experience in ‘1984’ was an example of systematic gaslighting.” Most authoritarian governments go about gaslighting with the utmost seriousness, using the power of the state and social pressure to get citizens to agree, like Winston in “1984,” that 2+2=5. The “fake news” gambit, however, is something different and possibly new. Rather than trying to induce insanity by making liberals question reality itself, conservatives are trying to make liberals go crazy by trolling them. All conservatives need to do is keep a straight face while insisting that they believe that 2+2=5, and liberals will exhaust all their mental and emotional reserves trying to explain that no, really, 2+2=4. Eventually, conservatives will point to the frazzled, distraught state of liberals begging people to believe that 2+2=4 and laugh and say, “What a nutjob!” What are conservatives thinking when they call something “fake news”? What is Trump thinking? It’s hard to imagine conservatives literally believe that the media is making stories up about the Trump-Russia investigation or that Trump had smaller inauguration crowds than Obama. Instead, the Republican war on media needs to be understood more as a rejection of truth as a value. To call something “fake news” isn’t to say that it’s real or not real, but a way of indicating that truth itself doesn’t matter — that the only thing that matters is loyalty to Trump and the right-wing tribe. Telling lies, in fact, is recast as a fun, sporting way to annoy liberals, and to punish liberals for their goody-two-shoes politically correct insistence that facts matter.
Fox News, still the country’s most popular propaganda outlet, built its entire brand on this notion that any media that doesn’t have an explicitly conservative viewpoint is inherently liberal. The network’s motto for decades, “fair and balanced,” intrinsically accused other media sources of being anything but fair and balanced. It was a nifty little trick. A motto like that not only demonizes more even-handed media sources, but it implies that there’s something more trustworthy about the information Fox News is handing out. Repeated studies, however, show that Fox News viewers are less informed about the news than other news consumers. A 2016 study from Fairleigh Dickinson University actually demonstrated that people who took in no news at all were better informed about current events than Fox News viewers. (NPR listeners were the best informed.)
Fox News works primarily as a propaganda outlet whose viewers have an almost cult-like loyalty. Anyone who has conservative friends or relatives over the age of 50 has probably witnessed the way that Fox News has become the wallpaper of red state life, turned on all day to pipe out a steady stream of balderdash. The ratings bear this impression out. For 16 years now, Fox News has been the number one cable news network. But Fox News does more than indoctrinate elderly white people day in and out. Even though it’s dropped it’s provocative “fair and balanced” slogan, the existence of the channel helps feed this narrative that all other media is hopelessly biased towards the left. That narrative, in turn, is used to guilt-trip mainstream media into publishing or broadcasting conservative misinformation in a fruitless bid to seem more fair and balanced themselves.
And yet, the fact that the Trump coalition (Fox News included) has no real views beyond wanting to damage liberals doesn’t mean they don’t present a very serious threat. It’s clear that it’s led the country to this point where our free press is being regularly threatened by the president and his supporters, who have convinced themselves that responsible journalism is just one more annoying liberal affectation that needs to be destroyed. Their anger is ridiculous, but they still have the power to turn their silly bigotries into real life attacks on the journalistic institutions that protect our democracy.
Here are more revelations on Trump and the media going at it, with the echo fully in Trump’s corner. Fox & the echo are no longer real media, as their rhetoric is not based on reporting facts, but has become strictly a propaganda machine. There can be serious repercussions when an extreme faction basically takes over a major political party & spreads repeated falsehoods to their base, especially when that base actually swallows it. And discrediting a free press is the surest way to usher in fascism. See Trump-s-GOP-A-Majority-Embrace-His-Stalinist-Rant-that-the-Media-is-the-Enemy-of-the-People & this ending posted here from the article a-majority-of-republicans-now-say-media-is-the-enemy-of-the-people, providing ample evidence the president’s crazy & unhinged rants against the media are actually working, because his base believes self-curated Trump news over the truth:
Trump has also managed to shape the average Republican’s perception of another one of his favorite targets: The media. Fifty-one percent of Republicans believe that the media are the enemy of the people — harkening back to an insult Trump used toward the press last year — with only 37 percent acknowledging the media’s important role in democracy. That said, among overall voters, the media is still more trusted than Trump by a margin of 53 percent to 37 percent. This finding is particularly troubling in part because it hinges on the false notion that liberal media outlets which criticize Trump are “fake news.” As media experts told Salon earlier this month, there is a difference between reporting that you dislike — or even reporting that is biased — and reporting that actually spreads falsehoods. “In general what I would consider ‘fake news’ is information that purports, that presents itself as conveying factual information about the world, about reality, that is in fact not factual, is not real,” Susan McGregor, an assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School, told Salon. “And I think that obviously what we’ve seen in the last year or so is the politicization of that term used as a label to mean anything that a person doesn’t like or disagrees with. And so, you know, obviously, those are two different things: I can dislike something that is factually true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fake.” “If you have a society that’s completely or very divided between Democrats and Republicans, between right-wing and left-wing, in fact even if the New York Times tomorrow would come out with a story that was factually not fake news, but actually very factual about some sort of Trump complicity in Russia and Russian affairs or whatever — most of the people, half of the people, the ideologues, would simply say, Well, that’s just fake news from, what? From the liberal media!” Dr. Stephen J. A. Ward told Salon. “And how we get around that, I don’t know.”
There are reports his Chief of Staff has called Trump an idiot inside links like john-kelly-calls-trump-idiot-
One of the many costs of the Trump era is the dumbing down of our political discourse. The incoherent spoken and tweeted outpourings from President Trump and the daily outrages of his administration leave little time for serious debate about policy or meaningful dialogue about our larger purposes. News outlets are entirely justified in lavishing coverage on the sensational and the personal, since developments in these areas are a part of a bigger story that could undermine the Trump presidency altogether. Nonetheless, the circus that Trump has brought to town is nearly as much of a threat to a well-ordered political system as is Trump himself. Nothing is significant for long, everything is episodic, and old scandals are regularly knocked out of the headlines by new ones. It’s a truly novel approach to damage control. And governing? It seems almost beside the point. This is where the Trumpian circus benefits the Trumpian project. If there are too many scandals for any one of them to seize our attention for long, all of them taken together allow what are potentially very unpopular policies to take root without much scrutiny. Yes, good journalists are on top of what’s happening. But their stories usually get buried beneath reports about the latest presidential statement contradicting an earlier presidential statement.
This vacuum is filled by strange concepts that hark back to the irrationalism of the 1930s. They include what to supporters of liberal democracy are oxymoronic ideas such as “illiberal democracy” or “authoritarian democracy.” Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright has the intellectual courage to raise the specter that lurks behind these terms in her new book, “Fascism: A Warning.” She notes that fascism arose at “a time of intellectual liveliness and resurgent nationalism coupled with widespread disappointment at the failure of representative parliaments to keep pace with a technology-driven Industrial Revolution.” Albright is not a catastrophist (and neither am I). But she doesn’t mind being called an alarmist. She notes “that for freedom to survive, it must be defended, and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed.” We can’t just “close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass.” Yet at a moment when we need politics to be thoughtful and engaging, we have a government whose profound swampiness only further deepens public doubts about democracy and encourages us to view public life as mere spectacle. It’s a very bad time to be distracted by a circus.
Part of that perfect storm also sees the GOP rank & file bowing at the feet of a demagogue, where party unity & staying in good graces with Trump, the echo & the base trumps upholding the rule of law. This conclusion to an article is seen in the-sense-of-justice-that-w
The Trump attacks on the justice system demand a stronger response. The media can’t become numb. His aides and appointees need to stand up to him more often — rather than, for example, assenting to a baseless new inquiry into Clinton, overseen by none other than Huber. And other Republicans, in Congress and private life, should summon more courage. “We don’t see senior Republican officials, either current or past, defending the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.,” John Bellinger III, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, said last week at a Georgetown University conference on democratic norms. “It’s just inexplicable.” Where are the Republican defenders of law and order? Where are you, John Ashcroft? What about C. Boyden Gray, Larry Thompson, Paul Clement, Ted Olson, Susan Collins and Ben Sasse? At least a few of them should be willing to take a little heat in defense of the American system of justice. In retrospect, Levi almost seemed to be pleading with them in his 1977 goodbye speech as attorney general: “We have shown that the administration of justice can be fair, can be effective, can be nonpartisan. These are goals which can never be won for all time. They must always be won anew.”
With regard to Fox fake news, no part 2 analysis could ever be complete without an article about their king knucklehead, so here it is: watch_sean_hannity_parse_
The mind reels. Whether by strategy or intuition, Trump has cultivated a way of talking that puts logical, linear listeners at a great disadvantage. If you pause to analyze anything he’s saying, you may find yourself missing the actual mischief. Like this: “They’re phony memos,” Trump said of fired FBI director James B. Comey’s memorandums of their meetings. What does he mean by phony? Don’t ask, you’ll fall behind and miss something. “He didn’t write those memos accurately,” Trump continued. “He put a lot of phony stuff. For instance, I went to Russia for a day or so — a day or two because I own the Miss Universe pageant.” How is this germane? You’re falling behind. “So, I went there to watch it, because it was near Moscow,” he sailed onward. “So I go to Russia — now, I did go there — everybody knows. The locks are there, the planes are there.” What locks? What planes? Falling behind! “He said I didn’t stay there a night.”
And there it is, the mischief, slipped into the word tempest as if by a magician hiding his trick in a flurry of gesticulation. So easy to miss amid the distractions: That’s not what Comey said. That’s what Trump said to Comey. The FBI man wrote that Trump tried to convince him he didn’t spend a night in Moscow. And later Trump was caught out by proof that he did. He puts his own untruth into the other guy’s mouth and calls that man a liar. Dizzy yet? The Fox News anchors certainly looked dazed. That’s what it feels like when Trump comes calling.
And what is this about?: justice-department-cuts-langua
When Stormy Daniels spoke to “60 Minutes” last month, the porn actress described a threat she received years ago after speaking to a journalist about her alleged affair with Donald Trump. A stranger approached her in a parking lot in Las Vegas. Daniels was there with her baby daughter. “Leave Trump alone,” Daniels recalled the man warning her. “That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.” Daniels did not report the threat to the police. On Wednesday, Donald Trump tweeted that Daniels’ account of events was “a total con job” about a “non-existent man.” As it happens, other people in disputes with Trump have also found themselves the targets of threats — and sometimes they’ve reported it to authorities.
In these articles trump-critics-fired-at-conserv
The war between Trump and the media was on full display a few nights ago. In equally obscene & offensive episodes from Saturday night, there was the White House Correspondent’s Dinner & the Trump unhinged rant in Michigan:donald-trump-michigan-speech-a
Evangelicals Gone Astray
Here’s an example why the evangelical church threatens to self-destruct. This pastor has his definition of demonic all backwards. Check out Trump-worshiping-pastor-thinks
The world has definitely taken note of the declining ethical principles, which is doing incalculable damage to the greater mission of the evangelical church. It’s getting to the point our faith is being seen associated with & advocates for radical rightwing politics headed by a dishonest/immoral leader, rather than being stewards of the love & sacrifice of Christ. Many in the faith would dismiss my thoughts as blasphemy, when in reality should serve as a red flag with warning sirens going off, how that decay from within threatens to ruin the church’s greater purpose & potentially lead to its downfall.
So some important lessons need to be learned: st-paul-american-church-partis
Only in this perverted time could a priest lose his job after committing the sin of crying out for justice for the poor. But then, look around: Everywhere are the signs of a rising kleptocracy. The $1.5 trillion tax cut did make winners of corporations and the wealthy. And actions since then show that the Trump administration is making losers of the poor. In a speech to bankers this week, Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney spoke of the “hierarchy” he followed when he was in Congress: “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you were a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” Also this week, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was on Capitol Hill, defiant as lawmakers grilled him about his lavish expense account (at a time when Trump wants to cut the EPA budget by 25 percent) and coziness with corporate lobbyists — most notably renting a condo at a sweetheart rate from the wife of an energy lobbyist. “I simply have not failed to take responsibility,” Pruitt said after blaming bureaucrats and others. “I’ve simply recited the facts.” Meanwhile, Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development, this week propose
d to triple the rent charged to the poorest families living in subsidized housing. “It’s clear from a budget perspective and a human point of view that the current system is unsustainable,” Carson explained. It’s hard to sustain help for the poor when you’re proposing to cut HUD spending by 14 percent next year — and when you’ve borrowed $1.5 trillion to give tax breaks mostly for the wealthy. Conroy, of course, didn’t preach about such truly political things; he prayed, generically, for compassion. In the prayer that earned him Ryan’s reprimand, he merely reminded lawmakers that “the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle.” He prayed that lawmakers “guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”Such heresies continued. He prayed for “peace and reconciliation where those virtues are so sorely needed.” He prayed for them to rise above “self-interest” and “immediate political wins.” He prayed for them to promote “justice, equity and truth.” He admonished them to “show respect for those with whom they disagree.” On Friday morning, in the well for one of his last remaining prayers, Conroy prayed “for all people who have special needs” and “those who are sick” and for those “who serve in this House to be their best selves.” Best selves? Respect? Reconciliation? No can do. Later Friday, Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), a Democratic leader, rose to request an investigation into Ryan’s dismissal of Conroy. Republicans moved to quash the proposal — and, to nobody’s surprise, they prevailed. If you preach about the poor in today’s Washington, you don’t have a prayer.
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