Calling the Media the Enemy of the People is Irresponsible & Dangerous….As we seek to defend the integrity of our elections & the essence of our constitutional democracy, it’s become apparent we’re not just fighting the Russians, but we’re fighting Republicans who’ve been taken over & corrupted by their cult leader. Backed by their state-sponsored media with distorted propaganda coming from Fox & the echo, they’ve managed to snooker a significant portion of the American public. Whether the conservative base is hell-bent on sticking behind tribal loyalties or they’re just that intellectually challenged, but for whatever reason, they are en masse subscribing to blatant lies & outlandish conspiracies that clearly cannot be true, as they willingly swallow whatever is dished out by Trump & his compliant pundits. In their world, what’s up is down & down is up if that’s what Trump & Fox say it is. Together they live in their own isolated bubble swimming in alternative facts, where truths are not absolutes but merely storylines to be manipulated for the tribe’s benefit. The section on the Enemy of the People is further below.
Trump corrupts everything he touches, evidently even a major political party. The GOP itself has transitioned from truth to lies, rational to radical, responsible to reprehensible, broad-based to narrow, compassionate to selfish, & good to evil. We may be approaching crunch time! We either defeat this curse of echo-propaganda & scourge of demagoguery while taking down this president, or else this cult through their own delusions could take American democracy down! As you read this article about the conditions that have helped bring about this deranged conspiracy movement known as QAnon: americans-buying-rabid-
It’s way too dangerous to continue allowing a mentally-unstable maniac to run our country. Trump proves his unfitness for office every day. Just his dishonesty alone is alarming. Despite the opinions inside the next link, Trump’s lying is beyond deliberate. He seems incapable of telling the truth. It’s a long-term pattern of personal behavior & expression that apparently has become an integral part of his very being. Showing many signs of being a psychopath, the prez has a distorted reality of himself & the world around him. The New Yorker chimed in with articles about Trump’s constant lying in trumps-escalating-war-on-
Trump has attempted to delegitimize the entire fact-based press in the eyes of his supporters. “Stick with us,” he said in a speech last week. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news . . . What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” George Orwell gets quoted too liberally these days, but, as the national security expert David Priess pointed out, these statements were Orwellian in the extreme. (“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”) And, judging by Trump’s steady approval ratings and the large crowds at his rallies, many people are willing to take him at his word.
What can be done about all this? The first thing is to recognize it for what it is: a reckless descent into the demagoguery, misinformation, and incitement that are normally associated with authoritarian regimes. In a statement on Thursday, two United Nations experts on freedom of expression warned, of Trump’s comments about the media, “These attacks run counter to the country’s obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law.” They added, “We are especially concerned that these attacks increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence.” This warning echoed one that A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, delivered to Trump in a recent meeting at the White House. Trump may think he is playing a political game. But, in a country that is littered with extremist groups, and where there are more than three hundred million guns in private hands, it is an extremely dangerous one. In less dark times, one might have hoped that senior members of Trump’s party would deliver this message to him forcefully. But today, with so much of the G.O.P. prostrating itself before its rogue President, what chance is there of that happening?
For journalists, the best and only response is to keep reporting the news, and analyzing it thoroughly. One good example is the Washington Post’s continued efforts to document Trump’s lies, deceptions, and exaggerations. As my colleague Susan B. Glasser noted earlier today, the Post’s fact-checking team hasnow logged 4,229 of them, and they are getting more frequent. Another is the story of Russia’s information-warfare campaign in the United States.Two years ago, during the campaign, Trump and others dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. Today, thanks to investigative efforts by the intelligence agencies, the special counsel Robert Mueller, and journalists, even Trump’s appointees are warning about the threat. This “goes beyond the elections,” Coates said at Thursday’s briefing. “It goes to Russia’s intent to undermine our democratic values, drive a wedge between our allies, and do a number of other nefarious things.” Although Trump is conducting a war on the media, he isn’t necessarily winning it. If he were, he wouldn’t be so angry.
Steve Schmidt Right On
A man after my own heart in this post from gop-strategist-as-the-
GOP strategist and MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt said Friday that the Republican Party is shrinking and becoming “crazier” as it does, linking the decline to the party’s takeover by President Trump. Schmidt, who ran Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign in 2008, told “Real Time with Bill Maher” that the Republican Party faces a major threat from a younger generation that largely identifies with Democrats. “As it shrinks, it gets smaller; just like the California Republican Party has, it will become crazier,” Schmidt said, after noting that the GOP had become a “third party” in the state. Schmidt added that there were likely many other Republicans who would denounce the party and vote for Democrats under a Trump presidency, as Schmidt announced he would do in June. “I think it’s a very significant number, and I think you’re going to start seeing college-educated Republican women in these swing districts deliver the blue wave for the Democrats,” he said.
Schmidt said in June that he would begin voting for Democrats until GOP lawmakers found their independence from Trump, whom Schmidt has frequently criticized. “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life,” Schmidt tweeted at the time. “Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump,” he added. Schmidt’s statement came amid the Trump administration’s family separation crisis, during which thousands of children were forcibly separated from their families due to Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Trump later halted the separations via executive order, but faced criticism from lawmakers in both parties.
How about a Schmidt article encore? Steve Schmidt always provides fervent opinions based on reality & principles, as seen in ex-goper-steve-schmidt-
Trump supporters amplified the president’s insults against networks like CNN, with some directing their angst against White House correspondent Jim Acosta, who has become one of Trump’s most prominent targets. “This isn’t a question about media bias,” Schmidt said during a panel discussion on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday. “What we’re seeing is … somebody go to mass rallies, constantly lie to incite fervor, and a cult of personality base. We’re seeing him make victimization honorable. They’re all victims, right?” Schmidt suggested that Trump’s message appealed to fringe groups, lending credence to their conspiracy theories, including the idea of the ” Deep State ” — a theory that claims Justice Department and FBI officials, most likely holdovers from the Obama administration, are actively conspiring to undermine Trump’s presidency.
“We’re seeing the allegation of conspiracy, the ‘Deep State,’ hidden, nefarious movements that only the leader can see,” Schmidt said. “We see the scapegoating of mass, minority populations, vulnerable populations, and then lastly, the assertion that ‘I need to exercise these powers that no president has ever claimed to have.'” “This is deliberate,” Schmidt added. “This is an assault on objective truth. And once you get people to surrender their sovereignty, that what is true is what the leader says is true, what is true is what the leader believes is true, even though what’s true is staring you in the face.” Schmidt referenced George Orwell’s “1984,” a dystopian novel about a totalitarian society, and described Trump’s allure as something “straight out of” that book. “When that happens, you’re no longer living in a Democratic republic,” Schmidt added. “Thirty-five percent of this country has checked out. They have joined a cult. They are obedient. They are obedient to the leader.”
The Nutty Conspiracy Universe Including QAnon
Although he needs to tone down his language on his TV appearances, I consider Rick Wilson a worthy/principled co-patriot along the same lines as Steve Schmidt. Wilson delivers an accurate, hard-hitting piece here on QAnon & those wild conspiracies as seen in excerpts from trump-fans-are-suckers-
Conspiracies are hard. They’re even harder when you’re stupid. They are, however, deeply compelling. Some people need a single, grand unifying theory of why the world refuses to line up with their expectations. When difficult realities confront people without the intellectual horsepower to understand and accept the truth, some turn to conspiracy theories to paper over the holes in their worldview. No matter how absurd, baroque, and improbable, conspiracies grow on their own like mental kudzu where inconsistencies aren’t signs of illogical conclusions, but of another, deeper layer of some hidden truth, some skein of powerful forces holding the world in its grip.
After Donald Trump’s rally in Tampa this week, the notorious QAnon scam became America’s conspiracy of the moment. And why not? In the face of Trump’s daily meltdowns, mood swings, and unmedicated rage episodes in which he lashes out at every target in reach, his base is desperately looking for a version of reality that gives them some comfort and stability. This Q conspiracy is filling the political bloodstream of the Trumpentariat and has been bubbling up inside the right for the last few months, and while Will Sommer and others have covered the story, there seemed to be a media shock moment after the Qbots showed up at Trump’s Tampa rally.
Conspiracies—this one in particular—give their devotees a sense of coherence that is lacking in everything Trump does. QAnon presents Trump as the character he plays on TV; bold, commanding, strategic, and brilliant…as opposed to the real Donald Trump, who displays the dignity, intelligence, and honesty of a strip-club tout with tertiary syphilis. In Q’s world, Donald Trump is courageously leading an effort to round up and punish—I’m not exaggerating—tens of thousands of child predators who occupy the highest reaches of government. Q and Don, side by side, doling out the secret knowledge to the new elite. Instead of getting a clearance, all you need to do is check out 4chan, Reddit, or YouTube.
Some even believe Q composes these messages for their eager consumption and interpretation at Trump’s direction, the amanuensis to an orange Nostradamus whose quatrains appear on the same image boards that feature bronie porn, hentai spank-bank material, and tween Neo-Nazi shitposter incels, instead of penned on parchment. They’re desperate to believe “Q” is a senior official cleared at the highest levels (as one former NSA official jokingly called it, “TS/SCI NOSEBLEED”) who is busily leaking cryptic messages to them. Set aside that the Q clearance is a Department of Energy designation, and is for access to particular nuclear weapons matters, not the Bondian highest-reaches-of-government shenanigans to which Q claims access; this entire thing reeks of enough bullshit to fertilize Mars.
QAnon asks its believers to “follow the breadcrumbs” and fill in the blanks. Those blanks get filled with epic idiocy. The glee with which the followers of this absurdity latch on to imaginary deportations of Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and others to Gitmo is notable. Several times, Q has promised them that any moment now the rest of the Deep State will occupy the darkest holes of the American prison system. QAnon tells them that retribution is at hand, and they’re ravenous for more. Lurid and exciting for the rubes, but as of yet, Hillary Clinton walks free. If that even is Hillary Clinton, and not a shapeshifting reptilian overlord. For actual authoritarians and the merely dictator-curious, building a separate, hermetic truth defined only by the Dear Leader is 101 stuff, and goes hand in hand with the relentless attacks on the free press an enemy of the people.
Why has Q eaten the Trump-right’s minds? Why does it work on them when it’s so obviously, evidently a gigantic pyramid of digital horseshit? It works because stupid people are stupid and because Donald Trump’s Administration loves what QAnon does to stoke the fires of paranoia, resentment, and division. QAnon works for Trump because people who are not knowledgeable about the world, politics, government, the intelligence community and reality more broadly are desperately looking for confirmation that they’re on the winning team. Q tells them that they’re on the right side of history and that for once in their dreary little lives they and only they possess the secret, hermetic knowledge from inside the esoteric cult. Q represents where the former GOP has gone in the era of Trump; possessed the desire to have a private space that makes even Fox News look mild in comparison, grasping desperately for a different reality.
If it’s too crazy for those edge cases, it’s too crazy. No, Trump fans, the storm isn’t coming. There is no Great Awakening. “Where we go one we go all” is a path to disappointment and madness, not to some brave new future where Donald Trump’s genius and his army of secret soldiers purge America of a vast, secret deep state of hostile insiders and pedophiles. Q is a meta-hoax, a recursive scam in service of a scam called the Trump Presidency. The “drops” are meaningless claptrap, noise without real signal, and most certainly not the signs of the new reality its eager marks desire.
Here’s a classic picture of a couple sickos who are partly brain-dead: trump-republican-
What makes QAnon a little a different, and little bit scarier, than many of the conspiracy theories Americans have latched onto through the decades, is that it’s fundamentally authoritarian (like Joseph McCarthy’s raving about communist infiltration of the government, but more surreal). QAnon believers aren’t fearfully scouting for black helicopters. They’re waiting for the sitting president to deliver their country from evil by rounding up his political opposition. Adherents have taken to jubilantly counting up the sealed indictments federal authorities have filed lately because they see them as a sign that a mass wave of arrests is coming. At Trump’s Wednesday night rally in Tampa, Florida, a shocking number of attendees showed up with QAnon T-shirts and signs. These people are all but asking for a strongman to seize control of the country, which is the thought I shared on Twitter. The number of responses, and my inability to determine who was actually writing them and how real they were, reminded me of Twitter during the campaign. In 2016, you could never quite tell whether the anonymous Trump supporter ranting at you in all caps was an actual, angry voter, a bot, or a contractor in Russia’s troll army. Ditto the Nazi frogs sending pictures of Jewish bodies in ovens. The problem with this dynamic is twofold: It is extremely disorienting, because it becomes difficult to know what’s real and what’s not. It also ultimately makes it impossible to determine the size or influence of the fringe, and to keep any sense of proportion and perspective.
Crazy Fox & the Nuts who follow that Delusional Nonsense
This link can help explain why some on Fox News are real journalists, while some are maniacal lunatics: bret_baier_on_jimmy_
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has heated up, so too have Donald Trump’s Twitter fingers. The president is fond of repeating certain disparaging phrases about Mueller’s investigation on the social media platform, repeatedly referring to it as a “hoax” and a “scam.” But his favorite moniker by far is “Witch Hunt”—embellished, in recent weeks, to “Rigged Witch Hunt”—which Trump has used a whopping 84 times this year alone in reference to Mueller’s investigation. This repeated public condemnation is almost certainly having a psychological effect on how Americans view the investigation. Multiple studies have shown that when something is repeated often enough, people start to think of it as true, whether it actually is—a concept known as illusory truth. “When a statement is repeated, it starts to feel more familiar,” said Keith Payne, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “That feeling of familiarity is easily interpreted as the feeling of truth.” Payne is the co-author of a study that found that even when people know a claim is false, just a few repetitions can make them more likely to think it’s true.
Trump’s consistent tweeting—and the constant media coverage of those tweets—makes his favorite phrases familiar to the American public. And that familiarity could be key to making his claims seem plausible, even believable. By consistently referring to the investigation as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” Trump is framing the debate on his terms. “If you start arguing about whether something is or isn’t a witch hunt, you’ve basically conceded that it’s plausible that it’s a witch hunt, or that that’s the right term to use,” says Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in Britain. So when Trump says, over and over, that the Mueller investigation is a “rigged witch hunt,” people subconsciously begin to think the idea that it is a witch hunt could be plausible—even when there’s no evidence to substantiate that claim.
It’s not just the president’s tweets that are constantly repeating his “truths.” Media outlets like Fox News frequently broadcast his claims as trustworthy, something that is also almost certainly contributing to their plausibility among the segments of the population that trust the network. Eighty-five percent of poll respondents whose most trusted network was Fox News believed that the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt as early as June 2017, according to a Suffolk University poll—more than seven times the respondents for any other network. In their March 2018 poll, Suffolk found that just 35% of viewers who trusted Fox also trusted the Russia investigation to be fair and accurate. These poll numbers all center around people whose political affiliations make them more likely to side with the president in the first place. Payne says that there are always at least two psychological forces at work: the force of familiarity, which is behind the illusory-truth effect, and the force of motivated reasoning, which is when people try to make new information fit in with their previously held beliefs. “In the case of President Trump making false statements about the Mueller investigation, the familiarity of repetition is working in the same direction for Republicans as their motivated reasoning is, so you have two things pointing in the same direction,” he said.
Below is the conclusion from why-the-gop-is-so-easily-
The reason is simple: Conservatives have been trained by the people they trust most to believe that everything is a conspiracy. And not just a conspiracy; a conspiracy against them. No one embodies that more than Trump himself, of course. He transformed himself from a celebrity into a political figure by becoming America’s most prominent proponent of the racist “birther” theory that President Barack Obama was not in fact born in America. No conspiracy theory seems too idiotic for Trump to at least consider, whether it’s that Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK, or that Antonin Scalia was murdered, or that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally against him, or that vaccines cause autism. He went on the program of the noxious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who among other things asserted that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged with child actors, and told Jones, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” But it started way before Trump. For years, conservatives have been fed one conspiracy theory after another by the hosts on Fox News, by Rush Limbaugh and by many other right-wing media figures. They’ve been told that climate change is a hoax dreamed up by scientists running a grift for grant funding. They’ve been told that unlike, say, the Koch brothers, who are just patriotic Americans exercising their right to spend their money advocating political outcomes they favor, George Soros is a sinister puppetmaster who pays protestors to agitate for left-wing causes.
In fact, even what we regard as relatively “mainstream” conservative news organizations offer their audiences a picture painted every day of a society run through with one conspiracy after another: a conspiracy of liberal professors to brainwash your children, a conspiracy of liberal journalists to twist the news, a conspiracy of liberals in Hollywood to undermine your values, a conspiracy in government to destroy Trump. No matter who is in power, there are still multiple conspiracies out to get you. One of the signal beliefs of the conspiracy theorist is that almost no one can be trusted, because the truth is buried under a mountain of lies. Don’t believe what you read in the newspaper and see on TV, because they’re all in on it. Or as Trump himself put it, “Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Is it any wonder that Trump’s Republican Party is particularly fertile ground for this kind of thing?
Enemy of the People?
Highlighting the very real dangers Trump’s savage rhetoric against the media could incite the more unhinged among his followers to commit violence against reporters, see this article trumps-rally-rhetoric-
The voice, if I had to guess, belongs to that of a white American male in late middle age. The accent is faintly Southern, the manner taunting but relaxed. It’s also familiar: I’m pretty sure he’s left a message on my office number before. But the last voice mail left almost no impression. Not this time. “Hey Bret, what do you think? Do you think the pen is mightier than the sword, or that the AR is mightier than the pen?” He continues: “I don’t carry an AR but once we start shooting you f—ers you aren’t going to pop off like you do now. You’re worthless, the press is the enemy of the United States people and, you know what, rather than me shoot you, I hope a Mexican and, even better yet, I hope a n— shoots you in the head, dead.” He repeats the racial slur 10 times in a staccato rhythm, concluding with the send-off: “Have a nice day, n— lover.” He doesn’t give his name. His number is blocked.
Which brings me to the July 20 meeting between Trump and two senior leaders of The Times, publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editorial page editor James Bennet. As Sulzberger later described the encounter, he warned the president that “his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” and that characterizations of the news media as “the enemy of the people” are “contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.” Sulzberger’s warning had no effect. Nine days after what was supposed to be an off-the-record meeting, the president tweeted that he and Sulzberger “spent much time talking about vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”
By now, it almost passes without comment that the president of the United States not only violates the ground rules of his own meetings with the press, but also misrepresents the substance of the conversation. Also nearly past comment was the president’s remark, in a follow-on tweet, that the media were “very unpatriotic” for revealing “internal deliberations of our government” that could put people’s lives at risk. That’s almost funny considering that no media organ has revealed more such deliberations, with less regard for consequences, than his beloved WikiLeaks. What can’t be ignored is presidential behavior that might best be described as incitement. Maybe Trump supposes that the worst he’s doing is inciting the people who come to his rallies to give reporters like CNN’s Jim Acosta the finger. And maybe he thinks that most journalists, with their relentless hostility to his personality and policies, richly deserve public scorn.
Yet for every 1,000 or so Trump supporters whose contempt for the press rises only as far as their middle fingers, a few will be people like my caller. Of that few, how many are ready to take the next fatal step? In the age of the active shooter, the number isn’t zero. Should that happen — when that happens — and journalists are dead because some nut thinks he’s doing the president’s bidding against the fifth column that is the media, what will Trump’s supporters say? No, the president is not coyly urging his supporters to murder reporters, like Henry II trying to rid himself of a turbulent priest. But neither is he the child who played with a loaded gun and knew not what he did. Donald Trump’s more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says. But not all of the president’s defenders are quite as sophisticated. Some of them didn’t get the memo about taking Trump seriously but not literally. A few hear the phrase “enemy of the people” and are prepared to take the words to their logical conclusion. Is my caller one of them? I can’t say. But what should be clear is this: We are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands.
Trump’s deranged & dangerous continuing rhetoric over the weekend featuring attacks on the media are further revealed in trump-attacks-reporters-as-
The Craziest Media Show Hosts
Alex Jones sings the same tune as Hannity & Limbaugh with all manner of twisted thinking, lies & conspiracies, only even worse. This isn’t banning free speech, it’s banning hate speech: alex-jones-banned-
But how can one tell who’s FAKE NEWS and who isn’t? Trump tried to clarify during a rally on Thursday night in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Ostensibly, he was there to drum up support for Representative Lou Barletta, who’s attempting to unseat Democratic Senator Bob Casey in the fall. But his remarks largely focused on his issues with the Washington press corps. As the audience booed and jeered, breaking into a chant of “CNN sucks” at times, Trump listed all the ways the press had treated him unfairly. To name just a few, they failed to acknowledge that his meeting with Kim Jong-un put an end to North Korea’s nuclear testing (it didn’t), or to celebrate his good relationship with Vladimir Putin, though “Russia is very unhappy that Trump won” (both U.S. intelligence agencies and Putin himself say that’s not true).
Later, Trump named two conservative pundits who definitely aren’t enemies of the people — in fact, they’re so not fake news that they’ve been elevated to the position of unofficial Trump adviser. Senate Republicans have been making moves this week to avoid a government shutdown when funding runs out on September 30, right before the midterms. But Trump has been calling for a shutdown before the election, threatening to use the maneuver to secure funding for his border wall and various other immigration policies (which don’t have anything to do with appropriations). Trump told the crowd in Pennsylvania that some of his Republican “friends” (probably GOP lawmakers) are advising him to save his shutdown for after the midterms — but he has the backing of two higher authorities. “You know who thinks it should [be] before?” Trump said. “Rush Limbaugh thinks it should be before. Before the election. You know who else? Sean Hannity.” The right-wing media personalities got a huge cheer from the audience, and Trump said they’re “great people.”
About Hannity, the far-left Daily Kos has this article: Trump-Supporting-C-
We know that Sean Hannity, during frequent late night phone calls with Trump, has helped to conspire against the United States by inventing false talking points and propaganda. It is important to understand that Mueller is well aware of all of this. The truth about Hannity’s involvement in the coverup of the worst case of treason in American history will become public. Depending on what he does going forward, Hannity will either end up in prison or as a disgraced former entertainer, but never a journalist.
Upstanding Trump Fans
Here’s an article showing some at his rallies who are unabashedly devoted to the Trump cult. Don’t they look like lovely people?: American-Psyche-The-
Cleveland Cavs 2016 NBA Champions
I’ll always appreciate our basketball superstar for bringing a long-awaited championship to Cleveland (between our 3 pro teams, I waited 145 seasons!). Now he has an even higher purpose. Trump is the most divisive president at a time when we need a leader to start bridging the wide divides, & as LeBron said of him, he also uses sports to divide us. In feeding red meat to his many racist supporters, he tends to insult the intelligence of African-Americans. We’ve seen that in his attacks on LeBron, Don Lemon & Maxine Waters. Even the First Lady called out her hubby for his despicable racist tweets. Click on lets-clear-lebron-james-
69 – 27 % say he is not a good role model for children;
56 – 41 % say he does not have good leadership skills;
64 – 32 % say he is not level-headed;
61 – 35 % say he does not share their values.
And as Don Lemon tweeted: Who’s the real dummy? A man who puts kids in classrooms or one who puts kids in cages?
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