Follow the Good Lord & he’ll show us the difference between Good and Evil….Most of us can discern between obvious facts & falsehoods, so it’s quite unnerving to see millions of our fellow-Americans succumbing to the lies. The depths of their misunderstandings from being taken in by all the deception & bizarre conspiracy theories are stunning beyond comprehension! To borrow a biblical phrase from Philippians 4:7, that which passes all understanding, or another phrase from Ephesians 3:19, that surpasses knowledge. Of course, these verses for describing the echo crowd I’m taking way out of context, since the first Bible quote describes the peace of God & the second one talks of to know the love of Christ. But the Bible teaches we’re engaged in this eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, from which we should all seek the truth to stay informed & gain the wisdom to be on the side which has already defeated evil.
In our endeavors to embrace the truth, we can also turn to John 8:44 from scripture, referring to Satan: He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. So by extension, if Satan is the Father of Lies,would the current president who lies more than any person we know be his servant? Some are offended at the mere mention of such a thought, but it’s a legitimate question. And what of Fox News & the rest of the echo that keep spreading those same lies, who are they serving? And what of all those in the Trumpeter/echo audience who follow along, believe in, & repeat those very same lies, who are they actually serving? Fortunately, our God is one of forgiveness & grace if we follow his path. In the same chapter of John, there is hope & redemption should we reject the Devil’s lies & earnestly seek God’s truth, as stated in John 8:32 where Jesus refers to his teaching: and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
When we as a society submit to pure falsehoods authored by the Father of Lies, as the deception & hypocrisy are fully unveiled far too late, it could wind up undermining/destroying our evangelical faith, our Republican Party, our freedom-loving nation, & practically anything else we hold dear. I seldom mix religion with politics, but the newsfeeds have regularly been rife with reports of evangelicals’ fervent devotion to this president. When the allegiance is so strong as to inspire the widespread denial of facts, setting in motion a tribal mindset accepting lies so preposterous & persistent, there may be some supernatural forces at work. The Devil is shrewd enough to know if he can deceive believers, he’ll do the maximum amount of damage to the faith. Perhaps his instruments being utilized are Trump, Fox News & numerous other echo mouthpieces, spouting deceptions that a sizable portion of the conservative base are being drawn to. As believers & as a nation, we should ask God to reveal the truth, so we can regain a sense of moral integrity & humanity for our fellow man. Embracing the wisdom of Christ as opposed to aligning with the insincere egotistical abrasiveness of our earthly leader, God has given us a conscience where he enables us to clearly see the difference between good and evil.
Kasich with Chuck Todd
On MTP Sunday, here’s an excellent interview with Kasich about what it means to lead & what the GOP should (& shouldn’t) stand for: kasich-gop-under-trump-do
Conspiracies as Delusional as they can be
But when the Trump/echo keep lying, & then lie some more to cover up the previous lies, the tales get increasingly preposterous. So that’s why the conspiracies keep getting more & more crazy, & more & more bizarre. These excerpts are taken from trump-conspiracy-theories
A lot of unexpected things have changed since Trump took office. But one of the oddest evolutions has been the mutation of the conspiracy theory. The corners of the internet where conspiracies flourish have always contained a weird mix of light and dark. They were places where one could laugh at some of the far out ideas (“the moon landing was faked”) or be completely horrified (“the Sandy Hook shooting was faked”). But with the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, the days of laughing at kooky theories like “Obama is a Lizard Person” or being mystified by Flat Earthers has given way to a far more troubling pattern. Trump and his followers have managed to latch on to some wild theories and, using his massive platform, bring them into the mainstream. And now they have been weaponized by a president who doesn’t just indulge these toxic conspiracies but gives them a validity they don’t deserve. Trump, after all, is a candidate whose political fortunes have been built on his promotion of an infamous and racist conspiracy: that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen. But this example is hardly an outlier. Since entering the presidential campaign in 2015 and right through to present day, Trump has embraced a variety of conspiracy theories with open arms and even spun off his own.
And as these theories have wrought real world consequences, the idea of patrolling the web for the weirdest and most outlandish conspiracies has become not an exercise in entertainment, but one of legitimate anxiety and fear. Threats of violence and conspiracy theories have often been linked, especially if Buzz Aldrin is involved. Unfortunately, Trump and violence have also been synonymous since before he became president, thanks to his incendiary rhetoric. When you combine all of these ingredients, it creates a combustible situation. The best example of this thus far is “Pizzagate,” the theory that Hillary Clinton and several other high-ranking Democrats were involved in a child sex ring that was run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. The theory is, of course, far-fetched and not true; Comet Pizza, the restaurant in question, doesn’t even have a basement. Yet that didn’t keep the theory from exploding online, perpetuated by figures on the far right that support Trump like InfoWars’ Alex Jones and toxic Twitterer Jack Posobiec. Eventually, that turned in to real life violence in December 2016 when Edgar M. Welch fired his rifle inside Comet Pizza in order to “self-investigate” the alleged scandal. Welch has since apologized and been sentenced to four years in prison, but it was still a shocking moment — a man pushed to violence by a conspiracy theory pushed by those who Trump has embraced. And now, with the move of QAnon from the dark corners of the web to the mainstream, there’s new concern about conspiracies prompting more violence. Though some have suggested that QAnon may have started as a hoax, it seems many of its followers think it’s very real, and its overlaps with Pizzagate gives some pause.
In June, an armed man blocked a road to the Hoover Dam in an armored vehicle, leading to a 90-minute standoff. After his arrest, the man wrote letters to Trump and others citing the QAnon conspiracy theory. Elsewhere in Arizona, another QAnon follower was arrested after illegally occupying a tower at a Cemex plant he was convinced was a hub for a sex slave ring. It’s one thing to believe a conspiracy theory, but it’s another to act on it like Trump followers have. To make matters worse, the theories have sometimes been fueled by the president’s own words. Even before he got to the White House, Trump was spewing conspiracy theories on the campaign trail where they were broadcast to the masses. It troubled many; it’s one thing for these theories to be discussed on Reddit, but in an opening, public setting by a major candidate for the presidency? Even worse: Trump could casually toss them out to the thousands of MAGA-hatted voters who lapped up whatever he said, regurgitating theories wrapped in an adversarial layer of “fake news” to those who dared to question them.
Trump favors floating his own conspiracy theories in a suggestive way that gives them veracity but allows him to keep a distance from being a full believer. He’s like your conspiracy-minded friend who throws up his hands and says, “I’m just asking questions, man,” except, unlike your friend, Trump has his finger on the big red button. For instance, not long after entering the White House, he started to posit that the voice on the infamous Access Hollywood tape wasn’t his, even after he owned up to it and apologized (sort of) for his comments. Once he got to the White House, he still had plenty of time to indulge his own fantasies about those he felt had wronged him. The most notorious example are March 2017 tweets in which Trump alleged that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump’s campaign. To accuse a predecessor of such a crime was unheard of from a U.S. president. The Department of Justice eventually said Trump’s claims were baseless but it didn’t matter — Trump continued to push the theory that Obama had spied on the Trump team.
But perhaps the most dangerous theory he’s concocted has been his repeated claims of voter fraud during the 2016 election. It started before the election even happened when, in late October 2016 as it looked like Hillary Clinton would win, Trump suggested the election was rigged against him and that he wouldn’t accept the outcome. A day later, he revised his statement by saying he’d accept the results if he won. Even after he won, Trump couldn’t leave it alone, suggesting that millions of illegal votes were cast. Trump blamed undocumented immigrants for the fraud, saying three to five million illegitimate votes were cast. (Coincidentally, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over Trump by about three million votes.) Trump never offered proof nor has any other concrete proof ever been presented. The commission Trump set up to find evidence of voter fraud was shut down without ever offering any evidence. In another theory that seems to spring from president’s narcissism, Trump and others, including prominent conservative figures like Sean Hannity, have been pushing a conspiracy of the “Deep State” since his inauguration. The theory suggests that a cabal of figures spread throughout the government are working quietly to usurp Trump from what he sees is his rightfully elected position. Those pushing the “Deep State” conspiracy have particularly latched on to the case of a pair of FBI agents that they say were working to undermine Trump’s presidency. One of those agents, Peter Strzok, has been the target of much of this speculation thanks to anti-Trumps text he sent to the other agent involved, Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
What Trump has done is take conspiracy theories from the darker corners of the internet and weaponized them, using them to spread disinformation among his base and wielding them as his own demented forms of proof. And in the process he’s divided the nation. The thing about conspiracy theories is that they can be ludicrous ideas spun out of small grains of truth. But just because there may be some Obama-appointed holdovers in the federal government who opposed Trump’s proposed policy doesn’t mean there’s a government-wide conspiracy to rebel against the president. Trump’s dissemination of these conspiracies has undermined the authority of the bedrocks of our society: our democratic process, our intelligence agencies, the press. That’s not to say any of these things are perfect; they’re not and they deserve a discerning eye to keep them honest and improve them. But Trump is using a blowtorch in situations that require the nuance of a scalpel. Conspiracy theories are no longer things to laugh at while you procrastinate online. (Well, in fairness, multiple Melanias is pretty amusing). Gone are the days when they could be easily dismissed with a few seconds of googling (say, that the moon is really a projection). They now carry an extra weight that comes from the association with those promoted by Trump, and undeserved suggestion that maybe that theory isn’t too outlandish to some since others are true, facts be damned. And with that approach, Trump has continued to erode our norms, allowing a frightening and dangerous rhetoric to seep into not just the mainstream, but into the fabric of our society, a move that could, ultimately, rot our democracy from the inside out.
More reports on those nutty conspiracies are posted here from Why-Trump-s-Loony-Charges
The top priority of State TV (aka Fox News) for the past year – and the one unfolding – is to make sure that Donald Trump is safely sheltered from any and all criticism and the devastating effects of unsanitized truth. The more that the American people learn about what Trump is doing, and has done, the more political peril he and his accomplices are in. Fox News has, so far, been diligent in carrying out their mission to protect the President. They are his rapid response team when negative news is reported, and that’s almost all of it. They are the attack squad to neutralize critics and truth tellers. And they are even the “brain” trust that incubates Trump’s agenda and public pronouncements. In the service of that calling, Fox News is now test marketing a new tactic aimed at undermining the rule of law and denigrating the people charged with enforcing it. It is a strategy familiar to totalitarian dictators who strive to hoard control over every institution of an otherwise free society. It surfaced recently when Fox’s Jeanine Pirro asked an eagerly agreeable guest whether special counsel Robert Mueller is “a greater threat than [Vladimir] Putin to this country.”
It’s an odd question for the obvious reasons. Putin is a ruthless dictator who has invaded neighboring countries, murdered his political adversaries, and waged a cyber war against the United States. While on the other hand, Mueller is a war hero, a lifelong public servant, and a man who has earned unqualified respect from across the political spectrum (at least until he took his current job). But the question is also a curious one coming from people who have lately been praising Putin as a strong leader who, according to Trump, would be a dandy friend to the U.S. and no threat whatsoever. Nevertheless, the allegation has been making the rounds at Fox News. The latest eruption of this slander came from Fox News host Mark Levin during an interview on Sean Hannity’s program. And he wasn’t shy about making a pointedly defamatory charge with no basis to support it:
“Robert Mueller is a greater threat to this republic and the Constitution than anything Vladimir Putin did during the campaign. And I’m no fan of Vladimir Putin. He’s threatening to take down a President of the United States.”
So Levin’s theory is that Mueller is worse than Putin because he’s trying to remove a president that Putin installed. And Hannity agrees, describing the legally mandated operations of the Justice Department (which is being run by Trump appointees) as akin to the former Soviet Union. It’s a rather peculiar spectacle to watch Fox News and the Republican leadership rail on Mueller, a man most of them praised as the perfect choice for special counsel when it was announced. But it’s nauseating to see a man with real integrity, principle, and courage, being trashed as a traitor to the country he served faithfully for his entire adult life. Especially when held up in comparison to the greedy, racist, sexual predator who is currently exploiting his occupancy of the White House to sell out the nation to its enemies. For the record, this is who Levin, Hannity, Fox News, and the GOP are castigating as a corrupt defiler of democracy.
Trashy Propaganda
There’s got to be a certain mentality that goes into somehow believing the propaganda rubbish coming from Trump & his echo. It’s why I say it has all the markings of a cult: how-qanon-believers-thin
If we’re going to have any hope of solving it, we need to better appreciate its complexity. The crisis of disinformation also demands that we as individuals assert more critical thinking in the content we consume, while strengthening local services in our communities, such as education, recreation and mental health, to offer those inching toward online radicalization in-person support. We, both as individuals and as communities, have a critical role to play.
More on how propaganda can poison the brain are revealed here in this posting from The-real-enemy-propaganda
“Propaganda works best when those being manipulated are confident that they are acting of their own free will.” Goebbels
The biggest non-secret in U.S. politics is the astonishingly successful right-wing propaganda machine which, for decades, has skewed the way Americans think. Consider the situation at this moment: Few discussions about the 2018 mid-terms don’t include at least some reference to ‘the hated Pelosi’ or ‘Democrats in disarray’. The huge message center created by wealthy right-wingers has known from the beginning that an effective message is one that is uniformly adopted by all corners of their media empire, and thrown out repeatedly in all directions like the promotion of an upcoming movie. The inevitable result of such universal repetition is that the theme quickly finds its way into mainstream media. Their success (with the assistance of their congressional stooges) with the two words ‘Hillary’s emails’ defies all description. During the 2016 presidential campaign it became impossible for reporters to focus on any Trump outrage without feeling obliged to add, ‘but Hillary’s emails.’ Moral equivalency became perverse.
Trump’s Assault on the Media
Our forefathers would view our current autocratic leader & his lapdog state-run media, along with regular attacks on the legitimate press, as their worst nightmare. Democracy has served our nation well for 2-1/2 centuries, but in this current information battle to win the hearts & minds of the people, we have a fight ahead of us. These excerpts are found in If-Only-Old-Tom-Could-See-H
Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and later served as the third president of the United States, was a strong believer in a democracy’s need for a free press. Here are some quotes, from famguardian.org, attributed to Jefferson regarding the Fourth Estate:
“The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”
“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”
“I am… for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.”
“The art of printing secures us against theretrogradation of reason and information.”
It seems as if what Jefferson feared most has come to pass with the elevation of a self-serving, arrogant, incompetent, egotistical, narcissistic, pathological liar to the White House … paired with a compliant Congress. As has been said, “The press is only an enemy to those who fear the truth.”
Here is a very worthy effort: at-least-100-newspaper
The views of rank-and-file Republicans, captured in voter surveys, are nothing less than galling. Let’s lead with a poll conducted by the global marketing firm Ipsos and reported by the Daily Beast. It found that 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” When asked if President Trump should shut down The Post, CNN and the New York Times, 23 percent of Republicans said yes. These findings are obviously troubling to me as a member of the Fourth Estate. But in the Trump era, assaults on the media come with the territory. More disturbing to me as a citizen is that those Trump cultists would knowingly and willingly give him the power to trample on the First Amendment, destroying an essential part of our democracy that he doesn’t like. That is appalling. They either don’t know or care about what Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in New York Times Co. v. United States in 1971: The Founding Fathers intended that “the press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”
Our home-grown destroyers of the First Amendment would have the United States join foes of press freedom around the globe. Places that the watchdog organization Freedom House has identified as:
● North Korea, where domestic media outlets are “state controlled and closely monitored, and produce propaganda with the aim of ensuring absolute loyalty to Kim Jong-un.”
● China, which “maintains control over news reporting via direct ownership, accreditation of journalists [and] harsh penalties for online criticism.”
● Russia, which controls the main national news agenda, and where news “outlets operate with the understanding that the government has the means to close them at any time.”
The animus of some Trump supporters toward the opposition, and their embrace of America’s longtime foes, is astounding. A photograph in circulation shows two middle-age men at an Ohio Trump rally, one of them wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, and both in T-shirts with a message printed on the front that read “I’d rather be Russian than a Democrat.” But don’t dismiss their behavior at the Ohio rally as a silly stunt by two grown men who should know better. The grass-roots Republican affection for Russia, because of Trump’s own affinity for the Kremlin, is more widely shared than you may think. Get this: In a Yahoo Finance-SurveyMonkey poll cond
ucted from July 25 to 27, 11 percent of the Republicans surveyed said it would be “appropriate” for Russia to interfere in the midterm elections if it helped their party keep control of Congress, and 29 percent said it would not be “a big deal.” Yes, a majority of Republicans (55 percent) opposed the idea. But the fact that 40 percent of Republicans would be okay with Russian interference in a U.S. election if it helped their side speaks to a lack of allegiance to our democratic institutions. Here’s another scary story. Nearly a quarter of Republicans (22 percent) believe Trump tells the truth only “some of the time or less,” but more than half of that group still approves of the job he’s doing as president, according to an NBC News-SurveyMonkey online poll. They seem to believe that Trump can do no wrong, even though they know he’s likely lying to them. Case in point: Trump tells the nation that his handling of the summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki was a great success. GOP leadership and 55 percent of Americans didn’t think so. But because Trump spoke those words, 71 percent of Republicans approved of his behavior, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll. Want more? While most Americans (59 percent) accepted the intelligence community’s findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign to help Trump, only 32 percent of Republicans agreed. The contrast couldn’t be greater. When it comes down to support for blocking news outlets, blessing the sucking up to foreign adversaries, and accepting outrageous and brazen lying by a president, Trump supporters have the field all to themselves. Their view: He has the throne; the rest must obey. And that is where our democracy faces its challenge. Election Day in November is the decision point. It offers the moment to reaffirm support for fundamental freedoms and integrity in government. The choice will be there in print. The Republican’s name on the ballot in your district may be different, but it is, de facto, Donald Trump. You know where his base stands. Where stand you?
Do Not Call This Christianity!
We don’t want to be seen as associated with whatever this is. If the world perceives this president of a so-called evangelical university represents our Christian beliefs & values, we might as well lock the churches’ doors & start over with a newly-minted genuine faith. When such men who are regarded as recognizable leaders of the evangelical faith spew demonic lies & conspiracies, such heretics do immeasurable damage to the credibility & reputation of the faith. Call Falwell Jr. a modern-day scribe & pharisee if you will. Parents who wish to send their high school graduates to a Christian college, it’s best to steer clear of Liberty U! The one at the top of the university seems possessed of a certain spirit, but it’s certainly not of God, as clearly laid out inside these next three links below.
Perhaps some of you might take issue with my term demonic, but when a professed evangelical leader is so obviously given over to a spirit of deception by spewing demonstrable lies, relentless in servitude to his cultist master, what else should we call it? When Falwell Jr. claims upstanding public servants who’ve committed no crimes should “rot in jail,” it indicates to me either his own mind may have rotted or is demon-possessed. This is a case where it’s easy to distinguish between good and evil. For the sake of the faith, the evangelical church should totally denounce him in the name of honesty & moral decency! So click on these articles to read the irresponsible claims that are just plain loony (& evil): jerry-falwell-jr-says-d
Other Echo Nutjobs
Look who they let out of his cage to again spew his unique brand of garbage: dinesh-dsouza-is-maki
It was bad enough that Fox News host Jeanine Pirro asked such a question but even worse that her two guests responded by suggesting that special counsel Robert Mueller, a decorated Marine Corps captain and former FBI director, is at least as big a threat to the U.S. as Russian President Vladimir Putin. Pirro took Fox News’ Operation Collusion Cover-up to new lows last night as she guest hosted the Hannity show. Speaking with two fellow members of the Collusion Cover-Up Club, she “asked,” Dan Bongino, Fox’s newly-minted legal expert without a law degree, “Is Mueller a greater threat than Putin to this country?” It says something about Pirro (whose ties to Trump include her alleged-mobster then-husband being kept on retainer) that not even these two dedicated Trumpers wanted to go all the way there.
But the responses were almost as disturbing. Bongino said about Mueller, “Oh, he’s a serious threat.” Bongino called the Russia investigation a “sham” – while all three conveniently ignored the 32 indictments and/or guilty pleas it’s produced so far. “Mueller greater threat than Putin, Charlie?” Pirro “asked” her other guest, Charlie Kirk. “Well, look, it’s tough to say,” Kirk replied. “Mueller’s doing so much damage to this country.” Then Kirk attacked congressional Republicans for “continuing to renew his funding” and not “going after him.” It’s one thing to defend Trump’s large cloud of worrisome ties to Russia but – probably because they know they can’t defend Dear Leader – these three are smearing a man who has spent a lifetime serving his country – in order to cover up and distract from Trump’s suspicious behavior. Watch Fox’s Operation Collusion Cover-up below, from the August 10, 2018 Hannity, via The Contemptor.
Reliable Sources
This video inside the next link is a very perceptive commentary from Sunday morning, calling out Trump’s Hall of Mirrors coming from Fox & the echo: brian-stelter-trump-does
“We would be a more unified country. There would be less overt hate, there would be less appeal to division, I guarantee it,” said the Mayor. “Because what Murdoch did through Fox News and the New York Post among others, is to create a dynamic where that stuff could come out in the open.” “There is no Donald Trump without News Corp,” he added. “I firmly believe that. He never gets to the presidency because he would never have been elevated the way he was consistently for years and years.” “We have to be able to call out when a particular company has a corporate agenda, has a political agenda, and has very effectively changed the American discourse,” he said. “Today you have one outlet and one outlet only that is constantly sewing division.” “So you would rather not have The New York Post or Fox News exist,” Stelter prompted. “Look, it’s a free country. I’m saying because they exist we’ve been changed for the worst,” he replied. “Isn’t that like saying they are fake news or they’re an enemy of the people?” asked Stelter. “No, because I think what the president tried to do is create a dynamic that’s anti-media, anti-free speech, undermining democratic norm,” said de Blasio.
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