Trump's Violent Attack On Truth

The other day, after Trump gave Turkish dictator Erdogan a cordial meeting at the White House, Erdogan watched his personal security detail attack and violently tackle, beat and kick peaceful protesters across the street from the Turkish ambassador's residence. This occurred on our soil while the Turkish president watched.

Reported by the Guardian.

Video at BoingBoing.

This appears to be where Trump is headed. This was a demonstration of the kind of brute force President Trump envies and admires.

Across the country there are new legislative efforts to criminalize peaceful political protest, to criminalize free speech. And what informs free speech? The information and facts we get from a free press. Trump is cracking down on press freedom already.

A reporter asking questions at the FCC was manhandled and arrested.

"Security guards at the Federal Communications Commission headquarters here manhandled a well-regarded reporter at a public hearing today and forced him to leave the premises after he had tried to politely ask questions of FCC commissioners.

"The reporter, John M. Donnelly of CQ Roll Call, is an award-winning journalist. He is also chairman of the National Press Club’s Press Freedom Team and president of the Military Reporters & Editors association. He has chaired the NPC Board of Governors and formerly served on the Standing Committee of Correspondents in the U.S. Congress, which credentials the Washington press corps.

"Donnelly said he ran afoul of plainclothes security personnel at the FCC when he tried to ask commissioners questions when they were not in front of the podium at a scheduled press conference.

"Throughout the FCC meeting, the security guards had shadowed Donnelly as if he were a security threat, he said, even though he continuously displayed his congressional press pass and held a tape recorder and notepad. They even waited for him outside the men’s room at one point.

"When Donnelly strolled in an unthreatening way toward FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly to pose a question, two guards pinned Donnelly against the wall with the backs of their bodies until O’Rielly had passed. O’Rielly witnessed this and continued walking…"

In West Virginia, a reporter asking HHS Secretary Price questions was arrested and faces charges. Charges of what? Of asking questions.

"On Tuesday evening, Public News Service reporter Dan Heyman was arrested at the West Virginia State Capitol after asking Price about the Republican health-care bill that passed in the House last week. Heyman wanted to know if domestic violence will be considered a preexisting condition if the bill becomes law.

"Price didn’t respond, so Heyman kept asking his question. He said he followed Price down a hallway and reached past people in his entourage while holding his phone. Then capitol police “decided I was just too persistent in asking this question and trying to do my job and so they arrested me,” Heyman said."

This is the Trump administration’s goal: to suppress, intimidate, and jail journalists for doing their job.

The Pointer Institute reports that Trump asked FBI director Comey to jail journalists who were embarrassing him.

"President Trump asked former FBI Director Jim Comey to lock up journalists for publishing classified information during a February Oval Office meeting, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting summarized Tuesday by The New York Times.

"Trump urged Comey to imprison journalists at the beginning of an exchange during which he also asked the former FBI chief to back off an investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, according to the story."

The story reported in The Guardian.

This intimidation predates the inauguration. We saw it on camera. We saw it in his legal intimidation of women who charged him with sexual assault. If Trump dislikes what someone says or reports, even if it’s true, he will retaliate––with all of the power and leverage a billionaire possesses, and with violence. Now he has the power to retaliate with the full force of the federal government and its police agencies.

How violent might this get? Trump has a record of defying rules and limits. He has a record of retaliating with force. Look at the foreign leaders he admires. Putin, whose operatives have been silencing his critics and opponents with lethal poisonings and machine guns and by throwing them from high windows. Trump admires Philippine leader Duterte who has bragged about joining his death squads on killing sprees.

Which brings us back to one of the tyrants Trump is modeling himself after.

Trump invited Turkey’s dictator Erdogan to a warm embrace in the White House, and Erdogan returned this favor by staging a vivid demonstration of how his dictatorship works at home. Kurdish protesters were assembled legally and peacefully across the street from the Turkish Ambassador’s residence, when this happened. The video is shocking. Muscular thugs in dark suits chasing and beating peaceful protesters, knocking them down then kicking them in the head and the groin. Brownshirt behavior in Washington DC carried out by a foreign dictator friend of our president. Think of it as an advertisement for Trump’s kind of leadership. Jackboots worn with business suits.

Reported in The Guardian.

This is not new. Erdogan’s personal security guards beat up journalists outside the Brookings Institution in March of last year.

Donald Trump’s campaign showed an escalating tendency toward violence. Trump himself has shown a tendency to push things as far as he can go and then further. When stopped or discouraged by officials or judges or rules he challenges their validity, questioning the law, discrediting the rules and norms that make the United States a democracy. Trump obviously would much prefer being president of a dictatorship where he can do whatever he likes and destroy whoever opposes him or criticizes him or asks him embarrassing questions.

Trump, the man who brazenly slanders and libels anyone who stands up to him, wants to change the libel laws to enable him to go after his critics. Now he has presidential powers to follow through on his threats. His goal? To undermine Americans’ ability to sort fact from fake and truth from lies.

Reported by Politico.

Newsweek analyzes Trump's threats to the First Amendment and lays out what it means going forward.

Trump fears the truth because truth and facts are our best defense against tyranny.

Trump won the election because of the flood of fake news. His campaign repeatedly cited and pushed fake news stories. They applauded and validated the fake news being produced by Russian proxies to pollute our politics.

The Trump campaign won the election in large part because they adopted the strategic false memes and smears the Russians were producing. They welcomed it and distributed it. They were playing by the Russian playbook and it worked. This according to intelligence expert Clinton Watts, in testimony before Congress.

Video testimony via CNN

The White House staff feeds President Trump a steady diet of fake news stories, which shape his “reality” (which is entirely unreal). And this enables him to shape his devoted followers’ reality to conform with his delusions.

Reported by Newsweek.

This war against truth and information is central to tyranny and Trump’s goal is exactly that. It’s happened before, but earlier tyrants did not have the power and machinery this president has to undermine our free access to good information. Trump is weaponizing the Big Lie, which is the tool Hitler and Stalin used to consolidate their power.

At VOX, historian Timothy Snyder explains how tyrants gain power by first destroying free and reliable information, by destroying truth.

Trump Ushers In A New Era Of Bold Dishonesty

Falsehoods, lies. deliberate deceptions.

These are the tools Russia deployed against American democracy via trolls and bots here and in old Soviet satellite countries (via the Intercept, reporting on Trump's troll allies in former Soviet bloc), and it was eagerly embraced by the Republicans. Why? Because lying to the public is also key to the Republican strategy. It has been for a long time, reported by MotherJones.

James Fallows has an excellent piece at the Atlantic covering the dangerous and difficult landscape we are entering, where truth and honest detail are going to become much harder to find. Trump realizes what the public doesn't know can't hurt him. Which is why he hid his tax returns. Sadly the news media aided him by not reporting on the corruption that existed in plain sight.

The U.S. has entered a time when news reporting is based on wild accusations rather than evidence, as this Storify essay explains.

BBC reporting on Trump's baseless accusations about voter fraud. Once again the accusation without evidence. The millionth Republican voter fraud accusation, based on no evidence yet useful in distracting Americans from the real problem, voter suppression.

From ThinkProgress, this essay explains how when the public is made unsure of the truth power becomes the only thing that matters. A totalitarian reality. An end to democratic thinking and an end to democracy.

From Politifact, we see how Trump's closest advisors are also engaged in the business of hoaxing and deceiving the American public by misleading the president elect. They will keep him focused on the false narratives that keep him wildly entertaining.

From Motherboard, a backgrounder on Trump's top advisor, white supremacist hoaxer Steve Bannon, who has a history of reshaping evidence to fit his own prejudices and interests. He was the one who rigged BioSphere to create a result he wanted. He will likely double down on the "climate change hoax" narrative. Watch for the mass firings of scientists from NASA and other government departments.

A respected former CNN anchor (from CNN's more admired heyday) an article about what the news media must do to sort fact from propaganda in Trump's America.

From Quartz, this article describes Trump as the editor-in-chief of fake news.

From The Intellectualist, this article explores the punishments Trump's junta promises to mete out to anyone who fails to bow down to his majesty. This has been a theme of Kellyanne Conway's in recent weeks. Surrender or be jailed. The intellectuals this magazine writes for have become an endangered species.

Media Matters, a frankly pro-Clinton media watchdog, describes in rich detail how the Republican technocrats are busy selling off and burning down the remaining institutions of good government, starting with Social Security and Medicare. The pro-Clinton bona fides of Media Matters shouldn't discredit their reporting. We are looking at a war between the Honest and the Dishonest here. Bias in favor of honesty is not something to apologize for.

Did Russia Win The White House?

The American voters chose Hillary Clinton by more than a million and a half votes and the margin is growing as absentee votes are counted. The ongoing updated vote tally is shown here.

But Russia and the Russian spy agencies and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin wanted Trump and it looks like they got what they wanted.

Esquire's very readable and credible political reporter Charlie Pierce reports on the Russian connection here, and here.

The Hill newspaper reports on it here.

Mother Jones reports on it here.

The Russian government wanted someone weak, inexperienced, irrational, incompetent and vacillating and Americans who voted for Trump helped them achieve that.

With perhaps some additional help from voter intimidation and voter suppression and election rigging.

David Pakman addresses vote anomalies in key swing states

Published on Nov 14, 2016
--According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Hillary Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI and FL), but ultimately lost those states according to computerized vote counts

The data from TDMS Research

BBC journalist Greg Palast addresses these concerns more directly here

(This sounds like the kind of rhetoric Trump was shouting just before the election. But it isn’t rhetoric. It has to do not with predictive polling but with information collected as the vote was happening, which is less prone to deviations. The deviations are what alert the public to irregularities. That is what this information suggests may have happened.)

So there were a number of very disturbing forces pushing for a Trump victory.

Another mechanism that distorted this election was the way social media amplified and disseminated the lies being told. Because of the greater skepticism of progressive voters most of the fake stories that worked their way into this election were biased toward Trump.

The story from WIRED

Fake news sites sold more Americans on bogus negative stories about Hillary (I read one that reported that close associates said she emitted a sulphuric smell indicating she was in league with Satan. She does not, and she is not. People believe this crap because if it’s on the internets it must be true) and bogus positive stories about Trump (the one having the greatest effect may have been the one saying Pope Francis endorsed Trump, when in fact Pope Francis clearly and forcefully rebuked Trump and the hateful policies he calls for.)

Untrue stories and rumors are often in play during elections, but this year the untrue stories outplayed the true ones.

The story reported by Buzzfeed

(I realize Buzzfeed sounds a bit like a fake news source. This is actually a very well founded story.)

Trump benefited from the sad fact that many Americans base their most important decisions on feelings rather than facts. Which is ironic, because it wasn’t very long ago that Republicans were the party that prided itself on being rational and responsible. They derided liberals as being fact averse. That has flipped entirely.

Vox discusses the fact that conservatives believe the false stories far more than liberals do

One of the Big Lies cited in the Vox story was broadcast to the millions of gullible Trump supporters is now the top advisor in Trump’s White House, the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon.

One of the fake news creators discussed his filthy profession with the Washington Post. He seems to be enjoying the damage as much as Putin is, while frantically denying any blame for the millions of people he lied into voting for Trump. He has a point: if you can persuade a stupid person to drink poison the joke is on them, right? Too late to apologize now.

The Oxford English Dictionary announces a Word of the Year each year. This year’s word is “post-truth”. We’ve reached a point when what is true doesn’t matter to millions of people. This should be troubling. This is one of the first corruptions that occurred during the Nazi era in Germany. Now I realize Donald Trump is not Hitler because Hitler was a vegetarian, but apart from his eating habits there are a disturbing number of close similarities, not just in what Trump promises to do but in the kinds of poisonous rhetoric he used to get people out to vote for him. The only real difference is that Trump shouted these things in English and not in German.

The true story about "post-truth" via the BBC

Nothing we can do, right? Too late now, right? Let’s all curl up in fetal positions underneath our beds, right? They won’t find us there...

Actually? Actually there is something that might prevent the inauguration of President Trump.

Something called the Electoral College. It’s the old device the slave states put in place to increase their influence in Congress by adding electoral power for people they owned as property.

But it was also put in place to keep power from being given to dangerous people who catered to the mob. Not the Mob, as in the Mafia. The mob as in the unwashed and volatile public. The ignorant folk who are easily fooled by fake stories about an honest candidate being dishonest and a dishonest candidate being truthful. The Electoral College was created to prevent people like Donald J. Trump (con man, fraudster, tax evader, sociopath, fascist, incompetent) from gaining power.

And to avoid that outcome we can still hope that enough of these carefully selected Electoral College Electors will refuse to ratify the presidency of Vladimir Putin’s favorite.

I am recommending that everyone who knows rational people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida or any state that swung or squeaked by for Trump to phone them and ask them to write sincere and respectful personal letters to the Electors in their state. Other letters can be written to respected Republicans who might have some influence, who those Electors might respect.

One argument that might be persuasive is that Trump is erratic and irrational and likely to fail in a manner that will reflect very badly on the Republican Party. His errors and his poor judgment will be the party’s fault forever. The Republicans now own all three branches of government. They will own whatever unfolds whether they intended it or not.

Many conservatives have already disowned him. And are continuing to after the election.

The story from SLATE

Folks in the redder parts of the country tend to revere America’s military. You might inform these Republican in the Electoral College that our nation’s military rate climate change as one of the greatest security threats America faces today.

The story about the security threat from global warming via Scientific American

If Trump is inaugurated there are other things we’ll need to do. But let’s try to stop him before we get to that point.