Trump And The Death Of Honest Information

George Monbiot from The Guardian discusses the ugly effect Trump might have on a trusting public. Trump’s closest advisors aren’t simply dishonest, they are leaders in the corporate disinformation system. Welcome to an era of propaganda enforced with government muscle.

Read it in the Guardian

This weekend’s shoot up in a family pizza restaurant in DC by a Trump vigilante shows how the Trump posse turns their bogus news stream into violent action

This BuzzFeed article demonstrates how the false news industry that helped elect Trump may also deliver an armed and gullible posse to wreak havoc where you live

An article published in The Nation 25 years ago predicted the advent of “post-truth” America

Read it in The Nation

Trump surrogate on NPR: “There’s no such thing as facts.”

The Atlantic explains what Trump's post-truth machine signifies for America

The same NPR interview discussed at Raw Story

Truth is becoming a scarce commodity in the Trump era.

CNN reports on how Trump plans to narrow access to the internet. Narrower access = more power to the dear leader.

Read it at CNN-Money

This Republican dislike of truth and facts is not new. It’s central to the Republican brand. Facts give them problems.

The New York Times reported on this same "we create our own reality" mindset in the George W. Bush administration. That false news strategy marched us into an unnecessary and catastrophic war.

Sarah Palin says that God intervened in this election. (She may be referring to her close neighbor Vladimir Putin)

The Independent, published in London, suspects Palin is a signal that America is losing its mind.

The editor of the Washington Post (Marty Baron, the hero who led the Boston Globe’s dogged exposure of priest child abuse) has some advice for journalists as we enter a new world where it’s dangerous to speak truth to power.

Read about Marty Baron's warning and advice at Vanity Fair

Fact Avoidance as Republican Policy

The people worked up about Planned Parenthood’s policies regarding fetal tissue don’t seem concerned about the fetal tissue that fertility clinics donate to science on a routine basis.

The Washington Post reported on this double standard.

The people worked up about Hillary possibly deleting emails do not get worked up about the 22 million White House emails deleted at the order of Karl Rove...

Pensito Review reported on this double standard.

What makes this difficult for the thinking half of the population is this. These people who are getting selectively worked up are not being intentionally dishonest. They are lying to themselves, you are just in the way.

“…One of the most frustrating things about attempting to engage "a Republican argument" is precisely how often the arguments seem disingenuous. It is not as if rank-and-file activists are actively lying about their motives. It is that they have never questioned them themselves. They have simply heard and regurgitated the talking points so often that they believe their own bullshit and are beyond questioning it. The frustrating thing is not that they are lying to you. It is that in effect (to borrow a Colbert construction), they are lying to themselves at you."

Digby's Blog reported on this interesting and useful gift of self-deception.

Trying to persuade them of the truth is dangerous the way trying to rescue a drowning person will sometimes drown the rescuer. A friend of mine once pointed out that the more you point out the truth to people the less they will believe it.

What are we supposed to do? Wouldn’t you think an advanced society would have mechanisms for revealing and destroying this kind of malicious bullshit? Because it’s all intentional, whether the people know they are being fooled or not.

That corrective mechanism is supposed to be journalism. When Karl Rove explained that the truth about Iraq didn’t really matter because “we create our own reality” it was a journalist who reported that. A lot of us thought the cat was out of the bag, but it wasn’t, because half of America took Mr. Rove at his word about George Bush being able to create new realities. A useful godlike ability, that. Why didn’t that revelation sink the Bush White House?

Journalism Professor Blog discusses the weird reality bending powers of Karl Rove here.

Too often the reporting class just reports, just repeats the bullshit. By reporting the bullshit it becomes news and most people figure news and fact are the same. They have a problem telling bullshit from fact. If it’s reported by a newspaper or a news channel it’s assumed to be fact. Just as Mr. O’Reilly declaring his program is a “no spin zone” means he would never spin a story. Ever. Because he says this with incredible force and conviction makes it even truer. And because Fox viewers are spinning at the same speed as O’Reilly is himself it begins to seem like the spin isn’t spin at all.

Planned Ignorance

There is a well-funded effort in this country to hide, suppress, distort and outright kill the truth––to kill the truth about a lot of things––about climate science, about the economy, about the ways concentrated wealth distorts our democracy and our justice system. Mostly they are determined to suppress the truth about their dangerous power. They have the power to hide the truth, to distort the public conversation, to suppress the public’s right to know things. They benefit from our ignorance and confusion.

Truth and honesty and understanding are inconvenient for certain powerful people and groups. The Founders of this country believed and never hesitated to say that the full and honest truth is a public good. It’s a conversation, a process, not a fixed truth but something we are constantly working out. This is why the public conversation cannot be a private one carried on in board rooms. But some very superior people hate the notion that the public has a right to anything. They believe nothing is deserved, that no one is entitled to anything unless they have the money to buy it. They believe this knowing that they have a growing monopoly on wealth.

Of course those with infinite wealth think it's appropriate (and safest for them) to keep information from the public: nobody is entitled to the truth. They own it and can dole it out as they like. They think nothing is deserved–––except the wealth they inherited, their dividend checks, their annual bonus. Owning for a living entitles a person to everything; working for a living entitles you to nothing. The democrats who founded this country invented our system of government to guard against this idea of narrow privilege. But that history is also being suppressed and distorted.

(The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an essay about this suppression and withholding of information from the public.)

Realizing that knowledge is dangerous to them, the fossil fuel billionaires have leveraged their influence to blackmail universities and professors and scientists. “If you publish your findings you will lose your professorship. You will lose the funding for your research. Your university won’t get the grants it needs in other areas. You will be targeted by our news organizations. We will question your integrity. We will investigate your private life. We will target your family.” Al Gore gave his film a perfect title: the overwhelming science on climate change was an Inconvenient Truth. He became inconvenient. They succeeded in making him disappear.

(From the Guardian: 125 million dollars have been spent hiding, disputing and distorting key climate science the public is entitled to know.)

Luckily there is some pushback… But what this does is promote the idea that climate scientists aren’t sure about what is happening. And the media owned by the fossil fuel billionaires will broadcast “the controversy” which doesn’t really exist.

(From VOX: luckily there is money being spent to get the climate science out there.)

I mentioned that concentrated wealth has also distorted the measuring and regulation of our economy. It’s a fundamental conundrum: is cash value the only measure of validity? Actually, the answer is Yes and No. Those with the most money can, in the words of Karl Rove, “create their own reality.”

(An excellent article from Bloomberg about the illogic and biased nature of modern economics and finance.)

But bad math and bad economics will have consequences somewhere. Great wealth insulates the wealthy from consequences. Great wealth has even been able to persuade the millions who suffer from the the wrongdoing of the billionaire class that these consequences were properly paid out and to applaud the vulgar excess of the billionaire class the way the poor used to applaud kings and queens. It’s all very different from what Franklin and Jefferson and Paine and Washington planned. Of course Franklin warned about this very thing.

Here's some further reading:


A new book about the problem of Willful Blindness.


What is the Dunning Kruger Effect?


What is Illusory Superiority?


What is Hanlon's Razor?


Why do some people believe knowledge is a curse?


(Now that we have a full Republican Clown Car) what is the Imposter Syndrome?


What is the ultimate insult you can throw at a foolish pundit?

Meanwhile, Red States across America are rewarding their citizens by dismantling their education systems.


(The Nation reporting on the dismantling of higher ed in North Carolina)


(Salon reports on college dropout Scott Walker's defunding of the university system in Wisconsin.)


Adam Smith was the father of capitalism. Today's capitalists worship him. But (as reported in MinnPost) even Adam Smith knew the immense value of a liberal education.

(Rolling Stone looks at the dystopia that will remain after the oligarchs are done with our public education system.)

And even if the public is able to think clearly, Congress doesn’t care. Why? Money. Concentrated wealth and power has completely corrupted our democratic system.