How Trump Uses Lies To Win

"By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.”

(In Hitler’s Germany this was called “working toward the fuhrer.”)

Read the whole story at Bloomberg

"Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly, about matters as serious as the election results and as trivial as the tiles at Mar-a-Lago. (According to his butler, Anthony Senecal, Trump once said the tiles in a nursery at the West Palm Beach club had been made by Walt Disney himself; when Senecal protested, Trump had a single response: “Who cares?”) When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It’s called cognitive load—our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true."

Read the entire story at Politico

“Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.

"Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government."

Read George Monbiot's essay in The Guardian

"Trump’s rise to power has followed a similar trajectory to that of quacks who peddle panaceas to the desperate—a bizarre and heartbreaking world I’ve long studied. Just like them, Trump will fail to deliver. But his supporters will find a way to exonerate him."

Read about Trump's psychological game at SLATE

“...the worst thing he could do -- and I see this as a real danger -- would be to politicize the agencies that produce government economic data, to put people in place that will skew the numbers in his favor. If that happens, the data will be useless, and we’ll essentially be flying blind when it comes to the true state of the economy."

Read at CBS about how Trump plans to corrupt our information stream

"Newt Gingrich wants to fire federal employees who voted for Clinton "There won’t be any real cooperation until we change federal law so we can fire them”"

At Salon

“Trump says he will pick which journalists will cover him."

From ReutersTV

"Anyone - citizen or journalist - who is surprised by false claims from the new inhabitant of the Oval Office hasn't been paying attention. That was reinforced when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told "Meet the Press" Sunday that Spicer had been providing "alternative facts" to what the media had reported, making it clear we've gone full Orwell."

From the Chicago Tribune

"This is how he’s going to chip away at our understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s real and what’s not. This is even stronger, more powerful gas lighting — making us question our own instincts and even start doing things because we want to fit in with “everyone else” who from what we know, seem to think this is all fine. Trump wants a cheering section at all his press conferences and if you don’t realize that those are not the reporters clapping, it will seriously fuck with you."

Read the entire piece at MEDIUM

"How did Dylann Roof go from being someone who was not raised in a racist home to someone so steeped in white supremacist propaganda that he murdered nine African Americans during a Bible study? The answer lies, at least in part, in the way that fragile minds can be shaped by the algorithm that powers Google Search."

How Dylann Roof was brainwashed by right wing media into a person who'd kill nine churchgoers he had prayed with

"I’m not bragging, it’s a fact, you the audience deserve to know this. Infowars is the main operating system of the rebirth of the American republic, and is a key blueprint worldwide in nation-states launching a new renaissance. I’ve been told that by the president, I’ve been told that by Nigel Farage, on and off air, I have been told that by the top generals, you name it.” ~Alex Jones, the voice of the paranoid Right, host of InfoWars

MediaMatters has the video

"Years of fear mongering, paranoia, and conspiracy theories on Fox News and talk radio paved the way for a Trump presidency. It’s up to journalists to stop that fear from continuing to hijack American politics.” ~MediaMatters

“When you’re a right wing media outlet and you want people to pay attention, what do you do? You scare the shit out of them.” ~MediaMatters

A useful video explains how the right wing has gaslit half of America from MediaMatters

"While no one knows what the new leaders will actually do, there are signs that are disturbing. We have seen the bald assertion of "alternative facts." We have heard the blatant attacks on science. Familiar signposts of our democracy –truth, civility, working together – have been obscured or swept aside.” ~Gov. Jerry Brown of California

MotherJones on Jerry Brown's promise to fight lies with the truth

When Will They Call Romney A Liar?

Dear CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS, CNN, (forget FoxNews, we know what they're in the business of), AP, UPI, major national newspapers,

Watch this, it explains my complaint. It's footnoted.

When are you going to start calling Romney a liar? When do you plan to point out the lies?

And don't pretend both campaigns are lying equally. It's not fair to call a partisan argument or judgment or point of view a lie. Distorting someone's words, though, is a lie in the Mosaic sense. It's bearing false witness.

It would be more correct, more precise, to call Romney a persistent liar, a stubborn liar. Either way, he's a liar who refuses to belief the truth when he doesn't like the truth. He's said that. He knows what he says is untrue and yet he repeats it for personal gain.

Because telling the truth is what newspapers are supposed to do, you should explain that Romney is a liar. Repeat it as often as Romney repeats the lies.

And you should correct the lies, rather than just repeating them. His millions and his friends' millions are already repeating the lies on your air and in your pages.

There is the welfare lie, and there is the "you didn't build that" lie. There is some pretty good debunking out there. Here's an NPR fact check story scolding Romney. But people are busy. They count on the news to explain when someone is lying his way into office.

The "you didn't build that" distortion could, I suppose, be called a stupid misunderstanding. After a month and millions of dollars of ads wrapped around the stupid misunderstanding, you probably should start calling Romney stupid too. For refusing to understand what a normal thinking person would be able to understand after it's been patiently explained to him by people able to think and reason.

To be elaborately bend-over-backwards fair, you could convene a panel of eight year olds with decent grades and ask them if they understood Obama when he said: "those roads––if you have a business––you didn't build that". And then you could say whether Romney is as smart as an eight year old. I'm confident he is, but he behaves and speaks and buys ads that make it look like he isn't.

Participating in stupidity and lies makes a news organization and its reporters and editors into stupid liars too.

Invisible Protesters Occupy Wall Street

Keith Olberman featured this invisible phenomenon the other night, and then again with Michael Moore the next night.

Nobody is covering the protests on Wall Street that have been going on for a week.

Meanwhile five people show up in colonial costumes with signs saying Obama is a Nazi and it's on all four network news programs and the front page of every newspaper.

Is it because most American side with Wall Street?

Or does Wall Street own the public conversation?

The Rupert Murdoch Propaganda Machine

Rupert Murdoch lies for profit. Coincidentally, his newspapers and broadcast companies function as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party here and the conservatives in Britain. Their power is his power and he does very well for them.

The News of the World, the infamous London tabloid, fools millions of working class Brits every week with its addictive sleaze and distortion. Their methods are outrageous. The most recent revelation involves the Murdoch tabloid reporters and editors hacking into the cell phone of a kidnapped child, leading frantic parents to believe she was still alive, stripping the privacy and dignity of crime victims to sell newspapers. The story was broken by reporter Nick Davies of the Guardian.

This is predatory journalism. Actually, to use the word journalism degrades that important and often heroic profession. What Rupert Murdoch's company engages in isn't journalism, it's just predatory. Rupert Murdoch thinks of the reading public as so many defenseless and deceivable chumps.

This behavior isn't any different at FoxNews here in the U.S. TruthOut published a very good piece recently about the set of tactics used. The "news" operation is run by Roger Ailes, who is not a newsman but one of the most egregious practitioners of smear politics and dirty tricks, and a deep-dyed Republican. Rolling Stone recently published an excellent and damning portrait of Ailes.

FoxNews makes no pretense of actual truth or decency. Beyond its cynical slogan of "Fair and Balanced" there is no attempt to be either. The stream is all pro-Republican and harshly anti-Democratic 24 hours a day. News is a team sport. it's about winning the political game to push Murdoch's right-wing agenda as hard as it can be pushed and thereby increase Murdoch's personal wealth and corporate power.

The Murdoch operation is a throwback to the ugly press of an uglier time. Shades of Germany in the 1930s, and a period in this country when newspaper magnates bragged about starting wars in order to sell newspapers. The goal of the Murdoch organization isn't to inform but to provoke.

They are willing to intentionally distort and misrepresent clear facts about the most critical issues of our time to toe an ideological line and win a political ballgame. (This piece by Shawn Otto describes how Fox took a Reuters headline about global climate change and changed it to give it the opposite meaning, helping stall efforts to head off the looming calamity.)

What Fox does is insulting and beyond dishonest, it's criminally dishonest. FoxNews has demonstrated again and again that it doesn't deserve to be allowed anywhere near the public airwaves, any more than an embezzler should be handed the presidency of a bank.

A Few Words About Hypocrisy

Never mind that Michele Bachmann can't tell John Wayne from John Wayne Gacy, it's her lies about her own personal government subsidies that should make voters angry. This from the Des Moines Register backs up this from Politico.

("But she's so pretty when she lies, and she seems to believe what she's saying.")

Pork is a big Republican boogeyman, but they love their earmarks. Republicans know how to suck up government spending even when they're busy condemning it. Government spending is wrong except when it's spent on them. Read about it in USNews and World Report, not exactly a liberal magazine.

Even thought they are dead set against government spending and high taxes, Red States pay less in taxes and receive more in government spending. As noted in the Washington Post.

It's called HYPOCRISY.

Republicans shut the "public option" down during the healthcare reform debate. Never mind that they have the Cadillac of public options. It's not socialist if a Republican enjoys it personally. Story from Raw Story.

Republicans holler about the minor misbehavior of Democrats and demand resignation. But they remain in office after far worse. All well reported in The Nation. Was this hypocrisy reported on FoxNews?

On the Republican side, sexual misbehavior is an institution. They have a special church group to cover it up. And notice it's all men. Reported on Alternet (because the main stream media is too afraid of being called liberal.)

Sanctity of marriage? Republican pols have a sorry record of infidelity and still manage to be sanctimonious and point fingers. Reported in Washington Monthly, but not talked about on right wing talk radio.

The culture war was invented by Republicans to "defend" the superior values of the solid Republican south, west and middle west. The problem is these Red States have the worst statistics on teen pregnancy, divorce, murder, poverty and other "values" issues than the so-called Blue States. Again, reported by Alternet because the main stream media is too busy covering Republicans preaching values.

Do Republicans preach values because they lack them? From ScienceBlogs. And again.

It's called HYPOCRISY. I for one have a hard time forgiving this sin.