Your Daily Trump––Trump & Rudy

Is Trump’s Plan B to capture a large segment of America and imprison them in an endless loop of hatred and lunacy? He’d find lots of investors. I’m guessing Roger Ailes will run it for him.

Vanity Fair reports on Trump's plan to become a TV network

Does the First Amendment protect deliberate lies?

The Atlantic sorts out this tricky issue.

Are liberals to blame for Trump? You’re joking...

The New Republic debunks this notion.

What we’ve learned about Trump supporters this past week

Reported by the New Yorker.

Trump and Giuliani as you’ve never seen them before. (Shared by my old editor at SPY)

Trump and Rudy on YouTube, where else?

Trump is already ordering his stormtroopers to intimidate voters on election day.

Trump's brownshirt plan reported by the LATimes.

From a year ago: Scientific America’s three part series examining the psychology of Trump supporters

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.

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.