emails: Digby:
thedigbyblog at gmail Dennis: satniteflix at gmail Gaius: publius.gaius at gmail Tom: tpostsully at gmail
Spocko:Spockosbrain at gmail
tristero: Richardein at me.com
"Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today's lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents--midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War --had little to do with a bottom line."
That's William F. Buckley.
He would have tried but nobody would have listened to him either ...
Oh, dear God is right. Alex Jones refused the job because "Make America Great Again" hats don't come in tinfoil. The irony is that most of the public has no idea who Frank Gaffney is (and I'm not going to bother with an introduction here). Nonetheless, correspondent James Ball tweeted, "We are so far off the map right now."
Donald Trump's transition team ("or lack thereof") is creating panic inside the Beltway, according to the HuffPost. Even as Trump's aides are asking Obama White House officials for recommendations for Republicans who might take their jobs, former Bush officials are reportedly recommending they "'stay away' from his 'angry, arrogant' team."
The resistance is already forming up and perhaps with more alacrity than the Trump administration. Tammy Palmer, a British activist who campaign against Brexit, offers some advice:
“Be tactical. Pick your supporters, pick the politicians who'll give you some information quietly, and find out what you need to do to influence people,” Palmer said. While the initial anti-Brexit marches brought tens of thousands of people to the streets, attendance at subsequent ones in less-united areas was paltry. “There has to be a point to a protest march, otherwise you look stupid. You look like a sore loser. They're great initially to rouse people, to get people angry,” Palmer said. “But if you're trying to use it for momentum, it can actually go the other way.”
[...]
“There's a certain arrogance among people like myself. I assumed people would never be stupid enough to do this,” Palmer said. “You hear this ‘liberal elite’ narrative, and liberalism has become a dirty word. We've brought some of that on ourselves—we've positioned ourselves as better than you—but actually that's nonsense. We are really trying to reach out to people, not to judge them, not to patronize them. The whole of this country isn’t racist, thank God. Most people don’t think that way.” In an interview with Politico, London Mayor Sadiq Khan echoed this sentiment.
I knew people were angry, but like Palmer never figured there were enough of them to elect Trump, never figured that as a country we were that foolish. Now jilted-feeling America lovers have dragged their beloved down to the banks of the Ohio River. All that's left is the drowning. But it will be a really great drowning.
As we ask ourselves what comes next, Masha Gessen offers six rules for survival in an autocracy at the New York Review of Books. Rule #2 is especially timely as we contemplate spending time with family at Thanksgiving. In spite of being "off the map," I'm sure my relations will move on as if nothing radical has happened:
Rule #2:Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time.
Roja Bandari, an Iranian American, describes life under a religious dictatorship in a series of tweets. Both Bandari's and Gessen's observations are sobering. But while offering his own advice on how to respond, Jonathan Chait notes similarly that any signs of normality are "purely superficial." He offers some perspective on just what lies ahead:
Trump’s election is one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worth recalling, however, that history is punctuated with disasters, yet the country is in a better place now than it was a half-century ago, and a better place than a half-century before that, and so on. Despair is a counterproductive response. So is denial — an easy temptation in the wake of the inevitable postelection pleasantries and displays of respect needed to maintain the peaceful transfer of power. The proper response is steely resolve to wage the fight of our lives.
So far, the incoming Trump administration seems ill-equipped to mount its own. But four years is a long time.
From Masha Gessen. The only thing I've read that makes full horrific sense of the implications of what just happened.
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
I don't know what to think about this. Obviously, I could not care less about the career prospects of Republican national security experts. I wouldn't join no matter what and I can see why these people are balking. Who wold want to be associated with this train wreck? But damn, what's going to happen? There are only a few weeks before these halfwits have to take over:
WASHINGTON — An already shallow national security bench is getting thinner for the Trump White House as government workers and national security hands worry over possible blowback from accepting a job with the incoming administration.
“Normally you’d be attracting the best and brightest at the beginning of an administration, but people are nervous,” one US intelligence official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the transition. “Is this a sure bet, or is this a house of cards that’s going to fall apart?”
The Trump transition team has already started farming Capitol Hill staffers and Washington think tanks for potential administration gigs, but there’s a running hesitation over what a position with the Trump White House even looks like, and whether it could be kryptonite for future career advancement, particularly within the national security world.
“I just don’t know who’s going to run foreign policy, in terms of organizationally, and I also don’t know who the personnel will be. Of the people who are being discussed, none of them inspire much confidence,” said one think tank analyst, who declined an approach by the Trump campaign for a potential foreign policy position. “There’s an argument out there that ‘it’s a patriotic duty to join, that it’s the right thing to do,’ but the more I hear from people who are actually talking with the campaign, the more people are starting to back away. It’s a nasty, vindictive place to work already….not really a good recruiting tool.”
That government workers and think-tankers are hesitant to take a Trump gig underscores just how unusual — and unprecedented — the next five weeks of administrative transition will be.
Government officials, including Republicans, are flying almost completely blind on potential national security nominations. Speculation on who the Trump team will tap to lead the CIA and fill other intelligence and national security posts is changing by the hour. It’s difficult to sift through what the Trump camp may actually be thinking, and which names are just passing through the proverbial DC echo chamber.
A conversation has emerged on social media in recent days, too, sparked by Eliot Cohen, a respected foreign policy voice on the right, on whether government workers should volunteer to serve the incoming administration. After briefly recommending government staffers serve Trump, he rescinded that recommendation in a series of tweets Tuesday.
After exchange w Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They're angry, arrogant, screaming "you LOST!" Will be ugly.
The hesitancy to take Trump gigs is a catch 22 for those worried about the president-elect’s inexperience on national security issues. On one hand, they like the idea of helping to shape policy, and feel their expertise is needed. But worries over retribution, and the possibility that the Trump White House could go up in figurative flames is enough to make many of them stay away.
“This is a whole new paradigm where people are actually leaving government, not just because of the pay or the hours, but because of the actual people running it,” the think tank analyst said. “Across the board, people are running away.”
Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross is President-elect Donald Trump's leading candidate for Commerce Secretary, multiple sources told POLITICO.
Ross, 78, is the founder of the private equity firm WL Ross & Co., known for restructuring failed companies and he's an economic adviser to Trump.
Carl Icahn appeared to confirm the news that Ross is the leading candidate for Commerce on Tuesday, tweeting, "Spoke to @realDonaldTrump. Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross are being considered for Treasury and Commerce. Both would be great choices."
Dan DiMicco, the former CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp and a Trump trade adviser, is seen as another top candidate for the Commerce Secretary job. But sources said he's also being eyed for U.S. Trade Representative.
The good news for his voters is that he seems to be very serious about getting rid of the Mexicans and the Muslims so his voters will be happy with it.
And since they believe their personal economic circumstances are already vastly improved just in the last week, that's probably fine with them.
Business manager and close friend Armstrong Williams said Carson won't join the incoming Trump administration and would only serve as an unofficial adviser.
Circa on Tuesday reported that Carson had been offered the position, citing Williams. But Williams told The Hill that no specific offer had been made.
"Dr. Carson was never offered a specific position, but everything was open to him," Williams told The Hill in a phone call.
"Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he's never run a federal agency. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency."
The man ran to be president of the United States. He was in the top tier for many months.
In May, Rodrigo Duterte, the provincial mayor who had just been elected President of the Philippines after promising to rid the country of crime and drugs by killing thousands of criminals, vowed to stop swearing. He told reporters, “Don’t fuck with me.” He called political figures “gay.” When a reporter asked about his health, he replied, “How is your wife’s vagina? Is it smelly? Or not smelly? Give me a report.” In an overwhelmingly Catholic country, he swore at the Pope. At first, he defended his language as a gesture of radical populism. “I am testing the élite in this country,” he said. “Because we are fundamentally a feudal country.” But, the day after the election, he appeared with a popular televangelist and said, “I need to control my mouth.” He compared his forthcoming transformation to that of a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. “If you are the President of the country, you need to be prim and proper,” he said. His inaugural speech, in June, was obscenity-free.
The resolution didn’t last. Duterte’s war on drugs has resulted in the deaths of more than three thousand people, drawing condemnation from human-rights groups and Western governments. In early September, before the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in Laos, a journalist asked Duterte what he would say if President Barack Obama raised the issue of human rights. “You know, the Philippines is not a vassal state,” he replied. “We have long ceased to be a colony of the United States.” Alternating between English and Tagalog, and pounding on the lectern, Duterte, it was widely reported, said of Obama, “Son of a whore, I’ll curse you at that forum.”
Duterte does not, as he has put it, “give a shit” about human rights, which he sees as a Western obsession that keeps the Philippines from taking the action necessary to clean up the country. He is also hypersensitive to criticism. “Duterte’s weakness is, really, he’s a tough guy,” Greco Belgica, a Filipino politician and an ally of Duterte’s, said. “You do not talk down to a tough guy. He’ll snap.”
The day after insulting Obama, Duterte released a statement expressing regret that his comment “came across as a personal attack on the U.S. President.” In his outburst, Duterte had used the Tagalog phrase putang ina, which means, literally, “your mother is a whore.” But it is also used to communicate frustration, as in “son of a bitch.” “It’s just an expression,” Salvador Panelo, Duterte’s chief legal counsel, explained to the press. “I don’t think it was directed to President Obama.” A columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer provided foreign journalists with a satirical guide to “Dutertespeak”: “Putang ina really means ‘I firmly believe you are mistaken.’ ”
Duterte thinks out loud, in long, rambling monologues, laced with inscrutable jokes and wild exaggeration. His manner is central to his populist image, but it inevitably leads to misunderstanding, even among Filipino journalists. Ernie Abella, Duterte’s spokesman, recently pleaded with the Presidential press corps to use its “creative imagination” when interpreting Duterte’s comments.
On September 7th, the second day of the asean summit, Duterte and Obama met briefly for the first time. Obama later described their encounter: “It was not a long interaction, and what I indicated to him is that my team should be meeting with his and determine how we can move forward on a whole range of issues.” Duterte presented a starker version: “I told him in a holding room, ‘President Obama, I’m President Duterte. I never made that statement. Check it out.’ ” According to Duterte, Obama was dismissive, and replied, “My men will talk to you.”
The next day, Duterte showed asean delegates, including Obama, photographs of Muslims who had been killed by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. “This is human rights,” Duterte recalled telling the delegates. “Do not tell me this is water under the bridge. A human-rights violation, whether committed by Moses or Abraham, is still a violation of human rights.”
What began as a reaction to a personal slight has led to a dramatic shift in foreign relations. Duterte has increasingly, if fitfully, signalled his intention to distance himself from the United States, the Philippines’ closest ally, in favor of China, which previous governments have viewed warily. In September, he called for the withdrawal of a contingent of U.S. military advisers and for the end of annual joint combat exercises between the two nations. (Last week, he approved limited exercises.) During a state visit to Beijing in October, he announced a “separation” from the United States. “America has lost now,” he told a group of Chinese businessmen. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow. And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines, and Russia.”
Trump isn't quite as crude, at least in public. But you can certainly see the similarities of style.
This is right wing populist authoritarianism. A whole lot of people like it, many moe than I realized. People like this:
Footage of a shirtless man shouting “go cook my fucking burrito bitch” to some Mexicans made the rounds yesterday, in what many people saw as the archetypal Trump supporter.
“Get the fuck out of here! Our country motherfucker, made in fucking USA. Trump! I love Trump,” Zack Fisher explains, flexing his biceps, on the film shot by photojournalist Eric Rosenwald.
Now Zack, 30, who was attending Trump’s rally in Phoenix, has spoken out to say the clip that was seen by millions in fact misrepresented him, and that anti-Trump protesters started it all by spitting on him.
Here’s his side of the story.
What would you like to say to the people who saw that video?
I just want people to know, dude, I love all colors. I’m no racist. I am who I am. There’s people out there of all colors that are horrible. Whites, browns, blacks, yellows out there, it doesn’t matter. It’s the color of your heart. You know how many people messaged me to say thank you so much for other people will not do because they’re scared? It sucks that people are scared to stand up for what they believe in, and yet Latinos can do it and it’s fine. And if we do it? We’re racist. White people? The only race you can legally discriminate against. People make movies about us and do we get mad? Like White Chicks? If there was a movie called Black Chicks, it would be a huge race thing. Do you understand? Do you know what movie I’m talking about, right? We couldn’t do that, no way, they’d be like, “this is so racist”. And yet they can make a movie making fun of white people. I just wish people could get over what happened back in the day, to Mexico or Blacks. That was back in the past, people don’t get over it and it sucks. I forgive and forget. A lot of people don’t.
How did it feel waking up this morning and seeing that video?
Waking up to millions of views of me going crazy on the internet… Honestly man, it’s fine. I kind of needed this to get my point across. When you spit on people for attending an American presidential rally, I don’t think that’s right. Going there to fly a Mexican flag – this is America. I don’t understand why they fly it here, I know they’re proud of their heritage. I’m super proud of my heritage, I’m from Germany and from Ireland. All of my parents and grandparents came here legally, the right way, that’s what I was trying to explain. We were walking by and got yelled at, saying “you like that taco, you like that burrito in your mouth?” and we just don’t want to put up with that all the time. You shouldn’t have to put up with that, I don’t get it. They’re bringing the hate to the rally.
What did they say to you?
They started saying to me, “we’re going to take this country over, we’re going to make this Mexico”. I got spit on my face, you can see on those videos, it’s clearly on my face. I don’t know who has AIDS, or who has anything disgusting, but I don’t want that on my face. You don’t do that, that’s very disrespectful. I lost my temper, man. My friend was over there getting harassed, they ripped his sign out of his hand. You saw that lady in California who got egged? If that was my mother, I would have pulled my gun out, and I would have tried to protect her, because nobody was helping her. And in the state where I come from, if you’re cornered and you feel helpless, and you need to defend yourself and you can’t run anywhere, you can start shooting. And I’m not saying people need to start doing that at all, but it’s just crazy how they just punked all the people like that. I didn’t want that to happen here, I didn’t like them saying “go stick my burrito in your mouth”. I’m not going to take that. I’m going to tell them to make my burrito. And yeah, I don’t think that’s right. If I have to yell “go make my tortilla, go make my wall” for getting spit on, I don’t know. You weren’t there.
I work out every single day in the gym. I have done MMA a lot. That’s what helped me keep my cool even more. When you study the art of Muay Thai in Thailand and stuff, you respect a lot more. But I kind of lose my cool whenever people spit on me man, that’s not right.
Do you have anything else to add?
People believe everything on the internet. People are so gullible. And then you guys put that on there, that’s not cool. People put up where I work, and stuff. Now I do have to carry my gun, with a bullet in the chamber. And that’s fine, I carry a gun with me everywhere and always.
I’m going to go on as many talk shows as I can, just to make people know we aren’t racist. We love Mexicans, we don’t like illegals. Like I said in that video, it’s not right. Come into this country legally, and we won’t have a problem at all. I don’t get it. Our problem is with ISIS, our problem is with fixing the entire world that’s going down the drain.
Is ISIS the biggest problem we face today?
Yes. I see nothing but terrorism going across the country, and ISIS is a big link to that. The big three issues, for me, are ISIS, illegal immigration, and our debt. We owe so much money. I don’t know who I’m going to vote for, for sure. I know I don’t want Hillary because she’s so corrupt and evil. And yeah, Donald Trump might not be the right guy, but that’s all we really have right now. I’m just so sick and tired of political correctness.
There are a ton of numbers floating around right now about everything but this one actually made me laugh out loud. From Gallup:
Just 16% of Republicans said the economy was getting better in the week before the election, while 81% said it was getting worse. Since the election, 49% say it is getting better and 44% worse.
It's a miracle! He's not even in office and it's already getting better! 33% better!
For those of you who may not be following the details of the Steve Bannon story out of sheer despair, here's a selection of quotes, via Mashable, that will fill you in on the man who has been chosen to the chief White House strategist under President Trump:
On why liberals hate conservative women:
" [T]hese women cut to the heart of the progressive narrative. That’s why there are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England." — 2011 radio interview with Political Vindication Radio
On sending his girls to an elite academy in Los Angeles
He "didn't want the girls going to school with Jews ... He said he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiney brats.'" — The Guardian, from his wife in court documents filed in 2007. Bannon has denied saying it.
Stephen Bannon, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign chairman, attends Trump's Hispanic advisory roundtable meeting in New York, Saturday, Aug. 20, 2016.
On furthering Tea Party goals
"I’m a Leninist ... Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment." — The Daily Beast
On Breitbart News
"We're the platform for the alt-right." —Mother Jones
"We call ourselves 'the Fight Club.' You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy." — The Washington Post
“We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation." — The Washington Post
"We hire people who are freaks" and "They don’t have social lives."— The Washington Post
"After making the Occupy movie, when you finish watching the film, you want to take a hot shower ... You want to go home and shower because you’ve just spent an hour and fifteen minutes with the greasiest, dirtiest people you will ever see." — The Atlantic
On his favorite group of Republicans, the GOP
"What we need to do is bitch-slap the Republican Party." — The Atlantic
"Leadership are all c*nts" and "We should just go buck wild." — The Daily Beast, from an email exchange.
On charges of anti-Semitism from former Breitbarteditor-at-large Ben Shapiro
"Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don't believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic." — Mother Jones. Shapiro quitBreitbart News after Trump's then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, allegedly assaulted Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. He accused Bannon of turning Breitbart "into Trump’s personal Pravda."
For even more ridiculousness, be sure to read some Breitbart headlines, such as "Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew" and the charmer above. For the very brave, jump into the comment threads.
Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of Donald Trump's victory is watching the media immediately mainstream his white nationalist lieutenant, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon whom he appointed as White House strategist. It's not a symbolic position; in previous administrations it was held by the likes of Karl Rove. According to KellyAnne Conway, Bannon is a "brillian tactician" and the "general" who ran the winning campaign so he will have immense power. This is an amazing turn of events. A man who was fringe player on the far, far right a year ago is the new president's Razputin.
“Bannon is going to be keeper of the image of Trump as a fighter against the status quo, and Reince is going to utilize his personal connections with the speaker and others, to make the trains run on time.
Yes, he actually used the phrase "make the trains run on time." The only good part of that is that he was referring to Preibus the colorless bureaucrat not Bannon the white nationalist. (Actually, after consulting Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, I remembered there isn't much difference between the two under the right circumstances.)
There has been a lot written about Bannon in the last few days but the gold standard piece about him is this one from last summer by Bloomberg's Joshua Green presciently headlined, This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America. It's a scary look at a very scary man. And now that scary man has a tremendous amount of power.
There are dozens of facets to the Bannon story worth looking at in depth, but one project was particularly important to the election of Donald Trump. Breitbart media surely played its part, but it was his blandly named "Government Accountability Institute" (GAI) that really did the job which Green describes as a non-profit organization designed to create indictments against major politicians to partner with mainstream media like the New York Times and the Washington Post to achieve wide dissemination. Its main contribution to the 2016 campaign was a bestseller by GAI’s president, a right wing propagandist named Peter Schweizer, called "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich" which I wrote about for Salon here. The mainstream press cooperated eagerly and the book created the framework for the "Crooked Hillary" theme that dominated the campaign.
It's interesting that after years of following big shot right wing donors like the Koch brothers that a new day has dawned in Republican politics when it comes to the big money. The influence of these deep pockets billionaires are surely still being felt in politics around the country, but Trump is not one of their creatures.
Still there is one pair of super donors in the Trump inner circle and they just happens to be in Steven Bannon's inner circle as well: hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.
And while the likes of the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson are far right menaces, the Kochs being libertaian ideologues and Adelson being singularly focused on the the issues of Israel and his own gambling empire, the Mercers are something else entirely. They are fringe kooks with a vast fortune and a willingness to back other fringe kooks like Steve Bannon. Rebekah Mercer was a director of his GAI propaganda outfit and the family has heavily funded Breitbart.
Both Mercers have spent tens of millions on various right wing candidates and institutions in recent years including establishment organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. In the primary they backed Ted Cruz with the Keep the Promise SuperPAC and later the "Defeat Crooked Hillary" Super PAC both of which first employed KellyAnne Conway and David Bossie who later joined the Trump campaign with Steve Bannon, reportedly at Rebekah Mercer's urging.
According to this fascinating profile by Bloomberg's Zachary Mider, Robert Mercer is an extremely eccentric character, a machine gun collecting computer genius who made his billions relatively late in life when he was hired by the Renaissance hedge fund to "crunch market data and spot patterns a human trader would overlook." He was extremely successful there and became CEO in 2009 with another "quant" who had come to the fund with him from IBM.
He may be a genius, but when it comes to politics he more closely resembles tin-foil hat conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones. Indeed, it's hard to find a fringe scientific theory he hasn't thrown money at, from climate change denial to conferences that feature speakers presenting "evidence" that HIV does not cause AIDS and that the disease is an elaborate government coverup of the health risks of "the homosexual lifestyle."
He's also put a lot of money into groups promoting far right economic theories including the weird idea that "fractional reserve banking", which is simply what banks have always done --- lend their depositors money to others --- is a massive fraud and a ponzi scheme. He is also a huge proponent of a return to the gold standard, of course.
These are just the tip of weirdness iceberg. Looking at the long list of crazy stuff that Robert Mercer is involved with, it seems that he believes everything he reads or hears from right wing kooks. And con men and grifters see him coming a mile away. Indeed, he and his daughter seem to be financing pretty much every far right fringe organization and wacky theorist in America, from white nationalists to climate deniers. So naturally, they are major backers of our new fringe President-elect, Donald Trump.
Mike Lux put up a lengthy breakdown of just what did last week for Democrats. Digby chewed on some of it yesterday, but recent events have me thinking about another section:
We are in for four years of a president who likely will be worse than Nixon in terms of domestic surveillance and dirty tricks against opponents. Trump and his AG will not care one whit about the rule of law, so we are likely in for wiretapping, electronic surveillance, targeting political opponents with rumors and innuendo, and maybe worse.
As for targeting political opponents with rumors and innuendo, we don't need a Trump administration to do this. We do it to ourselves by spreading fake news:
Mark Zuckerberg says the notion that fake news influenced the U.S. presidential election is "a pretty crazy idea."
The Facebook CEO is finding himself in a unique position in this election cycle. Many news organizations have come under fire for their coverage of the campaign. Now Facebook is getting it too, as a modern media company that does not vet fake news from its News Feed and that, critics argue, allows users to stay in information bubbles that reinforce existing prejudices.
Ya think? If it reinforced what they already believed, friends on the left cheerfully "Shared" this stuff as eagerly as your right-wing uncle "passed it on" to his email list a decade ago. One of my Facebook friends just declared he would unfriend anyone trafficking in this garbage. Mark Zuckerberg says he's working on weeding it out, claiming99 percent of his news feed is authentic, but:
Earlier on Monday Facebook denied claims that a tool to whittle out fake news had been created before the election, only to be shelved due to concerns it would make Facebook look like it was censoring conservative views.
Weeding out propaganda is bad for business. Zuckerberg wrote:
“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
Zuckerberg’s comment draws a false equivalency between “mainstream sources” of news (including TechCrunch) and political groups masquerading as news brands.
The Denver Guardian was one site that posed as a news publisher to bombarded readers with content full of misinformation meant to sway their opinions about candidates and issues on the ballot. And another group, based in Macedonia, had been posting fake news to Facebook’s News Feed simply to make money.
Fake news circulated virtually everywhere online, and on Facebook, at a time when voters needed facts to inform their decisions, unfortunately.
There is a possibility that Facebook may not even want to become “arbiters of truth,” because doing so could reduce engagement.
As a former Facebook designer named Bobby Goodlatte wrote on November 8th on his own Facebook wall, “Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement. As we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging.”
I bring this up because of a highly engaging story I saw on Facebook last night (although not from a "news" site). It was another nasty, post-election story of a black woman being harassed by two Trumpist white guys in a local grocery store. We're hearing lots of these. It was posted by a friend who said she got it from a friend. A commenter said she'd heard the sams story from an Uber passenger who "knew this woman." Did she really? It certainly reinforces an anti-Trump narrative, but is the story true or not? It matters. Given what's been documented so far, it may well be. But it has the hallmarks of an urban legend. It recalls a post I wrote criticizing e-propaganda back in May:
In the misty past before the dawn of the internet (1980?), I was visiting the home of a friend who told me with some alarm that I should never buy any more products from the Procter & Gamble company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Its president, she said, was on the Phil Donahue Show and said the company gave money to the Church of Satan. As proof she told me, you could look on their packaging and see a small crescent moon and stars symbol, a "satanic symbol."
"When did you see this?" I asked.
Oh, well, she had not seen it. A friend had told her about it. Except, of course, her friend had not seen it either, because it never happened. But because the news came from a friend and confirmed her darkest fears about how the world worked, she never questioned it.
This is going to be a real problem in a Trumpland whipped up by "Denver Guardians" and Macedonians. Especially with "the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement" whispering in Donald Trump's ear and the left primed to believe the worst without questioning sources. If you care about the truth, be careful what you pass around unless you know from whence it came.
It wasn't what was written about Trump that anyone cared about, it was the quantity. He was worthy of attention.
It wasn't what was written about Clinton. It was the fact that she barely was worthy of attention, and people barely worthy of attention will never, ever get elected president of the United States.
A study I saw in the middle of the Republican primary tracked how the more coverage Trump got, the higher he rose in the polls, even if not all of the coverage was positive.
And exactly how much coverage did he get? Well, for a while I was informally tracking it.
On a typical day, Trump was provided roughly 3 times the coverage of anyone. And nobody seemed to notice or care. Finally, I stopped, hoping to God that I'd see the gross skewing of coverage that I noticed covered as a news story in its own right by any of the major media I was reading. It never was.
But, it was worse than the mere quantity of the Trump coverage. The little coverage that Clinton got, comparatively, was approximately two-fold, nearly all of it awful, and a lot of it her campaign's own fault. Most that I saw was either:
1. Ethical scandals that clearly made her look as corrupt as Trump.
2. Policy articles by her and others in her campaign that were so incredibly boring, so inside-baseball, and so badly written that no one in their right mind would ever bother to read them.
According to the media I look at, it looks like all but one person has dropped out. Sure, there are a bunch of losers floating around, including someone who seems to be kind of sick, but only one candidate gets truly prominent news coverage, meaning headlines and pictures.
This happens more days than not. And in many more places than I have time to take screenshots of. And we wonder why the polls are are so alarming? No one else seems to be running.
And remember: It doesn't matter what gets said. All publicity is good publicity.
Go out and pick up a hard copy of the NY Times. The online edition is different, you need the full effect of actual hard print here. I'll wait.
Got it? Great! Now look on the front page. There's a headline with the word "Trump" in it above the fold. Now, go through section A (the main news section of the paper). The word "Trump" is on a smaller headline in the news summary on page 2.
Keep going. Page 10, "Obama" gets a headline. Page 16, again there's a "Trump" in the headline.
Page 18, again, two headlines above the fold with the word"Trump."
Page 25, an above the fold headline with the word "Trump."
Now, the editorial pages.
"Trump" is in the headline of the lead editorial on page 26. "Donald Trump" is in the headline of Tom Friedman's editorial on page 27. Both above the fold, by the way. And that's the front section of the paper of record.
Not a single headline mention of any rival candidate.
This regularly goes on day after day after day everywhere, in every media outlet in this country. All Trump, all the trumping time. There is no one else running for president.*
Whoops! Wait-a-minute, wait-a-minute... Flip back. On the op-ed page (nearly missed it!) there's an editorial entitled "My Plan For Helping America's Poor" with a byline by - wow, I can't believe it, they're letting her publish something?- Hillary Clinton!!! Let's look!!!!
Oh, dear... Oh, no. Oh.
It's unreadable, completely unreadable. Clinton takes 7 long and statistic-bloated paragraphs to tell us that (who knew?) she thinks it's bad that some American children are growing up in poverty.
And then her plan! A... a what? A 10-20-30 plan? What the hell is that? And who is Jim Clyburn? Is he running for president, too? Clinton finally gets her name (albeit in tiny type) mentioned above the fold and this is what we get, the best cure for insomnia ever, guaranteed?
We are doomed.
------
*Because who, including Times readers, has time to read more than one or two articles beyond the headlines, except for politics junkies?
After a few more, I gave up. No one understood.
It is impossible, literally impossible, to overestimate how badly the media behaved during this election.
It is also impossible, literally impossible, to overestimate how badly the Clinton campaign navigated the media landscape during this election.
[from an email I received from Seattle’s Labor Standards office]
Our Commitment to
Equity, Inclusion and Openness
As Mayor Ed Murray stated last week, Seattle remains a city guided by the values of equity, inclusion and openness. “Seattle is a city that supports women and the LGBTQ community, that welcomes our Muslim brothers and sisters, that embraces immigrants and refugees, and that believes that Black Lives Matter.”
As the Director of the Seattle Office of Labor Standards, and an openly transgender individual, I assure you that we in the Office of Labor Standards are deeply committed to upholding these values, and ensuring that we continue to be a supportive resource and partner to Seattle’s most vulnerable communities. We will re-double our efforts to advance labor standards through thoughtful community and business engagement, strategic enforcement and innovative policy development with a commitment to race and social justice.
To our immigrant community partners, Mayor Ed Murray has promised that the City of Seattle will remain a welcoming city, committed to serving all the residents of Seattle regardless of their immigration status. Under a local law passed in 2003, Seattle city employees are NOT allowed to ask about people’s immigration status when providing city services, unless required by law or a court order. We in the Office of Labor Standards are proud to enforce labor standards for all of Seattle’s workers, regardless of immigration status. We also have strong anti-retaliation provisions across all our labor standards ordinances.
If you have any questions about our work or services, feel free to contact us. We look forward to our continued work ahead.
In solidarity,
Dylan Orr
Director, Seattle Office of Labor Standards
We’re circling the wagons, folks. We have to stay strong.
As we all sit around in our hair shirts trying to figure out how to accomplish a total Democratic Party makeover before our next election, this is rather sobering:
The spread between the Electoral College and the popular vote was the widest since 1948. pic.twitter.com/BbvmvFy2lC
Last week’s election produced the widest gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote in a generation — a result of Hillary Clinton racking up huge margins in populous coastal states such as California and New York while narrowly losing several Midwestern battlegrounds to Donald Trump. Were this pattern to continue, Democrats could be at a significant Electoral College disadvantage.
Clinton, who’s currently leading in the popular vote by 0.6 percentage points and whose advantage should increase — probably to between 1.5 and 2.0 points — as additional ballots are counted, became the fourth candidate to lose the Electoral College while winning the popular vote. She joins Al Gore (2000), Grover Cleveland (1888) and Samuel Tilden (1876).1 But Tilden’s loss to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 was, in part, because Colorado — which had newly joined the union and said it didn’t have time to run an election — appointed its electors to Hayes via its state legislature. Thus, Clinton is likely to win the popular vote by the widest margin of any Electoral College loser in an election in which all states voted, surpassing Cleveland’s 0.8-percentage-point margin in 1888.
This is the second time in 16 years that the Democrat has lost the White House while winning the popular vote. This time the margin is truly astonishing.
Those of us in California and New York and the like, people in cities with large populations of people of color --- well, our votes just don't count as much do they?
The New York Times has produced a “short list” of people under consideration for top White House posts. There are 57 entries. 6 are women.
Yet the Associated Press says Trump is about to make history because he is considering a woman for one leadership post: chair of the Republican National Committee.
Here’s how the Associated Press frames the news, with emphasis added.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump is considering a woman and an openly gay man to fill major positions in his new leadership team, history-making moves that would inject diversity into a Trump administration already facing questions about its ties to white nationalists.
The chair of the Republican National Committee is not part of the Trump administration. Nor is the appointment of a woman to lead a major political party “history-making.”
The Democratic Party’s first female chair, Jean Westwood, was appointed in 1972.
The AP’s coverage is part of the normalization of Donald Trump. The candidate routinely belittled and demeaned women as a candidate — and none have been named to top posts in his transition or administration. During the campaign itself, more than 10 women accused Trump of sexual assault.
The remaking of Trump as a history-making champion of gender diversity less than a week after his election illustrates just how far, and how fast, the bar has been lowered.
Trump adviser Steve Bannon is an unabashed white nationalist, anti-Semitic proto-fascist. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times described him as an "outsider" and a "firebrand." Those words don't really capture the truth, do they?
Trump said the American people were demanding only the best
by digby
So Trump's considering John Bolton for Secretary of State. That sounds right. I wonder if he can find a place for Bolton's good bud, Pamela Geller?
Remember this?
The manifesto of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik, who attacked targets in Norway in July killing nearly 100 people, contained numerous citations to Islamophobic bloggers and other so-called experts on Islamic terrorism here in the United States. The references included “counterjihad” bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who received a combined 174 citations from Breivik (Geller and Spencer also feature prominently in CAP’s latest report on the Islamophobia network in the U.S., “Fear, Inc.”).
ThinkProgress’ Eli Clifton subsequently noted that former Bush administration official and prominent war hawk John Bolton — who is currently considering a run for president — has a “Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer problem.” Indeed, Bolton has deepconnections to Geller. He even wrote the foreward to Geller and Spencer’s 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. The book contains language eerily similar to Breivik’s manifesto.
Bolton kept quiet about his links to Geller and Spencer after Breivik’s attack. But now, it appears he’s fully embracing them. Geller announced today that Bolton will be speaking at her “9/11 Freedom Rally: Stand Against Ground Zero Mosque”
They go way back. if you search on Geller's site Atlas Shrugged, you can find a whole bunch of interviews with him. They're tight.
Progressive organizer Mike Lux has written a comprehensive and interesting analysis of the campaign that's worth reading and thinking about in its entirely. There are a lot of moving parts that have to be dealt with so i'm not going to address the whole thing right now. But his very first observation is absolutely brilliant and it's something I haven't seen anyone else point out:
Trump successfully used the media forms he knew to dominate the media narrative. FDR mastered radio; JFK won in ‘60 because of TV; the Obama team won in part because they dominated in email and Facebook. And a huge part of Trump’s victory was because he understood reality TV and Twitter. He knew that being outrageous and entertaining, sounding spontaneous and unscripted, would make him the media favorite and allow him to overwhelm everyone else in terms of free media and coverage. A study I saw in the middle of the Republican primary tracked how the more coverage Trump got, the higher he rose in the polls, even if not all of the coverage was positive. In fact, it didn’t bother Trump if he got bad press, because he was still dominating the debate and the media narrative, making the race all about him. The other dynamic was that all his outrageous statements made him seem much more genuine than other politicians, which voters loved and made them trust him more, even though they knew he wasn’t always truthful on the facts.
One of the things that had me worried throughout the campaign, and I think my worries were confirmed both by the polling I saw during the campaign, and the final results, is that we Democrats made this campaign too much about Trump. In doing this, we played into his strategy of defining the narrative of the race. Too many of the HFA ads were focused on how dangerous and outrageous and crude Trump was, when in fact those very characteristics were fundamental to his appeal as a change agent.
I suspect most Democrats thought that by exposing Trump for the cretinous monster he is that a vast majority of our fellow Americans would reject him. We assumed a basic decency would prevail. We were wrong about that and I doubt anyone will ever make that mistake again. We now know what our country is --- or have been reminded of it.
His observation about Trump's use of the new media is very apt. He is a man of moment who recognized the zeitgeist better than anyone. What confused us was that he's such a throwback to the 1970s, a man whose worldview is grounded in a period that only people who are my age or older would recognize. What I failed to see was that to his fans, his worldview is fresh. His use of the media of the moment to portray that was really quite brilliant. And to the older folks my age, he's just like them, reminding them of the good old days when they were young and had that same haircut.
I think we underestimated him all along. I certainly knew he could win, but I couldn't wrap my mind around him actually doing it. And I should have. I live in that media world too. He overwhelmed everything by being outrageous and provocative and unscripted. And he got his American alpha male dominance message (that's pretty much all it was) out not only with what he was saying but by how and where he said it.
And don't underestimate how much that excitement translated into a loathing of politics by people with more sensitive natures. By the end it was almost unbearable to deal with the negativity. Trump understood his audience. Clinton failed to understand that some measure of hers was traumatized and tuning out. Exposing his negativity perversely blew back on her.
And that brings me to another of Lux's points:
After we won in 2008, our party fell in love with technology and data- big data and what Obama and Clinton strategist Jim Messina calls “little data” and microtargeting. And data is very important to running modern campaigns. But we fell in love with it so much that it sometimes feels like we forgot that we have to create a political movement that excites and motivates and energizes people, a movement that involves actual humans who volunteer to make calls and knock on doors; who give their small contributions online; who get on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to post videos and memes; who are excited about convincing their friends and neighbors and coworkers to get out and vote for Democrats. Obama didn’t get 70 million votes in 2008 mainly because of data, he got those votes because people felt they were part of a movement. While they weren’t as excited in 2012, there was still enough residual love for him and that movement to put him over the top after a tough 4 years. We didn’t have that feeling this year, and we need a candidate and party that will get us back to that old time movement religion.
I'll just say this: the inspiration in this campaign was about electing the first woman president. And in the face of shocking misogyny and abusive behavior in person and online from all sides, women retreated to private spheres, as they always do when under assault. They were intimidated. Perhaps that was weak and cowardly but it was the reality. There was no way to create that surging sense of excitement in public without solidarity from the rest of the progressive coalition and it just wasn't there.
The lesson is that women's equality will never be that old time religion. Democrats will have to find something else. The first woman president will be a hard right Republican. That's the only woman who won't be met with overwhelming misogyny from the other side and will be defended by their own male allies. They are "the deciders."
Anyway, lots to think about in that piece by Lux. Some I agree with some I'm still thinking over. But it's the most comprehensive piece I've read by a progressive thinker to date that's looking at this from an organic perspective. Well worth the time.
