Fake News – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Race, Police, Education and Lies: The New Right-Wing Culture War

David Posnett — Sat, 08 May 2021 18:53:54 +0000

May 6, 2021

By Barbara Weber-Floyd reprinted from “The Resistance and Me“

This is the story of how our inability to confront our racist history is fueling a right-wing misinformation campaign against our schools, resulting in contentious, partisan school board elections in district after district around the country.

School board elections tend to be low turnout, non-partisan events. But for many districts, this year is different. On Long Island where I live, one of those races is taking place in the Smithtown Central School District. Three challengers are trying to unseat the incumbents who are up for reelection on May 18^th in a campaign unlike any school board election Smithtown has ever seen.

As in other districts, the opposition to the Smithtown school board began last year because of COVID. In some districts, parent protests were sparked by opposition to mask mandates. In Smithtown, it was opposition to a hybrid COVID modification plan of part in-classroom and part remote learning for the 2020-21 school year that set off protests. Under the slogan, “5 Days to Thrive”, meaning that all children needed to be back in school five days a week to thrive, a group of parents protested against the hybrid model. https://longisland.news12.com/smithtown-parents-continue-to-demand-their-kids-be-allowed-to-return-to-school-5-days-a-week-42529542

This was before vaccines and when the CDC was still recommending six feet between desks. The only way to achieve that was to have half the usual number of children in the classroom at any given time. The schools had moved from all remote learning at the beginning of the lockdown to the hybrid model last fall, just like the vast majority of schools in Suffolk County, but these protesting parents claimed that the board wasn’t trying hard enough to bring their children back full time. They did not view the decision as being in good faith. They claimed it was a conspiracy between the board and the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) to favor teachers over students.

This past spring, all students came back full time, with almost all teachers and staff being vaccinated and new CDC guidelines. But that did not quiet the protests or the spread of misinformation. They evolved from COVID to the right’s newest boogeyman, critical race theory (CRT). If you are not a consumer of Fox News and other right-wing media, where it has been a major focus for years, you probably never heard of CRT until recently. I know I had not.

Last month, Newsweek focused on states, such as Idaho, passing laws banning CRT from their schools. Below is an excerpt from that article:

Kendall Thomas, a law professor at Columbia University and co-editor of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, told Newsweek: “CRT maps the nature and workings of ‘institutional racism.’ CRT challenges us to see that racial injustice in America is not, and has never been, just a problem of isolated instances of individual bias and private prejudice which we can solve by enacting ‘color-blind’ laws and policies.”

He added, “The right-wing weaponization of CRT aims to shut down a difficult but necessary conversation about race, racism and the future of democracy in America. The architects of these anti-CRT laws want Americans to stop talking about institutional racism, even if it means trafficking in the reckless politics of racial division they say they oppose.”

https://www.newsweek.com/what-critical-race-theory-why-do-some-want-ban-1587389

The Washington Post published a lengthy article this week about the CRT controversy under the headline, “As schools expand racial equity work, conservatives see a new threat in critical race theory.” It opens with the following sentence: “The nation’s reckoning over race has reached thousands of U.S. schools, and so, too, has a conservative backlash.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/03/critical-race-theory-backlash/

Michelle Goldberg, in a May 3^rd column in The New York Times, entitled, “Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars,” wrote, “The Christian Coalition took off during Bill Clinton’s presidency, when the religious right engaged locally because it felt shut out of national power. Clearly some conservatives think that opposition to critical race theory could be the seed of something similar. Telling parents that liberals want to make their kids hate their country and feel guilty for being white might be absurd and cynical. It also looks like it might be effective.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/opinion/public-school-culture-wars.html

I read all the articles. I understood what the right hoped to gain from weaponizing the fears of their base. But I still did not understand why CRT, in and of itself, was controversial. The country was founded on protecting slavery, a Civil War was fought over it and Jim Crow was a Supreme Court sanctioned system of apartheid. Of course, we have systemic racism. Is it better than it was? No one is claiming it isn’t. But to deny that systemic racism still exists in our institutions seems, to me, to require a willful blindness.

As Charles Blow, columnist for The New York Times explained in a column this week, entitled,” Is America Racist?”, “Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn’t exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and become less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/opinion/america-racism.html

One sign of just how charged this issue has become was my inability to convince anyone I spoke to about the Smithtown school board race to go on the record. People supporting the incumbent school board members only felt comfortable speaking to me on background. They were too afraid of being targeted if their names were used. People aligned with the challengers refused to speak to me at all.

When was the moment that the Smithtown parent protests morphed from focusing on COVID to the school board race and CRT? The earliest sign I found was a website called Save Our Schools that went online the end of last year. You might remember the Save Our Schools phrase from a movement a few years ago that supported higher pay for teachers and more equity in public education. This new SOS website had nothing to do with that movement, other than appropriating the name. It was filled with inflammatory rhetoric and accusations that sounded a lot like McCarthy-era fearmongering:

Critical Race Theory was polished in the 1950s and by the time the counterculture phenomena exploded in the 1960s with postmodernism’s entrance into the world’s philosophical framework in the 1970s, it had become a guiding manifesto for action by radical elements like the terrorists at the Black Panther Movement. Today, its contemporary offspring, Black Lives Matter (BLM) along with its symbiotic associate, Antifa, continue the “war of liberation”. https://saveourschools.me/knowledge-is-power/

It was in the downloadable newsletter on the website that I first saw this issue tied to the police. The newsletter is organized under the following section titles: “HOW DO WE SHIELD STUDENTS AGAINST CRT? PROTECTING THE BLUE SO THEY CAN PROTECT YOU. HOW BOE RACES TURNED INTO DO OR DIE ELECTIONS.” https://saveourschools.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Save-Our-Schools-April_2021_v2.pdf

I came across an earlier newsletter that was circulating on social media, but was no longer on the website. This one specifically tied the three school board challengers to the SOS website. One of the challengers, Stacy Murphy, is the parent who spoke during the 5 Days to Thrive protests. Below are screenshots of that three-page earlier newsletter.

The website and the newsletter were not the only sources online. Partisan groups started posting about it on social media, all of them spreading the same misinformation about CRT and the school district. They included: Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin, who represents Smithtown, and has announced he is running for governor of New York next year; a fringe group of the Smithtown Republican Party; and the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the police union.

It was highly unusual for any organization, other than NYSUT, to endorse school board candidates. It was particularly upsetting for some residents to see the police union get involved. One Suffolk PBA post went so far as to name a Smithtown teacher and labeled him anti-police because he had signed an online Black Lives Matter petition against having armed policemen, as opposed to security guards, in the school. The PBA used this one teacher as their example of the school’s war on police, which could be stopped only by voting for the three challengers.

I called up the Suffolk PBA and asked for the press office. I stated that I am a journalist with an online blog and I was working on an article about the Smithtown School Board election. I had two questions. Why was the police union getting involved and could you please take down the post that named the teacher? Given the climate, it felt dangerous to me. I was told that the teacher’s social media post was public and therefore fair game. He then said he had no comment for my article and hung up the phone.

I reached out to the three challengers’ campaign through their Facebook page and asked them for an interview. I posed the same question, asking why was the police union getting involved? They did not respond.

The Smithtown BOE tried to remain positive and stick with an upbeat campaign for the three incumbents running for reelection. I shared their virtual postcard on Facebook. The postcard features the incumbents’ accomplishments and the text that accompanied it reminded residents to vote on May 18^th for a board that had shown their support for public education.

But by this time, the anti-CRT messages were going viral on social media. In public and private Facebook groups, heated discussions were taking place for and against CRT, even though there was no evidence that critical race theory was even taught in the Smithtown schools. At the recent school board meetings, the challengers’ supporters were loud and confrontative. It seemed to take the board, which had only just come back to in-person meetings, by surprise. Recordings of the meetings are on the BOE website. http://www.smithtown.k12.ny.us/boardofeducation/board_meeting_audio.

It became clear that the board needed to address the misinformation powering the challengers’ campaign head on. They released the following letter to all Smithtown residents, in both an email and on the district’s public Facebook page.

How astonishing that a school board needed to publicly explain what they were not doing. Will the letter be enough? There is one more school board meeting, on May 11^th, for them to make their case to the public and for parents to ask more questions. The more people understand what is driving this challenge, the more they can make an informed decision. While Smithtown is a conservative-leaning community, a Republican stronghold, I highly doubt they want school board members influenced by misinformation and conspiracies making decisions about the welfare of the teachers and students in their school system.

And for the rest of us, we need to keep a close eye on this new right-wing dog whistle and how it is being employed. In 2009, the Tea Party ran a racially charged misinformation campaign against the first African American president and the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Then, their dog whistles were “birtherism” “death panels” and “socialism.” They successfully rode that campaign back to power, taking back the House in the 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016. I have no doubt that is the intent here.

Pandemic: How did Trump’s America Screw up?

David Posnett — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 21:33:55 +0000

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/america-leads-world-covid-19-deaths/

The United States has just 4% of the world’s population but over 25% of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. With arguably the most advanced healthcare research and top hospitals and doctors, it seems difficult to fathom. What the hell went wrong?

Two friends (neither of them are Trump apologists) could not convincingly list the major ways in which this country and its leader, Trump, screwed up. So I asked others:

One friend came up with this list of 14 points regarding Trump’s failures:

He didn’t follow the procedures laid out in the pandemic plan the Obama administration left for him.
He had too many exceptions to the China travel ban.
He didn’t implement a European travel ban and that was where most of the NY cases that spread across the country came from.
He didn’t invoke the war powers act to manufacture PPE or ventilators or tests, which forced states to bid against each other and foreign governments, drove up prices and resulted in unnecessary shortages.
He has prioritized financial aid to large companies over aid to states and localities.
He stockpiled supplies at the federal level, bidding against states, without a cogent plan for distributing them to the states as needed and reportedly sending them to whomever spoke to or flattered him or Kushner.
He didn’t mandate masks and repeatedly said and demonstrated that they aren’t important, instead holding rallies, and time and again appearing in televised press conferences with others in a manner that flouts social distancing and mask wearing.
He didn’t allow scientists to speak at his televised daily briefings and instead spread misinformation about the severity of the pandemic and “how well” we’re doing.
He minimized the importance of and sought to reduce testing and tracking.
He implicitly and explicitly threatened scientists who tried to level with the public by expressing or implying by leak or tweet the vulnerability of their positions to his whims (Fauci) or by exiling them to travel for information sessions (Birx) which has most likely restricted the flow of accurate information to the public.
He recommended hydroxychloroquine and suggested treatment by light and cleansers such Clorox.
He pressured the FDA to authorize the use of convalescent blood plasma, skipping trials and full analysis of data.
He recommended schools and the economy open universally instead of setting federal standards for the number of cases or other criteria required to do so. (And I believe he has threatened to reduce or eliminate federal aid to school districts that don’t fully offer in-person school regardless of their numbers.)
He calls it the China flu, endangering Asian Americans.

Here is another list largely based on an excellent article by Ed Yong in the Atlantic.

Summary. The richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens and to initiate effective contact tracing. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread.
We should have seen this coming. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent pathogens could wreak. Health experts, business leaders, and even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the spread of new diseases. Back in 2018 Ed Young warned us in the Atlantic about the fragility of the nation’s health-care system and our poor state of preparation for a pandemic. COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of us ache to do.
Isolationism. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHO’s executive board, but left that position empty, only filling it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, Trump has pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office in China, who could have warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded an American epidemiologist embedded within China’s CDC. America First was America oblivious.
Trump’s dismissal of expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was ignored.
Early missteps. “By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.” Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators. Instead, he focused on the border. Travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions,
Misleading the public. Genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used the time between January and mid-February to prepare. Instead, Trump, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.
Testing debacle. The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldn’t find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldn’t cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves.
Superspreader events at indoor gatherings. The odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours. The hardest hit were prisons and nursing homes: as of mid-June, nursing homes accounted for 40 percent of coronavirus deaths. That includes both residents and staff. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. A Seattle nursing home was one of the first COVID‑19 hot spots, but similar facilities weren’t provided with tests and personal protective equipment. Rather than girding these facilities against the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states.
No priority for the public healthcare system. “Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID‑19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good. “As public health did its job, it became a target” of budget cuts, says Lori Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments are also struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Since the last recession, in 2009, chronically strapped local health departments have lost 55,000 jobs—a quarter of their workforce.
Pandemic preparedness. The US profit-driven healthcare system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.
Face masks and PPE fiasco. About half of the world’s face masks, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left. In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didn’t have enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the public, or navigated back-alley deals and internet scams. In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didn’t have enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the public, or navigated a morass of back-alley deals and internet scams. The federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them according to need. Instead, in March, Trump told America’s governors to “try getting it yourselves.” As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.
Delayed action led to more deaths. Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, and before governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay-at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants. A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID‑19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier.
Delayed action led to economic disaster. The indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that ties health care to employment.
The social safety net. The dismantling of America’s social safety net left Black people with less income and higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share of the low-paid “essential workers” who were expected to staff grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages without paid sick leave, they couldn’t afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They faced risky commutes on crowded public transportation.
Distribution of information. Distribution of accurate information is an important defense against an epidemic’s spread. The largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. In fact, an infodemic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. For example, in March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Lack of leadership in a pandemic. During a pandemic, leaders must rally the public, tell the truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeatedly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, and himself. He said that “nobody ever thought a thing like [the pandemic] could happen” and also that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” per Ron Klain. “It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”
Trump has corrupted the CDC. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and template for public-health agencies around the world. But during the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted COVID‑19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didn’t hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopening the country were shelved for a month while the White House released its own uselessly vague plan.
Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a “wartime president,” he merely presided over a culture war, turning public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that protect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public-health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats.

Undermining the U.S. Postal Service to Rig the Election

David Posnett — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 15:03:00 +0000

Will Zeldin protect our right to vote?

From: Daily Kos <campaigns@dailykos.com>
Just in case anyone thought it was a conspiracy theory to claim that Donald Trump was undermining the postal service in order to prevent mail-in ballots from being counted, on Thursday Trump flat out said it himself:

Trump saying clearly on Fox why he won’t fund USPS. “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots…But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting…”

Trump is clearly FREAKED OUT by the prospect of mail-in voting and doing whatever he can to suppress it. Politico even reports that Trump’s aides are exploring ways that Trump can curb mail-in voting through executive orders.

The more people vote, the less likely Trump is to win. He knows it, we know it. That’s why, as I detailed in the email below this one, Trump is doing everything he can to suppress the vote, while at Daily Kos we are doing everything we can to help people vote:

Trump is using Facebook and Fox News to spread disinformation about mail-in voting, while we are using every communication channel we have to debunk those lies and tell the truth about its near-total safety and security.
Trump is filing lawsuits to keep mail-in ballots out of the hands of voters, while we are sending hundreds of thousands of constituent letters to elected officials demanding full funding for the postal service and mail-in voting.
Trump is undermining and defunding the postal service, while we are funding 28 local civic engagement organizations in five crucial swing states who are providing on-the-ground support to help frontline communities vote.
Trump is recruiting 50,000 volunteers, including veterans and off-duty law enforcement officers, to intimidate prospective voters at polling places, while we are recruiting twice that many volunteers to work on turning out the Democratic vote.

Donald Trump has a multi-pronged campaign to suppress the vote in order to win re-election. At Daily Kos, we have a multi-pronged campaign to stop him.

First, here is Trump’s plan:

First, thanks to Big Tech companies like Facebook, Trump and his right-wing allies are using social media to spread disinformation about voting, in particular about the safety and security of voting by mail.
Second, in case the disinformation doesn’t work and Americans go ahead and request mail-in ballots anyway, Republicans are spending millions of dollars on lawsuits designed to keep mail-in ballots out of the hands of prospective voters whenever possible.
Third, in the event that prospective voters are able to acquire mail-in ballots, Trump has installed a Postmaster General who has deliberately slowed down mail delivery, with an eye toward preventing as many mail-in ballots from being counted as possible.
Finally, in the event that people give up on mail voting and decide risk their health by voting in person, Trump’s campaign, via the Republican National Committee, is giving millions of dollars to Republican state parties to recruit 50,000 volunteers–including veterans and off-duty law enforcement officers–to directly intimidate prospective voters and challenge ballots at “key precincts.”

At Daily Kos, we are not going to let this campaign against democracy stand. We will fight to cancel it, every step of the way:

First, through our heavily trafficked website, and our vast email and SMS lists, we collectively generate over 100,000,000 views from an average of 9,000,000 people every month. We have used, and will continue to use, these enormous channels to combat the right-wing disinformation campaign about voting by mail, and arm millions of grassroots activists with the truth: voting by mail drives up turnout, keeps you safe from disease, and is extremely secure.
Second, while we cannot afford high-priced lawyers to combat Republican lawsuits aimed at keeping mail-in ballots out of the hands of voters, we can more than make up for that with grassroots activism. This spring and summer, we have been coordinating with dozens of progressive organizations to send millions of letters to Congress, demanding full funding for voting by mail and for election security, and we will not relent until we win that campaign In the coming weeks, we will take that campaign to the state and local level, working with allies to pressure elected officials at every level to ensure a safe, democratic and high turnout presidential election.
Third, due to reports of delayed mail delivery, we are participating in an experiment with our primary Get Out the Vote partner, Vote Forward, to determine if the millions of letters our volunteers are preparing to mail to Democratic swing state voters in late October need to be sent out earlier this year than initially planned.
Finally, we are countering Republican efforts to intimidate prospective voters at the polls by recruiting two volunteers to help people vote for every one volunteer the GOP recruits to frighten them. Further, we are providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to local civic engagement groups who are on the ground in five key swing states–Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin–making sure those organizations have the resources they need to protect the right to vote for the diverse, frontline communities who bear the brunt of Trump’s assault on the right to vote

We are fighting back against Donald Trump’s comprehensive assault on democracy with a comprehensive defense of it. However, as a grassroots funded organization we can only go as far as you take us.

Please, chip in $5 a month to Daily Kos for the three months between now and Election Day and help us cancel Republican voter suppression.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Executive Campaign Director, Daily Kos

Best Bang for your Buck

David Posnett — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 23:38:57 +0000

Subject: the best bang for your political donation bucks just now

Some of you have heard me give this spiel, but for some of you, it will be new.

As part of a group that hears reports from national Democratic organizers every few weeks, i was particularly taken with a presentation a few weeks ago by a group at Stanford called Mind The Gap that has analyzed more data about registration/voting patterns than seems possible. And their conclusion – to be brief – is that from now until a few months before the 2020 election, support for non-partisan registration in key neighborhoods in key states will do more for the Democrats from top to bottom of the ticket than any other donation.

How is that possible? The Democrats need numbers. Not just the 75,000 or so more votes that would have changed the last election, but possibly up to a million new voters because lots of people seem to be energized by national politics right now, and Republican turnout is expected to hit new highs.

Registration-seeking organizations that set up in neighborhoods where there are large numbers of non-registered but presumed Democratic-leaning folks, that are manned by people who look like their neighbors (not like you and me) are proven to be the most effective way to encourage new registrants. And here is the insight from Mind the Gap: It doesn’t matter if some of them sign up as Republicans! The numbers will be overwhelmingly Democratic, and once they’ve registered, other organizations can follow up to see that they vote. That follow-up is important, but not until much closer to the election.

One of the best groups that are set up to do this kind of community-based registration is called the Voter Participation Center. Based in DC, but actively working with local groups across the country.

I’ve just sent them all the money I was planning to send to various candidates in 2019. I urge you to go to their website: www.voterparticipation.org and send what you can. And, remember, because they are non-partisan, your donation is tax-deductible!

Thanks for considering this.

Best, Marilyn (forwarded by Alice Tepper Marlin)

Trump’s Use of ‘Nationalist’

David Posnett — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 18:46:50 +0000

LTE in the New York Times from my neighbor (!)

A reader says the president is “rolling out the dog whistles.” Oct. 25, 2018

CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

To the Editor:

“‘You Know What I Am? I’m a Nationalist’” (news article, Oct. 24) was sobering. We see that President Trump has enthusiastically embraced words and ideas such as the slogan “America First,” which was used by the isolationists and Nazi sympathizers before World War II, to describe his foreign policy.

He repeatedly calls some journalists the “enemy of the people” despite the association with Stalin’s mass murders.

We need to counterpunch as aggressively as this pugilistic president does. He is coddling up to dictators today and reviving the tactics of dictators from the past. He is pitting people against one another and rolling out the dog whistles.

The time has passed for us to shrug our shoulders and just dismiss the rhetoric as drumming up his base. We must pay heed.

Steven A. Ludsin, East Hampton, NY

…and Lee Zeldin? Complicit. So sad. David Posnett MD

The Dark Side of SOTU

David Posnett — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 18:47:38 +0000

Yoda, we need you!

So perhaps you think that President Trump’s State of the Union was ‘presidential’ and his speach reached across the isle? If so, you would be joining a majority of viewers according to some polls.

But here is the dark side!

David Duke comments on the SOTU speach:

And David Duke is not alone:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) invited notorious right-wing internet troll and Holocaust denier Charles Johnson to be his guest at President Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, according to a Daily Beast report.

Gaetz and Johnson gave conflicting accounts of how Johnson came to be Gaetz’s guest. The Florida congressman, who has played a leading role in pushing the conspiracy theory that the “deep state” is out to undermine Trump, said he doesn’t know Johnson. Gaetz said Johnson used one of his SOTU tickets only after his father fell ill and couldn’t go. But Johnson told the Daily Beast that he and Gaetz were introduced by another member of Congress, and that he “took Gaetz’s invitation” because “he’s into stuff on the issues that I care about.”

Johnson was permanently banned from Twitter after he posted a tweet in 2015 soliciting donations from people to “take out” activist DeRay McKesson, who at the time was in the news because of his support for Black Lives Matter.

On Reddit, Johnson once argued that the number of Jews in the Holocaust was much less than the accepted number of six million. He also questioned the existence of gas chambers, writing, “I agree with David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. Why were their swimming pools there if it was a death camp?”

On GotNews, he’s referred to an alleged mob of Hispanic men protesting a Trump rally as “savages,”has repeatedly referred to Black Live Matter supporters as “thugs” and posted numerous stories alleging criminal acts by people he claims were affiliated with BLM. He’s also appeared on a podcast hosted by The Right Stuff, a proudly and profoundly anti-Semitic show hosted by white nationalist Mike Enoch.

It’s not surprising that Johnson’s fondness for conspiracy theories wouldn’t bother Gaetz. Earlier this week, Gaetz joined the show of America’s foremost conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, to tout a conspiracy theory about purported “deep state” efforts to undermine President Trump.

Are these your bed fellows Rep. Lee Zeldin?

Zeldin’s Friend Steve Bannon

David Posnett — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:36:31 +0000

You Are the Company You Keep! “Personal branding is the name of the game these days, and in our age of radical transparency it is informed not just by how you present yourself but also by the people you associate with“. So writes Marian Salzman , Contributor to Forbes. I doubt many would disagree.

Let’s examine Rep. Lee Zeldin of NY Congressional District-1. He has associated himself with Steve Bannon of Breitbart fame. Bannon recently headlined a Zeldin fundraiser in New York City and this has not gone un-noticed! Zeldin has excused Bannon noting that Bannon “gets a bad rap” and is not anti-semitic, but a “friend of Israel”. You can check out the story via various local outlets:

in the East Hampton Star
in Newsday

Dan Rattiner writes in Dan’s papers: “For those that have been living under a rock, Steve Bannon is the chief of Breitbart News, one of the most right-wing, fake-news, dangerous organizations imaginable. His “news” celebrates the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semites, the wildest of the redneck bigots and the neo-Nazis. If he had his way, Bannon would surely consider the likes of me, a member of the media, as someone who belongs in jail. He is a clear and present danger to the American democracy we all hold so dear.”

But what I would like to do here is expose Bannon. His tactics are devious. He avoids leaving a personal trail of antisemitic or hateful comments. In stead he hires writers for Breitbart News, his Alt-right platform. They then write inflammatory commentaries based on their neo-nazi sources, and an army of alt-right followers and nut-cases leave the most awful and hateful comments. So, lets examine the specifics. They need to be public to expose Mr. Zeldin and the company he keeps.

Breitbart Under Bannon: Breitbart’s Comments Section Reflects Alt-Right, Anti-Semitic Language as exposed by the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center). Bannon turned the comment section into “a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”

POLITICO reported, “Bannon said the best things about Breitbart are the comments section and the callers.”

Here is a list of Breitbart contributors, who they are and what they do. It is based on reporting by Breitbart Truth, It covers White Nationalists and InfoWars conspiracy theorists at Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. This is a great source (screenshots from FB and Twitter etc. )

The Breitbart journalists featured here have collectively written over 17,000 articles for Breitbart since 2010.

Click here and see more! Specially if you want to check the screen shots of tweets and pictures! (The material was too much to include in this post)

Charles Johnson, Breitbart US writer, CJ has written nearly 300 articles for Breitbart between 2010 and 2013. On January 9th, 2017, Forbes.com staff reported that CJ was helping to select Trump administration officials during the Presidential transition. On January 27th, 2017, CJ self described himself as a fascist in a Reddit Ask-Me-Anything. A Holocaust denier, Charles went on the self-described fascist podcast “Fash the Nation” where he talked about the genetic IQ inferiority of blacks and how Jews should not be able to hold top positions.
Milo Yiannopolous, Breitbart US writer: Milo was a senior editor at Breitbart US, and wrote 400+ articles for Breitbart between 2014 and 2017. In leaked emails, Milo praised a Neo-Nazi staff member of the Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Milo said: “He’s one of the funniest, smartest and most interesting people I know.” He also befriended white supremacist Devin Saucier and hired white nationalist Tim Gionet. In emails with Devin Saucier, Milo said he was “easing everyone in gently” to the racial IQ superiority ideas that Saucier supports. In April 2016, he sang for a Neo-Nazi gathering in Dallas, Texas. White nationalist Richard Spencer can be seen in the video.
Jack Hadfield, Breitbart US writer. …frequent Breitbart contributor JH acts as an administrator of the right-wing “free speech” Facebook group the Young Right Society (YRS), which is frequently awash with appalling racist and ‘alt-right’ content. Hadfield has authored over 200 articles for the far-right news outlet Breitbart, itself accused of pandering to the white nationalist alt-right.
Membership of the secret group has included open fascists and nazis, well-known alt-right figures such as Scottish blogger Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes), alongside Conservative Party activists and UKIP youth leader Jamie Ross McKenzie. …Hadfield also posted the work of Italian “traditionalist” philosopher Julius Evola, who idolised Hitler’s murderous SS and was admired by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, with the caption “Got me some good new summer reading”. The book was published by Arktos, the central publisher of the racist alt-right.
PJ Salvatore, Breitbart US writer. Twitter handle: @PortosJ81J. Salvatore has written over 750 articles for Breitbart between 2010 and 2012. As of 12-2-17, PJ has deleted nearly all of his Tweets and has removed nearly all of the accounts he Followed, like @DegeneracyKills @DereksCorpse

Virginia Hale, Breitbart London. @Virgehall. Hale has written over 300 articles for Breitbart since December 2014. Hale is currently writing articles at Breitbart London. Virginia Hale “liked” a tweet from @ShabbosShekels (aka FashyGoy). “Fash” means fascist in far right circles, and “goy” is a non-Jew in Yiddish. Followed and communicated with Julius Ebola, white nationalist Twitter user, as well as white nationalists Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach. She also follows Wagner C. Soto. You can read more about Virginia Hale’s views at Media Matters. Update (April 2017): Virginia Hale deactivated her Twitter account sometime in March of 2017, but continues to write for Breitbart London.
John Binder, Breitbart US writer. @Jxhnbider.He has written nearly 300 articles for Breitbart since August 2016. Follows Paul Town, Baked Alaska, InfoWars. Also follows Peter Brimelow, white nationalist who gives speeches for white nationalist groups National Policy Institute and American Renaissance. Follows Based Monitored, Blaqpilled Victor, Brittany Pettibone, Ricky Vaughn, and Brannon. All followers/retweeters of white nationalists. Retweets WND, a conspiracy theorist website, VDare and Vegas4Trump, a self described white nationalist.
Nick Hallett (@NickJhallett) Breitbart London writer. He has written nearly 2,000 articles for Breitbart since February 2014. Nick follows Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson. Infowars believes 9/11 was performed by the US government (inside job), and that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
Nick also follows @ReactionaryTree (aka TrumpenReich Tree)
Ezra Dulis, Breitbart US writer. @ezradulis Ezra has written about 300 articles for Breitbart since 2010. Ezra follows self described “American Nationalist” @RopePusher777 who retweets InfoWars, the 9/11 conspiracy website that says the US government performed 9/11 and killed 3,000 of its own citizens. Ezra follows and communicates with “Saul Townstein“ whose real name is Paul Town. Paul Town’s website, PaulTown.com, has a sidebar that invites people to visit American Renaissance website, a white nationalist group, and Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi group, and Fash, the Nation.com, a white nationalist website and podcast.
Christian Toto, Breitbart US writer. @HollywoodinToto. Mr. Toto has written nearly 3,000 articles for Breitbart since 2009. Mr. Toto follows Mark Dice, Illuminati/NWO conspiracy theorist. And also follows @kaleriley, who believes in the PizzaGate conspiracy theory and that Kanye West is fighting the Illuminati.
Donna Rachel Edmunds (@Donna_R_E). Breitbart London writer. Donna has written nearly 2,000 articles for Breitbart since May 2014. Follows Alex Jones (Info Wars), Info Wars main account, and Paul Watson (Info Wars). Info Wars is a conspiracy website that believes 9/11 was an inside job where the US government killed 3,000 of its own citizens. Also follows @ThaRightStuff, a self described fascist who runs http://www.Rightstuf.biz.
John Nolte, Breitbart US writer. @NolteNC. He has written nearly 6,500 articles for Breitbart since 2009. Nolte follows @velow1 who describes himself as a pro-white nationalist. He also follows “Resist Tyranny” who tweets Muslim American conspiracy theories and also follows “Fash” who tweets Infowars.
Lucas Nolan, Breitbart USA writer.@Lucasnolan_. He has written nearly 270 articles for Breitbart since June 2016. He follows InfoWars. Follows MissPatriarch (aka Becky), who is pro-Assad, pro-RT.com, and pro-white nationalism. Also follows and communicates with Paul Town, white nationalist who runs a website linking to Daily Stormer and Fash the Nation.
Katie McHugh, Breitbart US writer. @k_mcq. She has written more than 500 articles for Breitbart since 2014. She communicates with Paul Town (link 1, link 2) and Richard Spencer supporter @ReactionaryTree (link). Screencapped on 1-12-17. Here, Katie McHugh “likes” a Vdare tweet about John Derbyshire. Derbyshire was fired from the conservative journal National Review after he wrote the following:

“The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black.

(9) A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date.
(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.”

Source for quotes.

Derbyshire was positively mentioned by Breitbart here
As mentioned above, Vdare hosts white supremacist articles.

Dustin Stockton, Breitbart US writer, @DustinStockton. He has written nearly 150 articles for Breitbart since August 2015. Dustin follows, retweets, and tweets Based Alaska (@bakedalaska), who retweets Paul Town, InfoWars, RightStuff, and Richard Spencer. Dustin also retweets Mike Cernovich (“diversity is code for white genocide” link) and Mark Dice (NWO/Illumunati conspiracist)

Neil McCabe, Breitbart US writer. @NeilWmccabe. He has written nearly 400 articles for Breitbart since June 2016. Neil follows Irma Hinjosa who posts birther conspiracy theories. And Neil retweets InfoWars’ Paul Watson. InfoWars is a conspiracy site that believes 9/11 was done by the US government against its own citizens. Neil retweets Russia Today (RT.com) articles (RT is Russian government propaganda).
Matthew Boyle, Breitbart US writer. @mboyle. Matt has written nearly 2,500 articles for Breitbart since 2012. Mr. Boyle retweets VDARE tweets.Here are some excerpts of VDARE’s work:“America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely.”— Sam Francis, VDARE.com, July 21, 2003“What race realists find most infuriating about the liberalism of the last half-century is not just that it has lost its instinctive appreciation for the culture and people of the West but actively, viciously attacks them. Whites are doing something no other people have ever done in human history. Our rulers and elites welcome replacement by aliens, they vilify our ancestors and their own, they sacrifice our interests to those of favored minorities, and they treat the entire history of the West as if it were a global plague of rapine and exploitation. This is a disease that is killing us, and we must fight it head on.”Jared Taylor, VDARE.com, July 4, 2008

Lee Stranahan, Breitbart US writer. @Stranaha. He has written nearly 900 articles for Breitbart since 2010. Lee follows Haley Claus. also follows Westleigh, and Infowars, also follows Jeremy Nolt, more Infowars / RT connections. Infowars is a conspiracy website that believes 9/11 was a US government attack on its own citizens. RT (Russia Today) is a Russian government propaganda website.

Chris Tomlinson. Chris is a writer at Breitbart London. He has written over 660 articles for Breitbart since January 2016. He follows multiple “Identitarian” Twitter users. Identitarians are far-right activists similar to white nationalists.

Brandon Darby, Breitbart Texas Editor-in-Chief. @Brandondarby. He has written nearly 500 articles for Breitbart since 2010.Brandon follows John Blake, who retweets self described fascist @TheRightStuf, a self described fascist who runs www.Rightstuf.biz.

ASK YOURSELF: Do President Trump and Lee ZELDIN know that Steve Bannon hired multiple white nationalists and InfoWars conspiracy theorists? And that Breitbart News still employs them? Do right-wing media outlets like FOX News know of Bannon’s links to white nationalists and InfoWars conspiracy theorists, but choose to ignore the issue?

Here is an interesting article on Breitbart, racists and the dirty work of laundering the ‘alt-right’. I quote from this article: “the more apparent portrait is of a budding media empire that seems intent on growing its own market share, and political power, by courting some of the coarser and most hateful elements on the American right — or turning a blind eye to the staffers doing the dirty work. It shows its one-time star [Milo Yiannopolous] literally seeking the approval of the farthest of the far right, even as he and they agree that Breitbart risks too much in acknowledging their influence…. That was the conclusion conservative blogger Ben Shapiro reached when he resigned from Breitbart in March 2016.”

And what happened to Ben Shapiro after he left Breitbart? It is a messy story! I quote:

…since his resignation from Breitbart in March, Shapiro, currently editor-in-chief of Daily Wire, has increasingly found himself targeted by the so-called alt-right movement…Breitbart published a piece by an alt-right Twitter personality known as “Pizza Party Ben” …that consisted mostly of a video mocking Shapiro for having complained about anti-Semitism, the alt-right, and Trump…

The nadir came a couple of weeks ago, though, when Shapiro’s wife gave birth to the couple’s second child. As the Daily Wire noted, Shapiro was hit with a wave of vicious anti-Semitic abuse, including multiple Holocaust references and requests that Shapiro and his family be sent to the ovens.

Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right,” boasts Stephen Bannon as per MotherJones.

I ask Lee Zeldin, is this the kind of personal brand you want?

Fake News Regains Its Megaphone: “Keyword Bombs”!

David Posnett — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 15:14:07 +0000

After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone

The Shift By KEVIN ROOSE OCT. 2, 2017

When they woke up and glanced at their phones on Monday morning, Americans may have been shocked to learn that the man behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas late on Sunday was an anti-Trump liberal who liked Rachel Maddow and MoveOn.org, that the F.B.I. had already linked him to the Islamic State, and that mainstream news organizations were suppressing that he had recently converted to Islam.

They were shocking, gruesome revelations. They were also entirely false — and widely spread by Google and Facebook.

In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”

Google and Facebook blamed algorithm errors for these.

A Google spokesman said, “This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”

A Facebook spokesman said, “We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused.”

But this was no one-off incident. Over the past few years, extremists, conspiracy theorists and government-backed propagandists have made a habit of swarming major news events, using search-optimized “keyword bombs” and algorithm-friendly headlines. These organizations are skilled at reverse-engineering the ways that tech platforms parse information, and they benefit from a vast real-time amplification network that includes 4Chan and Reddit as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Even when these campaigns are thwarted, they often last hours or days — long enough to spread misleading information to millions of people.

The latest fake news flare-up came at an inconvenient time for companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, which are already defending themselves from accusations that they have let malicious actors run rampant on their platforms.

On Monday, Facebook handed congressional investigators 3,000 ads that had been purchased by Russian government affiliates during the 2016 campaign season, and it vowed to hire 1,000 more human moderators to review ads for improper content. (The company would not say how many moderators currently screen its ads.) Twitter faces tough questions about harassment and violent threats on its platform, and is still struggling to live down a reputation as a safe haven for neo-Nazis and other poisonous groups. And Google also faces questions about its role in the misinformation economy.

Part of the problem is that these companies have largely abrogated the responsibility of moderating the content that appears on their platforms, instead relying on rule-based algorithms to determine who sees what. Facebook, for instance, previously had a team of trained news editors who chose which stories appeared in its trending topics section, a huge driver of traffic to news stories. But it disbanded the group and instituted an automated process last year, after reports surfaced that the editors were suppressing conservative news sites. The change seems to have made the problem worse — earlier this year, Facebook redesigned the trending topics section again, after complaints that hoaxes and fake news stories were showing up in users’ feeds.

There is also a labeling issue. A Facebook user looking for news about the Las Vegas shooting on Monday morning, or a Google user searching for information about the wrongfully accused shooter, would have found posts from 4Chan and Sputnik alongside articles by established news organizations like CNN and NBC News, with no obvious cues to indicate which ones came from reliable sources.

More thoughtful design could help solve this problem, and Facebook has already begun to label some disputed stories with the help of professional fact checkers. But fixes that require identifying “reputable” news organizations are inherently risky because they open companies up to accusations of favoritism. (After Facebook announced its fact-checking effort, which included working with The Associated Press and Snopes, several right-wing activists complained of left-wing censorship.) The automation of editorial judgment, combined with tech companies’ reluctance to appear partisan, has created a lopsided battle between those who want to spread misinformation and those tasked with policing it. Posting a malicious rumor on Facebook, or writing a false news story that is indexed by Google, is a nearly instantaneous process; removing such posts often requires human intervention. This imbalance gives an advantage to

The automation of editorial judgment, combined with tech companies’ reluctance to appear partisan, has created a lopsided battle between those who want to spread misinformation and those tasked with policing it. Posting a malicious rumor on Facebook, or writing a false news story that is indexed by Google, is a nearly instantaneous process; removing such posts often requires human intervention. This imbalance gives an advantage to rule-breakers, and makes it impossible for even an army of well-trained referees to keep up.

But just because the war against misinformation may be unwinnable doesn’t mean it should be avoided. Roughly two-thirds of American adults get news from social media, which makes the methods these platforms use to vet and present information a matter of national importance.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are some of the world’s richest and most ambitious companies, but they still have not shown that they’re willing to bear the costs — or the political risks — of fixing the way misinformation spreads on their platforms. (Some executives appear resolute in avoiding the discussion. In a recent Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg reasserted the platform’s neutrality, saying that being accused of partisan bias by both sides is “what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”) The investigations into Russia’s exploitation of social media during the 2016 presidential election will almost certainly continue for months. But dozens of less splashy online misinformation campaigns are happening every day, and they deserve attention, too. Tech companies should act decisively to prevent hoaxes and misinformation from spreading on their platforms, even if it means hiring

The investigations into Russia’s exploitation of social media during the 2016 presidential election will almost certainly continue for months. But dozens of less splashy online misinformation campaigns are happening every day, and they deserve attention, too. Tech companies should act decisively to prevent hoaxes and misinformation from spreading on their platforms, even if it means hiring thousands more moderators or angering some partisan organizations.

Facebook and Google have spent billions of dollars developing virtual reality systems. They can spare a billion or two to protect actual reality.

Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union – SCARY!

David Posnett — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 16:14:28 +0000

GREAT INTERVIEW!

THE STONE JULY 5, 2017

Continue reading the main story Share This Page

Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview. Professor Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. Among his most recent books are “Hegemony or Survival,” “Failed States,” “Hopes and Prospects,” “Masters of Mankind” and “Who Rules the World?” He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976.— George Yancy

George Yancy: Given our “post-truth” political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump, what public role do you think professional philosophy might play in critically addressing this situation?

Noam Chomsky: We have to be a little cautious about not trying to kill a gnat with an atom bomb. The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the “post-truth” moment that the proper response might best be ridicule. For example, Stephen Colbert’s recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: “This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”

Quite generally, that’s how the Trump administration deals with a truly existential threat to survival of organized human life: ban regulations and even research and discussion of environmental threats and race to the precipice as quickly as possible (in the interests of short-term profit and power).

G.Y.: In this regard, I find Trumpism to be a bit suicidal.

N.C.: Of course, ridicule is not enough. It’s necessary to address the concerns and beliefs of those who are taken in by the fraud, or who don’t recognize the nature and significance of the issues for other reasons. If by philosophy we mean reasoned and thoughtful analysis, then it can address the moment, though not by confronting the “alternative facts” but by analyzing and clarifying what is at stake, whatever the issue is. Beyond that, what is needed is action: urgent and dedicated, in the many ways that are open to us.

G.Y.: When I was an undergraduate philosophy student at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was trained in the analytic tradition, it wasn’t clear to me what philosophy meant beyond the clarification of concepts. Yet I have held onto the Marxian position that philosophy can change the world. Any thoughts on the capacity of philosophy to change the world?

N.C.: I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world, and philosophers, including in the analytic tradition, have undertaken that effort, in their philosophical work as well as in their activist lives — Bertrand Russell, to mention a prominent example.

G.Y.: Yes. Russell was a philosopher and a public intellectual. In those terms, how do you describe yourself?

N.C.: I don’t really think about it, frankly. I engage in the kinds of work and activities that seem important and challenging to me. Some of it falls within these categories, as usually understood.

G.Y.: There are times when the sheer magnitude of human suffering feels unbearable. As someone who speaks to so much suffering in the world, how do you bear witness to this and yet maintain the strength to go on?

N.C.: Witnessing it is enough to provide the motivation to go on. And nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.

G.Y.: If you had to list two or three forms of political action that are necessary under the Trump regime, what would they be? I ask because our moment feels so incredibly hopeless and repressive.

N.C.: I don’t think things are quite that bleak. Take the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the most remarkable feature of the 2016 election. It is, after all, not all that surprising that a billionaire showman with extensive media backing (including the liberal media, entranced by his antics and the advertising revenue it afforded) should win the nomination of the ultra-reactionary Republican Party.The Sanders campaign, however, broke dramatically with over a century of U.S. political history. Extensive political science research, notably the work of Thomas Ferguson, has shown convincingly that elections are pretty much bought. For example, campaign spending alone is a remarkably good predictor of electoral success, and support of corporate power and private wealth is a virtual prerequisite even for participation in the political arena.The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive (basically New Deal) programs could win the nomination, maybe the election, even without the backing of the major funders or any media support. There’s good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin.Activism spawned by the campaign is beginning to make inroads into electoral politics. Under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party pretty much collapsed at the crucial local and state levels, but it can be rebuilt and turned into a progressive force. That would mean reviving the New Deal legacy and moving well beyond, instead of abandoning, the working class and turning into Clintonite New Democrats, which more or less resemble what used to be called moderate Republicans, a category that has largely disappeared with the shift of both parties to the right during the neoliberal period.Such prospects may not be out of reach, and efforts to attain them can be combined with direct activism right now, urgently needed, to counter the legislative and executive actions of the Republican administration, often concealed behind the bluster of the figure nominally in charge.There are in fact many ways to combat the Trump project of creating a tiny America, isolated from the world, cowering in fear behind walls while pursuing the Paul Ryan-style domestic policies that represent the most savage wing of the Republican establishment.

G.Y.: What are the weightiest issues facing us?

N.C.: The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war. On the former, the Republican leadership, in splendid isolation from the world, is almost unanimously dedicated to destroying the chances for decent survival; strong words, but no exaggeration. There is a great deal that can be done at the local and state level to counter their malign project.On nuclear war, actions in Syria and at the Russian border raise very serious threats of confrontation that might trigger war, an unthinkable prospect. Furthermore, Trump’s pursuit of Obama’s programs of modernization of the nuclear forces poses extraordinary dangers. As we have recently learned, the modernized U.S. nuclear force is seriously fraying the slender thread on which survival is suspended. The matter is discussed in detail in a critically important article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in March, which should have been, and remained, front-page news. The authors, highly respected analysts, observe that the nuclear weapons modernization program has increased “the overall killing power of existing U.S. ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”The significance is clear. It means that in a moment of crisis, of which there are all too many, Russian military planners may conclude that lacking a deterrent, the only hope of survival is a first strike — which means the end for all of us.

G.Y.: Frightening to the born.

N.C.: In these cases, citizen action can reverse highly dangerous programs. It can also press Washington to explore diplomatic options — which are available — instead of the near reflexive resort to force and coercion in other areas, including North Korea and Iran.

G.Y.: But what is it, Noam, as you continue to engage critically a broad range of injustices, that motivates this sense of social justice for you? Are there any religious motivations that frame your social justice work? If not, why not?

N.C.: No religious motivations, and for sound reasons. One can contrive a religious motivation for virtually any choice of action, from commitment to the highest ideals to support for the most horrendous atrocities. In the sacred texts, we can find uplifting calls for peace, justice and mercy, along with the most genocidal passages in the literary canon. Conscience is our guide, whatever trappings we might choose to clothe it in.

G.Y.: Returning to the point about bearing witness to so much suffering, what do you recommend I share with many of my undergraduate students such that they develop the capacity to bear witness to forms of suffering that are worse than we endure? Many of my students are just concerned with graduating and often seem oblivious to world suffering.

N.C.: My suspicion is that those who seem oblivious to suffering, whether it is nearby or in remote corners, are for the most part unaware, perhaps blinded by doctrine and ideology. For them, the answer is to develop a critical attitude toward articles of faith, secular or religious; to encourage their capacity to question, to explore, to view the world from the standpoint of others. And direct exposure is never very far away, wherever we live — perhaps the homeless person huddling in the cold or asking for a few pennies for food, or all too many more.

G.Y.: I appreciate and second your point about exposure to the suffering of others not being far away. Returning to Trump, I take it that you view him as fundamentally unpredictable. I certainly do. Should we fear a nuclear exchange of any sort in our contemporary moment?

N.C.: I do, and I’m hardly the only person to have such fears. Perhaps the most prominent figure to express such concerns is William Perry, one of the leading contemporary nuclear strategists, with many years of experience at the highest level of war planning. He is reserved and cautious, not given to overstatement. He has come out of semiretirement to declare forcefully and repeatedly that he is terrified both at the extreme and mounting threats and by the failure to be concerned about them. In his words, “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

In 1947, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists established its famous Doomsday Clock, estimating how far we are from midnight: termination. In 1947, the analysts set the clock at seven minutes to midnight. In 1953, they moved the hand to two minutes to midnight after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. exploded hydrogen bombs. Since then it has oscillated, never again reaching this danger point. In January, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the hand was moved to two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest to terminal disaster since 1953. By this time analysts were considering not only the rising threat of nuclear war but also the firm dedication of the Republican organization to accelerate the race to environmental catastrophe.

Perry is right to be terrified. And so should we all be, not least because of the person with his finger on the button and his surreal associates.

G.Y.: Yet despite his unpredictability, Trump has a strong base. What makes for this kind of servile deference?

N.C.: I’m not sure that “servile deference” is the right phrase, for a number of reasons. For example, who is the base? Most are relatively affluent. Three-quarters had incomes above the median. About one-third had incomes of over $100,000 a year, and thus were in the top 15 percent of personal income, in the top 6 percent of those with only a high school education. They are overwhelmingly white, mostly older, hence from historically more privileged sectors.

As Anthony DiMaggio reports in a careful study of the wealth of information now available, Trump voters tend to be typical Republicans, with “elitist, pro-corporate and reactionary social agendas,” and “an affluent, privileged segment of the country in terms of their income, but one that is relatively less privileged than it was in the past, before the 2008 economic collapse,” hence feeling some economic distress. Median income has dropped almost 10 percent since 2007. That’s apart from the large evangelical segment and putting aside the factors of white supremacy — deeply rooted in the United States — racism and sexism.

For the majority of the base, Trump and the more savage wing of the Republican establishment are not far from their standard attitudes, though when we turn to specific policy preferences, more complex questions arise.

A segment of the Trump base comes from the industrial sector that has been cast aside for decades by both parties, often from rural areas where industry and stable jobs have collapsed. Many voted for Obama, believing his message of hope and change, but were quickly disillusioned and have turned in desperation to their bitter class enemy, clinging to the hope that somehow its formal leader will come to their rescue.

Another consideration is the current information system, if one can even use the phrase. For much of the base, the sources of information are Fox News, talk radio and other practitioners of alternative facts. Exposures of Trump’s misdeeds and absurdities that arouse liberal opinion are easily interpreted as attacks by the corrupt elite on the defender of the little man, in fact his cynical enemy.

G.Y.: How does the lack of critical intelligence operate here, that is, the sort that philosopher John Dewey saw as essential for a democratic citizenry?

N.C.: We might ask other questions about critical intelligence. For liberal opinion, the political crime of the century, as it is sometimes called, is Russian interference in American elections. The effects of the crime are undetectable, unlike the massive effects of interference by corporate power and private wealth, not considered a crime but the normal workings of democracy. That’s even putting aside the record of U.S. “interference” in foreign elections, Russia included; the word “interference” in quotes because it is so laughably inadequate, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with recent history must be aware.

G.Y.: That certainly speaks to our nation’s contradictions.

N.C.: Is Russian hacking really more significant than what we have discussed — for example, the Republican campaign to destroy the conditions for organized social existence, in defiance of the entire world? Or to enhance the already dire threat of terminal nuclear war? Or even such real but lesser crimes such as the Republican initiative to deprive tens of millions of health care and to drive helpless people out of nursing homes in order to enrich their actual constituency of corporate power and wealth even further? Or to dismantle the limited regulatory system set up to mitigate the impact of the financial crisis that their favorites are likely to bring about once again? And on, and on. It’s easy to condemn those we place on the other side of some divide, but more important, commonly, to explore what we take to be nearby.

George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, is the author of “Black Bodies, White Gazes” and “On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis,” and a co-editor of “Pursuing Trayvon Martin” and “Our Black Sons Matter.”

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” an anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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Conservative ‘news’ outlets didn’t like Comey’s testimony—so they created a fake version instead

David Posnett — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:28:15 +0000

By Hunter

Wednesday Jun 14, 2017 · 9:31 PM EDT

Sean Hannity

The New York Times has a good look at how one particular conspiracy theory, a completely false notion that ex-FBI director James Comey said Trump did not ask he halt the Flynn investigation in his mid-May Senate testimony despite Comey in fact asserting no such thing, ricocheted around the usual conservative sites in a transparent hoax. It started with troll Jack Posobiec, who simply made it up. Breitbart and Alex Jones jumped on it and soon it made it to Rush Limbaugh and, of course, Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

It was an absolute fraud, and one that could easily have been proven a fraud by anyone who bothered to check—and it’s difficult to believe that the entire staff of Breitbart and Sean Hannity’s show were so uninformed as to the explosive nature of Comey’s testimony that they could have plausibly believed it in the first place. Comey’s testimony about Trump pressuring him to drop the investigation was the top news story of the day; peddling a tweet from a known hoaxer that claims the exact opposite can’t be described as “falling for” a hoax. It counts as being an accessory to it. Sean Hannity and his ilk were spreading the false version on purpose.

In an email, Mr. Posobiec described his work as “reality journalism — part investigative, part activist, part commentary.” A day before his tweet, the White House had allowed him into an Oval Office photo op with the president, and he tried to ask a question about Seth Rich, the murdered Democratic National Committee staff member.

The reason for peddling the hoaxes is simple: Many or most of their followers will believe them. They won’t check. So it doesn’t matter whether the news they present is entirely fabricated. They will get the desired effect—angry conservatives obligingly believing the conservative president has been vindicated—and suffer no consequences no matter how quickly their claims are proven false in other venues. It helps when you have an administration eager to help the effort. It helps more to have already pre-segregated news markets such that conservative fans aren’t likely to ever find out you’ve lied to them.

“The ability to mitigate such disinformation campaigns was far easier in the 1990s,” said Chris Lehane, who worked as an aide in the Clinton White House. Back then, he added, “for the most part the existing distribution channels were not as segmented across ideological lines that, in effect, create parallel realities that run along ideological grounds.”

It’s a conservative propaganda effort. It’s the dissemination of provably false information up and down the conservative “news” chain, from the lowest dregs to the Fox News cameras, facilitated by a conservative movement so contemptuous of mere objective reality that they don’t just tolerate, but demand they be given more pleasing versions.

The Times doesn’t touch on just how frighteningly dangerous the embrace of such tactics is. It is the cornerstone of authoritarian, fundamentalist, and fascist governments. When the government and their compliant media figures simply alter the news to best benefit the party, that’s the end of things. Democracy cannot exist in such places, and there is no informed consent of the governed if the governed are simply given whatever false information will render them most compliant.