Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Health Workers Give Poor Marks To Trump/Congress/Public
The charts above reflect the results of a recent Morning Consult Poll -- done between January 4th and 9th of a national sample of 1,000 health care workers, and has a 3 point margin of error. These health care workers gave the Trump administration, Congress, and the American public very low marks in their response to the Coronavirus outbreak. About 65% said the Trump administration had not done enough. About 59% said the same of Congress, and about 68% said the American public had not done enough.
The World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, and state governors did much better.
A Big Lie Works Only If It Is Built On Many Smaller Lies
If you are like me, you probably wonder how so many people could believe Trump's lie about winning the election (and having it stolen from him by the Democrats). Are these people just stupid? Do they not care about the truth and facts?
In an article for CNN, Ruth Ben-Ghiat tries to explain this conundrum. She says its just how propaganda works -- that a big lie only works if its built on many smaller lies. She writes:
"We won this election and we won it by a landslide," said Donald Trump at his "Save America" rally on January 6, which incited the assault on the Capitol. This is Trump's "Big Lie," a brazen falsehood with momentous consequences.
Trump's accusation that "radical left" Democrats stole his victory is certainly a whopper. But the focus on his Big Lie misses something fundamental about how propaganda works. A leader's Big Lie has no power and makes little sense on its own. It has traction only if the public has been fed many, many smaller lies. It relies on a larger network of falsehoods told by the leader and reinforced by his government officials and compliant media.
The Big Lie works because it is part of an established alternate belief system -- an edifice of lies, assembled piece by piece.
Trump, a leader of authoritarian intentions and tendencies, had disadvantages with respect to the foreign autocrats he so admires. He had no state media, like China's Xi Jinping. He could not rule by decree, like Hungary's Viktor Orbán. He had to govern and run for reelection in an open society with a relatively robust free press. Moreover, although he succeeded in making journalists into hate objects for many of his followers, he could not revoke or destroy the First Amendment.
So Trump took a different tack, unleashing a barrage of disinformation common in authoritarian states but without precedent in the history of the American presidency. He told more than 30,000 documented lies in public (30,573 was The Washington Post's final tally), on Twitter, at rallies and in interviews. If taken as an average, it would come out to 21 lies per day over his four-year term.
Let's break down the smaller lies that prepared Trump's followers to accept the Big Lie. Each of these was highly damaging and consequential, and most were repeated endlessly by Trump and his co-conspirators in and out of government and replicated on social media, right-wing TV and radio, and more.
Some were not expressed directly by Trump but were connected to the personality cult he built -- though he did make overt claims that he would "save the United States," and pronounced that "I alone" can fix the country's ills (an allegedly fraudulent election system among them). Personality cults enable the spread of propaganda by allowing an autocrat to forge a special bond with followers, one based on faith and emotion rather than reason. Put simply, they believe -- and help amplify -- his lies because they believe in him.
Indeed, Trump's claims to a unique competence to rescue America got an assist from a cadre of evangelical Christian preachers, authors, and government officials, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders among them, who contended that he ruled by divine benediction -- that God installed him to do His will. This encouraged followers to believe that Trump's destiny was to stay in office, priming them for the moment when Trump's asserted that a second term was rightfully his.
The events of January 6 cannot be understood without this structure of blind belief and all the small lies that supported it. For his supporters, Trump was a victim of the "Deep State" and other enemies -- his reelection had been foiled by their treachery, so it was up to his believers to fight back, to fix a rigged system with the only tool left: direct action.
The Big Lie seemed convincing because Trump had been lying about American elections for years. He started drumming up suspicion about rigged elections in 2016, when it looked like he would lose to Hillary Clinton. The ensuing four years of relentless propaganda aimed to erase all confidence in this fundamental institution of democracy.
It's not surprising that Trump's lying had a dramaticuptick in 2020, when he was campaigning for reelection during a pandemic that he mismanaged with lethal results. He needed to discredit the main thing that threatened his power -- the vote. He worked overtime to throw doubt on every single aspect of voting. He told lies about dead people voting, about fraudulent mail-in ballots, about votes illegally counted, not counted at all, or invented.
In his January 6 speech, he falsely accused Democrats of pulling "suitcases of ballots out from under a table." He lied that the news media had declared Biden the winner even though "they still don't have any idea what the votes are."
Focusing only on the Big Lie misses the big picture. It fails to convey the scope and gravity of the institutionalized lying that was Trump's biggest weapon. And it obscures the way minds were worn down, day after day, by one lie after another after another. Trump's aim in his ceaseless lying was to get his followers to trust him alone as the arbiter of reality and to distrust everyone and everything else -- especially the democratic system that stood in the way of his amassing sufficient power to become untouchable.
It's the authoritarian way. While Trump is now gone from the White House, millions of his supporters still cling fiercely to his lies. Each lie deserves our attention as we seek to combat the mass disinformation that threatens our democracy.
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Trump Told 30,573 Lies During His Term Of Office
From The Washington Post Fact Checker:
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.
This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.
What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.
Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
Blacks Have Made Progress In Government But Gaps Remain
The charts are from the Pew Research Center. Here is some of what they had to say:
Twelve years after Barack Obama made history as the first Black U.S. president, a Black woman was sworn in as vice president of the United States following the election of Joe Biden. Kamala Harris, who is of mixed Jamaican and Indian heritage, is the first Black American, first person of Asian descent and first woman to hold the second-highest office in the country. Harris’ election represented another advance in the slow but steady progress Black Americans have made in recent decades in gaining a greater foothold in political leadership, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Cabinets of recent presidents. But they have lagged in the Senate and in governorships.
The GOP Has Become The Party Of Racists And Fascists
Having two (or more) parties insures that the party in power does not go too far (whether it is a party of the left or the right), and promotes negotiation which usually results in policies that are good for the country.
Sadly, today's Republican Party no longer wants to negotiate. It simply wants power at any price so it can expose its agenda on the country. It has become the party of racists and fascists. It has an authoritarian view that labels anyone who disagrees as un-American and an enemy of the state. They are no longer the "loyal opposition".
Consider the following, which is part of an article by Loretta J. Ross at Counterpunch.org:
The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth. To paraphrase noted Black educator Vincent Harding, we are citizens of a country that has yet to be realized.
The Republican brand as a legitimate political party will be forever associated with far-right ideologies, including neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. These so-called “respectable” leaders coddled and stoked a white supremacist insurrection by Trump for the past four years. Their transactional opportunism enabled Confederate flags to be defiantly paraded in the U.S. Capitol, a shame not even achieved during the Civil War. They proved they don’t want to share a pluralistic democracy with other political parties and interests.
If Republicans can’t permanently dominate this country with a demographically shrinking number of angry white people, they proved they are ready to blow it up, figuratively and literally. Now they want us to rush to forgiveness and reconciliation, and ignore that truth and accountability come first in the achievement of healing. . . .
Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party.
I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years.
The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions. From the White House, to the Congress, to the streets, they declared war on democracy. They are seditionists, co-conspirators, and neo-Nazis hiding in plain sight who chose to use whatever power, platforms, and microphones they had to overturn this system of government. Their apparent goal is an apartheid-like system in which an embattled minority of people rule over millions of people who oppose them. We must send an unmistakable signal that this will not be tolerated when a more competent neo-fascist seeks to gain permanent power in the Congress or White House in the future.
We must defend an open, democratic society against these forces of fascism disguised as a respectable Republican Party that encouraged a white supremacist insurrection that seeks to rule like kings above the law. They see calls for unity and civility as weakness, as all fascists do. They take advantage of an open society to undermine the incremental progress of the 20th century in race, gender, citizenship, national, and international relations. For over a century they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with military power, disrupting other democracies by fomenting wars and low-intensity conflicts around the world that have killed millions of people. They are unable to accept the complexity of a multi-cultural and multi-racial globalized world, so they stew in their resentments, and fight every effort to democratize the privileges and benefits of our world. They are at the natural demise of a political party that sought to hold onto power through a web of lies to their followers to enrich a small cabal of people. . . .
Our commitment to human rights, just laws, social welfare, global peace, and democratic governance is what authoritarians seek to undermine through abuse of the concept of freedom. We should call them all American Nazis and prevent them from hiding behind mealy-mouthed words because they’ve shown us who they are. Now we must believe them.
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