The Right's Assault on Facts, Data, and Reality

[LFC]

The maker of the HBO documentary on QAnon may have just gotten an accidental confession from Q himself. Looking at the video snippet he does appear to have effed up and uncomfortably realize it.

Q is probably Ron Watkins, the administrator of the internet image board 8kun, formerly known as 8chan. The claim was made in the sixth and final episode of HBO’s Q: Into the Storm, which aired late Sunday, by filmmaker Cullen Hoback. Hoback concedes his theory “lacks definitive proof” but highlights an apparent slip-up that Watkins makes in his final videoconference conversation with Hoback. After briefly discussing his role in spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud following the 2020 election, Watkins says, “It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before—” and then realizing his error quickly adds, “—but never as Q.” In the documentary, Watkins tries to convince Hoback that former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon is actually Q, the mysterious leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory that has a legion of increasingly violent adherents. Hoback muses, “In order to throw off anyone who came sniffing around, wouldn’t it be smart to create a fake digital forensics trail, one that leads to someone from Trump’s inner circle?”

[LFC]

The GOP lies to take down democracy and break reality have worked for at least half their base.

Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters - many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags - also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.

Last month, 12 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution honoring Capitol Police officers who defended the grounds during the rampage, with one lawmaker saying that he objected using the word “insurrection” to describe the incident.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows a large number of rank-and-file Republicans have embraced the myth. While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.

“Republicans have their own version of reality,” said John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University. “It is a huge problem. Democracy requires accountability and accountability requires evidence.”

[goldenvalley]

Apr 5, 2021 18:03:39 GMT LFC said:

The GOP lies to take down democracy and break reality have worked for at least half their base.

Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters - many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags - also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.

Last month, 12 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution honoring Capitol Police officers who defended the grounds during the rampage, with one lawmaker saying that he objected using the word “insurrection” to describe the incident.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows a large number of rank-and-file Republicans have embraced the myth. While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.

“Republicans have their own version of reality,” said John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University. “It is a huge problem. Democracy requires accountability and accountability requires evidence.”

I don't know that anything can be done about this.  I don't think any of them will ever see any evidence to convince them they are mistaken or were misled. They seem to be too much invested in the idea to ever give it up.   If life goes on relatively unchanged in the country except for COVID being less of a problem, will they forget about it and/or conclude the election was stolen but it didn't end up hurting anything that actually touches their lives?  Would the fire dim in their minds?

[LFC]

Is it any wonder the right is so reality challenged? They lap up the sewage they're fed like it's ice cream.

Republican voters report receiving more information from conservative media about Dr. Seuss than the COVID-19 relief bill.

Dan Pfeiffer argued on Tuesday that it's not an accident that conservatives in the media are spoon-feeding their viewers and readers outrage about the six Dr. Seuss books that are no longer being printed due to racially insensitive material.

"The Republican plan to make 2022 about wokeness run amok is less stupid (and even more cynical) than it sounds," Pfeiffer explained. "The Cancel Culture crusade is not just the province of the blowhards on Fox News. The Republican Party leadership is making it a central part of their strategy."
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According to Pfeiffer, so-called cancel culture hits a nerve with people who believe "America is changing in ways that are bad for the political and cultural power that white Christians believe is their birthright."

He continued: "There is no doubt that a lot of what drives the Right-Wing's focus on 'cancel culture' is a sincere annoyance at the consequences of being a racist asshole in public. But there is a political logic underlying all of the carping, complaining, and crocodile tears."

[LFC]

The spectacle of Moscow Mitch's spittle filled rages against the cause he spent decades fighting for is positively schadenfreudelicious. Just as the Trump and the MAGAts ended up being a tiger they rode but couldn't tame he now has the same problem with companies who have decided their free speech rights including standing up for democracy, and we know we can't have that kind of shit going on. Chait covers the Republican meltdown in all its glory.

On June 15, 2012, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a speech portentously titled “Growing Threats to Our First Amendment Rights: An Address by Mitch McConnell.” (“Address” is the term politicians use for speeches they wish to be taken seriously.) The Senate Minority Leader used the hourlong remarks to warn that restrictions on political donations by corporations and wealthy people, or even mere disclosure requirements, were “an alarming willingness itself to use the powers of government to silence” dissent. Since “the form of speech most needful of absolute protection is political speech,” McConnell argued that President Obama’s efforts to require public disclosure of donations by figures like the Koch brothers amounted to the government “using its own powers to harass or intimidate those who participate in the political process.”

Whatever might be said about McConnell, here was an issue where not even his bitterest critics doubted his sincerity. Opposing campaign-finance reform as a dangerous restriction on political speech by businesses was the cause of his life. Obama’s memoir casually describes McConnell as lacking “any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign-finance reform.”

And yet, last Monday, here was McConnell treating the spectacle of business leaders engaging in political debate as a stark threat to be extinguished. The provocation was a series of corporate statements denouncing Republican-sponsored voting restrictions, which McConnell described as “a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people.” McConnell, invoking a spate of Republican proposals to punish firms that speak out against their vote-suppression laws, warned, “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country.”

The next day, after reiterating his warning to corporations to “stay out of politics,” McConnell clarified that he did not mean to discourage their continued donations. Corporate money is speech, but speech isn’t speech.

The phantasmal threat of government intimidating business leaders for exercising their First Amendment rights, which McConnell had once invoked to ward off any limits on their ability to use financial leverage over elections, had suddenly become real. And the source of the threat is McConnell himself. A few days’ worth of large corporations condemning voter suppression has left the Republican leader so thoroughly rattled that he’s thrown away decades of laborious work reputation-building on the single issue that is the foundation of his worldview.

There is more at work here than the latest cynical turn of the wheel. McConnell is acting not only out of calculation but a mix of fear and rage that is enveloping segments of the right that believed they had come through the Trump era unscathed. For a certain class of Establishment Republican, the events surrounding Georgia’s voting restrictions have set off a mental crisis more severe than anything they experienced during the previous four years.

From the standpoint of the Republican elite — in particular, the conservative Republicans like McConnell who went along with Trump while cringing at his incompetence — the Trump presidency was an unpleasant period during which they were beset on all sides by impossible demands. To their right, Trump’s most ardent cultists disdained them as country-club insiders who resented Trump for inspiring a populist uprising that shook loose their control of their party. To their left, the media, liberals, Never Trumpers, and perhaps their neighbors and younger family members dismissed them as little Eichmanns working alongside a monster.

But what were they supposed to do? Impeach the man? Vote against tax cuts they believed would help the economy? It was all so unreasonable.

The nadir came on two consecutive days in January. On Tuesday, January 5, a surprising special election deposed the Republican Senate majority and gave Democrats a working government. The next day, a Trumpist mob ransacked the Capitol. In that moment, they finally snapped. McConnell delivered a searing speech blaming Trump. Even Lindsey Graham said he was done with Trump.

But the party faithful weren’t done. Trump’s lie that his sacred landslide election was stolen by fraud took hold among the party’s base. And so they responded by instituting a national wave of restrictive voting bills, beginning in Georgia, the epicenter of Trump’s grievance. It did not strike them as especially significant that the state is a literal crime scene (Trump is the subject of two ongoing investigations stemming from his efforts to pressure state officials to overturn the election results.) Nor did the symbolism of launching their vote-suppression program in a blue-trending former Jim Crow state strike them as especially provocative. Voter-suppression laws would, they hoped, advance the party’s electoral prospects by discouraging young people and racial minorities from navigating the bureaucratic requirements of voting.

They're gobsmacked that corporations don't mostly walk in goose step lock step with them anymore. That means any "principles" concerning their free speech have been dropped faster than an invitation to take a ride in Madison Cawthorn's car. They are, however, faced with the reality that companies cater to cash and the majority of the cash (other than for MyPillows, gold, and prepper kits) is in mostly blue areas. And the top consumers are younger people who don't think like rank and file Republicans and in fact are horrified by them.

To see dozens of corporations denounce voter-suppression laws has therefore come as a shock to the party’s elite. Nobody — nobody they cared about, anyway — was denouncing them for passing vote-suppression laws in 2010. They had begrudgingly accepted some level of backlash against Trump. But now Trump was gone, many of them had openly denounced him on his way out, and here they find themselves still on moral probation.

A sickening realization has settled upon them that many of the uncomfortable changes to the political atmosphere over the last four years may be permanent. The cultural change that alienated the GOP from academia and Hollywood years ago are creeping into corporate America.

A major reason for this is that the country’s economy has a leftward skew that is even more pronounced than the rightward skew of its political institutions. Counties that voted for Biden account for 70 percent of GDP. The young educated people that big companies disproportionately covet as customers and as employees are far more liberal than the median voter.

Whether this is “fair” is a matter of perspective. In theory, the people who accept the legitimacy of an outcome driven by capitalistic dynamics ought to be the party that talks about free markets like they’re the hand of God. And yet their capitalist principles have offered Republicans little comfort. Instead, Republicans have lashed out at the market that has forsaken them, angrily threatening policy retribution against any companies that oppose their vote-suppression agenda. A Wall Street Journal editorial denounces “woke and weak CEOs” leading a wide array of companies. Why, that sounds like the kind of systemic market failure the Journal is always insisting can’t happen.

[LFC]

More screeching from Republicans horrified that companies would use the First Amendment rights the GOP fought so hard to hand to them for something the party didn't approve of. Corporations are people too and they speak up on issues they see as benefiting them.

J.D. Mesnard, a Republican state senator in Arizona, couldn’t hide his disappointment that a high-powered group of Phoenix business leaders had signed onto a letter calling a bill of his — one that significantly beefs up identification requirements for voting by mail — an attempt at “voter suppression cloaked as reform.”

“That exact phrasing that was used is beyond disappointing,” a wounded Mesnard told TPM over the phone Tuesday.

“I know those guys, at least some of them, that signed the letter,” the senator said. “I’ve got a reasonably good relationship with them. Don’t always agree on every issue. But that specific phraseology — how that’s characterized, my intent being questioned — is beyond offensive.”

The senator was peeved at something Republicans in Arizona and around the country have begun to note in recent weeks: Their friends and allies in the business community were feeling the heat from voting rights activists. And, in some cases, they’ve started speaking up to keep customers and employees happy.

[LFC]

I'm now of the opinion that if I hear/read anybody using the terms "woke" or "cancel culture" I can immediately assume that whatever they have to say is in bad faith. Moscow Mitch just reminded of the much older standby, "playing the race card."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday accused those opposed to a restrictive voting rights law in Georgia of “playing the race card,” insisting that any notion of voter suppression was a far cry from reality.

“People are not being denied the right to vote anywhere in America,” McConnell said in an interview with the New York Times published Wednesday night. “Nobody should buy this notion that this is somehow about voter suppression. They are also playing the race card, which shows how desperate they are to shame people into voting for this monstrosity.”

McConnell, who has long fought to fend off campaign fundraising restrictions, has been relentless in seeking a counter-narrative to push back on a campaign spending overhaul and voting rights expansion bill being pushed by congressional Democrats. The proposed legislation would likely undo some of the damage done by new restrictive voting laws in Georgia that are also cropping up in a series of states in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen election.

[LFC]

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texasshole) is now pulling a full blown Frank Luntz and calling the use of companies' free speech, which the Republicans have spent decades elevating and defending, "progressive fascism."

Get ready for a truly spectacular galaxy brain take.

Rep. Daniel Crenshaw (R-TX) on Wednesday night railed against the stream of corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola that are publicly condemning GOP lawmakers’ efforts to gut voting access, claiming that the criticism was a product of “progressive fascism” (which isn’t a thing).

“The Democrats have successfully captivated the institutions; pop culture, Hollywood, our education institutions and now our corporations into their own woke agenda,” the Republican told Fox News. “This is fascism. And they use cancel culture as a tool to impose their fascism on us.”

It goes without saying that not only is “progressive fascism” a plainly fictional concept, massive corporations exercising their right to free speech to criticize the government for making it harder for people to vote nowhere near the realm of fascism.

Additionally, Republican lawmakers are the ones trying to punish and/or “cancel” those corporations for speaking out against the voting restrictions by working to revoke their special tax breaks and anti-trust law exemptions.

Calling out their real fascism is now fascism. Welcome to the truly Orwellian GOP.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

[LFC]

QAnon and utter nutter conspiracy theories continue to cement their position into the Republican mainstream.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Texas GOP chair Allen West will brush shoulders with such QAnon luminaries as Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell at a conference in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend.

Gohmert, an avid peddler of the election fraud lie, has voted against a resolution in the House denouncing the QAnon conspiracy theory. West recently presided over a change in the state party’s slogan to “we are the storm,” a fairly blatant nod to the last judgement-like event QAnon believers think is coming, which will reinstate former President Donald Trump and leave prominent Democrats imprisoned or even executed.

The conference, called the “For God & Country Patriots Roundup,” will take place at the Gilley’s Dallas event venue and the Omni Hotel.

[pnwguy]

Apr 9, 2021 17:56:31 GMT LFC said:

QAnon and utter nutter conspiracy theories continue to cement their position into the Republican mainstream.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Texas GOP chair Allen West will brush shoulders with such QAnon luminaries as Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell at a conference in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend.

Gohmert, an avid peddler of the election fraud lie, has voted against a resolution in the House denouncing the QAnon conspiracy theory. West recently presided over a change in the state party’s slogan to “we are the storm,” a fairly blatant nod to the last judgement-like event QAnon believers think is coming, which will reinstate former President Donald Trump and leave prominent Democrats imprisoned or even executed.

The conference, called the “For God & Country Patriots Roundup,” will take place at the Gilley’s Dallas event venue and the Omni Hotel.

How could any one of us miss the chance to see LOUIE GOHMERT in person!  He's such a leading intellectual in GOP circles and his three daughter would probably receive future Nobel Prizes, if their husbands allow them to work outside of the home.

[LFC]

On the issue of wokeness and cancel culture Andrew Sullivan is indistinguishable from Tucker Carlson. This was his recent piece about the trans issue where he seems to be trying to stake out a bit of a sensible middle ground, albeit using a few too many examples and generalizations of the left that are pure Dreherisms. Then we have this (bold mine).

In our current culture, this somewhat complicated stance is anathema. For some trans activists, especially the younger more thoroughly woke ones, I am simply evil, beset by phobias, and determined to persecute and kill trans people, or seek their genocide. I wish this were a caricature of their views, but it isn’t. For some radical feminists, my empathy for trans women, and concern for their welfare, is regarded as a function of my misogyny and hatred of women, often wrapped up in some anti-gay, misandrist bile. I wish I were exaggerating here as well. The proportion of people in this debate who seem psychologically unstable, emotionally volatile and personally vicious seems larger than usual.

But we can no longer avoid the subject. There is now a flood of bills in state legislatures designed to ban medical procedures for minors who appear to be trans, and to ensure fairness between trans girls and girls in school sports, and a few that are even more extreme. Lines have been drawn. The woke establishment — all major corporations, the federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want. Amazon won’t even sell some books presenting one side of the case, while they still sell Mein Kampf. K thru 12 education now routinely tells children that biological sex is a spectrum (it isn’t) and they can choose where to fit.

"For some radical feminists" is a lead-in that Dreher could have written. "Some?" How many? Do they have control of the agenda? Please show your work.

I wonder how pre-marriage equality Andrew would have reacted to a statement like "The woke establishment — all major corporations, the federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on the side of anything the trans gay activists want." Yeah, yeah. I know. This time it's different.

And that book comparison is straight out of Faux News. To the culture war right, which Andrew seems to be joining, selling a monumentally historically significant book written by a man who is (mostly) viewed as a monster is the same thing as selling a book of no scientific value and filled with bad faith arguments that are directly designed to attack a group of people because of how they were born. Defending a bad faith argument with a bad faith argument. Looks like Andrew is still a Republican after all.

[LFC]

The perpetually truth challenged Ron DeSantis's screech that his lies being pulled down off of YouTube is "Orwellian" is ... well, Orwellian.

It has been less than a week since YouTube axed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' video questioning the effectiveness of masks, and now he is back with another roundtable discussion restating his previous claims.

On Monday, April 12, DeSantis and a group of scientists — including Dr. Scott Atlas, Stanford University's Jay Bhattacharya, and Harvard professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff — met again to discuss COVID-19. However, the stage quickly transformed into an outlet for the group to discuss their grievances about the influence of Big Tech power of censorship by way of social media, according to The Herald Tribune.

"What we're really witnessing is Orwellian," DeSantis said. "It's a Big Tech, corporate media collusion. And the end result is that the narrative is always right. Well, I don't think that's what the American people want."

DeSantis' latest remarks come amid a push to advance legislation that would give the state the ability to reprimand YouTube and other social media networks for account suspensions and/or blocking users and political candidate accounts.

"You don't think there are people in the state of Florida concerned about censorship? Or seeing how massive companies are controlling the terms of debate on some of the most important issues facing our country and the world?" DeSantis said.

[LFC]

This is a piece by somebody who has been covering conspiracy theorists for a long time but it's interesting to me. Despite actually being international in scope it's the parts that impact us here in the U.S. that I'm most interested in.

In 1999 I sat in a Vancouver café with a group of anti-capitalist activists. They’d just returned from protesting the WTO in Seattle to find a new, far stranger foe in town – David Icke. He was there to lecture about how the ruling elite are actually child-sacrificing, blood-drinking paedophile lizards in human disguise.

Nobody had ever suggested such a thing before, and the activists were working to get his books seized and destroyed. They were alarmed not just by the echoes of antisemitism but because something startling was happening. Icke was beginning to win over people who should have been on their side. I wrote back then that they were “seeing an omen of the blackest kind, the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land”. But this wasn’t prophecy on my part. I thought they were probably being overdramatic.

I spent much of the late 1990s chronicling the embryonic world of Satanic Hollywood lizard paedophile conspiracy theories for my book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, which turns 20 this week. Lately, of course, the theories have proliferated wildly – radicalising unparalleled swathes of YouTubers, inspiring an insurrection and reportedly in the past two years at least one murder and a suicide bombing. I feel lucky to have been there at its inception, but annoyed with myself for not anticipating quite how vast and malevolent things would get. Looking back, were there clues?

He describes his interactions with a Muslim man and his son and then ties this together.

Fifteen years later, Omar Bakri was imprisoned in Lebanon for supporting terrorism. His anxious teenage son Mohammed grew up, joined Isis, and was murdered by them, reportedly for cursing the Prophet Muhammad. It was heartbreaking. But these days when I recall the “Hitler the watercolourist” comment, I mostly remember a remark made by one of Omar’s circle during our first day’s reporting.

The man was recounting his daydream of releasing a swarm of mice into United Nations headquarters when he suddenly asked if I was aware that the world was being secretly controlled by a network of shadowy cabals from secret rooms. A year later I met a Ku Klux Klansman in Arkansas who was consumed by the same shadowy cabal conspiracy theories, and that’s when it hit me: there was an under-chronicled relationship between 1990s political and religious extremism and conspiratorial thinking. So I started hanging around the conspiracy world.

And, in hindsight, it was all clues. The most popular tables at the gun shows were frequently the ones selling the conspiracy VHS tapes – recordings of very long conversations between unengaging men in public access TV studios. They’d discuss how the Illuminati were the puppet masters behind the deaths at David Koresh’s church in Waco, or how the all-seeing eye on the dollar bill was evidence of the Illuminati’s takeover of the Federal Reserve. They were as dull as anything, but due to their scarcity the VHSs were passed around militia circles like rare jewels, gun-show Rosetta stones.

And then there's Facebook. Or more importantly the executive at Facebook who was responsible for killing the early attempts at reigning in the algorithms that were expanding the visibility of the conspiracy groups.

In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives had realised four years earlier that its algorithms were “exploiting the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness” – like the startling fact that 64% of users who joined extremist groups were enticed to do so by clicking on the “Groups you should join” and “Discover” buttons. Inside the company there was alarm. What might these rabbit holes be doing to users’ mental health and to society? Internal teams suggested numerous fixes – algorithmic tweaks to make the site more civil. But the executives nicknamed the proposals “Eat Your Veggies” and ignored them. (They argued that it was for reasons of fairness: there are more far-right pages on Facebook, so any changes would have disproportionately affected conservatives.) Facebook claimed in 2020 that it had changed in the years since these deliberations.

Were I a conspiracy theorist, I could easily concoct a theory about the man instrumental in killing the recommendations. He was Facebook’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan. In 2000, when Kaplan was an adviser to George W Bush’s election campaign, he was present at the Brooks Brothers riot, where dozens of paid Republican operatives masquerading as concerned citizens stormed Miami-Dade polling headquarters with the goal of shutting down the recount. They pounded on windows and chanted “Stop the fraud!” In the ensuing chaos, the recount was abandoned and Bush was elected president.

Read on about Kaplan. Zuckerberg picked a real winner with this a-hole.

[goldenvalley]

The Jon Ronson book is worth a read even if it is 20 years old.  It's one of those that stuck in my mind, so when I read about QAnon, I recognize the kind of people that fall in with or create some of the wilder conspiracy theories.  They are all so convinced that only they are smart enough to ferret out the truth and truth can be quite out of sync with reality.

[andydp]

Apr 14, 2021 22:12:49 GMT goldenvalley said:

The Jon Ronson book is worth a read even if it is 20 years old.  It's one of those that stuck in my mind, so when I read about QAnon, I recognize the kind of people that fall in with or create some of the wilder conspiracy theories.  They are all so convinced that only they are smart enough to ferret out the truth and truth can be quite out of sync with reality.

I usually ask them what color the sky is in their world.

[LFC]

The assault on reality continues as TAC puts up a piece that, like those before it, appeal to people's feelings about the integrity of the election rather than actual data that has shown over and over again that there was virtually no fraud and certainly not enough to matter. That's an amazingly quick turnaround from the side that coined "F*** YOUR FEELINGS!" Read just the opener for an absolute basket of lies and avoidance of the actual evidence we have in hand. I love the line "with the courts having closed their doors" rather than "with over 80 lawsuits having crashed and burned in the courts for lack of evidence."

The question of election integrity is not going away. As Justice Clarence Thomas recently pointed out, addressing weaknesses and opacity in election processes and voting laws isn’t just about 2020. The efforts being undertaken currently across the substantial majority of states are about finding a way that American voters can regain confidence in the security of their elections before the 2022 and 2024 seasons. Otherwise, those elections will also be questioned, potentially compromised, and our democratic process rendered illegitimate in the minds of tens of millions of Americans.

With the courts having closed their doors, the states are now taking up the issue of election integrity with just such an eye to the future. Analysis reveals at least 300 new bills being considered across 43 states to address voter integrity and election security. Many of these bills are in states that were the most controversial and closely contested in November, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These proposals have been met with shrill and knee-jerk cries of “Racism!”—including from quarters which should know better, such as the CEOs of Delta and Coca-Cola (in response to Georgia’s newly enacted laws). However, a recent poll confirms that 75 percent of Americans, including 60 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of African Americans, support the common-sense idea that voters should show identification before voting. We show IDs to board planes, rent cars, check into hotels and pick up baseball tickets, so why not to cast a ballot, the highest responsibility and privilege of citizenship?

The pivotal question now is, will states be allowed to reform their laws and improve their processes according to the clear will of their citizens, or will the federal government (through H.R. 1) and captured Corporate America stop them? H.R. 1 is particularly pernicious in that it would override state laws, abolish voter ID requirements, and enable congressional redistricting by an “independent” commission guided by H.R. 1. While H.R. 1 has passed the Democrat-controlled House, it is likely to run aground in the Senate, where the filibuster remains a powerful line of defense.

Corporate interference may be the more immediate issue. Our largest corporations have been engaged in what has been openly acknowledged by mainstream media as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” regarding elections.

State lawmakers have a battle on their hands. Those who have the courage to follow the expressed will of their constituents will stand up and resist corporate blackmail. Those who don’t are likely to be turned out of office next year. Executive Order 13848, regarding foreign interference in U.S. elections, may be a means to confront corporations acting under the pressurized influence of the CCP and its agents. Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey just signed a law banning any official from accepting outside funding to administer elections. He said: “With public confidence in our elections in peril, it’s clear that elections must be pristine and above reproach—and the sole purview of government.”

This comment summed up my views on this steaming pile of lies so well I figured I'd just quote it.

Yourcenar • 16 hours ago

It's revealing that the entire tone of this post is set by the subheading "No matter how many times they are told to shut up and move on, Americans still care about the security of their elections."

Instead of attempting to demonstrate in any particular that there was significant fraud in the 2020 election the writer rests on the fact that a lot of Americans, maybe 1/3 "believe" that it was stolen. And we need to cater to this belief. And the rest of us who think the 1/3 are ridiculous are apparently just being condescending and patronizing because we honestly point that out.

Apparently we're the ones who are supposed to shut up.

If Michael had intellectual integrity to match his concern for electoral integrity, he'd take one of those many documentaries and youtube clips he cites and examine it in detail, including the countervailing evidence.

Or he'd take one of the bills he's touting and explain why the benefit to election security outweighs the cost in voter suppression. But if he had intellectual integrity, as opposed to the ability to string together Republican talking points, he probably wouldn't be posting at TAC.

[pnwguy]

www.politico.com/news/2021/04/20/trump-georgia-gop-election-fraud-483193

Almost?

[LFC]

The assault on reality has right-wing law enforcement officials and agencies chasing tales of BLM and Anitfa coming to attack their communities. It's both sad and dangerously scary.

The graffiti on a port-a-potty in a gravel pit was, in the opinion of one Washington state resident, a sign that anti-fascists might blow up a nearby dam. Another local was convinced that a young man reading signs was actually an “Antifa or BLM scout.” A third person warned, via an anonymous email tip, that her ex-husband was part of an anti-fascist group that was coming to burn down the town.

All these complaints were forwarded throughout police ranks in Washington, where officials urged vigilance against the leftist threat.

As racial justice protests flared across the country in summer 2020, so did conservative fears of leftist protesters. From Oregon to Virginia, social media lit up with rumors about anti-fascists (“antifa”) or Black Lives Matter participants, who were allegedly coming to terrorize small towns.

Anacortes, a scenic city of 17,000 in coastal Washington, was no exception. From June to August 2020, the city’s police department received repeated tips about supposed antifa threats, according to police documents obtained by the government transparency nonprofit Property of the People and shared with The Daily Beast. Even some of the most absurd claims found their way up to state-level law enforcement, those documents show.

Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, reiterated that the complaints came amid a summer of rumors and innuendo about antifa and Black Lives Matter. After fresh fears circulated in some conservative channels and law enforcement warned about the potential for mass unrest in the wake of the verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder case in Minnesota, it’s safe to say that chatter has not subsided.

[LFC]

Global warming, the latest outrage for anti-science right-wing parents.

On a bright afternoon in September, as Hurricane Florence was lashing the shores of states just a few hundred miles north, Vernon, a retired IBM contracts negotiator and Marine Corps veteran, answered his door barefoot, wearing shorts and a green T-shirt. He had joined the Florida Citizens’ Alliance as a board member in 2012, initially inspired by the organization’s gun-rights advocacy. In fidelity to the IBM corporate ethos, Vernon and others in the Alliance recognized that the group wasn’t optimizing its potential appeal to the Florida citizenry, so they commissioned a team of consultants to evaluate the group’s strategy for obtaining new members.

“That’s when we decided we were a ‘Liberty Education’ organization,” Vernon said at his dining room table, reflecting on the organization’s decision to give up its laser focus on Second Amendment causes and begin promoting the teaching of conservative values to children. “Membership increased significantly when we started saying, ‘Look at what’s in our textbooks,’” Vernon said.

“The textbooks,” he added, “are a perfect reflection of the education system.”

Prominent on the group’s expanded menu of concerns was climate change, and humanity’s presumed role in driving it. The Alliance’s members began line-reading school textbooks for violations of their beliefs, creating carefully detailed reports on how many times, and in what context, elementary and high school students were learning about rising seas, or melting ice in Antarctica. “Unfortunately, what it’s become is indoctrination and not education. That’s our major problem,” Vernon said, echoing a prevailing concern among members of the Alliance and like-minded conservatives everywhere: the unchecked power and control over social institutions by perceived liberal elites. “We’re really concerned,” he added, “that our kids are not being educated, [but] simply indoctrinated in the philosophy of the academic aristocracy.”

[LFC]

TPM has a good piece (paywalled) on the history of the Republican assault on the CBO. I remember Paul Ryan et al screeching about the CBO not using "dynamic scoring" i.e. magic numbers that have no evidence of being anything more than magical thinking. If you can't meet the numbers you need then change how the math works. In full:

With breathlessly tight margins in the Senate and the filibuster batting down the bulk of the majority’s legislative agenda, lawmakers are increasingly governing unorthodoxly.

This session, that’s meant a dependence on passing legislation through reconciliation, a mechanism to pass budget-related bills on a simple majority.

It’s also meant a glaring spotlight on nonpartisan officials who once enjoyed general obscurity. Back in February, an attempt to get a federal minimum wage hike into the COVID-19 relief package thrust Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough front and center, who engendered significant Democratic disappointment and anger when she ruled that the wage hike could not be instituted through reconciliation.

Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel came under fire around then too, after the agency found that raising the wage to $15 an hour would increase the federal deficit by $54 billion over the next 10 years and lead to 1.4 million job losses over the next four.

Senate Democrats have even mulled firing Swagel and replacing him with a more liberal economist, according to a Mother Jones report from earlier this month. Staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chair of the Budget Committee, reportedly offered up potential replacements. The idea seems to have progressed no further however, as Sanders’ House counterpart, Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY), expressed his staunch support for Swagel through a spokesperson.

To former CBO directors, the whispers are unnerving.

“It might well just be saber-rattling,” former CBO Director Keith Hall, a Republican who served from 2015 to 2019, told TPM. “It’s like if a coach screams at the ref so maybe the ref is afraid to make another call against them — that’s attempted intimidation.”

But it doesn’t reach the fever pitch of 2017, the time when decades of grumbling about politically disadvantageous CBO scores mutated into a real assault against the agency under the Trump administration. Both former CBO directors TPM talked to, Hall and Doug Elmendorf, a Democrat who held the post from 2009-2015, pointed to that period as a “crescendo” of animus against the agency.

That was the time that Republicans were hellbent on repealing the Affordable Care Act, former President Obama’s greatest legislative legacy.

“It’s always been okay in my mind for people to disagree with CBO,” Hall said. “Being disappointed with CBO’s work, that’s okay, that’s the name of the game. But when I was there, things crossed the line in my view — in particular, with the ACA repeal and replace stuff.”

Republican leadership, Hall recalls, worked quickly and with little transparency for the rest of its caucus. He thinks that strategy, ultimately a failed one, increased GOP members’ frustration. Much of that was directed at him.

He remembers having finished scoring the House repeal and replace bill, which had passed the chamber already. The topline of the CBO report was that, if that bill became law, 23 million more people would become uninsured. As Hall and his agency shifted to work with the Senate, GOP anger grew.

“They were making noises that they were gonna haul me into a public hearing — it was a blatant attempt to politicize and, frankly, try to intimidate CBO for its work,” Hall said.

The pressure didn’t relent, especially as administration officials got involved.

Then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer laid the groundwork in March even before CBO had scored the House bill.

“If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place,” he said. “I mean, they were way, way off the last time in every aspect of how they scored and projected Obamacare.”

After CBO scored the House repeal bill, the tenor of the attack intensified.

Mick Mulvaney, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, gave an interview to the Washington Examiner where he floated getting rid of the agency altogether, dropping the jaws of former agency leaders.

“The days of relying on some nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to do that work for us has probably come and gone,” Mulvaney said, both impugning individuals at CBO and suggesting that Congress outsource the work to partisan organizations instead.

The cumulative effect of those attacks reached a height alarming enough to former CBO directors in late July 2017 — just days before Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) would flip his famous thumbs down — that they wrote a letter decrying the assault on the agency.

“The intensity of those attacks were what led me and other former directors to write, publish and express our views,” Elmendorf told TPM. “Former CBO directors appointed by members of both parties rallied to support the integrity of the organization under attack.”

Days later, McCain and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) joined with Democrats in killing the repeal and replace effort. Republicans never picked up the issue again with the same verve, after a defeated then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said it was “time to move on” during a Senate floor speech.

“When that was all over, I tried my best to reach out to the House and Senate, but especially the Senate just because they were angry,” Hall said, recalling that much of the GOP members’ discontent stemmed from CBO not considering specific proposals from individual lawmakers — something leadership told the agency not to do.

“I tried to impress upon them that they were talking to the wrong guy — that’s above my pay grade,” he said. “Go talk to your leadership about why you weren’t included in things, don’t scream at me about it.”

Throughout 2018, Hall was called before multiple congressional committees, mostly an opportunity for members to “vent,” he thinks, but ultimately a venture he hopes taught some lawmakers about CBO’s role.

“Their inability to overturn the ACA, the whole strategy there — they failed,” Hall said of the Republicans. “That’s not CBO’s fault.”

When his term ended in 2019, he was not asked to stay on despite his enthusiasm to do so. Former Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), then chair of the budget committee, was leading the selection process at the time.

Does Hall attribute that decision to Republicans blaming him and his agency for their own inability to repeal the ACA?

He paused for a few seconds. “Absolutely,” he said.

[LFC]

A look into how the right-wing, in particular Faux News, completely misrepresented the study on the reduction of meat consumption and climate change.

Keoleian and Rose took a look at the rightwing outrage storm, both immediately miffed at one of Fox News’ lesser mistakes in reporting on the fabricated ban.

“A colleague of mine contacted me and said, ‘did you see that your study is being misrepresented?’” Keoleian told TPM. “They sent me a tweet linked to a screenshot of Fox News, which called it a department of agriculture University of Michigan study — we are not a department of agriculture.”

“The guys at Fox did no fact checking at all,” Rose added. “The graphic they put together said the source was the University of Michigan department of agriculture — there is no such thing.”

One Fox News host did eventually come around to issuing a brief correction on Monday afternoon, clarifying that the network had errantly credited the data in one of its histeria-hyping graphics to the Biden administration. It did not correct the attribution to the imaginary agriculture department.

But in larger terms, the scientists expressed a gamut of emotions as they watched their research be contorted into a baseless partisan attack: frustration, alarm, amusement, even hope, that it would get people thinking about changing their diets.

But the volume of the anger, ratcheted up by rightwing media’s extensive reach and direct feed into social media tributaries, was enough to blow them back.

“We’re humble little researchers with our quiet little existence, doing studies and putting things out,” Rose said, chuckling. “Then there’s this whole different universe of noise and shouting and jumping up and down.”

Keoleian recalled in particular seeing Donald Trump Jr. retweeting the Fox News graphic, asserting that he would never give up his freedom to cram four pounds of beef into his stomach daily. That tweet got over 33,000 likes.

“To say that the basis is the Biden climate plan is also totally ridiculous because his plan doesn’t even talk about diet shift,” Keoleian said, referring to details the administration has made public, including a climate plan fact sheet. “It’s totally fabricated, totally fabricated,” he said, starting to laugh with exasperation. “There is frustration on so many levels.”

[goldenvalley]

Apr 28, 2021 15:17:35 GMT LFC said:

A look into how the right-wing, in particular Faux News, completely misrepresented the study on the reduction of meat consumption and climate change.

The point of the story was to stoke outrage.  And it did, just like the fulminating over light bulb choices, low flush toilets, etc. Rage and grievance, that's all there is to it. From there it's easy to point to AOC, Biden, Sanders, Democrats as the enemy of all that is familiar to people.

[LFC]

Maxine Waters is the same as Trump, at least according the the MAGAts. (Actually they say she's worse. Uh, huh.)

In Donald Trump’s political, media, and legal orbits, the former president and his Republican allies are coalescing around a new argument to fend off allegations that Trump incited the bloody Jan. 6 riot: Maxine Waters did it, too.

Since leaving office early this year, the ex-president—who soldiers on as the effective leader of the Republican Party—has been served with lawsuit after lawsuit over his role in instigating the mob violence at the U.S. Capitol. That riot led to Trump becoming the first president in American history to be impeached twice. But in numerous GOP circles still willing to defend him, Trump’s hands are, of course, clean—even though Waters’ aren’t. Or so they argue.

Waters, a 16-term Democratic congresswoman from California, ginned up a wave of conservative outrage when she urged protesters this month to “get more confrontational” in the event that a Minneapolis jury acquitted former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Almost immediately after her comment started making waves on right-wing media, the former president—now ensconced at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago—took notice.

Trump began rhetorically asking why he was getting so much criticism and inundated with lawsuits, when what Waters did was, in his apparent estimation, much worse, according to two people familiar with his private musings. Naturally, the ex-president wanted this to be made a prominent plank of political, legal, and messaging pushback against the sustained allegations that he’d incited a deadly riot, the sources recounted.

Reached on Tuesday evening, Trump’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, declined to comment.

Whether proponents of this argument have recently heard from Trump directly or not, the retort has indeed gained plenty of steam among conservative and MAGA luminaries. The argument, however, has not impressed everyone.

“It’s a political argument, not a legal one,” Ken White, a First Amendment attorney and former federal prosecutor, said on Tuesday. “There’s no legal doctrine to quote. There’s no ‘You Did Something Like It, And Therefore It’s Fine’ doctrine that I’m aware of.”

White continued that it was something a lawyer might use to attack Waters’ credibility as a witness or a plaintiff. “But the fact that one of the plaintiffs did something similar, and leaving aside whether it actually was similar, isn’t a legal defense, or something that would be a barrier to them moving forward with the lawsuit,” he continued. “It’s spin. It’s a truculent, crowd-pleasing argument.”

[LFC]

The Republican Party is completing its transition to a post-truth political party (paywalled).

Kevin McCarthy signaled this morning that Liz Cheney may be on the way out as conference chair. She can’t effectively deliver the message, he says.

The truth is he’s right. And that is damning. It confirms that the GOP message is loyalty to Donald Trump, embrace of the Big Lie of a stolen election and – subsidiary to these two points – pretending the insurrection never happened.

To my surprise and perhaps even chagrin I have gained a lot of respect for Liz Cheney over recent months. She voted for impeachment and she has not moved on. Indeed, in recent days as her political position has become more tenuous, she’s leaned into these critical points. I’ve seen people saying this cues her up for a presidential run in 2024. To which I would counter, good luck with that. No Republican politician this firmly committed to opposing Trump, the Big Lie and the Insurrection has much of any hope in the GOP.

But don’t forget that Cheney’s politics are odious. She is part of the unabashed libertarian, corporate, laissez-faire right. One would think this would this would provide plenty of common ground with fellow GOP caucus-members. But it does not. Because Trump and the Big Lie is the foundational message.

This is turn must be far more central to Democrats’ messaging. Republicans are the party of the Big Lie and the Insurrection. That’s not hyperbole. They’re telling us that themselves with this drama about Cheney. This is what they do in power. It’s what they do when the ordinary process of democracy leads to their losing power. Democrats should be referencing this, reminding everyone at every opportunity. All the time. Plots to overthrow the Republic cannot be forgotten so soon.

[LFC]

Feeding people complete and total bullshit and having them declare it's the most delicious chocolate desert they've ever eaten continues to work flawlessly with the MAGAts. They truly believe the Arizona recount is going to finally be the big reveal on massive Democratic voter fraud.

When the leaders of a review of Arizona’s election were trying to convince a judge not to halt their sketchy audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 results, they claimed they’d be perfectly happy to find that nothing was amiss in the tally.

“Our client is not going into this with the perception that they are going to find anything wrong,” Alex Kolodin, a lawyer for the auditors, said at a court hearing last week. “That nothing went wrong is an acceptable answer to our client, so we just wish to make that absolutely clear to the court.”

But in the far-right corners of the media ecosphere — and at the Palm Beach resort that the former president calls home — that’s not the perception.

Far-right blogs like Gateway Pundit have seen criticisms of the review as a sign that Democrats are “terrified” of the “alleged massive fraud” the audit may expose.

One America News Network (OAN) has framed up its coverage of the Arizona review as just the first in what could be a series of audits in other states where former President Trump contested his defeat.

Trump himself, speaking to a crowd at Mar-A-Lago last week, remarked on the “interesting things” that were happening in Arizona.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump said, as he rattled off several other battleground states that he had targeted with his claims of mass voter fraud.

Trump may be watching the audit from afar. But several of his supporters who boosted his crusade to overturn the election have a direct hand in the audit, which started last month at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. And as the recount chugs along, the wider MAGA world is pinning its hopes on the effort as a key step to finally — finally — overturning the election.

An OAN reporter even asked the election scholar Rick Hasen, according to a screenshot of the email he tweeted Monday, what would happen to a president if his election was proven to be “fraudulent beyond any doubt.” Hasen declined to give the reporter a comment.

Oooooooo! Cue dramatic music!