"Trump apologists may call his rhetorical technique justifiable hyperbole, but, to most observers, his words are just vicious lies designed to serve his own interests above that of the nation’s citizens."
Indictments for previous guy and his enablers are going to happen, even as Steve Bannon says we need to stay focused on signal rather than noise. We only know a signal’s message/meaning because of the noise differentials. There have been two impeachments and a seditious insurrection, as well as a significant tax fraud case.
- Sparse, embargoed information from DoJ may need to be just that, because the numerous prosecutions are being aligned in prosecutions much more complex than those in Watergate.
- Sparse, parsimonious information can defeat that firehose of disinformation and misinformation only by Doj’s work in the background. It has to be the most efficient way to operate in a landscape of numerous conspiracy theories promoted by a few media outlets committed to amplifying them.
There is an arc of history and it will bend toward justice. The moral universe is built from information, and democratic information ensures the quality of knowledge.
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on Monday said New York state and federal prosecutors have more than enough evidence to bring indictments against his former boss — and are working hard to do so.
Mr Cohen, who on Monday finished a three-year sentence he had been serving in federal prison and on home confinement for a variety of federal crimes which he said he had committed at former president Donald Trump’s behest, appeared on CNN shortly after completing the paperwork necessary for his release from federal custody.
The disbarred attorney, who was one of Mr Trump’s closest confidantes before he chose to cooperate with law enforcement and give evidence against his former boss, said he will not be the only person who serves a prison sentence for the crimes he committed while in Mr Trump’s service.
“I make this promise: I may have been prosecuted — and right now I am the only one — but I will not be the only one at the end,” he said during an appearance on CNN Newsroom.
Mr Cohen, who has continued to meet with and provide documents to prosecutors during his term of incarceration, suggested that others who could face federal indictment for the hush-money scheme he was imprisoned for include Mr Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr, his daughter Ivanka, and Alan Weisselberg, the Trump organization accountant who is currently facing charges for evading taxes on compensation paid to him by Mr Trump’s eponymous company.
www.independent.co.uk/...
More disinformation nonsense in another desperate interview by a noisy previous guy on the “’alternate state’ news channel”:
Thus, late night’s in-person appearance on Fox News was a rare chance to watch the disgraced former president peddle his B.S. up close and personal as he plugged his new coffee table photo book designed to wring additional dollars from his MAGA devotees with the promise of a pictorial walk down memory lane featuring images representing what Trump sees as the highlights of his destructive tenure.
Thanks to the curatorial prowess of self-described “internet hooligan” Acyn’s Twitter feed, we can present excerpts from Trump’s latest attempt at promoting his fictional alternative vision of the world and demonstrate just how far the former president detaches from reality in pushing his self-interested propaganda points.
The tenor of the interview was set in its opening moments when Trump kicked off the action with a bold and easily disprovable whopper of a lie concerning the price of gas in California, which any resident of the state could drive past their nearest petrol station to learn exactly how massively Trump has inflated his price claims.
occupydemocrats.com/...
- Trump: It was a beautiful period. I was under assault like no President has ever been I assume… We could’ve done some great things with Russia. Very good for our country… Also good for Russia..
- Trump: We did very well with Kim Jong-un and we liked each other. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? I’ll get criticized… He got along with me great after a really rough start. If you remember little rocket man and the buttons…
- Trump says the “1917 Spanish Flu” probably ended WW1. He had previously said the “1917 Spanish Flu” ended WW2
- Trump: Our country is not living up to the constitution… They’re trying to subvert it… This is communism. There’s no freedom of the press. The press is totally corrupt. That’s how communism starts
- Trump says they did a “phenomenal job” on COVID except with “public relations” because “no matter what we did, the press would not cover it fairly, so we did a fantastic job”
- Trump: Jimmy Carter is a very happy man because he’s no longer going down as the worst president in history
- Trump: I have a picture of Nancy Pelosi. I have a picture of Merkel.. who I got along with very well. That was a pointer also. We have a lot of pointers you know? There’s a lot of people pointing
- Trump: They knew they got gasoline for X dollars a tank and now they can multiply it times four
• • •
"The Democrats are feasting on January 6th, with no Republicans on the Unselect Committee (Cheney and Kinzinger are not Republicans!) but they are refusing to even discuss the root cause of that protest, which was the insurrection that took place during the November 3rd Presidential Election," Trump said in a statement emailed to reporters.
Trump has claimed that the insurrection did not happen on January 6th, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election results. Instead, Trump has lied that the insurrection actually occurred on election day, when he lost the vote to Joe Biden. The situation was so bizarre the Associated Press issued a fact-check that election day was not the real insurrection.
www.rawstory.com/...
Why the US has been such a hotbed of conspiratorial thinking throughout its history has been much debated. Scholars have noted US citizens’ sense of their nation as ‘exceptional’ and thus a target for sinister forces. Anti-intellectualism has come in for its share of the blame as well. But the main contender for generating conspiracy theories in the US is a strain of populism evident from the nation’s earliest days. It was, for instance, easy to see in the anti-freemasonry movement that swept through the US in the 1830s. In the 19th century, the ideological direction of this populism was hard to pin down – in some ways it appeared progressive, but in other ways, reactive. During the 20th century, however, the connections linking right-wing opposition to social progress, virulent bigotry, and conspiratorial thinking became stronger and stronger.
[...]
The question that many people have grappled with is how to counter conspiratorial thinking or even reverse its growing acceptance. Individuals can do two things.
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First, do not accept conspiratorial thinking even when it complements your own ideas. This worked remarkably well when left-wing critics of the Bush administration such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn refused to be drawn into a conspiratorial framework by 9/11 conspiracists.
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Second, counter conspiratorial thinking online immediately. Do not give it time to sink in, unopposed, into the public’s consciousness. The speed with which stupid ideas are debunked makes a great deal of difference.
The media can also help. Referring to anything suspicious or to any unusual belief as a ‘conspiracy theory’ does considerable harm by normalising conspiracy thinking. The person who thinks that perhaps Bigfoot may be real will, on hearing that belief called a conspiracy theory, thinks, ‘Well, I guess I must be a conspiracy theorist. Okay.’ We may never eliminate conspiratorial thinking, but we can try to move it out of the acceptable mainstream.
www.redpepper.org.uk/...
“Information disorder” is a malady that comes in many forms, from made-up news to manipulated media to misunderstood satire. According to a six-month investigation by a commission at the Aspen Institute, the United States is not trying nearly hard enough to find a cure.
The report starts, as any study aimed at restoring trust and truth ought to, by acknowledging reality: “In a free society, a certain amount of misinformation will always exist.” The hope isn’t to punish every exaggeration, piece of propaganda or flat-out lie but to home in on the most egregious damage caused by specific types of mis- and disinformation — by discouraging people from spreading falsehoods and minimizing the fallout when they do. This is easiest in “empirically grounded” areas, in which facts can most clearly be found: public health and election integrity foremost among them.
How do we do it? Some steps are obvious, such as mandating more transparency from technology companies. Platforms should be required, for instance, to publish data about the content, source, targeting and reach of posts seen by large audiences, as well as produce standardized archives of the material they remove or otherwise moderate. That’s the only way researchers, lawmakers and the rest of us can understand what policies cause what problems, as well as what interventions work to solve them. The report also calls on companies to take concerted action against superspreaders of mis- and disinformation. And it urges carveouts to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally provides legal immunity to platforms for content they host from third parties, such as advertisements and algorithmically amplified content — though these suggestions should be viewed with caution.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
International IDEA’s “The Global State of Democracy: Building Resilience in a Pandemic Era” report aims to influence the global debate and analyses current trends and challenges to democracy, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. It offers specific policy recommendations to spark new and innovative thinking for policymakers, governments and civil society organizations supporting democracy.
The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a "new normal" of Covid-19 restrictions. For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy.
www.idea.int/...
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