The conservative media problem

Most Republican pols refused to call on Trump to admit defeat even after it became obvious to everyone in the real world that Joe Biden had won the election. These pols are undoubtedly relieved that Government Services Administration head Emily W. Murphy finally certified Biden the winner on Monday, 23 November 2020, removing the need for them to duck into a closet every time a reporter approached.

Still, those Republicans aren't out of the woods: one angry tweet from the domestic Dear Leader and millions of Republican voters will turn on the targeted politician.

So goes the conventional wisdom, anyway. However, is it true?

Trump does have a disturbingly firm hold on nearly half the voting population. This Reuters piece, "Why Republican voters say there's 'no way in hell' Trump lost", includes statements from fifty Trump voters, all of whom "said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate".

Considering the numerous statements from both state and federal elections officials asserting that no significant election fraud took place anywhere in the country, Trump supporters' belief that fraud took place is remarkable. It's also quite bad from a state-of-the-country point of view. Nearly half the electorate believing a lie about a foundational element of our republic, elections, is a recipe for disaster. Worse, Trump's supporters seem willing to believe any accusation he levels, no matter how outlandish. By all appearances, they've surrendered their skepticism and given their judgment over to him.

Yet Trump didn't gain his stranglehold on his supporters through hypnosis. He got it from good old repetition and amplification: he said (often untrue) things, repeated them often, and got others to repeat them as well. It's the way propaganda has worked since the dawn of time.

And while social media, notably Twitter, played its part, Charlie Wurzel at the New York Times noted recent research "that suggested 'social media played only a secondary and supportive role' in the recent high-profile voting disinformation campaign".

Mr. Trump’s “position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media,” the Harvard researchers argued.

The "media elites" would be people like the opinion hosts at Fox News, along with numerous radio talk show hosts. And that brings me to my point.

The researchers are right.

We will continue to be in serious trouble as long as high-profile media figures — mostly on the far right of the political spectrum — give credibility and oxygen to hare-brained conspiracy theories and outright lies.

No question that courage is unknown among most Republican elected officials these days, but they're not entirely to blame. The party has been captured by the rabidly, blindly zealous mob drunk on the fever dreams peddled by irresponsible rabble-rousers, including Trump, who see in electoral loss a massive conspiracy to deny Trump his second term. The mob also has been conditioned to accept Trump as savior, a dangerous position to which to elevate anyone.

This conditioning has happened in plain sight on right-wing media outlets. For years people like Sean Hannity have instilled in their listeners and viewers the idea that their ideological opponents are not their neighbors (and friends and family members, for that matter), but their sworn enemies in a literally deadly battle for control of the nation's soul and destiny. The so-called mainstream media is corrupt and evil, as are elected Democrats. Trust could be given only to the voices on Fox News and other right-wing media.

Seeing in Trump a figure that galvanized the right in a way that hadn't been seen since Reagan, right-wing media glommed onto him, riding his rocket into space. In return for giving him a largely uncritical megaphone through which to send (and re-send, and re-send) his desired messages, he gave them huge audiences. Individual pundits learned that uncritically repeating his talking points was the way to hold those audiences. Dissenting from him guaranteed controversy and audience disaffection.

Giving the people what they want is certainly a recipe for success in business. It's not responsible news coverage, though. It sure as hell isn't responsible political discourse, not when you pander to people's darkest, most paranoid, most angry, most hateful impulses.

Pundits aren't "reporters" as such but they're supposed to color within the lines of the facts. The trouble with right-wing media is that it has long disdained inconvenient facts. If you say that mainstream media disdains different inconvenient facts, you might be right. What mainstream media doesn't do, though, is promote garbage conspiracy theories day after day after day. Mainstream media also doesn't declare its allegiance to a messianic figure and give him its imprimatur of credibility.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what right-wing media outlets have been doing during the entirety of Trump's time in office, and even before then. "Birtherism" wasn't a thing before Fox News and company got a hold of it and repeated it ad nauseam. "Pizzagate" and "QAnon" were plucked from deserved obscurity by right-wing media, then repeated uncritically (and, needless to say, without a shred of evidence) until the audience could sing along.

We're still living through, and dying from, the public-health catastrophe that is "Masks don't work" (and its relatives, like "the virus is a hoax" and "masks are dangerous"), another patently false and actively harmful garbage conspiracy theory that panders to the most delusional wishful thinking.

Now the choir's belting out "Trump was robbed" and the audience has, again, learned the tune by heart.

It would certainly help if more Republican lawmakers and officials would condemn bullshit when they hear it. But it's just as important to condemn the right-wing media that is peddling the bullshit to an eager and largely uncritical audience. By ginning up a fake reality that caters to the audience's dearest wishes, those media outlets encourage that audience to behave irresponsibly and to demand flatly unrealistic and often dangerous policies.

Mendacious right-wing media outlets poison our body politic just as surely as a heroin dealer poisons an addict.

The body politic can't even begin to recover until right-wing media stops injecting the poison of lies, bullshit, paranoia, and hatred. The rich men and women funding and/or controlling those media outlets know this.

It's time to put their feet to the fire — to make them confront the sickness they've induced in their audiences.

Barrett joins SCOTUS

Amy Coney Barrett, the anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, religiously radical right-winger who hid her radical religious associations and viewpoints from public scrutiny, wasn't so much "confirmed" as bum-rushed onto the U.S. Supreme Court. In the end her nomination garnered 52 senatorial votes, all Republican. (One Republican honorably voted against her.)

Don Trumpone is counting on Barrett to cement the radical right's hold on SCOTUS, and not incidentally, to support him and his administration in any cases that come before her.

What might such cases be? Hmm. How about any number of Republican challenges to local elections, whose aim will be to suppress likely Democratic voters' ballots?

How about any number of civil or criminal cases alleging Don Trumpone has committed wrongdoing?

How about any number of lawsuits against the Don's administration's policies, like its horrendous treatment of asylum-seekers; or its deployment of pseudomilitary federal forces to municipalities without local or state requests; or its recent change of civil-service rules to permit civil service professionals to be dismissed without cause? (The latter hasn't resulted in lawsuits — yet.)

Now, it must be said that Supreme Court Justices in the past have sometimes disappointed the president that nominated him or her by ruling in ways that don't accord with that president's views. But those past Justices weren't dyed-in-the-wool religionists like Barrett, whose strict and unforgiving Catholicism is extreme even by the standards of the Roman Catholic Church. I'm not counting on Barrett to experience the kind of personal growth exhibited by past Justices like John Paul Stevens. If you've looked at her judicial record, you know her hostility to Supreme Court precedent that cuts against her personal religious views, notably Roe v. Wade. This leopard won't change her spots.

The spectacle of the supersonic rush to get her on the Court, too, sticks in the craw of the majority of those who witnessed the disgusting and flatly unjust spectacle of the Mitch McConnell-supervised stonewalling of Merrick Garland. I trust Barrett will send flowers to McConnell and Trump — not just sometime in the next few days, but every year for her entire tenure on the Court, because she owes them big-time.

Justice Barrett, you join Justice Kavanaugh in my books as a flatly illegitimate member of the Court.

It would be delightful if one day I had occasion to apologize to you because you proved yourself an independent, thoughtful voice for real justice.

But I doubt any apology will be merited.

Chad Wolf protesteth too much

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf took offense at characterizations of the abusive federal officers in Portland, Oregon as "stormtroopers" and "Gestapo".

Wolf also defended the re-assignment of immigration officers and pushed back on accusations the officers were acting without proper oversight.

“These officers are not stormtroopers,” Wolf said. “They’re not the Gestapo, as some have described them. That description is offensive and hyperbolic, and it’s dishonest."

Most police officers in the United States work in uniform, not camouflage; the uniforms identify their departments. They operate in marked vehicles. Officers in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles display their badges and identifications when they have to take official action. They don't accost civilians without identifying themselves as police officers, and if they restrict a civilian's movements it's because they've placed that person under arrest.

The anonymous armed men lacking name tags or large, visible insignia on their camouflage-style uniforms, who assaulted peaceful protesters and heightened tensions with the local populace, who took peaceful protesters into their dubious custody and whisked them away in unmarked vehicles for interrogation without placing them under arrest — they don't operate like any reputable police force in this country. To the contrary, they sure as hell are reminiscent of the brutal thugs who worked for Hitler as far as I'm concerned.

How is the ordinary person supposed to know these unidentified men with no obvious affiliation with any recognized law enforcement agency aren't some extralegal, self-proclaimed "militia" that has decided to take "law and order" into their own hands? White supremacist groups have done that before. Come to think of it, that's how Hitler's Brownshirts started.

(Incidentally, federal police dressed in camouflage so outraged retired Army Lt. General Russel Honoré that he exploded on live TV: "What kind of bullshit is this?!" He demanded the Trump administration stop letting these federal police wear camouflage, forcefully noting that camouflage clothing has a specific purpose that is completely unrelated to the supposed mission in Portland. His obvious subtext was that police personnel have no business playing at being soldiers, and he's right.)

It would surprise me if Wolf knew what "Gestapo" actually meant. It's a German abbreviation for what translates in English to "Secret State Police". That, too, sounds like the amped-up, militarized thugs we've all seen in action in Portland.

So Chad, if you're offended by others calling your pets "stormtroopers" and "Gestapo", good. The rest of us are more than offended by your deployment of goons in camouflage where the local authorities are united in not wanting them, and where every indication is that those goons are worsening tensions.

Of course, fomenting a crisis — creating a shiny, made-for-Fox-News flashpoint of civilian-Gestapo strife — is probably exactly the order you got from your boss, the domestic Dear Leader. He badly needs a distraction from the more than 140,000 dead from CoViD-19 on his incompetent watch.

So I strongly doubt your outrage is genuine.

But ours is. And we will not forget your despicable aiding and abetting of this lawless "president", your ready acquiescence to his worst autocratic instincts. I, for one, am wondering if your actions warrant criminal investigation for abuse of power.

A little word of advice, then, Chad: better keep reminding the boss you've risked criminal charges for him and are counting on being included in his long list of pardons whenever he heads out the door.

Just understand that, pardon or no, you will go down in the history books as an authoritarian enabler, as egregious a lawbreaker and kingly sycophant as Bill Barr. No pardon will rehabilitate your terrible reputation.

Ignore Trump

The domestic Dear Leader is resuming coronavirus press conferences. Apparently he thinks it will help his popularity, which has taken a beating recently.

Much as I personally wish otherwise, we can't shut him up. Nor can we keep news outlets (or outlets that propagandize under the guise of delivering news) from covering him.

What we can do, though, is to ignore his gibbering.

It's not just that what he says is frequently unintelligible, or that the little that is intelligible is generally wrong, often catastrophically so. (Using bleach internally, anyone?)

Worse is that gratifying his desperate need for attention simply distracts us from doing the things that can be done in the absence of any coherent federal assistance or coordination. We need to preserve our energies and time to help one another, not to rage, however justifiably, against his latest inflammatory and/or boneheaded remarks.

Between his car crash of an interview with Chris Wallace (for which CNN's Chris Cillizza provides a helpful list of the lowlights) and his autocratic declaration that he will send more unidentified federal law-enforcement personnel to various cities (all of them under Democratic leadership, curiously enough) to quell what he deems unrest, Trump has shown himself to be, if not totally unhinged, less hinged than ever.

What we see, in fact, is a man of limited intellect and even more limited emotional control, flailing and failing to come to terms with multiple crises. These crises — the pandemic, systemic racism, a collapsed economy, and (for him the most important) his endangered reelection — were not entirely of his own making, save, perhaps, for the last. However, he has unquestionably worsened every one of them, by a lot. No sane, emotionally balanced, humane person would make the unforced errors Trump apparently can't stop himself from making.

His resumed coronavirus press conferences promise more of the same misinformation, distraction, and pathetic, empty boasting as before. After all, he is incapable of doing the work that a true leader would be doing at a time like this, so he has no truthful good news to deliver.

But the fact that you will learn nothing useful from him, and indeed, may come away less intelligent than you were before watching him, isn't why you should ignore him. It's not the only reason, anyway.

We all should ignore him simply because it's unkind to gratify the childish attention-seeking of a mentally diminished old man who insists on making a piteous spectacle of himself in public — even if he is the president.

Trump keeps failing the response

When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, he repeatedly claimed that the rest of the world was laughing at the U.S. That was, of course, not true except in his own messed-up head.

At least, it wasn't true in 2016. In 2020, well, that's a different matter.

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-Un have had many reasons to laugh, not just at this country but at the domestic Dear Leader in particular. It's easy to see why: they all have benefited tremendously from the dDL's gullibility, stupidity, and childish fragility.

Much of the rest of the world, especially our allies, isn't laughing. They're watching us with alarm ... and deep pity. And we deserve that pity, those of us who have watched our own country with such horror. Perhaps no modern democratic society has so thoroughly been reshaped in the broken mold of its executive as ours.

Four months ago it was obvious that Trump had failed to marshal the government to fight the novel coronavirus.

Four months ago it was obvious. In early March it was obvious.

Everybody knows what Trump has done since then.

Nothing.

Guess what we're facing now? Shortages of vital personal protective equipment. Again.

Again!

And why? Because our emotionally and intellectually crippled president can't bring himself to face the ugly reality that on his watch, 140,000 people have died. (And counting.)

So he refuses to engage with that reality, preferring instead to gibber about fucking dishwashers and light bulbs.

At least Nero made music on that fiddle while Rome burned. Trump simply makes noise as we die.

Any other sentient human being would have invoked the Defense Production Act starting in February to gear up production of personal protective equipment and testing supplies. (The CNN piece doesn't discuss testing but oh Lord, testing supplies are also inexcusably lacking.) Even if that person had botched the initial response the way the domestic Dear Leader did, that person would have learned from that mistake and ramped things up in March, when much of the country was starting to shut down and shelter at home.

Trump? He couldn't be bothered.

And he still can't.

This administration's response to the pandemic has been criminally negligent. I mean that literally. When we get a new president — and that had better happen this November or we are all fucked big-time — among the many things that new president will have to do will be to pursue criminal charges against Donnie and his Cabinet for gross malfeasance. (If incompetence were also criminal, these amoral vermin would merit life sentences in prison.)

No one knows how many would be sick and how many would have died under a different president. We can, however, safely assume that the numbers of sick and dead wouldn't be anywhere near as grotesquely high as the 3.6 million (and counting) confirmed infected and nearly 140,000 (and counting) dead.

Hurricane Katrina used to be the benchmark for presidential catastrophes. Now, CoViD-19 will stand as the dreadful standard by which all future presidential failures will be judged.

And George W. Bush can rest easy, knowing that he has escaped the judgment of history as the worst president the United States ever had. Bush 43 looks like a paragon of intelligence and competence next to the ongoing colossal failure that is Trump.

Think about this, Sen. Hawley

If there were statues of Nazi generals and political leaders in Germany, we would wonder, quite understandably, what kind of message those statues were intended to send. If the answer were that they represented a hugely significant, highly consequential era in German history and that Germans needed not to forget that history, we could agree with both points in principle — but we would still wonder, out loud, if statues were the best way of remembering.

After all, we don't use statuary to remember history: for that, we have history books. Statues honor specific persons or events.

Buildings and monuments, too, honor specific people or events. The exceptions are museums focused on horrific events and actions, like the Holocaust. Such museums are designed not to honor their subjects but to explain their horror to later generations, in hopes of not repeating such tragedies.

With all this in mind, here's what Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) had to say about a proposal to rename military installations currently named for Confederate soldiers, like Fort Bragg and Fort Hood.

"I just don't think that Congress mandating that these be renamed and attempting to erase that part of our history is a way you deal with that history," Hawley said. "I don't think turning your back on it's how you deal with it, confront it, and then move on."

Hawley added: "I've heard from a lot of soldiers who've come through those bases and they've said that those bases mean something to me I have my own history with those, please don't rename those."

Renaming those military bases will not erase history. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about the Civil War, and more will be written, I have no doubt. Schoolchildren will continue to read the names of Confederate civilian and military leaders in their textbooks. What renaming these bases will do is simply to stop honoring men who fought for what most of us now understand was not just a lost cause but an evil cause: slavery.

As for the idea that renaming the bases will somehow diminish the meaning they hold for those who lived and trained there, I would ask those who feel that way to ask themselves, "How will changing the name diminish the lessons I learned, the camaraderie I felt, the honor I take from my service?"

I acknowledge that hearing the name of a beloved institution can trigger a flood of cherished memories. Having that name stricken from common usage — knowing that the next time troops deploy from that fort, the news reports will refer to it by a different name than the one engraved in your heart — might leave you feeling a little lost, or worse.

However, with their current names those forts honor men who fought to keep African Americans enslaved. Every day those installations continue bearing those names, the nation says that it is still content to denigrate African Americans, because the nation is not willing to stop honoring those who dishonored, brutally abused, and killed their ancestors.

African Americans have endured generation after generation of literal second-class citizenship, of physical and psychological violence, at the hands of both their non-black neighbors and all levels of government. Can you who wish to retain the physical reminders of the Confederacy say the same?

No, you can't, even if you're poor. Why? Because the default color of this society is white. Our default expectations, our default assumptions, our default behaviors — they all derive from European American norms. As so many African Americans have had occasion to point out recently, if you think you've had a hard life as a white person in this country, try being black. That's what "systemic racism" is all about: it consists of all the assumptions we have and make that unconsciously bias every aspect of society in favor of whites and against blacks and other minorities. It doesn't mean all whites benefit equally or that all blacks are equally harmed. It means the odds are stacked against blacks and other minorities.

Having made that grandiose claim, you might be tempted to retort, "Well then how much good will it do to rename some military bases?" The answer is, not nearly as much as other actions that will have a more tangible benefit.

However, the small action of renaming military installations to honor those other than prominent Confederate figures is eminently achievable now with minimal cost. It would send the signal that the nation at least is trying to reckon with its past mistakes.

Sen. Hawley, the next time you hear from soldiers who oppose renaming such installations (or if you oppose renaming because you yourself spent time in one: the article's punctuation makes that unclear), I suggest you tell them that their prospective discomfort is minor compared to the denigration — indeed, the humiliation — African Americans feel every day this country continues to honor defenders of slavery. Tell those soldiers that their nostalgia comes at the price of others' pain. Ask them if the nation they served ought to allow that pain to continue.

For that matter, Senator, ask yourself that question.

Buffalo police not trustworthy

You might have heard that a 75-year-old-man was seriously injured Thursday night by Buffalo (NY) police. The man had been attempting to speak to officers when one pushed him in the chest hard enough to send him stumbling backwards and then to the ground. As he fell he hit his head on the pavement and blood came rushing out.

After a video of the incident went viral two officers were suspended without pay while the matter is being investigated. The suspension apparently angered the other members of the special emergency response team to which the suspended officers belonged.

"Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders," Buffalo Police Benevolent Association president John Evans told WGRZ on Friday. WKBW also reported news of the resignations.

Buffalo mayor Byron Brown defended the suspended officers by asserting that the victim shouldn't have been there.

Speaking of the injured man, the mayor said, "He was asked to leave numerous times last night."

Police felt that it was important to clear the area before fights broke out among the protesters, the mayor said. He stressed that the instructions from the police managers to officers was to be careful, protect residents and use common sense.

Hey, Mr. Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, I have some questions for you:

Is it part of Buffalo PD training and policy to shove a nonviolent, unarmed civilian to the ground hard enough to crack his skull open?

Were the officers unable to arrest a nonviolent, unarmed civilian, or simply unwilling to break their nice straight advancing line?

Are you claiming that inflicting a life-threatening injury on a nonviolent, unarmed civilian constitutes "simply executing orders"?

Mr. Evans, the suspended officers' actions don't make your benevolent association look benevolent. Neither do your "just following orders" remarks.

Either your members really did receive orders to hurt nonviolent, unarmed civilians — which I leave to you to prove if you can — or you are full of shit.

And Mayor Brown, "he was asked to leave multiple times" is a reason to have arrested the victim, not to have cracked his skull open. You'd better not be trying to claim otherwise.

To Mr. Evans and Mayor Brown and the officers involved, including the 57 who resigned from the emergency response team, you are proving protesters' point: police violence is out of control.

As not just police officers (or elected officials) but as members of the community, you have got to realize that.

You have got to stop seeing civilians as "other", as mere entities to be corralled and controlled by police.

You have got to see that the behavior of the two suspended officers was deeply disturbing and problematic.

Police around the country have been injured during these protests. However, that's not an excuse for police to hurt nonviolent, unarmed civilians preemptively.

Police are the ones with legally sanctioned weapons and powers of arrest. They have to be trained that with those powers come responsibilities. Chief among them is, or damned well ought to be, not harming nonviolent, unarmed civilians.

Police officers will make mistakes in the heat of the moment. Maybe, contrary to all the evidence I've seen, that will turn out to be the case here with the 75-year-old victim.

But Mr. Evans, and Mayor Brown, and you 57 Buffalo PD officers who resigned from the emergency response team, your words and actions can't be excused as mistakes made in the heat of the moment. You've all had time to digest what happened.

Your willingness to excuse the inexcusable suggests the Buffalo Police Department has a seriously twisted and sick culture, one that can't be tolerated by the civilians you are supposed to serve.