Month: September 2017

Facebook trolls and the hungry MSM


by digby

Margaret Sullivan lights into Zuckerberg and Facebook today:

What a ridiculous notion, Mark Zuckerberg scoffed shortly after the election, that his social-media company — innocent, well-intentioned Facebook — could have helped Donald Trump’s win.

“Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook . . . influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea,” he said. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

In fact, voters make their decisions based on many factors, not just their “lived experience.”

Disinformation spread on Facebook clearly was one — a big one. That was obvious in November. It was obvious in April when Facebook, to its credit, announced some moves to combat the spread of lies in the form of news stories.

It’s even more obvious now after Wednesday’s news that Facebook sold ads during the campaign to a Russian “troll farm,” targeting American voters with “divisive social and political messages” that fit right in with Donald Trump’s campaign strategy.

The news, reported Wednesday by The Washington Post, fits right in with the findings of a fascinating recent study by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Analyzing reams of data, it documented the huge role that propaganda, in various forms, played in the 2016 campaign.

“Attempts by the [Hillary] Clinton campaign to define her campaign on competence, experience, and policy positions were drowned out by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails,” the study said.

The Trump campaign masterfully manipulated these messages. Truth was not a requirement.

And Facebook was the indispensable messenger. As the Harvard study noted: “Disproportionate popularity on Facebook is a strong indicator of highly partisan and unreliable media.”

We don’t know everything about Facebook’s role in the campaign. What we do know — or certainly ought to know by now — is to not take Facebook at its word. It always plays down its influence, trying for a benign image of connecting us all in a warm bath of baby pictures, tropical vacations and games of Candy Crush.

The company recently changed its mission statement, as John Lanchester noted in a blistering takedown in the London Review of Books, mocking the “canting pieties” of such corporate efforts. What used to be just a soft ideal of “making the world more open and connected” is now giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

The new mission statement didn’t specifically mention bringing Russia and the United States closer together. But Facebook managed to accomplish that anyway.

Here’s an undeniable fact: Facebook is about advertising. And it is so wildly successful at leveraging our eyeballs and spending power into ad dollars that it is now valued at nearly $500 billion.

But for all its power and wealth, Facebook is a terribly opaque enterprise. (It recently hired former New York Times public editor Liz Spayd, a former Post managing editor, to help with “transparency.” Let’s just say that she has her work cut out for her.)

Facebook also has never acknowledged the glaringly obvious — that it is essentially a media company, where many of its 2 billion active monthly users get the majority of their news and information. As I’ve been pointing out here for more than a year, it constantly makes editorial decisions, but never owns them.

When its information is false, when it is purchased and manipulated to affect the outcome of an election, the effect is enormous. When the information purveyors are associated with a foreign adversary — with a clear interest in the outcome of the American election — we’re into a whole new realm of power.

Would Donald Trump be president today if Facebook didn’t exist? Although there is a long list of reasons for his win, there’s increasing reason to believe the answer is no.

I don’t know how to deal with Facebook’s singular power in the world. But having everyone clearly acknowledge it — including the company itself — would be a start.

And, as Sullivan, notes, the mainstream media has a lot to answer for as well. This is the intro to the Harvard study:

The fact that media coverage has become more polarized in general is not new, but the extent to which right-wing sites have become partisan is striking, the report says.

The study found that on the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations. Robert Faris, the Berkman Klein Center’s research director, noted, “Consistent with concerns over echo chambers and filter bubbles, social media users on the left and the right rarely share material from outside their respective spheres, except where they find coverage that is favorable to their choice of candidate. A key difference between the right and left is that Trump supporters found substantial coverage favorable to their side in left and center-left media, particularly coverage critical of Clinton. In contrast, the messaging from right-wing media was consistently pro-Trump.” Conservative opposition to Trump was strongest in the center-right, the portion of the political spectrum that wielded the least influence in media coverage of the election.

In this recently-emerged universe, Breitbart stands at the center of a right-wing media ecosystem and is surrounded by sites like Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed, according to the report’s analysis.

The report finds that political clickbait sites—hyperpartisan sites that frequently engage in dubious reporting—exist on both sides of the political spectrum, but these sites played a larger role on the right than the left. On the more insular and partisan right, the “fake news,” or political clickbait sites were a more integral part of the media sphere. On the left, readers gravitated towards center-left large media organizations which moderated the impact of political clickbait on the left.

This overall trend and the quantitative differences in coverage were far more consequential than the circulation of outright false stories, the analysis found. “Although fake news–fabricated and verifiably false reporting–was a phenomenon during the election, it had a minor effect on the media ecosystem of the presidential election according to our findings. A much larger concern was the misleading reporting that was propagated through partisan networks,” co-author and Media Cloud technical lead Hal Roberts stated.

The report found that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Trump’s agenda. Immigration received more attention than any other substantive issue. However, it was eclipsed by the attention given to the scandals surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the Clinton Foundation, which were perpetuated through the release of hacked emails. These two topics, immigration and emails, defined the public narrative around the choices for voters in the 2016 election.

The Berkman Klein study is based on an analysis of more than 2 million stories related to the election published online by approximately 70,000 media sources, between May 1, 2015, and Election Day in 2016, as well as an analysis of how often sources were linked to by other online sources and how often they were shared on Facebook or Twitter.

The study analyzed:

• Cross-linking patterns between media sources to offer a view of authority and prominence within the media world.
• Sharing of media sources by users on Twitter and Facebook, which provides a broader perspective on the role and influence of media sources among people engaged in politics through Twitter and Facebook.
• The differential media sharing patterns of Trump and Clinton supporters on Twitter, which enables a detailed analysis of the role of partisanship in the formation and function of media structures.
• Content analysis using automated tools to support the tracking of topics over time among media sources.
• Qualitative media analysis of individual case studies to enhance our understanding of media function and structure.
• The research used Media Cloud, an open-source dataset and suite of analysis tools jointly run by the Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Center for Civic Media. An earlier version of the research appeared as a report in March in Columbia Journalism Review.

Here’s one specific example of the mainstream media being willing tools of the right wing — or, at least, equally hostile to Clinton, even in the face of that pig Trump, than they have ever been prepared to admit:

The more insulated right-wing media ecosystem was susceptible to sustained network propaganda and disinformation, particularly misleading negative claims about Hillary Clinton. Traditional media accountability mechanisms—for example, fact-checking sites, media watchdog groups, and cross-media criticism—appear to have wielded little influence on the insular conservative media sphere. Claims aimed for “internal” consumption within the right-wing media ecosystem were more extreme, less internally coherent, and appealed more to the “paranoid style” of American politics than claims intended to affect mainstream media reporting.
The institutional commitment to impartiality of media sources at the core of attention on the left meant that hyperpartisan, unreliable sources on the left did not receive the same amplification that equivalent sites on the right did. 

These same standard journalistic practices were successfully manipulated by media and activists on the right to inject anti-Clinton narratives into the mainstream media narrative. A key example is the use of the leaked Democratic National Committee’s emails and her campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, released through Wikileaks, and the sustained series of stories written around email-based accusations of influence peddling. Another example is the book and movie release of Clinton Cash together with the sustained campaign that followed, making the Clinton Foundation the major post-convention story. By developing plausible narratives and documentation susceptible to negative coverage, parallel to the more paranoid narrative lines intended for internal consumption within the right-wing media ecosystem, and by “working the refs,” demanding mainstream coverage of anti-Clinton stories, right-wing media played a key role in setting the agenda of mainstream, center-left media. We document these dynamics in the Clinton Foundation case study section of this report.

They were happy to be manipulated. Eager for it.

It was a perfect storm of greed and opportunity combined with foreign propaganda, institutional bias and, frankly, sexism that created the conditions for Trump to eke out his bare electoral college win.

The mainstream media “the left” read every day still have still not reckoned with their part in this and I’d guess they never will. They are convinced that they were completely fair, treating boths sides with equal scrutiny. Even though they did this in the 10 days prior to the election and even though one of the stories was based on bullshit and one was simply false.

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Trump’s biggest fan

by digby

Has something to share with her readers:

This isn’t an ideology problem. It’s a maturity problem. And there are millions of people like her. One of them is in the White House.

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Into the eye
by Tom Sullivan

The live cams in the Florida Keys were offline this morning. But even until dark, an occasional pedestrian wandered into Mallory Square in Key West to test the weather by the ship docks. Two men in a pickup truck pulled away late in the day. To go where is anyone’s guess.

By the time this post goes live, Hurricane Irma will have come ashore on the Florida Keys as a Category 4 storm. The storm surge could overtop many of the islands. The New York Times reported just before 7 a.m. EDT:

The storm’s eye was on track to hit the Lower Keys between 7 and 8 a.m., the National Hurricane Center said in its 5 a.m. Eastern advisory.

The storm, which was about 30 miles offshore around 6 a.m., was expected to rake the state’s west coast — a change from earlier predictions — leaving some residents and officials scrambling to find shelter. The new track could expose St. Petersburg — not Miami or even Tampa — to a direct hit.

St. Petersburg, like Tampa, has not taken a head-on blow from a major hurricane in nearly a century, according to The Associated Press.

When Andrew hit Florida as a Category 5 storm in 1992, it traversed the peninsula from east to west. Irma at 400 miles wide is broader than the Florida peninsula. Traveling south to north, Irma will staying a while.

In Naples, Florida, Don Wingard eyed the surf as he waited (Tampa Bay Times):

“Everybody thinks it’s going to hit everywhere,” he said. “Just think how many millions of people have been scared in the last week.”

The owner of three homes, Wingard said he has been through hurricanes before, but Irma is huge and projections say it could linger for a frightening amount of time. “I’ve never been through a hurricane for 24 hours,” he said.

Fear has become a defining characteristic of life in America since September 11, interrupted by the brief glimmers of hope declared by Shepard Fairey’s posters and Barack Obama’s inauguration. But there are more people peddling fear. Marc Fisher and Perry Stein explain for the Washington Post:

Fear is in the water these days, spread with a new and viral efficiency on social media into everyone’s homes and everyone’s pockets at all hours, every day. There are so many fears and faux fears making people jittery that it has taken a special effort to get some Americans to pay proper attention to Irma, a storm whose danger is obvious to the naked eye.

The trick, they write, is to use it to motivate people just enough to get them to act, but not enough to induce panic.

But in the cacophony of the final hours before landfall, not every voice was calming or clear. On the radio, Rush Limbaugh earlier in the week argued that the storm was being hyped for mercenary reasons — megastorms win huge audiences for the news media, pumping up profits: “These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they’re reported,” Limbaugh said, describing TV graphics that “have been created to make it look like the ocean’s having an exorcism, just getting rid of the devil here in the form of this hurricane, this bright red stuff.”

On the Internet, Alex Jones gave his Infowars audience one more conspiracy theory to consider: the notion that “globalists” and scientists eager to prove that climate change is wreaking havoc with the world might somehow be manipulating the weather. After all, he said, wasn’t it strange that Irma and Harvey arrived just as a Hollywood movie, “Geostorm,” about the government altering the weather, is about to premiere?

“Back on planet Earth,” they continue, people prepare and strap in. It’s just sad that it takes a natural disaster to bring out the community in communities.

Sasha Abramsky, author of “Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream,” tells the Post that for many politicians, “it’s easier to bring people together with fear.” Abramsky continues, “[F]ear provides a sense of community. If I have a bunch of fears myself, I have an anxiety disorder. But if my wife and friends and neighbors share those fears, suddenly we have a community of fear.”

Across the Net this morning, that is evident. It’s just nice to know some people don’t lose their heads over a little wind, flooding, and life-threatening conditions (from yesterday):

MSNBC: Hurricane Irma
CNN: Hurricane Irma
New York Times: Hurricane Irma
Washington Post: Hurricane Irma
Fox News: pic.twitter.com/se5oES95yc— (((Jeff Tiedrich))) (@jefftiedrich) September 9, 2017

The question is whether the federal government has the capacity left to respond to Irma on the heels of Harvey. From Politico:

“After years of austerity politics, it’s not clear that the government is adequately staffed or prepared to address the catastrophe on the Gulf Coast and whatever happens in Florida,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at McGladrey, a consultancy. “Priorities need to be set.”

But not to worry. The administration has its top people are working on it. The best people:

“The federal government should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert told reporters. “I’m pretty comfortable in our ability and capacity as leaders and also as institutions.”

That’s comforting.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Forgotten crimes: Memoir of a Murderer **½ & The Sinner ***

By Dennis Hartley

You know what they say: watch out for the quiet ones. Consider Byung-su (Kyung-gu Sul), a taciturn, 50-something veterinarian who enjoys a quiet, retiring life with his adult daughter Eun-hee (Seol-Hyun Kim). He is the central character of South Korean director Shin-yeon Won’s psychological crime thriller, Memoir of a Murderer (in theaters now).

The single, 20-something Eun-hee is concerned about dad, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As inevitably occurs in the early stages, Byung-su is becoming forgetful, to the point where he keeps a mini-voice recorder with him so he can dictate reminders to himself. However, Alzheimer’s may be a blessing. There are certain things about his past he would just as soon forget all about-like the “career” he has “retired” from: serial killer.

Eun-hee is blissfully oblivious to her father’s macabre double life, which abruptly ceased 17 years previous, after Byung-su was involved in a serious car wreck. Whether or not the accident literally knocked him back to his senses is not made clear, but he decided then and there to end the killing spree and focus on raising his daughter as a loving father.

First-person flashbacks reveal that Byung-su’s murderous impulses may have been seeded in his childhood; he was frequently beaten senseless by his violently abusive father. Subsequently, when he becomes a serial murderer as a young adult, he targets those who are (to his determination as judge, jury, and executioner) abusers of all stripes. This is his self-justification; like television’s “Dexter” he feels he’s doing society a favor.

At any rate, that was the “old” Byung-su. Now, he wouldn’t harm a fly. Or would he? After several random murders with eerie similarities make local authorities suspect a new serial killer is on the prowl, Byung-su begins to fear that he himself could be the perpetrator (especially when he factors in his constant fuzziness from the Alzheimer’s). As if all of this weren’t enough to send him over the edge, he’s getting a disconcertingly “familiar” vibe from Eun-hee’s mysterious new boyfriend (Kim Nam-gil), a young cop.

Won’s film (adapted by Hwang Jo-yun and Won Shin-yun from Kim Young-ha’s novel A Murderer’s Guide to Memorization) recalls three other crime thrillers: Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (1979), and Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003); the former for its amnesiac, morally ambiguous protagonist, and the latter two for finding the humanity in otherwise repugnant characters.

That is not to say that this film is necessarily in the same class as the aforementioned. The premise is clever, leading man Sul has a brooding presence, and Choi Young-hwan’s atmospheric cinematography sustains a suitably nightmarish mood…but it gets bogged down by jarring tonal shifts; attempts at injecting humor become distracting, and you get a feeling Won wasn’t quite sure how to end his film. Still, it’s perfectly serviceable for dedicated fans of twisty crime thrillers…among whose company I can usually be found.

Speaking of twisty crime thrillers, if you don’t feel up to schlepping to the multiplex this weekend to overspend on a bucket of popcorn, you might have a summer TV sleeper already in your on-demand queue, begging for a “catch-up” binge-watching session. It’s USA Network’s limited series The Sinner, currently 6 installments into its 8-episode run.

Starring Jessica Biel (who also serves as an executive producer), it’s a deliriously lurid Zalman King-meets-Stephen King psychological mystery thriller (with a dash of Hitchcock tossed in for giggles). Here, Biel is the “quiet one” you need to watch out for.

They certainly know how to grab your attention in the series opener. Hot young mom Cora (Biel), her handsome hubby (Christopher Abbott, who you may recognize from HBO’s Girls) and their toddler son are enjoying a lovely sunny day at a crowded beach, when Cora espies a nearby group of young singles who are cranking the tunes and having a grand old time. When Cora suddenly leaps up without a word, purposely strides into their midst, and proceeds to brutally stab one of the young men to death, no one is more surprised than she. Turns out, this ain’t exactly a typical day at the beach after all, is it?

With hundreds of witnesses to this shocking and grisly crime (committed in broad daylight, no less), it seems like an open-and-shut case. But that would be too easy (and besides, there still 7 more episodes left). Cora isn’t helping her own case by essentially shrugging and saying “dunno” every time someone asks her the obvious question. While the D.A., police, and the public are already chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!”…there is one soul intrigued enough by the fact that Cora has no previous criminal record to dive into her psyche and discover the trigger for this seemingly inexplicable act of violence.

This Steve Bannon interview is really something

by digby

Oh, sorry, wrong link:

I’m not one to criticize people’s looks (well, except Trump who is asking for it with his arrogant insistence that he’s an Adonis.)

But Bannon does not look well, and they obviously have him made up as best they can.

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Also Locusts

by digby

I hadn’t heard much about this horror but I’ve been to this town and it’s devastating:

Under the glare of portable floodlights and the flashlights that some held, men in sweat-soaked jumpsuits dug into a hillock of rubble in this city, the night after the largest earthquake to hit Mexico in a century flattened buildings here and across southern Mexico.

Atop the mound of debris, the men at times moved like archaeologists, sifting with bare, dirt-encrusted hands, chunk by concrete chunk. At other times, they powered up an excavator, which, with its own brutish precision, moved the workers closer to their goal.

There was a man under there — perhaps alive, perhaps dead.

Throughout the day on Friday, victims were pulled from the debris of homes, shops and offices in Juchitán de Zaragoza, a city of 100,000 people in Oaxaca State: at least 36 dead, more than 300 injured.

The earthquake, which was felt as far north as Mexico City, more than 300 miles away, had killed at least 61 people across the south of Mexico. But no place had lost more than Juchitán, a small provincial city near the Pacific Coast.

President Enrique Peña Nieto, seeking to soothe the nation, visited the city on Friday afternoon.

“Indeed, the strength of this earthquake was devastating, but we are also certain that the strength of unity, the strength of solidarity and the strength of shared responsibility will be greater,” Mr. Peña Nieto said in a statement. By nightfall, he and his entourage were gone.

The earthquake that struck was more powerful than the one in 1985 that killed about 10,000 people, many in Mexico City. Thursday’s quake, however, was farther away from Mexico City and more directly affected a less populated region of Mexico, leading to a significantly lower casualty total.

Rescue workers searched for Juan Jiménez, the police officer buried in the rubble of the city hall building, where he was on duty when the earthquake struck on Thursday.

But nearly a full day later, there was one last person to try to save in the city.

The rubble the rescue workers were digging through had once been the city hall of Juchitán de Zaragoza, and trapped inside was a 36-year-old police officer, Juan Jiménez, who for 18 years had stood guard there, most recently working the night shift.

He was now buried under a story of wreckage, on the ground where he last stood. Finding him would allow the city to move from the rescue phase to repair and recovery. The search for him would continue until close to midnight on Friday, then resume at dawn on Saturday.

Apparently, they’re still digging.

A reminder that disasters and misery don’t just affect Americans.

Look at this:

An estimated 40 million people in South Asia are struggling to rebuild their lives after massive floods devastated the region nearly a month ago.

Authorities have described it as the region’s worst flood in 40 years, with a metre of rain falling in some areas in the space of days.

The worst-hit areas include Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh states in northern India, the Terai region in southern Nepal, and Kurigram and Chimari districts in northern Bangladesh.

In India alone, UNICEF estimated 31 million people were affected by the floods, losing their homes, livelihoods, cattle or property.

In Bangladesh, more than 8 million people were affected, including about 3 million children.

Earthquakes aren’t caused by climate change but the rest of these disasters are almost certainly affected by it. When the locusts come they will be too.

There have always been natural disasters and there always will be. Humans so stupid that they’re actually trying to make them worse and more common.

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The Fox effect

by digby

Even in the hurricane:

It has been 304 days since the election. This was on Fox last night. pic.twitter.com/rzlCqdtbzX

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) September 8, 2017

In case you were wondering if this matters, well, Donald Trump obsessively watches Fox.

And the network persuades more people than him:

Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel; in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections.

A new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

They estimate that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

For context, that would’ve made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama’s 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote.

“There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty” about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. “I personally don’t think it’s totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research.” And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections.

How Fox News transformed America
Martin and Yurukoglu integrated a vast array of data — on Fox’s channel position and viewership, individual/zip code/county level presidential voting behavior, and transcripts of cable news shows to showcase their ideology — into an extensive model that they can then use to estimate how effective Fox (and CNN and MSNBC) is at persuading viewers to vote its way.

[…]

The effects of CNN and MSNBC on centrist voters are mostly negligible; MSNBC, in 2000 and 2004, modestly increased odds of voting Republican, before it turned left in time for 2008. But Fox News increases Republican voting odds for centrists, for Democratic viewers, and even, in 2004 and 2008, for Republicans already strongly inclined to vote that way. Watching three minutes more of Fox News per week in 2008 would have made the typical Democratic or centrist voter 1 percentage point likelier to vote Republican that year.

“Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans,” the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizable minority aren’t, and they’re particularly suggestible to the channel’s influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle.

These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel’s viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public’s political views from 2000 to 2008.

What’s more, they find that Fox isn’t setting its ideology where it ought to to maximize its viewership. It’s much more conservative than is optimal from that perspective. But it’s pretty close to the slant that would maximize its persuasive power: that would result in the largest rightward movement among viewers. CNN, by contrast, matched its political stances pretty closely to the viewer-maximizing point, showing less interest in operating as a political agent.

Fox seems lost without Ailes so I’m not sure that they’re going to maintain their hold much longer. He had a unique gift. But they are rapidly moving into the Breitbart realm so it’s possible that even if they don’t retain the power to persuade, their propaganda style is becoming even more extreme.

Ailes always maintained the fiction that they were doing straight news and that gave people the ability to bullshit themselves into adopting their narrative if they were drawn to it. Breitbart-Fox isn’t even trying. It’s straight up incitement, no holds barred. It’s Trump. And they have figured out that flattering him will get their agenda passed and please their audience. Watch Fox and you can see what Trump is thinking.

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This will make you sad and infuriated

by digby

Trump and the Republican party are torturing this girl and 800,000 like her:

‘I’m gonna be sent back to a country that I’ve ever been to and I’m gonna lose every opportunity that I have.’ pic.twitter.com/JWzDsYfoSf

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) September 7, 2017

For what? Some abstract principle? Racist hate? Sadism?

Ding, ding, ding.

We have legalized millions and millions of immigrants from the time this nation was founded. It’s what America used to be about. These kids could all be legalized permanently tomorrow. The only reason any of this is happening is because a faction of right wing racists, like those creeps in the pictures above, are holding the country hostage.

This threat to deport them is nothing but a disgusting display of authoritarian white supremacy. It’s shameful.

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Minute by minute from Cuba
by digby

This shows a little bit of what it’s going to be like in Florida starting today:

This was @CNN_Oppmann’s view of Hurricane #Irma as it lashed Caibarién, Cuba, before heading off to the Florida Keys https://t.co/WbFelcU3Uu pic.twitter.com/Ze9WvmH71w

— CNN (@CNN) September 9, 2017

From what I gather, it’s likely going to pick up speed over the warm water.

Th good news is that after Trump gets his trade war with China going he’ll be able to force them to admit that this whole climate thing is a hoax and we won’t have more of these extreme weather events. Praise Trump.

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Blame the Reformation
by Tom Sullivan

New Age meets Spinal Tap, my 1997 de minimis opus.

In the “do your own thing” 1960s, rednecks beat up hippies. By the 1970s, hippies had joined Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade.” About the time Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time, the left had rejected objective reality and embraced alternative ones and alternative religions. By then, country singers were wearing mullets and the hippie beatings stopped. So America began its trip through Alice’s looking glass on its way to losing its mind, explains Kurt Andersen (although I added the mullet part). The host and co-creator of “Studio 360” is the author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire—A 500-Year History. A lengthy excerpt has been adapted for the the September issue of The Atlantic:

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

Conservatives who for decades decried the relativism born of the liberalizing 1960s have embraced it like long hair on their country singers. And with it truthiness, Stephen Colbert’s mocking descriptor for truth born of the gut, not the head.

By the 1980s? By the 1980s, Andersen writes:

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down.

Until in 2016, we elected president a reality show host devoid of government experience and with no ethical or moral core, a man unmoored from the truth and objective reality itself. A reflection of our times, Andersen believes.

It is an easy premise to buy for those who have lived through these last decades. The 1980s saw moral panics over satanic ritual abuse and childhood sexual abuse uncovered through “recovered memories.” People complained of multiple chemical sensitivity, perhaps a real syndrome and perhaps a species of anxiety disorder. Ronald Reagan promised he would slash taxes, expand military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time, and we believed. He promised trickle down economics, and we believed. He would build a defense net named Star Wars.

The Reagan presidency of the 1980s was “a triumph of truthiness and entertainment,” Andersen writes. Once the 1960s established the relativeness of truth, the American right found liberals were not the only idiots who could be made useful. Andersen argues conspiracy theorists of both the left and the right for a long time “have been on the same team.” His diagnosis?

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them. Before the internet, crackpots were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the web, just like actual news. Now all of the fantasies look real.

It is this working out of the American ideal of individualism that has run amok, Anderson believes, and created an environment in which, contra Daniel Patrick Moynihan, people feel entitled to their own facts. Yet I would argue that the 1960s figure so prominently in Andersen’s narrative only because the tumultuous decade occurred in many of our lifetimes. Perhaps since Andersen’s subtitle is “A 500-Year History,” he goes back as far as I do. I blame the Reformation:

Say what you will about the excesses of Rome and the papacy (and not to ignore Constantinople), prior to the Reformation there was some central authority to define Christianity for much of the West, to set standards and protocols, if you will. The Reformation may have decentralized the faith and brought it closer to the people, but it also meant by the late 20th century that any American huckster with a flashy suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a black, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition could define Christianity pretty much any damned way he pleased. And did. Who was to say he was wrong?

That do-it-yourself spirit extends as well to Americans’ understanding of their founding documents. Every born-again, T-party convert carries a pocket Constitution and becomes an instant expert and his own defining authority on what is and isn’t the true American faith. It’s the American Dream: every man his own Supreme Court; no priestly judicial caste interposed between a man and his God.

Sheriffs Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and other “constitutional sheriffs,” for example.

Add to that, as I wrote last year, conservative radio host Charlie Sykes who told Business Insider that years of right-wing talk radio have essentially destroyed the truth function of facts. Whereas liberals used to be accused by the right of relativism, decades of conservative talk radio attacks on the press (and science) have slowly dissolved objective reality on the right. Sykes says:

“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood,” he explained. “The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that. ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.’”

But the Internet age has taken us deeper down the rabbit hole we started digging in the 1960s. “Every screwball with a computer and an internet connection,” Andersen writes, and every crazy, right-wing uncle with an email list, I might add, became a vector for propaganda. Truth is no longer something sublime, but profane if it is not our own. Facts are suspect. The only ones that matter on the right now are “true facts.”
(Insert your own Schwarzenegger reference here.) In 1995, Barbara and David Mikkelson felt compelled to start Snopes, a.k.a., the Urban Legends Reference Pages, to defend truth from the tidal wave of propaganda and conspiracies the Internet unleashed.

I was spending my weekends at the time following the New Age, going to spirituality trade shows, watching huckster-believers hawk their healing potions and therapies while speaking of magical “energies” and channeling the dead. I created and never published a mock New Age business magazine based on those observations. I called it “Mantra-preneur.”

From belief in aliens to government conspiracies, whether it is the “the Corporate State” on the left or “the Deep State” on the right, both political poles abandoned the Enlightenment for a new, personalized Dark Age of unreason and magical thinking. Andersen notes, for example, “The belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.” Before Glenn Beck played it up FEMA camps before debunking them. In fact, a liberal friend swore it was true. Her friend had seen for herself “windowless” white rail cars for hauling political prisoners to the FEMA camps parked in the local rail yard. Here they are:

Norfolk Southern “camp cars,” rolling hotels for rail maintenance workers.

By the time Donald Trump ran for office, the alt-right had built its own alternative truthiness. Rush Limbaugh led the way, beginning in 1988, helped along by the right’s gutting the federal Fairness Doctrine. Andersen writes, “Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.”

But there is something still deeper I saw during my dive into the New Age. There was a certain “cargo cult” quality to it. Practitioners I met were for the most part therapists and artists, not scientists. They were disconnected from science, yet fascinated by it, folding terminology borrowed from quantum physics into their mystical beliefs to give them the veneer of credibility, as though their faith couldn’t stand on its own. Enlightenment science had stripped the mystical from their world, leaving them adrift, and they wanted that magic back. I wrote in 1993:

For all the talk about spirituality among devotees, the term faith is glaringly absent from the New Age lexicon. Perhaps that is because faith is not scientific. Perhaps because since Enlightenment positivism we have bought into the notion that science is the only intellectually respectable way of knowing the world. Nineteenth century Christian evangelicals, threatened by science’s march towards demythologizing the natural world (and by Darwin, specifically), worried that God would be its next victim. They responded not by reasserting the mystical nature of their faith, but by claiming biblical inerrancy. Where science and the Bible disagreed, science was in error. In so doing they reduced their sacred text to a textbook. They abandoned the spiritual high ground to play for the hearts and minds of believers on the field of scientific rationalism. In the process, they distilled out of their faith much of the mystical essence that had made it compelling for two millennia.

What they forgot, and perhaps what the new metaphysicians have forgotten, is that what makes faith so powerful is that it is not rational. Faith and reason are related, but different, processes. Faith is not irrational; it is beyond reason. It is supra-rational. Kierkegaard realized reason can only take one so far before a blind leap of faith is necessary to reach God. New Age spirituality is an attempt to reclaim that mystical connection with the divine, but they are in danger of repeating the fundamentalist error. The power devotees seek is not to be found in mechanisms of natural science or spiritual gadgetry: not in stars, not in potions, beams of light, vortices, crystals or other dimensions. Real spiritual growth has nothing to do with science or cookbook dogmatism. New Age believers have mistaken spirituality for faith.

Perhaps what Andersen misses is the mystery behind the conspiracy theories is not just an American compulsion for self-expression, but a human one for connection. Again, this is from 1993:

People are desperate for something in which they can believe. Communities have disappeared, replaced by subdivisions and condominiums. Terrorism and human rights abuses are more visible than ever. Anything you eat, drink or breathe might produce cancer. Science has reduced life to a cold set of mechanistic principles, demythologizing the world and stripping life of the meaning our myths once conveyed. The world seems to be coming apart and we are powerless to stop it. Nothing feels right anymore.

Is it any wonder people need something, some way to get control in their lives, some way to overcome our sense of powerlessness and paranoia? (Empowerment has become a hot term lately, both in enlightenment and legislative circles.) But in the absence of feeling that we can affect changes in our lives, we find solace in the notion that that power might exist somewhere else. It is as if we awakened to find ourselves locked in the trunk of a car careening down a mountain road. We desperately need to believe someone is behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is more comfort than no one at all.

A common response to such powerlessness is the conspiracy theory. The U.N.’s black helicopters, the international Jewish conspiracy, the Vatican, the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the oil companies, the CIA and others offer us someone to blame for the world’s problems – without having to take any responsibility ourselves. Identifying others as the source of evil empowers us, in an odd way, by convincing us that if we could just eliminate them, things would improve. Just ask the Klan.

In New Age thinking, more benign conspirators pull strings behind the scenes. The government may be hopeless and Jesus may have lost credibility, but our alien mentors, spirit guides and secret circles of Wise Guys are directing humanity to a brighter future. A host of channelers, gurus, practitioners and facilitators have selflessly come forward to guide us into their empowering presence. Stripped of our myths by science, people have scrambled frantically to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons – from pyramids to crop circles to UFOs – and a faith in beneficent higher beings that reassures us that someone is in control, even if that someone is not us.

Alvin Toffler theorized that too much change in too short a time can produce physical illness. Maybe. And maybe not just physical illness. Carl Jung spoke of a collective unconscious. If it exists, perhaps it is not so adaptable to rapid change either. What might it look like to go through life in the 21st century with a collective unconscious lagging a couple of centuries behind the times?

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