It was just after 1:30 Tuesday morning when Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) says he received the call from the city’s fire chief.
“He said, ‘Sir, the Key Bridge collapsed,’’ said Scott, who was awake with a 3-month-old child when the call came in. “I said, ‘Repeat that.’ He said, ‘The Key Bridge collapsed, a ship hit it, it’s gone, sir.’ ”
Scott, 39, said he threw on his official Baltimore city jacket and headed for the scene, calling the governor, the presidents of the state Senate and city council, and the city administrator along the way. When he arrived at the shore of the Patapsco River to see the wreckage, “you could still hear it moving at that point,” he said of the Dali, the 985-foot ship that had taken down the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Just before daybreak, as Scott began appearing in national television interviews to speak of the “unthinkable tragedy,” the attacks started.
One user on X, called him “Baltimore’s DEI mayor,” a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have come under attack by conservatives who say they lead to minorities getting jobs over more qualified White candidates. Meanwhile, others attacked Scott for his facial hair and for not wearing a suit. “He looks like your average street criminal,” another X user wrote. Neither user responded to a request for comment.
“He was doing what anyone would expect an elected official to do, and you assign that to DEI. It is bonkers. It is absolutely bonkers,” said Caryn York, president of the nonprofit Baltimore Corps.
The collapse of the Key Bridge has complicated the young politico’s efforts to revive the city’s fortune, and it thrust him into the national spotlight, making him an even larger target for racist commentators. It’s to be expected, Scott said in an interview. “When you’re young and Black in leadership, you know that that kind of stuff is going to come,” he said.
The racist attacks haven’t been reserved for him, Scott noted. Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore (D), who is Black, and the immigrants who lost their lives in the collapse have become targets, too.
Being Baltimore mayor’s has never been an easy job. The city’s high unemployment and crime rates, along with miles of blighted property, have long made it a somewhat thankless task. But as a young Black man, Scott said, he faces an additional challenge: a barrage of racist dog whistles, from being called a “thug” to being accused of fathering “one more Baltimore illegitimate black baby.”
I would imagine on the right wing sites, the racism was even more appalling. This stuff is worse than it’s been in decades.
Jena Griswold, the Colorado Secretary of State was on Chris Hayes talking about the threats she got and revealed that there was a 600% increase in threats to her and staff. 600% WTF?
That day, she received an email declaring: “We are coming for you bitch.” Another person emailed, “If you have kids, I hope they get murdered by illegal aliens,” adding, “Seriously, just die.”
In a voicemail, someone said, “I can’t wait to find you and follow you to your house and expose your address.” Another person left a voicemail saying, “I’d love for you to die.” Some time this month, a person told Griswold on social media, “Take my advice and wear Kevlar … a lot of Kevlar!!!”
‘Just Die’: Colorado Elections Chief Who Took on Trump Sees 600% Spike in Threats, By Andrew Perez, Adam Rawnsley, Ryan Bort, Asawin Suebsaeng March 28, 2024
On these cable news segments we often hear some specific threats, but unless someone counts all the threats, and then tells the media about them, we never know just how huge the problem is. And if we don’t know how huge the problem is, we also don’t know how terrible the response to the problem is.
At the end of the segment Griswold talked about how the DOJ Election Threat Response Task Force has failed. It’s been going since 2021 and has only 20 convictions.
Have you heard about any of those 20 convictions? Did you see any mugshots of the perps who are now serving 3 1/2 years in prison for threatening election officials? No. Because the DOJ didn’t use any photos of the convicted felons in their press release or press conference!
This is a huge failure by the DOJ. They MUST promote their successes to send a message to the general public that if you threaten election officials, their staff and poll workers you will be found, arrested, tried and punished. And I’m not the only one who thinks this. This is from AZ’s new secretary of state,
Even when federal prosecutors secure a victory after charging people making these violent threats, Arizona’s secretary of state argues that barely anyone hears about it — and that’s a major problem.
“In almost every other area criminality is deterred through public campaigns,” he adds. The Justice Department’s election task force issues typically press releases after convictions, but Fontes says press releases aren’t enough to deter people or adequate given the extent of the problem.
As my friend Bill said, that’s like if the feds did a massive drug and weapons bust but didn’t have a photo of the guy they busted or a photo of the 600 pounds of cocaine stacked up next to 275 rocket propelled grenades.
I couldn’t find a photo anywhere online of Joshua Russell of Bucyrus, Ohio who got 2.5 years in prison for death threats made in 2022 to Arizona’s top election official. The only mug shot I found was of Frederick Goltz of Lubbock Texas. He threaten Arizona elected officials and their kids on RW social media. I read all court documents for the entire Goltz case and the media coverage. His lawyers used all the usual explanations, ‘He was joking. He was in another state, he didn’t intend to take action, his comment was taken out of context, he is a good father who cares for his kids.” The prosecution countered all of those and proved he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Goltz was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.
This would have been an excellent case for the DOJ to promote nationally as a deterrent, because he threatened to kill kids too. But they didn’t. It was one of the victims who posted on social media that I found the mugshot. The VICTIMS should NOT have to promote the successful prosecution.
In the case of threats to Jena Griswold, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office went to the journalists at Rolling Stone and told them what was happening. THIS IS NOT what law enforcement tells people to do. But when law enforcement isn’t doing their job, they have to. Law enforcement knew of all the threats to Judge Engoron’s clerk during Trump’s trial, but they don’t talk about “ongoing investigations” so the New York state court system’s Department of Public Safety kept count of the threats and told the media.
Here’s Lisa Rubin telling Chris Hayes about the 275 Pages of transcribed voicemail threats. When he saw that the scale and scope of the threats it finally made an impact on Hayes.
The Secretary Of State office had to go the press because law enforcement isn’t doing their job. But even media pressure isn’t enough. There needs to be an look into WHY law enforcement is failing and fix the problem.
Thanks to great reporting from Linda So and Jason Szep at Reuters, we’ve learned that law enforcement often won’t investigate and they dismiss threats as not rising to the level of criminal threat prosecution. Or they declare them “protected political speech” But based on the experts who reviewed the threats, that’s a bullshit excuse. This is a must read piece on the failure of law enforcement to manage threats to U.S. election workers. It’s from 2021 and is damning. U.S. election workers get little help from law enforcement as terror threats mount Reuters Campaign of Fear Sept. 8, 2021,
What’s really behind law enforcement not wanting to do this? 1) It’s not a priority 2) They don’t have a budget 3) They don’t see it as a big deal, it’s “online” or on social media, so it’s not local or “real world.” 4) It’s a lot of work for a low conviction rate, especially if they have to prove intent. 5) The people getting threatened aren’t important (POC, low-level election workers, women like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss) 6) The people who are doing the threatening are not seen as domestic terrorists. 7) Lots of cops are MAGA Trumpers
I’ve dug into the reasons and excuses for law enforcement’s failure to act. 1) Show the problem is huge and real. The Secretary of States offices should talk to more people in the media about scale and scope. They should describe the actions that need to be taken, and by whom. There should be talk about who is blocking those actions and what pressures they are using. (Is this about Trump lovers in law enforcement? Budget? Fear of speaking out?) 4) Determine what pressures can apply to get action. What if the stories about 1,000s of actionable threats isn’t enough? Do we need to expose the INTENTIONAL internal failures and how they will lead to deaths?
And finally, since I LOVE to talk about successes, not just failures, when a law gets passed or a person is convicted for threats or a victim wins a civil law suit and is compensated for their pain and suffering, promote those stories! Make it a big deal!
(BTW, I’ve been doing this by educating groups on the power of civil legal actions and teaching them how to do follow up stories with the media. What I don’t know how to do, and needs to be done, is a social media plan that addresses the coordinated disinformation and gaslighting and fights back.)
One thing I learned from Glenn Kirschner is that the DOJ wants people to believe they are above pressure, but he said when they get new information, either from the original reporting or from reports from sources like the Secretary of State’s offices, the DOJ is forced to look at it and respond.
Based on this information everyone being threatened needs to USE that information. Get your story out there. Demand of law enforcement, “Where are the arrests?” If law enforcement does HAVE a success, SHOW IT!
Get the media to stop with their OWN excuses. I still see a reflexive move of the media to give the benefit of the doubt to people making threats. I get it, they don’t want to be seen as censors. They want to be able to criticize elected officials, Chris Hayes was still pushing the “You should expect some incoming” as a DA, as a normal experience, until he heard of the 275 transcribed pages of voicemail threats. That finally got through to him. But the media, and the public, need to hear it OVER AND OVER again. As Barb McQuade points out in her book, the right is exploiting our old views of in-person free speech in an actual public square, via an era of anonymous bots pushing lies and threats on social media.
The DOJ Election Threats Task Force should be doing big national stories about the people who are in jail for threats. SO big that FOX news can’t avoid covering them. And when RW social media and FOX try to turn the perpetrators into “misunderstood martyrs” whose “free speech is being censored!” There needs to be a social media rapid response team that flips that lie around. “This guy IS NOT A “FREE SPEECH” HERO.” THIS GUY THREATENED TO KILL KIDS, HE IS BEING PUNISHED AS THE LAW PROVIDES.”
The social media owners should know this is against their Terms Of Service AND the LAW! Any gaslighting about it being free speech needs to be called out as the BS it is.
“Death threats are not debate. Death threats do not contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Death threats are not a protected constitutional right.”
John Keller, head of the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force
John Keller, head of the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force
When there are no big stories about convictions for threats, no photos of the people who are going to prison for years following a trial by a jury of their peers, there will be no deterrence. Yes, justice was done, but the public doesn’t know about. Humans need to SEE justice being done.
I asked people for an example of seeing justice getting done. They recommended the ending scene of The Untouchables. I thought that was appropriate, especially since Trump has taken to comparing himself to Al Capone lately.
Trump has often told his ecstatic followers that he planned to stay in office beyond eight years. The media has always taken it as a joke. Now the ultra-MAGA website American Conservative has developed a “serious” rationale:
Lost in the Left’s endless babbling about Donald Trump’s alleged threat to democracy is a very simple but inconvenient truth: Trump’s re-emergence as the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 is a triumph of democracy.
Not only did Trump secure the nomination following his defeat in 2020—a rather incredible feat in and of itself—but did so in spite of every obstacle the mainstream media, the Republican establishment, and the lawfare apparatus have put in his way.
The primary voters and caucus-goers who chose Trump did so in spite of January 6, the prosecution of the former president, or even the popularity in some MAGA quarters of Ron DeSantis. They chose him because they damn well felt like it.
This is democracy in action: The voters surveyed the scene, tuned out the noise, and selected the man the rest of the world loves to hate. What could be more democratic than voting for your preferred candidate against the advice—the warnings, the threats, the fear-mongering—of your betters?
Yet, even if Trump returns to the White House this November, the Twenty-second Amendment will bar him from standing for re-election in 2028. Ratified in 1951, the amendment is largely seen as a kind of constitutional course correction following the four consecutive presidential terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The amendment reads, in part: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
This sounds reasonable enough, especially in light of FDR’s hold on the office. Yet those who supported the amendment more than 70 years ago could not have foreseen the prospect of a one-term president who lost the office but who later regained it in a subsequent election. Grover Cleveland remains the only president to have successfully vaulted himself to the White House in nonconsecutive elections, in 1884 and in 1892. (Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, also gave it a try by running as the Progressive Party standard-bearer in 1912.)
In modern times, it is virtually inconceivable that any of the ousted one-term presidents would have seriously thought of running anew against the same opponent (now the occupant of the White House) who had bested them four years earlier. (Think about it: George H.W. Bush running against Bill Clinton in 1996?) This is not a reflection of a weakness in their character but the reality of American public life: Voters are fickle, and by the end of the first term of any presidency, they have long forgotten the loser from four years earlier.
As the primary season has shown us, the Republicans have not moved on from Trump—yet the Twenty-second Amendment works to constrain their enthusiasm by prohibiting them from rewarding Trump with re-election four years from now.
This is plainly unfair. Indeed, there has long been support for axing the Twenty-second Amendment due to the artificial limits it places on voter choice. Many popular presidents have agreed. In 1985, the Washington Post reported that Ronald Reagan supported repealing the amendment, saying in private remarks that the lame-duck label being applied to his second term left him feeling “handicapped.” In 2016, Barack Obama told David Axelrod that he was sure he would have coasted to a third term if such a thing were permissible: “I am confident in this vision, because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could have mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”
The case of Donald Trump, however, makes an even more forceful ethical argument against the Twenty-second Amendment and for its repeal: If a man who once was president returns, after a series of years, to stand again for the office and proves so popular as to earn a second nonconsecutive term—as Trump seems bound to do—to deny him the right to run for a second consecutive term cuts against basic fair play. If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?
Just let that sink in.
I wonder if they’ll be ok with the fact that Democrats are then free to run Barack Obama who will only be 67.
Donald Trump’s bid to oust a Florida Republican who backed Ron DeSantis over him is reviving a long-running GOP anxiety: that he can’t be dissuaded from the grudges and inflammatory rhetoric that plagued his party’s lawmakers during his first term.
Trump’s call for a challenger to Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), the only House Republican from DeSantis’ state to endorse the Florida governor in the primary, reveals a campaign with little interest in courting his former rivals and their supporters. But as President Joe Biden makes a play for Nikki Haley voters who might be reluctant to back Trump, Republicans are starting to nudge the former president to at least try to tone it down.
They’re concerned about a rerun of the hair-pulling past — where GOP candidates in battleground races are constantly challenged to answer for their presumptive nominee’s more erratic and boisterous statements.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), another former DeSantis backer, told POLITICO that Trump’s scorched-earth approach to Lee risks turning off some voters who might otherwise favor him.
“Gratuitous attacks like these won’t help him win the presidency, and are counterproductive to building a conservative Congress eager to advance his agenda when he’s elected,” Massie said. “Fortunately, Laurel Lee will win her reelection by a comfortable margin, but in the meantime, these kind of statements alienate some of Trump’s potential voters.”
Trump is unlikely to heed such warnings to pivot to a more consistent general election message. So far this month, he has said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate” their religion and described some migrants as “not people.”
But the fact that Hill Republicans are even attempting to refocus him, underscored by nearly 20 interviews with lawmakers and aides, illustrates their real worries about a 2024 cycle where their electoral fates are inescapably tied to the man at the top of the ticket.
The former president “needs to be sensitive to where he’s strong and where he’s weak in the electoral map,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).
Atop of the list of topics some Republicans want Trump to avoid: his attempts to revise the violent history of the Capitol attack by his supporters and his description of people convicted of riot-related crimes as “patriots.”
Many GOP senators are wincing as Trump homes in on Jan. 6, 2021, rather than attempting to capitalize on Biden’s vulnerabilities. Some national polls show Biden with a potential edge on the issue of democratic values, and the president made the violent attack an early and central fixture in his State of the Union address this month.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), said that praising Capitol rioters “definitely is not my thing,” advising Trump to talk more about middle-class workers instead.
“I was there” on Jan. 6, said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D). “And the courts have clearly said that these individuals engaged in criminal activity. Not all of them, but a sizable number. And I’m most certainly not going to call them patriots.”
Still, Rounds made clear that he wants Biden out of office, launching into a fusillade of mainstream GOP criticisms of the president and congressional Democrats on inflation, energy and tax policy. Then, when asked if he agr
Behold the utter depravity of all that. They know Trump is totally unfit. They just like power more than anything.. They obviously see the danger that this freak is going to lose because of his bizarre character defects but they obviously figure they’d rather take that chance than temporarily lose power and help save the country from the man they know very well is unhinged.
Update — Speaking of unhinged:
Rep. Derrick Van Orden is done with Rep. Bob Good.
Good, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus and one of eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, has been at the center of internal GOP infighting that has left their party’s agenda in tatters and their conference embroiled in a bitter civil war.
Now Van Orden has joined hands with a band of House Republicans angling to knock Good off in his June primary by propping up his primary opponent, John McGuire – a tactic long viewed as a serious breach of protocol but one that underscores the bad blood within the House GOP.
“Bob Good didn’t come here to govern. He came here to be famous,” Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, told CNN. “Bob Good’s wearing our jersey, and he’s not on the team.”
Van Orden added: “If you look at what we have not been able to accomplish in this Congress, it’s predominantly because of Bob Good and his ilk.”
But Good is undeterred.
As he barnstormed through his district last week with fellow House GOP hardliners, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Chip Roy of Texas, Good said voters in his district don’t care what his colleague from Wisconsin thinks. And he pointedly accused many of his Republican colleagues in Washington of casting votes that hurt the country and undermine the conservative cause.
When it comes to job satisfaction, members of Congress aren’t the only ones considering calling it quits.
Only about one in five senior aides on Capitol Hill believe that Congress is “functioning as a democratic legislature should,” and about the same margin believe that it is “an effective forum for debate” on key issues.
Given those assessments by the people who live and breathe these issues, this particularly glum finding should not come as a surprise: Almost half of senior congressional aides are considering leaving the Hill because of “heated rhetoric from the other party.”
These are just some of the findings from an investigation by the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofitthat aims to improve both lawmaker effectiveness and constituent engagement. Situated seven blocks away from the Capitol in Eastern Market, the foundation conducts seminars for staff and offers research to outside groups trying to figure out the byzantine ways of the House and Senate.
Over the past seven years, the foundation has conducted three very deep dives into the lives of senior staff in Congress, understanding that these unelected officials wield tremendous clout and that their positive outlook — or lack thereof — can deeply affect the health of the institution.
They have raised the salaries and created new resources in recent years so that isn’t the problem:
What’s driving this new bout of staff departures is the overall environment on Capitol Hill. That includes pandemic fallout, ranging from partisan battles over mask mandates to the long closure of the buildings to the public. It also accounts for the ongoing toxicity since the January 2021 attack on the Capitol. These factors have added to an institution that was already pretty partisan.
Lawmakers themselves are incredibly fed up with the institution. Next month, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) will resign his seat, the seventh member of the House to quit midterm for the private sector, a historically unusual amount.
Slightly more senior Democratic staff members said they were considering leaving because of the GOP’s “heated rhetoric” than did Republican aides when considering Democratic rhetoric. But almost 6 in 10 senior Republican staffers said they were thinking about leaving their jobs because of the actions of “my party.”
Most congressional aides have gone to college and studied public policy or political science, and maybe have an advanced degree in law or some key issue area. They largely come to Washington to try to shape things toward their party’s ideological vision of things.
But now, too often, newer members of Congress show up without much concern about policy and instead focus on their communications staff and getting attention on social media and cable news.
A House Republican deputy chief of staff, granted anonymity by CMF’s staff, gave a harsh assessment of those political performance lawmakers and their ability to cause dysfunction.
“Perhaps courses on the constitutional role of Congress would help enlighten them on how representation is intended to work, and we could govern properly,” the House GOP aide said.
Threats of violence have now become a regular backdrop to the work of senior staff. Less than one in five express being “very satisfied” that lawmakers and aides “feel safe doing their jobs,” with a bit more saying they are somewhat satisfied.
GOP aides said they feel safer, but not by much. And aides from both parties find threats to be an almost regular part of their job.
Four in 10 senior aides — an identical amount in each party — reported that “direct insulting or threatening messages” occur frequently or very frequently while doing their jobs.
“The physical and psychological toll of this place cannot be understated. We are in danger as a nation,” the top Democratic aide to a House committee told the foundation’s staff.
[…]
Their collective ire also goes toward the representatives and senators themselves, who have amped up their bombast so much that it makes it harder for aides to secure the goodwill needed to do their jobs effectively. Almost half of senior aides strongly agreed that the tone taken by lawmakers “inhibits the ability of staffers to collaborate across party lines.”
With those viewpoints, it’s clear that more resources for policy expertise and a 33 percent salary boost don’t inspire senior advisers to want to stay on the job. Not when they can go to K Street and make more money, or go work at issue-oriented nonprofits to scratch their policy itch without the amount of anxiety that comes with their current jobs.
Ultimately, the CMF report’s authors found that voters themselves have to change what they value in lawmakers so that more serious, sober-minded members of Congress will take charge — and encourage their best staffers to stick around and help make that change.
“The nation can ill afford to lose them,” they wrote.
That’s very interesting but it doesn’t answer the big question, does it? Who is responsible for this change? It isn’t the Democrats, is it? And it didn’t happen overnight. The Republicans have been acting like monsters since the 1990s getting worse with each passing year. When Trump came along they just let their freak flags fly.
The Silent Generation generally avoided speaking directly about anything deemed uncomfortable in polite society. TV’s Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds, fergawdsakes. It was a thing when Lucille Ball was “expecting” (never pregnant) and they wrote it into the series. One of my old roommates had been a junkie as a teen before I knew him in college. My My Silent Generation mother was distressed that I seemed to know people with “problems.”
It’s like a throwback to the 1950s that today the news media has a problem openly discussing “problems.”
It's been four years since I was asked for three or four changes in political journalism that might begin to right this ship. (Emphasis on "begin to…") Here is what I came up with. pic.twitter.com/m462CLeEAt
Digby on Sunday referenced the Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn dealing plainly with uncomfortable truths about the immediate past president. Jay Rosen took note as well.
A newspaper editor — Chris Quinn of the Cleveland Plain Dealer — says it as clearly as he can:
"Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts." https://t.co/2nYQx8adj6
Michael Tomasky takes on the double standard the news uses in covering the immediate past president, citing the response to Trump posting an image of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck:
The Biden campaign issued a denunciation, and Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, always handy with hall-of-mirrors projection, snapped back: “Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
Take note of two points. First, the way Cheung equates “Democrats and crazed lunatics” with Trump; that is, if it’s okay for “crazed lunatics” to post irresponsible things about Trump, then it’s fine for Trump himself—the standard bearer of the Republican Party to hold the most powerful office in the world—to post irresponsible things about Biden.
Bothsidesism normalizes MAGA deviancy:
This is a long-standing right-wing sleight of hand—to take things said by random angry liberals on social media and prattle on as if “the Democrat Party” said them. When Barack Obama was president, we endured years of Republicans—in Congress and state legislatures, along with numerous state party officials—making watermelon jokes and being slippery about whether Obama was born in America. It happened incessantly. And then, every so often, a few online liberals would get some nasty and perhaps tasteless meme about Mitch McConnell trending, which would give Republicans the excuse to say, “Aha, see? Both sides do it!”
Republicans have gotten away with this for ages. The mainstream media has come to expect and tolerate this state of affairs for two reasons. It’s simple human nature: If a parent has a well-behaved kid and an unruly kid, the parent naturally over time expects more of the former and lowers the bar for the latter. And once something has happened a thousand times, it isn’t really news anymore.
But there’s more to this than bothsidesism and capitalist news enterprises soft-peddling MAGA deviancy to keep from losing readership.
The water in this pot is getting hotter while the press ignores it. Anat Shenker-Osorio remarked on NBC’s Kristin Welker’s euphemistically chalking up Trump attacking a judge’s family to us being a “deeply divided nation.”
“We aren’t merely unwitting frogs in the boiling water, the forecasters keep assuring us it’s merely a pleasant little hot tub,” Shenker-Osorio tweets.
I get the everyone is burnishing their credentials to work at TrumpTV but perhaps, I dunno, we could try to first stave off the total seizure of speech and freedoms?
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) April 1, 2024
“This whole, the news is what the public thinks the news is, isn’t merely an abdication of responsibility. It’s a pre-capitulation to fascism,” she continues.
I told my roommate about my mother generically referring to uncomfortable topics as problems. He smiled, grew animated, and spoke wildly with his hands.
“Problems? Problems? The guy’s a junkie! He has a two-bag-a-day habit! You could say he has problems!”
Our problem is a mainstream press that treats budding fascism as the 1950s treated Lucy’s pregnancy.
Quinn wrote:
Our nation does seem to be slipping down the same slide that Germany did in the 1930s. Maybe the collapse of government in the hands of a madman is inevitable, given how the media landscape has been corrupted by partisans, as it was in 1930s Germany.
I took a cue ten days ago from the Bulwark and every morning began posting the New York Times front page from four years ago. Remember those grim headlines?
The GOP’s idiotic attempt at campaigning in 2024 on “Are you better off?” relies on Americans having short memories and on our collective PTSD from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’d rather blot out images of empty store shelves, 6-ft distancing stickers, bodies in refrigeration trucks, mass graves, daily infection and death plots, etc. At one point, I was tracking how many preachers who claimed they were protected by the blood of Jesus had died of COVID. I stopped counting at 50 about this time four years ago. Donald Trump and the GOP want to play “Are you better off”? I’m happy to oblige.
On this April Fools’ Day, the Associated Press is running a series of articles highlighting the miriad ways Americans can be fooled.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A brutal conflict in Europe was fresh in people’s minds and the race for the White House turned ugly as talk of secret societies and corruption roiled the United States.
It was 1800, and conspiracy theories were flourishing across America. Partisan newspapers spread tales of European elites seeking to seize control of the young democracy. Preachers in New England warned of plots to abolish Christianity in favor of godlessness and depravity.
This bogeyman of the early republic was the Illuminati, a secret organization founded in Germany dedicated to free thinking and opposed to religious dogma. Despite the Illuminati’s lack of real influence in America, conspiracy theorists imagined the group’s fingerprints were everywhere. They said Illuminati manipulation had caused France’s Reign of Terror, the wave of executions and persecutions the followed the French Revolution. They feared something similar in America.
LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone and a devious imagination to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.
It marks a quantum leap from a few years ago, when creating phony photos, videos or audio clips required teams of people with time, technical skill and money. Now, using free and low-cost generative artificial intelligence services from companies like Google and OpenAI, anyone can create high-quality “deepfakes” with just a simple text prompt.
LONDON (AP) — AI fakery is quickly becoming one of the biggest problems confronting us online. Deceptive pictures, videos and audio are proliferating as a result of the rise and misuse of generative artificial intelligence tools.
With AI deepfakes cropping up almost every day, depicting everyone from Taylor Swift to Donald Trump, it’s getting harder to tell what’s real from what’s not. Video and image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and OpenAI’s Sora make it easy for people without any technical skills to create deepfakes — just type a request and the system spits it out.
These fake images might seem harmless. But they can be used to carry out scams and identity theft or propaganda and election manipulation.
Almost makes me nostalgic for false-flag robocalls.
