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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

How do you recall disinformation?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2023

We can’t even bury fascism

Yesterday’s first post explains why I’m not up to speed on what’s happening in Israel and Gaza and likely won’t catch up for a day or two. Compounding the problem is the inherent complexity of what’s happening there on the ground and what’s now happening with the internet. Digby tweeted (to hell with Musk) yesterday, “I used to turn to twitter at times like these but now I have no clue what’s real and what isn’t…”

A couple of observations about that.

Washington Post:

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Sam Stein tried it out. Yup.

Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

This epic AI fail reminds me of a line from George Carlin’s classic routine on birth control pills: “The entire female population of the US is being used as the guinea pigs to find out if birth control pills are gonna have any side effects or not. Isn’t that nice. Really, if every lady who used them gets to 61 and one leg gets shorter than the other one…better call the pills back.”

Decades later, all of humanity are guniea pigs for AI. Can you feel it yet?

Dan Froomkin has been relentlessly critiquing press obscurantism especially in New York Times headlines. It’s either conditioned reflex or deliberate. Crazy shit happens in Washington, D.C. and somehow there are no agents behind the chaos. It just happens, or both sides are behind it. Calling out the perps is bad for subscriptions and might provoke threats of violence against reporters.

Responding the crisis in Israel, Dave Roberts points out the bullshit Republican response on this continent. (It’s Joe Biden’s fault, you may have heard.)

Roberts adds, “Same thing with Trump’s repeated articulation of that most primal reactionary fear: they are laughing at us. Someone, somewhere, is laughing at us. Someone, somewhere, doubts our manhood so we must project it more, more, more! It’s so sad & sweaty.”

Speaking of sad and sweaty, Stephen Miller felt a need to weigh in on the Hamas attacks (h/t Rick Perlstein):

Perlstein: “Fuerherprinzip? Check. The Antisemitic code? Check. The palingenic chauvinism? Check. The ontological othering of liberalism? The workship of WILL? Check and check.” Also, “(I forgot one: “‘Rules” are chumps”? Check.”

Does anyone else always picture Miller wearing a black SS uniform?

One final bit of sadness and implied threat:

How should the press cover Donald Trump?

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

It’s become a perennial question and there aren’t a lot of good answers. But they should at least try to do something different.

I’m not sure I agree with all of these suggestions by Tom Rosenstiel in the LA Times but it’s worth considering. I do think that Trump absolutely must be covered because it’s vitally important that the normal people in this country do not lose sight of what a monstrous imbecile he really is, which is easy to do if he just becomes a regular candidate and they only cover him as some sort of a phantom from a vaguely remembered past. People must be relentlessly reminded of his current statements, which are even worse in many ways than those we recall from the last two elections. He is not a has-been clown we don’t need to worry about anymore, he is running again with a full-blown cult backing him up and it’s going to be close.

I have my doubts about what Rosenstiel says about journalists confronting Trump in interviews — he prevails by spewing a fire hose of bullshit that runs over even the best reporters. I think interviews are overrated anyway. They need to cover what he tells his followers and then explain why it’s crazy, stupid, dangerous etc.

Anyway, here are his suggestions:

Many confronting the challenge of covering Trump conclude that, as a recent column in the Arizona Republic put it, “It’s time to stop giving Trump airtime.” The larger point is that the media shouldn’t give exposure to people they know are going to make provably false assertions.

The problem with the “Don’t amplify liars” argument is twofold. First, the press is no longer a gatekeeper of what people know; it’s more often an annotator of what they’ve already heard elsewhere. So not covering Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene or others in politics who say patently false things will not silence them. It will just leave them less examined.

Second, it’s a dereliction of the press’ duty to ignore powerful dissemblers and liars in public life. We have an obligation to explain what’s false and offer clear and persuasive evidence of the truth. We have to help the public understand.

How can the press do that? Let’s start with Kristen Welker’s much-criticized recent interview with Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The problem wasn’t that a reporter was interviewing Trump. The failures were in the execution.

The greatest failure was in not anticipating what Trump would predictably say and being prepared to follow up. Journalists tend to exaggerate the power of the “great question” and too often fail to develop strategies that lead to better answers. One reason so many politicians are having their way with reporters today is that they are better-prepared and better-versed in interview dynamics than the people interviewing them.

This notion of mapping out a questioning strategy is Interviewing 101 for lawyers. Attorneys identify where they want to end up and work backward, developing a series of questions that will guide a dishonest witness to a place where their evasions are exposed. Journalists need to plan their interviews in the same way but too often don’t.

This strategy usually relies on specificity: asking an evasive subject to provide evidence of their false assertions and having evidence ready to contradict predictable falsehoods and exaggerations. Jonathan Swan, then of Axios, provided an apt example in a 2020 interview with Trump. When the then-president tried to flimflam him with misleading statistics at one point, Swan replied with precision, detail and follow-up.

“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan told Trump. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad — much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”

“You can’t do that,” Trump replied weakly.

“Why can’t I do that?” Swan retorted.

When journalists lack that level of preparation, they slide into a trap Welker fell into. She ended up in a debate with Trump, repeatedly insisting “That’s not true” but having nothing in hand to prove it.

In the end, such encounters between journalists and politicians almost never get a subject to admit they’re wrong. But a well-prepared interview strategy, with a line of questions pointing in a clear direction and backed by evidence, offers the public three tangible benefits: It creates clarity rather than confusion, reveals more about the politician and makes it harder to lie.

Even if the press is not interviewing Trump or another politician — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is too afraid to face reporters one on one — this strategy of having hard evidence ready and using it well has become essential to reporting on their statements and campaigns. Again, we are now annotators.

How should the press cover a modern campaign more generally? The answers here are not new or complicated. But they do require more discipline and enterprise than chasing the parade, a habit journalists too readily fall into.

The press should dramatically reduce the time it spends following candidates around and attending rallies, imagining that the way politicians run their campaigns is a proxy for how they would govern. This conventional approach inevitably leads to stories on campaign tactics and horse-race coverage. Most voters don’t care. The press does it because it’s easy.

The 2024 race will be nothing like what journalists have encountered in past elections. They would better serve the public if they changed their habits and shifted their resources to four other dimensions of the campaign.

The candidates’ biographies: The campaign biography should be a full-time beat, not a one-day story. Reporters should focus on telling us who the candidates are, what they have done, how they have led, the impact of their choices, how they treat other people and more. And modern storytelling forms can present this information more effectively and accessibly than the classic candidate biography.

The nation’s problems: Campaign coverage shouldfocus more on the biggest problems facing the country, from inflation to climate change to the resilience of our democracy, and tell us what the candidates have done and can be expected to do about them.But these shouldn’t be old-fashioned compilations of shorthand policy positions that don’t mean much and falsely suggest every candidate is equally prepared for every challenge. If a candidate doesn’t really have a record on an issue or much apparent understanding of or interest in it, reporters need to make that clear.

Better fact-checking: Fact-checking needs to become a less haphazard and more relentless feature of political coverage. Traditional journalistic fact-checking is often too subjective: Journalists look for questionable statements to check out, inviting suspicion about bias. Beyond that traditional approach, fact-checkers should also borrow from social science by testing and measuring the veracity of random samples of statements, which would give voters more insight into the candidates’ truthfulness. Also, because research shows voters resist fact-checking of their favored candidates, fact-checkers should organize their work by issue as well as by politician, which would be more informative for more people.

The electorate: The press is supposed to operate in the name of the people, but too often its work reduces the public to a bystander. It should be a subject. Journalists should go beyond the usual polls and Midwestern diner interviews to report more deeply and consistently on what people across the country are feeling and thinking.

At bottom, elections are moments of public self-reflection. They tell us how we, the people, feel about the country and our future. If, on election day, the result seems inexplicable, that is a failure of journalism.

I wish I trusted the media to tell us anything about the electorate except tired tropes about “economic anxiety,” status loss and the high price of eggs. I just don’t think journalism has ever cracked what is going on with a political culture in real time because people don’t actually know what’s driving them most of the time. They are subject to conventional wisdom, peer pressure, cliches and stereotypes that may sound good to them and to others but don’t really get to the heart of why they are making political decisions.

There’s some utility in doing deep analysis of the electorate and there are some great journalists (like Ronald Brownstein) already doing it. But dispatching reporters to go forth into the country to figure out what “the people” are feeling and thinking mostly just tells us what they think they’re supposed to say.

Anyway, everything he recommends is all good as long as the media realizes that they have got to find novel ways of covering what’s going to be an unprecedented and momentous election. Just doing what they’ve been doing could be disastrous.

Meanwhile, back in the states

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

An insane man says Democrats kill babies after they’re born if the mother doesn’t want them

And that’s not all:

Aaaaand:

He is literally telling his cult that he judges everyone, including serial killers, whether or not they like him. And they think that’s great. If you think it’s a joke just look at how he treats Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

Who DIDN’T he tell?

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

If you’re in earshot of Donald Trump, chances are you’ll hear him blurt out some classified information

That time Trump shared top security information with the Japanese Prime Minister and his customers at Mar-a-Lago

Our best satirist Alexandra Petri makes a good point here:

The more that comes out about Donald Trump’s post-presidency conduct, the clearer it becomes that the real challenge was not prying confidential information out of Trump but avoiding receiving confidential information.

I think I see the problem. Donald Trump has two modes of conversation. He is either ranting about all the things he intends to do when he becomes dictator of the country — so many rights to strip away! so much vengeance to extract against his enemies! so many guardrails to dismantle! — or he is volunteering classified information. Those are really it. If you don’t want one, you have to buckle in for the other.

Which brings us to the news from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that Donald Trump apparently shared sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with an Australian billionaire. You might be wondering: Is this a private party, or can anyone play? Yes! All you have to do is pay money to be around Donald Trump by, say, attending a fundraiser or joining Mar-a-Lago, the most valuable golf club on the planet, valued at approximately $6 billion more than the sun, and you, too, can take the Trump Top Secret Challenge! See how long you can go without having Donald Trump just hand you some classified information.

Do you see all these people getting sensitive information from Trump — book researchers, foreign moguls, random users of the site formerly known as Twitter, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte — and wonder, Gee, how long can a person go in his company without hearing something they are not supposed to know? Is it measured in seconds, or in hours? Days seems too long. Fortunately, to answer this question, there’s the Trump Top Secret Challenge! Almost anyone can play! It’s not just for donors, although it is definitely for donors. The only objective is that you spend 24 hours around Donald Trump without learning any classified information.

Anyone can try! If you win, they give you a T-shirt (printed all over with state secrets), but nobody has won it yet. Somebody came close, once, because she was at Mar-a-Lago during a weekend when Trump was absent, but she made the mistake of visiting the wrong bathroom and — boom! Nothing but boxes of classified documents. Now she knows all our sources and methods. She wasn’t even interested in the sources and methods, but she hadn’t brought her phone into the bathroom with her, and she needed something to read.

Presumablythe Australian billionaire who reportedly learned about our nuclear submarines was also trying to do the Trump Top Secret Challenge. He thought he had a shot. Here he is, a foreign national, a cardboard magnate, with no obvious interest in naval warfare. (Usually, you can tell if a man has interest in naval warfare. That is one of the first things you know about him, usually.) Going into the challenge, his fear was that, knowing his passion for cardboard, Donald Trump was going to rush him to the bathroom and start showing off his collection of boxes, asking for his opinion on their absorption power and shape stability, and he might accidentally glimpse a secret that way. He had girded his loins against that possibility. What he was not prepared for was the fact that Donald Trump, any time there is a lull in conversation, will just tell you how close our nuclear submarines can get to a Russian submarine without detection. (Duterte made the same rookie mistake back in 2017.)

Other noteworthy losers include Russian officials (in the Oval Office in 2017), random social media users who looked at Twitter at the wrong moment in 2019 and got to see a classified photo taken by a classified satellite, and a pigeon that got too close to Air Force One at a critical moment.

It is one thing to walk into a meeting in the Oval Office and, say, be Russian. Everyone knows that Donald Trump loves to impress Russia. The odds were heavily against them. But researchers working on a book about somebody else mistakenly thought they had a shot. They weren’t even at Mar-a-Lago. That seemed promising. But no! Moments into the conversation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and the former president is waving classified documents at them. “Secret,” said Donald Trump. “This is secret information. Look, look at this!” Those are actual quotes.

This game is hard! But if you are willing to pay for proximity to the ex-president, you can play as many times as you like! Eventually, you’re bound to lose!

In all seriousness, I heard someone on TV yesterday (don’t recall who, sorry) saying that when they were first exposed to top national security secrets in a SCIF, they felt a massive weight on to them and they wished they didn’t know about it. The idea of accidentally revealing something so important is a huge burden to normal people. Trump not so much. But then, he’s not normal.

“The president is loaded”

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

50 years ago, Kissinger said that Nixon was too drunk to talk to the British Prime Minister when the Yom Kipper War broke out.

Right wingers are attacking Joe Biden all over the internet for waiting a couple of hours to issue a statement about the Israeli crisis, suggesting that he’s “in his basement” (which would be correct since that’s where the Situation Room is. ) Anyway, I think they need to shut their pieholes.

This one’s a doozy

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

This could be a syntax problem but that doesn’t make any sense either. Is he saying that “many reports are that American taxpayer dollars helped fund the attacks?” What does that mean? All the “reports” said that the money released recently to Iran was from a frozen account in South Korea that was sent to Qatar and hasn’t been released yet.

In any case, this garbled nonsense is typical for the putative GOP nominee for president.

I’m not going to be commenting too much on the Israel situation today because it’s very hard right now to get real information from social media and the mainstream media is also difficult to sort out. This was obviously a massive intelligence failure which is a condemnation of the current Israeli government as well as those supposed new Middle Eastern allies that Trump is so proud of creating. This is going to turn out to be more complicated than usual and that’s saying something.

Maddow’s new book sounds great

Published by digby on October 7, 2023

Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, in PREQUEL: An American Fight Against Fascism, #1 New York Times bestselling author Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.

I don’t think I would have ever thought I’d see the necessity for understanding this history in 2023 but here we are.

Don’t buy a gavel just yet, Jimmy boy

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 7, 2023

Trump’s endorsement may not be enough

If John Fetterman can wear a hoodie, Jim Jordan should be able to go jacketless as speaker. But he’s not there yet.

“GOP lawmakers are casting doubt on whether former President Trump’s endorsement of House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) will move the needle in the speaker race, Axios has learned.”

One side:

What they’re saying: Moderate lawmakers and those representing districts President Biden won in 2020 are worried that voting for Trump’s hand-picked candidate could hurt them in their elections back home.

  • “It likely hurts more than helps. Likely Jordan accelerates getting the votes he was going to get anyway but hardens those he wasn’t getting faster,” another lawmaker said.
  • “It probably works both ways. Some will be impressed, some are sick of him and would like him to stay in Florida,” another moderate said. “For me it’s a negative. His brand is toxic.”
  • “The real question is can Republicans in districts Biden won vote for a Trump-endorsed Speaker?” one conservative who is backing Jordan questioned. “They will still have to cast a public vote on the House floor.”

On the other hand:

The other side: Others said that it might nudge lawmakers off the fence who represent conservative districts and have good relationships with both Jordan and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.

  • “I think his endorsement helps. But the question is always can you get to to 218? I don’t think it hurts in that regard, but I do think it helps consolidate support, or get people who are maybe undecided to look more favorably at the Jordan camp,” one lawmaker told Axios.
  • “Yes [it helps],” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) said.
  • I think it creates a net gain, but it does pull some others off,” said another lawmaker who is backing Jordan.

As Digby said, this is their problem. Ours is how long are Americans going to hand a book of matches to Republican arsonists and expect Democrats to put out the fires an clean up the mess?

Don’t think. Just do.

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 7, 2023

What the left is missing

Ok, my neurons fire funny. Stick with me. Something about bonding is coming.

The last several days, people of all ages from the community here have been building a playground not far from where I sit. Rather, rebuilding a playground:

After two years of fundraising and advocating for a park rebuild, ground was broken Sept. 28 for Candace Pickens Memorial Park, formerly Jones Park Playground, in North Asheville. One of the people holding a shovel was Keesha Martinez, whose daughter, Pickens, was the 22-year-old murdered at the park in May 2016.

[…]

Pickens was killed in 2016 on her then 3-year-old’s son birthday. She had taken him to the park to celebrate, according to previous Citizen Times reporting. Her son, Zachaeus, was also shot, losing his left eye and surviving.

The company that designed and furnished material relies on community volunteers to build out the site under direction from its superintendent and foremen. They supply most tools. Neighbors bring theirs too.

While we were hauling materials around the site last night, Martinez introduced herself as Candace’s mother. An idiot, I didn’t know what to say. But another crew member burst into tears and she and Martinez hugged and cried for several minutes.

Hundreds of people from the neighborhood, from across town, and from Asheville High have pitched in. (As a politico, the first question I ask is where people live — I think in precincts.) I’ve met neighbors whose houses I walk by every day but have never met. The work is somewhat chaotic, frantic even, but joyful. It’s a bonding experience.

Politico yesterday examined how fandom bonds together both Swifties and MAGA. It’s “a shortcut to community.”

Joanna Weiss writes:

Anyone who’s attended a stop on the Eras Tour, as a passionate Swiftie or a casual observer, knows the power of a collective fan experience. A Swift show is part concert, part costume party, part tent revival with sequins. Listening to the music is part of the goal, but so is singing along, word by word, with the strangers beside you. Lynn Zubernis, a clinical psychologist and professor at West Chester University and the author of several books about fan culture, talks about fandom in physical terms: the “collective effervescence” you feel at a joyful group event; the “vicarious achievement” that affects your brain chemistry. When your team scores a touchdown or your favorite celebrity gets an ovation, you get a boost of hormones, too.

That’s because the group identity that makes fandom tick developed as a biological imperative, she says. “Back in the day, speaking in an evolutionary sense, if you didn’t belong to a group you were going to die. So we are really highly motivated to find a group of like-minded people to belong to.”

Singing along to church hymns is a similar experience, although outside Black churches there is less “collective effervescence.”

When I spoke to Zubernis, she had just returned to Philadelphia from a convention for fans of the long-running TV show “Supernatural.” In a Marriott hotel outside of D.C., 1,500 people had gathered to rehash episodes and dissect the show’s fictional lore, their passion unfaded even though the show has been off the air for years. Whenever she watches coverage of Trump rallies on TV, Zubernis told me, she marvels at how Trump supporters behave like those conventioneers. The MAGA hats and Trump gear feel like a kind of political cosplay. The stylized posters that show Trump as a muscular G.I. Joe type, physically fighting for America, function a bit like fan fiction.

Perhaps that community experience found in evangelical churches has crossover reinforcement for the MAGA faithful. On the more secular left, it’s missing.

There’s much more on the psychology of fan communities. And on the downside: doxxing of the celebrity’s critics and even death threats.

When feeling endangered or embattled, Weiss writes, “a threat to group identity can feel like a matter of survival. And while not all fans become trolls, she suspects that fans’ anger toward perceived transgressors might be rising.” Feeling embattled “makes those fan connections even stronger.”

She concludes:

We’ve all seen what those powerful connections can deliver: an upset victory on Election Day, a concert tour that quite literally breathed new life into local economies, an unprecedented attack on the Capitol. When fandoms are at the height of their power, they’re capable of a lot.

This points to a weakness on the left. Perhaps we are not as much joiners, or our in-groups tend to have a narrower, niche focus like outdoor activities. We are activists for this or activists for that. Our communities are smaller. The Achilles heel for many Democratic groups is they are simply older and no fun. Plus, we seem to live more in our heads.

We don’t much sing together on the left.

Building a playground with hundreds of neighbors is a reminder (to me) not to think so much. Community is not built in your head. Or as Rooster says to Maverick, “Don’t think. Just do.”

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on October 6, 2023

It’s not too late to vote in Fat Bear Week!

There are now just two competitions left:

Get ready for a jaw-dropping generational joust between the tough tectonic tank 806 Jr and the bomb of a boar, 32 Chunk the hunk. In the game of percentages, cubs can outcompete adult bears in weight gain to body size. The tank grew 7000%. While the hunk…well, just blew up, he’s practically a Chunkasaurus.Will 32 flatten the floof? Or will the tenacious tank dunk on the Chunk?

And:

This match is a battle of the survivors!Massive mama 901 survived a series of firsts: The 2022 #FatBearWeek competition as runner-up and her first year as “a single mom who works two jobs, who loves her kids and never stops.” 9480 Otis the GOATis has survived more #FatBearWeek competitions than any other bear with 4 wins under his belt. Despite his late arrival and scrawny size, he lost no time going from gaunt to gargantuan!Select your survivor.

Click the following link to vote!

https://explore.org/fat-bear-week