Shiftless2
Well-known member
Sounds like a Roto-Rooter ad - number one in the number 2 business.
HEADLINES: 2024
- Thread starter sear
- Start date
I seem to be in a desperation-powered potty-minded slump.
... I'm dreaming of a Black / South-Asian Christmas, just like the one no one's ever known ...
"Roto-Rooter, that's the name
and away go troubles, down the drain. Roto-Rooter!"
... I'm dreaming of a Black / South-Asian Christmas, just like the one no one's ever known ...
The promotional "jingle" isn't entirely gone, but that one from the previous millennium, from my childhood over a half-century ago, is memorable.
"Roto-Rooter, that's the name
and away go troubles, down the drain. Roto-Rooter!"
Shiftless2
Well-known member
The reason I remembered the Roto-Rooter slogan (number 1 ...) is because it was actually playing on the car radio just before I came home yesterday.
- holy cow -
I haven't heard it in the new millennium. I figured they might have gone the way of Robert Hall, down the tubes.
- guess not - (or, your car has a real old radio?)
A couple found the Kentucky highway shooter's remains by being bounty hunters for a week, they say
DYLAN LOVAN and BRUCE SCHREINER / Updated Thu, September 19, 2024 at 5:59 PM EDT
Kentucky Interstate Shooting
In this photo made from video provided by Sheila and Fred McCoy shows the couple while searching for the remains of a suspected highway shooter in London, Ky., Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (Sheila and Fred McCoy via AP)LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Days after a shooter attacked an interstate and disappeared, leaving a Kentucky community scared and on guard, Fred and Sheila McCoy decided to lace up their boots for the first time in a long time and spend days in rugged terrain searching until, finally, they found a body.
Kentucky State Police credited Fred and Sheila McCoy, who typically spend their retired days creating YouTube videos about the Hatfield-McCoy feud, with helping investigators find what they believe are the remains of Joseph Couch. Couch, 32, is suspected of firing randomly at vehicles on Interstate 75 on Sept. 7, wounding five people.
A couple found the Kentucky highway shooter's remains by being bounty hunters for a week, they say
Days after a shooter attacked an interstate and disappeared, leaving a Kentucky community scared and on guard, Fred and Sheila McCoy decided to lace up their boots for the first time in a long time and spend days in rugged terrain searching until, finally, they found a body. Kentucky State...
High-speed rail project connecting two major US cities takes massive step forward: 'Looking to open in the early 2030s'
Mike Taylor / Thu, September 19, 2024 at 6:30 AM EDTTexans know how bad big-city traffic can be, and various proposals to widen highways never seem to provide adequate remedies. So, why not turn to trains?
The long-anticipated high-speed rail project to connect Houston and Dallas — for decades nothing more than a rumor — is finally taking concrete shape, Houston Public Media reported.
The 240-mile line would include a stop in the College Station area and boast a travel time of less than 90 minutes at 205 mph.
The company only entered the conversation in April after it inked a non-binding agreement with Texas Central, who created the plan, but it is already moving the needle. Amtrak and the Japanese government are in talks to use the N700S Series Shinkansen train for the line.
"The Shinkansen has a flawless — flawless — safety record," senior vice president of high-speed rail development Andy Byford said at a conference in April. "It has not had one single train-caused fatality in its whole operation since 1964. It's remarkable. And that's because what you're buying is a system."
High-speed rail project connecting two major US cities takes massive step forward: 'Looking to open in the early 2030s'
"Watch this space."
The U.S. passenger & freight rail systems are antiquated. Here's a list of the 10 fastest on Earth, none of them in the U.S.
High speed rail in Texas? Good idea?
House to Vote on Short-Term Spending Bill to Avert a Shutdown
By Catie Edmondson / Reporting from Capitol Hill / Sept. 25, 2024 Updated 9:34 a.m. ETSpeaker Mike Johnson is once again turning to Democrats to supply the bulk of the votes to keep federal funding flowing through Dec. 20.
“It would be political malpractice to shut the government down,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday.Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
The House is set on Wednesday to vote on a short-term spending bill that would avert a government shutdown just ahead of the November elections but punt a bigger funding fight to the end of the year.
Unable to break through a wall of conservative opposition to any measure that would not significantly cut federal spending, Speaker Mike Johnson is once again turning to Democrats to supply the bulk of the votes to keep federal funding flowing through Dec. 20.
After it appeared that a critical mass of conservatives could move to block consideration of the bill on the House floor, Mr. Johnson opted to bypass them entirely. He plans to bring the legislation to a vote on Wednesday evening using a special procedure that requires the support of two-thirds of those voting to pass.
It is the continuation of a long-running saga that has bedeviled House Republican leaders, both Mr. Johnson and Speaker Kevin McCarthy before him.
House to Vote on Short-Term Spending Bill to Avert a Shutdown
Speaker Mike Johnson is once again turning to Democrats to supply the bulk of the votes to keep federal funding flowing through Dec. 20.
Speaker Johnson [R] may have gotten help from Democrats [D], BUT !!
Republicans dumped Speaker McCarthy.
In September 2023, McCarthy relied on Democrats to help pass a bipartisan continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown. As a result, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz filed a motion to vacate against McCarthy.[14] Following a largely unprecedented House floor debate between members of the majority party, McCarthy was voted out as speaker on October 3, 2023.[15] His tenure was the third-shortest for a Speaker of the House in United States history,[16][c] and he became the first speaker to ever be removed from the role during a legislative session.[17][18][19] McCarthy resigned as a member of the House at the end of that year.[20]
Kevin McCarthy - Wikipedia
Shiftless2
Well-known member
A Supreme Court Justice Warned That a Ruling Would Cause “Large-Scale Disruption.” The Effects Are Already Being Felt.
- Long-time Precedent Abandoned: The high court rejected a doctrine granting deference to regulatory agencies in interpreting laws when Congress hasn’t clearly defined the scope of the agencies’ power.
- Effects Were Immediate: After less than three months, parties or judges have invoked the new ruling in 110 cases, with more likely to come.
- Broad Reach: The ruling has already been cited in cases on abortion, overtime pay, airline fees, protections against health care discrimination, background checks for guns and more.
For headline-grabbing drama, few Supreme Court decisions could equal the justices’ July ruling that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for virtually all of their official acts. But a decision in the seemingly humdrum realm of administrative law could end up having far broader consequences, affecting vast areas of American life by slashing the power of federal regulatory agencies that police pollution, food safety, health care and countless other aspects of modern society.
Lower court judges have already cited the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, in a case known as Loper Bright, to halt implementation ....
CONTINUED
Shiftless2
Well-known member
New York Judge Resigns amid Investigation into Alleged Jan. 6 Role
Story by Flynn NichollsAn upstate-New York judge has resigned from his judicial positions amid an investigation into his attendance at Donald Trump's January 6, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C.
Judge Donald R. Spaccio, who served as a village and town court judge in Montour Falls, Schuyler County, submitted his resignation earlier in September, according to documents from the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
Judge Spaccio had been notified in April that the commission was investigating complaints related to his conduct, which included ....
CONTINUED
candidate doesn't
Seriously.
I'm not endorsing Spaccio, or the doin's on Jan. 6. But is what Spaccio did any worse than what Trump did?
If the Western tier is as crooked as the Northern, they'll need a lot more resignations to clean up Schuyler county.
Shiftless2
Well-known member
And yes, I know what the New Republic is
Who is Rupar? He’s a liberal Substacker and prolific tweeter who prints all the news The New York Times doesn’t deem fit to print. The latest case in point is Trump’s weekend rally at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin—an appropriately named venue for a speech in which Trump was barking out hatred and bile like a mad dog.
If you’re the sort of person really steeped in campaign coverage, you may have read about what went down; if you missed it, spoiler alert: Trump said something at this rally so insane and offensive that even the Times finally roused itself to cover it. Trump called Kamala Harris “mentally disabled” and added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.”
That statement, whatever else we might call it, was obviously news, so the Times couldn’t help leading with it. Ditto the Post, which decided to produce a story that emphasized Trump’s violation of politically correct manners. The Post piece quoted a mental health advocate scolding Trump for his insensitive language—as if what he said was offensive only to people struggling with mental illness!
Meanwhile, here are some other things Trump said at the rally, which you had to read Rupar’s X feed to know about.
“These people are animals” (referring to migrants).
“I will liberate Wisconsin from ...
CONTINUED
Oops, They Did It Again: The Mainstream Media Buries Trump’s Outrage
The former president spent the weekend spewing dangerous nonsense at a rally. The press spent its weekend polishing it into palatability.
It’s a pretty sad commentary on the way our mainstream media cover Donald Trump that if you really want to know what Trump said at a given rally, you would be wasting your time going to The New York Times or The Washington Post and you really need to read Aaron Rupar.Who is Rupar? He’s a liberal Substacker and prolific tweeter who prints all the news The New York Times doesn’t deem fit to print. The latest case in point is Trump’s weekend rally at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin—an appropriately named venue for a speech in which Trump was barking out hatred and bile like a mad dog.
If you’re the sort of person really steeped in campaign coverage, you may have read about what went down; if you missed it, spoiler alert: Trump said something at this rally so insane and offensive that even the Times finally roused itself to cover it. Trump called Kamala Harris “mentally disabled” and added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.”
That statement, whatever else we might call it, was obviously news, so the Times couldn’t help leading with it. Ditto the Post, which decided to produce a story that emphasized Trump’s violation of politically correct manners. The Post piece quoted a mental health advocate scolding Trump for his insensitive language—as if what he said was offensive only to people struggling with mental illness!
Meanwhile, here are some other things Trump said at the rally, which you had to read Rupar’s X feed to know about.
“These people are animals” (referring to migrants).
“I will liberate Wisconsin from ...
CONTINUED
... “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me *"
unless Trump / Vance win the election
* Statue of Liberty
note:
Trump / Vance may not be a xenophobic as portrayed in the press. Trump / Vance actually favor immigrant populations. Doubt it? Find some Wisconsin residents Trump / Vance seek electoral support from this November. How many of them are fluent in Ojibwe?
Shiftless2
Well-known member
Just so you know, the grift is out of control
Inspirational candor. Thanks RF.
If he's genuinely self-deluded Trump may consider it merchandising. Trump sells $7 hats for $50.
It's the inevitable outcome of a sociopath living life by the "the ends justify the means" standard.
US Supreme Court considers legality of Biden's 'ghost guns' restrictions
By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel / October 8, 20249:25 AM GMT-5- 'Ghost guns' now feature regularly in crimes nationwide
- Manufacturers and gun rights groups challenged rule
- Supreme Court rejected 'bump stocks' ban in June
The administration is appealing a lower court's decision declaring that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority in issuing the rule targeting parts and kits for ghost guns, which can be purchased online and quickly assembled at home.
Shiftless2
Well-known member
In other words, he doesn't want Harris (or Biden) getting any credit for providing aid before or after the storms
abcnews.go.com
You'd think that he and his team could at least co-ordinate their stories. From the article
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis refused call from VP Kamala Harris about hurricane aid: Source
DeSantis believed the call was politically motivated, a source said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis refused call from VP Kamala Harris about hurricane aid: Source
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has refused to take a call with Vice President Kamala Harris about Hurricane Milton, a source close to the governor told ABC News.
abcnews.go.com
You'd think that he and his team could at least co-ordinate their stories. From the article
Alright.
I'm w/ "Ron DeSanctimonious" [R-FL] here.
"Politically motivated"? The U.S. presidency is an elected position. Even those that lose the vote but gain the office, Trump for example, are politicians.
Whether VP Harris' outreach was partisan, a separate issue. Would it matter to the recipients of disaster relief in Florida?
Even if so, so what? Governor DeSantis [R] would deny those in his State in greatest need, because of Gov. DeSantis' own political aversion? Which of those two is worse? *
Kemp praises Biden’s Hurricane Helene response amid Trump criticism
by Brett Samuels - 09/30/24 5:27 PM ETGeorgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) expressed his appreciation for the role the federal government has played in responding to Hurricane Helene, contradicting comments from former President Trump, who claimed during a Monday visit to the state that Kemp had trouble reaching President Biden.
Kemp and White House officials confirmed Monday that Biden spoke to the governor on Sunday to offer support as the state sorts through the damage from Hurricane Helene.
“He just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Kemp told reporters of his call with Biden. “And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We will work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which, I appreciate that. But we’ve had FEMA embedded with us since, you know, a day or two before the storm hit.”
* If DeSantis were bobbing in the waves mid-ocean when a yachting man happened by, would DeSantis ask the yachtsman / would be rescuer: "Are you Republican or Democrat?"
If DeSantis wouldn't be that choosy over his own rescue, why so for those subject to his governorship?
Shiftless2
Well-known member
From my FB feed
October 6, 2024 (Sunday)
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.
Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”
They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.
Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.
But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States... encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,... [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”
But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.
In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.
Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.
Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.
Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.
Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.
Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.
Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.
They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.
But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.
Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.
October 6, 2024 (Sunday)
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.
Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”
They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.
Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.
But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States... encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,... [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”
But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.
In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.
Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.
Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.
Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.
Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.
Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.
Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.
They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.
But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.
Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.
- uh oh -
Some may dismiss the following question as too technical, or a "fine point of law".
It appears such foreign intervention, exploitation of our First Amendment to alter a U.S. presidential election, may go against the legitimate wishes of the People, the U.S. electorate.
We might speculate such foreign involvement / interference is intended to promote Trump's election to a second term.
The question is, legally, is Trump culpable? Or is implausible deniability enough to spare Trump legal repercussion?
Opinion
Fox News Is Having to Fact-Check Its Own Anchors on Hurricane Lies
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling / Wed, October 9, 2024“You have DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying FEMA is running out of money and going bankrupt,” Hannity said Tuesday night. “Bankrupt? This has not been a busy hurricane season. This happened to FEMA—FEMA directed more than $1 billion to pay for housing and food for Harris-Biden illegal immigrants.”
“Because this story looks really bad for Democrats in charge, they are trying to just outright lie to you and pretend this is misinformation. This is a deepfake statement by conservatives. Well, it’s also on the FEMA website,” Hannity continued, providing no visual evidence of such claims. “It’s completely truthful, it’s completely real.”
But Hannity’s source doesn’t jibe with information that circulated even inside the conservative media behemoth. A fact sheet produced by conservatives on the House Appropriations Committee, obtained by Fox, revealed that FEMA “has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton,” reported Fox News’s senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram.
Fox News Is Having to Fact-Check Its Own Anchors on Hurricane Lies
Sean Hannity drilled down on Donald Trump’s hurricane conspiracies just minutes after a Fox reporter debunked them.
Question for undecided voters:
If this vast Trump conspiracy is willing to lie like this merely to gain political control
just what do you suppose they're prepared to do once they do?