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Jamelle Bouie: JD Vance Should Resign in Shame!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
9

Despite the debunking of the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, despite the story becoming a national joke, JD Vance continues to peddle it. Vance is a senator from Ohio, meaning that he is hurling insults at people he supposedly represents.

Jamelle Bouie is a regular columnist for the New York Times.

If Senator JD Vance of Ohio had a moral compass, a shred of decency or a belief in anything other than his own ambition and will-to-power, he would resign his Senate seat effective immediately, leave the presidential race and retire from public life, following a mournful apology for his ethical transgressions.

As it stands, Vance has done none of the above, which is why he is still, as of today, using his position in the United States Senate and on the Republican Party presidential ticket to spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.

The main impact of those lies and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats” — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.

On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.

“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued. “Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.”

This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. “Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,” Vance said on Friday. “We should talk about it every day.”

The “humanitarian crisis,” it should be said, is the revitalization of Springfield after years of decline. Haitian immigrants have filled jobs, bought homes and filled city coffers with property and sales taxes. And while there are growing pains from the sudden influx of new residents, the charge that Haitian immigrants have, in Vance’s words, brought a “massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates and crime” is false. He is lying about people, the very people he swore an oath to represent, in ways that will inspire additional threats of violence and may well bring physical harm to the community.

Categories Elections, Fake, Hoax, Immigration, Lies, Ohio, Vance, J.D.

Margaret Sullivan on “Sanewashing” Trump

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2024 //
119

Margaret Sullivan is an experienced journalist who previously served as the Public Editor (ombudsman) of The New York Times. She now has a blog, where she writes about the media.

In this post, she explains the phenomenon called “sanewashing.” What is this term? It’s recently invented, presumably in reaction to current events. It refers to framing a news story to describe an incoherent rant as a thoughtful policy discussion.

She writes:

Like whitewashing a fence, sanewashing a speech covers a multitude of problems. The Urban Dictionary definition: Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public … a portmanteau of “sane” plus “whitewashing.”

Here, as an example, is a Politico news alert that summarizes a recent Trump speech: “Trump laid out a sweeping vision of lower taxes, higher tariffs and light-touch regulation in a speech to top Wall Streets execs today.” As writer Thor Benson quipped on Twitter: “I hope the press is this nice to me if I ever do a speech where no one can tell if I just had a stroke or not.”

Trump has become more incoherent as he has aged, but you wouldn’t know it from most of the press coverage, which treats his utterances as essentially logical policy statements — a “sweeping vision,” even.

After the intense media focus on Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, you would think Trump’s apparent decline would be a preoccupation. He is 78, after all, and often incoherent. But with rare exceptions, that hasn’t happened.

I will give the Washington Post some credit here for the way it covered the speech mentioned above, specifically his answer to a question about how he would fund child care.

“Trump offers confusing plan to pay for U.S. child care with foreign tariffs,” the headline said. But many others, including the New York Times, sanewashed what he said, which went like this:

“Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, who was so impactful on that issue … But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’ve talking about because the childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”

And then he went on to say that his idea of tariffs on China will take care of the cost of pretty much everything, which might remind you of how he claims deporting immigrants will pay for affordable housing.

Sweeping vision, you say?

But why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

And it’s also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That’s often a good thing; it’s part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Fake, Language, Lies, Trump

John Thompson: How the Media Should Cover Trump

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2024 //
53

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian, has pondered how the media should cover Trump. He lies with such frequency that his lies are barely worth mentioning, whereas any error or overstatement by Harris or Walz is a news story. For instance, CNN’s Dana Bash questioned Governor Tim Walz about a 1995 drunk driving arrest and how he characterized it in his campaign for Congress in 2006. The media doesn’t have to ransack through Trump’s statements to find a lie from nearly two decades ago. Just listen to whatever he said today. He still claims that he won the 2020 election, without any evidence.

Thompson writes:

This post began as a nuanced response to the USA Today’s fact-checking conclusion that “Project 2025 is a political playbook created by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups, not Trump, who said he disagrees with elements of the effort.” Although the USA Today acknowledged the role of “numerous people involved in Project 2025 who worked in Trump’s first administration,” it failed in fact-checking Trump’s statement that, “I know nothing about Project 2025.”

Neither did it challenge the Heritage Foundation’s claim that this was just a plan for the next conservative President, as opposed to Trump!?!?

When I read Diane Ravitch’s reposting of Dan Rather’s Don’t Believe Donald Trump, I knew that now there is no need for the nuance I planned. Rather cited the CNN video of Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, and a key author of Project 2025, who was recorded on a hidden camera.

Rather linked to the video, posted on CNN, when “Vought described the project as the ‘tip of the America First spear.’ He said that after meeting with Trump in recent months, the former president ‘is very supportive of what we do.’” 

Vought also said that Trump’s current attempts to disassociate himself from Project 2025 are “just politics,” and “distancing himself from a brand.” He said Trump is “very supportive” of their efforts and has raised money for “us.”

In other words, it is clear that Rather is correct in saying, “I cannot state it strongly enough: Project 2025, with Donald Trump at the helm, is the greatest existential threat to American democracy in recent history.”

But, but as Trump and his allies continue to double-down on lies, the need to converse with journalists about how they fact-check and report on MAGA-ism will continue and, perhaps, become more complicated. And that gets me back to discussing USA Today’s fact-check as a case study in journalism’s norms during this crisis. As Slate wrote:

Of all Trump’s recent lies, his attempted dissociation with Project 2025 may be the most important—because he’s trying to convince the American people that the choice between dictatorship and democracy that they face is not before them at all.

Being a former academic historian, I believe journalists should consider how a historian would fact-check this issue, covering the recent history of Trump and the Heritage Foundation, as well decades of rightwing propaganda seeking to reduce government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” and the history of Edward R. Murrow standing up for democracy in 1954.

At a minimum, the history of Trumpism and of “astro-turf” think tanks over the last half-century, should have reversed the burden of proof for fact-checking; given that history, fact-checkers would have had to first show evidence substantiating Trump’s and his allies’ claims.

I would then recommend a 2016 Columbia Journalism Review analysis by David Mindich, For Journalists Covering Trump, a Murrow Moment. Mindich starts in 1954 with Murrow’s “now-famous special report condemning Joseph McCarthy.” Murrow said that McCarthy”: 

Didn’t create this situation of fear–he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. … This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, … “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Mindich then explains that “American journalistic goals of detachment and objectivity are long held.” They made a good trade-off, “Journalists would avoid taking sides, and they would be given access to newsmakers–and news consumers–from both parties.” He then praised journalists who moved beyond “the usual practice of studied balance” to reveal the threatening nature of Trump. Moreover, it is time for “mainstream journalists to abandon their detachment … when a politician’s words go way beyond the pale.”

In the last eight years, Trump has gone farther and farther beyond the lines of democracy. And in the next few months, his rhetoric (and that of his supporters) is likely to go more dangerously beyond the pale. And as Mindich wrote, “journalists have been more likely to become advocates when they see others, like politicians and protesters, speaking loudly in dissent.”

So, we must join together and commit to Murrow’s principles in our fight for democracy.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Tucker Carlson Interviews Holocaust Denier

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2024 //
25

Tucker Carlson lost his popular show on FOX News, but he now has a podcast on Elon Musk’s Twitter platform (X). Recently he invited a Holocaust Denier to appear on his show.

This is personal to me because every member of my extended family in Europe was murdered. As a child in Houston, I remember meeting people who had a blue tattoo on their arm–a string of numbers. They were survivors, and they told stories and wrote books about the atrocities they saw and experienced. In fact, there are countless videos taken by the Nazis to document the atrocities that Holocaust Deniers now claim are fiction.

It’s one of the strange ironies of our time that right wingers like Tucker Carlson now look sympathetically on fascists like Viktor Orban of Hungary and dictators like Putin. Carlson scored an exclusive interview with Putin and visited a supermarket to showcase the quality of life in Moscow. Trump praises Putin and the dictators of China and North Korea.

Who is Darryl Cooper? I looked him up on Google. Checked Wikipedia. I could find no evidence that he had gone to college. He is no historian.

Then I found historian Niall Ferguson’s commentary, which he called “The Return of Anti-History.”

He wrote:

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none. 

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.” 

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history. 

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism. 

Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, was taken aback by Carlson’s latest foray into historical revisionism.

She wrote:

This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast (and newsletter) called “Martyr Made,” considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.

This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.

Long before 4Chan existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers, in an early 1990s speech, to break through the “appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by being aggressively tasteless. “You’ve got to say things like: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,’” he said.

Until quite recently, American conservatives mostly maintained antibodies against Irving-style disinformation. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride at America’s role in it and viewed Hitler as metaphysically wicked. Rather than recognizing the way right-wing politics, taken to extremes, could shade into National Socialism, they would hurl Nazi comparisons at the left, as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”

[Jonah] Goldberg’s approach was dishonest, but it was representative of a broad antifascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies

Wow! Trump Admits That He Lost the 2020 Election!

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2024 //
11

During an interview on a podcast, Trump let slip that he lost the 2020 election. He claimed he lost the election “by a whisker.” In fact, he lost the popular election by 7 million votes. Perhaps he was thinking of the electoral vote, which he might have won if a few thousand votes in battleground states like Georgia had gone his way.

Nonetheless, he has falsely claimed for almost four years that he won in 2020 but the Democrats stole the election. Logic suggests that the party in power has the means to “rig” an election. He was in power. Republicans controlled Georgia, and Trump lost there.

He lost. He admitted it. Maybe it just slipped out. But he told the truth. For once.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump

Elon Musk Posts Fake Image of Kamala in Communist Uniform

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2024 //
13

Twitter (X) has few rules but one of them bars fake images.

X belongs to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. He can do whatever he wants on X. Rules are for others. So he did.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, on Monday posted a fake image of what appears to be Vice President Kamala Harris dressed in a red communist uniform.

“Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, in response to the vice president’s post warning about Trump being a “dictator on day one.”

According to X’s policy, users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm. … In addition, we may label posts containing misleading media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide additional context.”

Musk’s post does not have any such label on it.

Last month, Trump posted a fake, AI-generated image depicting Harris speaking in front of a communist symbol at the Democratic National Convention. 

The least trustworthy tweets are those posted by Musk.

Categories Billionaires, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Media

The Status Kuo: Why Tim Walz Drives MAGAts Crazy

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2024 //
16

I wrote a post on Monday about the relentless GOP attacks on Tim Walz and his wife. They claim his 34 years of service in the National Guard was tarnished; they say he’s not really a coach; they say he and his wife are left wing radicals; they say the Walz family is worth almost $200 million; they say Tim is possibly a spy for China. All lies. Trumpian lies.

In his blog The Status Kuo, Jay Kuo explains why the GOP is aiming their insults at Walz, not Kamala, and why it’s a good thing.

He writes:

There’s a strange phenomenon occurring with the terminally online right. Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris announced that Gov. Tim Walz would be her running mate, many of the right have acted with fury. They’ve attempted to “Swift Boat” his 24-year service record in the Army National Guard. They’ve called him a racist for talking about “white guy tacos.” And they’ve drudged up a nearly 30-year old DUI—for which he took accountability and after which he stopped drinking altogether—to prove he’s somehow not so perfect a role model.

What they haven’t been able to do is make any of this stick. And yet, Walz continues to draw fire, which could otherwise have been directed at Harris.

In other words, Walz is turning out to be a shrewd pick. At net 11 points positive favorability in polls, Walz is immensely more popular than his counterpart on the GOP ticket, JD Vance, who is underwater by nine. And as they continue to rail against him, the right keeps making his fundamental point about them: They are just really weird.

In today’s piece, I explore some theories about why Walz brings out the worst impulses of the right just by being who he is. Then I’ll lay down some political tarot cards and prognosticate about where I think this leads.

Politico Uno Reverse

By most identity measures, Walz should be one of the MAGA right. He’s a midwestern white dude in his late 50s. He loves to hunt and is a sharpshooter. He served for decades in the military and achieved the highest enlisted rank of Command Sergeant Major. He was a football coach who helped lead his team to the state championship.

And yet, despite all these identity markings, Walz in an unabashed progressive. He is for reproductive rights and an ally and protector of gay teens. And there isn’t a bigoted bone in his body. It’s as if when Harris picked him, she played, as writer Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman succinctly described it, a “political uno reverse.” The Walz card threw it right back at them, as if to say, “I’m a guy just like you, but without any of the weird baggage.”

The MAGA GOP’s base is supposed to include white guys like Walz. But here is living evidence that they don’t have all of them or the best of them. That’s why they’re so eager to discredit him, because if they don’t, as psychologist Julie Hotard notes, then Walz will stand instead as a model of what is possible. On many levels, an appealing, white, male Democrat is a far bigger threat to their sense of identity than even a biracial woman candidate for president.

The 2004 playbook

All this helps explain why Republicans have trained their fire upon Walz and are so determined to sink him. To do so, they tried an old play that Walz and the Harris team saw coming for miles.

In an election 20 years ago, Republican dirty trickster and campaign strategist Chris LaCivita created the “Swift Boat” controversy to tarnish John Kerry’s otherwise unblemished military record. It was character assassination from a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and it worked—even though there was no basis in fact for any of it. As NPR recently summarized,

“Their accusations are widely understood to be false. Military records (released by Kerry’s campaign) backed up his combat claims. And while most of the swift boat veterans who spoke out against Kerry did not serve with him directly, the ones who did publicly supported his version of events….The swift boating undercut Kerry’s momentum coming out of the Democratic National Convention, and turned one of his greatest strengths into a liability….“

Now LaCivita is back as senior advisor to the Trump reelection campaign, as are attempts to impugn the military record of Walz, another veteran turned politician. The Trump campaign claimed, for example, that Walz resigned from the military in order to avoid the fighting in Iraq, making him a coward with “stolen valor,” but the timeline doesn’t match up. Walz retired months before his unit received any deployment orders to active duty overseas.

This time, however, Democrats were ready for the bad faith attacks, and reporters (outside of the Fox ecosystem anyway) appeared unwilling to take the bait. So far, the swiftboating of Walz is fading fast from the headlines.

Attacking Mr. Nice Guy

For the past two decades, the GOP has shifted markedly toward being a party of cruelty, of “owning” the libs and drinking their tears, and of being as unpleasant and in-your-face as they can be. That kind of behavior has been rewarded with appearances on Fox and other right wing media, fundraising dollars from the MAGA base, and a spot at the side or in the tweets of the ex-president himself.

As author Patrick S. Tomlinson observed, Walz represents what shouldn’t be an extraordinary notion: that you can be a nice guy, supportive of women, embracing of gay people, and still be all the coded masculine ideals of soldier, football coach, hunter and father that the MAGA right believed it had a lock on. Plus, you can be all those things without ever asking weird questions about menstrual cycles, chromosomes and genitalia.

The right even tried to make a big deal about Walz’s efforts as governor to ensure free tampons were available to girls in school. Rumors circulated that schools had been required to also put tampons in boys’ bathrooms, but those claims turned out to be untrue, while demonstrating how off kilter the right becomes over sexuality and gender. The “Tampon Tim” moniker didn’t stick. On the contrary, there are probably many moms and dads grateful for a governor like Walz who is thinking about their daughters’ needs.

For a party accustomed to attacking its enemies, the GOP is now at a loss over how exactly to attack Walz next. Their latest meltdown over his “racist” comment about eating “white guy tacos” exposed them further as the very “snowflakes” they decry, delicate creatures who don’t understand the basic difference between racism and self-deprecation. And really, don’t they have anything better to do than whine about one of their own making a joke about spice tolerance levels? It’s all very silly, but also bogs them down in their own angry stew. 

And in that obsession to bring him down, the right is walking right into Harris’s trap. Every day that Walz draws their attention is one more day Harris moves closer to the presidency end zone, without anyone getting close enough to tackle her. For his part, Walz appears perfectly happy to distract her would-be assailants.

It’s a play an experienced and successful defensive coach like Walz would appreciate.

The fact is that the GOP hasn’t figured out how to attack Kamala without being racist or misogynistic. Trump has called her “Laughing Kamala,” “Crooked Kamala,” “Lying Kamala,” but none of his schoolyard bully taunts has stuck. He has said she is “low IQ” and the “worst Vice-President in history,” but that didn’t stick either. He also called her a “communist,” but no one takes him seriously. So the empty headed MAGA crowd sticks with “Tampon Tim,” which assumes that none of them have teenage daughters. The girls are grateful to Governor Walz.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Fake News, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump, Walz, Tim

Trump Claims That Democrats Staged a Coup by Replacing Biden

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2024 //
56

At the time of the Republican Convention, Trump felt sure he was on his way to a landslide victory. He had centered his campaign on the theme that Biden was senile. The attack ads were ready to roll. But only days after the lights were turned off in Milwaukee, Biden announced that he was stepping aside, and he endorsed his Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Trump was furious. How dare Biden decide not to run! Trump began to claim that what the Democrats had done was “unconstitutional” and that it was a “coup.”

Biden was pressured by party leaders to withdraw because, after his awful performance in the June debate, they feared that not only would he lose but he would hurt the chances of Democrats running for other offices. The switch at the top was unprecedented but was certainly not unconstitutional. The nation’s political parties are not even mentioned in the Constitution. They make their own rules. But facts never get in Trump’s way.

Trump continues to insist that there was a “coup,” and some in the media believe he’s setting up the basis for another violent attempt to restore him to power. His most rabid followers believe whatever he says, and this article by Colby Itkowitz and Hannah Allan in the Washington Post shows that they now believe that Harris’s substitution for Biden was illegitimate, intended to cheat Trump of the Presidency yet again.

The article reminds us that Trump predicted that the election in 2016 was rigged, that the election in 2020 was rigged, and now he’s back to the same bogus claim. The only election results he accepts as valid are his own wins.

They write:

From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the surprise Democratic presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump began arguing that she was anointed through a “coup” rather than chosen by primary voters. After barely mentioning election integrity at the Republican convention in July, Trump is now casting the upcoming election as “rigged” against him and baselessly labeling any hurdle in his path as election interference.

“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday, referring to Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. He later added: “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in this year’s election are reminiscent of the tactics he used in the 2020 campaign and indicate how he could again seek to delegitimize the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency, election and national security experts said.

“This is Donald Trump’s playbook: ‘There’s a deep state, they’re all out to get me,’” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Trump administration and is now among his conservative critics. “Even here — as he’s going to have to face a stronger, harder candidate to defeat — his default is, ‘Well, this couldn’t possibly be legal. This is a coup. This is wrong,’ even though there are no facts to back that up.”

While some of this is “just for show,” Neumann said, Trump and his allies are also setting up the “next version of ‘Stop the Steal.’”

Trump has long insisted that his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power, and he has weakened faith in the U.S. election system despite widespread evidence that the results can be trusted. When asked to comment for this article, Trump’s campaign responded with a statement attacking Harris and again characterizing her nomination as part of a “coup.”

“President Trump and our campaign have never been more confident that we are going to win this election,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he falsely claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stole the Iowa caucuses, and he told his supporters that the general election was “absolutely being rigged” against him. After winning, he falsely said his loss in the popular vote was due to “millions of people who voted illegally.” In 2020, he baselessly claimed the influx of mail-in ballots amid the global pandemic led to widespread fraud that cost him the election, and as Congress gathered to certify the results, Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the process.

Trump refuses to say whether he will accept the results of the 2024 election, even as he tells his fans that the Democrats are cheating.

In an Aug. 6 post on Truth Social, Trump presented a fantastical story that envisioned Biden, “whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him,” crashing this week’s Democratic National Convention to take back the nomination.

“They forced him out. It was a coup. We had a coup,” Trump said of Biden at an Aug. 9 rally in Bozeman, Mont. “That was the first coup of the history of our country, and it was very successful.”

This post-election time will be different from January 6, 2021. If Trump calls up his Proud Boys and his other militias, D.C. will be prepared. And Trump will not be in charge.

Categories Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Trump

Right-Wingers Claim Tim Walz Was Not Really a Coach; GOP Investigates Whether He Is a Spy for China

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
27

Trump supporters are desperate. First, they attacked Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard because he retired to run for Congress at a time when his unit knew they might be deployed to Afghanistan in the next two years.

The Trump rumor mill has been working overtime to depict Walz and his wife as dangerous, leftwing radicals.

Snopes debunked a rightwing rumor that Tim and Gwen Walz have a net worth of $182 million and their daughter Hope got a student loan of $82,000 forgiven. In fact, the Walz family has a net worth made up of their pensions; they own no stocks or bonds. In 2023, they had a joint income of $299,000, with almost half coming from pensions. By contrast, Republican VP candidate J.P. Vance is a multimillionaire, with a net income of $1.2 million-$1.3 million in 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. Some Americans like the fact that Walz is not wealthy, says the WSJ, but others think he lacks the financial acumen of a wealthy man.

Now, says The New York Times, they say Walz wasn’t really a coach because he was not the head coach of the high school football team. Only the head coach, they claim, is a real coach. How petty can they be?

Meanwhile, hard–right Congressman James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced that his committee will investigate Walz because of his visits to China as an exchange student and as chaperone for student exchanges. Is he a spy?

All of this is a reflection of Republican desperation and Red-baiting.

Jess Bidgood, a reporter for the New York Times, asked her colleague Alan Blinder of the New York Times to explain whether Walz was really a coach:

Fact-checking questions about Walz’s role as a coach

A surprising argument has emerged from some right-wing circles: that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was not a high school football coach because he was his team’s defensive coordinator, not the head coach. I asked my colleague Alan Blinder, a font of football knowledge who wrote about Walz’s coaching career *and* answers my questions about sports whenever I have them, to explain what’s what.

Setting aside that assertion’s spuriousness for the moment, our reporting last week on Tim Walz as Coach Walz suggests just how comfortable he is with not being the top dog.

Rocky Almond, who coached basketball with Walz in Nebraska in the early 1990s, said that Walz had “been the supporting actor for his whole life,” recalling a trip to China that the future vice-presidential pick organized. Even though Walz was the group’s veteran Asia hand, Almond remembered a coach who never tried to seize command.

“He just was always in the background,” said Almond, who thought the vice presidency was “the perfect role” for his old colleague’s temperament.

“I think he had the intensity, but it was a positive energy,” said Jeff Tomlin, the Nebraska high school head football coach who brought Walz aboard to coach linebackers. “He was a very good assistant that way. As the head coach, you sometimes have to be an enforcer and really guard your culture and make hard decisions. As assistant, you want to be loyal to your head coach and back up your head coach, and he was all of those things.”

And as for that question of whether Walz should count as a coach at all? Some players on his Minnesota title-winning team still refer to him as “Coach Walz,” and football staffs are filled with specialty coaches who are, in fact, coaches with headsets and playbooks.

“Defensive coordinator is arguably the most important position on a coaching staff other than the head coach,” the ESPN commentator Paul Finebaum mused to me today. “You can’t win a game, let alone a state championship, without being able to stop someone.”

— Alan Blinder

Categories Character, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Republicans, Trump, Walz, Tim

The New Republic: Tim Walz Is the Best Antidote to the Poison and Lies of FOX News

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
45

I don’t know how any self-respecting journalist could work for FOX News. It offers a good job in a competitive industry, but why sell your soul to the devil? I have recently seen tweets by Megyn Kelly, viciously attacking Kamala Harris, and every time I do, I remember Trump saying of her in 2016, after the first GOP debate, that she had blood coming out of her orifices. Yet still she is his sycophant.

In The New Republic, Thom Hartmann writes that Tim Walz may be the perfect antidote to FOX’s vitriol. If you want to reprogram family members, introduce them to Tim Walz. He is a good man, a decent man, not a FOX liar.

Hartmann writes:

All across America families are in mourning: Their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the right-wing hate and rage machine.

Jen Senko produced a movie—The Brainwashing of My Dad—about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my radio show a few times, and her story is one replicated across America millions of times. Her father—a totally normal Midwestern guy—began watching Fox “News” when he retired, and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.

Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, is America’s intervention against the mind poison that Trump, Fox “News,” and right-wing hate radio have infected our nation with.

He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s veterans during his decade in Congress.

He used the G.I. bill to go to college, getting his master’s degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his school’s football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever.

He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.

He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start his school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.

No purchased bone-spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad, who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in World War II, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.

His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up J.D. Vance—with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals and birth rates and fealty to his billionaire patrons—for the weird guy that he is. He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multibillion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.

To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch in 1985 so Murdoch could legally purchase U.S. media properties; Reagan ordered the Federal Communications Commission to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.

In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting: Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times), former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Fox and Murdoch’s power in Australia came, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

It’s the same here. When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6 coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.

Along with its relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6—while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House adviser to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.

While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the right-wing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded right-wing hate.

So let the dad jokes begin!

As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’s head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door, and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”

And God willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be vice president of the United States.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Goodness, Lies, Walz, Tim
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