As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
We know this is coming. So, in the spirit of forewarned is forearmed, McKay Coppins has an excellent report on the disinformation campaign to re- elect dangerous dolt Donald "Impeached Forever" Trump, starting with how clicking "like" on the Trump campaign Facebook page opened a Pandora's box of alternative reality:
I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.Because we know this social media strategy bleeds into the "mainstream media's" coverage, the effects are multiplied many times over, to audiences that would otherwise not have any exposure to Trump's campaign ads. Trump's stooges will be deploying every weapon in their arsenal to maintain power for this loathsome creature and his enablers. The Democratic Party is the only institution standing in the way of a president- for- life Trump. A failure to recognize and aggressively combat this disinformation strategy would be the most consequential case of political malpractice in our nation's history. Coppins concludes:
The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.Forewarned is forearmed.
On a more positive note, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, who nailed the results of the 2018 midterm elections, has a prediction for 2020:
[A]nd today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.Sure, there will be Republican voter suppression and the aforementioned fire hose of lies, likely on an unprecedented scale. But Bitecofer believes the threat Trump poses to the Republic is the unique motivating and unifying factor that will produce what wins elections, regardless of the Democratic nominee: turnout.
Anytime you hear Trump boasting about "his" economy, remember this:
President Donald Trump has always exaggerated the strength of his jobs record, claiming to have brought about an unprecedented hiring boom when, in fact, payrolls have been growing at a somewhat slower pace than they had been during Barack Obama’s final years in office. But it turns out, the reality of it was even weaker than the official data let on.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest batch of employment numbers, along with its annual benchmark revisions adjusting its estimates from prior months. Before, the government believed that the U.S. had added 223,000 jobs per month in 2018, the year that the GOP’s tax cuts and new, higher spending levels took effect. It has now lowered that estimate to 193,000 per month, a significant drop.
Here’s how this changes the story of the past few years. Based on the old numbers, it looked like Trump had inherited a steady economy but gave hiring a boost in 2018 through some deficit-fueled stimulus. Based on the new numbers, it looks like he inherited a steadily growing economy and didn’t do much at all. Trump’s deficits likely juiced employment growth a bit, while his trade war likely undercut it. (The Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes probably muted growth in 2018 a bit too.) In the end, the economy has added fewer jobs in every year of his presidency than it did during Obama’s final one. There never was much of a Trump bump.There are some good graphs at the link that illustrate the points.
On the Oscar beat, kudos to producers Barack and Michelle Obama for "American Factory", winner of the Best Documentary Feature (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert and Jeff Reichert):
Congrats to Julia and Steven, the filmmakers behind American Factory, for telling such a complex, moving story about the very human consequences of wrenching economic change. Glad to see two talented and downright good people take home the Oscar for Higher Ground’s first release. https://t.co/W4AZ68iWoY— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 10, 2020
Suck on that, Trump!
Finally, please check out Infidel 753's always- excellent link round- up for a much, much more comprehensive gathering of links to interesting posts from the last week. He does the curating, you get to enjoy.
