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):
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.
