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The Lunatic and Dangerous Lies of the Political Right

Almost every word out of Donald Trump's mouth is either a lie or deliberate distortion of reality and a rejection of the objective truth.  Trump seeks to sow chaos and mistrust since he apparently believes it helps him politically and keeps the members of his MAGA base stirred up and, I'm sure he hopes, sending money they can ill afford to his campaign.  But Trump has plenty of assistance when it comes to spreading lies and untruth as he and far right elements seek to sow mistrust and to erode the nation's institutions - e.g., JD Vance's lies about Haitian immigrants.  What is equally disturbing is the willingness of the MAGA base and those who obtain their "news" from Fox News and other propaganda right wing sites to believe the most outlandish and insane conspiracy theories and GOP lies that on their face are so ridiculous that they should be rejected by thinking individuals. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the lies, conspiracy stories and misinformation deliberately disseminated by the politic right and difficulty in getting the MAGA cultist to look at objective facts.  In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign we can expect even more extremism and lies flowing from Trump and his acolytes.  Here are column excerpts:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue.

Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times.

The result of this fearmongering is what you might expect. Angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees. According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an extremism-research group, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,” including “calls to send militias to face down FEMA.” The study also found that 30 percent of the X posts analyzed by ISD “contained overt anti-Semitic hate . .  .

Online, first responders are pleading with residents, asking for their help to combat the flood of lies and conspiracy theories. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said that the volume of misinformation could hamper relief efforts. “If it creates so much fear that my staff doesn’t want to go out in the field, then we’re not going to be in a position where we can help people,” she said in a news conference on Tuesday.

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not.

This has all been building for more than a decade. On The Colbert Report, back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which he defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world..

[T]he vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview.

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. . . . . people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

In one sense, these attacks—and their increased desperation—make sense. The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era, one that will reverberate to Election Day and beyond. Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.

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November’s Second-Most-Important Election Is in Florida

A piece in the New York Times by a "pro-life" advocate rightly calls Florida's abortion referendum perhaps the second most important election next moth.  Sadly, the author fails to grasp that Florida's six week abortion ban is but a part of the white Christian nationalists effort to force their religious beliefs on all Americans. If this element of the GOP/MAGA base successfully defends the Florida ban, gay rights and even contraception are next on the agenda, along with efforts to further restrict the voting non-whites.  Florida has been in the forefront of this forced imposition of Christofascist beliefs on all be it in the form of the abortion ban, "don't say gay" laws and efforts to erase anything this reactionary element deems "woke."  Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis and the Republican controlled legislature have allowed the Florida home insurance framework come to near collapse (it may yet collapse after Hurricanes Helene and Milton) while pushing a culture war agenda.  Ironically, the GOP, Trump and MAGA world bleat incessantly about "freedom" but the ugly reality is that this brand of freedom is only available for some: white, heterosexual male evangelical Christians.  Women, gays, and everyone else have their rights and bodily autonomy subjected to Bronze Age beliefs and and desires for a resurgent white supremacy.  Despite the exceptions in the Florida abortion ban, the law is basically a forced birth law and the children born as a result are then treated as disposable garbage by the political right unless they are white and born into evangelical households.  This reality is anything but "pro-life" - something the author fails or refuses to see.  Here are column excerpts:

I believe that the second-most-important election of 2024 is the Florida contest over Amendment 4, a ballot measure that would enshrine a right to abortion in the Florida Constitution.

The text of the amendment is broad: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.” And it is aimed straight at what I believe to be one of the most reasonable pro-life laws in the nation.

Florida’s Heartbeat Protection Act bans abortions if the gestational age of the fetus is over six weeks, but it also contains exceptions for pregnancies that are a result of rape, incest or human trafficking; for fatal fetal abnormality; and to preserve the life of the mother or “avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”

Properly interpreted (problems interpreting pro-life laws have tragically led to too many terrible incidents), this is not a law that leaves women vulnerable to dangerous pregnancy complications.

Any electoral collision between pro-life and pro-choice laws is consequential, but this one is far more consequential than most. The pro-life movement is defending a well-drafted law in a red state and confronting an amendment that would largely restore the legal regime that existed before Dobbs.

[T]he deck is also stacked in favor of Florida’s abortion restrictions. In Florida, state constitutional amendments need a 60 percent supermajority to pass, and the DeSantis administration is aggressively opposing the amendment. Too aggressively, in fact. The Florida Department of Health recently sent letters threatening criminal prosecution to television stations it claimed were broadcasting misleading advertisements in favor of Amendment 4.

This was an absurd and dangerous overreach. The answer to a misleading ad isn’t criminal prosecution, but rather a competing ad calling out the misrepresentation.

If the pro-life movement can’t win more than 40 percent of the vote in a red state when its popular governor (he won re-election by more than 19 points) is all-in defending the heartbeat law, then where can it win? And if Donald Trump carries the state while the heartbeat law goes down to defeat, won’t that simply reaffirm the Trump Republican pivot away from defending the unborn?

[I]f Amendment 4 prevails, it will raise a question: Where can the pro-life movement prevail? After its legal victory in the Supreme Court with Dobbs, does it now face a long, slow defeat if pro-life laws fall one by one even in Red America? Will it be reduced to a rump movement, ignored by both national parties and relegated to a desperate defense of the few remaining abortion restrictions in the most deep-red states?

The outcome of the election is uncertain. . . . . a New York Times/Siena College poll indicated that 46 percent of likely Florida voters would vote for Amendment 4, 38 percent would vote against it, and 16 percent were undecided or wouldn’t say how they’ll vote.

Florida is not the only state voting on an abortion-related ballot measure this year. Arizona, Missouri, and South Dakota also face ballot initiatives attempting to overturn abortion restrictions and several other states are voting on measures designed to establish a right to an abortion. But none of those contests are as important, electorally or culturally, as Florida.

The right under Trump had become so vicious that it was losing the ability to win hearts and minds. Its hatred of its enemies contradicts the spirit of love that should animate the argument for life.

No serious pro-life activist thought that overturning Roe would mean that New York or California would suddenly become pro-life. Yet now the pro-life movement is losing in states that it should win, and it’s lost the national Republican Party — at least so long as Trump remains in charge.

Unless popular momentum is reversed, the United States may end up with an abortion regime that is more permissive than when Roe was in effect. Broad ballot measures will have swept away even the modest restrictions that existed under Roe.

There is a certain irony at work. Hard-nosed politics, including the Senate maneuvers that blocked Merrick Garland’s confirmation in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency while confirming Amy Coney Barrett mere days before the 2020 election, helped create the court that overturned Roe, but that same political aggression is alienating the voters necessary to secure legal protections for the unborn.

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The Atlantic: The Case for Kamala Harris

I remain unable to grasp how some friends and acquaintances who I have always thought of being decent, moral people can support Donald Trump.  Supporting Trump and true morality are mutually exclusive in my view.  Some I suspect are willing to sell their souls in the quest for lower taxes - the husband and I pay plenty in taxes ourselves, so I'm not adverse to lower taxes  - but the reality is that Trump's proposed further tax cuts would not benefit most middle class and upper middle class voters and would only benefit the very wealthy , leaving most of us paying a higher percentage tax rate than the very rich.  For others, I fear the motivation for supporting Trump is more sinister and stems from toxic racism even though these people would try to claim otherwise.  Neither group seems at all concerned about the manner in which Trump and his extremists circle of advisors would shred democracy and roll back decades of social progress. For all of these people and those amazingly still on the fence as to how to vote, The Atlantic lays out an endorsement of Kamala Harris that ultimately makes the case that voting for Harris is the act of responsible citizens and a first step in repairing the nation's political landscape. . Here are highlights from The Atlantic's endorsement of Harris: 

For the third time in eight years, Americans have to decide whether they want Donald Trump to be their president. No voter could be ignorant by now of who he is. Opinions about Trump aren’t just hardened—they’re dried out and exhausted. The man’s character has been in our faces for so long, blatant and unchanging, that it kills the possibility of new thoughts, which explains the strange mix of boredom and dread in our politics. Whenever Trump senses any waning of public attention, he’ll call his opponent a disgusting name, or dishonor the memory of fallen soldiers, or threaten to overturn the election if he loses, or vow to rule like a dictator if he wins. He knows that nothing he says is likely to change anyone’s views.

Almost half the electorate supported Trump in 2016, and supported him again in 2020. This same split seems likely on November 5. Trump’s support is fixed and impervious to argument. This election, like the last two, will be decided by an absurdly small percentage of voters in a handful of states.

Because one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history was on the ballot, The Atlantic endorsed Trump’s previous Democratic opponents—only the third and fourth endorsements since the magazine’s founding, in 1857. We endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860 (though not, for reasons lost to history, in 1864). One hundred and four years later, we endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson for president. In 2016, we endorsed Hillary Clinton for more or less the same reason Johnson won this magazine’s endorsement in 1964. Clinton was a credible candidate who would have made a competent president, but we endorsed her because she was running against a manifestly unstable and incompetent Republican nominee. The editors of this magazine in 1964 feared Barry Goldwater less for his positions than for his zealotry and seeming lack of self-restraint.

Of all Trump’s insults, cruelties, abuses of power, corrupt dealings, and crimes, the event that proved the essential rightness of the endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden took place on January 6, 2021, when Trump became the first American president to try to overturn an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme. Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. “We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,” the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.

[W]e know a few things for sure [about Harris]. Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her. 

This endorsement will not be controversial to Trump’s antagonists. Nor will it matter to his supporters. But to the voters who don’t much care for either candidate, and who will decide the country’s fate, it is not enough to list Harris’s strengths or write a bill of obvious particulars against Trump. The main reason for those ambivalent Americans to vote for Harris has little to do with policy or partisanship. It’s this: Electing her and defeating him is the only way to release us from the political nightmare in which we’re trapped and bring us to the next phase of the American experiment.

Trump isn’t solely responsible for this age of poisonous rhetoric, hateful name-calling, conspiracies and lies, divided families and communities, cowardly leaders and deluded followers—but as long as Trump still sits atop the Republican Party, it will not end. His power depends on lowering the country into a feverish state of fear and rage where Americans turn on one another. For the millions of alienated and politically homeless voters who despise what the country has become and believe it can do better, sending Trump into retirement is the necessary first step.

If you’re a conservative who can’t abide Harris’s tax and immigration policies, but who is also offended by the rottenness of the Republican Party, only Trump’s final defeat will allow your party to return to health—then you’ll be free to oppose President Harris wholeheartedly. Like you, we wish for the return of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, a party animated by actual ideas. We believe that American politics are healthiest when vibrant conservative and liberal parties fight it out on matters of policy.

If you’re a progressive who thinks the Democratic Party is a tool of corporate America, talk to someone who still can’t forgive themselves for voting for Ralph Nader in 2000—then ask yourself which candidate, Harris or Trump, would give you any leverage to push for policies you care about.

And if you’re one of the many Americans who can’t stand politics and just want to opt out, remember that under democracy, inaction is also an action; that no one ever has clean hands; and that, as our 1860 editorial said, “nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers.” In other words, voting is a right that makes you responsible.

Trump is the sphinx who stands in the way of America entering a more hopeful future. In Greek mythology, the sphinx killed every traveler who failed to answer her riddle, until Oedipus finally solved it, causing the monster’s demise. The answer to Trump lies in every American’s hands. Then he needs only to go away.

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