Bigotry Dominates the GOP and Fox News

Early in her career, Kay Cole James - now head of the Heritage Foundation - was involved in Virginia politics and we met back in my days of Republican activism.  For the most part she always came across as calm and level headed and nowhere near as strident as some in what was then considered the conservative wing of the GOP. Thus, it was interesting to see her statements after the death of George Floyd given that she has remained involved in a political party that is increasingly open in its racism, especially with an open white supremacist in the White House.  Of equal interest was the way in which her views and statements were basically trashed by Tucker Carlson - a vile individual in my view -  and many of the other talking heads on the network's propaganda channel not to mention across much of the GOP.  Michael Gerson (a former Republican) calls out Tucker and the GOP in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts: 

On the theory that decency and sanity are rare enough these days that they should be recognized, let us praise Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation.

James — the first African American and the first woman to head the conservative think tank — reacted to the “horrific and needless death” of George Floyd in Minneapolis by recalling the reality of racism in her own story, in a Facebook post that appeared directly after the killing.

“When your family has had crosses burned on their front lawns,” she said, “when your own children have been stopped and harassed by police because they were driving through a white neighborhood . . . when you sit up at night with all the normal fears any parent would have when their kids are out, but have to add to that worry that they may not make it home just because they are Black males.”

James asked, “How many more black people must die, and how many more times will statements of sympathy have to be issued? . . . How many more committees will have to be formed until America admits that racism is still a problem in this country? . . . It’s time America takes responsibility and expands human flourishing to all of its citizens — not just the majority of them.”

Carlson attacked James’s article as a “long scream denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation” and urged his listeners to stop sending funds to Heritage. This is what happens when the main media platform of American conservatism is dominated by bigotry.

James felt compelled to make her points because she is woman of faith and character. For a glimpse of what the total absence of faith and character looks like, see the Republican Party of Texas. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, a dozen elected leaders of the GOP wrote or retweeted racist memes and conspiracy theories. Comal County Republican Party Chair Sue Gafford Piner propagated the idea that philanthropist George Soros is funding a race war. Bexar County GOP Chair Cynthia Brehm suggested that Floyd’s death was staged to hurt President Trump’s reelection chances. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller wrote that the civil rights protesters are “domestic terrorists who were organized and paid for by George Soros.”

This is not the rejection of “political correctness”; it is the success of white supremacy in the Texas Republican Party. The GOP, in many places, has become an institution where leaders are elevated and groomed for cruelty and bigotry. This is what happens when the president of the United States normalizes racism and mainstreams ideological madness.

These habits of prejudice took root easily in the GOP, indicating a broad, preexisting disposition. If Republicans are ever to recover their moral balance, they will need to dispose of three pervasive assumptions.

[E]very abuser of rights is dismissed as one of a few bad apples — even when it is clear that some institutions (say, police forces or the Trump GOP) are engaged in the mass production of rotting fruit.

The second is the assumption of personal innocence — the belief that because an individual is not personally at fault for segregation, redlining and police abuses, he or she is not obligated to address their legacy. This amounts to a selfish rejection of the common good, as well as a denial of the Golden Rule.

The third is the assumption of historical irrelevance — the belief that if subjugation did not take place this morning, it is morally extraneous. This is a particularly absurd view for conservatives, given their traditional belief that the past has a powerful hold on the present. . . . this does not even start to cover the legacy of stolen labor, educational inequality and disenfranchisement.

There are many horrors in American racial history but also some powerful inspiration. It is extraordinary that a group of people who came to our country in chains came to understand the essence of Christianity and the essence of our country far better than their oppressors. You might even call it providential. And this should lead to an enduring lesson: America often sees itself more clearly through the eyes of the harassed and oppressed.

When one is black, Hispanic, gay or non-Christian, one must more more fully analyze and focus on what America should be given the reality that you cannot sit back and enjoy the level of societal privilege that goes with being white and heterosexual.  Your rights and safety are always at risk.

Watching Fox News May Be Harmful to Your Health

(Screenshot: Fox Business)

Personally, I have long viewed watching Fox News as a form of self-administered lobotomy given that studies have shown its viewers to be among the most poorly informed and its programming often consisting of propaganda rather than legitimate news. Now, in the age of Covid-19, a new study (which can be found here) suggests that watching Fox News may also be harmful to one's health and may literally endanger Fox viewers' lives but also the lives of others in their communities as Fox News viewers failed to accept the dangers of the pandemic and refuse to comply with social distancing, wearing masks, etc.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the study's findings which  also note the ties between support of Donald Trump and noncompliance with stay home orders and other heath precautions.  Here are article excerpts:

A new study produced by business school profs at Columbia and University of Chicago suggests that viewing Fox News is strongly correlated with ignoring social distancing guidance during the first weeks of the COVID19 epidemic and is in fact driving that non-compliance.

The researchers looked at geospatial data derived from anonymized cell phone data and cable channel position by ZIP code around the country. They found that a 1% increase in Fox News viewership in a zip code reduced social distancing by 8.9%.

The study abstract follows …

We test for and measure the effects of cable news in the US on regional differences in compliance with recommendations by health experts to practice social distancing during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of Fox News viewership on stay-at-home behavior by using only the incremental local viewership due to the quasi-random assignment of channel positions in a local cable line-up. The average partial effect of Fox News viewership in a zipcode implies that 1 percentage point increase in cable viewership reduces the propensity to stay at home by 8.9 percentage points compared to the prepandemic average.  We find a persuasion rate of Fox News on non-compliance with stay-at-home behavior during the crisis of about 33.5%-50% across our various social distancing metrics.

From reviewing the study it’s not entirely clear to me whether the persuasive effect of Fox News is demonstrated as opposed to the correlation. Fox News viewership is a marker for conservatives. Conservatives are less likely to social distance, etc. But that likely amounts to something similar since Fox is the key source of political information not only for Fox viewers but for the conservative information ecosystem generally.

The authors do note, revealingly, that they are not able to fully distinguish between the impact of Fox News commentators versus the administration officials and especially [Trump] the President whose views are so aggressively repeated and amplified.   

Far Right Groups, Trump and GOP Behind Social Distancing Backlash

What the far right is trying to pass of as a grassroots, organic uprising against social distancing and stay home orders is actually an orchestrated efforts with some of the organizers comprised of far right white supremacist groups.  Joining in their effort is Donald Trump who is tweeting against states with Democrat governors, including Virginia, and other Republicans who care more about "reopening" the economy than the possible death toll among their constituents.  The ultimate goal behind the actions is politically motivated: to save Trump's reelection effort, especially now that his polling numbers are dropping and some polls show a 60% disapproval rate for his handling of the pandemic.  In Michigan where some of the loudest protests - with armed protesters, of course, as The Guardian reports the organizers were anything but grassroots: 

While protesters in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and other states claim to speak for ordinary citizens, many are also supported by street-fighting rightwing groups like the Proud Boys, conservative armed militia groups, religious fundamentalists, anti-vaccination groups and other elements of the radical right.

On Wednesday in Lansing, Michigan, a protest put together by two Republican-connected not-for-profits was explicitly devised to cause gridlock in the city, and for a time blocked the entrance to a local hospital.

It was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which Michigan state corporate filings show has also operated under the name of Michigan Trump Republicans. It was also heavily promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group linked to the Trump cabinet member Betsy DeVos.

Near the state house, local radio interviewed a man who identified himself as “Phil Odinson”.  In fact the man is Phil Robinson, the prime mover in a group called the Michigan Liberty Militia, whose Facebook page features pictures of firearms, warnings of civil war, celebrations of Norse paganism and memes ultimately sourced from white nationalist groups like Patriot Front.

These are NOT nice people and I have to ask my Republican "friends" if they'd invite these folks into their living rooms and private clubs.  If not, they need to distance themselves from them and the politicians who are working with such ugly groups. As for those being duped to jump on the protest bandwagon, it sad that they still can't see beyond their racism and anger to see that those who are manipulating them are the ones who are most responsible for their economic plight.  The willful ignorance of these people is stunning and sad.

As for the motivation of the organizers behind these efforts (which, no surprise include Fox News), a piece in the  Washington Post lays it all out nicely.  Here are highlights:

The social distancing backlash is here. Like many such eruptions of anger, it’s partly genuine and partly fed by political actors with their own preexisting agendas — in this case, mostly to rescue President Trump’s imperiled reelection campaign. And it will get ugly.

On Wednesday in Lansing, Mich., thousands of protesters came to the state capitol to demonstrate against the stay-at-home order issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). Though Michigan now has the fourth-highest total of covid-19 cases of any state, with nearly 2,000 deaths, the protesters argued that Whitmer’s order is unnecessary and overly strict.

“It wasn’t really about the stay-at-home order at all,” Whitmer said later on MSNBC. “It was essentially a political rally.” . . . . some were wearing MAGA hats and carrying Trump signs, and Confederate flags appeared in the crowd (though I’m sure that was just about Michigan’s … um … heritage?). Similar though smaller protests have occurred in North Carolina and Ohio. After the Lansing protest, Fox News swung into action, praising the protest on multiple programs.  The unmistakable message being communicated is that stay-at-home orders are a leftist plot, and conservatives should be rejecting them. It’s all over right-wing media . . . . . The natural comparison to make with these efforts is the tea party eruption, and there are some points of similarity, including conservative media fanning the flames of anger and the overblown rhetoric about liberty . . . . But the more useful comparison is to Donald Trump’s election itself.

Specifically, the way Trump’s campaign was built on the anger of working-class white voters, especially men. . . . . grievances that were exploited by powerful forces on the right for their own political and economic ends. Those grievances were then channeled into an act — voting for Trump — that was primarily expressive in nature.

Liberals are quick to attribute the white working class’s support for Trump to racism and xenophobia, and there’s no doubt they played an absolutely critical role. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that when Trump told voters in Rust Belt towns that the “the system” was rigged against them, they had reasons to think he was right.

Trump spoke directly to that dissatisfaction — then layered on top of it a heaping portion of hate directed at immigrants, minorities and liberals. Never mind that “draining the swamp” turned out to be more tax cuts for the wealthy and making it easier for corporations to exploit workers and befoul already-struggling communities.

The pain people are now feeling is even more acute. Twenty-two million Americans have filed for unemployment, wiping out a decade of job gains in weeks. In Michigan, roughly a quarter of the workforce is now unemployed, an absolutely stunning figure. None of us have seen anything like this in our lifetimes.

If you’re not sick and you don’t know anyone who has died, it’s natural to say, “Why are we doing this? Why can’t we go back to work?” Then along comes a bunch of Fox News hosts and conservative activists who tell you, “You’re absolutely right. You’re being forced to suffer needlessly. Those snooty liberals in their coastal cities who can comfortably work from home are just trying to screw you over.”

And once again, the solution being offered will only make things worse. Voting for Trump didn’t help people who live paycheck to paycheck, and defying stay-at-home orders will only give new life to the coronavirus, prolonging the pandemic and making it harder to recover economically.

But if Republicans can convince people that the only way to understand this crisis is through a partisan lens, they can tamp down difficult questions about Trump’s performance and minimize the political damage he’ll suffer, making it possible for him to win in the fall. That’s the goal, one they’re pursuing with all their usual cynicism — even as they fight against Democratic efforts to provide more support to those being hit hardest by the recession.

Could it work? Probably not, but it just might.

Fox News: First Amendment Protects Lies and Untruths

Faced with a lawsuit alleging consumer fraud, Fox News is defending the lies and falsities it disseminated as protected free speech, exhibiting no concern for the lives it may have jeopardized both among its viewers and members of the larger public that they may infect with Covid-19.  In its court filing, Fox News basically conceded that it had disseminated falsehoods but said that the false nature of its "news" and lies of its anchors did not matter under the First Amendment's protection of free speech whether that speech is false or not. Indeed, the lack of any social conscience is stunning.  A piece in Salon looks at Fox News' defense of its false propaganda.  Here are highlights:

Fox News has moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Washington state group accusing the network of "deceptive" coronavirus coverage by arguing that the First Amendment protects "false" and "outrageous" speech.

The network's lawyers said in a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit that the "First Amendment does not permit censoring this type of speech based on the theory that it is 'false' or 'outrageous.' Nor does the law of the State of Washington."

The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) filed a lawsuit in King County earlier this month seeking a court order barring the network from "interfering with reasonable and necessary measures to contain the virus by publishing further false and deceptive content."

The suit accused the network of violating the state's Consumer Protection Act by "falsely and deceptively disseminating 'news' via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a 'hoax' and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety."

The suit specifically cited Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox Business host Trish Regan for having "acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus."

Hannity downplayed the threat of the coronavirus and argued it was less dangerous than the flu. Regan was fired shortly after accusing Democrats of pushing a "coronavirus impeachment scam." "It's Constitutional Law 101: the First Amendment protects our right to speak openly and freely on matters of public concern," Fox News Media general counsel Lily Fu Claffee said in a statement. "If WASHLITE doesn't like what we said, it can criticize us, but it can't silence us with a lawsuit." The network's lawyers argued that Hannity and Regan simply took part in an "intense public debate" over "how serious of a threat" the virus posed, . . . . Legal experts largely agreed with the network's position that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.

Catherine Clark, an attorney for WASHLITE, vowed to respond to the motion and told Variety that the suit "was not about prohibiting free speech, but making sure that news organizations convey accurate information."

Legal culpability aside, media analysts have widely criticized Fox News for putting their viewers at risk by downplaying the threat posed by the virus, which has now killed 26,000 people in the United States.

"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," wrote New York Times columnist Ben Smith.

A letter signed by more than 70 journalism professors around the country criticized Fox News for spreading "misinformation" about the virus.

Fox News Preparing for Lawsuits Over Coronavirus Misinformation

One lawsuit has already been filed against Fox News for what amounts to consumer fraud for its lies and untruths during the first stages of the coronavirus pandemic when the network largely parroted or amplified the untruths coming out of the Trump/Pence regime, including claims that the whole matter was a Chinese hoax. It appears the network grasps the reality that more lawsuits will follow. The irony, of course, is that while desperately seeking to protect Donald Trump and bludgeon Democrats and parts of the news media that actually report facts as opposed to propaganda, Fox News endangered its own viewers who remain the most likely to disregard the seriousness of the pandemic and to ignore the safeguards recommended by medical experts.  The other irony is that purveyors of lies like Hannity claim they never said things that are documented on video.  They seemingly believe everyone is a stupid as their viewers. Fox News deserves to pay a very high price for the harm it has done to the nation.  Here are highlights from a piece in Vanity Fair:

Just over a week ago, former Fox Business host Trish Regan parted ways with the network, ostensibly because she called the coronavirus melee “yet another attempt to impeach...demonize, and destroy the president.” That the comments, which mirrored those of nearly every other Fox host at the time, would result in her termination seemed disproportionate, and last week a member of Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch’s front office told the Daily Beast that Regan represented “a sacrificial lamb”—a scapegoat for critics who lampooned the network for dangerously misinforming its viewers about a deadly pandemic. Regan’s ouster failed to achieve this goal, and according to new reports, Fox is now lawyering up, bracing for a litany of public-interest lawsuits and letters of condemnation for pedaling misinformation for weeks prior to coronavirus’s explosion in the U.S. 

The first such consumer-protection complaint came from the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) on Thursday, which named Murdoch,__ Fox News, AT&T, Comcast, and other related entities as defendants. Seeking nominal damage, the suit claims the “defendants acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19, which is now recognized as an international pandemic.” . . . . We believe it delayed and interfered with a prompt and adequate response to this coronavirus pandemic.”

Well past the olive branch phase, Fox is reportedly ready for whatever court battles come next. “The strategy is no settlements, even if it costs way more to fight the lawsuit and seek sanctions for ambulance-chasing lawyers,” an executive told the Daily Beast.  He recalled the Murdochs’ successful evasion of two lawsuits related to conspiratorial Fox coverage of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, which were dismissed in 2018 . . . .

This time, however, might be very different from the Rich case. During a Sunday appearance on MSNBC, my colleague Gabriel Sherman said Fox insiders had expressed “real concern...that their early downplaying of the coronavirus actually exposes Fox News to potential legal action by viewers who maybe were misled and actually have died from this.” He went on to say that while the Murdochs are “privately taking coronavirus seriously”—Rupert Murdoch quietly cancelled his 89th birthday party on March 11—top hosts like Regan and Sean Hannity were actively “telling viewers that it’s a hoax...If it actually winds up being proved that people died because of it, this is a new terrain in terms of Fox being possibly held liable for their actions.”

A number of public opinion surveys suggest Fox succeeded in swaying the perception of coronavirus among its viewers. Despite COVID-19 deaths mounting to more than 10,000 in the U.S., and case numbers here surpassing 350,000, 79% of Fox News consumers who responded to a Pew Research survey last week believe the media “slightly or greatly exaggerated the risk of the pandemic.”

A mid-March poll conducted by Survey 160 and Gradient Metrics poll revealed that Americans who tune into Fox News are more likely to ignore Centers for Disease Control advisories to stay at home than both non-Fox-watching Republicans and Democrats.

A similar poll from YouGov and The Economist conducted in mid-March showed that, compared to consumers of other types of news media, Fox News viewers are the least likely to express concern about coronavirus.

“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers—and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” states the letter, enumerating misleading coverage.

In an interview with Newsweek, Hannity himself fired back at the letter in an attempt to rewrite history.  . . . ...I never called it a ‘hoax,’” he said. . . . . On March 9, Hannity implied that media outlets covering the virus were doing so to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.” Two days later, he insisted that the seasonal flu is “much more dangerous” than COVID-19 and argued that “we’re all dying” anyway. 

 One can only hope that Fox News' history of outright lies finally catches up with it and that it suffers a serious financial reckoning.  As for its viewers, perhaps deaths among its  knuckle dragging viewers will cause some to wake up and change the channel. 

America's Other Pandemic: Right Wing Hate

Hannity on February 27, 2020.

Each day Americans who choose to tune into Donald Trump's coronavirus press conferences get to watch a series of lies, untruths and a times dangerous misinformation by the narcissist -in-chief.  Yet Trump is hardly the only one spreading lies and, even worse, hatred and the embrace of egnorance and bigotry.  Fox News, after weeks of lies and misinformation, has its anchors denying what was said on video and captured for the world to see. Beyond Fox News, in the ugly underbelly of the right wing media, conspiracy theories are promoted, health experts are attacked - Dr. Anthony Fauci has needed increased security - and efforts to excuse the right's "glorious leader" malfeasance are non-stop. It is all part of the larger unleashing of hate that has plagued America since Trump's election which has given a green light to white supremacists and coddled some of the most extreme and bigoted acolytes of the Christian Right.  America needs to win the war against Covid-19, but it also needs to win the war against hate, bigotry and the celebration that Trump has unleashed.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality:

We see the best of America in the health-care workers and first-responders risking (and sometimes losing) their lives to help others. But we also see the pathologies that have surfaced (or recurred in new mutations) during Trump’s presidency: the scapegoating of religious minorities, attacks on science and scientists, and promotion of globalist conspiracy theories (in this case, that the World Health Organization conspired with communist China to conceal the virus).

This country’s woeful response to the virus has an obvious cause: a president who refused to heed warnings and to prepare, instead offering false assurances while the nation snoozed. Even now, inexcusable delays limit tests, ventilators and respirators, and even now President Trump resists a nationwide stay-at-home order.

But it’s painful for some to put the responsibility where it belongs. Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.” And this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.

Others follow Trump’s lead in blaming scientists for our woes. As The Post first reported, the government had to step up security for Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health and the most visible scientist responding to the crisis. Threats had been made against the 79-year-old doctor, who frequently contradicts Trump’s uninformed happy talk. Fauci has been attacked by pro-Trump outlets such as Gateway Pundit and American Thinker, which labeled Fauci a “Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving Stooge.” The dark-web conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the like do worse to Fauci, a loyal public servant under every president since Ronald Reagan.

Still others try to distract from the Trump administration’s failures by blaming a globalist conspiracy. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) demanded an investigation into the WHO for “helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.” Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.), Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pro-Trump outlets such as the Federalist and Breitbart have proclaimed similar sentiments. The scientists issued a report warning that the virus is “spreading with astonishing speed” and called for governments to “immediately activate the highest level of national response,” including immediate and extensive testing and planning for closing schools and workplaces.

And yet, Trump slept. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 28. He blew it. Not the scientists, not the WHO, and not the Jews.

The Gathering Storm in America's South

Thankfully, over the last decade and especially since 2017 Virginia has effectively ceased to be a southern state and has embraced modernity and Democrat political control.  Thus, Virginia was the first state in the South to see a gubernatorial "stay home" order - Kentucky, North Carolina and Louisiana, also with Democrat governors followed suit.  Only much later did a few other states - e.g., Georgia and Florida - issue such orders although Florida's order exempts church gatherings from the restrictions.  Why the difference?  Simple: all the other states are "red states" with Republican governors eager to kiss Donald Trump's ass and beholden to Fox News and fearful of their knuckle dragging base.  We have yet to see the consequences of these failures to act as urged by medical experts.  A piece New York Times looks at Tennessee as a case study of the Republican failure to heed medical experts.  Note the governor's idiotic call for mayors and other local leaders to pray even as he ignored medical experts. Here are article excerpts:

NASHVILLE — On March 22, when Nashville’s mayor John Cooper closed nonessential businesses here, it was a terrible blow to companies and shops still reeling from the tornado that tore through Middle Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Small businesses struggle in the best of times, and a one-two punch like that — a natural disaster followed by a lethal pandemic — will almost certainly force some of them to close for good.

But it had to be done. Nashville’s courts and schools were already closed, but the crowds on Lower Broadway, the heart of Nashville’s tourist district, showed no sign of dissipating . . . Even after the Nashville Board of Health voted unanimously to shut the honky-tonks down, several bar owners said they would not comply unless ordered to do so by the governor of Tennessee.

Such orders have been slow in coming here, and in nearly every other state in the American South. Tennessee governor Bill Lee was slow to end the legislative session and send members of the Tennessee General Assembly home to their districts, slow to close public schools, slow to suspend church services, slow to shutter restaurants and gyms.

Many city charters in Tennessee prevent local leaders from issuing their own orders, and mayors begging for a statewide directive got none. . . . . On March 16Mr. Lee told local leaders around the state that mandates weren’t necessary to enforce social-distancing guidelines: “We’re not issuing orders, we’re issuing guidance and strong suggestions,” Mr. Lee said. “We don’t have to mandate people not do certain behavior because Tennesseans follow suggestions.”

As it turns out, they don’t. . . . where I expected to find a deserted parking lot, it was business as usual on a sunny spring Saturday. Nashville has received hundreds of reports of similar violations.

On March 30, when Mr. Lee issued an executive order shutting down nonessential businesses, he stopped short of requiring Tennesseans to stay home. “It is deeply important that we protect personal liberties,” he said, ignoring tens of thousands of health professionals who argued that nothing less than a stay-at-home order would save this state from disaster. And not just this state.

Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border, restricted travel to Nashville. And Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee . . . . If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that’s not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here.”

Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South.

What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.

Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both [Trump] the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria. That’s why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter-in-place order is a Republican.

In that March 16 conference call with mayors and county leaders around Tennessee, Mr. Lee offered some advice: “I want to encourage you to pray. . . . . I want you to know that you’re being prayed for as leaders in your community that you will have wisdom and discernment.”

I, too, pray for my fellow Tennesseans. I pray for the success of researchers racing for a vaccine. I pray for the safety of every medical team working to save lives. But I also pray for our leaders to lead, to put the safety of their citizens far, far above partisan pandering. And when the entire medical community — people who are putting their very lives on the line for us — are begging for help, the answer isn’t prayer alone. It’s also action.

 One can only hope Republican idiocy doesn't lead to tragedy, but if it does, I hope citizens will hold their foolish, partisan governors accountable. 

The Far-Right Media Is Weaponizing Coronavirus

I continue to be shocked by those I know who ought to know better that continue to post and share false stories put out by right wing fringe publications like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Red State, Town Hall, and, of course, Fox News.  These individuals seemingly never fact check stories and merely promote them because they fall in line with their prejudices - often racial or religiously extreme - and happily spread falsehoods while making themselves look like fools and/or bigots.  Now, with coronavirus creating semi-hysteria and fears and uncertainty, the right wing media machine is jumping into high gear and promoting falsehoods and out right misogyny as laid out in a piece in New York Magazine.  For "friends" who continue to promote false stories, they need to know that others are watching and judging them and not in a good way.   Here are article excerpts:

The coronavirus pandemic has been marked by medical uncertainty, rapidly changing information, and partisan rancor, making it a prime target for the spread of disinformation: some of that disinformation is about unproven cures, for both the disease and the disintegrating economy; some is intended to delegitimize the politicians who may or may not be in a position to steer the nation through it (and some of it comes not via the internet but from [Trump] the president himself; see the man who died after heeding Trump’s assurances that chloroquine was a possible answer to coronavirus). Jiore Craig is a political consultant at a research firm, GQR Insights and Action, who has spent the past four years tracking the spread of disinformation online, much of it originating with, or being propagated by, the far-right political media — sites like Breitbart and Infowars. The Cut spoke to her about the patterns she’s seen and how they’re playing out in the midst of this pandemic. [W]e study conservative bad actors, those known for putting out disinformation, and what’s been interesting in the midst of COVID-19 is that even they needed to take a moment to get their bearings. Typically bad actors on the right — conservative online media which rampantly spreads disinformation — are very quick to align, and get their messaging straight, which usually comes down to reaching for handy attacks, targeting women, etc. But in this moment, it took a while for them to turn their cannons in the same direction. Obviously there’s Fox News, but I’m talking about more specialized online publications, like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Red State, Town Hall, and people like Ben Shapiro and Tomi Lahren. There’s something called Salem Media Group; they control niche Facebook pages like I Am A Conservative Woman and Shut Down Planned Parenthood, and the social network only recently identified that both of those pages were controlled by Salem. I focus on what’s being shared on Facebook and other platforms where the majority of voters are spending their time. We know that Facebook increasingly has an older audience, so I look at what’s spreading there.
 [T]hose pages I mentioned often coordinate; they’re posting at the same time and coordinating around specific attacks, and one area where they do that is attacks on women. And there is a good example involving coronavirus. When Trump called out individual politicians, including governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, it was very easy for these sites to use a typical framing right away: an unflattering picture of her, where she looks drunk or cross-eyed, or appears dumb, crazy, emotional, unhinged, angry. The sites are ready to echo each other, and so they amplified an attack on Whitmer more than they amplified attacks on other male governors that Trump got into fights with last week. Now part of that is that Whitmer is in a swing state, while Andrew Cuomo, for example, is not. But it’s also that those misogynistic frames are so readily available to them.

They’re very organized, very militant: they will push out the same line as a steady drum beat— the same hashtags, #shiftySchiff or #nervousNancy, to signal that there’s a trend — whereas voices on the left are more individualistic.

So now with Coronavirus, they’ve landed on attacking the left about “PC culture” — arguing that the left is more worried about the racist phrasing Trump uses for the virus than about the virus itself. That’s an example of something they’ve unified on since last week, because they know this playbook; they know how to attack the left on PC culture; they can run with that.

[W]henever we see a social media spike that isn’t correlated with what’s happening in the news and wonder what’s driving that, it’s something that is driven by the right. I still think people underestimate how wide-reaching these pages are and how good they are at repetition. The second part is, how much of what is published online from the right is connected back to pretty extreme movements. I wasn’t expecting my work — which is typically to deal with candidates and how opinions about them are formed — to get so quickly into hate speech, man-o-spheres, intense online misogyny. . . . . the reality is that this is what the mainstream is now on the right. The conservative media I mentioned earlier, which some may consider fringe, have become more mainstream on social media in terms of the volume of content they generate and their reach. W]e’re going to see a lot of conspiracy theories being applied. But the bad actors don’t really know who to attack at the moment; it can’t quite be about government control, because Trump is the government. So there’s going to be a question of how to make it about the Democrats: maybe invoking false claims around martial law. You have Alex Jones and Infowars profiting off of readiness products because people are scared. We may get to the conspiracy that Democrats want to take away their guns and take away their rights. And I think both sides will start asking: Were you focused on people’s health or were you focused on politics-or-profits? Both sides will try to make it seem like the other side isn’t focused on the issue at hand.

Times of crisis show us who remains logical and acting on facts, not conspiracy theories and lies (and prejudices and bigotry), and  some who are blinding promoting far right disinformation should pause to consider how they will be viewed once the crisis has passed.

Fox News and Trump: No Empathy, Only Lies and Anger

It is hard to calculate how much damage Fox News and its lies, pro-Trump propaganda have done to America. Hopefully, future historians will quantify the damage and some of the "stars" of Fox News will be reviled by future generations.   None of this absolves Trump for his sins, but Fox News and spineless Republicans fearful of a primary challenge from the bizarre and insane far right of the GOP  have enabled him and allowed the poison he spreads to flourish.  The irony now is that their lies and misinformation campaign has left Fox News devotees perhaps the most vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic since they least believe that the danger is real and are least likely to modify their behavior - perhaps Darwin's theory will play out with the GOP base.  A column in The Atlantic by David Frum, a former Republican, looks at Fox News' role in Trump's bungling of America's response to the virus threat and how it is now engaged in Trump's effort to shift blame for the Trump/Pence regimes incompetence and malfeasance.  Here are column highlights: 

On the evening of June 21, 1941, American Communists went to bed subject to one party line. At the sun set, Britain was fighting an imperialist war against Germany, about which the United States must remain neutral.

American Communists awoke on June 22, 1941, to discover the party line abruptly changed. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. Now the war was a struggle between democracy and fascism, one the United States must immediately join.

The personalities on Fox News executed a similarly abrupt and total pivot on March 13, 2020. The Washington Post produced a stark before/after anthology of the same hosts saying precisely opposite things a few days apart.

Yet the many weeks of denial have had their effect. An Economist poll released March 18 found that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers took the virus seriously, half as many as among MSNBC and CNN viewers. For Trump’s sake, Fox risked the lives of its own audience.

Like the old Moscow-line Communists, the upholders of the Trump party line now need an excuse for their long history of denial and deception. They insisted it was not Trump’s fault that he, and they, squandered precious weeks and that his administration is suddenly dithering and failing. . . . They accused anyone who recalled the truth of repeating Chinese propaganda.

The Trump party line swaps new lies for old. Whereas once the ideological enforcers called concern over the virus a hoax, now they say that it’s a hoax to remember they said it was a hoax.

The Atlantic has been pulled into the crosshairs of the new lies that replaced the old lies in a retweet by the president himself. In response to an article that documented how China’s official lying had aggravated the crisis in that country, and lamented that Trump’s official lying had done the same here, the president’s Twitter feed repeated a slur that The Atlantic “spews communist China’s propaganda.”

Trump wants Americans to call the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Trump’s new slogan aims at two goals. The first goal is to shift blame away from Trump’s failures and onto China’s. This goal is very unlikely to succeed. We all saw Trump’s catastrophic misjudgments inflict their toll in real time. . . . No, Trump won’t succeed in shifting blame.

It’s the second goal that could succeed. By revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!

A president who sincerely mistrusted China would not have to resort to name-calling after the fact. He would have acted decisively, in good time. Instead, Trump relied on China to do his job for him.

It was Trump and Fox, not the independent media, who repeated Chinese propaganda and put Americans at risk.

A personal note: I was a target of one of Trump’s key media allies on Fox on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson. Carlson has played an interestingly complex role on the Fox network. On the one hand, he was the first Fox host to speak some measure of truth about the virus. . . . On the other hand, Carlson is the most explicit of Fox’s race-baiters, the Fox personality furthest from traditional conservatism and nearest to the new alt-right. Carlson is the main voice on Fox for Russian state propaganda, . . .

While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an early visit to a Washington mosque. He spoke feelingly against bigotry, and helped curb the rash of hate crimes that erupted in the fall of 2001.

Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. . . . . The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.

Trump Supporters Are in Denial About the Virus Threat

When one chooses to listen to a propaganda network that spins an alternate reality non-stop (despite the availability of countless reputable news sources) because it legitimizes one's hatreds and prejudices, the consequence is that when governmental agencies and medical experts saying things that impact with this fantasy world, these accurate and perhaps lifesaving messages are ignored.  At least that is what is happening in the context of the coronavirus nightmare.  Hard core Trump supporters and many Republicans either do not believe the threat is real or - the always dangerous Ron Paul continues to say it is a hoax - or downplay the situation.  If this willful rejection of reality continues, these Trump cult followers will be endangering not only themselves - for whom I have zero sympathy since they have made the conscious decision to embrace ignorance - but also their communities.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Behold, the perils of the Pinocchio presidency.  For three years, President Trump told his supporters that the federal government perpetrates hoaxes and frauds, that the media produces fake news and that nothing is on the level except for his tweets. He did the same with the novel coronavirus, portraying it as an ordinary flu that would “disappear” and accusing Democrats of a hoax and the media of exaggerating.

Belatedly, Trump has begun to speak the truth about the virus, which by some estimates could kill more than 2 million Americans without attempts to control it.

But Trump’s late conversion to reality has left behind one group of Americans that will be difficult to convince: his own supporters. Their alternative-facts diet has left them intolerant of anything the government and the media feed them.

An alarming new poll from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist shows that the number of Republicans who believe the virus is a real threat has actually fallen over the past month, from 72 percent in February to just 40 percent now. A majority of Republicans now say the threat has been blown out of proportion — more than double the 23 percent who said so last month.

Naturally, they’re not so inclined to cooperate with efforts to slow the virus’s spread. Only 30 percent of Republicans plan to avoid large gatherings (vs. 61 percent of Democrats), a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found just before Trump proposed such limits. Republicans were half as likely to say they were rescheduling travel and a third as likely to stop eating out at restaurants.

Key Trump allies aren’t cooperating, either. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) recommended on Monday: “If you want to go to Bob Evans and eat, go to Bob Evans and eat.”

Also Monday, Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate and father of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said, “People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated.”

After weeks of false reassurances and disinformation, Trump abruptly shifted this week. At Tuesday’s briefing, he lavishly praised the government scientists and public health experts he had until lately been contradicting, and he celebrated recent bipartisanship.

For once, he put his priority where it should be: on the human toll. “For the markets, for everything, it’s a very simple, very simple solution. We want to get rid of it. We want to have as few deaths as possible.” And he admonished those not following social-distancing guidelines: “I’m not happy with those people.”

There can be no doubt who “those people” are: Fox-News viewing Trump supporters who, until this week, had been encouraged to believe Trump’s claims that the virus was well under control. . . . . After encouraging his Fox fan base for weeks to scoff at the virus, Trump now finds that his presidency, the U.S. economy and countless lives depend on him convincing them otherwise.

I am not sure how one convinces those who reject anything they do not want to hear.  Perhaps we will witness Darwin's theory in practice as the willfully ignorant fail to survive. 

El Paso Killer Echoed the Words of Conservative "Media Stars"

At work in the kitchen I will walk in and find on occasion that someone has set the TV to Fox News.  I typically turn it off or change thee channel rather that hear the lies and distortions spewing from the like of Laura Ingraham or other "stars" of the conservative media universe. Some of the things said are so outlandish that one has to wonder who believes the crap being said - certainly not the anchors who cannot possibly believe some of the things that are so far from even remotely true. The shooter in El Paso apparently not only listened to the lies but believed them and acted on them.  That's the conclusion in a piece in the New York Times that looks at the shooters "manifesto" and other writings.  Words have consequences, yet the shrills of Fox News and other conservative "news" sites care nothing about the potential for violence they are happily creating.  Just yesterday, the Orlando Sentinel reported as follows:

Richard D. Clayton, 26, of Winter Park, [a white supremacist] was arrested Friday after he posted threats to kill or do bodily harm on Facebook.  According to officials, the investigation began Tuesday after Clayton made a threat on Facebook saying: "3 more days of probation left then I get my AR-15 back. Don't go to Walmart next week." 

People are listening and some will frighteningly act in violent ways. Here are highlights from the Times piece: 

Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”

A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity.

There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

[H]is post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.

An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.

“Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people,” Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle,” said on her show on July 10. Days after the shooting, the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed a connection between words used by the gunman and by President Trump, saying: “If you use the term ‘invasion,’ that’s not anti-Hispanic. It’s a fact.”

In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media, the Times review found.

Sometimes the hosts are repeating [Trump's] the president’s signature phrases. Sometimes [Trump] the president appears to take his cues from television pundits. The cumulative effect is a public dialogue in which denigrating sentiments about immigrants are common.

Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts. The vast majority of those were spoken by Fox News hosts and guests, but some included clips of Mr. Trump using that language at rallies and other public appearances.

“It’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said the conservative writer William Kristol, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who has worked at Fox News and other networks. “Something is said on Fox News, and Trump repeats it, and that legitimizes it — and then someone else goes a little further.”

He added, “The use of what once would have been viewed as really extreme and inappropriate and sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes dehumanizing language is really striking.”

The Trump-friendly media world — from outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group and The Drudge Report to platforms like Breitbart News and Gateway Pundit — has used similar incendiary rhetoric. At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.

The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today.

Before the El Paso shootings, others with deadly or hateful motives used the same language. 

The man who is alleged to have killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had expressed his contempt for “invaders” before he opened fire on the congregation with an AR-15-style assault rifle, the authorities say. During the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that left one woman dead, marchers shouted, “You will not replace us.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the shared vocabulary of white nationalists and many prominent conservatives was chilling. “Where that intersects with the Republican Party today,” he added, “is the Republican argument that the Democrats are in favor of immigration because that will give them a permanent majority.”

The overlap between fringe ideology and the words of conservative talk show hosts is not accidental, critics say. “They’re putting that into the zeitgeist,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News, who is now working for a news aggregator aimed at a progressive audience, Front Page Live.

“Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger,” Mr. Cameron added.

Days after the El Paso massacre, Mr. Carlson said on-air that white supremacy was “actually not a real problem in America” and likened it to a “hoax.”

Be very afraid of the seeds these irresponsible shrills and self-promoters are sowing.