Trump's Attacks on Twitter May Backfire

As Adolph Hitler rose to power, one of his first targets other than Jews were media outlets that reported the truth and refused to be propaganda arms of Hitler's Nazi Party.  Under Hitler confidant and sycophant Paul JosephGoebbels, the  Reich Minister of Propaganda gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany.  Newspapers and radio stations that failed to comply with Nazi Party dictates were vandalized, publishers arrested and put out of business.  Fast forward to 2020 and it is obvious that Donald Trump wants the same control over the media and seeks to silence any platform that exposes his endless lies and untruths. Trump's executive order signed yesterday - which is likely illegal - is a step in trying to silence social media platforms that have felt compelled to notate the untruthfulness of Trump's Twitter outbursts.  The irony is that by stripping them of limitations on liability for content, Trump may unwittingly be forcing them to be more vigorous in removing false content - something that would result in the opposite situation from what Trump wants: an unfettered platform to lie,  A piece in the New York Times looks at how Trump may have shot himself by his rash and tyrant like behavior.  Here are highlights:

President Trump, who built his political career on the power of a flame-throwing Twitter account, has now gone to war with Twitter, angered that it would presume to fact-check his messages. But the punishment he is threatening could force social media companies to crack down even more on customers just like Mr. Trump.

The executive order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday seeks to strip liability protection in certain cases for companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook for the content on their sites, meaning they could face legal jeopardy if they allowed false and defamatory posts. Without a liability shield, they presumably would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries — like [Trump's] the president’s.

That, of course, is not the outcome Mr. Trump wants. What he wants is to have the freedom to post anything he likes . . . . . Furious at what he called “censorship” — even though his messages were not in fact deleted — Mr. Trump is wielding the proposed executive order like a club to compel the company to back down.

It may not work even as intended. Plenty of lawyers quickly said on Thursday that he was claiming power to do something he does not have the power to do by essentially revising the interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the main law passed by Congress in 1996 to lay out the rules of the road for online media. Legal experts predicted such a move would be challenged and most likely struck down by the courts.

Mr. Trump’s order is intriguing because it attacks the very legal provision that has allowed him such latitude to publish with impunity a whole host of inflammatory, harassing and factually distorted messages that a media provider might feel compelled to take down if it were forced into the role of a publisher that faced the risk of legal liability rather than a distributor that does not.

“Ironically, Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230,” said Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which instantly objected to the proposed order. “If platforms were not immune under the law, then they would not risk the legal liability that could come with hosting Donald Trump’s lies, defamation and threats.”

Mr. Trump has long posted false and disparaging messages to his 80 million followers on Twitter, disregarding complaints about their accuracy or fairness.

[S]ome government officials said his plan was unenforceable. “This does not work,” Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the F.C.C. first appointed under President Barack Obama, said in a statement. “Social media can be frustrating. But an executive order that would turn the Federal Communications Commission into the president’s speech police is not the answer. It’s time for those in Washington to speak up for the First Amendment. History won’t be kind to silence.”

Even some conservatives objected, warning that the president was handing control of the internet to the “administrative state” and creating a bonanza for liberal trial lawyers to go after unpopular speakers traditionally filtered out by the mainstream media — including those like Mr. Trump himself.

The Communications Decency Act was passed during the dawn of the modern information age, intended at first to make it easier for online sites run by early pioneer companies like Prodigy and AOL to block pornography even when it is constitutional without running afoul of legal challenges.

By terming such sites as distributors rather than publishers, Section 230 gave them important immunity from lawsuits. Over time, the law became the guarantor of a rollicking, almost no-holds-barred internet by letting sites set rules for what is and is not allowed without being liable for everything posted by visitors, as opposed to a newspaper, which is responsible for whatever it publishes.

Mr. Trump may face an uphill road with his order. Daphne Keller, who teaches at Stanford Law School and has written extensively on internet law and regulation, said the order appeared to be “95 percent political rhetoric and theater that doesn’t have legal effect and is inconsistent with what the courts have said.”

However, Ms. Keller, who worked as an associate general counsel at Google for 10 years, said that even if the order did not carry legal weight, it may still be challenged because it was potentially an abuse of power that could violate the First Amendment rights of the companies.

Leaked Emails Show Trump’s Minion Promoted White Nationalism

Many Republican "friends" take offense when confronted with the reality that one of the Trump/Pence policies that attracted swing voters that allowed Trump to eek out a narrow Electoral College win is the active promotion of white nationalism.  Perhaps that truth hits a bit to close to home for their consciences. In any event, newly leaked emails underscore how Trump point man on immigration, Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump/Pence regime, actively promoted white nationalism to pander to the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  As noted previously, good people do not support bad people and cruel and vicious policies based on hatred. Republican "friends" need to decide whether or not they are indeed good people and cease their support of Trump/Pence and white nationalist policies or, instead, admit to themselves and the world that they are not good people and are cut from the same cloth as Stephen Miller and the overt racist policies he espouses. They do not get to have it both ways. The Washington Post reports on the cache of Miller emails. Here are excepts:

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller sought to promote white nationalism, far-right extremist ideas and anti-immigrant rhetoric through the conservative site Breitbart, according to a report released Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report is the first installment in a series that draws on more than 900 emails that Miller sent to a Breitbart writer over a 15-month period between 2015 and 2016 and were given to the SPLC. The report describes Miller’s emails as overwhelmingly focused on race and immigration and characterizes him as obsessed with ideas such as “white genocide” (a conspiracy theory associated with white supremacists) and sharply curbing nonwhite immigration.

In the wake of the news Tuesday, at least one member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), called for Miller to resign.

Among the more damning email exchanges highlighted in the SPLC report is one that shows Miller directing a Breitbart reporter to aggregate stories from the white-supremacist journal American Renaissance, or “AmRen,” for stories that emphasize crimes committed by immigrants and nonwhites. In another, Miller is apparently upset that Amazon removed Confederate battle flag merchandise from its marketplace in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church massacre; others reportedly show him promoting “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist French novel popular among white nationalists.

SPLC’s report indicates Miller was widely successful in molding the race- and immigration-focused stories that appeared on Breitbart. It repeatedly details how an email from Miller corresponded to a related article later appearing on the site.

The emails were provided to the SPLC by Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart writer and editor who exchanged scores of messages with Miller during his time transitioning from a press aide for then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to a senior adviser with then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. . . . McHugh has since denounced her association with white nationalism and the far right.

“[McHugh] is well aware of the risks she took in giving us the material and confirming information,” said SPLC investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden, who wrote the report. “I think that’s incredibly brave.”

Hayden told The Post that he made contact with McHugh earlier this year as she was formerly on the periphery of several extremist groups he was following. McHugh was familiar with his work, Hayden said, and mentioned having materials she wanted to show him. After allowing him to view the emails on what Hayden recalled was “a very old computer,” McHugh ultimately decided to release the emails to him.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh said to the SPLC.

Several years on from the email exchanges, Miller is probably at the height of his power within the West Wing. As The Post previously reported, Miller is one of Trump’s longest-tenured advisers — along with Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — and the most influential adviser shaping the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Excerpted emails shared with The Post show Miller drawing on stories from outlets such as the anti-immigration white-nationalist site VDARE and the conspiracy theory website Infowars and sending them to McHugh. Miller appears to urge McHugh to write about the stories and discusses how to frame them and push them to prominence on Breitbart’s site.

Hayden said. “The most important takeaway for me is that Stephen Miller found the basis for his ideas on websites that traffic in hate, and made it clear in his emails."

Miller is a thoroughly foul individual who has even been condemned by his own family members for his racism and advocacy for inhumane policies. He is a modern day Goebbels.

Trump's Vicious Immigration Policies' Willing Accomplices

While the Trump/Pence regime's Stephen Miller physically resembles Hitler's Joseph Goebbels, the cruel immigration policies he is pushing - and which Der Trumpenführer is gleefully embracing - are more akin to the policies of Heinrich Himmler's - the man who oversaw the "Final Solution" and the murder of millions of Jews across Europe. Like Hitler and Himmler, Miller and Trump see no common humanity in the immigrants their policies abuse, including small children in some cases wrenched from their parents. There are other parallels to the horrible Nazi past alive and well in America in 2019: the portion of the population that supports such horrors and, even more so, the personnel implementing the policies and abusing immigrant families.  No doubt the latter justify their conduct in the same manner Nazi death camp workers did: we were just following orders.  As if that excuse washed away any responsibility for the harm they did to others.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump and Miller's accomplices - individuals who deserve to be damned by history.  Here are excerpts:

As President Trump continues his mad purge of the Department of Homeland Security, a sinister figure is emerging as the driving force behind all the chaos: Stephen Miller, the president’s top immigration adviser. . . . Mr. Miller seems to have rarely met an immigrant he didn’t want to deport. He is among the hardest of hard-liners, known for spurring his boss to pursue ever more draconian measures.

Not that Mr. Trump needs much encouragement. He did, after all, ascend to the White House on an immigrant-bashing, ethnonationalist platform as dishonest as it was divisive. Many of the administration’s uglier policy ideas have been a result of Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on his signature campaign promise of a “big, beautiful” border wall. Small wonder Mr. Miller has emerged as his favorite consigliere on such matters.

He [Miller] was a chief architect of the travel ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries. He favors the building of tent cities at the border for warehousing asylum seekers. He’s agitating to end the 20-day limit on detaining migrant children. And he wants to reinstate the practice of snatching migrant children from their families — though this time he’d like to give parents a “binary choice” of having their kids taken from them or held with them in detention indefinitely.

Mr. Miller is being credited with the blood bath at the Department of Homeland Security. Since Friday, a handful of top leaders have been, or are soon to be, shown the door, including the head of the Secret Service, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was never quite ruthless enough for the president’s or Mr. Miller’s taste. More firings are expected as Mr. Miller moves to remake the department in his image.

Bottom line, Stephen Miller is a man whose anti-immigration zeal remains unfettered by concern for the law, international norms or basic humanity. . . . And yet. The portrait of the 33-year-old policy adviser as a figure of singular evil is both overly simplistic and counterproductive.

But no matter how much of the administration’s immigration agenda Mr. Miller has been responsible for, it’s taken a village to make that vision a reality. Giving too much credit to any one person builds up Mr. Miller, undeservedly, as a Machiavellian genius and lets many other folks off the hook.

A society does not fall because of a small coterie of bad actors. Widespread rot requires legions of enablers, many of whom are driven by varying blends of personal ambition, ideological expedience and the self-aggrandizing delusion that, through their invaluable counsel, they can save the state from total destruction.

Expect increasingly to hear this last rationalization from former administration officials starting redemption tours as they resume life outside the Trump bubble.

Advisers like Kellyanne Conway, lawmakers like Senator Lindsey Graham and the former House Speaker Paul Ryan, party apparatchiks like the Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel and a whole host of Trump-friendly media personalities may not  personally share the president’s views or policy aims. But their willingness to swallow some of the administration’s cruelest acts renders them complicit. Neither their reputations nor their consciences should be wiped clean.

Take Ms. Nielsen. . . . . Throughout her tenure, stories bubbled up about how she incurred Mr. Trump’s wrath by dragging her feet on policies that would have run afoul of the law or thrown the nation into chaos. But she still carried out and aggressively enforced her share of atrocities.

Now, defenders are portraying the woman who was in charge of caging migrant children as a hapless victim of the administration’s more unhinged forces.

It’s tempting to see Stephen Miller as the archvillain of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But there is much guilt to go around, and even reluctant collaborators cannot be allowed to absolve themselves of responsibility for the administration’s continuing outrages.

Those who quietly allowing the Trump regime's abuses to continue are little better than the "good Germans" who did nothing as millions were murdered. These people deserve no respect and deserve to be treated as pariahs. They are morally bankrupt no matter how frequently they park their asses in church pews.

Fox News’s Destructive Role in America

Throughout its history, the United States has never had an official state TV such as one saw in Soviet Russia - and still see today under Putin - that's sole agenda is to support the regime and spread propaganda no matter how untrue or far fetched.  At least, not until now.  As a very long piece in The New Yorker lays out, Fox News has become a de facto arm of the Trump?pence regime and its tactics and "news" coverage looks like something out of Nazi Germany's Reich Ministry of Propaganda. Hannity and others at Fox News have become the equivalent of Joseph Goebbels.  The damage being done to the fear and anger based lies spewed daily on Fox are simply without precedent, as are its ties to the Trump/Pence regime.  From birtherism to fanning an untrue picture of immigration, Fox News seemingly has one goal (besides raking in money) which is to prop up the Trump/Pence regime.  The piece is a long read, but should be read to understand the dangerous influence Fox has become.  Here are article highlights:

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support.

For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. [M]any people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.” Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. . . .  Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. . . . . “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!” The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.” . . . . Rubin told me, “It’s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.” Shine is only the most recent Fox News alumnus to join the Trump Administration. Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K. T. McFarland to be his deputy national-security adviser. (McFarland resigned after four months.) Trump recently picked the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, but she soon withdrew herself from consideration, reportedly because her nanny, an immigrant, lacked a work permit. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

Axios recently reported that sixty per cent of Trump’s day is spent in unstructured “executive time,” much of it filled by television. Charlie Black, a longtime Republican lobbyist in Washington, whose former firm, Black, Manafort & Stone, advised Trump in the eighties and nineties, told me, “Trump gets up and watches ‘Fox & Friends’ and thinks these are his friends.

It is hardly unprecedented for American media barons to go beyond their pages to try to influence the course of politics. . . . . But now a direct pipeline has been established between the Oval Office and the office of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born billionaire who founded News Corp and 21st Century Fox. Multiple sources told me that Murdoch and Trump often talk on the phone. Murdoch could not have foreseen that Trump would become President, but he was a visionary about the niche audience that became Trump’s base. In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission . . . . his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. . . . . “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.” Trump’s arrival marked an important shift in tone at Fox. Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.” In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.” Many Fox News reporters were angry, and provided critical anonymous quotes to the media, but Hannity didn’t apologize, saying that he had been “surprised yet honored” when Trump called him up onstage. This response was dubious: before the rally, Trump’s campaign had advertised Hannity as a “special guest.” Murdoch’s views could scarcely be more at odds with Fox’s current diatribes about hordes of “illegal aliens” who are “invading” the U.S. and killing innocent Americans, leaving behind grieving “Angel Moms” and “Angel Dads.” Van Susteren told me that she wasn’t surprised by this rhetorical turn. “Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. . . . . Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign. With Trump’s election, the network’s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.” Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material. Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. . . . . In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.

Given Fox’s status as a dominant source of information for Trump, some people argue that the network should be especially vigilant about outside influence. Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.” But a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!” 

Gertz, of Media Matters, argues, “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.” Blair Levin, the former F.C.C. official, says that Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”

Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. . . . Since the midterms, in which the Republicans lost the House, the Nielsen ratings for Fox’s evening lineup—Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—have fallen by twenty per cent.

Jerry Taylor, the co-founder of the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington for moderates, says, “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”

Be very afraid.

CDC Lists ‘Fetus,’ ‘Transgender’, "Diversity", "Evidence Based" as Forbidden Words

One of the hallmarks of Nazi propaganda - when not vilifying targeted groups, especially Jews - was to work to erase people and terms from public discourse.  This effort went hand in hand with Adolph Hitler's and Joseph Goebbels' view (now practiced daily by Fox News and Breitbart), that if one lied often enough, the public would come to believe the lies as truth. Reports are now coming out that the Trump/Pence regime has directed the Center for Disease Control ("CDC") to cease using words that conflict with the regime's antiscience, anti-abortion, pro-discrimination agenda.  Two banned phrases sum this up: "evidence based" and "science based" are now verboten.  Along with this, of course, are other terms not popular with evangelical Christians and white supremacists, words like "diversity."  Frighteningly, just like in Germany as Hitler rose to power, much of the public is oblivious to what is happening.  The Daily Beast looks at this propaganda effort.  Here are excerpts:

Policy analysts working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were told on Thursday about a list of forbidden words being imposed by senior CDC officials, according to a report in The Washington Post. The forbidden words are reportedly “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based.” Alison Kelly, a senior leader in the agency’s Office of Financial Services, reportedly led the meeting and did not say why the words were being banned.

The cited Washington Post story provides in part as follows:

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of "science-based" or ­"evidence-based," the suggested phrase is "CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes," the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.

The question of how to address such issues as sexual orientation, gender identity and abortion rights — all of which received significant visibility under the Obama administration — has surfaced repeatedly in federal agencies since President Trump took office. Several key departments — including Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, as well as Justice, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — have changed some federal policies and how they collect government information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

HHS has also removed information about LGBT Americans from its website. The department's Administration for Children and Families, for example, archived a page that outlined federal services that are available for LGBT people and their families, including how they can adopt and receive help if they are the victims of sex trafficking.

The longtime CDC analyst, whose job includes writing descriptions of the CDC's work for the administration's annual spending blueprint, could not recall a previous time when words were banned from budget documents because they were considered controversial.

The reaction of people in the meeting was "incredulous," the analyst said. "It was very much, 'Are you serious? Are you kidding?' "  In my experience, we've never had any pushback from an ideological standpoint," the analyst said. 

"Community standards and wishes" is a indirect way of saying "Christofascist standards and wishes."  Be very afraid.

CNN Declines to Air White House Press Conference Live

Given Trump/Der Fuhrer and his administrations clear indications that lying -or "alternate facts per Kellyanne "Goebbels" Conway - will be the new norm, the media needs to adjust how it operates so as to insure that they are not complicit in spreading falsehoods.  CNN may have hit upon how to proceed going forward: never broadcast press conferences or Trump speeches live.  Instead, record them, fact check them, and if they are full of lies, simply do not broadcast them. Go instead with an edited version that deletes the lies although that could mean not airing the pieces at all.  Variety looks at what CC did and how the press needs to change its mode of operating when confronted with a pathological liar and his propaganda agents.  Here are excerpts:   

CNN this evening declined to air live a press conference with the nation’s new White House Press Secretary, pointing to a growing rift between the embryonic Trump administration and the press corps that covers it and undermining the credibility of Sean Spicer, a longtime Republican operative who has become the new spokesman for President Donald Trump.

Producers at the cable-news outlet, owned by Time Warner, this evening decided to see what was said at the press event, according to a person familiar with the network, then play relevant parts as deemed necessary. Despite a robust amount of evidence to the contrary, Spicer during the conference insisted that Trump’s inauguration Friday drew “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” The statement is a deliberate falsehood: TV ratings data issued Saturday by Nielsen show that fewer people watched Trump’s swearing-in than President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. What’s more, photos of Friday’s crowds showed that a smaller number of people had come out to Washington, D.C.’s Mall to take part. Data from the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority also suggested fewer people were attending the inauguration than in years past.

Now, at a time when TV-news outlets have seen their ratings thrive thanks coverage of the colorful and fiery politician, CNN’s decision could be a momentous one: Trump and his representatives have been known to obfuscate and lie. CNN’s refusal to take the live feed suggests executives there are reluctant to put false statements on air, and, what’s more, do not think the new White House press representative is entirely credible.

“CNN’s decision to not air the press conference live illustrates a recognition that the role of the press must be different under Trump. When the White House holds press briefings to promote demonstrably false information and refuses to take questions, then press ‘access’ becomes meaningless at best and complicit at worst,” said Danna Young, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who studies politics and the media. “Democracy works best when journalists have access to the executive branch, of course. But that holds true if and only if that access leads to verifiable, accurate information. The decision on behalf of CNN to wait and verify before airing it live suggests that the media are adapting quickly to this new era.”

CNN has not established a policy about airing White House press conferences live, the person familiar with the matter said, preferring instead to make editorial decisions as circumstances demand. And it was not immediately clear Saturday evening whether its decision might prompt other news outlets to do the same. Spokespersons for CBS News, NBC News and MSNBC were not able to offer an immediate response. 

'Alternative Facts': The Needless Lies of the Trump Administration

It seems that with every passing minute we are increasingly discovering that in Trump world, the "truth" is whatever Der Fuhrer wants it to be.  Never mind that it is demonstrably false.  Hence the new double speak of "alternate facts" as espoused by Kellyanne Conway who seemingly is striving to make Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels look like a pillar of honesty in comparison. The take away form all the lies: do not believe ANYTHING that is said by Trump or his propagandists.  If they lie about small things easily shown to be lies, why believe them on anything?  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Orwellian world of Trump/Pence.  Here are highlights:

One of the many things that is remarkable about the Trump administration is its devotion, even in its first days, to a particular variety of pointless falsehood.

Mendacity among politicians and the spokespeople hired to spin for them runs across eras and aisles, though it is true that some are more honest than others, and Donald Trump was a historically dishonest presidential candidate. But the Trump administration has displayed a commitment to needlessly lying that is confounding to even the most cynical observers of American politics.

No incident better summarizes this than a bizarre briefing by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday. Speaking in the Brady Briefing Room, Spicer laid into the assembled reporters.

Then came the big whopper: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.”

Spicer’s statement required dismissing all available evidence: ridership count, eyewitness testimony, independent crowd-counts, and Nielsen television ratings. Spicer cut his teeth at the Republican National Committee as the combative voice of a body often at odds with the media, but even by those standards, his furious insistence on assertions at odds with the evidence were peculiar.

They are, however, emerging as a hallmark of the administration. 

Ahead of the inauguration, Trump threw a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial. “This started out tonight being a small little concert, and then we had the idea maybe we’ll do it in front of the Lincoln Memorial,” Trump said in brief remarks. “I don’t know if it’s ever been done before. But if it has, very seldom.” That claim was also ridiculous, whether it was intentionally misleading or simply badly misinformed. There was a huge, widely covered concert at the memorial to kick off Obama’s inauguration festivities eight years ago.

But how is anyone to view Spicer’s statement as stemming from anything other than a deliberate intent to mislead? The facts are clear, and given that Spicer did not take questions, his main purpose on Saturday must have been to spread falsehoods about crowd size.

Top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet the Press Sunday morning, where Chuck Todd grilled her on the incident. “The presidency is about choices. I’m curious why President Trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size,” Todd asked. Conway first tried to deflect, saying, “I don’t think presidents are judged by crowd sizes, they’re judged by accomplishments.” Fair enough, Todd said—so why lie?

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,” Conway responded.

Todd was flabbergasted by the Orwellian turn of phrase: “Alternative fact are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

There’s still no good explanation for Spicer’s statement, but it fits with a long-running mantra from Trump aides and supporters that there’s no such thing as an objective reality. The question for Trump and his aides is simple: If you’re willing to lie about stuff this minuscule, why should anyone believe what you say about the really big things that matter?

Perhaps there is a solution to Trump's lies provided the media has the backbone to be responsible: When Trump and his administration make clearly false statements, simply do not give the statement coverage.  Take away the podium and do not disseminate the lies.   

Will “Trump Derangement Syndrome” Be Used to Silence Critics?

Personally, I believe that one needed to be deranged to vote for Donald Trump - or motivated by hate, racism, bigotry and/or right wing Christian extremism.   If you voted for Trump, facts simply did not matter nor did the endless stream of lies issuing from Trump's mouth and those of his sycophants.   Yet now that Der Fuhrer is just days from assuming the presidency, some Trump apologists - and perhaps modern day JosephGoebbels equivalents - may be poised to launch a campaign claiming that it is Trump's opponents who suffer from derangement.  The premise? First, lie often enough and eventually many will believe the lie. Second, when you cannot counter the factual argument of opponents, simply malign them and attack them and try to "change the subject."  The Bolsheviks and Nazis used this type of approach and we know - or at those of us who know accurate history - where that led Russia and German, respectively.  A piece in Salon looks at the likely coming campaign against Trump/Pence opponents and the reality that it is the Trump supporters and apologist who are deranged.  Here are excerpts:

Do you believe that Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy? Have you shared these concerns and anxieties with other people? Do you see disturbing connections between how fascism and authoritarianism took hold in other countries and what is occurring in the United States at present?

If so, you may be suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — at least according to Los Angeles Times guest columnist Justin Raimondo.  Raimondo explains:

The country is in the throes of a major epidemic, with no known cure and some pretty scary symptoms. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, and it’s rapidly spreading from the point of origin – the political class – to the population at large. In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect’s every tweet provokes a firestorm, as if 140 characters were all it took to change the world…

In the advanced stages of the disease, the afflicted lose touch with reality. Opinion is unmoored from fact. . . . . Opinion is unmoored from fact. Life resembles a dark fairy tale in which the villain – Trump – is an amalgam of all the worst tyrants in history, past and present, while the heroes – Trump’s critics – are akin to the resistance fighters of World War II. TDS victims routinely compare Trump to Hitler …

Which raises the question: If he’s another Hitler, if he’s in league with Putin, then why is assassination out of the question? Poke a TDS victim and you’ll find they don’t think that “solution” is out of the question at all.

This is the final stage of the TDS epidemic: violence against a democratically elected leader. Unless a cure for TDS is found, this is where we are headed.

Raimondo’s theory and claims are absurd.  They are an exercise in projection. It is not Trump who has been greeted with almost deranged, crazed, unhinged, unfounded, unreasonable and maddened opposition, but rather Barack Obama.

Republicans and the broader right-wing news disinformation-entertainment complex created racist conspiracy theories such as “Birtherism” (whose lead advocates included Donald Trump) in an effort to delegitimize the country’s first black president. Republicans also used the language of the American Civil War in their threats of “nullification,” “secession” and invocations of “states’ rights” against Barack Obama. This was part of a broader pattern of reckless, extreme and irresponsible behavior by Republicans with the goal of undermining Obama’s presidency. Republican leaders went so far as to develop a strategy of opposing every one of Obama’s potential initiatives, regardless of what he proposed.

Basic facts should encourage people of conscience to resist Donald Trump. This is not derangement but rational and reasonable behavior. As I have explained numerous times, Donald Trump is a fascist authoritarian. He has promised to undermine basic tenets of American democracy, such as freedom of the press. Trump has also encouraged violence against his political foes. He has surrounded himself with political advisors who are affiliated with the most extreme and dangerous right-wing elements in American politics (and, increasingly, global politics), such as white supremacists and white nationalists. The American intelligence community has concluded that Russian spies and other agents, acting in support of Donald Trump’s candidacy, actively interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

Ironically, efforts to pathologize or psychologize those who oppose Donald Trump actually reflect deeper problems with both him as a candidate and now president-elect, as well as his supporters. Psychologists and other observers have concluded that Donald Trump may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. He is an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur. Trump is also profoundly ignorant, and as the Atlantic pointed out in a blistering condemnation during the 2016 campaign, “he appears not to read.” His movement possesses the attributes of a political cult. Trump is now also the leader of a Republican Party (and broader conservative movement) that acts more like a religion than a functional political organization interested in responsible governance.

While Raimondo’s claims are absurd and irresponsible, we ignore them at our peril. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a preview of the narrative framework that will likely be used by conservatives and their allies in a compliant corporate news media to silence Trump’s critics. To that end, those who oppose Trump and his administration will be described as “crazy” or “unhinged.” The mainstream news media — because of its slavish adherence to false equivalency and a “both sides do it” narrative — will insist that Trump’s critics should “give him a chance” and are somehow “hypocrites” if they complained about Republican obstructionism against Obama.

The right-wing propagandists who will deploy “Trump Derangement Syndrome” against their enemies have one ultimate goal: to normalize the danger to American democracy represented by Trump and his supporters.

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Be very afraid, but never stop the opposition.

Elite Washington Schools Snub Trump's Mistress of Lies

Perhaps there remains some small measure of justice as the nation hurls towards disaster under the regime of Der Fuhrer.  It seems, according to Page Six and some other sources that despite Kellyanne Conway's efforts, elite schools around Washington, D.C., want nothing to do with Conway's children.  Since Donald Trump wants to destroy public education as evidenced by his Secretary of Education nominee, Betsy DeVoes, it is fitting that Conway might have to place her children in public school or settle for some church affiliated school high on toxic theology and short on quality science and fact based education. I have no malice towards Conway's children - none of us get to choose our parents - but Ms. Conway is hopefully learning that there are consequences to selling one's soul to the service of a narcissistic, sexual predator pathological liar.  Conway forgets that less than 27% of voters supported Der Fuhrer and that no election land slide occurred except in the mind of that psychopathic liar and is sycophants.  Here are highlights from Crooks and Liars:

This is a Page Six story, so we look at it with the usual amount of skepticism we have for DC gossip. But after all her whining that she wasn't going to take a White House job because her children needed their mom at home (Re-launching the mommy wars to garnish sympathy from Stuart Varney, Kellyanne? Nobody cares.), it now appears poor Kellyanne Goebbels Conway can't seem to get the DC elite public schools to bend to her will.

She really did say this:

“My children are 12, 12, 8, and 7, which is bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea for mom going inside [the White House],” Conway said. “They have to come first and those are very fraught ages.” She then implied that the same standards should apply to all mothers who are seeking high-level jobs. When male colleagues suggested Conway take a White House job, she said, “I did politely mention to them that the question isn’t, ‘Would you take the job?’ … but ‘Would you want your wife to?’ And you really see their entire visage change. It’s like, oh, no, they wouldn’t want their wife to take that job.”

The struggle is real, Kellyanne. No one around DC wants Kellyanne or her children infesting their schools. Yes, I know, they are innocent children and shouldn't be punished because their mother is a soulless, vapid, shallow, narcissistic, lying liar or all liars who talks out of both sides of her mouth while also sucking the life out anyone in her path.

So here is the story: Page Six reports that Sewer Rat Barbie is worried that her kids will get blackballed from DC elite schools because, get this, they are *prejudiced* against President Trump. Yes, prejudiced. Oh my, she is feeling discriminated against because of who she is and that is so hard, right? How unfair it is to her children to be banned from things purely because of something out of their control, like their parent's beliefs or heritage, right?

The irony is delicious, coming from a party and candidate that literally only wins elections because of voter suppression, gerrymandering and racism. Oh, and her candidate quite literally ran on a racist campaign. But she feels discriminated against? Of course.

I expect the schools have no problem with Conway children attending but would rather Kellyanne stayed away from the PTO meetings.

And given her history of lying, it's entirely possible that Kellyanne floated this story herself in order to remind everyone what a great mom she is and how persecuted her President Trump's White House is by the Beltway insiders, boo hoo.

Meanwhile, Kellyanne is reaching out of her *friends* at her kids' current private school for help finding a placement for her children.  Welcome to the swamp, Kellyanne!

Feel the Love: Liberty Counsel - Gays Are Diseased

Liberty University and the toxic Liberty Law School are a blight on Virginia and long term I suspect will be a detriment to the city of Lynchburg.  What progressive, decent business will want to be based in a city where a university that rants against modernity and longs to see gays back in the closet and blacks back on the plantation is located?   A taste of the gay animus that plagues Liberty was provided by the amicus brief filed by Liberty Counsel in gay marriage case now pending before the 5th Circuit Court of appeals.  Liberty Counsel's main arguments for bans on same sex marriage: (i) gays are diseased and a health risk, and (ii) mob majority rule should trump minority rights.  One would think the brief had been drafted by Joseph Goebbels for the Nazi regime.  Simply substitute the word "Jew" for "gay."  The full brief can be found here.  Here are some excerpts:

Not only is there no bodily good or function toward which two same sex bodies can coordinate, but there are in fact inherent harms associated with same sex unions.  Gay and bisexual men (who have sex with other men) are about 17 times more likely to develop anal cancer than men who only  have sex with women.” These increased rates of disease cannot be attributed to “stigma” or discrimination, since the rates of AIDS infections is the highest in California which offers homosexuals broad protection from discrimination.  Instead, there is a biological basis for the high incidence of anal cancer and other diseases among those who engage in homosexual behavior . . 

The personal, social and financial costs of these homosexual-specific health problems concern not just those who engage in homosexual activity, but also the larger community of citizens who help provide services and who must bear part of the burdens imposed by the health challenges. It is eminently rational, if not compelling, for the voters of Florida to seek to minimize the deleterious effects of these conditions on public health, safety and welfare by affirming that marriage in Florida remains the union of one man and one woman. In addition, same-sex relationships, particularly relationships involving two male partners, carry greater risks for domestic violence than do marriages. 

Even if one were to believe what Liberty Counsel claims, stable, monogamous same-sex relationships greatly reduce promiscuity and related health concerns.  Moreover, banning same sex marriage doesn't automatically equate to less same sex activity.  Nor does it address the biggest cause of HIV exploding in the African American community: closeted and married men having unsafe "down low" sex and then spreading HIV to their girl friends and wives.  Hence, we get to Liberty Counsel real argument: the majority should have the right to determine the rights of minorities:

To hold that the FMPA does not even pass rational basis would be to hold that 5 million Florida voters acted irrationally in voting for the Amendment. Furthermore, such holding would essentially proclaim that billions of people in every government and major religion worldwide, as well as every state in the union from the founding until 2003, were irrational in their universal support of man-woman marriage. (Marriage was defined as the union of one man and one woman by every government, world religion and state until 2003.) Such a conclusion is breathtaking.

Part of me longs for the day when Christians have become a minority.  Then we can employ Liberty Counsel's argument to strip them of civil rights.  Now that would be divine justice!