Homeland Security Will Collecting Data on Journalists

In follow up to the previous post and the growing dangers of a revival of fascism, Bloomberg has a piece reporting on a new operation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  In a move that could have legitimate benign purposes yet is also reminiscent of what the Bolsheviks did following the October Russian Revolution and what Hitler did during his rise to power, the Homeland Security will start collecting data on hundreds of thousands of journalists, media outlets and even bloggers.  While useful in identifying anti-American foreign efforts and Russian derived "fake news," the action is fraught with potential abuse.  Yes, the effort could be useful to even identify terrorist operatives, it could also be used to harass, censor or silence those simply reporting the truth and/or those critical of Der Trumpenführer regme which describes any critical pieces as "fake news" regardless of their accuracy and truthfulness.  A fress press is the number one threat to would be dictators.  Here are article highlights: 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.

The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.

“Services shall provide media comparison tools, design and rebranding tools, communication tools, and the ability to identify top media influencers,” according to the statement. DHS agencies have “a critical need to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners,” it said.

The DHS wants to track more than 290,000 global news sources, including online, print, broadcast, cable, and radio, as well as trade and industry publications, local, national and international outlets, and social media, according to the documents. It also wants the ability to track media coverage in more than 100 languages including Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, with instant translation of articles into English.

The request comes amid heightened concern about accuracy in media and the potential for foreigners to influence U.S. elections and policy through “fake news.”

The DHS request says the selected vendor will set up an online “media influence database” giving users the ability to browse based on location, beat, and type of influence. For each influencer found, “present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer.”

A department spokesman didn’t immediately return a phone call and email seeking comment.

I have no faith in the current Trump/Pence regime not to put such information to nefarious uses.

Requiem for American Conservatism

Conservatism has morphed into something both ugly and frightening.  The rise of Trump - who cares only about his own power and constantly fluffing his insatiable ego - has made what was already a growing cancer withing so-called conservative circles.  The cancer has metastasized and what was long known as conservatism in America is dead.  While most people outside of the political junkie set do not follow the events at the annual CPAC gathering, what was on display this year was complete insanity with a large measure of fascism.  Indeed, long time conservative columnist Mona Charen needed to be escorted out by security personnel after she called out the extremism on open display throughout the gathering.  The irony, of course, is that the falsely termed "conservative Christians" in attendance now support an agenda that is the antithesis of Christ's gospel message.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the death of American conservatism.  Here are excerpts:

It is time to read last rites over the American conservative movement. After years of drifting steadily toward extreme positions, conservatism is dead, replaced by a far right that has the Republican Party under its thumb.

Conservatism is a complex creed, some of it less than appealing and some of it noble. The less-attractive kind involves an ideology whose main purpose is to defend existing distributions of power and wealth, and to resist reforms that might redress the grievances of those facing discrimination and marginalization.

The enticing brand of conservatism is rooted in an affection for a particular place and its way of life. This conservatism is not always opposed to reform because reforms are often required to preserve the arrangements its exponents revere. Conservatism’s positive function is to warn against measures designed to fix things that are wrong, but whose main effects are to undermine institutions that are widely valued. 

Conservatism is more about tweeds and a good scotch. Neither brings to mind incitement and divisive anger.

Yet for two decades, the tweedy sort of conservatism has been giving ground to the extremists who want not simply to defeat their adversaries but to crush them; who traffic in conspiracy theories rather than in respect for facts and history; and who are willing to destroy the very institutions they claim to be trying to save.   This has happened before (as when the white South’s displaced leadership backed the Ku Klux Klan to end Reconstruction after the Civil War), and we are seeing it anew in the age of President Trump.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in recent days was a clear demonstration of the far right’s success in displacing anything that deserves to be called conservative.

Before President Trump, it would have been shocking to see Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a leader of the French neo-fascist National Front, appear at the same event with traditional conservatives such as Vice President Pence and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and also with the president of the United States. But thanks to Trump, European-style ethno-nationalism has become so much a part of the movement that Maréchal-Le Pen’s visit seemed almost natural.

Encouraging responsibility in the sale and use of firearms would seem to be a thoroughly conservative cause, an effort to maintain order and protect the innocent from violence. But the National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful forces within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. It uses paranoid rhetoric and incendiary attacks on its foes to justify riotously permissive firearms policies that no other democratic republic would dream of adopting.

Shamefully, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s top gun who is increasingly becoming America’s extremist in chief, showed few signs of being moved by the slaughter of high school students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

What should worry us is that the radicalism of the NRA is not exceptional on the American right. It is what the right is all about.

This was brought home when the conservative writer Mona Charen had the courage to ask the crowd on Saturday why CPAC had invited Maréchal-Le Pen (“the Le Pen name is a disgrace,” she said) and called out “people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women.”  . . . . She needed to be accompanied by security guards when she left.

And The Post’s Dave Weigel reported on an otherwise little-noticed CPAC speech by White House Counsel Donald McGahn linking Trump’s judicial appointments to his dismantling of regulation. . . . . McGahn is describing a judicial branch that is little more than an instrument of right-wing executive power. This should scare us, too.

[I]f those who still believe in moderation don’t face up to it now, they will be complicit in the far right’s ascendancy.

As for Charen, she describes her experience in a piece in the New York Times where she says she was proud that she was booed by the hideous gather.  Here are highlights:

I’ve been a conservative my entire life. . . . . So you’d think that the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, would be a natural fit. It once was. But on Saturday, after speaking to this year’s gathering, I had to be escorted from the premises by several guards who seemed genuinely concerned for my safety.

What happened to me at CPAC is the perfect illustration of the collective experience of a whole swath of conservatives since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. We built and organized this party — but now we’re made to feel like interlopers.

[T]oo many of us have given up the fight. We’ve let disgust and dismay lead us to withdraw while bad actors take control of the direction of our movement.
 CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. Last year, they invited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (and withdrew the invitation only after lewd tapes surfaced). This year, in addition to the president and vice president, CPAC invited Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen.

Matt Schlapp, CPAC’s chairman, described her as a “classical liberal” on Twitter. This is utter nonsense. Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen is a member of the National Front party, and far from distancing herself from her Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist grandfather, she has offered him a more full-throated endorsement than her aunt has.

So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the blood and soil nationalists of Europe.

While there were reasonable, mainstream Republican speakers at CPAC, the lineup also featured demagogues . . . .

How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate?

I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began. . . . I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability.

For traditional conservatives, the past two years have felt like a Twilight Zone episode. Politicians, activists and intellectuals have succumbed with numbing regularity, betraying every principle they once claimed to uphold. But there remains a vigorous remnant of dissenters. I hear from them. There were even some at CPAC.

Just before I reached the exit, a woman approached me and called my name. “That was so brave!” she told me.

Sadly, had more Republicans put principle and decency ahead of winning, Trump would not be in the White House.  There are indeed times when losing is winning. Charen and other traditional conservatives have discovered this far too late.  

London 2017 - Days 5 and 6 and a Somber Homecoming

The husband in front of our hotel on Frith Street in the heart of Soho

The husband and I returned to the USA yesterday after enjoying two more wonderful days in London which included celebrating my birthday on Saturday.  With the disturbing event that unfolded in Charlottesville, I can truthfully say that I have mixed feelings about being back in America.  During the flight back I watched the Zookeeper's Wife, which recalled all to clearly what this kind of hatred that we are witnessing can lead to more quickly than many want to believe.  As previously noted, during our trip, it was constantly embarrassing being an American and having to explain that the majority of Americans did not vote for Trump and his call to racism and Neo-fascism, nor do we support him now.  We must save America's image in the world and say "No" to Trump and his supporters.

As I have noted on Facebook, I earned my undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Virginia and I know Charlottesville well. The white supremacists on display over the last few days such as n the image below are NOT representative of Charlottesville and its people.  They are, however totally representative of Trump's base, including evangelical Christians who despite lip service to the message of Christ long ago threw away and right to call themselves Christian.  They now worship a virulent form of white nationalism that sows hatred of anyone with different beliefs, skin color, faith and/or sexual orientation. Don't believe Trump's utterly disingenuous attempt to build a false equivalency between the gathered white supremacists and those who oppose racist and fascism. 

These white supremacists - and by extension every evangelical Christian who voted for Trump - need to become social and political outcasts. While the Trump/Pence regime will never properly condemn them in a meaningful way, the rest of us patriotic Americans must oppose them and ultimately silence them. The cancer that they represent must be stopped.

More images of the white supremacist via the New York Times make it clear that these people descended on Charlottesville to intimidate and cause violence.  You do not carry an automatic weapon to a "peaceful Protest."

Historian: Almost Inevitable that Trump Will Attempt a Coup

Perhaps many of us are growing accustomed to the normalization of the reprehensible and destruction of political norms after 100 days of misrule by Der Trumpenführer, Reichsmarschall Pence, and his propaganda ministers.  As I speculated over the weekend, perhaps Trump lacks the self-discipline and consistent ideology to be another Adolph Hitler.  But one historian sees Trump as a continuing danger to American Democracy.  Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, is the award-winning author of numerous books including the recent “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” and a new book, "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.”  Snyder, in fact believes that Trump will attempt a coup as he finds himself unable to increase his popularity and unable to pass any meaningful legislation be it good, bad or indifferent.  A piece in Salon looks at why Snyder sees a continuing threat.   It also tells us that we must resist and not dive into the flow or become complacent.  Here are excerpts:

American democracy is in crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made normal.

Trump has threatened violence against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests. Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.

Trump is threatening to eliminate an independent judiciary and wants to punish judges who dare to stand against his illegal and unconstitutional mandates. In what appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself, his family and his inner circle by peddling influence and access to corporations, foreign countries and wealthy individuals.

How long does American democracy have before the poison that Donald Trump and the Republican Party injected into the country’s body politic becomes lethal?

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University . . . . explores how the American people can fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian regime.

The Greeks understood that democracy is likely to produce oligarchy because if you don’t have some mechanism to get inequality under control then people with the most money will likely take full control.

With Trump, one sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.” He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of inequality.

As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism. . . . . Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.

In your book you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?

Let me make just two points. The first is that I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don’t think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines — not just because the president is historically unpopular. It’s also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like.

Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future.

My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along.

The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

Every day you don’t do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you’ve got to get started right away. “On Tyranny” is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. There are plenty of other great ideas from people coming from other traditions, but the basic thing is you have to change your protocol of daily behavior now.

Don’t obey in advance because you have to start by orienting yourself against the general drift of things. If you can manage that, then the other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016. You have to set your own habits now.

I hope he's wrong, but I can all to easily see Trump using a national emergency real or manufactured - to seize power, mussel the media and curtail civil rights. 

LA Times Editorial Series Savages Trump

The Los Angeles Times has been running a six-part editorial series on Der Trumpenführer that is brutal in every way, yet totally honest and truthful in evaluating the malignant narcissist who inhabits the White House.  The titles speak volumes in and of themselves:  "Our Dishonest President," "Why Trump Lies," "Trump's Authoritarian Vision," "Trump's War on Journalism," "Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,' "California Fights Back."  If you have not read the series, please do so.  In today's editorial, the Times explains why it felt compelled to do the series.  Here are excerpts:

Why now?  That question cropped up repeatedly, from President Trump’s supporters as well as his critics, after we launched our six-part series of editorials about the 45th president.

The answer is simple. Even though we’re only 11 weeks into the Trump presidency, there is good reason to believe that rather than grow into the job, he’ll remain the man he was on the campaign trail — impulsive, untruthful, narcissistic, ignorant of the limits on presidential power and woefully unprepared to wield it. Rather than wait until the public grew inured to the lies, the undermining of democratic institutions, the demagoguery and bluster, we decided to lay out our concerns at length and in detail.

Although we strongly disagreed with many of Trump’s proposals, that wasn’t what made him so uniquely dangerous. It’s the man himself, his character and temperament, that set him apart from his predecessors. So we decided to write instead about how Trump’s erratic, impulsive, narcissistic personality manifests itself in his actions in ways that pose a threat to our democracy.

[W]e’ve grown increasingly doubtful that Trump will lead any responsible efforts to reform immigration policy, grow the economy, improve healthcare or achieve other shared goals. His Cabinet choices and budget proposals show he’s more interested in dismantling federal agencies and programs than improving their effectiveness.

Here is a sample from "Why Trump Lies":

The insult that Donald Trump brings to the equation is an apparent disregard for fact so profound as to suggest that he may not see much practical distinction between lies, if he believes they serve him, and the truth.

His approach succeeds because of his preternaturally deft grasp of his audience. Though he is neither terribly articulate nor a seasoned politician, he has a remarkable instinct for discerning which conspiracy theories in which quasi-news source, or which of his own inner musings, will turn into ratings gold. He targets the darkness, anger and insecurity that hide in each of us and harnesses them for his own purposes. If one of his lies doesn’t work — well, then he lies about that.

If we harbor latent racism or if we fear terror attacks by Muslim extremists, then he elevates a rumor into a public debate: Was Barack Obama born in Kenya, and is he therefore not really president?

If his own ego is threatened — if broadcast footage and photos show a smaller-sized crowd at his inauguration than he wanted — then he targets the news media, falsely charging outlets with disseminating “fake news” and insisting, against all evidence, that he has proved his case. . . .

He is dangerous. His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency. He gives every indication that he is as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.

He has made himself the stooge, the mark, for every crazy blogger, political quack, racial theorist, foreign leader or nutcase peddling a story that he might repackage to his benefit as a tweet, an appointment, an executive order or a policy. He is a stranger to the concept of verification, the insistence on evidence and the standards of proof that apply in a courtroom or a medical lab — and that ought to prevail in the White House.

There have always been those who accept the intellectually bankrupt notion that people are entitled to invent their own facts — consider the “9/11 was an inside job” trope — but Trump’s ascent marks the first time that the culture of alternative reality has made its home at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.