The Red White and Blue Pill
Trump’s real war isn’t with the media. It’s with facts.
Delegitimizing the institutions that might report inconvenient or damaging facts about the president is strategic for an administration that has made a slew of impossible promises and takes office amid a cloud of ethics concerns and potential scandals.
I think the lies are just going to get more and more brazen and the defenses of his lies more and more bizarre.
Trump’s Age of Ignorance Threatens Humanity
He seems hell-bent on ushering in an era where expertise is not just ignored, but actively disdained. This has manifested itself all over his still-short list of appointees, but the nominees related to science and health seem particularly egregious. These are Trump’s “unspecialists”—anti-experts, candidates that would be laughed off as absurdities if we weren’t living in the middle of a Philip K. Dick dystopia.
Trump-Funded Operative CAUGHT Soliciting Illegal Acts to Disrupt Inauguration
This story fell through the cracks. Really scary.
Conway: Dems trying to humiliate Cabinet picks
They want to be treated like special snowflakes and spared the humiliation of answering questions about the jobs they’ll do.
The Case for Not Being Crybabies
Why are we still saying Trump isn’t doing enough to avoid conflicts of interest? He’s made clear he wants to profit off his presidency. Let’s accept that. That is what he wants to do. If you’re a journalist, start documenting the details. If you’re an activist or politician start mobilizing against his corruption.
Anti-Trump Republicans and Trump’s ‘Blacklist’
The thing to keep in mind here is that these jobs are technocrat jobs and the people in the blacklist are life long Republicans with experience in government. It’s spectacularly bad judgment to block these people when the Trump administration is so understaffed.
The Music Donald Trump Can’t Hear
The collapse has been almost total, and shockingly uncritical. A few resisters aside—in the press, the names Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, and David Frum come to mind—even those who know better, or did, have allowed the ancient habits of hatred to overwhelm their normal sense of right and wrong. Republican legislators who, a year ago, would have been aghast at any politician who praised the brutal dictator Vladimir Putin now have little trouble swallowing their tongues when Trump insists that Putin’s good opinion, however earned, is “an asset.” Those who made a fuss about pursuing any possible conflict of interest among Obama’s appointees now meekly allow the most conflict-ridden and least “vetted” of candidates for high office to walk through largely unmolested. And the insistence of the leader that he has no obligation to release any record of his financial entanglements, with the bold repeated lie that an “audit”—whose existence can’t be confirmed and wouldn’t matter anyway—prevents him from doing so, is simply and mutely accepted. The collapse—motivated for some by opportunism, for others by the intimidation of the mob—is complete.
This should be a bigger story.
Authoritarians Distract Rather than Debate – Marginal REVOLUTION
Distraction is a clever and useful strategy in information control in that an argument in almost any human discussion is rarely an effective way to put an end to an opposing argument. Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back up
That’s the China’s propaganda machine. Remind you of anyone?
State Level Dems Frustrated with DNC
Democrats around the country are demanding change from a national committee they say has focused too heavily on the White House at the expense of governorships, legislatures and state party operations.
To Stop Trump, Democrats Can Learn From the Tea Party
Their tactics weren’t fancy: They just showed up on their own home turf, and they just said no.
Here’s the crazy thing: It worked.