Truth and the Trumpers

Very interesting. “Republicans' trust in national news outlets drops by half in just five years” This piece details how liberals still have “some” or “a lot” of trust in the media, but for Republicans, that trust went down very quickly from 70% to 35% from 2016 to 2021.

Why might that be? The Netflix series “How to Become a Tyrant” provides an answer. In episode 4, the series points out that an effective tyrant must “Control the Truth.” He (They’re always a “he”) must control the past (The George Orwell novel 1984 showed us in great detail how that’s done) and he must, like a domestic abuser, “Plays mind games, such as when he denies requests he has made previously or when he undercuts her sense of reality.”

A dictator must have people believe that he is the only source of truth. That only he can be believed. That no other source is worthy of any trust.

Now, does this mean I or liberal friends of mine trust the media implicitly? No, we apply critical tests to distinguish truth from falsehood. There are certainly faults and problems with the media. CNN seems to believe that Afghanistan, the Texas “snitch” law on abortion and the economy are all “crises” for President Biden right now. They are, of course, nothing of the kind. But CNN has to get “clicks” on its websites and eyeballs on its TV show, so they’re desperate to make the news more dramatic than it actually is. .

Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan says “It was not rigged. It was not stolen," Ryan told WISN 12 in a rare interview on Monday. "Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won..." But here we are, 10 months after the 2020 election that Joe Biden won by about 7 million votes and “Two-thirds of Republicans still think the 2020 election was rigged.”

What is their proof? The “Kraken” lawyers, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others, are on the verge of losing their licenses to practice law, their lies were so clearly and egregiously false. The brainwashing appears to have worked.

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

 

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

awful @MeetThePress premise this morning: we're "divided" over Covid and masks! we're not: 70% have a shot. 70% support masks.

Eric Boehlert

The problem with the crush of COVID-19 patients using up most of the available ICU beds* and crowding out emergency facilities is that it’s all so unnecessary.

*Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas are nearly out of ICU beds as Covid-19 cases surge across the US — particularly among unvaccinated Americans.

CNN

Here are the ICU beds that are occupied just by Covid patients in each of 14 states. Now, if you’re vaccinated and catch even the dreaded Delta Variant of the coronavirus, it might still result in some unpleasantness, but you’re unlikely even to have to go to the hospital.

To say that Americans are “divided” is to suggest that both sides have good reason to feel the way they do. That, for instance, taking Ivermectin, a cow de-wormer that yes, people can safely take under some very specific circumstances, but that the FDA says please don’t use it for Covid, is a reasonable and rational choice. It isn’t. It’ completely insane to think that the vaccines that the US went to great length to produce and to safety-test and to test for efficacy is less safe or effective than a quack cure pushed by Fox News and other conservative commenters.

There’s also a problem with a claim that anti-choicers/forced birthers make, that the new Texas “snitch” law “...bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women are even aware they are pregnant."

As the C&L piece points out, a six week-old embryo (It won’t become a fetus for another month) doesn’t actually have a heart!

The rhythmic sound that can be heard is "a group of cells with electrical activity. That's what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system." That's all from Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at University of California, San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology

There’s absolutely no question that the people who came up with the term did so consciously and deliberately, with malice and forethought. But why mainstream news reporters keep mindlessly repeating that “fetuses” have a heartbeat after six weeks is a real puzzle. This is a claim that fails a very simple true/false test.

Another recent problem is that the Texas “snitch” law didn’t just suddenly pop up out of the blue. The law was passed back in May. The course it took to the Supreme Court was publicly documented. Yet, the Supreme Court decision landed like a bombshell because, apparently, the press was so wholly and completely absorbed in the withdrawal from Afghanistan (a legitimate and worthwhile story) that it just didn’t have any time or attention to spare for the gutting of a Supreme Court ruling that’s been in effect since 1973. The press played catch-up with a number of pieces after the ruling was made, but there was absolutely no need for it to have been such a surprise.

Why does this happen? Why does the press constantly use right-wing talking points that are completely bonkers or ignore a clearly important issue that will obviously have a great impact? My own personal theory is that media people like to run stories through people they feel are outside experts, who are always free to chat and who provide authoritative-sounding quotes. In other words, reporters have right-wing “friends” who have cultivated close relationships with them and who assure them that a fetal heartbeat at six weeks is a real thing and who discourage putting out pieces on something like the Texas “snitch” law that will make right-wingers look bad (Fox News apparently realized how unpopular the new law was as they didn’t mention it for quite awhile). Reporters don’t need to stop talking with right-wing “friends.” What reporters need to do is to get friends on the “other side of the aisle” who can provide corrections and equally authoritative-sounding quotes.