Today is, in theory, the second-to-last day before Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) deadlines for both the bipartisan infrastructure deal and the Democrats’ reconciliation package.
Continue reading “So, What’s The Plan With The Infrastructure Bills?”
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) finally came around to getting vaccinated against COVID-19 on Sunday after remaining tight-lipped for months about his vaccination status. Continue reading “Scalise Joins Bandwagon Of Right-Wingers Suddenly Eager To Tout COVID Vaccines”
While the bipartisan infrastructure bill hovers in limbo between life and death, Democrats are looking ahead to the reconciliation package which may ultimately subsume that hard infrastructure piece, should the bipartisan deal fail.
Continue reading “Democrats Are Getting Ready To Just Do It All Through Reconciliation”
Describing Trump confidant Thomas Barrack as a “serious flight risk” who may receive the support of foreign leaders in fleeing the Justice Department, federal prosecutors asked a judge in a Tuesday memo to detain the 2017 Trump inaugural committee chair.
Continue reading “Feds Demand Detention For Barrack, Label Him A ‘Serious Flight Risk’”
Fox News hosts go full vaccine.
Hannity Monday night: “I can’t say it enough. Enough people have died. It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science, I believe in vaccine science.”
Chris Ruddy, owner of Newsmax, announces Biden is doing a totally awesome job with the vaccines which are great.
After months of stalling Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R) gets vaccinated, calls it “safe and effective.”
Right wing homunculus Ben Shapiro: “Get vaxxed. I did. My wife did. My parents did.”
I think my colleague Nicole LaFond get at the heart of what’s going on here in this passage below.
This article was co-published with The Informant.
It was once a feather in the cap for Rip McIntosh.
The Florida man sat on the board of trustees for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West with the likes of former governors, a former senator, and even former Vice President Dick Cheney. The role with the Smithsonian-affiliated museum in Cody, Wyoming was a good one for a philanthropist who enjoyed the outdoors and who spent a lot of time in the Rocky Mountain region.
All of that came to an abrupt end on Monday night when McIntosh tendered his resignation from the board following revelations that he was the publisher of a racist newsletter that disparaged Black people and often served as a vehicle for white grievance politics.
News of McIntosh’s resignation was first reported by the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.
“The views represented in Mr. McIntosh’s online and social media content do not represent or reflect the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s core values or its mission,” a spokesperson for the museum told the Star-Tribune.
McIntosh’s resignation came a week after TPM and The Informant revealed in an investigation that he ran a shockingly racist email newsletter and recently published an essay that said Black people have “become socially incompatible with other races” and “American Black culture has evolved into an un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.”
The focus of the investigation was McIntosh’s affiliation with Turning Point USA, a massive pro-Trump group to which he serves as an advisor. McIntosh included the logo and fundraising pitch for the group at the bottom of his newsletter.
There’s no sign Turning Point has taken any action against McIntosh since the investigation was published. His name and photo still appear on the organization’s governance page on its website. A spokesperson for the group didn’t respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
McIntosh has faced additional fallout in the past week, too.
He told the Casper Star-Tribune that his account was terminated by Constant Contact, the email marketing company he used to send out his newsletter.
While the report didn’t say exactly which day McIntosh got the boot, it appears that the most recent email he sent to his list was on Wednesday.
The subject line of the email was “White Privilege — The Left’s Bourgeoisie Bogeyman,” and it contained an essay by Kathleen Brush, who frequently writes about white identity for McIntosh’s newsletter. Brush lamented what she described as the redistribution of “vast amounts of wealth from whites (and privileged self-reliant Asians) to people of color” by way of government benefits.
“White people need to wake up,” the essay said. “Socialism requires drumming up hatred for the rich, or, in this case, the white middle class — the bourgeoisie. It’s a pity to slur and guilt-trips (sic) the descendants of white ethnicities that endured hell to build a country where people of all races and ethnicities could succeed.”
McIntosh told the Star-Tribune that he planned to continue publishing the newsletter just as soon as he could find a new platform that would take him.
“I’m afraid I’ll be dark until I can engage another service that will facilitate my posting articles,” he told the newspaper.
Nick R. Martin is a TPM alum who has also written for The Daily Beast and BuzzFeed News, among other places. These days, he runs The Informant, a publication dedicated to covering hate and extremism in the U.S.
This big indictment of Trump confidante Tom Barrack is not anything I had on my dance card for today or any time in the future. But as Josh Kovensky suggests in our first write up of this news Barrack had his hands in all sorts of stuff in the Trump world so legal trouble was never hard to imagine. The investigation people were expecting he’d get in trouble for was the one into the Trump inaugural, that Barrack chaired.
Barrack is the guy who put Trump together with Paul Manafort when Manafort was desperate for the gig. He was also at the center of the feeding frenzy of Gulf governments and plutocrats attracted to the fee-for-service culture surrounding the Trump campaign. Barrack was in the mix in numerous parts of the Trump-Russia story but never quite at the center of it.
This article was originally published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
The number of federal political committees that have spent money in the first half of 2021 at Trump Organization properties has dropped dramatically from the same period two years ago, Federal Election Commission filings show. Those continuing to spend: a smaller circle of loyal supporters of former President Donald Trump and candidates jockeying for his favor in contested Republican primaries. Continue reading “Campaign Spending At Trump Properties Down, But Not Out”
A federal grand jury in Brooklyn has returned a multi-count indictment against Trump confidante Tom Barrack and two other co-defendants for allegedly acting as agents of the United Arab Emirates.
Continue reading “Trump Inaug Chief Indicted Over Alleged Failure To Register As Foreign Agent”
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
The U.S. is in an information war with itself. The public sphere, where Americans discuss public issues, is broken. There’s little discussion – and lots of fighting.
One reason why: Persuasion is difficult, slow and time-consuming – it doesn’t make good television or social media content – and so there aren’t a lot of good examples of it in our public discourse.
What’s worse, a new form of propaganda has emerged – and it’s enlisted us all as propagandists.
I teach classes on political communication and propaganda in America. Here’s the difference between the two:
Political communication is persuasion used in politics. It helps to facilitate the democratic process.
Propaganda is communication as force; it’s designed for warfare. Propaganda is anti-democratic because it influences while using strategies like fear appeals, disinformation, conspiracy theory and more.
Since there are few examples of persuasion in our public sphere these days, it is difficult to know the difference between persuasion and propaganda. That’s worrisome because politics is not war, so political communication isn’t – and shouldn’t be – the same as propaganda.
Mass propaganda techniques emerged with mass communication technologies like posters, pictures and movies during the first World War.
That old propaganda model was designed by political elites to “manufacture consent” at home so that citizens would support the war, and to demoralize the enemy abroad.
According to linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, the manufacture of consent was believed by elites to be necessary because they thought “the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things…We have to tame the bewildered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things.”
During World War I, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, a federal agency, oversaw the production of pro-war films like the 1918 silent film “America’s Answer.” When Americans went to see the film in theaters, they would often encounter a speech from one of the “Four Minute Men” – the local citizens whom Creel enlisted to give patriotic speeches during the four minutes it took to change the movie reels.
After World War I, according to Herman and Chomsky, all sorts of elites turned to propaganda to “tame the bewildered herd.” The old propaganda was good at taming citizens. But there was a nasty side effect that played out over almost a century of its use: disengagement. Political communication scholars in the 1990s and early 2000s worried about what they saw as the crisis in democracy, which was civic disengagement characterized by low voter turnout, low political party affiliation and rising distrust, cynicism and disinterest in politics.
The elite-controlled old vertical propaganda model couldn’t withstand the changes in communication brought on by the new participatory media – first talk radio, then cable, email, blogs, chats, texts, video and social media.
According to recent Pew research, 93% of Americans are connected to the internet and 82% of Americans are connected to social media. We now all have direct access to communicate in the public sphere – and, if we choose, to create, circulate and amplify propaganda.
A lot of people use their social media connections and platforms to knowingly and unknowingly spread misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy and partisan talking points – all forms of propaganda. We’re all propagandists now.
Rather than the elite manufacturing consent, a new propaganda model has emerged in the 21st century: what I call the “manufacture of dissent.”
The “manufacture of dissent” model takes advantage of our individual abilities to produce, circulate and amplify propaganda. It sets us in motion to, in Chomsky’s words, “rage and trample and destroy things.”
The new propaganda can emerge from anyone, anywhere – and it is designed to create chaos so no one knows whom to trust or what is true.
Now we have a new crisis in democracy.
Citizens are called upon and trained by political parties, media, advocacy organizations, platforms, corporations – and more – to become propagandists, even without realizing it. Though both sides of the political spectrum can and have used the new propaganda, it has been embraced more on the right, largely to counter the old manufacture of consent model embraced by the mainstream.
For example, the slogan topping daily emails sent by ConservativeHQ, a longstanding and influential conservative news blog, says, “The home for grassroots conservatives leading the battle to educate and mobilize family, friends, neighbors, and others to defeat the anti-God, anti-America, Marxist New Democrats.”
From this perspective, politics is a “battle,” it’s warfare and ConservativeHQ’s readers can fight by educating and mobilizing – by spreading ConservativeHQ’s propaganda.
Likewise, the conspiracy website InfoWars tells its audience “there’s a war on for your mind.”
Social media platforms train users to communicate as propagandists: Recent research shows that platform users learn to express polarizing emotions like outrage through “social learning.” Social media users are taught through app feedback – positive reinforcement through notifications – and peer-learning – what they see others do – to post outrage even if they don’t feel outraged and they don’t want to spread outrage.
The more outrage we see, the more outrage we post.
Today’s new model of propaganda has dangerous consequences.
The Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection was a direct result of the manufacture of dissent. Right-wing politicians, citizens and media used disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy, fear appeals and outrage circulated via the old and new propaganda to cast doubt on the nation’s electoral process.
President Trump primed his followers to believe that the election would be “rigged,” which led people to look for and circulate so-called “evidence” of fraud.
Courts and election officials certified the integrity of the election. Conspiracists saw that as further evidence of the “plot” and supported Trump’s Big Lie that the election had been stolen.
Trump’s supporters amplified the conspiracy via posts on social media, videos, text messages, emails and secret groups – spreading doubt about the election to their friends, neighbors and audiences.
When Trump told people to march on the Capitol to defend their freedom, they did.
But the Big Lie that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was merely part of an even bigger lie.
Since the 1990s and the emergence of the manufacture of dissent, right-wing propaganda’s major premise has been that “politics is war and the enemy cheats.” Every news story from that perspective is an elaboration on that theme, including those about the 2020 election.
When politics is seen as war and the enemy can’t be trusted, then every election is seen as dire and the electoral process that denies your side victory is seen as unfair. According to a recent Monmouth University poll, 30% of Americans still believe Trump’s Big Lie.
The legitimacy of the American political system requires the actual consent of the governed, and its vitality and health requires we allow actual dissent. But our broken public sphere has neither.
Both come from persuasion, not propaganda.
This isn’t about nostalgia for traditional propaganda. Both the old propaganda and the new propaganda are anti-democratic. The old propaganda manufactured Americans’ consent, using communication as force to keep people disengaged and compliant.
The new propaganda manufactures dissent. It uses communication as force to keep people engaged and outraged – and it sets us in motion to trample and destroy things.
[The Conversation’s most important politics headlines, in our Politics Weekly newsletter.]
Jennifer Mercieca is a professor of communication at Texas A&M University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
