Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

It's always so disappointing to learn these kinds of things about people you admired or respected.

What, exactly, has been censored?

You can't seriously expect that white people will welcome BLM's message of anti-white hatred?

Corbin Bolies @CorbinBolies
4h
NEW: Howard Kurtz said he's been barred by Fox from covering the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, a decision he said he “strongly disagrees” with. “It’s a major media story,” he said on his show Sunday.

Andrew Feinberg @AndrewFeinberg
Feb 24
Tulsi Gabbard on Fox just now: Biden efforts to hire women, minorities, LGBT+ etc for top administration roles makes him just like Hitler.

(she actually said this on live television not 10 minutes ago)

Whew. I know, I know… my cynicism even wears me out…

I don’t know why, but it just seems comical to me when I see a story talking about Fox News is “exposed” as dishonest.

It kind of strikes me like saying - straight-faced, in serious tones - we’ve discovered that Trump is often lying.

Whew. I know, I know… my cynicism even wears me out…

Dear Mr. Darwin,

Alfred Russell Wallace suggested we talk to you. Our family would like to employ you to develop a theory that will undermine Christian civilization and cause people to question authority. Your work would supplement that of Mr. Marx, who's been working for us since 1848. We are seeking a biological theory rather than an economic one.

Sincerely,
Nathan Rothschild

Another filing today in the defamation lawsuit of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox News Network has revealed more of the machinations behind the construction of the Big Lie that former president Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

A previous filing showed that Fox News Channel hosts knew full well that Biden had won and that Trump loyalists saying the election was fraudulent had no evidence. Personalities like Tucker Carlson continued to push the Big Lie, though, apparently out of fear that they would lose their audience to Newsmax and other right-wing outlets that continued to parrot the idea that Trump had won the election.

Today’s filing shows that executives at the highest levels of the Fox Corporation and the Fox News Network knowingly permitted Fox News Channel personalities to spread false conspiracy theories about the election in order to protect their profits. It includes testimony from Rupert Murdoch, the chair of the Fox Corporation, showing that Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chair and chief executive officer of the Fox Corporation, as well as Suzanne Scott, the chief executive officer of Fox News Media, were all deeply involved in the question of how to deal with Trump’s lies and with the personalities who were echoing those lies, without losing viewership.

Rupert Murdoch spoke with Scott frequently, and testified: “I’m a journalist at heart. I like to be involved in these things.” Lachlan Murdoch, as well, was in the loop with his father and Scott. Ultimately, although they knew that claims of massive election fraud were unfounded, they decided to give the lies airtime anyway to stop their audience from abandoning them for other channels. Fox board member and former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) warned them “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories,” but they ignored him.

Murdoch also revealed FNC’s role as a wing of the Republican Party when he testified that he “provided Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden's ads, along with debate strategy… (providing Kushner a preview of Biden's ads before they were public).”

Political writer Rick Wilson summed it up: “They knew Trump lost. They knew there was not then (nor is there now) a scintilla of fraud. They knew, and lied. Over, and over, and over. They chose guests they knew were lying. They allowed story meetings promoting a massive, dangerous lie that reduced faith and belief in the American system. The entire top level of Fox management knew their lies were leading to danger for this nation…. They knew the lies were lies. They fed and fed the beast.”

The Big Lie has become central to the worldview of far-right Republicans. On February 23, in Arizona, newly elected Republican, conspiracy theorist, and election denier Liz Harris hijacked a hearing of the House and Senate election committees to feature a speaker who talked of election fraud and made wild and unsubstantiated accusations that state lawmakers and judges are taking bribes from a Mexican drug cartel.

When another election denier, state senator Wendy Rogers, said the hearing was “not the appropriate venue” to talk about potential criminal activity, one of her own supporters accused her of being “compromised,” and another said that revolution was now “inevitable.”

Also in the news today was the death of Gleb Pavlovsky, former top political consultant to Russian president Vladimir Putin, after a long illness. Before quietly turning away from Putin, Pavlovsky helped to engineer his rise through a concept called “political technology,” a system that uses technology to manipulate voters into rubber stamping the election of favored political leaders.

According to historian and political scientist Andrew Wilson, who specializes in Eastern Europe, “political technologists” in the post-Soviet republics created a virtual political reality by blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to take their voters, creating false parties to create opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Under such manipulation, usually delivered in a firehose of outrageous and competing stories, people lost the ability to tell what was real and lost faith that they could have any effect on the political system.

In the hands of political technologists, democracy was no longer about voters choosing their representatives, but was simply a way to legitimize manipulation by corrupt politicians to keep themselves in power.

After House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave exclusive access to 41,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol to Tucker Carlson of the Fox News Channel, news organizations CBS News, CNN, Politico, ProPublica ABC, Axios, Advance, Scripps, the Los Angeles Times, and Gannett have asked the speaker for equal access to the material.

“Without full public access to the complete historical record,” attorney Charles Tobin wrote, “there is concern that an ideologically-based narrative of an already polarizing event will take hold in the public consciousness, with destabilizing risks to the legitimacy of Congress, the Capitol Police, and the various federal investigations and prosecutions of January 6 crimes.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to try to restore faith in the government. The Commerce Department will announce tomorrow that any company that hopes to get one of the new federal subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing under the CHIPS and Science Act must make sure its construction workers and employees have access to affordable, high-quality childcare. Such companies will be able to use some of the government money to build new childcare facilities, subsidize care at existing facilities, or find other solutions.

The measure is designed to ease the labor shortages by enabling women currently unable to find affordable childcare to enter the workforce. It will also leave the establishment of more childcare facilities in the hands of private companies, thus avoiding another round of fights over Biden’s so-called soft infrastructure bill that emphasized childcare, elder care, education, and so on.

Using government contracting to enact social change is a long-standing practice, and the call for childcare is not new. The report from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women declared: “Child care services are needed in all communities, for children of all kinds of families who may require day care, after-school care, or intermittent care. In putting major emphasis on this need, the Commission affirms that child care facilities are essential for women in many different circumstances, whether they work outside the home or not.”

The kicker of that statement is that the president who convened the Commission on the Status of Women was not Biden. It was John F. Kennedy, and the commission issued its report in 1963, sixty years ago.

On Feb. 3 a train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Some of the contents immediately caught fire. Three days later authorities released and burned off additional material from five tankers. These fires caused elevated levels of harmful chemicals in the local air, although the Environmental Protection Agency says that the pollution wasn’t severe enough to cause long-term health damage.

Train derailments are actually fairly common, but you can see how this one might become a political issue. After all, the Obama administration tried to improve rail safety, for example by requiring superior modern brakes on high-hazard trains, and then the Trump administration reversed these regulations. As it happens, these regulations probably wouldn’t have prevented the Ohio derailment, because they were too narrow to have covered this particular train. Still, the events in East Palestine would seem, on the face of it, to strengthen the progressive case for stronger regulation of industry and hurt the conservative case against regulation.

Instead, however, the right is on the attack, claiming that blame for the disaster in Ohio rests on the Biden administration, which it says doesn’t care about or is even actively hostile to white people.

This is vile. It’s also amazing. As far as I can tell, right-wing commentators have just invented a whole new class of conspiracy theory, one that doesn’t even try to explain how the alleged conspiracy is supposed to work.

Conspiracy theories generally come in two forms: those that involve a small, powerful cabal and those that require that thousands of people colluding to hide the truth.

Historically, theories about powerful cabals have often been tied to antisemitism, to the belief that the Elders of Zion and/or the Rothschilds were shaping history — a view promoted by some actually powerful people, including Henry Ford. These days, however, the most prominent example is QAnon, with its claim that a secret ring of pedophiles controls the U.S. government. And at this point, of course, QAnon adherents hold significant power within the House Republican caucus.

The thing about secret-cabal theories is that while they’re generally absurd, they’re hard to definitively disprove. Is President Biden actually a shape-shifting alien lizard? The White House physician will tell you no, but how do you know that he isn’t a lizard, too?

The other kind of conspiracy theory, by contrast, seems as if it would be easy to disprove, because thousands of people would have to be in on the plot, without a single one breaking ranks. A prime example, still highly influential on the right, is the assertion that climate change is a hoax. To believe that, you have to claim that thousands of scientists are colluding to falsify the evidence. But that hasn’t stopped the belief that climate change isn’t real from being widespread, maybe even dominant, on the U.S. political right.

The Big Lie about the “stolen” 2020 election would seem to fall into the same category, requiring malfeasance by election officials across the country. Yet a large majority of Republicans told pollsters that they didn’t believe Biden actually won.

And there’s a new conspiracy theory in town: the claim that the war in Ukraine isn’t really happening, that it’s some kind of fake. Who could possibly believe that all the reporting, all the film footage is concocted? Well, Donald Trump’s first national security adviser is apparently now a Ukraine war truther, and I won’t be surprised if we start to hear this from many people on the right.

But the conspiracy theorizing about the Ohio derailment takes it to a whole other level. When Tucker Carlson suggests that this happened because East Palestine is a rural white community, with another Fox News host going so far as to say that the Biden administration is “spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people,” how is this even supposed to have worked? How did Biden officials engineer a derailment by a private-sector train company, running on privately owned track, which lobbied against stronger safety regulations?

The administration also hasn’t stinted on disaster aid. Multiple federal agencies quickly arrived on the scene, and Ohio’s Republican governor says of the federal response, “I don’t have complaints … we’re getting the help that we need.”

But never mind. Something bad happened to conservative white people, so surely woke progressives must have been responsible.

Given what we’ve learned about how Fox handled claims of a stolen election — feeding the Big Lie in public while mocking it in private — it’s a good bet that the network and other right-wing commentators know perfectly well that their accusations about the derailment are junk. But they know their audience, and probably believe that it’s good business to propound racist conspiracy theories even if they make no logical sense.

Of course, it does no good to appeal to the right’s better nature. But let me make a plea to mainstream media: Please don’t report on this as if there were an actual controversy about who’s responsible for the East Palestine disaster.

But let me make a plea to mainstream media: Please don’t report on this as if there were an actual controversy about who’s responsible for the East Palestine disaster.