Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

i was thinking Siberia...

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First of all, I'm no fan of Fox. Second, lying in news reporting isn't a crime.

1. Deliberately and knowingly lying in news reporting may not necessarily be a crime,
but it is a crying shame and should be denounce.

2. The news reports have reported that deliberately and knowingly lying about Dominion voting machines
is the basis of the lawsuit against Fox News.

3. In this particular case, it may not necessarily be a crime, but it may prove to be civilly liable.

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Third, I dare you to give me one and only one example in your own words (not a link to someone else's words) of a lie they told.

1. Why are you asking us?

2. Why don't you ask Tucker Carlson?

3. Why don't you ask Laura Ingraham?

4. Why don't you ask Sean Hannity?

5. Why don't you ask the Fox employees, Fox executives, and Fox hosts?

6. Ask them about their text messages that has been reported as being part of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.

7. Ask them about their sworn under oath testimonies, that has been reported as part of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.

8. We at A2k don't need to put anything in our own words.

9. We are relaying what has been reported regarding the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.

Somewhere in America, a magat is sitting in the dark, masturbating with his rifle, fantasizing about sacrificing his pathetic life for a cult figure who doesn't give a bucket of warm piss about him.

This is the dream Donnie has instilled in his followers.

Region Philbis wrote:

i was thinking Siberia...

I was thinking anywhere where there are no golf courses...but "Siberia" has a very nice ring to it.

And I don't think there are many golf courses there.

Rumors that he is about to be indicted in New York in connection with the $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels have prompted former president Donald Trump to pepper his alternative social media site with requests for money and to double down on the idea that any attack on him is an attack on the United States.

The picture of America in his posts reflects the extreme version of the virtual reality the Republicans have created since the 1980s. The United States is “THIRD WORLD & DYING,” he wrote. “THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD.” He went on to describe a country held captive by “CRIMINALS & LEFTIST THUGS,” in which immigrants are “FLOODING THROUGH OUR OPEN BOARDERS [sic], MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS,” and where the president is “SURROUNDED BY EVIL & SINISTER PEOPLE.” He told his supporters to “SAVE AMERICA” by protesting the arrest he—but no one else—says is coming on Tuesday.

Trump’s false and dystopian portrait of the nation takes to its logical conclusion the narrative Republicans have pushed since the 1980s. Since the days of Reagan, Republicans have argued that people who believe that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure are destroying the country by trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. Now Trump has taken that argument to its logical conclusion: the country has been destroyed by women, Black Americans, Indigenous people, and people of color, who have taken it over and are persecuting people like him.

This old Republican narrative created a false image of the nation and of its politics, an image pushed to a generation of Americans by right-wing media, a vision that MAGA Republicans have now absorbed as part of their identity. It reflects a manipulation of politics that Russian political theorists called “political technology.”

Russian “political technologists” developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy by creating a virtual political reality through modern media. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.

But it also fit nicely into American politics, where there is a long history of manipulating voters far beyond the usual political spin. As far back as 1972, Nixon’s operatives engaged in what they called “ratf*cking,” dirty tricks that amounted to political sabotage of their opponents. The different elements of that system became a fundamental part of Republican operations in the 1990s, especially the use of a false narrative spread through talk radio and right-wing television.

More recently, we have seen blackmail (former representative Madison Cawthorn [R-NC] blamed his own party for the release of compromising photos); the use of state power to help candidates (through investigations, for example); double candidates (a Florida Republican won a seat in the state legislature in 2020 after a sham candidate with the same name as the Democratic candidate siphoned voters); and the deliberate creation of a false political reality.

Indeed, David Klepper at AP News reported just yesterday that Russian social media accounts are up to their old tricks in the U.S., pushing the idea that federal authorities have been lying about the true impact of the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment because they want to divert U.S. money from problems at home to Ukraine. “Biden offers food, water, medicine, shelter, payouts of pension and social services to Ukraine! Ohio first! Offer and deliver to Ohio!” one of those accounts posted.

So the United States has had its own version of political technology that overlaps with the Russian version, and it has led to the grim picture Trump is portraying in his attempt to rile up his supporters to protect him.

But here’s what I wonder: What happens when people who have embraced a virtual world begin to figure out it’s fake?

Russians are having to come to grips with their failing economy, world isolation, and rising death rates as President Vladimir Putin throws Russian soldiers into the maw of battle without training or equipment. Now they have to deal with the fact that the International Criminal Court has indicted their president for war crimes. Will they rally around their leader, slide away, or turn against him?

In the United States, MAGA Republicans have been faced with evidence released in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case against the Fox News Corporation that shows Fox News Channel personalities lied to them. Now those who have cleaved to Trump have to face that he is asking them to risk their freedom to oppose his arrest for paying $130,000 to an adult film actress to keep quiet about their sexual encounter, hardly a noble cause. And the last time he asked people to defend him, more than 1,000 of them—so far—faced arrest and conviction, while he went back to playing golf and asking people for money.

Tonight, Erica Orden of Politico reported that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg emailed his employees to say “we do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York.” He told them: “Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment.” He also noted, without mentioning specific cases, that his office has been coordinating with the New York Police Department and with the New York court system during certain ongoing investigations.

Some of Trump’s radical supporters have taken to social media to make a plan for surrounding Mar-a-Lago and protecting Trump with firearms, but others appear to be more eager for someone else to show up than to do so themselves.

Ali Alexander, who helped to organize “Stop the Steal” rallies to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, wrote to his supporters today: “Previously, I had said if Trump was arrested or under the threat of a perp walk, 100,000 patriots should shut down all routes to Mar-a-Lago…. Now I’m retired. I’ll pray for him though!”

“Previously, I had said if Trump was arrested or under the threat of a perp walk, 100,000 patriots should shut down all routes to Mar-a-Lago…. Now I’m retired. I’ll pray for him though!"

NBC News presidential historian and author of ten books, Michael Beschloss, summed it up: “So Trump is planning his first campaign rally for Waco on thirtieth anniversary of the siege where a cult leader challenged the authority of the federal government and threatened violence.”

Saturday morning, in several lengthy all-caps rage posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed he was being arrested on Tuesday, and demanded his followers “protest, take our nation back!”

Retired FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi, now a well-known NBC News national security analyst, wrote: “Cult leader to hold rally where wanted cult leader refused to surrender to feds 30 years ago, killed ATF agents, and ran deadly stand-off where at least 75 died: Donald Trump will host first 2024 presidential rally in Waco.”

Had Fox news really been guilty of lying, you could have done what I asked. I win.

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Had Fox news really been guilty of lying, you could have done what I asked. I win.

I just want everyone to see what Brandon9000 wrote.

A chilling moment came in 2016, when Seo [author of “Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard”] and some Harvard debate pals were watching one of the Presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What they saw was not diplomatic restraint but pure emoting. Trump was a product of what the linguist Deborah Tannen calls “argument culture,” in which a “pervasive warlike atmosphere” hangs over all public dialogue. Watching Trump, Seo was reminded of what could happen in the nastiest of debate rounds, when opponents competed in bad faith. “Bullies used the adversarial format to bludgeon opponents and used rhetoric not to enhance but to elide reason,” he writes. “They took advantage of the debate’s openness to ideas by introducing lies. Bad debates seemed to point back to some weakness in the activity itself. They showed that a debate, so hijacked, could be a harmful force in the world.”

He has to be ... fed slop.