News bits: Election propaganda; The reality disconnect; Rewriting history!

Now that Honest Joe and Crooked Don have secured their party nominations, our eyes and ears want to seek out the onslaught of divisive, de-rationalizing TTKP lies, slanders, crackpottery and irrational emotional manipulation that is most certainly coming our way.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

NPR reports about a key bit of Great white Replacement Theory propaganda that TTKP elites are test driving to see how good the lies’ traction (rage, terror, etc.) is likely to be with the public. The elite liars are lying about a tidal wave of illegal voting by illegal immigrants in the 2024 elections.  

It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and numerous studies over the years have found that it almost never happens, but voting experts still worry the claims could take hold at a time when huge numbers of Republicans simultaneously don't trust elections and see immigration as the top problem facing the country.

“I think that’s what it’s meant to do — to freak people out over an issue. It’s a continuation of this myth of voter fraud,” said Gilda Daniels, an election law professor at the University of Baltimore. “It not only creates hysteria, but it [furthers] this idea that only certain people should be allowed to participate in the process.”

Given its apparent power to foment irrational fear, anger and outrage among the increasingly deceived TTKP base, this racist lie is likely to be prominent in the coming months. 

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Vox maybe inadvertently reports about the vast gulf in how Crooked Don’s supporters see him and his actual track record: 

Trump just opened the door to Social Security cuts. Take him seriously.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States, the targeted assassination of terrorists’ family members, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and enormous corporate tax cuts.

And voters considered him the most “moderate” Republican candidate in more than four decades. [Huh? What?]

To the extent this perception had any basis in reality, it reflected Trump’s genuine moderation on one highly salient issue: Unlike many of his GOP predecessors, the mogul emphatically opposed any cuts to Medicare and Social Security. This likely made it a bit easier for ideologically conflicted older Rust Belt voters to pull the lever for a Republican.

Also in his track record of moderation are moderate accomplishments like (i) chronic lying including lying about the vast, still-ongoing stolen 2020 election lie, (ii) DJT’s violent coup attempt on 1/6/21, (iii) two impeachments, (iv) the indictments and criminal cases that are moving at the speed of cold molasses due to his stonewalling the courts, and (v) working with a cadre of convicted felons, many of whom he pardoned. 

Yeah, he definitely is a moderate! (sarcasm)

Q: If DJT is a moderate, what does an extremist look like? Putin? This guy?:

Is he a moderate too?

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The AP writes about another example of the massive TTKP propaganda campaign that is now getting underway in earnest. 

No, not that Earnest

This time the propaganda tactic is rewriting history:

House GOP launches new probe of Jan. 6 and tries 

shifting blame for Capitol attack away from Trump

House Republicans are launching a vast reinvestigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, seeking to push the blame away from Donald Trump, who has been indicted over his actions or his supporters in the mob siege trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Chairman Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., called Jan. 6 a “dark day” in U.S. history as he opened Tuesday’s hearing to delve into the investigation of pipe bombs that were left outside Republican and Democratic party headquarters that day. But, he said, “we still have many unanswered questions.”

The panel’s work comes as Trump and President Joe Biden are galloping toward a 2020 rematch this fall, and Republicans, some once skeptical of Trump’s return to the White House, have quickly been falling in line to support the former president. The House GOP’s high-profile impeachment inquiry into Biden has stalled without a clear path forward.

Speaker Mike Johnson said House Republicans intend to release a final report on Jan. 6 “to correct the incomplete narrative” advanced by the previous work of the Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack.

Germaine muses about the final report: The TTKP final, final report will find and expose Hillary’s deleted emails, with evidence of collusion with terrorists in the Benghazi fiasco and socialist deep state operatives in the federal government. From that, a connection with be made to the hidden deep state documents on Hunter Biden’s laptop and pictures of Anthony Weiner’s wiener. Those previously hidden documents will show that not only was Hunter a naughty newt, he and Joe together planned and executed the 1/6 coup attempt as a false flag operation by the pedophilic, socialist deep state operatives, rogue atheists and peeping Toms in trench coats pretending to be DJT supporters. 

There, I have set the record straight. Fact checkers agree:

☹️ Well OK, maybe the fact checkers are not quite in full agreement.

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For the last ~12 years, I have strenuously argued many times that dark free speech is tearing America apart. An article by Barbara McQuade that Time published a couple of weeks ago seems relevant:

Disinformation Is Tearing America Apart

“The information war is about territory—just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory.” — Renée DiResta, The Digital Maginot Line

ON JANUARY 5, 2021, Rosanne Boyland left her home in Kennesaw, Georgia, for the ten-hour drive to Washington, DC. Boyland had fallen under the spell of the election-denier movement, bound by a belief that the incumbent president, Donald J. Trump, had won the presidential election but had been robbed of his victory through fraud.1 In fact, sixty-one courts and Trump’s own Justice Department had already rejected every claim of fraud, and federal cybersecurity and election officials had declared the 2020 election “the most secure in U.S. history.”

The next day, Boyland joined a mob egged on by Trump and stormed the U.S. Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” as the movement slogan went.

Like the rest of America, Boyland had been bombarded with false claims that Biden had used fraud to steal the election—a fabrication that would become known as “the Big Lie.” Eight others would also lose their lives as a result of the Capitol attack that was sparked by the deluge of disinformation.

In 2022, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative, warned that 2020 was merely a dry run to steal future elections. He called Trump and his allies a “clear and present danger” to U.S. democracy. Indeed, after Trump was charged with crimes for efforts to upend the 2020 election, he began telling a second Big Lie—that the indictments were themselves election interference, filed solely to prevent his election to the presidency in 2024.

Is American democracy undergoing a slow erosion, invisible in real time but as devastating as a metastasizing cancer? Even if our form of government is not destroyed altogether, it risks becoming unrecognizable, controlled not by the people at large but by a small faction of the far right, willing to say or do anything to seize power. And while the current purveyors of disinformation do not represent every member of the GOP, the party’s silence is a form of complicity. When Republican leaders like former congresswoman Liz Cheney denounce their party’s disinformation, they are ignored or purged. Now that the potency of disinformation has been revealed, this weapon can be used by any demagogue or self-interested opportunist, regardless of political affiliation.

A key insight that McQuade mentions is the cancer-like malignancy of the disinformation threat. The cancer has been growing for decades. It arguably predates even Rush Limbaugh when he started spewing his poison on air in 1984. 

Q: Was Germaine premature to start whining about the dangers of disinformation or dark free speech all those years ago? Why could Germaine, often maligned as alarmist, hyperbolic, crackpot, liar, etc., clearly see a grave threat that most others could not, and some still cannot?