The terrifying mendacity and fascism of Republican elites

Evidence of Republican Party mendacity and authoritarianism continue to accumulate. A week or so ago, Rachael Maddow reported that pro-ex-president attorney John Eastman disavowed a legal strategy memo he wrote that described how Mike Pence could have subverted the 2020 election and kept the ex-president in office. It would have been easy and effective. Legal experts believe the memo was crackpot nonsense and its implementation would have amounted to an overthrow of the government.

Maddow reported that last Friday Eastman disavowed his own memo to an interview with the National Review.

Then last night Maddow reported that in private on last Saturday, Eastman was clear that he still believes his strategy was sound and it would have been legal and effective at keeping the ex-president in power. He claimed it failed only because Mike Pence was a weak establishment Republican who refused to get on board with a rank and file Republican movement to keep the ex-president in power. An undercover reporter, Lauren Windsor, falsely posing as an ex-president supporter and person present at the 1/6 coup attempt approached Eastman on Saturday. After she dished out some flattery to Eastman about him doing God’s work, saving democracy and whatnot, she got him to speak candidly about the memo and Pence. 

Windsor to Eastman: You're doing the Lord’s work

Windsor to Eastman: Your legal strategy was totally solid

Eastman to Windsor: Yeah

Eastman to Windsor, Pence was just an 

establishment guy

In other reporting last night, Maddow reported that the same reporter, Lauren Windsor, conned Republican candidate for governor, Glenn Youngkin, into admitting that he is much more anti-abortion than he is willing to admit to the people of Virginia. The New York Times reported on Oct. 7:

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, revealed to her that he could not publicly press his anti-abortion agenda for fear of losing independent voters. 

A spokesman for Mr. Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia denied he had said anything privately that he had not uttered publicly, even though he told Ms. Windsor that he had to be discreet about his anti-abortion views. “When I’m governor and I have a majority in the House, we can start going on offense,” he said to her in their encounter. “But as a campaign topic, sadly, that in fact won’t win my independent votes that I have to get.”

At least in some competitive races, at least some Republican candidates feel it is sad that they have to deceive voters to get the votes they need to win elections. So, while in the midst of all-out attacks on democracy and elections, FRP (fascist Republican Party) elites are lying when they tell us they fighting hard to save democracy and elections. Meanwhile, the FRP members of congress either openly support these tactics or are complicit by their silence. FRP mendacity and fascism is nationwide and mainstream, not local or fringe crackpottery in the party.

Advocacy journalism, or immoral or unfair tactics?

The NYT commented on Lauren Windsor’s reporting tactics:

Ms. Windsor, 40, calls herself an “advocacy journalist,” though her methods fall beyond the pale of mainstream journalism, where reporters generally shy away from assuming false identities and secretly recording conversations.

She says her stings are justified by Republicans’ efforts to spread disinformation about the election and to weaken the nation’s democratic underpinnings through restrictive new voting laws and measures taking greater control over how elections are run.

“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” she said in an interview. Assuming a false identity, she argued, can produce a truer record of a politician’s views. “Acting like you’re one of them — you’re going to elicit different answers than if you have a recorder in somebody’s face and they know you’re a journalist.”

While Ms. Windsor’s videos are often picked up by left-leaning news outlets, the political impact of them can be limited. Some of her Republican targets dismiss her videos as nothing they haven’t said before, in so many words.

The bait she dangles to draw out a response can be highly tendentious. “This is a Christian state, and Democrats are not Christian,” she told a cowboy-hatted Texas legislator in the Capitol in Austin.

Claiming to have been at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, she challenged Mr. Pence about why he didn’t “stop the election from being stolen.” The former vice president didn’t bite: “Read the Constitution,” he said, before offering parting praise of her “heart.”  

Her practices have drawn inevitable comparisons to the right-wing gotcha squad Project Veritas, but she says there are crucial differences.

While Project Veritas has embedded moles in left-leaning groups and Democratic campaigns, Ms. Windsor says she avoids such methods.  

She makes her undercover recordings at public events in brief encounters. She usually uploads the full interaction to her YouTube page, The Undercurrent, or in segments on Twitter (which limits a video’s length).

Questions: 

1. Is what is reported here about Republican elites reasonably called mendacious or fascist?

2. Are Windsor's deceptive tactics to gather candid comments from Republicans who want their real beliefs hidden from voters unfair or immoral, or as some people argue, should fairness and morals[1] be mostly or completely ignored in politics because they are too subjective and/or irrational? 

3. Do candidates for elected office in a democracy, unlike political leaders in a tyranny, have any duty, legal, moral, ethical or otherwise, to be honest with voters, or is that ideal too utopian to be taken seriously, with most or all politicians mostly alike regardless of the form of government and kind of society they operate in?

4. Is the Democratic Party just as bad in terms of mendacity and authoritarianism or fascism as the FRP?

Footnote:

1. Fairness has been cited as an example of an essentially contested concept. Wikipedia writes:

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., “fairness”), but not on the best realization thereof. They are “concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users”, and these disputes “cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone.”

Morals and morality are also essentially contested concepts. From what I can tell, the FRP decided years ago that the sacred ends (single party power, wealth at the top, and Christian God in government) justify essentially all means, including lies, deceit and even illegal means when they can get away with it. 

What is the Opposite of Entropy?

 This stuck in my craw this morning while I was busy coding. As I understand it, as a system no longer maintains the energy necessary to sustain itself, either from external forces, or somehow generating it internally entropy begins to occur, and the system starts losing its form as its order is slowly subverted by chaotic forces.

Maybe I misunderstand that?

If so, then what of a hypothetical system absent any entropy at all? Would it be perfectly ordered? Is that in itself, a sort of perfect death of the system? Can it no longer grow and adapt?

I am not a student of systems theory in the general sense. There's far more that I don't know about it than anything I know about it.

Does anyone here have any insight on this? I'm not sure how to Google it because the title doesn't quite cut to the meat of what I'm wondering about.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Disagreement on facts and political discord cause damage

It clear and undeniable that the 2020 election is not over for the most of America's radical right. It may never be over for them. Some want some kind of revenge. Some want the ex-president put back in power right now. Some choose to believe that false crackpot conspiracies are real and true. One bit of crackpottery holds that the ex-president still is in power and is still running the country, with a plan to purge tens of thousands of deep state Democratic socialist pedophiles from government and restore God to his rightful role as a infallible dictator acting through his chosen vessel, the sacred ex-president. 

There's plenty tearing American society apart. To rationalize its main talking points, the radical right sweeps aside inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. This is raw and primal. In the process, it undermines civility and democracy. The Washington Post writes on how a formerly united area in Montana has become bitterly divided. Some people are dying because of that. As usual, toxic social media is part of the mess:

KALISPELL, Mont. — By the time the third teenager had died by suicide since the start of the school year, the Flathead Valley was desperate for unity. The community had been jittery for months.

Supporters of former president Donald Trump, adamant that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, were driving through town in pickups lined with Trump flags, Confederate flags and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags featuring a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike at government intrusion.

The coronavirus pandemic had cleaved neighbors into camps for and against masks. A popular Facebook group featuring wildlife photos and local events had degenerated into a forum for politics, bullying and suspicion of the new people moving here.

The October death by suicide of the ninth local teenager in 16 months prompted offers of counseling, training for teachers and visits from national suicide prevention experts. But it also whiplashed into partisan recriminations, as residents lashed out in public forums against the superintendent of schools for failing to impose dress codes and discipline, against parents for not securing their plentiful firearms — used in several suicides — and against the supporters of masks and other pandemic restrictions for stifling teenagers. An issue the valley might have rallied around, in another time, risked dividing it yet again.

“Our community is going through a divorce right now,” Mark Johnson, the mayor of Kalispell, told local officials gathered at city hall to find a path forward from the tragedies, recounting a high school student telling him the hostility around him was a reminder of his parents. “The adults are arguing about what’s right and what’s wrong,” he said in an interview. “The kids are watching it happen. They don’t feel they’re on firm footing.”  

Hostility over the November election, the coronavirus and social movements have left a trail of bad blood among old-school Republicans, backers of the former president, increasingly vocal Democrats and out-of-state transplants, convulsing everything from the school district and the public library to daily interactions.  

Local businesses, politicians and ordinary people now find themselves navigating angry confrontations, and a nuanced political tradition of splitting tickets on Election Day has given way to partisanship that propelled a Republican sweep of races for governor, president and Congress in November for the first time in two decades.  

Even the Independence Day parade shifted this summer from a once-revered slice of Americana to another battle in a culture war. As thousands packed Main Street in Kalispell, the 26,000-population county seat, the Flathead Democrats’ float with a rainbow gay pride flag was heckled the length of the parade. A horse-drawn wagon bearing a “Trump 2024 No More Bulls---” flag rushed toward it, leading the Democrats to fear injury. Someone smashed the plate glass window of a bookstore along the route, then crumpled the gay pride flag displayed inside.  

Ultraconservatives newly in power backed two candidates for state office in 2020 with misdemeanor criminal records. One was Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a charge of assaulting a reporter during his campaign for the House back in 2017. (He would later be elected governor after an endorsement from Trump, who praised Gianforte’s violence.)  

Politics has animated Tammi Fisher for most of her adult life, and ever since Bill Clinton’s affair turned her away from the Democratic Party, she’s been a conservative Republican.

No one would mistake the outspoken former Kalispell mayor for a big-government liberal. But Fisher, 45, is aghast at what her party has become as Montana’s tradition of political independence gives way, as she sees it, to being just another Trump red state. “The extremists have stolen everything,” she said. “Our community has lost community,” 

Kevin Geer, who leads a local congregation of 4,000 at Canvas Church in Kalispell, said in an interview. He’s angry, too, at extremists he says are polluting religion with ugly politics: “They’ve hijacked the conversation.”

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to believe that, in general, the Republican Party and ex-president supporters are more intolerant and aggressive in their rhetoric and other behaviors than the rest of America's political spectrum?

2. Should people opposed to the ex-president refrain from expressing their opinions in public, e.g., displaying a gay pride flag, and instead just keep quiet to avoid provoking bad behavior from the radical right? Or, would keeping quiet make no difference and Montana's traditional independence would still be obliterated and replaced with hard core radical right partisanship? 

3. How much responsibility, if any, does the ex-president, the GOP and their enablers, e.g., Fox News, bear for fomenting the usually disinformed terror, rage and hate that now flows copiously from the radical right and most of the GOP's rank and file? Or, is the terror, rage and hate a falsehood and mostly or completely non-existent, with those bad feelings being grounded in facts, truths and sound reasoning instead of disinformation?  

4. Is it reasonable to label the current Republican Party as a whole as extremist, ultraconservative, radical right or fascist? Or is the GOP just doing conservative politics as usual?

Newsmax, Fox News air outdated, out-of-context photos of empty shelves in segments bashing Biden

• In recent segments, both Newsmax and Fox News displayed old, out-of-context photos in a misleading way that suggested they showed empty shelves in the U.S. today.

• For example, six photos that Newsmax represented as pictures capturing the current situation in the U.S. actually showed London in March 2020; Los Angeles in March 2020; Japan in September 2020; Australia in May; London in July; and Berlin in March 2012.

• Social media users have similarly circulated outdated photos that show grocery stores with depleted shelves due to early-pandemic panic buying or other circumstances.

Newsmax and Fox News have aired old, out-of-context photos of empty grocery store shelves in recent segments bashing President Joe Biden for the jammed-up supply chain that experts say is backlogged due to the coronavirus pandemic’s strain on the global economy.

Shortages of labor and raw materials have certainly created bottlenecks at a time when shoppers are looking to spend. And photos of depleted shelves, like these from the Associated Press in October, have legitimately helped to illustrate that story.

But other photos that appeared on Newsmax and Fox News were taken as early as March 2020, and some were snapped in other countries. The conservative networks represented them as though they were current and taken in the U.S.

"It is unprofessional and unethical to repurpose images from another time and place to illustrate a story that has nothing to do with the original context in which those images were made," said Nina Berman, the director of the photojournalism program at Columbia Journalism School.

"Using a photograph which shows empty shelves because of a coming typhoon in Japan, or old images from the early days of panic pandemic buying, to make a point about the current state of the U.S. economy is a classic case of disinformation," Berman added.

Newsmax and Fox News did not respond to requests for comment about the misleading photos.

Social media users have also circulated several outdated empty-shelf photos out of context. In one instance, conservative commentator Kimberly Klacik shared a photo of a British grocery store from March 2020 and falsely claimed that it offered "a look at" Biden’s economic policies. 

But when TV networks do the same thing, it reflects poorly on all journalists and contributes to distrust of other news organizations, said Lee Wilkins, an author on media ethics and professor emerita at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. 

PolitiFact reached out to Getty Images and the Associated Press, the services that supplied the empty-shelves photos that Newsmax and Fox News used out of context. We did not hear back. 

Newsmax poaches photos from London, Japan, Australia and Germany

On Oct. 18, Newsmax host Chris Salcedo interviewed Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., about the supply chain issues. Comer shared a clip from the interview on Twitter, writing that the "high prices and empty store shelves are a direct result of Joe Biden's reckless spending policies."

In the short clip, Comer faulted Biden’s economic policies and COVID-19 vaccine requirement for large employers for labor shortages, high prices and depleted store shelves. 

But as Comer spoke, Newsmax filtered through six old, out-of-context images of empty shelves on screen, leaving the false impression that they depicted the situation Comer described. Here’s what the original photos actually showed, according to their captions on Getty Images:

• The first photo showed empty shelves and long lines at a London supermarket in March 2020.

• The second photo showed an aisle of empty shelves at a Hispanic specialty market in Los Angeles in March 2020, back when former President Donald Trump was in office and the coronavirus pandemic was first breaking out.

• The third photo showed shelves that had been depleted at a convenience store in Japan as the country prepared for a typhoon to make landfall in September 2020.

• The fourth photo showed empty toilet paper shelves at a supermarket in Melbourne, Australia, as the city began a seven-day lockdown in late May.

• The fifth photo showed a sign seen at a London supermarket in July that read, "Please bear with us. We’re experiencing high demand."

• The sixth photo showed a customer walking through a drugstore in Berlin on the last day the store was open before permanently closing in March 2012.

Newsmax did not label any of the six photos on screen, an omission that media ethics experts said was deceptive toward viewers.

"If you’re going to run a story with a photo of empty shelves from Japan, be sure to say that they’re in Japan, and not in the U.S." Wilkins said.

Early pandemic photos on Fox News

A similar scene played out at Fox News Oct. 19, when host Laura Ingraham opened her show by teasing an interview with GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Mark Green about the supply chain.

"A new piece in the Washington Post reveals what the left wants for America: to have less, and to suffer, of course," Ingraham said, referring to an Oct. 18 column on the supply chain woes.

As Ingraham spoke, two photos from the Associated Press displayed on screen. But neither was current. The two photos showed rows of empty shelves at a Nebraska supermarket and a Pennsylvania grocery store in March 2020.

A day earlier, Fox News host Will Cain also aired a photo from March 2020 as he blamed Biden for the depleted shelves and the chyron read, "Vaccine mandates are hurting America." Fox News had previously used the same image in a March 2020 report on its website.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/oct/22/newsmax-fox-news-air-outdated-out-context-photos-e/