News blasts ’n bits: Christian Sharia’s initial step to tax dollars, etc.

News blast: Christian theocracy under Christian 

Sharia law starts an effort to crack open a state treasury

A central, cherished goal of the radical right Christian nationalist wealth, power and theocracy movement has been to sink its greedy claws into taxpayer dollars at the state and federal levels. One way in has been to argue in courts that religious schools are entitled to tax dollars. State laws that separate tax revenues from religion have stood in the way. However, a Supreme Court decisions held that such separation was an unconstitutional burden on free speech by religion, thereby knocking down a major barrier that protected tax dollars from Christian pillage. That decision went a long way to neutering the Constitution’s establishment clause, which had been the basis for keeping the hooks of religion out of tax revenues.

Politico writes:

Oklahoma’s departing attorney general just took a big step toward achieving a conservative education milestone.

A state law that blocks religious institutions and private sectarian schools from public charter school programs is likely unconstitutional and should not be enforced, Attorney General John O’Connor and Solicitor General Zach West wrote in a non-binding legal opinion this month.

Their 15-page memo leans on a trio of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that favored religious schools and won rapt attention from conservative school choice advocates and faith groups.

Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said the advisory opinion “rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma.” Newly-elected state Superintendent Ryan Walters called it “the right decision for Oklahomans.”

Now it’s time to see if faith-based Oklahoma institutions successfully apply for taxpayer support to create charter schools that teach religion as a doctrinal truth just like private schools do today, and if legislators will push to change state law. Legal authorities in other Republican-led states could also pen similar opinions.  

“The policy implications are huge because this is the first state that is going to allow religious charter schools,” said Nicole Stelle Garnett, a University of Notre Dame law professor and influential religious charter school supporter who wants other states to follow Oklahoma’s lead. “The legal implications are huge because this is the first state that says that they have to,” she said in an interview. 

.... [this] formal opinion of a conservative attorney general marks one of three ways religious charters can find legal footing.

In a widely-read 2020 report for the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, Garnett argued states could also amend or write laws that allow such schools to exist. Or perhaps a lawyer could sue on behalf of a school operator that wants to incorporate religion into its curriculum.

His opinion, though, relies on three groundbreaking high court cases involving religious institutions: Carson v. Makin earlier this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer in 2017.  

“It is a whole other ballgame for the state to instruct children on religious doctrine and teach it as truth,” said Derek Black, education and civil rights professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, in an interview. “That’s what we’re talking about here: State dollars in public schools, delivering instruction to children preaching religion as a way of life that must be adhered to. That’s staggering.”

This is more evidence of what pro-theocracy Christian nationalism empowered by Supreme Court-endorsed Christian Sharia law intends to do. Once the Christian nationalist Supreme Court finishes obliterating the concept of church-state separation as a viable legal barrier, powerful Christian nationalist elites, i.e., most Republican politicians in Congress and state legislatures, will be unleashed. Fundamentalist Christianity will be freed to have unfettered access to our tax dollars.

Because the threat is grave and imminent, I will keep raising these warnings about the threat of intolerant American theocracy under a vengeful Christian Taliban that is dead set on killing tolerant democracy and civil liberties.

Inside the 1/6 coup attempt

Talking Points Memo has obtained evidence that the House 1/6 investigation committee has about the role of Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows is a well-know Christian nationalist elite who supported the coup attempt. Meadows is on of the key Christian Taliban  leaders. TPM has 2,319 text messages that Meadows sent to various elite Republicans, including 34 congressional Republicans. This is more evidence that Christian nationalism was a major influence in support of the 1/6 coup attempt. TPM writes:

The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words.

The texts Meadows provided to the select committee encompass the period from election night in 2020 through President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It is not clear which, if any, texts Meadows withheld from the committee, but the text message log offers multiple hints it is only a partial record of his conversations. There are discussions that clearly lack prior context and messages where participants indicate there is further communication taking place on encrypted channels.  

TPM is kicking off this series with an exclusive story showing that the log includes more than 450 messages with 34 Republican members of Congress. Those texts show varying degrees of involvement by members of Congress, from largely benign expressions of support for Trump to the leading roles played by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jody Hice (R-GA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the plot to reverse Trump’s defeat.

Meadows’ text log shows what the scheme to subvert the 2020 election looked like behind the scenes. It reveals the roots of the violence and its key enablers in Washington. The messages show the plot began well before Jan. 6 and continued afterward. They are essential documentation of a dark day in American history.

It is no wonder that radical right, fascist House Republicans have already publicly stated that on Jan. 3, 2023, the day they take control of the House, they will shut the 1/6 Committee down. They need to end any further House investigation of the role of Trump and his Republican enablers in trying to overthrow the US government on 1/6. They have a hell of a lot to try to hide and spin from treason into something the Republican Party officially calls “legitimate political discourse.”

We can only hope that the Democrats release all of the evidence they have before their power to honestly inform the American people is taken away. Once the Democrats are shut up, the fascist Republicans will start their massive propaganda campaign to turn a true horror for democracy into a faux triumph for democracy.  

Book banning by radical right zealots:

The role of Christian business and its money

The NYT writes:

A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups 

Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans

Some groups are new, some are longstanding. Some are local, others national. Over the past two years, they have become vastly more organized, well funded, effective — and criticized.

The Keller Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, passed a new rule in November: It banned books from its libraries that include the concept of gender fluidity.

The change was pushed by three new school board members, elected in May with support from Patriot Mobile, a self-described Christian cellphone carrier. Through its political action committee, Patriot Mobile poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Texas school board races to promote candidates with conservative views on race, gender and sexuality — including on which books children can access at school.  

“This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” said Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group focused on education, “and letting the parents decide what the child gets rather than having government schools indoctrinate our kids.”

It is easy to see the power of this Christian Taliban tactic. Overtly Christian businesses generate profits. Then they leverage that profit with tax breaks to PACs that support putting more Christian Taliban into positions that can influence public schools, elections, law enforcement and everything else they can corrupt. 

Also, notice the sophisticated propaganda this is packaged with. Book banning is spun into a narrative not about banning books, but about empowering parents. The Christian Taliban wants parents to indoctrinate children into their bigoted theocratic world view by keeping them ignorant and fostering intolerance of aspects of the real world the Taliban hates and wants to oppress.  

1933 book burning ceremony in Berlin, Germany

2022 book burning ceremony in Tennessee

(Harry Potter and Twilight got torched)

Thoughts about anti-Semitism and 

bad faith rhetoric

In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote this:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

As I’ve argued here before, talented demagogues, tyrants, religious and political ideological zealots, kleptocrats and the like (“bad people”) have known for millennia that bad faith in the form of blatant lies, slanders, flawed crackpot reasoning, scapegoating bigotry and the like are hard to defend against. The burden on the defenders of truth to explain usually complicated truth in the face of assertions of simple false reality and/or reasoning.

Just as bad people understand the power of bad faith rhetoric, some observers have long understood the great advantage that the bad people have over the defenders. Along with Plato and Aristotle, John-Paul Sartre was one of those who understood the asymmetry in rhetoric and the imbalance in persuasion power that is inherent in the asymmetry.

However, maybe one thing has changed from the time Sartre wrote his comments. These days, at least for radical right American fascists, even when they are pressed quite closely, they do not fall silent. Instead, they double down and renew their attacks, lies, slanders and crackpottery. For modern bad people, the time for argument is never past.

IT's TOTAL WAR !!!!!

 A collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders gathered in Manhattan for the New York Young Republicans Club’s (NYYRC) annual gala Saturday night, where that group’s president declared “total war” on perceived enemies.

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax declared to a room full of supporters at 583 Park Ave., an event venue on New York’s Upper East Side.

“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.

At the five-hour event, which Hatewatch reporters attended, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance.

Republicans publicly lauded members in attendance from an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.

“Then Jan. 6 happened. And next thing you know, I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon,” Greene said, referring to allegations that she had led reconnaissance tours of the Capitol for soon-to-be insurrectionists in the days prior to the violence.

“I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won,” she said, as attendees erupted in cheers and applause. “Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

Lots more to read about here:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/12/11/white-nationalists-other-republicans-brace-total-war

A bit of legal news: Things aren't always necessarily what they look like

Judge ‘Loose’ Cannon reluctantly dismisses 

her own partisan pro-Trump decision

The 11th Circuit federal appeals court rejected Aileen Cannon’s brazenly partisan decision to appoint a special master to review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago. Her decision was widely seen as partisan and unjustified. The DoJ appealed and the appeals court said that Cannon’s court did not have jurisdiction to even hear Trump’s unfounded demand for a special master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents. Trump’s filing effectively slowed progress in the case by months.

The deadline for Trump to appeal to the appeals court decision to Supreme Court expired last Thursday. Trump did not appeal.

One could see this as a loss for Trump, but winning an obviously unwinnable motion probably was not what Trump intended. Instead, he arguably won by getting a delay in the DoJ investigation from the pro-Trump judge his legal team intentionally put the case in front of.

If Trump had not filed his demand for a special master to review documents and Cannon hadn’t gone along with it, the criminal case would have advanced farther between August and the November midterms. That was at a time when things looked a lot different. Trump took no political hit from the radical right until the last few weeks, not last August.

In August Trump appeared to be a lot more politically formidable. Everyone expected a devastating red wave to blow the Democrats out of control of congress. Trump arguably reinforced his image of untouchability by stiff-arming both the rule of law and common sense with his legally hopeless motion.[1] Confidence did not start to drop off until early voting polls came in within days of the November midterms. The unknowable thing is what if his supporters started writing him off and fracturing a month or two earlier. We cannot know if it would have made any difference in the House and Senate elections and majorities. It could have. 

In other words, if Trump had not filed this motion in August, it is possible (not certain) that the Republicans would not have taken control of the House and maybe even lost one or two seats in the Senate. 

All in all, one can think that Trump’s delay tactic more likely than not succeeded if one assumes it was filed to delay the DoJ’s investigation for political advantage, not to win on the legal merits. Maybe the whole point was to win by delaying, denying and obstructing, not to win on the merits.

Footnote: 

1. For example, I was unsure whether the radical right 11th Circuit appeals court would pass on the legal flaws in Cannon’s order for a special master. It was only after reading some of the appeals court decision to slap Cannon down hard, did the weakness of Trump’s motion become plausible. That is when I started to believe that Trump’s tactic was likely legally hopeless. That belief was cemented into certainty when Trump chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court.

This exemplifies a big problem with fomenting irrational, unfounded distrust in government, elections, political opposition, etc. Distrust can spread to and poison public confidence in the courts. That was where I was and still am. Even with this appeals court decision, I do not trust that radical right circuit will adhere to the rule of law when the stakes are much higher for the radical right than was the case here.   

News bits: Climate science modeling advances, etc.

Climate models start to get a grip

on the influence of clouds

A WaPo article discusses recent research on how clouds affect climate. The thin wispy clouds way high up in the air (cirrus clouds) have been known to tend to trap energy and increase global warming. Big fat clouds closer to the ground have been known to reflect solar energy, which tends to decrease warming. Advances in models are now digging into effects on clouds. The models are starting to generate predictions about what will happen to clouds and the impact on global warming that projected changes in clouds will probably exert.

Cirrus clouds are heat trappers

The WaPo writes:

First, the high, wispy cirrus clouds that trap the Earth’s radiation are expected to shift upward in the atmosphere, to lower temperature zones. Thanks to a complicated relationship between clouds and the radiation of the Earth, that will increase the amount of radiation that the cirrus clouds trap in the atmosphere. “When they rise, their greenhouse effect, or warming effect, on the Earth tends to increase,” Myers said.

That result has been known for about a decade, and indicates that clouds are likely to amplify global warming. But just in the past few years, researchers have also discovered that the number of low-level stratus or stratocumulus clouds are expected to decrease as the planet continues to warm. One study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, used satellite observations to discover how cloud formation is affected by ocean temperatures, wind speed, humidity and other factors — and then analyzed how those factors will change as the world warms.

“We concluded that as the ocean warms, the low-level clouds over the oceans tend to dissipate,” said Myers, one of the authors of the study. That means that there are fewer clouds to reflect sunlight and cool the earth — and the change in low-level clouds will also amplify global warming.

Researchers have also begun to understand how clouds will be affected by certain changes beyond warming — such as the reduction of artificial aerosols in the atmosphere. Clouds form around particles floating in the atmosphere, such as aerosols; it is possible, therefore, that low-level clouds would have decreased even more if not for human-induced air pollution. According to another study released last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sulfate aerosols have spurred cloud formation, thus masking some of the global warming that has already occurred. “There’s potential that as we clean up air pollution, we unmask global warming,” said Casey Wall, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo. 

Combined, these new findings have helped scientists zero in on how much the planet will warm if carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere were to double from preindustrial times. (Before the industrial revolution, CO2 concentration was around 280 parts per million, or ppm; now it has reached 412 ppm, and is still rising.) Scientists once estimated that if CO2 reached 560 ppm, the temperature would increase between 1.5 and 4 degrees Celsius — a range that spans a “still very livable planet” to “near-apocalypse levels of warming.” 

The new cloud research indicates that the lower estimates for warming are highly unlikely. Instead, the recent papers estimate that CO2 levels of 560 ppm would probably result in at least 3 or 3.5 degrees of warming. 

That doesn’t mean that the world will definitely hit 3 degrees of warming — if countries continue to shift to clean energy, CO2 in the atmosphere could be stabilized at a level significantly below 560 ppm. But it does mean that the most optimistic estimates for how warming will unfold have been taken off the table.

No doubt, the pro-pollution radical right propaganda Leviathan will spin this into a narrative something rationally incoherent but partisan coherent like this: “See, we told you, trying to clean up pollution makes things worse. The evidence shows that sulfur pollution is good for the good clouds. Your idiotic warnings about climate change are just hysterical socialist alarmism and lies. We are defenders of the good clouds and freedom.”

Cumulus clouds, the juicy good ones

The fentanyl plague 

The WaPo writes:

During the past seven years, as soaring quantities of fentanyl flooded into the United States, strategic blunders and cascading mistakes by successive U.S. administrations allowed the most lethal drug crisis in American history to become significantly worse, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Presidents from both parties failed to take effective action in the face of one of the most urgent threats to the nation’s security, one that claims more lives each year than car accidents, suicides or gun violence. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, the country’s premier anti-narcotics agency, stumbled through a series of missteps as it confronted the biggest challenge in its 50-year history. The agency was slow to respond as Mexican cartels supplanted Chinese producers, creating a massive illicit pharmaceutical industry that is now producing more fentanyl than ever.

The Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies are responsible for detecting illegal drugs at the nation’s borders, failed to ramp up scanning and inspection technology at official crossings, instead channeling $11 billion toward the construction of a border wall that does little to stop fentanyl traffickers.

“Law enforcement did the best it could,” said David King, executive director of a federal drug task force in San Diego. “We can only do so much. But in Washington, they have been very slow to respond to this and now we are at the confluence of paralysis.”

The DEA said it is now taking direct aim at the Mexican cartels and the fentanyl epidemic. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram acknowledged that the government remained too focused on heroin at the onset of the crisis, as Mexican traffickers ramped up production of synthetic opioids. 

The agency continues to count the death toll for 2021 — in a provisional tally seven months ago, it calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl. 

There is one federal system that collects both fatal and nonfatal overdose data in real-time in several regions of the country. But the system, called ODMAP, is kept from public view. .... Without comprehensive data, the federal government is driving blind.

When President Richard M. Nixon launched America’s first war on drugs 51 years ago, annual overdose deaths stood at 6,771.

At a lethal fentanyl overdose scene

San Diego, Nov. 10, 2022

There you have it. A confluence of government paralysis helps build a useless wall and creates a situation that kills tens of thousands of people each year. Good job gridlocked government! Good job war on drugs! We went from 6,771 corpses/year to some unknown number over 100,000. That's a smashing success by any drug cartel’s standards!! MAGA!!

So one question pops up, which party is more responsible for the gridlock, the useless wall and the failed war on drugs, or are they both at about the same level of incompetence, or if you are a drug lord, competence?

My assessment:

~65% Republican Party

~35% Democratic Party

The Tijuana border crossing south of San Diego

From the poisonous MAGA!! files: 

MAGA!! poisons Germany

An opinion piece in The Hill comments:

The terrorist plot foiled by German security services makes abundantly clear that far-right extremism is not a uniquely American problem, but a pervasive threat to Western democracy.

In a series of raids across Germany, 3,000 members of law enforcement apprehended 25 people suspected of plotting a coup.

Eerily reminiscent of certain aspects of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol, the plan called for storming the Bundestag (parliament), murdering the chancellor and seizing ministers.

The plotters are associated with the Reichsbűrger movement, an anti-government group with approximately 21,000 followers that denies the legitimacy of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany). Like anti-government groups in the United States, the Reichsbűrgers resist what they consider government overreach. Some refuse to pay taxes and engage in other forms of civil disobedience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased support for the far right in America and Europe. COVID-deniers, vaccine skeptics and people angry at lockdowns have found extremist movements attractive.

Conspiracies fuel extremism on both sides of the Atlantic. The German prosecutor’s office explained that the Reichsbűrger followers “are firmly convinced that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called ‘deep state.’”

QAnon followers in the United States have long believed that pedophile Satan worshipers control the government. They expect Donald Trump to return to power and defeat them.

The Reichsbűrger movement has a disturbing similarity to its American cousin the Oath Keepers. Both groups recruit former and active-duty military and police. 

This is more evidence of the poison stew of irrational, toxic rage, fear and hate that bigoted, authoritarian Trump and his corrupt, morally rotted Republican Party have unleashed on the America and the world. They continue to unleash the same poison stew today.  

From the fascist Republican criminals and politicians files:

MTG would have overthrown the government

if she and Bannon had been in charge

The Hill writes:

The White House lashed out at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Monday for saying the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol would have been armed and successful if she planned it, arguing her rhetoric is violent.

Greene on Saturday appeared to hit back at claims that she and former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon were involved in planning the Jan. 6 riots.

“And I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said at a gala for the New York Young Republicans Club on Saturday.

News bits: Republican doublespeak, etc.

Republican doublespeak in Florida:

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps

The AP writes:

Florida lawmakers released a massive property insurance bill that would create a $1 billion reinsurance fund, seek to reduce insurance lawsuits and force more people out of the state-created insurer of last resort even if it means property owners end up paying more.

The 123-page bill was filed Friday night, less than three days before lawmakers begin a special session on insurance, property tax relief for Hurricane Ian victims and reducing tolls for frequent commuters.

“The goal we all share is for Florida to have a robust property insurance market that offers homeowners the opportunity to shop for insurance that meets their needs and budget. We also want to make certain that when damage occurs, claims are paid promptly and fairly,” Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said in a news release.

What?? Republicans claim to want a property insurance market that offers affordable insurance choices by forcing people out the the state-created, lower-cost insurer of last resort? If people in Florida get screwed, and they will, they voted for it. They deserve it. This is how Republicans treat average people: → → Pull yourself up by your bootstraps you lazy bums.

Thoughts about the limits of radical right

Christian bigotry

A WaPo opinion by E.J. Dionne articulates the issue nicely:

.... there is no obvious limiting principle for when religious convictions should allow exemption from anti-discrimination laws. If this exemption applies to same-sex couples, why not, for example, to interracial couples? Or to couples from different religions? Or for couples who opt for civil rather than religious marriages? Why not to other forms of discrimination that have nothing to do with marriage?

But such questions also invite us to examine the case from a different perspective: Why do conservative Christians want this exemption in the first place?

That question is neither naive nor rhetorical. Many traditionalist Christians view homosexual relationships as sinful. I think they are wrong, but I acknowledge that this is a long-held view. Yet many of the same Christians also view adultery as a sin. Jesus was tough on divorce. “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he says in Matthew’s Gospel.

But unless I am missing something, we do not see court cases from website designers or florists or bakers about refusing to do business with people in their second or third marriages. We do not see the same ferocious response to adultery as we do to same-sex relationships. Heck, conservative Christians in large numbers were happy to put aside their moral qualms and vote twice for a serial adulterer. Why the selective forgiveness? Why the call to boycott only this one perceived sin?

What we are seeing in the opposition to same-sex marriage is less about religious faith than cultural predispositions.

Given the vast, uncheckable power the radical right Christian nationalist Supreme Court has, we are probably going to start to see the limits of hate and bigotry-inspired discrimination. It will take a few years, but some clarity will probably come. Maybe the day will come when Christians are willing and empowered to shun people in their second or third marriages and serial adulterers, but with the option to not discriminate against the bad ones they choose to forgive and/or ignore. 

For context, IMO intentional discrimination like what Christian nationalists employ against the LGBQT community is bigotry.

Bigotry: Unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group

Brain science: Misinformation tends to be more

powerful than information: The illusory truth effect

A WaPo article comments:

Blame the brain.

Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information; however, our psychological biases and predispositions make us vulnerable to falsehoods.

As a result, misinformation is more likely to be believed, remembered and later recalled — even after we learn that it was false.

“On every level, I think that misinformation has the upper hand,” said Nathan Walter, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University who studies the correction of misinformation.

No one is completely immune to falsehoods, in part because of how our cognition is built and how misinformation exploits it.

We use mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to make many of our judgments, which benefit us. But our cognitive tendencies can make us susceptible to misinformation if we are not careful.

“By default, people will believe anything they see or hear,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who specializes in understanding how people respond to corrections of misinformation. In our day-to-day lives, “that makes a lot of sense because most things that we’re exposed to are true,” he said.

At the same time, the more we see something repeated, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. This “illusory truth effect” arises because we use familiarity and ease of understanding as a shorthand for truth; the more something is repeated, the more familiar and fluent it feels whether it is misinformation or fact.

“There is only typically one true version of a claim and an infinite number of ways you could falsify it, right?” said Nadia Brashier, a psychology professor at Purdue University who studies why people fall for fake news and misinformation. “So, if you hear something over and over again, probabilistically, it’s going to be the true thing.”

But these shortcuts do not work so well in our current political environment and social media, which can repeat and amplify falsehoods. One study found that even a single exposure to a fake headline made it seem truer. Politicians often repeat lies and seem to be aware of the power of the illusory truth effect, Brashier said.

Of course marketers, ideologues, politicians, propagandists, liars, grifters, demagogues, tyrants and kleptocrats all know about the power of the illusory truth effect. They do not just seem to be aware. They are practiced experts. 

Advances in deepfake technology: Posting photos of yourself poses a risk

ARS Technica writes:

AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease

AI tech makes it trivial to generate harmful fake photos from a few social media pictures

If you're one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.

If you haven't been paying attention to the rapid progress in AI image generators recently, seeing what we've pulled off above might be very alarming. Basically, computer scientists have figured out how to generate new photorealistic images of anything you can imagine by teaching AI using real photos, and the technology has accelerated rapidly over the past year.

By some counts, over 4 billion people use social media worldwide. If any of them have uploaded a handful of public photos online, they are susceptible to this kind of attack from a sufficiently motivated person. Whether it will actually happen or not is wildly variable from person to person, but everyone should know that this is possible from now on.  

Right now, you can try to take all your photos offline. Maybe that's a good idea. But for some people, like politicians or public figures, it's not feasible. And in other cases, friends may have published photos of you in group settings that are outside of your control.

If there are photos of yourself on the internet, don't antagonize people with computer skills. They can make your life unpleasant or miserable if they are motivated to do so.