Republican Party propaganda tactics

In complexity lies opportunity for liars, slanderers and betrayers

This story is complicated, but it exemplifies the propaganda techniques that radical right sources routinely employ to deceive, polarize, enrage and foment distrust, among other bad, immoral things. In this instance, Fox News is the major lying propagandist source in this pack of lies about the horrors of Democrats. The New York Times writes:

WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.

But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency. 

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats. 

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.

There you have it. Republican propagandists including Fox News and the ex-president, do not hesitate to make up lies and stories to smear and slander Democrats. Evidence and truth are irrelevant. There is not one shred of moral qualm in Republican Party neo-fascist, anti-democratic propaganda. 

Shift the burden to the listener, then trap them 

in a web of lies and crackpottery

A key point here is that when propaganda like this is grounded in complexity and detail, the effort the public needs to distinguish truth from lies is high. How many people who take the ex-president and/or Fox news seriously, will even consider the fact that they have been subtly lied to, emotionally manipulated and betrayed? 

That number must be pretty close to ~0.1%., or about 1 in 1,000. By now, everyone inclined to seriously question Fox, T**** and other radical right propaganda and lies sources concluded long ago that they are chronic liars and walked away. What is left is a hard core of believers who will never question or walk away. In more ways than one, that cadre of blind believers is a necessary and core part of the radical right threat to American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties.

The ex-president, Fox, and the Republican Party and its core financial backers (corrupt mendacious capitalists) and influencers (rabid mendacious Christian fundamentalist extremists) love complexity and piles of hard to fact check detail. It works for them and against us. The liars and manipulators love it.

So, for neo-fascist Republican liars and falsehood-based manipulators, lies and slanders grounded in complexity with lots of details is their best friend. Complexity and details constitute a great ecosystem to make lies feel like truth, irrational emotional manipulation feel warranted, and crackpot partisan motivated reasoning feel rational. The cognitive and social burden and costs are too high for believers to question, so they don’t.

A last thought, Mr. Durham should be fired for refusal to answer questions. His refusal to talk looks a lot like a radical right, neo-fascist deep state operative tactic. And, while we're firing Durham, let’s also fire our grossly incompetent Attorney General Merrick Garland. At this point, neither firing would hurt and maybe one or both would help a little. 

Propaganda from conservative autocratic editorial pages

Standard misleading autocratic Republican motivated reasoning

This is a Jan. 6, 2022 example of routine radical right propaganda from the editorial page of the autocratic-plutocratic Wall Street Journal. It is a good but routine example of crackpot partisan motivated reasoning and deflection tactics. The WSJ autocrats ignore the reality of America’s situation as exemplified by this article, Campaigning to Oversee Elections, While Denying the Last One, from the New York Times[1]. The pro-autocracy WSJ editorial page published this deceit-riddled, hyper-partisan motivated reasoning as recently reported by The Week magazine, which wrote:

Democracy isn't dying, said the Wall Street Journal. Jan.6 was a national disgrace but the mob and Trump’s “‘war room’ of motley characters” never came close to overturning the election. The fact is that “America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure” -- thanks in large part to Republican officials who held firm and certified electoral votes and Republican-appointed judges who rejected “flimsy” election challenges. Not that you’d know that from listening to Democrats who “seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power.”

What the WSJ’s propaganda intentionally ignored are the facts that (i) the challenges to the 2020 election came in the form of a coordinated attack on the election from a sitting Republican US president and his close allies (the “motley characters”), (ii) most Republican Party elites and T****, the GOP’s leader, to this day still claim the 2020 election was stolen despite what the WSJ calls “flimsy” election challenges, (iii) Republicans who want the 1/6 coup attempt investigated or who stand for honest elections are being RINO hunted out of the party by the rest of the extremist authoritarian GOP elites, and (iv) as the NYT reported in the linked article above, Republicans are trying to take control of elections in red states to prevent a repeat of the non-existent massive election fraud in 2020, i.e., they want the power to overturn election results that Republican autocrats dislike.  

About those four omitted inconvenient facts. They are lies of omission. That is standard Republican propaganda tactics. Ignoring important, relevant facts like this is central to Republican propaganda. The WSJ editorial page exemplifies it quite well. Those ignored facts contradict the WSJ’s autocrat asserted opinion that 1/6 never came close to overturning the election. Despite the WSJ’s lies of omission, reasonable people can see 1/6 as having come close to succeeding. Both the ex-president and most congressional Republicans were and still are attacking the 2020 election as fraudulent. There was and still is major political power that drives the stolen election propaganda movement and responsive public opinion about it.

Also note the the WSJ autocrats’ cheap shot deflection about Democrats exploiting the 1/6 coup attempt to try to retain power. There is nothing wrong with pointing to 1/6 as evidence the Republican Party and its elite leadership are anti-democratic authoritarians who wanted to overthrow the government by guile and force. What is wrong with rationally and honestly exploiting a legitimate political issue for political gain? Nothing is wrong.

In my opinion, the Democrats would look a lot worse if they were not making a big deal of 1/6. Defense of democracy, the rule of law and truth demands no less than a strong, urgent, sustained response. Arguably, the Democrats are not making a big enough deal of it. In essence, what the WSJ autocrats and plutocrats are arguing is that (i) 1/6 was no big deal because not close to success in their opinion, and (ii) therefore it should be ignored and Americans should just move on. The Republican hope is that Americans will forget that Republicans anti-democratic extremists had everything to do with 1/6. It was not a matter of innocent tourists being confused or Antifa infiltrators causing confusion or any other crackpot lie the GOP has made up to deflect from its direct responsibility for what happened.

Hard questions: Does The Week magazine make the mistake called false balance or bothsidesism when reporting what is intentionally deceptive and flawed commentary from the WSJ? Do facts and sound reasoning in current American politics inherently favor the Democrats or the Republicans in their rhetoric and propaganda?

Footnotes: 

1. The NYT wrote this on Jan. 30, 2022:

Nearly two dozen Republicans who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state across the country, in some cases after being directly encouraged by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.

Their candidacies are alarming watchdog groups, Democrats and some fellow Republicans, who worry that these Trump supporters, if elected to posts that exist largely to safeguard and administer the democratic process, would weaponize those offices to undermine it — whether by subverting an election outright or by sowing doubts about any local, state or federal elections their party loses.

Party affiliation shifts: Business as usual

Gallup polling throughout 2021 indicates that there was a large shift in preference from Democrats to Republicans, apparently related to popularity shifts of Biden and the ex-president. Gallup comments:

On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).

However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.  

Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.  

Shifting party preferences in 2021 are likely tied to changes in popularity of the two men who served as president during the year. Republican Donald Trump finished out his single term in January, after being defeated in the 2020 election, with a 34% job approval rating, the lowest of his term. His popularity fell more than 10 points from Election Day 2020 as the country's COVID-19 infections and deaths reached then-record highs, he refused to acknowledge the result of the election, and his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent Congress from counting the 2020 Electoral College votes.

Fortune magazine commented on that data: “That’s a swing of 14 points in just one year, the largest shift Gallup has seen in its 30 years of polling.” Gallup also reported this, which omits data about people who lean  to one party or the other:

Fortune also wrote this:

Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, told The New York Times that “it seems like the Democrats can’t get out of their own way. The Democrats have got to do a better job of being clear on what they’re trying to do.”

Steadfast supporters of the Democrats are also showing their frustration. Members of some civil rights groups boycotted Bidens’ voting rights speech in Atlanta last week because they were disappointed with his inability to push the issue. Six of Biden’s former public health advisers also aired their criticisms of his handling of the pandemic.

“How do you plan to win back moderates and independents who cast a ballot for you in 2020, but polls indicate they are unhappy with the way you’re doing your job now?” a reporter asked [of Biden in a press conference].

The president simply answered, “I don’t believe the polls.”

What does this mean?

Unless something changes, Democrats are probably going to lose control of the House in the 2022 elections and maybe also the Senate. If the comments by Bien and Ryan are good evidence, Democrats are befuddled about how to get their messages out to the public. In the information vacuum, more than enough Americans are willing to give power back to the Republicans. Those Americans act like they do not see much threat to democracy, elections or anything else from the GOP to not consider voting for its candidates. Typical thinking and behavior still appear to be the norm. 

Many Americans do not see through the deceit, mendacity, emotional manipulation, and crude but effective partisan motivated reasoning that dominates GOP rhetoric and propaganda. They cannot see that the GOP has become seriously anti-democratic and seriously autocratic-theocratic.

Making matters worse, America's significantly neutered professional news media is doing a dismal job of explaining the authoritarian GOP threat. On this issue the MSM deserves a grade of F in my opinion. F- if there was such a thing. On the other hand, radical right sources, like the GOP's main propaganda organ Fox News, are doing a great job. Radical right deceit, blame shifting, responsibility avoidance, emotional manipulation, reality denial by silence, crackpot partisan reasoning, etc., is top notch stuff. 

Millions of Americans falsely believe that Fox speaks truth and sound reasoning. Those people cannot see the Republican threat. Their minds are trapped in an alt-reality based on alt-facts, an emotional train wreck and crackpottery that passes for serious political discourse.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Snowflake for mentioning the Gallup poll and the Fortune magazine article.

Pussyfootin' Around with Putin

 How to address the pending invasion of Ukraine?

The U.S. and NATO way: remove your citizens from Ukraine, wag your finger at Putin, and impose sanctions. I am sure Putin is running scared.

Snowflake's way: have the U.S. and NATO build up massive number of troops and heavy military hardware all along the Belarus border, and let Putin know if he invades Ukraine, the West will invade Belarus.

Send Ukraine massive deadly weapons. Arm them to the teeth. Make the cost of invasion too costly.

Impose those sanctions NOW, not after the fact. Offer to remove them if Putin withdraws all forces from the border to Ukraine, and leaves Crimea.

Cancel the pipeline NOW, offer to reinstate it only after Putin withdraws.

ALL OF NATO AND THE US immediately withdraw ALL of it's citizens from Russia and ban travel there. This aught to crush their tourism industry. 

BUT, my way might force Putin to react in anger, right? Wasn't that the same argument Europeans, the Brits, and Americans made prior to World War 2. Ask Hitler to play nice but don't ruffle his feathers? And how did THAT work out?

Thoughts?

A GOP alliance to oppose Trumpism

The New York Times reports on a GOP effort to keep Trumpism from fully consuming the party, making the ex-president a full-blown dictator in control. This effort has been going on quietly for months. This is surprising news to me. More surprising is the NYT’s disclosure that Mitch McConnell is leading the effort to stop Trumpism and he is aided by former president George Bush.

The circumstances here are bizarre. In public, McConnell has supported essentially all of what the ex-president wanted and did, including protecting him from impeachment on transparently crackpot hyper-partisan logic. 

What the hell is going on here? What effect, if any, will the reporting of this story have on internal GOP politics and the party's corrupt authoritarian, ideology? What about the critically important issues? Specifically, where do defense of or opposition to democracy, the rule of law, inconvenient facts, inconvenient truths, sound reasoning, secularism and civil liberties stand with each side in this quiet internal Republican war among GOP elites? 

It is the fight among the elites that count here. Rank and file Republicans are just as clueless as I, and probably most of the rest of the American public, were. In the end, rank and file Republicans and with the rest of us, will be lied to, spun, manipulated, distracted and deceived, no matter how this war plays out.

There are three basic ways to see this, roughly mostly good, mostly bad and mostly mixed-ambiguous.

The NYT writes:

As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him. The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.

Mr. McConnell for years pushed Mr. Trump’s agenda and only rarely opposed him in public. But the message that he delivers privately now is unsparing, if debatable: Mr. Trump is losing political altitude and need not be feared in a primary, he has told Mr. Ducey in repeated phone calls, as the Senate leader’s lieutenants share polling data they argue proves it.

In conversations with senators and would-be senators, Mr. McConnell is blunt about the damage he believes Mr. Trump has done to the G.O.P., according to those who have spoken to him. Privately, he has declared he won’t let unelectable “goofballs” win Republican primaries.

History doesn’t bode well for such behind-the-scene efforts to challenge Mr. Trump, and Mr. McConnell’s hard sell is so far yielding mixed results. The former president has rallied behind fewer far-right candidates than initially feared by the party’s old guard. Yet a handful of formidable contenders have spurned Mr. McConnell’s entreaties, declining to subject themselves to Mr. Trump’s wrath all for the chance to head to a bitterly divided Washington.

Mr. Trump, however, has also had setbacks. He’s made a handful of endorsements in contentious races, but his choices have not cleared the Republican field, and one has dropped out. 

If Mr. Trump muscles his preferred candidates through primaries and the general election this year, it will leave little doubt of his control of the Republican Party, build momentum for another White House bid and entrench his brand of politics in another generation of Republican leaders.

If he loses in a series of races after an attempt to play kingmaker, however, it would deflate Mr. Trump’s standing, luring other ambitious Republicans into the White House contest and providing a path for the party to move on.

But while there is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has eased, polls show the former president remains overwhelmingly popular in the party. Among politicians trying to win primaries, no other figure’s support is more ardently sought.

Mr. Trump is backing primary opponents to incumbent governors in Georgia and Idaho, encouraged an ally to take on the Alabama governor and helped drive Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts into retirement by supporting a rival. The Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Ducey leads, this week began pushing back, airing a television commercial defending the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, against his opponent, former Senator David Perdue. It was the first time in the group’s history they’ve financed ads for an incumbent battling a primary.

Mr. McConnell has been loath to discuss his recruitment campaign and even less forthcoming about his rivalry with Mr. Trump. In an interview last week, he warded off questions about their conflict, avoiding mentioning Mr. Trump’s name even when it was obvious to whom he was referring.

The Senate Republican leader has been worried that Mr. Trump will tap candidates too weak to win in the general election, the sort of nominees who cost the party control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012.

“We changed the business model in 2014, and have not had one of these goofballs nominated since,” he told a group of donors on a private conference call last year, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times.

Analysis

On the one hand, McConnell dislikes goofballs and tries to get reasonable-sounding Republicans like Maryland governor Larry Hogan to run for office. On the other hand, nearly the entire GOP leadership went along with open attacks on or rejection of democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law, civil liberties, etc. Before T**** came on the scene, corrupt authoritarianism and incompetence was the direction the GOP had been moving toward for decades. T**** accelerated the moral rot in already anti-democratic, anti-truth, anti-civil liberties GOP. McConnell cannot undo anything he did, e.g., saving T**** from impeachment twice.  

Assume that McConnell succeeds in neutering T**** and the goofballs. So what? What will be left to run the party? When it comes to the important issues, how far apart is the T**** goofball wing of the GOP and the McConnell-Bush radical Christian right, laissez-faire capitalist wing? Christian nationalists and their grip on the party are not going to go away. Neither are laissez-faire capitalists with their hundreds of millions in cash needed to run party operations and campaigns. None of that will change. Both have shown their acceptance or tolerance of T**** and the goofballs. What about Kevin McCarthy? he is a hard core T**** supporter and likely to become House speaker in less than one year. He is not going to go away or change his mendacious authoritarian brand of politics.

Given the intense threat that democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties are under from hyper-toxic T**** wing of the Republican Party, it probably makes sense to hope that McConnell triumphs and what is left of the GOP can be more effectively opposed.

So, much as I dislike the self-serving, sleazy, corrupt McConnell (and his corrupt wife Elaine Chao), I hope he succeeds and democracy remains more or less intact.

The Democratic Party better wake up. There isn't much time left, assuming there is still enough left to effectively defend democracy.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this NYT article out.

The party of shameless double standards and hypocrisy

Double standard vs hypocrisy: A double standard arises when two or more people, groups, organizations, circumstances, or events are treated differently even though they should be treated the same way. ... If correctly identified, a double standard is viewed negatively as it usually indicates the presence of hypocrisy, bias or unjust behaviors.

Can you guess which party that might be these days? These comments from a New York Times article summarize it nicely:

Donald J. Trump once thundered that the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server were “bigger than Watergate.” On his 2016 presidential campaign, “where are her emails?” became a Republican rallying cry that was soon replaced with an even more threatening demand: “Lock her up.”

Now, it’s Mr. Trump who faces accusations of improperly taking government records to his private residence. But among Republicans, once so forceful about the issue of mishandling documents, there was little sign of outrage.

Several Republicans who once railed against Mrs. Clinton’s document retention practices did not respond Thursday to questions about Mr. Trump’s actions. Others who had been directly involved with investigating Mrs. Clinton declined to discuss the specifics except to suggest, without evidence, that the National Archives and Records Administration was treating Mr. Trump more harshly.

“Why is the Archives handling this differently?” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa asked in a statement relayed through his spokeswoman.

Although the details differ, the broad strokes of the controversy over a former official’s handling of government documents were strikingly familiar, prompting a wave of Democratic anger — and some painful memories. The fact that Mrs. Clinton was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing only added to the sense of frustration among Democrats.

“There is just the hypocrisy and irony of it all,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist and former Clinton aide, who added that she wasn’t particularly surprised by the new accusations against Mr. Trump. “This is who Donald Trump is. He frequently will attack people falsely for things he is actually doing.” 

The years long State Department probe of emails sent to Mrs. Clinton’s private computer server concluded with a whimper in 2019, when State Department investigators sent a report to Congress finding that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” (emphasis added 😘)

Republican double standard hypocrisy speaks for itself. Too bad that tens of millions of Americans who are trapped in authoritarian radical right echo chambers won't hear even a squeak about this, although some or most might hear some demagoguery and lies about it. Or they might not.