Trump’s Wildly Unhinged New Ramblings on Fox News Reveal the True MAGA As Trump unleashes a series of vile claims on Fox, the author of a new piece on MAGA explains how Trump is speaking directly to his movement’s increasingly radicalized obsessions. https://newrepublic.com/article/185...inged-new-ramblings-fox-news-reveal-true-maga Over the weekend, Donald Trump did a long, bizarre Fox News interview, flatly declaring he had a “right” to interfere in the last presidential election. He also mused that “God” may have chosen Trump to fix our “sick” country,” and seethed about an “enemy within” that’s out to get him. It’s unhinged stuff that gets at a bigger story: Trump’s feeding of his MAGA audience’s various pathologies has been getting darker and uglier. We talked to writer Anne Lutz Fernandez—author of a good new piece at The Unpopulist website about MAGA—who helps us decode how Trump is communicating to the increasingly radicalized elements of the MAGA movement these days. Listen to this episode here.
Is this all they got? MAGA disciple flips over Kamala Harris going by her first name: 'She's not a soccer star!' https://www.rawstory.com/peter-navarro-kamala/
Fake news, social media, and "The Death of Truth" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-news-social-media-and-the-death-of-truth/ We live in an age of alternate facts. More and more Americans are getting their information almost entirely from outlets that echo their own political point of view. And then, of course, there's social media, where there are few (if any) filters between users and a wide world of misinformation. For example: On July 13 a sniper came within inches of assassinating Donald Trump as he addressed an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania. Within minutes, social media was alive with uninformed speculation. One woman posted, "Who did it? I bet you it was the government themselves. They're all on the same side." Koppel said, "We have no idea who she is, she has no particular credibility. Why should I even care that she is out there?" "Because she could potentially have an audience," said journalist and author Steven Brill. "If the algorithm gives it steam, that could be seen by millions of people." And then on X (formerly Twitter), this message: "You're telling me the Secret Service let a guy climb up on a roof with a rifle only 150 yards from Trump? Inside job." That message has seven million views and counting. Brill said, "We're at a point where nobody believes anything. Truth as a concept is really in trouble. It's suspect." The cumulative impact of the lies and distortions just keeps growing, such that Brill titled his new book "The Death of Truth." "There are facts," he said, "and it used to be in this world that people could at least agree on the same set of facts and then they could debate what to do about those facts." But we're losing our grip on any sort of shared reality. Brill's company, NewsGuard, is attempting to put the brakes on. Its 40 or so staffers around the world identify and rate the credibility of online news and information sources. It's a finger in the dike, because there's no price to be paid. Almost 30 years ago, the federal government decided that internet platforms were like the phone company. You can't sue the phone company for what a caller might say in a phone conversation. Brill said, "They inserted a three-paragraph section called Section 230, which said that these [internet] publishers would not be responsible for anything that was published in their chat rooms." Instead, it left the internet essentially without any enforceable rules. Social media companies exercise only limited control, permitting lies, fake news and intentionally divisive content to proliferate. The torrent of allegedly Moscow-backed content provoked an angry reaction from the U.S. this past week. But most of the damage is home-grown, from national and supposedly local outlets. "There are more fake news sites posing as legitimate local news in the United States than there are news sites of legitimate local newspapers," said Brill. "There is no monopoly on virtue from either side here. Just to take an example, the most effective fake local news sites are financed by liberal political action committees. And they're sort of especially self-righteous about it. When I interviewed them, they basically said, 'Well, the other guys do it, so we'll do it.' But it's undermining democracy." And then, Brill points out, we're just beginning to come to terms with the full potential of artificial intelligence. Note that none of these images is real: Brill said, "It disorients everything, because you don't know if something is a hoax, or is political propaganda, or is a deep fake. You just don't know what to believe." Koppel asked, "In the environment you describe, is it possible for us to have a clean, fair, universally-acceptable election?" "Your last condition is the one that is, I think, impossible – universally acceptable," Brill replied. "Forget universally, even modestly acceptable. I have a real fear that one way or another, regardless of the outcome, that the chaos and the disbelief and anger that's going to prevail on November 6, the day after the election, is really going to put our country to the test." READ AN EXCERPT: "The Death of Truth" by Steven Brill For more info: "The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World – and What We Can Do" by Steven Brill (Knopf), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org NewsGuard
Trump is drowning in the misinformation swamp he helped create https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/12/business/trump-misinformation-social-media-moderation/index.html
Hey look, it's the Trumpy Ohio AG who is running for governor shoveling complete disinformation. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost defends conspiracy chorus about Haitians in Springfield Springfield public buildings and a local elementary school had to be closed Thursday due to bomb threats https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024...spiracy-chorus-about-haitians-in-springfield/ Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on Wednesday did his bit to amplify a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants legally present in Springfield, Ohio are stealing and eating pets, ducks and geese. The conspiracy has been debunked by the Springfield mayor, city manager and chief of police, as well as by Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. Yost is looking to succeed DeWine as governor in 2026. “Citizens testified to City Council,” Yost posted on X Wednesday. “These people would be competent witnesses in court. Why does the media find a carefully worded City Hall press release better evidence?” Many of Springfield’s public buildings were closed for much of the day Thursday due to bomb threats after former President Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were stealing people’s pets and eating them. “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. A day earlier, on Monday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, posted on X that “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” As the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Thursday, between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitians have migrated to Springfield over the past five years. Contrary to Vance’s claim, the great majority of them are legally in the United States, either as naturalized citizens or under temporary protected status due to the violent chaos in their home country. Earlier this week, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced he would send state highway patrol troopers to Springfield to help, as well as $2.5 million to help with health care resources. While resources in the city of almost 60,000 have been strained by the heavy influx, the New York Times last week reported that many there believe it also revitalized a community that had long been on the decline. But Trump and his supporters have long been whipping up fears of immigrants — particularly those of color — even though multiple studies show that immigrants — particularly the undocumented — commit crime at substantially lower rates than the native-born. The influx of thousands of immigrants had already brought hate groups to Springfield, with a neo-Nazi group marching there in August. Some Springfield residents have begged politicians to stop promoting conspiracy theories about their community. And some Haitian immigrants are keeping their children home out of fear for their safety, the Haitian Times reported Thursday. But last week, Yost’s campaign claimed that undocumented immigrants were “terrorizing” Ohio communities. As evidence, it pointed to a Fox News article about the situation in Springfield that made no such claim. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Yost continued to perpetuate assertions about Haitians in Springfield. “There’s a recorded police call from a witness who saw immigrants capturing geese for food in Springfield,” Yost said in his X post. “Citizens testified to City Council. These people would be competent witnesses in court. Why does the media find a carefully worded City Hall press release better evidence?” In other words, Yost, a former journalist, was criticizing the media for not assigning the same credibility to any claim made in a police call or council meeting as they would to the public declarations of the Springfield mayor, city manager, police chief, and the Ohio governor. Yost campaign spokeswoman Amy Natoce was asked how the attorney general could justify this logic, and whether he was concerned that his post would further whip up racial resentments and place a target on a minority community in the United States. She replied that Yost was using official resources to answer those questions. “Since the AG’s staff is writing a legal memo on this, I’ll have you reach out to the official office with your inquiries,” she said. Asked the same questions, the AG’s Communications Director didn’t respond directly. She instead discussed problems dealing with the influx. “This is what the people of Springfield are reporting,” she said in an email. “You can choose to believe them or not believe them. But the indisputable fact is that the heavy influx of immigrants is overwhelming the city’s services and schools. And the federal government is doing nothing to help. AG Yost is interested in finding a pathway to help Springfield and other communities by holding the federal government accountable.” Anti-immigrant rhetoric has been linked to mass violence. Experts say that whipping up fears of an “immigrant invasion” and “terror” and conspiracy theories of a “great replacement” have helped motivate racist massacres over the past six years in El Paso, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh.
This is where J.D. and Trump get their talking points from. Not much different than MAGA idiots here on ET who repeatedly re-post false crap them find on social media. Source of Trump’s Dog-Eating Immigrants Claim Unmasked FACEBOOK GROUP HELL The poster got the story from a friend of her daughter who heard it from an “acquaintance of a friend.” Trump quoted her, but “I don’t have any proof,” says Patient Zero. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ohio-migrant-pet-eating-conspiracys-patient-zero-heard-it-fourth-hand The social media user who posted what appears to be one of the first claims of Haitian migrants kidnapping and eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio was simply repeating a story she had heard from a neighbor—who’d heard it themselves from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else, according to a new report. The fourth-hand claim about a dead cat rocketed to national prominence when Donald Trump mangled it during his Tuesday night debate with Kamala Harris, claiming, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Reporters from NewsGuard, a company that works to counter online misinformation, tracked down the poster, a Springfield woman named Erika Lee, 35, who admitted to being the source of the Facebook rumor that traveled from her keyboard to Trump in just a matter of days. But Lee said she had not actually witnessed the story—concerning a cat found hung from a tree for butchering. Instead, she said a neighbor named Kimberly Newton, 43, told her about it. When contacted by NewsGuard, Newton said, “I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” adding that the cat’s owner was the “acquaintance of a friend,” and therefore not of the daughter mentioned in the post. Newton added: “I don’t have any proof.” City officials and police have repeatedly said there has been no evidence or credible reports of people’s pets being abducted or harmed by members of the immigrant community. But the rumor has taken off since Tuesday's debate, with many linking to an unrelated animal abuse case as proof. The woman accused of killing and eating a cat some 170 miles northeast of Springfield in Canton, Ohio is an American citizen. Lee was reasonably clear in her since-deleted Facebook post about the fourth-hand nature of this rumor. Posting in a private group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information” earlier this month, Lee wrote that her neighbor told her that her daughter’s friend found her lost cat hanging dead from a tree near her Haitian neighbor’s house like “a deer for butchering.” Newton, the neighbor in question, told NewsGuard that her daughter was not involved, but that the friend who told her about the supposed incident had learned about it from “a source that she had.” Lee's claim took off when it jumped from Facebook to X, and a conservative user named @BuckeyeGirrl with just over 2,100 followers posted a screenshot of Lee’s post on Sept. 5. JD Vance then doubled-down on the claim by tweeting on Monday that while the specifics of the rumor may “turn out to be false,” it represents the real danger they supposedly pose to “suffering Americans.” Right-wing X users have since gone on to flood social media with AI-generated images of Trump protecting cats and ducks. Elon Musk tweeted “Ohio rn” over a screenshot of a Simpsons episode showing Bart and Lisa staring at a cat’s grave. Prior to the debate, the Trump campaign said in a news release that Haitian migrants had “reportedly been caught ‘decapitating ducks’ and hunting geese and other livestock in public parks—and even kidnapping residents’ pets—then eating them.” Lee, who described herself as a Democrat who supports Donald Trump, said while she was “shocked” to see Trump repeat a claim she had made on social media, she has not been following the story closely—even as it became a viral sensation. “Actually, I haven’t really been following the news much on it at all,” she told NewsGuard. “I’ve only really seen it like on Facebook, what things pop up on my news feed, or what other people have shared on things that they have read up on.”
GOP representatives really shouldn't say the quiet part out loud. GOP lawmaker: Making it harder to vote 'is our opportunity to win' https://www.rawstory.com/brian-steil-save-act/
Just Elon Musk and MAGA shoveling misinformation again. Same thing -- over and over. ‘Unfounded’: Police Debunk Viral Claim Shared By Elon Musk And Others of Bomb Found Near Trump Rally Site https://www.mediaite.com/politics/u...mp-rally-site-shared-by-elon-musk-and-others/