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This is What Propaganda Looks Like

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At a campaign-style rally in Melbourne, Florida (on his way to his 3rd vacation in 3 weeks) as his proof to support his xenophobic and anti-immigration policies, Donald Trump made a claim that Sweden experienced a terrorist attack the previous day in direct result of accepting an influx of refugees escaping war.

However it turned out, there was no terrorist attack in Sweden or anywhere else in Europe that day, Trump simply misinterpreted something he saw on television and presented it as fact.

While the President of the United States creating fake news is indeed a problem, there is something else problematic this is surrounding the President’s lies. And that is the rush of pro-Trump media sites to create news reports in order to support the already debunked false claims of the President. There is a word for this, “propaganda.”

propaganda – noun – Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
–Oxford English Dictionary

The meaning of propaganda has been watered down recently, because it gets thrown around too easily in social media in an attempt to discredit a news story someone doesn’t like, so when we see it actually occurring we may not recognize that it is happening.

But watch pro-Trump news sites like Breitbart and Fox News scramble every time Trump makes a ridiculous or unsubstantiated claim, even long after facts are presented that absolutely refute what was said. Like when they still stand up and say “No, the President was really telling the truth!!! Sweden is a living hell!!!”

It’s their job to “cover” for him, to make the case that, “Trump said X but he really means Y,” or just to outright lie for him.

We saw this all throughout his campaign. Trump would say things like he wants to ban all Muslims or Obama founded ISIS, and these sites would trip over themselves to find a way to make him appear less controversial, look for quotes out of contexts to support their cause, or to say he really didn’t literally mean what he said.

But Trump did eventually institute a Muslim ban with an executive order and also later came back and said I’m not joking, Obama is the literal founder of ISIS.

That, is propaganda.

A Little Background

To highlight how this is happening, we’ll first walk through the series of events surrounding Trump’s false Sweden claims, then we’ll take a look at an actual propaganda article from Fox News.

First, Trump Shouted a Lie

During his rally, Donald Trump referred to several countries that have taken in a disproportionate number of refugees and that have recently been the target of attacks.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible.”

However the claim sent pundits and political observers scrambling to find evidence of any such incident in Sweden — and they came up empty.

There was, of course, no terrorist or refugee-related incident in Sweden the previous day, as Swedes helpfully pointed out.

Then Trump Claimed a Lie Was Never Made

So Trump offered clarification on his remarks over Twitter, saying it was from a Fox News story he just watched earlier that day:

The Fox News segment Trump was referring to was an interview between host Tucker Carlson and documentarian and media personality Ami Horowitz that aired Friday night. Horowitz presented a clip from a film documenting alleged violence committed by refugees in Sweden, and the segment extensively referenced an alleged crime surge in Sweden and its links to immigrants.

To top things off, that Fox News segment itself was fact-checked and found to be full of errors and misleading statements.

Then Trump Accused Media of Attacking Him

In response Trump sent out a tweet accusing journalists, who he has recently labeled “an enemy of the people“, of saying large scale immigration in Sweden is not a problem. And the “real news” is the influx of migrants from other countries is causing a crime wave.

Trump, again, is trying to push his claim that immigrants are causing crime without providing any evidence.

Now Let the Propaganda Begin!

Enter the right-wing pro-Trump network Fox News, who recently published this article titled, “Trump may have been unclear, but Sweden experiencing a migrant crime wave“.

The Fox News article makes the case that Trump was actually telling the truth because a single police investigator in Orebro, Sweden named Peter Springare wrote a super-racist Facebook post a few weeks prior which claimed his five-day caseload was, “Mohammed, Mahmod, Ali, again and again.”

Springare’s post listed five rapes, three assaults, a pair of extortions, blackmail, an attempted murder, violence against police and a robbery. According to Springare, the suspects were all from Muslim-majority countries – Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Turkey – save for one Swedish man nabbed in a drug-related case.

Just to be clear, Fox News’ proof was just one guy’s experience over less than a week, and taking him at his word no less. Seeing that Sweden employs about 29,000 police officers who report on crimes year-round, that is a really small sample size they are holding up in order to make your case.

Springare’s post actually made national news in Sweden… on how stupid his claims were. It was even debunked by the Swedish Prime Minister.

If Fox News wanted to be honest and provide quality reporting, they would have presented their viewers with actual data from the The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, known there as Brå.

If we take into account the, preliminary figures for 2016 which show that offenses against individual persons was up slightly, but still at the same levels as recent years, we can clearly see crime in Sweden has remained largely the same, even as more immigrants are living in the country.

What Fox News did was take the racist ramblings of ONE police officer over the course of a few days (without any evidence) and hold that up to ALL police officers in Sweden over the course of a decade and say, “these two are equal.”

They are not equal.

Fox News was dishonest with their viewers by ignoring the vast body of evidence that disagreed with their conclusions in order to push a false narrative to their viewers that Donald Trump really knew what he was talking about.

That, is propaganda.

 

References

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-doubles-down-on-sweden-claims-2017-2

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/19/sweden-has-no-idea-what-trump-meant-when-he-said-you-look-at-whats-happening-in-sweden/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_wv-sweden-843am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&tid=a_inl&utm_term=.f33bb4247e96

 

 

 

 

Trump Just Repeats What He Sees On The News

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Many people wonder how Donald Trump continues to repeat outlandish claims, and where could he possibly have received such information in the first place.

It is actually quite simple. The president consumes a ton of news, specifically Fox News’ morning show “Fox & Friends” and crank conspiracy theory sites, and like a dumb parrot he simply repeats what he hears.

That’s it.

Think that’s ridiculous? Look at this Fox News headline from February 14th at 9:15 AM, then Trump’s tweet a few minutes later at 9:28 AM.

Fox News asks why information was leaked to the media, thirteen minutes later we have the start of an actual federal policy to investigate leaks coming from the intelligence community.

And that’s not the only example.

Sweden is Under Attack

President Donald Trump cited a nonexistent incident in Sweden while talking about the relationship between terror attacks and refugees around the world during a rally in Melbourne, Florida.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden … Sweden … who would believe this? Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening Brussels, you look at what’s happening all over the world,” Trump said.

No incident occurred in Sweden the previous night.

However, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran an interview on Friday night’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with documentarian and media personality Ami Horowitz, who presented a clip from a new film documenting alleged violence committed by refugees in Sweden. The segment went on extensively about a supposed crime surge in Sweden and its links to immigrant populations.

Crime rates in Sweden have stayed relatively stable, with some fluctuations, over the last decade, according to the 2016 Swedish Crime Survey.

Ungrateful Traitor Chelsea Manning

In the final days of President Barack Obama’s administration, on January 17th the president commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, who had leaked intelligence cabals and video of war crimes the US Army had covered up to the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.

A week later, January 26th at 5:50 a.m. ET on Fox News, anchor Abby Huntsman reported on a recent op-ed penned by Manning that argued Obama had “few permanent accomplishments.”

With a chyron below that read “ungrateful traitor,” Fox News’ Huntsman opinioned that Obama was a weak leader” and how “Chelsea Manning is sounding less than grateful to President Obama for cutting nearly twenty-five years off of her sentence for leaking unclassified information.”

Fourteen minutes later, president-elect Donald Trump sends out a tweet with very familiar terms:

Fox says “ungrateful traitor,” Trump says “ungrateful traitor,” Fox says “weak leader,” Trump says “weak leader.”

Vast Jewish Conspiracy

The right wing propaganda network Fox News isn’t the only source of information our president trusts to repeat.

There was this one time Trump made a statement during his campaign that “international banks plot the destruction of US sovereignty.” Now this claim sounds completely loony to a normal person, but if you were a frequent listener of nutcase right-wing conspiracy theory pusher Alex Jones who runs the crackpot Infowars.com site, then you’re feeling relief that finally you have a president who is “speaking the truth.”

Alex Jones frequently invokes “globalists” as the villains behind the various conspiracy theories he discusses on his radio show and included in almost every article and documentary on his Infowars.com website has a reference to the crank Rothschild conspiracy theory, that there is secretive Jewish family controlling all word events for their personal monetary gain. Some examples of these articles include:

Is it crazy? Yes. Is it super-antisemitic? Oh yes. Is that the only example? Unfortunately no.

There is No Drought

Speaking at a rally in Fresno, Calif., Trump accused state officials of denying water to Central Valley farmers so they can send it out to sea “to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

Then Trump told California voters in attendance that he can solve their water crisis, declaring, “There is no drought.”

Again Donald Trump’s California drought conspiracy theory comes straight from lunatic Alex Jones’ InfoWars in an article just 3 days prior titled, “Environmentalists Caused California Drought to Protect This Fish.”

And of course California at the time was in its fifth year of drought, which has taken a heavy toll on agriculture in particular.

Refugees Are an ISIS Trojan Horse

In May 2016, Donald Trump did an interview with the National Border Patrol Council podcast “The Green Line” where he suggested refugees would launch a 9/11-type attack and the terrorist group ISIS was paying for thousands of refugees’ cell phone plans.

They all have cell phones so they don’t have money, they don’t have anything, they have cell phones. Who pays their monthly charges, right? They have cell phones with the flags, the ISIS flags on them.

The reference to Syrian refugees with ISIS phones appears to be from an article first reported by the Norwegian newspaper The Netavisen, where a few of the refugees had cell phone images with horrors of war that they documented in their travels. This included images of flags, symbols, and characters that can be linked to the terrorist group ISIS and other terrorist groups, who were present in these war zones.

But that Norwegian article was then floated on the conspiracy site Infowars just a few months earlier, which left out important facts and upped the number of refugees in Norway were found with photos of ISIS flags on their phones to “hundreds.”

Why?

Trump literally believes anything from sources that he trusts, and that is all he needs. Watch as Trump claims that he had the biggest electoral win since Reagan, that he had 304 electoral votes, and how he reacts when he is fact-checked on the spot.

“Well this is what I was told.”

That’s his entire answer. He never questions it because Trump has always placed loyalty to him above all else, so without question he trusts his crackpot but loyal sources.

But the crazy thing is, his supporters who voted for him don’t care. They don’t care. They see videos like this and cheer someone taking it to “the lame-stream media.” To them the free and open press are the enemy, who report on things they don’t like to hear, so it must be fake. So they’re glad to see President Donald Trump stand up for himself, it doesn’t matter the words are bat-shit nuts or he comes off like buffoon. His supporters will still love him just for standing up to the press.

And because of this, Donald Trump will never have the need to put any effort into ensuring his words and beliefs are factual. He can just keep going on, believing his trusted sources at face value.

 

Sit Down and Shut Up

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Last night, Senator and vestigial backbone of the Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren, got up to filibuster the impending confirmation of one Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions is President Trump’s pick for Attorney General which in any other case would be unusual for Trump. I mean, Sessions attended law school at an accredited university, practiced law in Alabama, was a U.S. District Attorney and the Attorney General for Alabama before becoming a senator and would otherwise seem immensely qualified to hold the office. All of which, one would think, would DIS-qualify him to head the Justice Department under Trump, the same man who nominated a brain surgeon to run HUD, Rick “Oops” Perry to oversee our nuclear arsenal, and Betsy DeVos, who knows so little about public schools she believes the greatest threat to them are bears, to become the Secretary of Education.

So why the filibuster? It might be because Sessions had failed in 1986 to be appointed as a judge to the U.S. District Court due in part to his prosecution of civil rights workers known as the “Marion 3” who he erroneously concluded were committing voting fraud. Perhaps it was part of the culture of the senate back then: In order to become one, you must first be killed by one. Actually, I think that’s vampires.

One of the ways in which Sessions’ transgressions were brought to light back then was by a letter written by Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr., who had at that point had about 20 years of blood, sweat, and tears on her “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit!” sign. King wrote the letter to then head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Strom Thurmond, the Republican/former Democrat who switched parties in 1964 after the passage of the Voting Rights Act which, I’m sure, was merely a coincidence. Yet that letter, sent to arguably one of the most racists Senators in American history convinced the Judiciary committee that Sessions had:

“…marginal qualifications who lacks judicial temperament. … A nominee who is hostile, hostile to civil rights organisations [sic] and their causes.”

Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio

So when looking for debate as to whether or not Senator Sessions was fit to hold the highest law office in the land, Senator Warren took to the floor to read the same letter that had disqualified him for the objectively lower office of federal judge over 30 years ago. That was until Mitch McConnell, box turtle and protector of the high-bar of senate decorum, stood up to Warren’s obstructionist preaching of factual information by calling up rules of the senate, specifically Rule XIX, Section 2, for a little dirty talk:

No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.

Senate Rule XIX, Section 2

According to McConnell, by reading the letter that said Sessions had “used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens,” Warren had “impugned the motives and conduct of [Sen. Sessions].” Just… real quick; can someone please remind me which party is supposed to be full of people so sensitive to insults that conservatives came up with the uber-catchy nickname of “snowflake?” Are you sure? ‘Cause these guys just quoted a senate rule that protects against hurt feelings.

But Rule 19 isn’t just for protecting senator’s delicate sensibilities. There’s all sorts of useful sections in there! Like this one, that says:

“[A]ll debate shall be germane and confined to the specific question then pending before the Senate.”

Senate Rule XIX, Section 1(b)

That may have been nice to bring up back in 2013, when Senator Ted Cruz spend part of his 21 hour filibuster on Obamacare to read Green Eggs & Ham. Though, in fairness, eating green eggs isn’t considered a pre-existing condition, and if I can’t eat spoiled food and expect to suckle at the government teat, why bother?

Or if Warren was going to be shut down by Rule 19, why not go full-bore and violate Section 5 which says after being called to order, whatever words she said would be written down and read to the Senate? That way she could have had McConnell read aloud that Jeff Sessions looks like a pale, elfish gopher with the redden hue of a life-time alcoholic, yet still looks so boyish he’d need to crawl up on the apple crate to look pappy in the eye like a man when he’s talking to you!

But what’s terrifying about the enforcement of this rule is that it effectively means is that ANY senator who would be up for any future confirmation would be exempt from having any negative statements used against them. For example, were McConnell himself up for a position in the Trump administration other than democratic hair-clog and Vichy-esque legitimizer, no one in the senate could mention his penchant for fresh leaf lettuce and crunchy carrots, or his inability to roll over should he find himself on his shell. I mean back. A position he should get accustomed to, because if there’s one thing Trump has made clear, it’s that he doesn’t wait for consent.

While it’s fun to poke at the withering constitutions of McConnell and Sessions, the reality is McConnell used an obscure rule of the senate to silence debate of Sessions’ appointment to the highest law office in the land, not because it impugns the character of the senator, but because they already know what it says. And when the former Justice Department finds systemic racism in places like Ferguson and Chicago, when people of color make up 60% of prison populations and face beatings, shootings, and strangulation at the hands of those sworn to protect them, when conservatives call Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, Coretta King’s letter isn’t seen as a condemnation of Jeff Sessions, it’s seen as a resume.

Donald Trump Takes Credit For Dow Bump, Ignores Its Down Slide

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With only a week into his presidency, Donald Trump wasted little time taking a victory lap for the Dow soaring above 20,000 for the first time ever during his first full week in office.

“We just hit a record, and a number that’s never been hit before. So I was very honored by that,” Trump told ABC News.

It is true that the Dow raced to a 1,700 point boom, as investors looked optimistic that his promises of infrastructure spending, deregulation, and tax cuts to businesses would spur short-term economic growth.

Pro-Trump sites blew up the internet with memes and articles like:

But unfortunately the good times have ended.

It might be a shock for the Trump supporters to learn, but just a few days later on January 31st, the “Trump Bump” ended and the Dow slid back down to 19,789.77, about 40 points below the day when Trump took the oath of office.

Once Trump focused the majority of his attention to a Muslim ban, which coincidentally is a broad concern to the markets, and stopped talking about his economic policies that excited the investors in the first place, that put the breaks on any optimism and squashed his dream of the Dow only going “up, up, up.”

Of course, the pro-Trump sites have been mysteriously quiet on the economy as of late. A quick scan of these same sites show no articles for the disappearance of the much-hyped “Trump Bump.”

But the Dow wasn’t the only victim of Trump’s policies so far.

However what is most infuriating, was that Trump and his pro-Trump sites, never recognized the efforts of President Obama who turned around a failing economy and  whose policies and put the Dow within a hair of 20,000, leaving office with the Dow at 19,827.25. People forget when Obama inherited The Great Recession, caused by deregulation policies of George W. Bush and Republicans, the Dow crashed below 7,000 points.

It was like Obama ran 26.1 miles, then Trump took his baton, walked a few steps, and claimed victory for running an entire marathon.

What Is the Alt-Right

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Trump and alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog kissing.

This week, Donald J. Trump named Steve Bannon as White House Chief Strategist, to the condemnation of many groups.

Bannon, Executive Chairman of the antisemitic site Breitbart.com, was most known as giving the “alt-right” a platform and turning it into the fourth most commented website in the world.

Under Bannon, Breitbart.com published controversial articles like:

The term “alt-right”, or Alternative Right, was not created by Hillary Clinton, as Trump once suggested, but was coined in 2008 by Richard Bertrand Spencer, who heads the white nationalist think tank known as the National Policy Institute, to describe a loose set of far-right ideals centered on “white identity” and “the preservation of Western civilization.”

The alt-right movement is associated with white nationalism, white supremacism, antisemitism, right-wing populism, nativism, and the neoreactionary movement and wholeheartedly embrace the overt racism, misogyny, neo-Nazi affectations, bullying and trolling of chan culture as a lifestyle.

While many of the values of Trump and the alt-right overlap (such as mass deportations of immigrants, preventing Muslims and refugees from entering the country) the alt-right does not consider Trump or Bannon to be members, only “useful to them.”

Many people were unaware of the alt-right movement before the 2016 election and still do not understand it. So we wanted to help you educate your friends by sharing a video made by one of its leading members, Jared Taylor, explaining exactly what the alt-right is.

In the video Taylor attempts to distance himself from Bannon, saying he never publicly supported the alt-right. However this claim ignores Bannon enthusiastically declaring “We’re the platform for the alt-right,” encouraging Breitbart to be the go-to-place for the movement, and even going so far to publish a guide to make alt-right appear more palatable to conservatives.

WARNING: This video is not safe for work and contains offensive and ignorant statements with claims not backed by any scientific consensus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ3B6L2fUA8&feature=youtu.be

Day 1 In Trump’s America

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Nazi graffiti on a wall

What most people failed to understand, and what so many of us tried to explain, is the language Donald J. Trump used during his campaign that belittled Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims, and other groups have consequences. The election of him to the Presidency made it okay for the rest of us to talk and act the same way, thus allowing hate to be the new normal in America.

This effect has not taken long. Here is a sample of stories of people’s real experiences of hate on day one.

If you see this happening, or experience bullying yourself, there are tried-and-tested psychological techniques to help diffuse the situation, but always think of your safety first.

The 2016 Election Results

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Hello friends who cast their votes for Donald J. Trump.

I want you to know first congratulations. For whatever your reasons, from fear of ISIS, concerns about jobs, or just wanting to stick it to the system, you got the candidate you wanted.

But in order to deliver this message it also came attached with a lot of ugliness. From racism, sexism, approval of violence against those who disagree with you, conspiracy theory, white supremacy, curtailing the Constitution, and a complete disregard for empirical evidence. (Trust me, I read all of his policies and have over 600 examples on Stop The Donald Trump to back me up.)

And for some, I see you actually support these things, and others had to find ways to excuse them in order to cast your vote, but frankly I don’t know which is worse. And that is horrible.

I’ll continue Stop The Donald Trump twice as hard now, I’ll still continue to catalog his hate and ignorance. And I still want this to be a safe place for you to join in on the conversation, because it is blindly obvious where you get your information from is a farce which lead you into believing to fear so much while providing so little evidence.

But you got the candidate you wanted. With a laundry list of impossible campaign promises to fill, let’s see how well this goes for you.

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