Middle Aged Rage

The Gaslight Zone: Undermining Reality

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John Podesta has published an article called “Trump’s Dangerous Strategy to Undermine Reality.”

Trump is deploying a strategy, used by autocrats, designed to completely disorient public perception. He’s not just trying to spin the bad news of the day; all politicians do that. He seeks nothing less than to undermine the public’s belief that any news can be trusted, that any news is true, that there is any fixed reality.

Trump is attempting to build a hall of mirrors where even our most basic sensory perceptions are shrouded in confusion. He is emulating the successful strategy of Vladimir Putin.

There’s that name again: Putin. For the life of me, I cannot understand why and how the GOP has suddenly become so passive and acquiescent in a President’s cozying up to Russia and its leader, a former KGB agent with the dead eyes of a shark. This is such a radical about-face that it defies explanation.

Even a mere reader and private citizen like myself has read enough to see that there are many threads that seem to connect Trump to various Russian interests, from his advisers to his loans to his real estate. Now that his National Security Adviser has been forced to resign for LYING about his contacts with Russian diplomats before this Administration took over, we have every right to demand a full and independent investigation of what is starting to look like Russiagate, complete with a coverup by the GOP.

(Footnote: did we really want a National Security Adviser who didn’t realize any phone call to the Russian ambassador was certainly going to be recorded by our own intelligence agencies? Duh).

This won’t go away. No amount of gaslighting, no hall of mirrors, will make this disappear. It is the most serious potential White House scandal with the most potential for criminal convictions that I have seen in my lifetime — and I remember Watergate.

And it is really, really stupid for this President and this White House to go on the attack, repeatedly, against the American intelligence community. They number in the tens of thousands. They are smart. They work hard. They know their work is important. And they have ALL the records, all the tapes, all the wiretaps. If he pushes them too far, payback is going to be a bitch.

Staying Woke Without Losing Our Minds

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Resistance is not futile, but it is exhausting. In the middle of the night following the election, as the sick reality was starting to set in, I began to get frantic texts, emails, and messages on social media from people who were trying to wrap their minds around the absolute worst-case scenario. They were processing what seemed like……

via Stay Woke, But Get Some Sleep (Self-Care in the Resistance) — john pavlovitz

Trump limo, empty stands, on Inauguration Day 2017

The Gaslight Zone: “The Camera Cannot Lie” — Or Can It?

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Quartz Media has published a short guide to understanding what news photographs do and don’t tell us about the true situation: Want To Resist the Post-Truth Age? . The example it uses is that of Inauguration Day, when some published photos were taken at an angle and with tight cropping that showed a smiling Trump family and Pence family walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, waving to the crowd. Except that there wasn’t much of a crowd. Wider angle shots like the one above, published by The Atlantic, showed mostly empty viewing stands. There are many other similar published images.

I remember when President Ronald Reagan’s White House manipulated images in this way. When he would arrive at a location, there were actually barriers that kept the press at a far distance. So in order to have any kind of publishable photo, they would use powerful zoom lenses to get close-ups. Here is the kind of intimate photo that resulted:

President Reagan boarding helicopter

President Reagan boarding helicopter

Looks like the photographer was right next to him, doesn’t it? And see how the image focuses on Reagan’s cheery smile, his jaunty salute? It makes you feel as if you know him. Creating a sense of that kind of intimacy was Reagan’s specialty as a politician and public figure, starting from his TV days as an ad spokesman for General Electric.

But in reality, even the press pool photographers who were assigned to cover Reagan routinely were kept at an unprecedented distance from him, as documented by The New York Times in 1981, his first year in office:

One effect of many of the security steps has been to establish a physical distance between Mr. Reagan and the reporters who directly accompany him in a small representative group, or pool. For example, reporters at the airport at South Bend were kept too far away from the President to ask questions, which is a normal feature of airport arrivals and departures.

The rationale given by the White House was the then-recent 1981 attempt on Reagan’s life. Okay, that seems legitimate — except the attempt on his life happened on a city street. It had nothing to do with scheduled, controlled airport locations on tightly controlled, limited-access tarmac. The effect was to insulate a President who was known to make misstatements from pesky press questions, while creating a situation where they were almost forced to generate falsely intimate images.

It will be even more essential for us all to develop better skills in media literacy and critical thinking, given the propagandists who now occupy our White House. Good night, and good luck.

 

The Gaslight Zone and How to Resist

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via Daily Prompt: Resist

We are living in an era that I call The Gaslight Zone: where the President of the United States routinely lies to us on a daily basis, enabled by power-hungry staff who are accountable only to him and his delusions, and power-drunk GOP Senators and Congressmen who think they can control him to achieve their own goals.

We have just witnessed the spectacle of several hundred travelers being detained, or denied entry, or removed from airplanes, or stopped at departure gates — including US citizens, legal permanent residents, and holders of special immigration visas. Several of the US citizens detained were young children who were separated from their parents, at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and Dulles airport. US citizens were also detained at O’Hare airport, among others.

Holders of special immigrant visas were also detained; they are usually people who actually worked with the American military in Iraq or Afghanistan as interpreters or contractors, and whose lives are in real danger there as a result. Some came to the U.S. long enough ago that they are now legal permanent residents with green cards — no matter. They were detained anyway. Try to wrap your head around this: these are people who put much more on the line for our country than over 99%  of Americans, because most of us don’t serve in the military and even those who do, have mostly not served on the ground in Iraq. These are Iraqis who faced the same danger as our own troops, but without body armor. This, from a President who dodged the draft when it was his time to serve.

But the chaos of this past weekend is just the most recent, visible sign of tyranny emanating from the Trump White House. The reorganization of the National Security Council, also done by sudden executive order this past weekend, gives unprecedented priority to a purely political adviser with virtually no national security expertise: Steve Bannon, until recently the CEO of Breitbart News, proudly identified as the platform of the “alt-right” — a neutered term for white nationalists. This sends a strong signal to the experts — Trump is putting his alt-right political adviser ahead of our top military and intelligence officials. And, by the way, he made that announcement on the same day as his weekend phone conversation with Putin.

Knowledgeable observers and journalists are actually starting to use the word “coup”. One commentator compiled a sequence of substantiated news reports from different sources to show a truly disturbing picture of what looks like a deliberate strategy to leave the State Department and National Security Council bereft of experienced personnel and create chaos, possibly as a cover for the lifting of sanctions against Russia and the oil company Rosneft. And guess what? In December (the same month when there were multiple contacts between Trump’s now National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the Kremlin), Putin privatized Rosneft. Reuters reported last week that 19.5% of Rosneft stock had been transferred under mysterious and indecipherable circumstances. Remember that “Steele Dossier” of alleged intelligence against Trump? One of the allegations was that Trump’s adviser Carter Page had used his Russian connections to broker a deal with the Putin regime that they would offer Trump and his associates 19% of Rosneft stock if he lifted those sanctions. And now a number of high-ranking  FSB/KGB officers, suspected of being Steele’s sources, have been very publicly arrested and charged with treason. Another was found dead, also in December. What else happened in December? Trump and his closest aides started getting the most detailed, most sensitive intelligence briefings. You can’t make this stuff up.

Trump isn’t new to getting tens of millions of dollars from Russian plutocrats. In 2008, he sold a Palm Beach estate, which he had bought just three years earlier for $41 million, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. For $95 million. That’s a $54 million premium in three years. Rybolovlev has never lived there. Sounds fishy to me — almost like someone wanted to pour tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s pockets and needed a cover story.

I don’t know what to think about all this, but none of it is normal. The activity since the inauguration feels as if boundaries are being tested on many fronts. It feels as if much of the uproar is orchestrated as a distraction. It feels like a “shock event.” The Reuters news service has now instructed its reporters to cover the Trump administration under the same protocols they use in authoritarian countries “such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists.”

Think fascism can’t happen here, because that’s like, so last century? It can happen here.

What to do? Resist. And here is some guidance. First, there is the “Indivisible Guide“, a list of practical tips from former Congressional staffers on how to make yourself heard by elected officials. Second, below is even more advice:

Resistance advice from a high-level Senator staffer in the Democratic Party (but worth reading by all, regardless of party, who fear that our system of government is under attack):

“Bottom line of this long but worthwhile read – we should be calling our senators and representatives daily!!! Even in deeply blue states it seems. We need them to know we want them to delay and resist Trump at every turn. None of this is normal. None of this is okay!!!

You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing.
Online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash unless you have a particularly strong emotional story – but even then it’s not worth the time it took you to craft that letter.

There are 2 things that all Democrats should be doing all the time right now, and they’re by far the most important things:

1. The best thing you can do to be heard and get your congressperson to pay attention is to have face-to-face time – if they have town halls, go to them. Go to their local offices. If you’re in DC, try to find a way to go to an event of theirs. Go to the “mobile offices” that their staff hold periodically (all these times are located on each congressperson’s website). When you go, ask questions. A lot of them. And push for answers. The louder and more vocal and present you can be at those the better.

2. But, those in-person events don’t happen every day. So, the absolute most important thing that people should be doing every day is calling.

You should make 6 calls a day: 2 each (DC office and your local office) to your 2 Senators & your 1 Representative. Calls are what all the congress people pay attention to. Every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics. They’re also sorted by zip code and area code.

And this is IMPORTANT:

She said that Republican callers generally outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it’s a particular issue that single-issue-voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc…), it’s often closer to 11-1, and that has recently pushed Republican congressfolks on the fence to vote with the Republicans. In the last 8 years, Republicans have called, and Democrats haven’t.

SO WHEN YOU CALL:

A) When calling the DC office, ask for the Staff member in charge of whatever you’re calling about (“Hi, I’d like to speak with the staffer in charge of Healthcare, please”). Local offices won’t always have specific ones, but they might. If you get transferred to that person, awesome. If you don’t, that’s ok – ask for their name, and then just keep talking to whoever answered the phone. Don’t leave a message (unless the office doesn’t pick up at all – then you can…but it’s better to talk to the staffer who first answered than leave a message for the specific staffer in charge of your topic).

B) Give them your zip code. They won’t always ask for it, but make sure you give it to them, so they can mark it down. Extra points if you live in a zip code that traditionally votes for them, since they’ll want to make sure they get/keep your vote.

C) If you can make it personal, make it personal. “I voted for you in the last election and I’m worried/happy/whatever” or “I’m a teacher, and I am appalled by Betsy DeVos,” or “as a single mother” or “as a white, middle class woman,” or whatever.

D) Pick 1-2 specific things per day to focus on. Don’t go down a whole list – they’re figuring out what 1-2 topics to mark you down for on their lists, so, focus on 1-2 per day. Ideally something that will be voted on/taken up in the next few days, but it doesn’t really matter…even if there’s not a vote coming up in the next week, call anyway. It’s important that they just keep getting calls.

E) Be clear on what you want – “I’m disappointed that the Senator…” or “I want to thank the Senator for their vote on…” or “I want the Senator to know that voting in _____ way is the wrong decision for our state because…” Don’t leave any ambiguity.

F) They may get to know your voice/get sick of you – it doesn’t matter. The people answering the phones generally turn over every 6 weeks anyway, so even if they’re really sick of you, they’ll be gone in 6 weeks.

From experience since the election: If you hate being on the phone & feel awkward, don’t worry…there are a bunch of scripts (Indivisible has some). After a few days of calling, it starts to feel a lot more natural. Put the 6 numbers in your phone all under Politician or Favorites, which makes it really easy to click down the list each day!
Now go get ’em!

#Resist.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson on Trump’s Muslim Ban: “It’s a Shock Event” | the way of improvement leads home

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Reblogging from historian John Fea, who specializes in American history with an emphasis on politics and religion:

Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College is one of my favorite historians.  I highly recommend her most recent book To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party.  Today Richardson gave me pe…

Source: Historian Heather Cox Richardson on Trump’s Muslim Ban: “It’s a Shock Event” | the way of improvement leads home

The Gaslight Zone: And So It Begins …

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The former Public Editor of The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, has issued a harsh warning to all journalists and members of the press who try to hold President Donald Cobblepot accountable: A Hellscape of Lies and Distorted Reality. The Columbia Journalism Review notes that Trump acts more like a media organization than anything else, one that is heavily influenced by the tactics and tone of Breitbart News, formerly led by his top adviser Steve Bannon, and Fox News, formerly led by his mentor Roger Ailes: Donald Trump is a Media Organzation.

What happens when emotion-driven messaging dominates over policy-making and good governance? Propaganda. I hate overblown comparisons to Nazis, but let’s not forget that Hitler and Goebbels were masters of communication innovation and used the most advanced means at their disposal to spread their poisonous dogma. And that dogma plunged the world into war and caused the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people. They too acted like media organizations. I think a sober analysis of how their propaganda succeeded in what had been one of the world’s most advanced and cultured societies is worth our time and attention, to avoid going down the 21st century version of that road.

The Weekly Vent: We’ve entered The Gaslight Zone

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Remember the TV show The Twilight Zone? If you’re middle-aged, you probably do. It was famous for its unsettling introduction by narrator/creator Rod Serling, which always ended with the dark words: “You’ve entered … The Twilight Zone.” And thus would begin another episode of warped reality, almost like science fiction but set in the quotidian, humdrum, familiar environments of American homes, small towns, cities.

It has become ever more clear that with the election of Donald Trump, we are entering uncharted territory: the most powerful nation on earth is now led by a malignant narcissist with a tenuous grasp on the truth, a lot of hatred in his heart, and many unsavory supporters. I call him President Donald Cobblepot:  “Only I Can Protect You…” . The coming years will severely test our culture and our democracy. Do you think “it can’t happen here”? Yes, it can. In fact, there’s a Twilight Zone episode about that very possibility: “He’s Alive”.

“Portrait of a bush-league Fuehrer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors, he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. The something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon, he calls it faith, strength, truth.” Sound familiar?

And so in honor of Rod Serling, I am naming this era “The Gaslight Zone.” We have entered The Gaslight Zone. Donald Trump’s favorite method of communication, like abusive spouses and bosses, and tyrants everywhere, is the tactic known as “gaslighting.”  He makes statements that are recorded, then baldly denies having made them. He sends outrageous “tweets” to distract the press and the public from his actions. He lies, then doubles down on his lies when caught. He attacks people and groups who correctly describe his statements and activities: from a teenager, to CNN, to individual journalists and Hollywood stars, to the BBC. He is a modern version of an American fascist, and he has fanatic followers whose chants at his rallies, pre and post-election, are eerily reminiscent of German brownshirts and whose “alt-right” neo-Nazi activities are clearly inspired by 1930s Germany: American Nazis Rising as Trump’s Armed Brownshirts to Target Jews.

Trump’s campaign included many “dog-whistles” to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. He has barely commented that they should “stop” when pressed on that point, and he has appointed one of the “alt-right”‘s chief spokesmen, enablers and promoters, Steve Bannon, to be one of his closest advisers in the White House. OUR White House. The house of the American people.

We must all work against the hatred and gaslighting that this administration will constantly inject into our government and politics. Check facts. Call out lies. Demand accountability from Trump and the GOP. Go to work at the grass-roots of democracy. Try to counter the tide. We cannot let this man take our country and the world down this road. We’ve been there before. It’s not a good place.

 

 

Weekly Vent and Daily Prompt: Folly

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via Daily Prompt: Folly

Every morning when I read a headline about another of Trump’s proposed appointments, folly is one word that comes to mind — that, plus “disaster”.

I could see a rational President-elect making a couple of seriously controversial appointments, plus some others that push the party platform and naturally draw disagreement from the opposite party. That is democracy. But this man is making appointments that are almost all seriously controversial and will generate much serious conflict, here and abroad, which is very foolish for the leadership of a nuclear superpower.

He does not have a mandate to upend eight years of public policy, let alone eighty. Contrary to the outright lies spread by him and his supporters in the most shameless way, he did not win the popular vote. He did not win by a “landslide.” A wiser man would feel his way toward the center of this country’s political beliefs, which is why a wiser President-elect would not make almost every single major appointment a lightning rod by picking someone who represents an extreme position. Ronald Reagan was very conservative, and he didn’t do that. He made some controversial appointments, not all controversial appointments.

The radicalism of Trump’s proposed appointments is unprecedented. It is making our allies and our antagonists around the globe very antsy, and antsy is not a good thing when we’re talking about countries with nuclear weapons. Some see advantage to themselves and will try to exploit it through aggression. Some see danger and will try to deflect it through aggressive, pre-emptive action. This is the kind of uncertainty and instability that can lead to war. War that is not confined to, say, the Middle East. War that is global. World war.

And in a nuclear age, global war is folly.

The Weekly Vent: Fact or Fiction?

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Before the election, I wrote about my sense that Donald Trump was portraying our country as the dark, dysfunctional Gotham City of Batman Returns, claiming “Only I Can Protect You…”. And I was optimistic that American voters would recognize that no, we don’t live in a failed Gotham City and we don’t need to elect Oswald Cobblepot, that sleazy, lying groper.

And then we — or some of us — did.

Not most of us, contrary to the claims of a “landslide.” In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by the largest margin in U.S. history for a candidate who did not win the election: 2.5 million votes. But here we are, stuck with Donald Cobblepot as our President-elect.

And President-elect Cobblepot is now on a “victory tour” of rallies like the ones he used to whip up angry crowds before the election, calling for deeds like deporting millions of people, building a wall between us and Mexico, and “locking up” the former First Lady and Secretary of State who was his political opponent. Scary stuff, and it scared me.

But hey, now some of his handlers are making the rounds, claiming that there are no such things as actual facts any more — all that matters is how many people believe whatever lies the President-elect and his advisers spread in their “post-truth world”. Including the leader of the white supremacist platform Breitbart “News”, the President-elect’s senior adviser Steve Bannon. Sure sounds like propaganda to me, in the mold of the Big Lie — and apparently the libertarian magazine Reason agrees. Trump’s former campaign manager says the press takes “too literally” what the President-elect says and has said. Shucks, he doesn’t really mean any of those things! And yet he continues to repeat them, now, after the election, at the rallies that he so enjoys, with an ugly, triumphal tone that is as far as one can get from being a gracious victor.

And isn’t it weird that he is holding these “victory tour” rallies? Is that customary for U.S. President-elects? Well, no, it’s not. In fact, it’s not customary or normal for most elected leaders of Western democracies. The last Western leader who held post-election rallies like this, full of fire-breathing threats against vanquished enemies, was Adolf Hitler. No, that’s not hyperbole. Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek did the research.

I am really horrified by the spectacle of a President-elect whipping up the faithful into an angry frenzy when he should be learning the job he has so little training to do. His lack of training, or knowledge, or understanding, or even intelligence, has been amply demonstrated by his amateur meddling in foreign affairs and his disorganized communications with foreign governments. So far, he has: seized opportunities to discuss his business priorities with them and ask for favors; included his adult children, who will run the family’s global empire, with foreign leaders like the Prime Minister of Japan; offended the governments of China and the U.K.; undermined the credibility of NATO; and, apparently, endorsed the murders of thousands of Filipinos under the out-of-control president of the Philippines, Duterte. Yes, the one who called President Obama “son of a whore” for having raised concerns about those illegal killings of civilians without any legal process. They had a nice chat on the phone. The chat included the topic of Trump’s major real estate investments and development plans in the Philippines. But, we are told, there are no conflicts of interest between the incoming administration and public policy. Richard Painter, former head of the White House ethics office of President George W. Bush, begs to differ, calling those conflicts of interest real, unethical, and dangerous.

So what next? I hope that the few rational beings who have been named to the incoming Cabinet will be able to keep Trump from conflagrating worldwide conflict. Retired General Mattis seems both sensible and clear on the deference our military owes to the Constitution and civilian control. And I am looking to President Obama for help, though he certainly doesn’t owe this country anything after eight long years of service and having saved the world from another Great Depression. I believe he will do what he can, while he can, to put as many safeguards in place as are available for public lands and waters, voting rights, etc. And I am praying that he will deploy his considerable skills as a constitutional lawyer, community organizer, Senator, President and communicator to help rally organized, lawful opposition to the Cobblepot who will soon move into OUR White House. Let’s not forget that it belongs to us — and he works for US, not the other way ’round.