America is at war with propaganda robots — and the bots are winning by breaking us down psychologically
US President some rich asshole orders the expulsion of 60 alleged Russian spies. (AFP/File / Nicholas Kamm)
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After the 2016 election, Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian specializing in totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe, wrote a heralded pamphlet titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder warned what a the rich asshole presidency could bring and suggested how to resist authoritarians. His latest book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe and America, describes how propaganda is being deployed by authoritarians in the U.S. and abroad with anti-democratic results. AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld talked with Snyder about how vast slices of society in the U.S. and Europe have been left feeling powerless, and as they turn to social media and the internet, they are easily targeted by provocateurs. This dystopian landspace is today’s political stage.
Steven Rosenfeld: In your book, you talk about how politics in the United States, in Europe and Russia are bouncing between these poles of what you call the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity. In both cases, the role of citizens is shrinking. What is this landscape you see unfolding now?
Timothy Snyder: Yes, underlying all of this is a concern for, well, at the very end of the book, I call it the politics of responsibility. It’s what you’re calling citizenship or civic engagement. Underlying all of this is a concern for how citizens should be seeing the world, and what we think we ought to be able to do, and what we think we’re responsible for; not everything, but some things.
By the politics of inevitability, what I mean are ideas of automatic progress where we don’t think they’re really alternatives [remaining] in history. We think capitalism is going to create democracy and there aren’t really any alternatives, and history’s basically over. A lot of us have been living with that spirit, unfortunately, in the last 25 years and we’ve educated a whole generation I’m afraid, largely in that spirit.
The problem with that, as you say, is that if you think you know the rules of history, if you think everything is at least in broad strokes foreordained, then you don’t really have to take responsibility for any particular part of what’s going on. More than that, you don’t have to remember what happened in the real past because those alternatives are dead. You think those things can’t possibly come back. Then when that goes wrong… All I’m trying to do with these ideas of inevitability and eternity, is I’m trying to give us some broader way of thinking, or some more stable place of standing when we think about where we are.
SR: That takes us to what you call the politics of eternity.
TS: What happens when inevitability goes wrong is that people then slip into something that I call the politics of eternity. Let’s say inevitability leads to economic inequality, which it does. Let’s say people stop seeing that there is a future, which they do. In many parts of the U.S. that’s already happened. It’s been happening since 2008; it’s been happening for a decade now. That means that people have been vulnerable to another idea, which says, ‘Well, all the good stuff was in the past and the reason why things aren’t good anymore is other people. It’s the immigrants. It’s blacks. It’s Muslims. It’s the outsiders.’
That style of thinking takes the future away entirely and just gets people trapped in these notions like ‘America First,’ or ‘Making America Great Again,’ where you just kind of go around in a cycle and it’s not all clear that the government’s promising you anything better. It’s just promising to remind you that things should be better for you, but maybe not for other people. Then you get caught in the drumbeat of the daily news cycle, and the daily propaganda, which reminds you that you deserve something and other people don’t deserve something.
SR: And that takes us to the present.
TS: In a broad way, I think what’s happening in the U.S., and not just in the U.S., is we’re kind of shifting from one thing to the other thing; of expecting a future where things were automatically going to get better according to certain rules, to then shifting to a situation where we’re all kind of spinning around. Whether we’re on the right or the left now, we don’t really expect the government to be doing anything. We just expect it to give us our daily injection of feeling righteous, or feeling outraged.
SR: Right, and what you have done in not just this book, but in a lot of your writing, is talk about how we’ve seen versions of this before. It’s not as if history repeats itself exactly, but there are dynamics that recur. If I correctly read the book, we’re sort of at that tipping point now. Maybe we have been for a while. How would you put it?
TS: You put it really well. History doesn’t repeat, of course, but history does offer you a reservoir of things that were possible. It gives you a sense of patterns, of what things tend to go together and what things don’t go together. It also offers a source of examples for people who want things to go in a certain way, which I consider undesirable. There’s been a certain renaissance of thinkers from the 1920s, 1930s, and ’40s in America, also in Europe, and maybe especially in Russia, and this is part of the politics of eternity that you go back to the ‘30s and you say, ‘Well, the ‘30s weren’t so bad after all. Let’s revive this fascist, or that fascist. Let’s imagine we can go back to there and that things will turn out well.’
What I think is that we’ve reached the turning point where basically none of us, I hope, are convinced anymore by these automatic ideas of progress. But many of us are already convinced that we’re stuck in some kind of a loop and there’s no way out of the loop. That has something to do with the past. Fascist ideas and other far right ideas are being revived. White supremacy is more important unfortunately in America than it was until very recently. But, there’s also something new about it, which are the techniques, the internet techniques, the various psychological techniques of persuading us that there’s nothing that we can really do besides leaving the couch.
The other thing that is new is the kind of lack of a final goal. In the 20th century, there were big ideas about where you might take the nation, or where you might take the class. Those don’t exist anymore. What’s going on now is more of an attempt to just kind of beat out of you head any notion that things might get better, and to get you on a different track where instead of thinking that other things might be better for all of us, we just get used to imagining every day, every minute, every second, that there’s somebody on the other side who’s trying to make things worse.
SR: This is really interesting. I’ve recently interviewed people running for office. There’s a new line, which is, ‘I can’t fix this, but together we can, so elect me and we will all do our part.’ That’s kind of appealing in a certain way, but it acknowledges that downward spiral. I’ve also talked to publishers who say, ‘I don’t even know what’s real anymore.’ They look at tips and wonder who got this information in the first place. Both feel like there’s no solid ground.
TS: But there is though. One of the methods that I follow in Road to Unfreedom, in the new book, is that I paid a huge amount of attention to investigative journalists. I write about things which are very confused at the time, and are still pretty confusing like the Maidan [protests] in Ukraine, or like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, things which were just propaganda drenched, things which were kind of testing grounds for the new unreality in the new forms of cyber war that we now deal with all the time. It turns out that if you just pay attention to the actual investigative reporters who actually wear out the soles of their shoes and go places and talk to people, you can kind of figure out what’s going on if you pay attention to them.
It’s a tiny percentage of the bandwidth of what’s out there in the so-called media. It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, but for a lot of these events it’s really enough. These are important examples to me. Like what happened in Russia in 2012 with their election, what happened to the Ukraine in ‘13 and ’14. These are all really important to me. They take something that concerns all of us, economic inequality, we know about economic inequality because of the reporters. Those who broke the story of Panama papers [international money laundering by financial and political elites], who broke the story of the Paradise papers [more overseas financial shelters]. We have the numbers and we have the examples from people who are actually doing this work.
SR: As you’ve said before, in an era deluged with fake news, real reporting matters.
TS: We can start from them, and the more investigation we have, the better we feel. In terms of our own habits, we do make choices about how we consume the internet. But what I did in Road to Unfreedom was I paid a lot of attention to human investigators, and then I treated the Internet very critically. I treated the internet as kind of a subject rather than a source. I tried to figure out the patterns of how it’s used to influence people. There are things that we can do, but I agree with your basic concern. Without factuality, we’re not going anywhere. Without factuality, we can’t speak to each other, let alone begin to solve problems.
SR: I’ve been to forums at Stanford with top people at Google, Facebook and other platforms. Google says, ‘You are saying the problem is there’s too much information and people are making too many decisions? Isn’t that an outbreak of democracy and independent thinking?’ They say they’re giving journalism tools so their reports can be seen as more authoritative. Facebook does this too. That helps their brands because it elevates their content. Meanwhile, the way these sites are designed to trigger reactions, for advertisers, including politicians, hasn’t changed. People are going to social media for news more than ever and it’s impulsive. It’s almost as if human nature wants to react before it thinks. And that’s the propaganda model that’s been used. Am I saying it correctly?
TS: I think you’re seeing it completely correctly. Look, fundamentally what we have to see with the internet is that it’s a kind of space just like the real world is a space. We’ve known the real world is a space for millions of years. We’ve been kind of thinking about how you reconcile the real world space with democracy, or rule by the people, or law for at least 5,000 years. Maybe we’ve gotten a little bit better at it, but it’s always hard. The internet survives because the internet is treated as a place of exception. It’s this magical place where the normal rules don’t apply, and you don’t have to pay taxes, and yada, yada. Anything’s possible.
But that’s all nonsense. It’s just another space. Like the space that we live in when we’re not on the Internet, it has to have some rules. Those rules can’t just be like the things which are at the top of the mind of the people who happen to be the CEOs of these companies. We all have to think about this seriously, and think about what the rules are going to be, and think about how we’re contributing to those rules. Secondly, I agree with you about the psychology. One of the things which has gone wrong is that we’re not defeating the robots. The robots are defeating us.
SR: That’s a critical point.
TS: The robots have figured it out. The way that all of this stuff works from Facebook, from Cambridge Analytica, to the Russian interventions, is that rather than us using computers to think, computers are using our nervous systems to move us around. The computers are getting around our frontal lobes where we make decisions, and down to the simpler more business like parts of our brains where we feel, where we have impulses, where we decide who’s us and who’s them. That’s what’s happened, this combination of psychology and machine learning. That’s what’s pushing us around.
When people in Silicon Valley use the kind of language of rationality and choice, and say, “Oh, we’re just giving you more choices,’ they know that’s not what they’re doing. They’re actually teaching us how not to choose… A choice is something that you consider. You use a certain part of your mind for that. It’s not the same thing as, ‘I like this. I like this. I like this. There’s the enemy, I don’t like him.’ That’s something that’s a different part of our minds. There has to be a more humanistic conversation about this. For my part, I’ve been trying to have it with some of them.
SR: Right, right. The reason I asked about this is because you go into great detail about how the internet fueled misinformation and disinformation in Ukraine, Russia and in 2016’s campaign. In many respects, people who throw the first punches in politics always gain an advantage. Then those left reeling end up copying the tactics just used against them. I’m not sure the technology sector really understands what they have unleashed. What bigger patterns do you see?
TS: Yeah. Well, one of the patterns I see is the relationship between wealth inequality and communication. The further you let wealth inequality go, the harder it is to communicate because the people who have all the money just don’t live the same kinds of lives the people who don’t. That’s actually one element that the Silicon Valley and rest of us communication problem. It’s kind of hard to get through to them because they’re not really living the same kinds of lives as everyone else is. They may have this kind of notion that everyone can make it [financially] the way they did, but that’s just not going to happen.
Another thing which I observe is that [device-driven] psychology hasn’t made us happy, but psychology has found ways to break us down; break us down in terms of analytically, but also break us down psychically, like actually make us feel worse. Those are unfortunately the things that are easiest to deploy. It’s much easier on the Internet to make someone stupider and less happy than it is to make them wiser. The internet has good purposes if people use it very wisely, but in terms of what’s simplest, it’s much easier to break somebody down than it is to build them up. That’s a major thing.
Then in terms of the machine learning, as seen by what’s on Twitter [faked profiles, robot driven shares] I think that more and more the internet is a realm where humans are in the minority and they’re getting overwhelmed. There was this old idea in science fiction about … not just in science fiction, the Turing Test in computer science. When are computers going to actually be artificially intelligent? The test was, ‘will they be able to persuade us that they’re human?’ What’s actually happened is it’s not that the computers are competing with us to be more human, it’s that the computers are making us less human. That’s how they’re winning. They’re breaking us down into little pieces so that we’re less human and more tribal, and more angry and more emotional. That’s the way this competition is actually shaking down.
There’s simple things to do like just spend less time on the internet and more time in the real world. There are things we can do as individuals to shake free of that. But yeah, basically it allows nasty forms of politics, which people did not anticipate. And to just deny or spin your wheels as Facebook has spent the last couple of years doing, and others the last couple of years doing, is really, really harmful. One has to think expansively and creatively about the negative possibilities and see what’s happened, what has really happened. What happened is that some rich asshole is the payload of a Russian, and not only a Russian, but mainly a Russian cyber weapon [propaganda strategy]. That’s what happened. One has to see that as part of a larger palette of possibilities of things that can happen and think seriously about it.
SR: Do you see any evidence that people are thinking seriously about it, or are they just trying to copy the rich asshole digital director Brad Parscale because he figured out how to use Facebook’s advertising platform on a scale that others hadn’t gotten to first?
TS: There are certainly people who are thinking seriously about it. There are people who are running media literacy projects. There are people like Tristan Harris who are trying to be cyber ethicists. There are people like Peter Pomerantsev who are trying to explain how this works in Russia, and therefore what the signs are that you need to look out for. That’s a minority. There aren’t that many people, but yeah there are people who are thinking seriously about it. What one has to worry about is the possibility that we all just get in the same game and we’ll all think, ‘Okay well, life is just a matter of fooling the other person better.’ If they use cyber weapons on us, we use cyber weapons on them. We’ll all just make each other stupid in the methods that we prefer.
We’re never going to have a democracy that way. We’re never going to have the rule of law that way. We’re not going to have happy populations that way. When people end up voting because they’re motivated by messages that are false, that means that they’re basically unhappy because A) their vote cannot lead to a productive result because they’re voting in unreality; and B) they then have to come up with human reasons to explain why they did this thing, even if the reason why they did it, the cause wasn’t human. Then they use their human intelligence to rationalize what they did before. That also makes them unhappy, and it makes other people unhappy as well.
This weird uncanny feeling that one has in America now is partly the effect of a lot of humans using their human intelligence to try to rationalize things that they got manipulated into doing. It’s an unhealthy emotional smell almost in the atmosphere, which is the result of all this.
SR: Do you see this changing, or do you just see small pockets of resistance by a minority of people who, like 20 years ago, would say, ‘I’ll turn off my television.’ I see so many ways the role of being a citizen is shrinking. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. Cyber tools of negative campaigning. It just goes on and on.
TS: I’m glad to talk to somebody who sounds more negative than me because I don’t usually get to be in that position. Look, the three-dimensional world is still out there. As you know very well, you can still have campaigns in the three-dimensional world that make a difference. Precisely because the internet, in many ways, is dark, that means that doing little things like marching make us feel better than they would have otherwise. It is possible to run campaigns with humans. Especially when I talk to young people, one of the things that I feel like we have to work through is the hesitation that we have with talking to or engaging other individual human beings in the real world. That’s become a kind of political problem. We think everything has to start with cyber. But not everything has to start with cyber. Things can start in the real world as well.
There are plenty of examples of that. I don’t think it’s irreversible. I think the cyber thing has to be conceptualized and it has to be contained. But then in addition to that, there has to be activity out in the three-dimensional world, out in the real world where human beings are talking to other human beings. I agree with you, we can’t have citizenship without that. That’s one of the things that the Greeks had right. They thought that democracy was public. Democracy is public. If we all end up sitting in our basements liking and unliking [things online], we’re definitely not going to have democracy.
SR: I’m not trying to be unduly negative for its own sake. I’m trying to push back a little bit because you can actually talk about this with a level of clarity that I appreciate.
TS: There’s one more thing that I’m hopeful about, too—if I can just?
SR: Sure.
TS: That is people who are young are internet literate. We may be at the cusp of a generational change where there are people who take all these wonders for granted and they’re no longer quite so stunned by them, or drawn in by them, and are maybe looking for something fresh. What I’m hoping for, and in a way counting on from the generation to come, is the ennobling of activity in the real world, and making facts sexy, making the real world be the attractive countercultural thing that people find interesting again, making knowing things cool. I think there are some stirrings, not just here, but also a little bit in Russia that this is going on. That’s another reason I have to be a little bit hopeful.
the rich asshole spends a second day incorrectly linking ‘caravans’ to DACA
An effort making its way through Mexico has nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands of young people still living in limbo.
A caravan of Central Americans making an annual pilgrimage to the U.S. border has found itself at the heart of two days worth of tweets from President the rich asshole, who linked the effort to protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
“Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large “Caravans” of people enter their country. They must stop them at their Northern Border, which they can do because their border laws work, not allow them to pass through into our country, which has no effective border laws,” the rich asshole wrote on Twitter early Monday morning, calling upon Congress to pass legislation securing the border.
The president went on to say that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was “dead” and pushed for his long-floated wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The tweets marked a continuation from the weekend — on Sunday, the rich asshole wished followers a happy Easter before launching into a series of tweets bemoaning the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and criticizing Mexico’s immigration policies.
“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release,” the rich asshole went on. “Getting more dangerous. “Caravans” coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
“These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!” the president declared.
That’s a bold assertion — one that is likely completely untrue.
the rich asshole’s reoccurring mentions of “caravans” seems to be a nod to efforts by “Pueblo Sin Fronteras,” or People Without Borders. For the past five years, the organization has led a procession of people across borders and up through Mexico towards the United States. Participants say they hope to ultimately gain asylum or cross without papers into the country.
This year marks the largest effort to date, with upwards of 1,000 marchers, the majority of whom are from Honduras. A BuzzFeed reporter is embedded with the group, providing the movement with some media coverage, and Fox News, the president’s preferred news source, has also documented the effort.
Mexico has actually spent hundreds of millions of dollars strengthening its border with Guatemala, but the country has yet to detain anyone from the caravan, perhaps due to its size. The country deported upwards of 76,000 Central Americans last year.
Members of the caravan told BuzzFeed they are fleeing crime and political violence in their home countries. Many expressed their hope that the sheer size of the group would deter anyone — criminal, official, or otherwise — from stopping them.
“Going alone is risky. You’re risking an accident, getting jumped by robbers, and even your life,” said 29-year-old Mateo Juan. “All of that, and then you don’t get to the United States. The caravan is slower but you know you’re going to get there safely.”
The caravan is unconnected to DACA, an Obama-era policy that applied only to a certain group of undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children and underwent a grueling application process in exchange for temporary relief from deportation. the rich asshole ended DACA last September, giving Congress a deadline of March 5 to find a solution protecting the hundreds of thousands of people covered by the program. That day has flown by and DACA’s fate is still tied up in court, with little indicator as to what will happen to its recipients.
Those traveling with the caravan are not eligible for DACA — instead, many likely plan to turn themselves into U.S. custody at the border, asking for asylum. Such cases are rarely successful, but they often take time to migrate through the legal system, sometimes taking years.
“I asked some of the migrants on the caravan what they thought about the rich asshole saying they were going to the US for DACA. Some laughed and others said they thought (correctly) they wouldn’t qualify,” wrote Adolfo Flores, the BuzzFeed reporter traveling with the caravan, on Twitter. “For whatever reason the rich asshole is conflating two different issues, DACA and reasons these people are on the caravan. I’ve spoken with dozens of people who cite violence, instability, and poverty as reasons for leaving. Not one has mentioned DACA.”
While the tweets are amusing for members of the caravan, they aren’t doing much for U.S.-Mexico relations, already suffering over the rich asshole’s support for a border wall and stalled NAFTA renegotiations. Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray Caso, fired back at the rich asshole on Sunday following the president’s initial tweets.
“Every day Mexico and the US work together on migration throughout the region. Facts clearly reflect this. An inaccurate news report should not serve to question this strong cooperation. Upholding human dignity and rights is not at odds with the rule of law,” he wrote. “Happy Easter.”
POLITICS
the rich asshole Defends Conservative Media Company After It Orders Anchors To Bash ‘Biased’ News
Dozens of local news anchors across the country read the same strongly worded script, thanks to Sinclair Broadcasting.
President some rich asshole on Monday defended Sinclair Broadcasting Group amid reports that the conservative telecommunications company ordered local news anchors to recite a script condemning other media outlets.
“Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” the rich asshole tweeted.
Sinclair, which owns or operates more than 170 TV stations across the U.S., has come under fire in recent weeks for directing dozens of anchors to read from the same strongly worded script during on-air broadcasts.
“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script read. “Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias. ... This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
Deadspin created a supercut of anchors reading the script. ThinkProgress shared a similar clip that showed newscasters reciting the identical lines:
Scott Livingston, the company’s senior vice president of news, told The Baltimore Sun that the script was a way for Sinclair to reiterate its “commitment to reporting facts.”
“We are focused on fact-based reporting,” Livingston told the Sun. “That’s our commitment to our communities. That’s the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth.”
Sinclair, the country’s largest broadcaster, has been accused of pushing for pro-the rich asshole content to run on its stations. It’s not uncommon for the company to send its stations “must-run” video segments that feature positive commentary about the rich asshole, The New York Times reports.
The broadcasting group is currently in the process of purchasing Tribune Media, which would allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households.
the rich asshole has invited Putin to the White House — despite furor over poisoning of ex-Russian spy
some rich asshole and Vladimir Putin (MSNBC)
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President some rich asshole has formally invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to a meeting at the White House, despite the continued furor over Russia’s alleged poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom.
Agence France-Presse is reporting that the rich asshole has proposed a White House meeting with Putin, despite the fact that the American government recently expelled dozens of Russian diplomats over that country’s alleged role in releasing a deadly nerve agent on the soil of America’s closest ally.
#BREAKING President Trump has proposed White House summit to Putin: Kremlin
Even though the American government has responded swiftly in its response to Russia’s nerve agent attack, the rich asshole himself has been notably silent on Russia’s actions. During a recent telephone call with Putin last month, the rich asshole ignored aides’ pleas to not congratulate the Russian president on his recent reelection, and he also neglected to mention Skripal’s poisoning.
In response to criticism over the call, the rich asshole lashed out at the media and insisted that he still wanted to pursue stronger ties with the Russian government.
“I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also),” the president wrote on Twitter. “The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
In 90 seconds, White House spokesman takes every possible position on immigration reform
Hogan Gidley twisted himself into a pretzel on Fox News.
After some rich asshole spent the weekend abandoning his pretense that he wants to make a deal to restore protections to the hundreds of thousands of immigrant kids whose Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections he unilaterally stripped, his spokesman Hogan Gidley went on Fox News on Monday to blame his decision on congressional Democrats and Barack Obama.
Asked about the rich asshole’s announcement that there would be “no DACA deal,” the White House deputy press secretary unleashed a series of contradictory, false, and misleading claims to try to show that the rich asshole deserves no blame for his own actions and that they actually show that he does want t a long-term solution including a DACA deal.
Watch:
First, Gidley said that the “out of hand” immigration situation is “one of the reasons that the president wanted a lasting, long term solution, when he so graciously offered 1.8 million people a potential pathway to citizenship — three times that of Barack Obama.” After initially promising to sign any immigration deal congress sent to him, the rich asshole repeatedly rejected proposed deals and vowed to veto bipartisan legislation to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Next, Gidley urged viewers to “remember how we got here,” claiming, “Democrats had control of the House of Representatives. They had a filibuster-proof Senate. And they had a Democrat in the White House, in Barack Obama. And he pledged a hundred days to fix the immigration problem. None of it got fixed.”
While it is true that for part of the period between 2009 and 2010 Democrats controlled the House and White House with a 60 vote majority in the Senate, that period was quite brief and did not coincide with the first 100 days. With a Minnesota Senate seat left vacant until July 7, 2009 while former Senator Norm Coleman (R) challenged his narrow loss to then-Senator-Elect Al Franken (D), the Democrats’ super-majority did not begin until then. It ended after Republican Scott Brown, at the time from Massachusetts, won a January 2010 special election. In between, with Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Robert Byrd (D-WV) battling medical issues and often absent, and then with Kennedy’s death, the filibuster-proof majority lasted just a few months.
Moreover, Obama did not pledge to fix immigration in the first 100 days of his administration — in fact, he said just the opposite. In a May 2008 interview, Obama told Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos: “I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days. But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I’m promoting.” With the economic meltdown that followed, his focus that first year was mostly on implementing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a major stimulus bill, and the Affordable Care Act.
Next, Gidley, incredibly claimed that “Democrats are playing politics with people’s lives,” because “DACA wasn’t even in this last omnibus bill.” While this is true, the reason was that the Republican House, Senate, and White House leadership would not agree to Democratic lawmakers pleas to include it.
Finally, Gidley praised the rich asshole for standing up to the Congressional Democrats who had tried to get DACA protections passed, noting that during the brief government shutdown, they had “decided to stand with hundreds of thousands of people who are here unlawfully and illegally, as opposed to the American citizens.”
In a two minute span, Gidley epitomized the the rich asshole immigration policy: ignoring facts, demonizing political opponents and undocumented immigrants, pretending to support protections for undocumented kids, and ultimately demonstrating the exact opposite.
‘Sinclair is far superior’: the rich asshole praises right-wing broadcaster amid ‘state media’ criticism
President some rich asshole (AFP Photo/Thomas COEX)
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President some rich asshole on Monday praised the Sinclair Broadcast Group amid criticism that it forces its news anchors across the country to read pro-the rich asshole propaganda on their shows.
“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased,” the rich asshole wrote. “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”
Criticism of Sinclair has come after Deadspin created a viral video compilation of Sinclair anchors reading the exact same statements attacking the mainstream press for being “extremely dangerous to our democracy” because they published stories that were critical of the rich asshole and his administration.
Sinclair, which owns local news stations across the country that are trusted primarily for their coverage of local issues, has been pushing its employees to inject right-wing political messages into their broadcasts that include attacks on the mainstream press.
Watch Deadspin’s compilation of Sinclair anchors below.
WATCH: CNN panel flays Roseanne for tweeting wild conspiracy theories about the rich asshole and sex trafficking
Roseanne Barr on Wendy Williams show/Screenshot
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During a Monday political discussion on CNN, the panel couldn’t help but wonder when ABC will step in to curb Roseanne Barr’s conspiracy theory tweets.
Last week, Barr tweeted out a conspiracy theory that was a twist on PizzaGate, but had all of the same pieces like child sex trafficking and Hillary Clinton.
“There is a conspiracy theory that she bought into once again — the age-old child sex trafficking, child sex ring,” host Alisyn Camerota noted. “Didn’t we learn during Comet Pizza or whatever it was, PizzaGate. A guy had to go to jail over this because he showed up with his gun. But Roseanne Barr, what does it mean that she is either retweeting this or falling for it?”
Media analyst Brian Stelter noted tens of millions of viewers will watch her again this week, “yet, she is vulnerable to the conspiracy we see from so many people. It’s a huge headache for ABC. I think it’s going to be a bigger headache, executives at ABC know that. That said, this isn’t just about Roseanne. It’s about why so many people want to believe deranged conspiracy theories.”
He explained that the format follows something about child sex trafficking, Hillary Clinton being evil and President some rich asshole swooping in to save everyone. Barr noted in another tweet that she simply enjoys the drama of the conspiracy theories she’s tweeting. “It’s like a video game,” Stelter said.
Watch the conversation below:
CNN panel mocks the rich asshole for getting DACA wrong because he watches Fox News
some rich asshole speaks to Sean Hannity during a Fox News town hall on Aug. 17, 2016. (YouTube)
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The Monday morning political panel on CNN’s “New Day” couldn’t help but highlight the misinformation President some rich asshole appears to have used to justify an embarrassing tweet about immigration.
With a chart on the screen of those who spent the weekend with the rich asshole at Mar-a-Lago, Daily Beast editor John Avlon described the visitors as, “three Fox News hosts, two ex-cons and a pillow salesman.”
Legal analyst Jeff Toobin explained that this is how the rich asshole decided to flip-flop on his action around Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
“All the Fox News people who care about cracking down on immigration, that’s what we see, including statements like people are coming across the border to take advantage of DACA,” Toobin said. “Which is factually inaccurate. DACA only applies to people who have grown up here. You can’t come across the border and take advantage of DACA. That’s the people who he is getting his facts from.”
Host Alisyn Camerota read a Washington Post report that cited 23 sources that are either former White House staffers or those close to the rich asshole.
“This is now a president a little bit alone, isolated, without any moderating influences and if anything a president who is being encouraged and goaded on by people around him. It really is a president unhinged,” she said.
Avlon warned of a shocking level of absurdity Washington is contending with.
“Here’s the core reality where we are,” he began. “The president of the United States is taking action based on things he sees on TV rather than intelligence reports. That is objectively troubling.”
Commentator Brian Karem, of Sentinel Newspapers, feared that the rich asshole is making decisions not only on the last person he speaks to but “what he ate last night [and] what he saw on TV.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he continued. “Unhinged is what we have seen covering this White House from the very beginning. What you are now seeing is people protecting him, being the gatekeeper.”
Watch the full discussion below:
POLITICS
White House Walks Back Claim That David Shulkin Resigned
Shulkin says the rich asshole fired him as secretary of veterans affairs. The White House, until Monday, claimed he quit.
The White House on Monday changed its story about David Shulkin’s departure from the Department of Veterans Affairs, acknowledging he didn’t voluntarily quit.
Shulkin was asked to resign as secretary of veterans affairs, but President some rich asshole ultimately decided to remove him, Mercedes Schlapp, White House director of strategic communications, suggested on “Fox & Friends.”
White House chief of staff John Kelly “called Shulkin and gave him the opportunity to resign,” Schlapp said. “Obviously, the key here is that the president has made a decision. He wanted a change in the Department of Veterans Affairs. He wanted more results coming out of that particular department. ... That is why he moved to make this change.”
Schlapp’s comments contradict a White House statement on Saturday that said Shulkin resigned. Shulkin on Sunday insisted on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that he was fired.
“I came to fight for our veterans, and I had no intention of giving up,” Shulkin said. “There would be no reason for me to resign.”
Shulkin said Kelly told him he’d been terminated “shortly before” the rich asshole tweeted about it on Wednesday, adding that he neither offered his resignation nor submitted a letter of resignation. He said his dismissal was “somewhat of a surprise,” since “President the rich asshole and I actually spoke the day that he sent the tweet out, just a few hours before.”
The White House on Sunday doubled down on its claim that Shulkin resigned.
“Our statement still stands,” Ninio Fetalvo, assistant White House press secretary, told HuffPost in an email, when asked for comment about Shulkin’s insistence that he was fired.
Shulkin, on CNN’s “New Day” Monday, reiterated that the rich asshole fired him.
Alisyn Camerota: "So, the tweet (from President Donald Trump) fired you?"
Former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. David Shulkin: "Yes." cnn.it/2Guca2b
Moments later, Schlapp walked back White House weekend statements about Shulkin’s departure on “Fox & Friends.”
The rich asshole administration’s apparent reluctance to confirm Shulkin’s firing could have legal implications, reported CNN. the rich asshole’s pick for interim leader of veterans affairs, Defense Department official Robert Wilkie, could be challenged under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998.
This law allows the president to temporarily fill an executive branch vacancy created by a person who “dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office.” The language surrounding terminations is less clear, which could jeopardize Wilkie’s authority.
This article has been updated to include information about the legal implication of Shulkin’s ouster.
the rich asshole’s Easter wish: An end to protections for undocumented youth
After managing just one tweet of holiday kindness, the president went back to the xenophobic well.
For almost 90 minutes Sunday morning, immigrants and those undocumented U.S. residents who were brought to the country as children could reasonably have thought that some rich asshole had wished them a “HAPPY EASTER!”
But a couple hours after firing off that all-caps blip of holiday cheer on Twitter, the president was back to the decidedly un-Christian, nativist fearmongering that defines his public brand.
“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming,” the rich asshole tweeted at 9:56 am, an hour and 29 minutes after the Easter tweet.
In the same tweet, he seemed to commit himself against any compromise that would extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that provides alternatives to deportation for undocumented people who entered the country as minors. “Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!” he wrote.
Technically that’s a newsy reversal, as the rich asshole has previously insisted that the only reason DACA hasn’t already been renewed is that Democrats wouldn’t act on his supposed desire to fix and extend the program. But such claims were always dubious, given the rich asshole’s core nativism on immigration policy and his chronic difficult keeping his word when it comes to dealmaking.
The president’s once-avowed desire to do business on DACA has been enough to buy off both Democratic senate resisters like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and harumphing Republicans like Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). The Easter tweet about caravans and nuclear politics only confirms what a bad bet such senators have made in giving the rich asshole a vote he needed in exchange for a promise of talks on DACA.
the rich asshole continued in the same lane throughout the morning, tweeting another demand for a border wall and renewed threats to rip up trade pacts with Mexico and Canada. “They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA,” he said in another tweet.
In a fourth that followed quickly, he showed again that he’ll never actually support DACA or anything like it. Those “caravans” from Mexico? They “are all trying to take advantage of DACA,” the rich asshole wrote, as families around the country marked a holiday celebrating a man murdered after preaching a messianic socialism focused on aiding the vulnerable. “They want in on the act!”
Laura Ingraham is taking an ‘Easter break,’ but advertisers keep taking a permanent break from her
Bayer AG is the source of her latest headache
Laura Ingraham announced on Friday that she was taking last-minute “Easter break” from her show. But The Laura Ingraham Angle is on the ropes: the show is hemorrhaging advertisers after she bullied teenaged Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.
Advertisers didn’t like being associated with a TV host who harangued a kid for not getting into college, and dozens have announced they would cut ties with her show. Bayer AG is the latest company to announce it would pull its ads from the Fox News program, confirming via Twitter late Saturday that they have no plans to return, either.
Beth, are you SURE about Bayer? I haven't seen that yet. If it's true, I'll be happy to update my post. Thanks!
Yes, @JonCoopertweets, that’s right. @BayerUS has stopped advertising on Laura Ingraham and we have no plans to resume any time in the future.
Companies announcing that they have dropped advertisements from her show include Nutrish, TripAdviser, Wayfair, Expedia, Nestlé, Stich Fix, Hulu, Jos. A. Bank, Jenny Craig, Office Depot, Honda, Miracle-Ear, Liberty Mutual, Principal Financial Group, Ruby Tuesday, Atlantis Resort, Entertainment Studios, and Johnson & Johnson.
This should be a familiar routine for Fox News by now: Bill O’Reilly also announced he was taking a “scheduled” vacation right around the time he lost advertisers in droves. In that case, he and Fox News were under fire for having paid millions of dollars to women who say O’Reilly had sexually harassed them. O’Reilly never came back on air from that vacation: Fox News had fired him before his scheduled vacation was even over.
Fox News told the Washington Post that Ingraham’s vacation was pre-planned.
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