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Doug Muder has been my favorite read for rational political analysis since 2016. He spoke to Pennswood Residents via Zoom on January 17th. Anyone concerned about credibility and truth in the media will find this video informative and thought-provoking.

Doug Muder on Citizen Journalism

Beyond any reasonable doubt, voter fraud is rare. In isolated local cases where it does occur, it doesn’t usually affect outcomes.

You probably already know that. Those who don’t wish or choose to believe it’s vanishingly rare don’t read this sort of post. I’m posting this article by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post because we need to see the facts to avoid the corrosive effect of persistent malicious disinformation that fosters doubts.

The GOP’s big lie strategy is intended to gaslight their base and rationalize a bundle of voter repression initiatives. They manufacture the controversy and use it to justify making it more difficult to vote if you are marginalized by poverty or ethnicity.

If you value facts and analytical thinking, read this:

A delusion is a belief that is contrary to objective reality. It’s different from the self-deceptions that most of us indulge in. A growing number of observers are taking a hard look at the extremism in our political parties. It’s not merely a difference of viewpoint, or interpretation of objective fact. We are witnessing solidarity among partisan politicians who choose to believe things that are manifestly not real. Election deniers and climate deniers are the foremost examples.

Robert Draper was an insider to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. In this talk, he explains how his view of the GOP and the seeming willingness of rational people to ignore evidence and assert false perceptions and beliefs. He speaks about Weapons of Mass Delusion, “The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge.”

When asked how this delusion can be overcome, he suggests it may only end when the supporters fail miserably at governing — which he characterizes as a dangerous experiment.

Dangerous indeed.

Storyteller Susan Klein tells a wonderful fairytale in which the prince must guess what all women most earnestly desire. It continues for some time, and she keeps you guessing to the very end. (Spoiler alert: to make my point here, I will need to reveal the secret — but not just yet.)

The guesses that male listeners make are usually far off the mark, and some are transparently egotistical when they venture into romantic fantasies. Men have “implicit bias” that blinds them, me included. They can’t see what’s missing that is so much to be desired from a woman’s point of view because they do not experience such a lack as men.

Yet when the reveal in the story comes, it’s a forehead slapper. Listeners say, “Of course!” and “Why couldn’t I see that?” The wonderful art of Susan’s telling of the story leaves a lasting impression, and possibly an awakening.

Lately I have been thinking that something similar is going on with Trumpists and the rest of us. What is it that Trump’s followers most earnestly desire? What can’t we get about them?

I’m not thinking about political opportunists, those who exploit that earnest desire. I’m thinking about the rank-and-file follower. The men and women who buy into conspiracy theories, whose outrage is always just under the surface, who are angry and see Trump as a tarnished knight, a tough guy who speaks their mind.

In Susan’s tale, what women most earnestly desire is “agency.” They want to make their own choices and not be owned or told. Women have long been identified as “the weaker sex” and subordinated to men. They fought for two generations to get the vote and continue to fight for equality and justice in civic, employment, and domestic life.

Could Trumpists be fearful of losing their agency? Do they believe they have already lost some precious agency to the “elite” liberal class, to overreaching government, to rising minorities, immigrants, coastal progressives, the deep state, and Antifa? That’s certainly what the manipulators are plugging. Is Trumpism about the loss of agency?

How do we assure Trumpists that their agency isn’t diminished if others gail agency. How did most men come to recognize that a woman’s newly won agency does not diminish their own? On the contrary, both men and women benefit.

Dana Milbank documents the decline of ethics and morality that characterizes the Republican party and now threatens democracy itself.

The essay echoes a theme in my observations of political leadership on the right. There is a long tradition of political scheming and distortion of the public’s perception of reality. Lee Atwater said “Perception is reality,” and he actively employed that principle to create negative political memes. Manifort, Stone, Gingrich, Rove, and many other GOP political operatives have risen to power and influence manipulating perception without concern for fairness or truth. They seek to win by any means.

“I spent 40 years as a litigator and trial lawyer. I have the utmost respect and admiration for the investigation and presentation by the Committee. It is telling a multi-layered, complicated story in an understandable, accessible manner. That is no mean feat. The Committee has achieved that result through discipline and hard work. Kudos to the Committee,” says Robert B. Hubbel in his blog remarks about the January 6th Committee.

“Once again, as it did last Thursday, the committee relied entirely on senior Republican officials and on members of Trump’s own inner circle to tell the story of how Trump tried to overthrow our government. This undercuts accusations that the committee is engaging in a ‘partisan witch hunt.’ Notably, the committee itself is measured, polite, and serious, demonstrating to viewers what hearings used to be before they became ways to produce sound bites for right-wing media,” says Heather Cox Richardson.

Everything about the presentation of the findings speaks of an intention to present their findings with clarity and with fact-based credibility. The assertions about Donald Trump and his enablers are direct and bold, and they are backed by live and recorded testimony by people with direct knowledge of the facts.

It’s telling that Fox is not doing live coverage and that Trump’s social media channel is blocking users who post about the hearings. What is being revealed can’t be dismissed as political theater, or a witch hunt when so much of the sworn testimony is by GOP operatives who are reporting what they saw and did.

“It is a story of the greatest political crime ever attempted by an American President.”

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D Md.) is a determined methodical fact-finder, a man of integrity, and a member of the January 6th Committee. He’s not a grandstander. He’s not charismatic. He is respected by his colleagues for sincerity and hard work. The quote is not hyperbole. I’m confident the committee will make the case that supports his statement.

Much of the for-profit media is framing the January 6th hearings as a political contest between Dems and the GOP. Regrettably, it may be in their self-interest to avoid framing for what it really is: a criminal indictment where the general public is the grand jury. Based upon the evidence presented, Americans and the world will decide whether Trump and his supporters are guilty of attempting a political coup.

The committee seeks to reveal a pattern of facts and circumstances that lead to the conclusion that Donald Trump and his followers attempted to seize power using a series of ploys culminating in an elaborate and violent ruse aimed at derailing the 2020 Presidential Election. As justification for what was to follow, they began with the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen. But that was propaganda to cover a very real and determined effort to steal the election by GOP operatives.

My Republican friends want to dismiss the proceedings without examining the evidence. They see it as political gamesmanship. They liken these hearings to the Benghazi hearings, which yielded much rhetoric but no crimes or causes for congressional action. This in itself is a tacit admission that their party’s motivation was political and not a sincere attempt to uncover wrongdoing or inform future legislation.

We can understand the commercial media’s reluctance to frame their reporting as Raskin does: the story of a crime by Trump and the GOP. They earn revenue in proportion to the audience they deliver to advertisers. Telling 40% of their audience that they are being led by an authoritarian crook, even though evidence is forthcoming, will drive away people whose attention they need.

So we get why they frame it as a political game, a contest, a sparring match. It’s in their economic best interest. But that does not serve America and journalistic integrity.

Democracy, government by consent of those governed, is hard-won and hard to sustain. We are witnessing an ongoing brash attempt to subvert Democracy by the leader of the GOP. Trump is an unabashedly authoritarian and vengeful leader, who rules his party by fear and whose excesses are tolerated because of his extremist followers — it is a classic cult of personality.

Other GOP efforts to subvert democracy include:

• Widespread partisan gerrymandering so that representation does not reflect the will of the majority of voters. (e.g.: Operation Red Map)
• Partisan judge appointments so that the courts favor the aims of the GOP.
• Vote suppression measures designed to make it inconvenient and difficult for urban (often Democratic) voters to vote (hours, locations, adequate numbers of voting stations, etc.)
• Disenfranchisement measures. Unnecessarily rigorous voter ID requirements, intimidating registration processes, etc. “Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like strict voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. These measures disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities,” according to the ACLU.
• Disinformation. Political “dirty tricks” aimed at biasing perception against the opposition candidate. Roger Stone has characterized himself as an expert in this. Lee Atwater is credited with the phrase, “perception is reality,” in creating negative memes for opposing candidates. Other Republican political operatives Paul Manifort, New Gingrich, and Carl Rove also practice the craft of manipulating public opinion for personal gain. Kellyanne Conway famously referred to “alternate facts” when defending false statements of the Trump Whitehouse. (The alternative to a fact is, by definition, a falsehood-not factual.)
  

Democrats can’t claim to be totally innocent of using any of these tactics, but the scale and gravity of their offenses in trivial by comparison. Usually, when we hear examples cited it is done in an attempt to distract attention from the pervasive reliance the GOP currently places on these corrupt measures.

Trump’s attempt to derail the legitimate transfer of power is only surprising in its boldness and violence. The failure of the GOP to support accountability and corrective measures reveals the extreme lack of honor and utter contempt for the rule of law that pervades the GOP’s lust for the power to govern as a minority party.

If you search back to 2015, seven years ago, you will find a post that notes the introduction of a new line of tabletop robotic arms, a development that I then anticipated heralded a new era of manufacturing. Previously the auto industry and the electronics industries were the only large-scale users of robotics. This week I saw this:

Robots

In 2021, there were 16,755 orders for industrial robots in the North American automotive sector and 22,953 orders for industrial robots from everywhere else, several thousand more than any other year on record. The $1.6 billion in orders was up 22 percent year over year. Demand is only rising: In the first quarter of 2022, orders for workplace robots were up 40 percent compared to the same quarter of 2021. The automobile business was responsible for 71 percent of robot orders in 2016, but the rest of the industrial economy has caught on to the appeal of robots, and now that share is down to 42 percent last year.

Bob Tita, The Wall Street Journal via NumLock

Assembly lines with people are vanishing. Factories that employed hundreds now employ a few engineers and technicians. Those skilled jobs require education and the ability to understand new technology. The people who do them are far more autonomous than yesterday’s factory workers. They are not trained on the job to operate a workstation, they are educated to program the machine to perform each new operation perfectly. In electronics, they program the computer that in turn programs the assembly line robots.

An electronics hobbyist today can design his new gadget using SPICE, an electronic drafting program that will simulate how it will perform in a virtual prototype. He or she can experimentally change or “tweak” component values until the design is optimized without ever buying a component or soldering. Once satisfied, the simulator will design a printed circuit board, finding the most efficient placement of parts and routing of connecting wires. That design, containing all the necessary manufacturing drawings and specifications, is a small computer file–one that can be emailed to vendors for quotes. In a matter of days, UPS will deliver an elegantly crafted, fully assembled device that will probably work without further tinkering. The only human that touched it was the hobbyist when he opened the package.

As if that weren’t remarkable enough, the moment has already arrived where humans are not capable of working with the tiny electronic components. The newest and smallest component parts do not lend themselves to hand assembly. Only a robotic system has the precision. Only a laboratory process can solder the connections. Soon enough the very expression “hand assembled” will seem dated.

Consider the printing press. Ben Franklin assembled individual characters taken from a type case, locked them into a frame, applied ink, and imprinted individual pages one at a time. Today, type cases are used to decorate walls and hold bric-a-brac. Print media are disappearing. You are reading this from an image on a screen. Ink and paper are not necessary or desirable for most communications like this humble essay. And there are computers now that can write better essays than this on any topic you choose, in any style you prefer, with or without footnotes.

Don’t look over your shoulder. Something out there wants your job.

Politicians, foreign agents, con artists, and grifters are using media as weapons. It behooves all of us to learn how to recognize and combat information crafted to confuse and deceive us. There has been a rapid proliferation of interest and learned attention to the threats posed to society and the remedies available. The first line of defense is to inform ourselves and our friends.

Here are some contemporary resources:

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

Commission on Information Disorder Final Report

The Commission makes 15 recommendations for how government, private industry, and civil society can address America’s urgent mis- and disinformation crisis.

Credible?

How do savvy street-wise people tell fake news from what’s authentic? This book, Credible?, asserts that anyone can tell what’s authentic simply by close inspection of the content and knowing the source. These pages are chock full of practical insights and tools to sharpen your ability to sniff out…

What Drives People to Self-deceive?

It seems to me that people deceive themselves when they need to do so to reduce the dissonance between two incompatible perceptions. It takes cognitive energy to hold incompatible beliefs.

Consider this discussion of “Replacement Theory” as the primary motivation that prompted people to participate in the January 6th insurrection.

The fear that white privilege may be replaced by minority privilege could cause otherwise rational people to fear the progressives’ embrace of racial justice, economic equity, gender equity, and “woke” thinking in general. Political opportunists have been fueling such fears.

We are discovering that our economic interdependence can be a powerful deterrent to rogue behavior by leaders like Putin. Listen to historian Yuval Harari (Sapiens) as he analyzes the Ukraine situation.

Solidarity in Europe is not, by any means the whole picture. Here is a more pragmatic, or perhaps cynical view from Ian Bremmer, who heads an international consulting organization that advises heads of industry on international politics.