Steven Lee Myers, Misinformation Reporter - The New York Times
Stephan:
It is becoming harder and harder for me to do SR because of the proliferation of misinformation sites put up by TCPs and Russians. I have actually visited some of the sites listed in this article, and I have to double and triple-check everything to make sure what I am publishing in SR is fact-based. Because most people don’t make such an effort I think the weaponization of lies (see the SR archive and search on “weaponization of lies”) is going to seriously distort our election. I doubt our corrupt Congress and Supreme Court will do anything to counteract what is happening. The simple answer is vote only for Democrats if you want to preserve our democracy. After the election, we are going to have to create a citizens’ movement demanding what is posted as news must be objectively verifiable as a fact. We have to make honesty, and the fostering of wellbeing our national priority. The alternative is you will live in a country like Russia or Hungary.
The Miami Chronicle’s website, which mimics an actual news site to push Russia propaganda, first appeared on Feb. 26.
Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.
I realized tonight as I was doing the research and writing for SR something that I had not fully comprehended: The Great Schism Trend is reaching its crescendo, and we are in the midst of a civil war. One-third of Americans mostly low-income, low education resentful angry Whites, with some Blacks and Latinos financed by White oligarchs want a christofascist authoritarian nation ruled by what they think of as “Christians”, and controlled by the ultra-wealthy Whites who funding the TCP. The low income, low education Whites have armed and are being trained for violence in militias, Proudboys, etc.. They think they will win what they plan to be America’s last democratic election. They want the United States to become something like Hungary. That’s why the Christian Nationalists were meeting with Viktor Orban. The other two-thirds of Americans are mostly asleep to what is really going on. They think this is just another election. It is not. If the TCPs lose and the Democrats win, and I will certainly do everything I can to make that happen, I fear we are going to see civil violence increase, and that it will become a large issue in Biden’s last term.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks at CPAC in Dallas, Aug. 4, 2022. Credit: LM Otero / AP
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was in Washington DC on Thursday. But the controversial autocrat wasn’t making an official state visit. Indeed, President Joe Biden had intentionally declinedto extend a White House invitation to a man who has pursued a vision of “illiberal democracy” and cracked down on press freedom since taking power in 2010. Instead, Orbán was in town to participate in a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation, a Christian conservative think-tank.
The authoritarian leader was introduced by failed GOP presidential candidate and aspiring authoritarian Vivek Ramaswamy, who has become a regular at the Hungarian embassy in DC over the past year. Orbán posted a slick video of his Washington visit on social media, including a clip of Heritage president Kevin Roberts gushing that Orbán has “a lot of fans here in the United States. You have a lot of people who are intrigued by policies you enacted.”
According to information distributed by the prime minister’s press office […]
I think Biden keeps funding fascist Netanayou and his cabal of fascists who are obviously attempting a genocide of Palestinians or, at least, reducing Gaza to rubble and claiming control of the territory, because they fear if they stop backing Israel the Iranians and other Middle Eastern terrorists will attack Israel and disrupt the entire region and take it into war. I think that is a mistake because nothing justifies the genocide that is occurring in Gaza, with over 30,000 mostly innocent women and children and the complete destruction of the buildings that once made up the homes, shops, hospitals, and offices of Palestinian society. In addition, I think the Biden team has miscalculated the political impact on Israel, which is becoming a loathed country. It is also having a very negative effect on Democratic voters in the U.S., particularly young people. I think Biden’s team has assessed that Trump will be so awful, with multiple court convictions, that the election will become basically democracy vs authoritarianism and that will overwhelm this growing antipathy. It is a very cynical and calculated political call, and while it may work, I have lost great respect for Biden.
Biden announced his pier plan after the United Nations raised the alarm about an “imminent” famine in the Gaza region Credit: Said Khatib / AFP / Getty
The U.S. military estimates that building a temporary floating dock on Gaza’s shores to speed up humanitarian operations might take two months.
U.S. President Joe Biden announced the plan in his State of the Union address on Thursday, calling the situation in the Gaza Strip “heartbreaking” as the Israeli military continues its retaliatory bombings on Hamas after the militant group’s October 7 terror attack on Israel.
Pentagon spokesperson Patrick Ryder said on Friday that constructing the pier may require up to 60 days and the contribution of more than 1,000 American troops. Ryder confirmed Biden’s pledge that no U.S. serviceman will enter Gaza during construction operations.
Biden announced his pier plan after the United Nations raised the alarm about an “imminent” famine in the Gaza region amid reports that Israel’s military operation is hindering road deliveries of aid and food to the […]
Speaking of miscalculations, I think the TCP has also made a miscalculation. They put a Hand Maid up as their spokesperson, and the reviews have been, well you have probably read or seen some of them. It was not a success, which I see as good news. This is the best assessment of TCP Senator Katie Britt and her little Hand Maid act that I have read. Jess Piper has all the nuances. The TCP seems to think that the women voters of America will be conned by her. I am sure the TCP women identified with her, but I hope the majority of women saw through her act.
TCP Senator Kattie Britt of Alabama
I was about to head to bed after the State of the Union last night, when I heard a voice coming from my television that stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know who was speaking, but it really didn’t matter—I recognized the voice. It was so many voices from my childhood. It was so many Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. It was potlucks, and baby showers, and graduations, and birthday parties.
It was Senator Katie Britt using her well-practiced fundie baby voice.
I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.
I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point […]
Like you, I hear the TCPs saying over and over again about how crime is so bad and on the rise in the United States. It’s a lie, like almost everything else the TCPs say. Here are some facts. They all mimic criminal Trump their leader who seems incapable of telling the truth about anything.
Credit: Matt Popovich / Unsplash
The FBI’s most recent Quarterly Uniform Crime Report data for Q3 2023 shows that nearly all crime in the US is going down; some to pre-pandemic levels, some to multi-decade lows.
This includes a violent crime average, as well as murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery property crime, burglary, and larceny, with quarterly data showing the largest percentage declines ever recorded for the violent crimes.
It rubs against the public perception of rising crime in America driven, some suspect, by more widely distributed media content than ever before. This is particularly true for larceny, or petty theft and shoplifting, which got out of hand in San Francisco after a 2020 law removed it as a misdemeanor crime.
Videos of shoplifters brazenly robbing places like Rite Aid and Niemen Marcus were fodder for social media virality, and paired with riots across the US in the summer of 2020, it gave the impression that American cities were taking on the character of Kurt Russell’s Escape from New York.
