162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact checks former President Trump

Stephan: 

There is something seriously wrong with the U.S. corporate media. They are covering Trump and Harris as equivalent candidates. They are not. Harris is an historically typical partisan candidate. What you would normally expect from either party. Criminal Trump is a psychopathic liar, and almost everything he says is either a distorted lie or a total fabrication lie. As for social media, in my view it really has become a hopeless cesspit of misinformation. If you get your information from social media, you are almost certainly wrongly informed. Sadly, except for a very few people like Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow, if you get your information from television the same equivalency problem exists.

Criminal Trump lying from the podium at a news conference. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty

There were a host of false things that Donald Trump said during his hour-long news conference Thursday that have gotten attention.

A glaring example is his helicopter emergency landing story, which has not stood up to scrutiny.

But there was so much more. A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.

Politicians spin. They fib. They misspeak. They make honest mistakes like the rest of us. And, yes, they even sometimes exaggerate their biographies.

The expectation, though, is that they will treat the truth as something important and correct any errors.

But what former President Trump did this past Thursday went well beyond the bounds of what most politicians would do.

Here’s what we found, going chronologically from the beginning of Trump’s remarks […]

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Why isn’t the media reporting on Trump’s increasing dementia?

Stephan: 

Robert Reich clearly describes the other failure I see in media. Criminal Trump is not only a psychopathic liar, if you listen to him it is clear he is also increasingly demented. His sentences are not only lies and fabrications they also frequently make no sense. If you wrote them out this would be immediately clear. The MAGAt Party is advancing a candidate who is obviously increasingly mentally dysfunctional, which says a great deal about what this party is about.

Criminal Trump visits a bodega in the Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan where a worker killed a man who had assaulted him in 2022, on April 16, 2024 in New York City. Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty 

Today, Trump held an hourlong news conference in the main room at Mar-a-Lago. He insulted Kamala Harris’s intelligence, lied about the state of the U.S. economy, and claimed the country would be in mortal danger if he didn’t win the election.

In other words, the usual Trump torrent of lies and insults.

But what got my attention was his description of his departure from the White House as a “peaceful” transfer of power, his insistence that the group that mounted the assault on the Capitol was relatively small, and his boast that attendance at his January 6 rally preceding the assault was larger than the crowd Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the National Mall for his “I Have a Dream” speech.

“If you look at Martin Luther […]

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Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean

Stephan: 

There is still so much we do not know about the systems of the Earth, as this article describes. This is why we need to be focused on new technologies and how to create a healthy Earth. Instead all we focus on is profit.

The potato-sized metal nodules look like rocks, littering parts of the deep seabed.
Credit: NOC / NHM / NERC SMARTEX

Scientists have discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, apparently by lumps of metal on the seafloor.

About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. But, before this discovery, it was understood that it was made by marine plants photosynthesising – something that requires sunlight.

Here, at depths of 5km, where no sunlight can penetrate, the oxygen appears to be produced by naturally occurring metallic “nodules” which split seawater – H2O – into hydrogen and oxygen.

Several mining companies have plans to collect these nodules, which marine scientists fear could disrupt the newly discovered process – and damage any marine life that depends on the oxygen they make.

“I first saw this in 2013 – an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science. “I just ignored it, because […]

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‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy

Stephan: 

The corporations involved with the carbon era are pouring billions of dollars into lies and misinformation on corporate and social media. These people have no interest in the wellbeing of humanity, only in their immediate continued profit. The MAGAt (formerly Republican) Party is fully in league with this at local, state, and federal level as they clearly outline in Project 2025. As a result they are slowing down or stopping appropriate and adequate response to climate change and there is going to be great misery and death as a result. Do not vote for anyone in any country who is not fully committed to the Paris Accord, and proper preparation for what is coming.

Consequences of climate inaction are being felt in rich countries as well as poor, the UN climate adviser said. Credit: Steven Saphore / AAP

Fossil fuel companies are running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy, the UN has said.

Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The perception among many political observers of a rejection of climate policies was a result of this campaign, rather than reflecting the reality of what people think, he added.

“There is this prevailing narrative – and a lot of it is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult, it’s too expensive,” he said. “It is absolutely critical that leaders, and all of us, push back and explain to people the value of climate action, but […]

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Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos

Stephan: 

This is a fact-based report of what the christofascist MAGAts have in mind to do with the United States if criminal Trump wins the Presidency. It is horrifying, of course, these people are not in the least interested in America remaining a democracy. But what strikes me as particularly weird, and I mean really weird, is that they don’t seem. to believe climate change is really happening, and they don’t want people talking about it. It is beyond willful ignorance. I actually think it is a form of mental illness, an inability to deal in a meaningful way with reality. We have about a third of the country suffering from this, and its is not going to produce a happy future for the United States if Trump wins.

Illustration by ProPublica. Credit: Project 2025 training videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented, and The7Dew/Getty 

Reporting Highlights

  • Deep State Battle: Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could fight the so-called deep state on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
  • New Videos: Dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025 were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
  • Advice Given: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. Were they helpful?

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future […]

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