The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult

[Longhorn_Fan68 33857]

what a dumb dildo. he sure showed everyone!

[RDCanecutter 26370]

16 hours ago, Pancho said:

 

0:47 several landwhales wearing tents for shirts appear, walking up the path behind her, quite improbably under their own power and making good speed, I am reminded of the charging hippo.

Also, is that supposed to be some famous building behind her? I am sure I have no idea as I do not frequent land-locked states where they produce this sort of ying-yang whiny music.

Edited October 1 by RDCanecutter

[RDCanecutter 26370]

7 hours ago, Goofyboy said:

Why are these people so fucking stupid and when you tell them they are wrong, they double down?? This image is floating around FB with the caption “FB keeps deleting this…”. No shit!!! It’s an AI image. Fucking morons.

They believe it, they believe it, they believe it. They believe it even more if they know you don't believe it.

[C-Man 27172]

Elmo posted this at 2:54 AM.

[Gap03 3298]

31 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Elmo posted this at 2:54 AM.
 

He was definitely spanking it to this right after he posted it, wasn't he?

[atomheartbevo 89587]

2 hours ago, C-Man said:

Elmo posted this at 2:54 AM.
 

1 hour ago, Gap03 said:

He was definitely spanking it to this right after he posted it, wasn't he?

Or sliding into her DMs.

Are we sure she's even human?  These AI videos are getting pretty realistic looking, but she does look like she had the Mar-a-Lago facelift.

[Pancho 44652]

[Pancho 44652]

[jimmyjazz 45826]

CTE is real.

[Post Oak 20200]

 

[TheStoicPaisano 9919]

4 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

0:47 several landwhales wearing tents for shirts appear, walking up the path behind her, quite improbably under their own power and making good speed, I am reminded of the charging hippo.

Also, is that supposed to be some famous building behind her? I am sure I have no idea as I do not frequent land-locked states where they produce this sort of ying-yang whiny music.

She was this close to tipping over in the first five seconds. I felt her pain below tho. Still laughed in both instances.

[Bullneck 19070]

5 hours ago, ROFL BOX said:

 

https://heritageairtx.com/

 

 

Edited October 2 by Bullneck

[TexEx15 17504]

5 hours ago, ROFL BOX said:

 

11 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

 

https://heritageairtx.com/

 

 

I hope y’all are sitting down because I’m not sure you are ready to hear this…. It turns out that this was not in fact a guitar signed by Taylor Swift

 

[RDCanecutter 26370]

18 minutes ago, TexEx15 said:

 

I hope y’all are sitting down because I’m not sure you are ready to hear this…. It turns out that this was not in fact a guitar signed by Taylor Swift

 

MAGA Grandbabies wondering why they can't have nice things.

[Restless Native 315]

"Dead or alive, I'm gonna die." I think that really is a lesson for us all.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13488]

I assumed that was just a Taylor swift merch guitar listed for $40 on Amazon with her signature printed on it. And a setup bid to get attention. Fairly successful hoax. 

[Pato del Muerto 52460]

Big Tom Herman vibes with the hammering though

[Biff Tannen 45645]

4 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Fairly successful hoax grift. 

Fixed.  And god dammit, another one I missed out on.

[ROFL BOX 6647]

[tx 3 putt 76760]

lulz 

 

[mdmost 42993]

Republicans- you can't tax your way to prosperity!

Same Republicans- you can tariff your way to prosperity!

[tx 3 putt 76760]

23 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Republicans- you can't tax your way to prosperity!

Same Republicans- you can tariff your way to prosperity!

 

1890’s !!!!

[RDCanecutter 26370]

1 hour ago, ROFL BOX said:

Quick, pull her back up out of the Chick-fil-A fart zone.

[Pancho 44652]

 

[Sawbonz 27514]

10 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

lulz 

 

Why do these pussies just let these dumbfucks continue to talk over them with this nonsense?

[tx 3 putt 76760]

[NeverMarryAStripper 21850]

Why are they standing in front of a flag from the mid-1800s? From 1867 to 1877, the U.S. flag had 37 stars.

[SydneyCarton 47993]

1 minute ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

Why are they standing in front of a flag from the mid-1800s? From 1867 to 1877, the U.S. flag had 37 stars.

AI can't even count fingers right, you're shocked it can't count stars on a flag?

[C-Man 27172]

This is certainly "I am Jack's lack of surprise" territory here but ... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/study-conservative-users-misinformation-sharing-drives-higher-suspension-rates-not-platform-bias/ar-AA1rBi4k

Study: Conservative users' misinformation sharing drives higher suspension rates, not platform bias

Given DJT's connection to MIT, I'm sure he'll pay this article the proper attention it merits.

Quote

A new paper, "Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions," published today in Nature suggests that the higher quantity of social media policy enforcement (such as account suspensions) for conservative users could be explained by the higher quantity of misinformation shared by those conservative users—and so does not constitute evidence of inherent biases in the policies from social media companies or in the definition of what constitutes misinformation.

Written by researchers from MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and Yale University, co-authors of the paper include Mohsen Mosleh, Qi Yang, Tauhid Zaman, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.

The spread of misinformation has become an increasing concern, especially as the 2024 presidential election in the United States approaches. Many Americans who disagree on political issues agree that the sharing of false information is a substantial problem; sixty-five percent of Americans say that technology companies should take action to restrict the spread of false information. However, there is great dissension as to whether tech companies are actually moderating platforms fairly.

"Accusations of political bias are often based largely on anecdotes or noteworthy cases, such as the suspension from Twitter and Facebook of former President Trump," said MIT Sloan professor Rand. "This study allows us to systematically evaluate the data and better understand the differential rates of policy enforcement."

The asymmetry of conservative sanctions versus liberal sanctions should not be attributed to partisan bias on the part of social media companies and those determining what counts as misinformation, Rand and the co-authors noted.

The research began by looking at Twitter's suspension of users following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Researchers identified 100,000 Twitter users from October 2020 who shared hashtags related to the election, and randomly sampled 9,000—half of whom shared at least one #VoteBidenHarris2020 hashtag and half of whom shared at least one #Trump2020 hashtag.

Researchers analyzed each user's data from the month before the election to quantify their tendency to share news from low-quality domains (as well as other potentially relevant characteristics), and then checked nine months later to determine which users were suspended by Twitter.

Accounts that had shared #Trump2020 before the election were 4.4 times more likely to have been subsequently suspended than those who shared #VoteBidenHarris2020. Only 4.5% of the users who shared Biden hashtags had been suspended as of July 2021, while 19.6% of the users who shared Trump hashtags had been suspended.

"We found that there were political differences in behavior, in addition to the political differences in enforcement," said Rand. "The fact that the social media accounts of conservatives are suspended more than those of liberals is therefore not evidence of bias on the part of tech companies, and shouldn't be used to pressure tech companies to abandon policies meant to reduce the sharing of misinformation."

To better understand this difference, the researchers examined what content was shared by these politically active Twitter users in terms of the reliability of the sources through two different methods. They used a set of 60 news domains (the 20 highest volume sites within the categories of mainstream, hyper-partisan and fake news), and collected trustworthiness ratings for each domain from eight professional fact-checkers.

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In an effort to eliminate concern about potential bias on the part of journalists and fact-checkers, the researchers also collected ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople. Both approaches indicated that people who used Trump hashtags shared four times more links to low-quality news outlets than those who used Biden hashtags.

"Prior work identifying political differences in misinformation sharing has been criticized for relying on the judgment of professional fact-checkers. But we show that conservative Twitter users shared much lower quality news, even when relying on ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople," said co-author Dr. Mohsen Mosleh, Associate Professor, Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford.

"This can't be written off as the result of political bias in the ratings, and means that preferential suspension of conservative users is not necessarily the result of political bias on the part of social media companies."

The study also discovered similar associations between conservatism and low-quality news sharing (based on both expert and politically-balanced layperson ratings) were present in seven other datasets from Twitter, Facebook, and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries.

For example, the researchers found cross-cultural evidence of conservatives sharing more unambiguously false claims about COVID-19 than liberals, with conservative political elites sharing links to lower quality new sources than liberal political elites in the U.K. and Germany as well.

"The social media users analyzed in this research are not representative of Americans more broadly, so these findings do not necessarily mean that conservatives in general are more likely to spread misinformation than liberals. Also, we're just looking at this particular period in time," said Rand.

"Our basic point would be the same if it was found that liberal users shared more misinformation and were getting suspended more. Such a pattern of suspension would not be enough to show bias on the part of the companies, because of the differences in users' behavior."

Even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, the researchers expect that there would be political asymmetries in enforcement. While the analyses do not rule out the possibility of any bias on the part of platforms, the inequality of sanctions is not diagnostic of bias one way or the other.

Policy-makers need to be aware that even if social media companies are working in an unbiased way to manage misinformation on their platforms, there will still be some level of differential treatment across groups.

More information: Mohsen Mosleh et al, Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07942-8

Provided by MIT Sloan School of Management

 

[Willfully Horn 7984]

2 minutes ago, C-Man said:

This is certainly "I am Jack's lack of surprise" territory here but ... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/study-conservative-users-misinformation-sharing-drives-higher-suspension-rates-not-platform-bias/ar-AA1rBi4k

Study: Conservative users' misinformation sharing drives higher suspension rates, not platform bias

Given DJT's connection to MIT, I'm sure he'll pay this article the proper attention it merits.

 

This is why the criminals and freaks party is redefining misinformation as mere opinion, and not a thing which is verifiably false.

Edited October 3 by Willfully Horn

[Pato del Muerto 52460]

1 hour ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

Why are they standing in front of a flag from the mid-1800s? From 1867 to 1877, the U.S. flag had 37 stars.

There’s 15 stripes too 

[C-Man 27172]

The smooth-brained Q-addled folks in my social media feeds are now talking about how Hurricane Helene was a government-created storm designed to wipe clean vast areas of western NC (and other locations) so "they" could strip-mine lithium or something like that. One guy who I met at the State Fair of Texas kickoff golf tournament a half-dozen years ago, who went to St Mark's, Greenhill and Duke, has completely fallen off the Q conspiracy ledge in the last 9-12 months. He said Helene is not dissimilar from the "Maui landgrab." His descent into this idiocy is as fascinating as it is sad.

[Foosters 17799]

You can take the man out of Dallas, but you cant take Dallas out of the man

[C-Man 27172]

On 10/1/2024 at 7:54 PM, Bullneck said:

 

https://heritageairtx.com/

 

 

Pretty fancy locale for that event

[Longhorn_Fan68 33857]

21 minutes ago, Foosters said:

You can take the man out of Dallas, but you cant take Dallas out of the man

not true. born and raised there but came to Austin for college and never looked back. about the only way I would return is if someone offered me an 8-figure salary to be King Architect of Dallas. otherwise, go Stars and whatnot, but perfectly happy here and that city can have itself

[Pescado_Rojo 19400]

18 minutes ago, C-Man said:

The smooth-brained Q-addled folks in my social media feeds are now talking about how Hurricane Helene was a government-created storm designed to wipe clean vast areas of western NC (and other locations) so "they" could strip-mine lithium or something like that. One guy who I met at the State Fair of Texas kickoff golf tournament a half-dozen years ago, who went to St Mark's, Greenhill and Duke, has completely fallen off the Q conspiracy ledge in the last 9-12 months. He said Helene is not dissimilar from the "Maui landgrab." His descent into this idiocy is as fascinating as it is sad.

I've seen that one. Also that Biden caused it to displace republican areas of swing states.

The dockworker strike conspiracies are trending today, though. One guy thinks it's the jews, but didn't articulate a reason (shocking, I know) another competing theory is that Biden caused it to cause panic buying to look like the economy is improving. That one from a fishing guide in Louisiana that might legitimately have an IQ in the 80s. 

[Pato del Muerto 52460]

27 minutes ago, C-Man said:

The smooth-brained Q-addled folks in my social media feeds are now talking about how Hurricane Helene was a government-created storm designed to wipe clean vast areas of western NC (and other locations) so "they" could strip-mine lithium or something like that. One guy who I met at the State Fair of Texas kickoff golf tournament a half-dozen years ago, who went to St Mark's, Greenhill and Duke, has completely fallen off the Q conspiracy ledge in the last 9-12 months. He said Helene is not dissimilar from the "Maui landgrab." His descent into this idiocy is as fascinating as it is sad.

Had a fun update this morning- apparently there’s no fema money for hurricane relief because “they” raided that account to pay for migrants. 

[bolverk 29620]

38 minutes ago, C-Man said:

The smooth-brained Q-addled folks in my social media feeds are now talking about how Hurricane Helene was a government-created storm designed to wipe clean vast areas of western NC (and other locations) so "they" could strip-mine lithium or something like that. One guy who I met at the State Fair of Texas kickoff golf tournament a half-dozen years ago, who went to St Mark's, Greenhill and Duke, has completely fallen off the Q conspiracy ledge in the last 9-12 months. He said Helene is not dissimilar from the "Maui landgrab." His descent into this idiocy is as fascinating as it is sad.

Imagine holding the thought in your head that humans couldn't possibly be heating the atmosphere while simultaneously believing humans, in fact, could gin up a Cat-4 hurricane on a whim.

[WhatTheBuck 28764]

1 hour ago, C-Man said:

The smooth-brained Q-addled folks in my social media feeds are now talking about how Hurricane Helene was a government-created storm designed to wipe clean vast areas of western NC (and other locations) so "they" could strip-mine lithium or something like that. One guy who I met at the State Fair of Texas kickoff golf tournament a half-dozen years ago, who went to St Mark's, Greenhill and Duke, has completely fallen off the Q conspiracy ledge in the last 9-12 months. He said Helene is not dissimilar from the "Maui landgrab." His descent into this idiocy is as fascinating as it is sad.

Ask them if the government was so interested in lithium then why did we leave Afghanistan. Watch them race to their Google machines and leave them scratching their heads. 

[Horn Dog 9788]

Transcript: Trump-MAGA Erupt at CBS over Debate—Exposing Big MAGA Scam

https://newrepublic.com/article/186690/transcript-trump-maga-erupt-cbs-debateexposing-big-maga-scam

Kinda long, and not but good read.    Here is the salient point:

"They were going to attack the moderators no matter what happened. It’s what they do after the Trump–Harris debate. Trump attacked the moderators claiming they were biased against him, even though they gave him five minutes more speaking time than Harris and routinely let him interrupt both them and Harris and break the rules. It’s just not a sincere objection. That’s the first thing everybody should understand. We shouldn’t treat it as such. We shouldn’t treat it as a legitimate complaint.

But there is a piece of it that I do think that they really do believe, and that’s that JD Vance and Donald Trump fundamentally think they should be able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nobody should even question them. It’s just a very fundamentally authoritarian worldview that shows up in small ways like this and in large ways like talking about jailing journalists and others who say and do things they don’t like."

 

Spoiler

Greg Sargent: At the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, the CBS news moderators fact-checked JD Vance a single time. Once. That was all it took to trigger Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who fanned out and hammered CBS relentlessly for that enormous transgression. All this opens a window on a larger story: the degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on top of an immense superstructure of endless and shameless lies. Bullying the media into not fact-checking Trump and Vance is essential to that larger project. Today, we’re talking about all this with Jamison Foser, who writes regularly about media capitulation to the right wing on his Substack, Finding Gravity. Thanks for coming on, Jamison.

Jamison Foser: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: At the debate, JD Vance exaggerated wildly about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, an obsession of his, suggesting that they’re here illegally. CBS’s moderator pointed out that they’re actually here legally on temporary protected status. Vance objected saying, “Hey, the rules were that you’re not supposed to fact-check.” That triggered MAGA. Trump erupted on Truth Social. Other Republicans jumped in. Here’s audio of Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Newsmax:

Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming, especially since the rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves because I think they were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.

Sargent: Jamison, I guess CBS maybe violated its rules, but still it was one extremely minor correction. What’s your reaction to all this?

Foser: Yeah, extremely minor is exactly right. The moderator literally just said, “To clarify for our viewers, there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield who are here legally.” Vance then flipped out, and first we have to acknowledge just how pathetic he sounded saying, “The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” I immediately thought of that old Saturday Night Live skit in which Chevy Chase is playing a befuddled Gerald Ford in a debate and says, “It was my understanding that there’d be no math involved.” It was just ridiculous. He looked small and weak and dishonest. That was my first reaction. But we have to understand this objection Vance had in the moment and the reaction since that you’ve highlighted from his fellow conservatives, that it’s extremely just completely insincere, right? They don’t actually believe that the moderators were biased against them.

They were going to attack the moderators no matter what happened. It’s what they do after the Trump–Harris debate. Trump attacked the moderators claiming they were biased against him, even though they gave him five minutes more speaking time than Harris and routinely let him interrupt both them and Harris and break the rules. It’s just not a sincere objection. That’s the first thing everybody should understand. We shouldn’t treat it as such. We shouldn’t treat it as a legitimate complaint.

But there is a piece of it that I do think that they really do believe, and that’s that JD Vance and Donald Trump fundamentally think they should be able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nobody should even question them. It’s just a very fundamentally authoritarian worldview that shows up in small ways like this and in large ways like talking about jailing journalists and others who say and do things they don’t like.

Sargent: To highlight a point you made, Trump and MAGA know the ability to lie with impunity—and that’s the essential thing, impunity—is absolutely central to the success of their political project. The debate really showed this in a new way. Vance lied about everything. The borders are open when in fact crossings are down. Immigrants take Americans jobs when in fact they’re helping grow the economy and labor force. Trump tried to protect people on the Affordable Care Act when in fact he tried to destroy it. Trump’s economy was uniformly fantastic when it actually ended in Covid-fueled catastrophe. Biden and Harris have decimated energy production when in fact oil production has soared. It’s really endless. Now Jamison, we all recall George Bush, Karl Rove, and the making of their alternate reality. Is what we’re seeing now something different?

Foser: I think it’s something different in kind of a hyperinflation of it. What we’re seeing now in terms of how the Republican candidates and the conservative movement are behaving and how the media reacts to it are trends that have been in place for decades and that many of us have been talking about and highlighting. I know you have been, and I have been for a very long time. What’s happened in the current MAGA era and the Trump era is the natural conclusion of those trends continuing unchecked. They’re just going to grow. It’s not hard to see the connection between the Bush administration saying “we create our own reality” and the way Donald Trump and JD Vance are behaving right now. If they’re allowed to do that and the media goes along and helps them in doing that by treating their lies and their fabrications as legitimate topics for discussion on things we should focus on, then they’re just going to do more and more of that.

Sargent: You had an interesting piece recently comparing coverage of Trump to coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. The press at that time decided that Gore was a liar and an exaggerator and they covered him that way in a concerted relentless way. Can you talk about that and how it compares to the present?

Foser: A core theme of the 2000 presidential campaign coverage was that Al Gore was this fundamentally untrustworthy figure, this compulsive liar. It was based on a couple pretty trivial small examples that weren’t even true. There were ironically enough things that the media exaggerated from Gore’s comment in order to portray Gore as an exaggerator. What you had all that year was this constant through line in coverage of the campaign. George Bush was a straight talker, and Al Gore was fundamentally dishonest. It wasn’t just that they’d fact-check him in one piece when he’d say something. They’d criticize it. That was then the dominant frame through which they covered him.

And that’s a striking contrast to the way the media treats Donald Trump and JD Vance. With Trump and Vance, to your point, they do fact-check some of the lies. Sometimes they even do it pretty consistently. We’ve seen in the lie that JD Vance and Donald Trump have been telling about Haitian immigrants. If you look at the articles about that, the media has actually done a pretty good job of saying, It’s not actually true, Haitian immigrants aren’t eating cats…

Sargent: Or spreading diseases.

Foser: ...or spreading diseases. But the way they do that actually helps further the core agenda that Trump and Vance have here. They do something that I call “privileging the lie.” This is a concept I developed about 15 years ago during the 2008 campaign. When the news media reports a lie, even if they make clear that it’s false, if they adopt the lie as the framing of their story, they’re helping the liar. They’re giving the liar the license to set the terms on the topic of discussion. All these stories about Vance’s Haitian immigrant lie, they’d point out that it’s not actually true what he’s saying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, but the whole article would then be about Haitian immigrants and the effect that they’re having on the communities in Ohio and elsewhere, and the problems that this is causing according to some of the residents and on the other hand, some of the benefits from it. That core story would be one about immigration, which is what Trump and Vance wanted. JD Vance has explicitly said he made these stories up to get that outcome. The other way of approaching that would have been the way they approached Al Gore.

The story here is not immigration. The story here is that JD Vance is a fundamentally untrustworthy figure who is lying yet again—he has a long history of lying. That then becomes the story and the focus: JD Vance and Donald Trump and their history of lies, their fundamental dishonesty and untrustworthiness. If you cover it that way, you don’t privilege the lie. You don’t privilege the liar. You don’t incentivize future lies. But instead what we’ve seen is [the media] giving the Trump campaign exactly what they wanted.

Sargent: Yeah, I like your coinage there. There’s another device or at least another technique that’s used by these guys, and I’ve been calling it the “secondary lie” or the “subordinate lie.” What happens is the press gets relentlessly focused on a falsehood like “Haitian immigrants are eating pets.” And understandably, it’s a pretty big story, that they went there, right? But for days and days and days, every story about that would have the fact-check of the lie about eating pets, but then underneath it, JD Vance or whoever was speaking would advance another set of lies, like Haitians are spreading diseases. Readers and viewers are seeing, OK, the pet eating isn’t true, but then they’re hearing Vance say, Well, there are these other problems, like they’re spreading diseases, and that isn’t checked. That’s a subsidiary problem to what you’re talking about.

Foser: Yeah. That’s a core part of the Trump and Vance strategy, and that’s a core reason why privileging the lie and allowing… Not just allowing, because news companies have agency here, right? They’re not allowing Trump and Vance to dictate anything. The news companies are making a decision to cover the topic that JD Vance wants them to cover when he tells these lies. The consequence of doing that is you then create this story that has space for all these other lies and you can’t possibly keep up with them. You can’t possibly correct them all. There isn’t time and space for that. It is fundamentally a conversation that rewards the liar.

Sargent: Absolutely. Let’s step back and retrieve some more context here. When CNN failed to fact-check the debate between Trump and Biden a few months ago, the result was it let Trump lie uncontrollably with impunity for 90 minutes. That was widely acknowledged as a journalistic travesty and a grave disservice to the American people, including by some in the journalism profession. Then CBS stepped up and said you know what, we’re going to do the same thing. Journalists all understood perfectly well that CBS had calculated that if they fact-checked Vance, they’d get hammered by MAGA, and CBS just didn’t want that. Now, the Overton window has moved so much that MAGA is ginning up fake outrage over a single fact-check, never mind a sustained set of fact-checks out of the debate. What does that say about what’s happening to the profession more broadly in the Trump years?

Foser: It demonstrates just how thoroughly the media buys into this completely phony grievance that Republicans offer toward their coverage and have not yet wrapped their heads around the fact that we’re going to get attacked no matter what we do, so we may as well do good journalism. Because if we do bad journalism for the sake of heading off attacks, we’re a, doing bad journalism and b, we’re getting beat up anyway. There’s no upside there unless you want to conclude that they know what they’re doing and they’re going along with it. It’s what they want.

Sargent: Brian Beutler has been good on this on his Substack as well. He’s pointed out that these numerous failures to fact-check the debates under pressure from Trump and MAGA are actually a form of capitulation to authoritarian politics, a politics which actively turns any institutions that won’t affirmatively rig the political debate in their favor into enemies of the movement. I feel like we need to stress an essential point that goes back to what you said about how they just simply expect our institutions to create a situation that’s favorable to them. Only one side bullies and threatens the media for fact-checking, for telling the truth. It’s Trump and MAGA. Democrats don’t do that. Yet, again to your point, the press responds to this at least to some degree by rewarding it. Is there some way out of this perversity? What’s the way out?

Foser: The way out is to do good journalism and not worry about what Republicans are saying about you, to fundamentally recognize that your job as journalists is to inform the public. That’s who you have a responsibility for. You don’t have a responsibility to keep Donald Trump happy and you couldn’t do it even if you thought you did. Your responsibility is to make sure that your readers and viewers come away from every interaction with your news product, with your broadcasts of a debate, with your articles, with your op-eds, understanding the world better, having an accurate understanding of things that matter. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing your job.

Sargent: It seems to me that when people react on Twitter or wherever to a failed headline or a failure to render accurately the true pathologies that Trump is betraying or revealing, it actually has an effect. We were in a situation recently where we were all beating up on The New York Times for sane-washing some really crazy stuff that Trump was uttering about the economy. I think it was a speech about the economy that he gave. Then it actually changed for a while there. They started to do stories where they really showed how ridiculous what Trump was saying was. They were really rendering accurately the mental unfitness he was displaying. Yet it just keeps backsliding. It just keeps slipping back. Are we going to be stuck in this loop forever where we all react without rage, we all pressure them, things get better, then they don’t, and then they backslide again? What can people do?

Foser: The answer to that is: Yes, we will be stuck in this loop forever. That unfortunately is the reality of having news media dominated by a few companies that have a pretty clear trend of behavior. The natural state of The New York Times is to behave this way. They’ve been behaving this way for decades for as long as anybody can remember. I’ve been publicly criticizing it for decades. You can, to your point, have an effect. If people are vocal and forceful about demanding better, that effect will be temporary. You need to keep showing up every day and doing it. And also vote with your advertising dollars, vote with your subscription dollars. There are other news companies people can get their news from if they’re not satisfied with the ones that they’re going to. It’s not going to be a situation in which we point out one flaw in media coverage and we do it aggressively and collectively for a week and it fixes itself or they fix it and stay fixed. They will backslide. They will continue to behave in the way that’s consistent with their instincts, which are very bad instincts journalistically.

Keep in mind, one of the reasons to cut them a little bit of a slack here is that they’ll get constant pressure from the other side, right? Republicans and conservatives aren’t going to let up in their attacks on the media. We shouldn’t think that we can push back once or twice and fix the problem and then we can go home and stop doing it. It’s unfortunate that that’s the nature of the situation we’re in, but if one side doesn’t participate in a debate, you’re going to lose it.

Sargent: We’re at a deep structural disadvantage here as well, which is that when liberals criticize the media, the instinct of a lot of newsroom leaders and executives is to say to themselves, Well, you know, that’s actually good because it’s going to quiet the right. Their default position is that the right is right about them.

Foser: Yeah, it is. That’s false, but it’s their default position, and that is the reality of why we can’t just disengage. If their default position is that the right is right about them and the right criticizes them, they’re going to keep moving further and further to the right, absent some force pushing back a little bit. It’s unfortunate. Nobody wants to hear it, but it’s not going to just get better without people working on it. And again, find other places to get your news.

Sargent: Jamison, does it all matter? That’s what I want to ask you, finally. My tendency is to think that whenever people criticize a New York Times headline, a whole chorus of contrarians attacks those critics for supposedly wasting everybody’s time obsessing over small things. But those things matter. The New York Times’s headlines really influence, I think, how smaller news companies around the country cover stuff and present reality to their readers and viewers, don’t you think?

Foser: Absolutely. The New York Times is the most important news company in the world, right? That’s not just because of the number of people who get their news directly from The New York Times, though that’s a lot of people. It’s also because they’re the leader in the media industry in America. Other journalists look to them for cues. If The New York Times says something’s important, then other journalists internalize that. They treat it as important. So it is important not just to push back on the Times, but other news organizations as well, and to encourage them to cover some of the things that they aren’t covering at all.

One of my pet examples in recent weeks is Donald Trump last week threatened to imprison people for criticizing the Supreme Court. And The New York Times hasn’t reported that. Not once, not a word. During last night’s debate, JD Vance attacked Kamala Harris and Tim Walz saying that they wanted to censor people. Well, that would have been the perfect opportunity for The New York Times and for media coverage today of last night’s debate to say, Well, look, JD Vance talked about censorship. There’s only one campaign that’s threatening to imprison and fine people for criticizing the government, and that’s Trump and Vance.

Sargent: I mean, Trump is making these threats constantly. Well, Jamison, are you optimistic or pessimistic about where things are going right now? I feel like in some senses, the truth about Trump’s authoritarian leanings is getting through to people. But I also think that that’s partly because his big red face is screaming in the faces of other people. That’s what actually gets them to get scared of this guy, not the way that press is covering it or not covering it.

Foser: Fundamentally, a core truth of the Trump era that is really easy to overlook, and a lot of people do overlook it, is this guy’s never had a majority support in this country. It’s not for a day. It’s never been the case. He lost the 2016 election by three million votes. His approval rating was underwater every day that he was in office. He lost the 2020 election. He’s never had majority support in this country. That’s something I think people should feel some comfort in, but recognize that we’re up against a lot here. We’re up against the large number of people who do like him. We’re up against some structural imbalances that favor the Republican Party from the Electoral College to any number of other mechanical realities about our elections and our government, and we’re up against a media environment that is elevating his lies and centering them. That means we all have work to do.

Those two things, if you put those facts together, we should feel hopeful. There are more of us than there are of them. But we can’t passively expect that things will sort themselves out because we are up against way too much for that to be the case. Part of that means, Look, if the news media is centering what Donald Trump and JD Vance want to center in this election, it’s our responsibility in our conversations with each other, those of us who have public platforms, those of us who just talk to our friends and family, to talk to them about the issues that matter to you. We don’t have to have the conversation solely about the issues that JD Vance and Donald Trump want us to talk about.

Those two things, if you put those facts together, we should feel hopeful. There are more of us than there are of them. But we can’t passively expect that things will sort themselves out because we are up against way too much for that to be the case. Part of that means, Look, if the news media is centering what Donald Trump and JD Vance want to center in this election, it’s our responsibility in our conversations with each other, those of us who have public platforms, those of us who just talk to our friends and family, to talk to them about the issues that matter to you. We don’t have to have the conversation solely about the issues that JD Vance and Donald Trump want us to talk about.

 

[Red Five 40776]

And the one fact check might have been done to prevent violence against a group of people Vance has been demonizing and lying about. 

"20k illegals in Springfield."

"Yeah they aren't illegal immigrants."

"But I want to call them that."

"Sorry, they're not. Anyway...."

"BUT YOU SAID NO FACT CHECKING"

[Pancho 44652]

Attention surly, you have a job to do:

 

[Pancho 44652]

Imagine going to prison for 9 years because of turnip. Couldn’t be me

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Judge verbally unloaded on her before sentencing for like 8-10 minutes, rightfully so.  

[Pato del Muerto 52460]

2 hours ago, bolverk said:

Imagine holding the thought in your head that humans couldn't possibly be heating the atmosphere while simultaneously believing humans, in fact, could gin up a Cat-4 hurricane on a whim.

How do we steer these things, anyway?  Seed it way out in the Atlantic and 3 weeks later it goes right into the fl panhandle, through Georgia, and hammers the Carolinas and Tennessee just like planned?  

[royiv 9193]

8 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

How do we steer these things, anyway?  Seed it way out in the Atlantic and 3 weeks later it goes right into the fl panhandle, through Georgia, and hammers the Carolinas and Tennessee just like planned?  

It’s all done with Jewish space lasers these days.

[bolverk 29620]

3 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

How do we steer these things, anyway?  Seed it way out in the Atlantic and 3 weeks later it goes right into the fl panhandle, through Georgia, and hammers the Carolinas and Tennessee just like planned?  

Well, we know that, apparently, a president drawing his preferred path with a Sharpie on a map doesn't do the job, so there's got to be some other way to steer them.

[SydneyCarton 47993]

16 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Judge verbally unloaded on her before sentencing for like 8-10 minutes, rightfully so.  

Video of that, please...

[GenXer 2843]

7 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

How do we steer these things, anyway?  Seed it way out in the Atlantic and 3 weeks later it goes right into the fl panhandle, through Georgia, and hammers the Carolinas and Tennessee just like planned?  

 

Well it’s pretty obvious

 

[TexEx15 17504]

18 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Judge verbally unloaded on her before sentencing for like 8-10 minutes, rightfully so.  

 

1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

Video of that, please...