Thursday Open Thread

7 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. On the cat story. Marcy at EmptyWheel.

   This is what the Republican Party has become. Fact Checking Big Foot Sightings.

   All the evidence suggests this is not “a baseless urban legend.” Rather, it is a packaged neo-Nazi attack designed to sow violence against migrant communities.

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   1. Neofascism. More from Marcy.

      This entire story, then, is about creating false stories in order to stoke far right violence against immigrants. It’s not an urban legend. It is deliberate propaganda.

      It is already having real effects on the Haitians in Springfield.

      And as such, it’s little different from the deliberate disinformation used to stoke the Dublin or Southport riots. Indeed, the networks behind all of them have very significant overlaps.

      What is different here is that Trump is running to regain the presidency on such a platform of such disinformation. Trump’s team is riddled with participants in this transnational effort to stoke fascism with viral disinformation targeting immigrants; some of them aren’t even serving prison terms in Danbury FCI for covering up January 6! And Elon Musk has been all too happy to encourage it on Xitter.

      Because of this — because of the way Trump’s team participates in this — Trump’s meltdown calls for far more than embarrassed retconning.

      I don’t doubt that this was an orchestrated, intentional smear, one that Trump flubbed because Kamala Harris first made Trump insecure and then because Muir came ready with a fact-check. The fact that Trump’s handlers are trying to excuse it away as — in the Axios version — a matter of the fascist conspiracists he has admitted into his old man bubble, is a tell, but also an opportunity.

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2. FIGHT BACK and eat TRUMP and the RICH supporters of his ilk. LOL  

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3. My teenage daughter was scrolling through Tik Tok this morning while I was driving her to school and it almost every other video had the ” they’re eating dogs ” line in it to her continued laughter and delight. It’s traveling far and wide and won’t go away. Nice to see Trump’s worst fear of becoming a laughingstock come true because he deserves every bit of it.

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4. If you have time, this powerful statement from Linda Ronstadt criticizing DJT and JDV is worth a read, but for an excerpt:

   "Trump first ran for President warning about rapists coming in from Mexico. I’m worried about keeping the rapist out of the White House."

   As the kids say (I hope), that's fire!

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5. My favorite comment, I think:

   https://www.dailykos.com/…

       According to the media analytics company Nielsen, the debate drew an estimated 67.1 million viewers across 17 networks—nearly 16 million more viewers than watched the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.

       So this was Trump’s biggest crowd ever and he was made a fool of publicly?

   Perhaps Karma is a cat …

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6. I saw a new (to me) term yesterday: sanewashing.

   As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants—be they on social media or at in-person events—and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing.

   https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_incoherent_media_sanewashing.php

   I think the debate blew the lid off that one. 

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