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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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OldmanRob
Well-known Member
Our unemployment is the lowest in U.S. history, my lead guys paycheck is almost 200 dollars better a month from just taxes alone.
McCabe has been fired as he should be and the Clinton's will be under indictment soon enough.
Everything is going as hoped for
McCabe has been fired as he should be and the Clinton's will be under indictment soon enough.
Everything is going as hoped for
STUPID ...
The president targeted three bureau officials who could provide key testimony in the Mueller probe.
OldmanRob
Well-known Member
Ok, I admit, this one is kind of funny
The conspiracist mindset moved into the White House with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Trump is the most powerful person who views politics through a miasma of secret, malignant intent, but he’s not the only one. Alex Jones, a syndicated radio talk show host from Austin, Texas, has become a celebrity by peddling conspiracy.
Fox News is not above giving its audience the conspiracy they want to hear—even if it turns out to be false, as was “pundit” Andrew Napolitano’s charge that British intelligence (on President Obama’s orders) spied on Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Amplifying charges by characters such as Napolitano are websites like Infowars (which is operated by Jones) or the Gateway Pundit, which, like burbling mud pots, release new conspiracies by the day. And underlying the officials, celebrities, and the fantasy news sites are online forums like Reddit, where anyone can share conspiracy theories with an audience of thousands at the click of a button.
What can be done? First, we must call out conspiracists’ claim to reality. Speaking truth to conspiracy is a moral imperative. It is a sign of dangerous times that so few responsible office-holders, and barely any among conservatives, do.
We also need democratic narratives as compelling as the accusations conjured by conspiracists. Speaking truth to conspiracy is disarming, when it is, not because it offers facts or represents sounder reasoning but because it supports a story that makes better sense to citizens.
Yet we also need more. When conspiracism becomes a regular element of public life, we need to defend the ordinary routines of democratic politics. That means not only adherence to the customary and legal processes of constitutional democracy by both parties (and civil society groups and others) but also literally articulating them, pedagogically, so citizens appreciate the purpose of democratic norms.
Citizens need to witness exhibitions of institutional integrity and regular politics at work, such as when the chair of a congressional intelligence committee announces that he will investigate as the evidence warrants rather than act at President Trump’s direction. These deliberate exhibitions of institutional integrity and regular democratic politics have to be meaningful, producing recognizably fair outcomes in the public interest. With that, the conspiracist threat to democratic legitimacy may be called out and contained.
Reversing the damage already done, however, is more complicated. Conspiracism has an extended half-life. Re-legitimation will be long and arduous. The challenge is clear: as Archibald MacLeish once said, “It is not enough, in this war of hoaxes and delusions and perpetuated lies, to be merely honest. It is necessary also to be wise.”
Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon. Its CEO is Alexander Nix
LONDON — As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.
The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.
So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.
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Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”
“They want to fight a culture war in America,” he added. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”
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Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.
During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.
“This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,” Mr. Grewal said.
Trump is signaling that he doesn’t care what the truth is. From now on the truth will be whatever he says, and he expects every loyal follower to faithfully parrot the official party line. Or else.
Another disturbing indicator of the same authoritarian pathology came this week after Trump’s graceless ouster of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The White House initially claimed that Tillerson had been notified the previous Friday that he was being let go, but on Tuesday Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2018/03/15/trump-dumped-secretary-of-state-rex-tillerson-in-a-tweet-whats-the-worst-way-youve-been-fired/?utm_term=.b706eb95f178 (contradicted) that spin by telling reporters that Tillerson was “unaware of the reason” for his firing and had just found out about it. Goldstein was immediately canned and, in a significant bit of symbolism, replaced with a former host of “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite TV show. Trump is sending a signal that not only does he insist on his right to lie but that he regards telling the truth as a firing offense. Government officials, take note.
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The same vindictiveness was apparent in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision Friday night to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbis-andrew-mccabe-is-fired-a-little-more-than-24-hours-before-he-could-retire/2018/03/16/e055a22a-2895-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html?utm_term=.df1b86fcd371 (after 21 years of service,) just more than 24 hours before he was due to receive his pension. The excuse apparently was McCabe’s supposedly unauthorized communications with the media about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, followed by alleged attempts to mislead investigators. But Trump’s gloating tweet makes it obvious this was punishment for telling the truth about the Maximum Leader’s attempts to obstruct justice and end an investigation into his links to the Kremlin. Those are inconvenient truths.
As his presidency advances, Trump is becoming increasingly intolerant of disagreement and defiance, especially from aides who know what they are talking about. ...
As his presidency advances, Trump is becoming increasingly intolerant of disagreement and defiance, especially from aides who know what they are talking about. Economic adviser Gary Cohn tried to tell him that tariffs and trade wars are bad economics; Trump didn’t listen and Cohn resigned. Tillerson tried to tell him that scrapping the Iran nuclear deal is a bad strategy, and now he’s gone. National security adviser H.R. McMaster is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-decides-to-remove-national-security-adviser-and-others-may-follow/2018/03/15/fea2ebae-285c-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html?utm_term=.00b9170ffc00 (said) to be the next candidate for the heave-ho, because he reportedly rubs Trump the wrong way. Of course he does. McMaster is well known in the Army for his blunt willingness to disagree with superiors when he thinks they’re wrong. Trump’s ego is too fragile to handle the truth.
The frightening thing is that Trump’s insistence on redefining reality is working, at least with his base. The video news site NowThis has posted a hilarious and horrifying clipshowing Fox News talking heads hyperventilating over President Barack Obama’s promise to meet with the leaders of hostile states such as North Korea (Mike Huckabee: “President Obama likes talking to dictators!”), before going on to fulsomely praise President Trump for doing just that.
Trump is sucking a substantial portion of America into his Orwellian universe. The rest of us have to struggle simply to remember that war isn’t peace, freedom isn’t slavery, ignorance isn’t strength.
