Focused Read in 2-5 minutes,
depending on how far you choose to go
“To skim through Star
reporter Daniel Dale’s year-end compendium of Donald Trump’s
deceptions is to confront anew the U.S. president’s era-defining
antagonism to the truth.
All the hits are there.
The record-breaking crowd at Trump’s inauguration. Barack Obama’s
wiretapping of Trump’s office. The massive voter fraud in blue
states. The skyrocketing murder rate. The mortal threat to teenage
girls posed by undocumented immigrants. Dale documents these and
nearly 1,000 other fantasies foisted on the American public by their
president as statements of fact.
... His apparent sense that the truth
doesn’t matter as it once did, coupled with his own agnosticism on
the issue, allows him to say absolutely whatever suits his purposes.
And he does. He even brags about this habit in his autobiography.
“Truthful hyperbole,” his ghostwriter dubbed his unending stream
of baseless braggadocio. Apparently Trump loved the term, with its
built-in lie.
In recent days, as Dale
and other journalists and fact-checkers have published their year-end
lists of Trump’s falsehoods,
a number of pundits and media analysts
have questioned whether this is a good use of our industry’s
dwindling resources and reporters’ increasingly squeezed time.
Some posit that
fact-checking Trump is a waste of energy.
The question of the
president’s honesty has already been settled, they say. He is a
liar. Why belabour the point? Trump believers will never be converted
by the “dishonest media” and Trump skeptics don’t need
journalists to painstakingly enumerate his every fib and mistake.
Some suggest the close
reading of Trump’s tweets, speeches and interviews, the combing for
lies and errors, is an exercise in pedantry that suits the
president’s elite-bashing agenda just fine.
While liberals amplify
each other’s outrage over Trump’s falsehoods and unearned boasts,
unwittingly reinforcing his messaging in the process and persuading
no one of anything, the president passes his tax bill, pushes his
Muslim ban, finds ways to deport young undocumented immigrants who
have known no other country.
But the lies are not
merely a distraction. For one thing, they make the indefensible
defensible.
The Republican tax bill is an easier sell for those, like
Trump, willing to describe it as tough on the wealthy, good for the
middle class and lucrative for the federal government, though it is
objectively none of the above. Trump’s effort to deport the
so-called Dreamers may seem less reprehensible if you believe the
president’s inventions about undocumented immigrants committing
terror attacks in Sweden or “slicing and dicing” teenage girls in
the United States.
More fundamentally,
however, the lies are an attack on truth itself.
... Trump’s relentless barrage of lies makes the unnatural
process of critical thinking harder still. And so we are tempted to
throw up our hands: who knows what’s true.
As the Russian dissident
and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, himself no stranger
to the distortions of demagogues, once wrote,
the ultimate goal of
modern propaganda is not simply “to misinform or push an agenda,”
but to “exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
This project is of course
antithetical to democracy. Without some shared understanding of what
is true, of what challenges we face, we cannot have a reasoned debate
about how to respond.
That is why fact-checking
is essential,
particularly in this post-truth moment: not simply
because each lie deserves to be corrected, though it does, but also
because each correction is an affirmation that neither Trump nor
anyone else can choose the truth, that facts are real and worth
protecting.
In an era of declining
trust, amid attacks from Trump and other post-truth politicians,
government, academia and other embattled truth-stewarding
institutions must up their game.
The media, which is also
less trusted today than in previous decades, is no exception. That
means being transparent in our policies and practices, challenging
authority without being unduly antagonistic and rigorously applying
the same standards to those with whom we agree as those with whom we
don’t. It certainly doesn’t mean giving a pass to liars because
we suspect we might not be believed. Some minds will never be turned.
But the fact-checkers may already be having an impact. Trust in
Trump, too, is hitting historic lows.
Over the past year, the
American president said 1,000 false things,an average of about three
per day.
In an interview with the New York Times last week, he said
another 25. The assault on truth and democracy shows no sign of
letting up and much in our nature will ease its way.
So let
fact-checkers beat on, to paraphrase another American fabulist, like
boats against the current.
You can read more here
PLUS ~
You can read Daniel
Dale's referenced piece: “Donald Trump has said 1012 false things as U.S. president” here
(You can also see an extended list of fact-checking resources below, per the Society of Professional Journalists.)
Focused Thought in 15 seconds
(You can find a link to register to vote at the bottom of the page, per the League of Women Voters.)
Focused Action in 30 seconds
You can share Reich's Tweet here
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→ Direct sources for Democrats:
* ( Personal favored and most informative follows are shared here with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify I am using a star rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
The Democratic Party Website
The Democratic Party on Facebook
Also
C-SPAN (a good place for speeches & hearings direct source (s))
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
( ⬆⬆⬆ Wallace is new to the job but for right now
her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO)
...for Networking for Democrats today!
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(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
(Remember 2018...)
In honor of women leading the American Resistance ~
" ... Susan, a Quaker, came from a background where girls were valued and educated just as Quaker boys were, but Susan began to see the real world when she became a teacher and was routinely paid about one-quarter of the salary she would have received if she had been a man.
Elizabeth was from a well-to-do family where boys were favored. Elizabeth married and began having children ... At that time, women had little opportunity to control whether or not they became pregnant, and it frequently happened that just as Elizabeth was about to attend a new round of meetings or take on a new push for voting rights, she would find herself pregnant and more or less homebound again. Despite this, Elizabeth attended everything she could and when she was needed at home, she served their team effort by writing speeches that Susan could use at conventions or on the road. ... "
You can read more about this power friendship here
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Curated by Gail Mountain, with occasional personal commentary, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( You can also find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GKMTNtwits )
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See the League of Women Voters website:
Vote411 here
Thank you for focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
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