Just How Stupid is Trump, Anyway?

Trump is now so stupid he can't even spew his own scripted propaganda any more.

Mr. Peace Prize Starts His War

It's Trump, and with Trump the outcome is always complete chaos. And that's because Trump is an ignoramus and a moron who cares about nothing but himself. So strap in or bail out.

NPR, i.e. 'No Point in Reporting'

In a snotty and condescending tone, the NPR journalists said that journalists should not address their audience in a snotty and condescending tone, and should report what their audience wants to hear.

So far, sounds just like Fox News.

In an era when journalists are being arrested by a totalitarian GOP government merely for reporting the facts, I don’t think the problem is that the reporters are insufficiently “folksy.”

“The customer is always right” is a rule of thumb that may work for grocers, but it decidedly does not work for professionals like physicians, lawyers and journalists. The journalist’s mission to provide accurate, important and relevant information to the public, particularly information that the public does not know it needs to know.

How We Got Here

A country where citizens must prove their citizenship to masked strangers who don’t have to prove they’re law enforcement and can kidnap and/or kill them on the spot may be many things. But not one of them is “free.”

Ask Not for Whom the Sirens Sound

Obviously, Trump’s real goal is to start a civil war and use it to seize totalitarian power. If his goal was deporting undocumented aliens, he would have sent his masked secret police from ICE agents to Florida and Texas, not Minnesota.

And think of all the things the nervous corporate news media now refuses to report on, starting with Trump's obvious cognitive collapse. They've gone Pravda on us.

Code name: Manchurian Cantaloupe

Funny that Trump says he has to take Greenland to keep it out of the hands of the Russians, but Russian state propaganda applauds the idea of Trump's seizing Greenland.

Add that one up and see what you get.

We Told You So

I am amused by people who think there is something called “the law” the Trump will obey. This dictator will obey nothing.

By granting Trump total immunity, the Supreme Cult has rendered itself irrelevant, and the law impotent. It has wrecked the country.

Those of us who have seen this disaster headed straight at us for many years have felt like the mythological Cassandra, able to predict the future but cursed so that no one would ever believe us.

As Austen Leigh said, the hardest part of descending into fascism is bearing the weight of those who don’t see it.

It's Not Immigration Control. It's Ethnic Cleansing

Guard the Unendurable Laughter

A sense of humor is sanity’s steam valve.

Shaftesbury, in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, said humor is the only real test of gravity because “a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious.”

Put another way, it’s just that cartoonists realize that sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

In fact, speech that offends someone is the only speech worth defending. Inoffensive speech is necessarily meaningless, and is never censored.

And why keep the stiletto of ridicule always handy up your sleeve? Because, as Euripides observed, “The laughter of one’s enemies is unendurable.”

Lured by Fox News

I always knew if Fox News was permitted to get away with it, without being exposed, our society would have had it.

Fox News, the Voice that Destroyed America

Fox News has been softening us up for fascist totalitarianism for a quarter of a century now. They’ve left the American electorate punch-drunk.

The Fox News “journalistic principle” is a simple one: everything the Democrats do is wrong, and nothing the Republicans do is wrong (even when it's the same thing).

Listen for when Fox News spokesmodels utter the phrase, "Some say." It will be followed by whatever propaganda lie they have been instructed to push today.

It is news media misinformation, spearheaded by Fox News, that has done the country in.

That's 'Kill' as in 'Kilmeade'

Fox News has been softening us up for fascist totalitarianism for a quarter of a century now. They’ve left the American electorate punch-drunk.

So Shall Ye Reap

And empathy is, of course, the basis of morality.

Btw, it isn't “assassination culture” at work here, Washington Post headline writers. 

It’s gun culture.

In other news, we've had 46 school shootings so far this year in the U.S.

Oh, wait, that's not news any more, is it? Too common.

As Jim McNutt observed, “I see a lot of outrage over a shooting today. Where are your posts asking for prayers for the kids murdered in school today? Oh yeah, I forgot, that's just ‘the cost of the 2nd amendment.’”

Access to guns everywhere at all times now gives Americans the freedom to murder each other over political crack-pottery, childhood curiosity, too many drinks at the bar, not getting laid enough and the last parking space. The color of freedom is innocent red, and you can see it swirling down the street gutters.

Blame Those Who Refused to See

The perpetually surprised "both-sider civility" crowd effectively runs intellectual interference for the fascists. It sprays out the fog through which they attack.

Fox News vs. Superman

The scripted Republican attacks on Superman 2025 don’t seem to be working. It’s cleaning up at the box office.

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld whined as an on-screen graphic proclaimed that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

Fox News has always peddled such ugly fascist trash propaganda aimed at destroying empathy and decency. Previously, Fox News called Captain America, Wonder Woman and Superman “un-American,” while describing the children’s gentle champion Fred Rogers as “evil.”

In its constant quest to gaslight its willing victims, Fox News uses panic mongering, character assassination and ad hominem arguments, psychological projection and flipping, the rewriting of history, scapegoating, conflation of violence with power, bullying, confusion, populism, invocation of the Christian God, saturation, the disparagement of education, guilt by association and diversion. 

Fox News’s most basic propaganda technique is simply to lie about facts, and it does so constantly.

Fox News is where Phineas Taylor Barnum meets Paul Joseph Goebbels.

How the Ruthless Rich Underestimated their Idiot

“In ditching democracy for autocracy, (the billionaires) underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon — a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports — will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization?

“But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidence-based decision-making.

“If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth — and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it.”

— Fintan O’Toole, the New York Review of Books

USA RIP

In 2001, I feared that unbridled lies disguised as journalism on Fox News, coupled with the corruption of the GOP and the excuse of 9-11 terrorism, could lead to a fascist dictatorship in America and the death of the Constitution. 

Well, despite the best efforts of many of us, here we are. 

What now? 

What next?

I guess we can only hope that on some finer day in the future, the words “Republican Party” will be greeted with the same visceral, historical loathing that the term “Nazi Party” inspires.

The Fox News Reality-Reversal Machine

How can Republicans possibly offer such uniformly low-grade, corrupt and often ignorant candidates for the highest office in the nation? 

Because they have developed a corporate media propaganda echo chamber/fog machine so high-grade that it’s capable of conning any number of citizens into believing that black is white, government is evil, invasion is liberation, poverty is freedom, health care is luxury, stupid is smart and contemptible is heroic.

If you have sufficient propaganda power over the news media, you can launch and sustain just about any horror. You can, for example, demonize an unarmed boy who had committed no crime, and make a champion of the man who stalked and killed him.

Serving the Idol of Ignorance

The human species is capable of both discovering wisdom, and of ignoring it. We’re busy with the latter right now in the U.S.

“We sneer at experts,” observed David DeWitt. “We spit epithets like ‘academic elites’ at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams. 

“We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence. We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.”

“It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.”

Michael Bell wrote, “With the accumulated knowledge of all history at our fingertips, willful ignorance still wins the day.”

“Anti-democratic forces benefit from ‘post-truth politics’ because in the absence of truth, truth is defined by power,” as Chrissy Stroop observed.

And that’s why accepting lies as facts is a snake pit out of which all other evils crawl.

Back with a Vengeance

“(Trump) bears responsibility for what comes next, as do his allies and supporters,” wrote Timothy Snyder in The New Yorker. “Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.”

Donald Trump is not a president at all. He’s the first American dictator, one the corporate news media helped usher into office by drowning us in sanewashing.