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When the Trump reelection campaign kicked off its Latinos for Trump outreach effort in Miami this summer, it didnt have the benefit of any Latino Cabinet members who might appeal to the large number of Spanish-speaking voters in the state. So it turned tothe next best thing: Vice President Mike Pence.

Its hard to imagine someone less suited to rally Latino voters than Pence, a non-Spanish-speaking white guy from Indiana, a state whose Latino population clocks in at a mere 7 percent. Yet there he was, walking on to the stage to Frees All Right Now in a hotel ballroom full of cheering Latinos. Hola Miami! he cried, giving a big thumbs up. Speaking for 40 minutes, Pence hammered home Trumps biggest selling points with Latino voters: the roaring economy, the low Latino unemployment rate, and the presidents robust opposition to socialism, especially in places like Venezuela.

The campaign needs Latino voters if it wants to carry states like Florida again in 2020, and its making a big push to make that happen. But its clear from the headliners at events like these that Trump has to dig deep to find appropriate, big-name Latino surrogates who are willing to make the case for him, given how unpopular his harsh immigration policies have been. The campaigns Latino advisory board has just 20 members. By comparison, Mitt Romneys list of Latino advisers topped 200 people in 2012, and his Hispanic steering committee included several former Cabinet members, current and former members of Congress, prominent former White House staffers, and top business leaders.

During the 2016 campaign, Trumps Latino outreach was an ad hoc operation, and the organizing vacuum made room for his often-controversial grassroots supporters to fill the void. The original Latinos for Trump organization actually had nothing to do with the campaign. The current Florida representative of thatgroup, Enrique Tarrio, is also the head of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, the alt-right group with ties to white nationalists.

Yet the jayvee Latino organizing efforts made up for lack of experience with enthusiasm for Trump. Even with the obvious liabilities of the candidate, Trump managed to win just over a quarter of the Latino vote nationallyslightly better than Romney in 2012and 35 percent in the crucial swing state of Florida, where Latinos make up about a quarter of the population. Since then, Trump may have further solidified his support in the Latino community.

Alfonso Aguilar, president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, who served as the chief of the Office of Citizenship, says, Theyre much better organized than four years ago. I believe Donald Trump is going to perform better with Hispanic voters than he did three years ago, because of his policies. He says Latinos support Trumps anti-abortion judges and his work on religious freedom, and he notes that the unemployment rate among Latinos is at a record low. Hispanics are seeing that and theyre responding very, very well, he says.

The Miami rally marked the transformation of the campaigns Latino outreach from a scrappy, decentralized grassroots movement in 2016 to a well-oiled political machine. And conservative Latinos who have been involved with the campaign say some of the engine for that change is coming from an unusual source: Pences nephew, John.

Now a senior adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign, John Pencethe son of Mike Pences brother, Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.)has received accolades and criticism for his pioneering work stage-managing and producing Trumps big campaign rallies. In their book Let Trump Be Trump, former Trump campaign operatives David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski credit Pence with devising a crowd-building process that turned Trumps campaign rallies into feats of logistical sophistication. According to former Trump White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman, Pence was also instrumental in orchestrating the inflammatory audience chants that have come to characterize Trumps campaign rallies. Far from being spontaneous shows of support for Trump, she explained in an interview on MSNBC, these chants were started by section leaders whom Pence helped set up and who controlled how long they lasted. This included the one in July in North Carolina when the crowd chanted Send her back, referring to Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). All of that is coordinated and manufactured to stoke fear in this country, Manigault Newman said. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment or for an interview with Pence for this story.

Pence, a white Indianan like his uncle, would seem an unlikely emissary from the Trump campaign to the Latino community. But he is the rare campaign official who also speaks Spanish. He majored in Spanish at the College of William & Mary in Virginia and spent a semester studying journalism at Argentinas Universidad Nacional de La Plata, whose politics didnt exactly align with Trumps today. While he was there, the university gave former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez an award. Pence listened to his speech surrounded by students who cheered in response to Chavezs attacks on the Yankee empire. He later taught English in Nicaragua, in a neighborhood that supported the Marxist president Daniel Ortega. Pence told the Daily Caller that the experience taught him firsthand how socialist policies had wrecked Latin America.

His Spanish skills and his background in some of the hotbeds of Latin American socialism have made him a natural leader in the campaigns Latino outreach. Pence has been a regular presence on Spanish media, talking up the administrations jobs numbers and its work in Venezuela to try to oust socialist president Nicolas Maduro. In September 2018, Pence further secured his position in the Trump firmament when he married a White House communications aide, Giovanna Coia, who is the cousin of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Jesus Marquez, a member of the Trump campaigns Latino advisory board who hosts the only Spanish conservative radio show in Nevada, says that John Pence was in Miami for the campaigns Latino outreach event and that the presence of both Pences is evidence of just how much importance the campaign is placing on attracting Latino voters. John Pence, he says, was a very big part of that. Hes been an essential key of this coalition.

The Latino advisory board consists of an assortment of supporters with varied backgrounds. A number of the people on the board denounced Trump in the past or dropped their support for him during the 2016 campaign because of his offensive comments about immigrants. In March 2016, when she was supporting Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in the presidential race, the boards co-chair, Florida Lt. Governor Jeanette Nunez, tweeted, Wake up Florida voters, Trump is the biggest con-man there is.

The boards other co-chair is Margarita Palu Hernndez, who serves on the board of Herbalife, a dietary supplement company accused by investors and consumer watchdogsof being a pyramid scheme. An experienced GOP fundraiser, she was one of Jeb Bushs biggest bundlers during the 2016 campaign. When Bush dropped out of the presidential race, she threw in with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), not Trump.

Then theres Ramiro Pea, a Waco, Texas, pastor who was on Trumps 2016 Hispanic advisory council but threatened to quit after Trump gave a harsh anti-immigrant speech in Arizona in September 2016. I am so sorry but I believe Mr. Trump lost the election tonight, Pea wrote a letter to the campaign. The National Hispanic Advisory Council seems to be simply for optics and I do not have the time or energy for a scam.

His departure from the advisory board did not last long. Pea returned to the council the very next day,and he later made headlines for his television appearances promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had been murdered by people associated with Hillary Clinton. Before the vice president spoke at the June Latinos for Trump event, Pea kicked things off with a prayer.

Matthew Gomez is another curious addition to the advisory board.Hes a Texas resident and self-proclaimed Second Amendment activist who helped found the original grassroots group Latinos for Trump back in 2015, and most of the pictures in his Instagram profile are of piles of guns. His connection to the campaign seems to come by way of Trumps sons Eric and Don Jr., who are reportedly hunting buddies.

Katrina Campins, a failed contestant from the first season of The Apprentice who went on to work for Trump International Realty, is also on the board.

Aguilar, of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, dismisses any suggestion that members of the Latino outreach team lack enthusiasm for the president, though he understands the initial reluctance of conservative Latinos to back Trump. There is a genuine change of heart because we know who the man is, Aguilar says. Im not saying that people love every time he tweets, or some of his comments. But people know who he is and what his policies are, and hes authentic.

Aguilar too withdrew his endorsement after the 2016 Arizona speech, but he is on board now after realizing that Trump is not as scary as Democrats said he would be. Hes proven that his policies are not anti-Hispanic, Aguilar says, and that hes not deporting every undocumented person in the country. He wont be surprised if Trump wins more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in Florida in 2020, as Trump fans Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis did in 2018.

In October, the Trump campaign scored some points by trolling Joe Biden over Latino voters. Biden had just rolled out his own Latino outreach effort, dubbed Todos con Biden, but failed to buy the web address for it. The Trump campaign scooped up TodosconBiden.com. Its home page now says, Oops! Joe forgot about Latinos. Joe is all talk. It directs visitors to the Trump campaign. It was a savvy move, but the Trump campaign doesnt own all the social media accounts or domain names for its own Latinos for Trump efforts, either, including LatinosforTrump.com. Thats because most of the domain names related to Latino Trump supporters are owned by grassroots activists like Bianca Gracia, one of the co-founders of the original Latinos for Trump, who says she owns about 15 of them.

The campaign is actively trying to keep a lot of these people at arms length. It has sent legal threat letters to organizers of pro-Trump Latino groups instructing them to stop invoking the presidents name or using it for fundraising. Those efforts have alienated some of the original die-hard Trump backers in the Latino community.

Marco Gutierrez, one of the founders of the original Latinos for Trump, got his 15 minutes of fame during the campaign when he predicted during an MSNBC interview that if something didnt change in immigration policy, Youre going to have taco trucks on every corner. Guiterrez, who is no longer involved with Latinos for Trump, has been sidelined from the official campaign. When Trump announced his campaign, we didnt know they were going to roll out their own Latinos for Trump, he says. They wanted us to say we were not part of the campaign. Guiterrez still supports Trump but has contempt for the more professionalized Latino outreach, referring to at least one member of the advisory board as an empty suit.

As the guy who has done most of the Latino outreach since Trump announced [his candidacy in 2015], I dont think theyre really doing a good service to Trump, he says, noting that the original Latinos for Trump Facebook page has more than 30,000 followers, nearly three times the number of the one established this year by the campaign.

Ileana Garcia, a local Florida TV personality, founded Latinas for Trump before Trump was even considered a serious candidate. The campaign eventually hired her to do outreach to Spanish media, and she later spent 10 months working as the deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. She too has been shut out of the 2020 campaign, even though shes frequently called on by Spanish media to serve as a Trump surrogate. She says the campaign has been dismissive of many of the original grassroots supporters who helped put Trump into office. Im very surprised that no ones embraced the people who go out there and do the work, she says. People who cant get into the campaign are considered grifters, which I find not nice on their part.

She learned only late in the game that the campaign was launching a Latino outreach effort on her home turf this summer. After some cajoling, she eventually scored an invite to the Miami event, where she introduced herself to John Pence. She politely reprimanded himfor not including many of Trumps earliest supporters in the campaign. She says she told Pence, Im surprised that none of the original people who were insulted, spit on, got fired from their jobs, are here.

But neither Garcia nor Gutierrez blames Trump for their treatment by the campaign. They believe its been taken over by Washington insiders and that Trump is simply unaware of their exclusion. If Trump had more of an understanding of whats going on, Gutierrez laments, this would be working differently.

Read more from the original source:
Former Trump-Bashers and Mike Pence's Nephew: Meet Trump's Latino Outreach Team - Mother Jones

What do trans women gamers, Jewish journalists, academics of color, and feminist writers have in common? All of them could find themselves targets of coordinated harassment campaigns simply because they have a presence online.

Take the story of Trista (all names have been changed to protect privacy), a trans woman gamer. When she began streaming her games on Twitch, bands of harassers arrived en masse to jam up her channel with what she called low effort, hateful memes. Another woman gamer was called an eBeggar, the misogynistic gaming equivalent of gold diggers. On 4Chan, where harassers organized their attacks, posters organized raids of SJWs (or social justice warriors) against gamers like Trista, planning to post many swasticas [sic] and hurl ableist insults to threaten and belittle them.

Or take the story of Keith, a white Jewish man, comedian, and media professional. After criticizing neo-Nazis and the alt-right in his comedy, he found himself the target of anti-Semitic attacks from users of the website 4Chan. Harassers found his image online and vandalized it in racist and anti-Semitic ways, depicting him with darkened skin covered in sores, an enlarged nose, and altered hair. They drew on old tropeswhite supremacist ideas that Jews cannot be considered white, are identifiable by their facial features, and are uncleanin an attempt to insult him.

These are just two examples from an original study we conducted with the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, titled The Trolls are Organized and Everyones a Target. We set out to understand how these campaigns happen and what its like to be on the receiving end of coordinated harassment. While several recent studies have quantified the problem of online harassment, including studies by Amnesty International, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Pew Research Center, as anthropologists of technology, we wanted to hear directly from individuals who had been affected by harassment. Our study involved 15 in-depth ethnographic interviews and an extensive review of previous research, all focused on understanding the experience of harassment and how it was shaped by the identity of the targeted individual. In line with previous studies, we found that cyberharassment severely affects women and people of color, particularly trans women and women of color.

Building on previous research, we found that the nature of online harassment has changed with the advent and spread of networked technologies such as social media. Harassers have new ways to interfere with the lives of their targets and to follow them wherever they go online. Study participants told us again and again about harassers high degree of collaboration and persistence. Each person we spoke to had been the target of repeated, sustained harassment, often across multiple platforms.

Each person we spoke to had been the target of repeated, sustained harassment, often across multiple platforms.

We call these types of campaigns networked harassment in the report. Targets receive barrages of hateful messages on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, via chat or messaging tools, in their live stream on Discord or Twitch, and through email. At the same time, if they own a business, like one Jewish woman we spoke to, they might receive false and defamatory online reviews on Google, Yelp, and even GlassDoor. Occasionally, online messaging escalates to in-person stalking or confrontations.

Because most of our respondents work in professional and knowledge work fields such as academia, media, gaming, nonprofits, business, or law, many relied on digital tools and spaces to build professional reputations and find work. Online harassment thus directly threatened their livelihoods and employability.

But while these people were inundated with horrifying, demeaning messages, they did not necessarily take the abuse passively. About half of the people we spoke to had documented how harassers targeted them. They and their friends took screenshots of tweets when they appeared on Twitter to keep a record of what was said by which accounts. Many but not all of the accounts responsible were anonymous or obviously created only to harass unsuspecting victims. In some cases, a public figureoften with many times the number of online followers as the targeted individualwould mock the target on social media, triggering hundreds or thousands of followers to pile on insults. Targeted individuals sometimes went so far as to systematically record the waves of harassment in spreadsheets. Even though targets were active in documenting and requesting responses from the companies hosting such behavior, such efforts often had little tangible effect.

The spreadsheets and screenshots revealed that often different accounts would use nearly identical language, suggesting that a single individual or group had coordinated behind the scenes. Some people who were targeted found evidence that attacks had been planned on sites like the anonymous 4chan message board, where attackers would post screenshots and archived links of conversations about who to target and how to do it. Often, these documents were submitted to platforms as evidence that offending accounts should be shut down, but platform companies rarely complied or responded in a timely fashion.

Although everyone we spoke with used the available reporting tools, none felt doing so led to adequate resolution.

Many targeted individuals responded to their harassment by withdrawing from social media, like Trista, the gamer described earlier, and Naomi, a professor and writer. Naomi was targeted for nine months after far-right websites like Breitbart covered her work, triggering waves of rape and death threats on Twitter and Instagram. Although everyone we spoke with used the available reporting tools, none felt doing so led to adequate resolution. Platforms such as Twitch or Twitter cant stop the harassment campaigns on their own. Even when these companies block or ban users from their service, they cant prevent harassers from finding their targets on other platforms.

Some people, such as Charles, a Latino academic, or Barbara, a Jewish businesswoman, felt unsafe enough to reach out to law enforcement. Yet local law enforcement were largely ill equipped to help because the harassment took place online. Most perpetrators were savvy enough to avoid explicit or specific threats to physical safety that would have been more likely to prompt law enforcement involvement (for instance, saying I hope you die rather than I want to kill you). On rare occasions, however, harassers would move from online to offline. For example, one white woman academic received threatening letters mailed to her new home only days after moving in. Another was stalked in person at her workplace, and building security acted as a protective layer between her and her would-be attackers.

Our findings build on over a decade of research on trolling, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and other forms of online harassment and abuse. Researchers such asLisa Nakamura pioneered studies of how old prejudices appear anew in digital worlds. Recent work by Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Simone Browne, and many others show how prejudice is not just replicated on but built into new technology platforms. Our research, like previous studies, shows that perpetrators punch down. In other words, harassers target people with less social power and visibility than they have: young people, women, people of color, trans women, and disabled people. Trolling and harassment campaigns have long featured extremist and white supremacist themes.

So then what is to be done? In our report, we recommended three main areas for overhauling responses to cyberharassment and numerous ways to achieve them.

The personal, social, and material harms our participants experienced have real consequences for who can participate in public life.

First, platform companies must improve moderation tools and user control over profiles, pages, and accounts. They should consider formalizing practices targeted individuals already use, such as distributing moderation among trusted friends. Moderation and filtering tools should be strengthened, with referral-site filtering to prevent coordinated attacks from a single site, like 4Chan, and more stringent blocking to stop abusive individuals from viewing the activity of their targets.

Second, platforms can improve the abuse reporting process by adding transparent means to track abuse claims. They should also improve staffing and response time for existing reporting systems. Our research participants reported waiting weeks or months for responses from some platforms, which is simply unacceptable.

Third, platforms need to cooperate in preventing and responding to multiplatform harassment. This approach requires including targets of harassment, especially from marginalized and targeted groups, in the design processes and engineering oversight. For example, common standards and API-based tools could offer possibilities for blocking abusers across multiple platforms or sharing information across company safety teams. Platforms can prioritize user safety by hiring diverse designers and training technical staff to have a more rigorous understanding of how power, identity, and hate operate in society in online spaces and beyond.

Online harassment is ultimately about trying to control what kind of people are visible and have a voice in public arenas. The personal, social, and material harms our participants experienced have real consequences for who can participate in public life. Current laws and regulations allow digital platforms to avoid responsibility for content produced by users, but digital media companies must truly listen to their users, especially those from marginalized and frequently targeted communities, and follow in good faith any future regulations that limit hate speech and increase platform responsibility for abuse. And if online spaces are truly going to support democracy, justice, and equality, change must happen soon.

Originally posted here:
The trolls are teaming upand tech platforms aren't doing enough to stop them - Fast Company

Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that online platforms, including Pinterest and the Knot Worldwide, would restrict content that features or romanticizes weddings held on former slave plantations. These changes were the result of a campaign by the social justice organization Color of Change. In a letter, Color of Change wrote that plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen. The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry.

Color of Change posted the news on Facebook, where it was, of course, received with appropriate empathy and contemplation. The 600 comments included lots of gems such as Proud of our civil war plantation wedding! Eat shit color of change [sic]!! because one exclamation point wasnt enough. There was the old-faithful slavery was too long ago argument, with one commenter adding, So stupid. That was hundreds of years ago. Why not call them beautiful homes or restored homes. Are they canceling castle weddings too? And the unheard-of sentiment: There were slaves of every color.

The basic themes were echoed by the wedding vendors quoted in news reports: that slavery was in the past, that it wasnt that bad, that the splendor of plantations has outlived whatever negativity they might represent. While these pronouncements can be easily countered with reason, logic unfortunately doesnt matter.

Slavery was indeed in the past a shocker to readers, Im sure. Yet this hasnt prevented America from fervently preserving the history it does deem worthwhile, no matter how far back or inconsequential. Many Americans zealously defend their right to praise the Confederate flag, defend inanimate buildings from demolition or restoration (have you seen the passion among landmark preservationists?), and, yes, scroll endlessly through plantation-inspo, with none of the icky historical context.

Its not just about the maintenance of white power structures, but the prioritization of white Americans feelings and experiences

Historical texts, news articles and academic research are all available for anyone genuinely interested in examining slaverys brutality, which was often most severe in the deep south states where slave-owners built plantation mansions. If anything, the cruelty of the institution has been underestimated. Southern school districts are known to issue textbooks reducing enslaved black men, women and children to mere workers rather than what they were: forced laborers who often lived in perpetual terror and were sold as property with no human rights.

Theres also the persistent trope that black people were happy slaves. But most African Americans dont find much joy in seeing plantations glorified and their human histories deemed a niggling inconvenience.

For people committed to this narrative, however, facts dont matter. That their feelings are regularly given such credence reveals one end of Americas white supremacist spectrum. While we tend to associate white supremacy with reactionary violence and alt-right trolls, it also lives in more subtler spaces. Its not just about the maintenance of white power structures, but the prioritization of white Americans feelings and experiences.

These are the same feelings that have discounted black oppression in every era of black American life. In 1964, just a few months after the Civil Rights Act was passed and its effects were yet to be seen, a majority of white New Yorkers polled by the New York Times felt that the civil rights movement had gone too far. While the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act had yet to be passed, claims of reverse discrimination already abounded.

Today, plenty of people still claim that the Confederacy had nothing to do with hatred, and was a movement founded for personal freedom and states rights. Similarly, discrimination against black consumers and homeowners wasnt about subjugation, but asserting ones private rights without government interference.

The same logic guides the people who apparently believe that wedding websites restricting plantation content is an affront to the abstract rights of white Americans. White people being told what to do, even in theory, is a problem.

Many white Americans insist that they had no role in slavery and that it was so long ago. Yet they seem quite adamant about defending it. Of course, denying black Americans pain and preserving and normalizing the symbols of black subjugation is just as American as slavery itself.

View original post here:
Plantation weddings are wrong. Why is it so hard for white Americans to admit that? - The Guardian

A modern murder mystery for one and all

Two of my favorite films this year have been about the failings of generation wealth and the illusion of power. Ready or Not may have had one of the best endings of any film in its genre, delivered in such a satisfying and final way, a way left no room for doubt about the finality of fates of the characters.

Knives Out is similar in a lot of ways, just without the edge or the Satanisim. This isnt a criticismKnives Out is as traditional a mystery as it can be, right down to the idiosyncratic private detective and foreboding Victorian style house.

Which is surprising, considering its a film by Rian Johnson who is most well-known for subverting the expectations in The Last Jedi, causing millions of nerds to cry out on film Twitter, only to be suddenly silenced by Baby Yoda.

Knives Out is as Agatha Christie as can be, note for note, twist for twist. As a result, the film is fun and entertaining, if maybe a little long in the middle. As with most mystery stories, when the curtain is drawn back and the culprit revealed, everything that came before is worth the trouble. Its a competent movie worth seeing in theater.

Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a mystery writer of massive success, with assets in the millions of dollars and publishing empire worth much, much more. He is the patriarch of a large family of the privileged varietythe type that argue that raise alt-right teenagers and think Donald Trump is a jerk, but one that the country needed.

Theyll even happily involve their staff in their inane political discussions, asking their fathers Latina nurse whether or not she agrees with the current immigration policies, despite routinely forgetting exactly which Latin country from which her family originates.

You can tell they are a family who relies heavily in the idea of noblesse oblige to excuse their worst impulses. Some of those impulses involve adultery, embezzlement, and general aimlessthe traits that plague the upper classes. But do the faults extend to murder?

When Thrombey is found dead in his room, of an apparent suicide, someone hires Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to find out. Blanc is a famous detective recently featured in The New Yorker for solving some case or another, but more importantly hes got a goofy, genteel southern accent that is a stand in for a Poirot mustache, meaning he must always know more than he lets on. Poirot, I mean, Blanc gives himself forty-eight hours to solve the case and enlists the young nurse Marta (Ana De Armas) as his Watson.

The cast is excellent, of course. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans and Toni Collette, just to name a few and theres no way the film could be underperformed. The writing is strong as well, carefully plotted and telegraphed for mystery fans. I enjoyed it, mostly, although the film felt a little too long. Luckily for Johnson, his final act is superb and funny, bringing home the loose ends with aplomb.

More than the plotting, however, I enjoyed the subtext of the story, particularly how it dealt with the underpinnings of white privilege and racism and its general middle finger to both (although, Johnson himself is as white and privileged as they come, but at least he seems aware of it).

As far as the filmmaking is concerned, as I mentioned, it was competentnothing stood out as particularly stylish, which might be the style in and of itself. The entire film was a throwback to a certain genre of storytelling and it seems that Johnson was careful not to stray too far away from those conventions.

Still, Knives Out is likely a crowd pleaser. Theres nothing outlandish or objectionable. Its as safe a film as you can find, particularly for the holiday season. Sometimes its nice to find a film I could easily see with my mother over the course of the holidays. It might give us something to talk about besides who recently divorced or died who I might have known (but probably didnt) from church. Knives Out is worth a night out to be sure.

Link:
Knives Out Is A Shoo-In - The Pulse - Chattanooga Pulse

Perhaps the strangest part of the impeachment process against President Donald Trump is its origin: Trumps own false belief that somehow the government of Ukraine has been secretly working against him.

It is difficult to state, without exaggeration, just how bizarre this notion is. Trump will be tried in the Senate over the actions he took based on an idea that doesnt exist in reality.

The idea Trumps idea is that Ukraine is responsible for pushing a false narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, to his benefit. (Theres no evidence for this idea. The opposite is true: Russia did interfere in the election, and Ukraine had nothing to do with it.)

Even on its own terms, the idea makes no sense. Ukraine needed the USs help in its fight against Russia. Why would it be simultaneously sabotaging an election while asking for help?

Nonetheless, Trump believes it.

They tried to take me down, Trump said of the Ukraine government, at a meeting in the Oval office in May, according to the Washington Post. They are horrible, corrupt people.

His staff, including Energy Secretary Rick Perry, tried to give him good advice. After all, Ukraine is a country that desperately needed US military aid at the time.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo couldnt find any evidence for the theory either, and he ended up calling Fox News for clues.

Trump was having none of it. We could never quite understand it, a former senior White House official told the Post. There were accusations that they had somehow worked with the Clinton campaign. There were accusations theyd hurt him. He just hated Ukraine.

Trumps impeachment isnt the only real-world consequence of the fictional belief that, for some squirrelly reason, Ukraine was sabotaging Trump while simultaneously relying on him for help. Trumps personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, has spent so much time in Ukraine in search of the truth that he is now under federal investigation for possibly failing to register as a foreign agent of Ukraine, and possible violations of campaign finance law, according to Bloomberg.

This has potentially serious consequences for Giuliani. The penalty for failing to register as a foreign agent is up to five years in prison.

Yet Giuliani is doubling down. He spent early December in Ukraine interviewing former prosecutors in hopes of finding something anything that might demonstrate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Bidens son was somehow involved in corruption in Ukraine. So far, nothing.

Previously, conservatives pushed false conspiracy theories precisely because they knew the theories were false. Airing theories that are false has several tactical advantages:

There is a great story by BuzzFeeds Joe Bernstein that describes how alt-right conspiracy web sites create their news. Activists see their lies as a form of entertainment, in much the same way that liberals used to enjoy Stephen Colberts fictional conservative persona on The Colbert Report.

In the story, Nora Ralph, one of the editors of the Ralph Retort (a conservative conspiracy site) describes how she feels about Infowars Alex Jones, another prolific pusher of political fiction. To me, thats entertainment. We dont really think the frogs are gay. I dont think the protein powder works. I never thought some people watch this stuff and are like, yes, this is hard-hitting journalism. I thought most of us could distinguish between entertainment and facts. I never really thought people were stupid enough to get caught up in this stuff.

It comes as a surprise to discover that Trump is not in on the joke. Hes not blathering on about Ukraine because he enjoys triggering Trump Derangement Syndrome among his enemies. He really believes this stuff.

And its not just Ukraine. Consider:

Trump isnt pushing conspiracies as part of an elaborate game with the media. He is genuinely unable to tell fact from fiction. That makes the crisis inside the White House a level more dangerous. Dangerous for him in terms of the legal consequences. And dangerous for the country, whose foreign and domestic policies are being derailed by things that dont exist in real life.

I asked Travis View, a longtime observer of the QAnon conspiracy movement, why anyone would voluntarily gull themselves into such a tight corner that they might, like Giuliani, be prosecuted.

For Pizzagate believers, it was satisfying to think that Hillary Clinton would be arrested for child sex trafficking. For Alex Jones, spreading baseless conspiracy theories gained him a large audience and wealth, he told me.

For Trump, believing that Ukraine was responsible for election meddling absolves Russia, and therefore removed the taint from Trumps election victory. It takes less emotional effort to believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that uplifts your allies and condemns your enemies than a difficult, hard, complex truth.

The embrace of fictitious beliefs regardless of the real-world consequences is a step-change in conservative thinking. You can see it in climate science denial, QAnon, the anti-vaxx movement, and believing that the water supply is contaminated with chemicals that make frogs gay. False ideas are no longer being pushed as a strategy of distraction. Now they are required as articles of faith, facts that require belief regardless of the real-world consequences.

As Giulianis legal situation indicates, there are real dangers to this line of thinking. Alex Jones, too, has been successfully sued for pushing the line that the Sandy Hook shooting never occurred.

Trump, however, clearly doesnt care.

The question is whether conservatism as a whole wants to follow him off this cliff.

Read more:
Trump's very real impeachment is based on his own false beliefs and it represents a suicidal step-change in conservative thinking - Business Insider