Mediaboss Marketing

Among dozens of addled tweets from the commander in chief over the past few days, one in particular deserves pausing over because it demonstrates not just the weak-mindedness of our president but also the way his leadership is sabotaging conservatism.

Trump retweeted a post featuring disgraced columnist Michelle Malkin, who complained about being silenced on social media. Trump responded: The radical left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!

In the name of standing up for aggrieved conservatives, Trump soils the brand. First, a detail. The radical left is not in control of those outlets, and even if it were, they are private entities and therefore perfectly free to make their own judgments about content. There is nothing illegal about it. If the administration (SET ITAL)were(END ITAL) working to remedy the situation, that is what would be illegal. Another detail: Trump has 19.7 million followers on Instagram, 26.7 million on Facebook and 80 million on Twitter. Perhaps what keeps him so popular is his audiences inexhaustible appetite for whining.

The woman Trump thanked is a columnist and social media entrepreneur who was a respected member of the conservative commentariat emphasis on the past tense. In the past two years, she has been shunned by respectable conservative outlets. She is no longer welcome at CPAC. The Young Americas Foundation has dropped her, and the Daily Wire and National Review discontinued her syndicated column.

The occasion for the deplatforming was Malkins swan dive into the right-wing fever swamps. In 2017, she endorsed alt-right candidate Paul Nehlen (Paul Nehlen slams ... corporate open-borders elites!), and contributed to the VDARE website which frequently hosts white nationalists, racists and anti-Semites.

Her most grotesque relationship though, and the one that got her booted from the Young Americas Foundation, was with a group calling themselves groypers, led by a 21-year-old YouTube host named Nick Fuentes. To get a sense of just how loathsome this figure is, have a look at this video in which he wonders, grinning, about whether 6 million cookies could really be baked in ovens and how the math doesnt add up. Holocaust jokes. How droll. Fuentes, you will not be shocked to learn, is one of the very fine people who marched with neo-Nazis at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Remember Pepe the Frog? Hes their mascot. He described the mass murder in an El Paso Walmart as an act of desperation. Turning Point USA is too tame for his tastes, and his group has lately been heckling speakers like Ben Shapiro, Dan Crenshaw and even Donald Trump Jr.

Yet, Malkin has declared herself the mother of groypers and called them good kids. When she was rebuked by mainstream conservatives, she declared her allegiances proudly:

They want me to disavow Nick Fuentes and VDARE and Peter Brimelow and Faith Goldy and Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys and Steve King and Laura Loomer and on and on.

They did want that, but now Trump has vitiated that work by praising Malkin. The thing Trump retweeted was not actually a Malkin post, but a tweet of Malkin speaking to the Western Conservative Summit. America First Clips is a feed for one of Fuentess outlets. Naturally, Fuentes is gloating.

Trump defenders will no doubt protest that Trump knew nothing of Malkins descent into neo-Nazi land. But thats no excuse. In fact, Trump probably did not know much about those he praised, either Malkin or, by extension, Fuentes. But he has a duty to know. Yes, hes an indolent ignoramus, but guess what, the taxpayers are paying for a huge staff. He has people who can check. He doesnt use them because he doesnt care. His moral reasoning is primitive. If you are pro-Trump, no matter what else you are (a murderous dictator, a racist troll), youre fine in his book. Loutish protesters harass a TV journalist using the F words (fake news and, you know, the other one), and Trump proclaims them great people. He has no objective moral standards. Everything is about him. On a scale of moral reasoning, he is subzero. But the world of conservative opinion-shapers does still attempt, however weakly, to maintain some guard rails. With every passing day of Donald Trumps leadership, those standards crumble a bit more.

Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her column is syndicated by Creators.

Originally posted here:
Charen: Trump smashes the right's ability to police itself - The Winchester Star

One thing we know for sure about Donald Trump is that he doesnt change. On Tuesday, he was back on Twitter claiming that an expansion of mail-in voting would lead to rampant voter fraud and regurgitating a groundless conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, was involved in the murder of a former member of his staff, Lori Klausutis, who died in 2001. In another Tweet, Trump threatened to close down Twitter and other social-media platforms if they silence conservative voicesby which he means if they take away his right to spread all sorts of lies and smears in the run-up to November.

Trumps demagogic use of social media has been a blight on American democracy for years, of course, but the stakes are now bigger than ever. With a little more than five months left until the election, he is behind in the polls and struggling to overcome the popular perception that he mishandled the coronavirus pandemic. The official mortality toll is about to hit a hundred thousand, and, due to uncounted deaths, the real toll is almost certainly higher. In these circumstances, Trumps relection prospects hinge on his ability to rewrite history, create diversions, and vilify his political opponents and critics. Like Squealer, the propagandist pig in George Orwells Animal Farm, Trump is asking the citizenry to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and believe made-up tales. What is different is that Trump is using social media to distribute to his followers their daily diet of disinformation, resentment, and incitement.

On Tuesday morning, when Trump took to Twitter, he had little reason to believe that his posts would provoke anything other than the familiar reactions: thousands of angry comments, tens of thousands of likes, and some tut-tuts from his media critics. The unwillingness of the big social-media platforms to rein him in is so well established that it has descended to the level of a bad joke. To companies like Twitter and Facebook, politics is a revenue stream, and the stream flows fullest when the politics is bitter and divisiveor, in a word, Trumpian. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook shut down an internal team of researchers after it had warned the companys leadership that the platforms algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. Twitter, for its part, has repeatedly promised to remove false and incendiary material, but it has also conspicuously failed to apply its rulebook to the political arsonist in the White House.

On Tuesday, Twitter took a small step in the right direction, by flagging the factual inaccuracy of a pair of Trumps tweets about mail-in ballots and voter fraud. Underneath these tweets, it inserted a blue exclamation mark and a link that read, Get the facts about mail-in ballots. If you click on this link, you land on a page with the headline Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud and also links to a series of articles contradicting the Presidents claims. The company said that these alerts were in line with a previously announced pledge to apply fact-checking labels to tweets that contain misinformation.

But, for some unexplained reason, Twitter didnt flag another Trump tweet, in which he claimed that he had provided the nations governors with unlimited Testing for the coronavirus, which also was a blatant lie. And the company refused a written request from the widower of Lori Klausutis to take down Trumps tweets about his late wifes death, which Trump has used to smear Scarborough, despite the fact that Scarborough was eight hundred miles away when it happened. Klausutis worked in Scarboroughs Florida office when he was a Republican congressman. A medical examiners report said that she died of a blood clot in the brain subsequent to a fall precipitated by heart disease. Trump picked up on an Internet conspiracy theory that the death was a homicide, and that Scarborough was involved. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so, Trump wrote a couple weeks ago. On Saturday, he urged his followers to keep looking into the death of Klausutis, who worked in Scarboroughs office when he was a Republican congressman. On Tuesday, he again referred to Scarborough as Psycho Joe, adding, So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I wont bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?

In his letter to Twitters C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, Timothy Klausutis pointed out that the conspiracy theory about his wifes death had caused a great deal of anguish to her family. Even some loyal Republican voices blanched at Trump promoting it. We suppose there are some Trump followers who enjoy this, the editorial page of the New York Post said. The libs say horrible things about you, go ahead and say terrible things about them! There is a difference, though, between mocking someones ratings and hurting an innocent family with the memories of their tragic daughter because of a petty feud.

Scarborough told the New York Times that Trumps calls for a police investigation of one of his political critics had echoes of Vladimir Putins Russia and Viktor Orbns Hungary. Timothy Klausutis said that, if an ordinary Twitter user like him had posted something so incendiary, he would have been banned from the platform. Twitters list of rules explicitly states that users may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. And yet Twitter refused to take down Trumps tweets on the flimsy grounds that Scarborough is a public figure.

To an amoral serial offender such as Trump, that is an invitation to keep at it. As long as he targets people in the public domain, he can evidently say anything he wants, and amplify any conspiracy theory that appears from the feverish swamps of the alt-right. In a redux of the 2016 Pizzagate disinformation campaign, Donald Trump, Jr., recently posted on Instagram a meme that accused Joe Biden of being a pedophile. Facebook, which owns Instagram, took no action against Trump, Jr. How long before his father joins in? If the social-media companies dont do more to meet their responsibilities as publishers and de-facto public utilities, it probably wont be long. There is no sewer so vile that Trump wont wade into it, dragging the entire country along. Thats another thing we know about him.

See the rest here:
Fact-Checking Donald Trump on Twitter Wont Stop His Demagoguery - The New Yorker

HIP-HOP

On Monday morning (May 25),Doja Cattried shutting down the #DojaCatIsOverParty by addressing her allegedly racist songs from the past, early participation in what was considered to be alt-right chat rooms and self-hatred issues rooted in her curly hair in a lengthy Instagram Live video.

The video supported a note she wrote to her 6.8 million fans on Monday about how she grew up using public chat rooms to socialize with others and how she takes pride in being a Black woman with her fatherDumisani Dlamini's side being from South Africa.

What resurfaced about Doja Cat (real nameAmalaratna Zandile Dlamini) over the weekend got Twitter chatting nonstop about whether the "Say So" hitmaker, who recently scored her first No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit with the Nicki Minaj-assisted remix, is a racist or has internalized racism in controversial ways.

Her first bullet point during the apologetic IG Live session was about self-hatred after a video surfaced online where the naturally curly-haired singer complained about maintaining her locks. "It's frustrating for me. It's very hard for me," she confessed. "A lot of my friends would agree who have hair like mine that they have a hard time taking care of it. What I think that the mistake may have been that I made was saying it on a social platform, saying it in public.... In no f---ing way does it mean that I hate my hair. My hair is amazing. I have beautiful hair."

The twofold debate parted Twitter viewers in different groups, with some blaming black women in general for not "appreciating their natural hair" to others showing sympathy for the artist for not being more in touch with her African roots after Doja told Whoopi Goldberg earlier this month that she had never met her father.

Another hot button topic she discussed was her2015 track "Dindu Nuffin," a racial slur that distorts the phrase "didn't do nothing" used to ridicule unarmed Black people who fall victim to police brutality. Twitter users claimed her song specifically mocked the death of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody that same year after being arrested during a traffic stop, which Doja denied had any connection to her.Much like the way Black people reclaimed the age-old n-word either colloquially or musically, the 24-year-old singer wanted to repurpose the racial epithet in her track after having the term hurled at her in the chat rooms.

"As for the old song that's resurfaced, it was in no way tied to anything outside of my own personal experience. It was written in response to people who often used that term to hurt me," Doja wrote on her Instagram. "I made an attempt to flip its meaning, but recognize that it was a bad decision to use the term in my music."

During her half-hour non-scripted mea culpa, Doja continued explaining how these chat rooms bred such a hurtful environment for her that she recorded "Dindu Nuffin" as a "f--- you" statement.

"I'm very sorry to anybody who's taken offense, to anybody who I've hurt using this term. When I used it, it was because I was in chat rooms all the time, and I was kind of locked away," she revealed. "I was always on there just dealing with people coming at me left and right talking about different slanderous terms after another. The term that I used in the song is one that I learned that day. People were calling me it left and right, left and right and I used it in a song. It was to kind of take back and f---ing just say 'f--- you to those people.' The song, however, I agree, may be the worst song in the entire world."

The term couldn't have come back in a worse time during America's history after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man from Minnesota died Monday (May 26) shortly after a police officer pressed his knee onto Floyd's neck when three other officers suspected him of forgery. Whether fans were able to hear her out on her decision or completely nullify it, Doja conveniently claimed that "to see my song that I made connected to an innocent Black woman's death is one of the most awful rumors that I have ever encountered."

But Doja's online history, especially in these previously free chat rooms, didn't just include what was said to her, but what she supposedly asked another member to do to her. Twitter users scraped up old footage of Doja hanging out on the video-chatting website Tinychat and askinga white man to call her the hard n-word as a form of raceplay, which is a type of sexual roleplay where one person insults the other with derogatory slurs as a form of domination. She admitted in the IG Live video that she's "kinky as f---" yet denied she made this request or ever participated in raceplay in whatTwitterusers claimed to be exclusively white supremacist chat rooms, which she also denied.

One Twitter user described the kink as potentially stemming "from internalized racism" and as a common phenomenon in pornography. The commentary seems to fit Doja's character as a self-proclaimed e-girl, which has taken on the derogatory meaning of girls who spend a lot of time online in search of sex while sporting eclectic aesthetics, ranging from rainbow-colored hairstyles to winged eyeliner. The "Boss Bi---" artist even created aVogueguide to e-beauty last December.

But hot pink wigs or fetishes don't summarize Doja's sexuality. She also debunked the rumor that she only dates white men, saying race, religion and other factors don't factor into whom she loves. However, those still hanging out at the #DojaCatIsOverParty haven't been loving her hits lately because of the confusing slew of clips that came back online and the live video she started to disprove them.

One fan wrote, "i'm still listening to doja cat. i just aint condoning her self hatred," but others cannot separate the artist from the person like that, a common phenomenon for controversial musicians. With online virality being forever etched into her career (her self-produced 2018 "Moo" YouTube music videopaved the path for her success before "Say So" gained early attention from TikTok), whatever Doja has said or done on the Internet gets carved in stone right next to her musical milestones.

More:
Here's How The Internet That Built Up Doja Cat Broke Down Her Alleged Racist Remarks - Billboard

Last week, a 17-year-old boy in Toronto was charged with an act of terrorism in the alleged killing of a woman with a machete the first time such a charge has been brought in a case involving incel ideology.

Also last week, a 20-year-old man who self-identified as an incel short for involuntary celibate allegedly went on a shooting spree in Arizona, targeting couples to express his anger over the fact women had rejected him.

These are just two of the most recent attacks attributed to incels. Incel-related violence has been on the rise for the past seven years, and according to our research, has been linked to the deaths of at least 53 people and scores of injuries.

Incel is the name adopted by an online community comprised almost entirely of men and boys who rage against women and blame them for their sexless lives.

While many are simply lonely and use the community for support in an age of digital isolation, some radicals advocate for social and sexual rebellion. These extremist incels seek revenge through violent attacks against people they call Chads and Stacys, a reference to men and women they perceive as very successful when it comes to sex.

In our new research, we argue governments should recognise incels as ideological extremist organisations and, through stronger policies and laws, start combating misogyny in the same way they fight Islamic extremism.

In our research, we reviewed incel attacks over the past seven years, looking at what the perpetrators were posting online and how they were engaging with others in the community.

We found incels are angry because they believe the sexual revolution has made women promiscuous and manipulative. They believe feminism, the contraceptive pill and womens involvement in politics have fuelled this promiscuity.

But they believe women are choosing to have sex only with Chads, not incels, and feel a sense of injustice and persecution as a result.

According to the incel-run Incel Wiki website, these men view Chads as the only male beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. They hate Stacys because they are vain and obsessed with jewellery, makeup and clothes, and are entitled whores.

Read more: How a masculine culture that favors sexual conquests gave us today's 'incels'

These misogynistic views connect incels to other alt-right, anti-women groups like Pick Up Artists and Mens Rights Activists, which believe feminine values have come to dominate society and men must fight back against a politically correct and misandrist culture to protect their very existence.

Alt-right groups, including incels, have been emboldened by the presidency of Donald Trump in the US, and are certainly active in Australia.

They use online forums to spread their messages of hate, convincing other would-be incels they can blame their social and sexual difficulties on others. Some fantasise about committing acts of violence.

This was the case for Alek Minassian, who has admitted to driving a van onto a sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people. Minassian has told police he was radicalised by other incels online.

Before the van attack, Minassian posted this message on Facebook:

the Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

The last part of the quote refers to Elliot Rodger, who published a 141-page incel manifesto online before killing six people in a shooting and stabbing spree in California in 2014. He has since become a martyr in the incel community.

Our research shows incel violence presents a similar threat to public safety as religious extremism and its increasing.

Incel extremism fits the definition put forth by Home Affairs for violent extremism:

the use or support of violence to achieve ideological, religious or political goals.

However, Home Affairs apparently does not view misogynistic extremism as such a pressing issue. While some states have developed threat assessment centres that could be used to monitor radical incels, the federal government has not provided important leadership by labelling incels or misogyny a security threat.

Understanding the threat posed by incels is difficult because it requires unpacking and critiquing the misogynistic views that underpin their behaviours. Some men misread this as an attack.

Read more: Remembering everyday violence against women and girls on Dec. 6

Some lessons can also be learned from strategies to counter other forms of violent extremism.

Targeting specific groups can create suspect communities and contribute to feelings of persecution. This, in turn, can increase the chances of people becoming violent. Incels already feel disempowered and victimised, so creating a suspect community could exacerbate the problem.

Our research suggests the most effective interventions should occur at a societal level.

One reason for this is the anonymous nature of the incel movement. These men tend not to admit to their beliefs in public, relying instead on comments from opinion leaders to legitimise them. If we counter these types of misogynistic statements and deem them a security threat, it could lessen their impact with individual men.

This also means not allowing the mainstream media, politicians or public commentators to excuse or justify gendered violence when it happens.

There is also plenty of evidence that tackling misogyny in this way could help reduce domestic violence, as well as all other forms of violent extremism.

Read more: 'Ideological masculinity' that drives violence against women is a form of violent extremism

Beyond this, health, education and social workers could be trained to spot at-risk behaviours in individual men and act when appropriate.

Following ideas surfaced by other researchers on countering violent extremism, we advocate taking a public health approach that allows us to address the feelings of isolation and alienation among incels and intervene at early stages to prevent violence from occurring.

Waiting for radicalised people to start planning attacks is too risky. Germany and Norway have had significant success changing opinions and behaviours by targeting at-risk individuals at earlier stages of potential radicalisation.

It is time for Home Affairs to end its preoccupation with external threats and instead address the threats within. Misogyny needs to be understood as a real threat to our public and private security.

Original post:
'Incel' violence is a form of extremism. It's time we treated it as a security threat - The Conversation AU

Tiana Lowe, a conservative commentator for the Washington Examiner who recently wrote an article defending Musk, said she hoped it was a sign that Musk fans and Trump fans could find common ground over their shared enemies.

We don't see him hinting and nodding and winking at the alt-right, and we don't see him hinting or nodding or winking at racism or sexism, Lowe said. But there is sort of an attitude of, if Texas is going to let me run my business, that's great. If fake news media is going to say lies about me, screw them. And I think that really does kind of resonate with Trump. Musks representatives did not return a request for comment.

Before the Covid-19 crisis, the only things both men had in common seemed to be their shared desire to send mankind back to the moon, and their tendency for unfiltered, occasionally nonsensical tweets.

Musk, who is a registered independent voter and previously described his views as moderate, has openly criticized Trump in the past, suggesting in 2016 that he doesnt seem to have the sort of character needed to be president, blasting him in 2017 for withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and withdrawing from his business advisory groups as a result. In one of his rare political endorsements, he threw his weight behind Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who shared his views on a universal basic income in an increasingly automated society.

But unlike other tech billionaires, whom Trump often attacks for disagreeing with him, the president continued to express his admiration for the South African-born polymath, even before the coronavirus. He likes rockets. And he does good at rockets, too, by the way, he told CNBC at Davos in February, calling him one of the worlds great geniuses, and one of our very smart people, and we want to cherish those people.

Trump campaign deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews said in a statement that the president has breathed new life into space exploration and taken bold steps towards guaranteeing American space dominance. She said the Obama-Biden administration essentially shut down the space program and made America reliant on Russia for space travel. The statement did not mention Musk.

From the beginning of the crisis, Musk, the temperamental billionaire leader of SpaceX and Tesla, has frequently questioned mainstream scientific research, reporting and policy on Covid-19, to the point that Twitter was forced to deal with a wave of complaints suggesting the social-media platform remove his tweets for spreading disinformation. He accelerated the proposal of hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure from the backwaters of Bitcoin twitter discussions into the mainstream, off of two tweets (maybe worth considering), bucked government lockdowns in order to keep his electric cars in production and recently stated that he believed policies designed to keep Americans safe were violating their constitutional rights. As he bluntly tweeted in March: The coronavirus panic is dumb.

In the process, hes done things that Trump and his followers more than happily applauded, such as slamming CNN in April when they reported that he had not distributed ventilators to California, as he had once promised. What I find surprising is that CNN still exists, he tweeted, followed by a flurry of evidence that he had sent the promised ventilators to hospitals across the state. And as Trump equivocates on whether states should reopen their businesses, Musk, as a wealthy private citizen with billions at his disposal and a noted reputation for erratic behavior, is able to do what he cannot: openly defy government lockdown orders, and tweet his anger at government officials with impunity.

Read the original:
Trump and Musk unite over Twitter, the moon and sticking it to the establishment - POLITICO