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At least that's the explanation Alex Jones, a right-wing radio broadcaster, was peddling on his show this past Wednesday. He argued that Trump Jr. should be praised, not ridiculed, for trying to protect America from hostile foreign intelligence. Jones is notably the same broadcaster who last month interviewed Robert David Steele, a man who claimed that the 2,000 children who go missing every day are being shipped to Mars to be used as sex slaves. It's easy to dismiss Jones' show and his cohorts as far-right conspiracy theorists, but his blog, Infowars.com, has over 3 million American viewers every month and his radio show, which is syndicated on more than 60 stations, is reported to have anywhere between 2 million and 5 million listeners daily. Most importantly, his show also has the backing of President Donald Trump, who has argued Jones has an amazing reputation and deserves a Pulitzer.

Going as far back as Joseph Pulitzer's and William Randolph Hearst's "yellow journalism," America has developed a tradition of sensationalist writers, broadcasters and fearmongers. But now we have a dangerous mix with a sensationalist president who tweets out his own form of yellow journalism and reinforces the credibility of unhinged thinkers like Jones and his cohorts.

Put simply, fact and fiction are morphing into alternative facts and gospel. Since the United States is the most powerful economy and military in the world, this is not just an American problem -- it has the potential to be a global problem, particularly if our government begins to make decisions based on falsehoods.

Yet the phenomenon of believing the absurd rather than critically questioning it is nothing new.

What can those of us who eschew the illusion of knowledge and seek the truth do? Charles Mackay wrote, "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." So go find a member of the herd. Appeal to his mind by listening carefully and creating an exchange, and then introduce elements of critical thinking.

Appeal to his patriotism by paraphrasing President Carter's reflection that "The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation." (Tip: don't tell them that Carter said it.)

The whole world is depending on you.

More:
Donald Trump, Alex Jones and the illusion of knowledge - CNN

Evangelical voters put Donald Trump over the top to protect the unborn, but he has declared war on them instead.

For a start, the World Health Organization estimates that between 2030-2050, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 deaths every year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.And that was before Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord, putting the entire agreement at risk.

Of course, these arent the unborn children most religious conservatives mean.They mean fetuses and embryoseven miscarried fetuses, which as of last week may be issued birth certificates by the state of Florida. But as a rising generation of creation care Christians have emphasized, to be truly pro-life requires protecting human life in all its forms, not just before birth. And tallying up the Trump administrations war on the unborn is truly horrific.

Theres the 250,000 annual deaths caused by climate-related diseases as droughts increase, crops fail, and micro-climates shift. That number is the tip of the climate change iceberg, however.As President Obama patiently explained to Leonardo DiCaprio in a video that has since gone viral, the greatest human dangers from climate change will result from mass migration, as hundreds of millions of peoplemost of them poorflee coastal areas and newly desertified regions, choking cities and straining food supplies.

Imagine the Syrian refugee crisis, magnified by a hundredfold.

And while youre imagining Syrian refugees, remember that the Syrian conflict was also, in large part, a result of climate change.A 2015 report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that the unprecedented drought from 2007-2010 forced Syrian farmers to abandon their farms for the cities and caused a massive crop failure that led to food shortages, riots, overcrowding, instability, and civil unrest that led to government crackdowns.

This was no ordinary drought.Based on a century of data on precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, the report concluded that anthropogenic climate change made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 20072010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone.Its no wonder that the University College London Institute for Global Health stated that climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.

Oh, but there are others.

Next are the 24,000 Americans who will die each year for lack of health coverage if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, according to a number of studies that have tracked the health effects of insurance (or lack thereof). That number is probably too conservative.It is based on 20 million people losing insuranceless than the Congressional Budget Office now estimates and extrapolates from the impacts of expanded insurance coverage in Massachusetts.Extrapolations based on New York, Maine, and Arizona yield an annual death toll of 44,000. (Incidentally, none of these figures are based on the study cited in one attempted refutation of the projections.)

And then the unknown number of people, born and as yet unborn, who will get sick because of newly lax or eliminated water pollution rules, smog rules, power plant emissions regulations, fracking regulations, and pesticide regulations.Indeed, one of the first acts of the Scott Pruitt-led Environmental Protection Agency was to de-regulate chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that EPAs scientific studies conclusively showed to be a carcinogen.

Overseas, the popular UNICEF program is the worlds largest provider of vaccines to vulnerable children around the world1.5 million of whom die every year due to diseases that can be prevented by vaccination. But instead of increasing funding for UNICEF, the 2018 Trump budget zeroes it out completely, a loss of $132 million for the agency. The human cost?To be determined.

There are even 20,000 refugees with immediately life-threatening health conditions, according to the United Nations, whose entry to the United States has been held up by the administrations on-again/off-again travel ban.

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Then there are the numbers that are harder to quantify.We will never know how many people will get sick because government funding for scientific research has been slashed, for example.Nor can we know the effects of Trumps withdrawal from the international world order and the decline in U.S. global leadership.

And all of these numbers are only the health-related casualties of the Trump administration.The current pace of civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes1,484 were killed in Iraq and Syria during the month of Marchwould blow away the Obama civilian death toll, and the count will likely rise higher as ISIS moves into urban areas.Trump is indeed bombing the hell out of ISIS, and, exactly as predicted, this has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent bystanders.

Needless to say, none of this includes any future death toll from wars in the Middle East, Iran, the Korean Peninsula, or wherever else the hawkish wing of the Trump administration turns its attention.

There is a coherent ideology tying together all of these statistics. It is the philosophy of tyrants past and present: that power is the greatest good, that life is a bitter competition among hostile combatants, that what matters are properties like strength, fame, money, possessions, and size.

And the worst things?Weakness, femininity, being a nobody, foolishly believing in nave myths of cooperation and compassion.Our vulgar, narcissistic president is a Nietzschean, an Randian, even though I am sure he has never read either of them.His only value is his own aggrandizement.

In their hearts, religious conservatives must know that Trump is not truly pro-life. Not simply because, as he said many times, he believes in the rights of women to make their own reproductive health care choices.But more broadly: because his adolescent, dog-eat-dog worldview is the very opposite of the biblical one, in which Jesus favored the meek, the outcast, the humbleprecisely those Trump would call losers and discard.

God says in Deuteronomy 30:19: I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.Donald Trump has done the opposite.

See the rest here:
Donald Trump's War on the Unborn - Daily Beast

The Post's Ruth Marcus explains why Donald Trump Jr. is in legal jeopardy. Hint: stupidity is not a legal defense. (Adriana Usero,Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)

The key insight from a week of gobsmacking revelations is not that the Russia scandal may finally have an underlying crime but that, asDavid Brookssuggests, over the past few generations the Trump family built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil. (Remember when the media collectively oohed and ahhed that, Say what you will about Donald Trump, but his kids are great!? Add that to the heap of inane media narratives that helped normalize Trump to the voters.) We now see that, sure enough, the Trump legal team (the fastest-growing segment of the economy) has trouble restraining its clients, explaining away initial, false explanations and preventing self-incriminating statements. (The biggest trouble, of course, is that the president lied that this is all fake news and arguably committed obstruction of justice to hide his campaign teams misdeeds.)

Let me suggest the real problem is not the Trump family, but the GOP. To paraphrase Brooks, It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a [partys] mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing. Again, to borrow from Brooks, beyond partisanship the GOP evidences no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code.

Lets dispense with the Democrats are just as bad defense. First, I dont much care; we collectively face a party in charge of virtually the entire federal government and the vast majority of statehouses and governorships. Its that partys inner moral rot that must concern us for now. Second, its simply not true, and saying so reveals the origin of the problem a woe is me sense of victimhood that grossly exaggerates the oppositions ills and in turn justifies its own egregious political judgments and rhetoric. If the GOP had not become unhinged about the Clintons, would it have rationalized Trump as the lesser of two evils? Only in the crazed bubble of right-wing hysteria does an ethically challenged, moderate Democrat become a threat to Western civilization and Trump the salvation of America.

Indeed, for decades now, demonization of gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc. has been the animating spirit behind much of the right. It has distorted its assessment of reality, giving us anti-immigrant hysteria, promulgating disrespect for the law (how many respectable conservatives suggested disregarding the Supreme Courts decision on gay marriage?), elevating Fox News hosts blatantly false propaganda as the counterweight to liberal media bias and preventing serious policy debate. For seven years, the party vilified Obamacare without an accurate assessment of its faults and feasible alternative plans. Obama bad or Clinton bad became the only credo leaving the party, as Brooks said of the Trump clan, with no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code and no coherent policies for governing.

We have always had in our political culture narcissists, ideologues and flimflammers, but it took the 21st-century GOP to put one in the White House. It took elected leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican National Committee (not to mention its donors and activists) to wave off Trumps racists attacks on a federal judge, blatant lies about everything from 9/11 to his own involvement in birtherism, replete evidence of disloyalty to America (i.e. Trumps Russia first policies), misogyny, Islamophobia, ongoing potential violations of the Constitutions emoluments clause (along with a mass of conflicts of interests), firing of an FBI director, and now, evidence that the campaign was willing to enlist a foreign power to defeat Clinton in the presidential election.

Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOPs disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their fathers unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave because that is what conservatives must believe, since liberals do not is a party that will deny Trumps complicity in gross misconduct. Its a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. Its not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any external moral truth or ethical code.

Read this article:
The GOP's moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr. - Washington Post

In Paris on Thursday, Donald Trump said, A lot of people dont know that France is Americas first and oldest ally. That may be true. But commentators noted that when Trump uses the a lot of people dont know formulation, its usually a sign that he didnt know himself.

Its called projection. And Trump does it with remarkable frequency. You may have noticed that over the last few days, Trump and his allies have begun talking a lot about the Hillary Clinton campaigns alleged collusion with the governments of Russia and Ukraine. On Wednesday morning, for instance, Trump tweeted a quote from the conservative Washington Times that claimed, Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump.

Why is Trump suddenly interested in the Democratic Partys ties to the Russian government? Perhaps because on Monday, The New York Times broke a blockbuster story about his campaigns ties to the Russian government.

Its a pattern that has repeated itself again and again since Trump launched his presidential bid. Last June, as Hillary Clinton was finishing up her primary campaign, she began testing a line that she would use against Trump throughout the summer and fall: Hes temperamentally unfit. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, she added that, A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. Soon, Trump was making the same argument about her. I dont think shes all there, he declared in August. In September he called her trigger-happy and very unstable.

Another, related, Clinton theme was the impact of Trumps bad behavior on Americas children. In its first negative ad, the Clinton campaign depicted children watching Trumps crude, violent, and demeaning comments on TV. Trump soon picked up the theme himself, asking a North Carolina crowd, What should these parents tell their children about Hillary Clintons attacks?

Then in August, after Trump named Steve Bannon to be his campaigns chief executive, Clinton announced she would give a speech on Trumps ties to white nationalists. That same day, Trump told a Mississippi crowd that, Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.

Pat Robertson Gives Trump a Pass on Russia

The following month, as journalists pressed him to state definitively that he believed President Obama was born in the United States, Trump announced that, Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. In October, as numerous women came forward to accuse Trump of sexual harassment, he began accusing Clinton of abusing women.

Trump invited three alleged victims of Bill Clintons sexual harassment to the second presidential debate, and declared from the podium that, Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.

During the primaries, Ted Cruz actually tried to diagnose this Trump habit. This man is a pathological liar, Cruz insisted. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.

Why does Trump do this? Sigmund Freud believed people project onto others impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Erick Erickson suggested that projection may be a response to crisis or extreme stress. Others have linked it to narcissism.

The more important question is why it works, at least among Trumps base. One answer may be that Trump supporters embrace his projection because theyre doing it themselves. Consider Trumps claim that Hillary Clinton is the real bigot. On its face its odd given that Clinton enjoyed overwhelming African American support. But its easier to understand the statements appeal when you realize that, according to a November 2016 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, Trump supporters were twice as likely to say whites face a lot of discrimination as they were to say blacks face a lot of discrimination. When it came to bigotry, in other words, Trumps overwhelmingly white fan base may have been projecting, too.

Or take Trumps claim that Clinton was the real harasser of women. Its easier to understand when you realize that more than 40 percent of Trump supporters think, society seems to punish men just for acting like men, according to a PRRI/The Atlantic poll. And that in a May 2016 Morning Consult poll, 49 percent of Republican men who had an unfavorable opinion of Clinton called her a sexist. A November ABC/Washington Post poll found that 87 percent of Republicans considered Trump more honest than Clinton despite the fact that Politifact judged 50 percent of the Clinton statements they evaluated to be true or mostly true compared to only 17 percent of Trumps.

Maybe Trumps supporters believe his projections because hes not the only one who wants to escape from reality.

Continue reading here:
The Projection President - The Atlantic

MSNBC

Donald Trump is already a legend in his own mind MSNBC About a month ago, at his first full cabinet meeting, Donald Trump spoke very highly of himself. Never has there been a president, with few exceptions case of FDR, he had a major depression to handle who has passed more legislation and who has ... How to win a friend and influence a PresidentCNN Read Excerpts From President Trump's Off-the-Record BriefingTIME President Trump spoke with reporters for an hour, but it was off-the-record... or was it?CNNMoney all 41 news articles »

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Donald Trump is already a legend in his own mind - MSNBC