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Warren to address liberals at weekend retreat – The Hill

The CPC gathering at Baltimore's Inner Harbor is an annual event designed to rally Congress's most liberal bloc behind a strategy for pushing its policy agenda. But after November's elections put Republicans in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress, liberals see themselves as the last line of defense against the GOP's promised attacks on President Obama's legislative achievements.

"In a year when many progressive issues hang in the balance, this will be a vital opportunity for progressive leaders on and off the Hill to come together, build power collectively, and strengthen the resistance against hatred, bigotry and discriminatory policies," reads an introduction to the retreat.

"American values of liberty and inclusivity are under threat."

She hasn't said what topics she'll broach, but the event arrives just a day after Trump signed an executive order rolling back parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which established many consumer protections championed by Warren.

Other speakers slated to address the CPC conference include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); Rep. Ral Grijalva (D-Ariz.), a co-chairman of the CPC; Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters; Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of liberal Jewish group J Street; and Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

The retreat arrives as one of the leaders of the Progressive Caucus, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), is in the midst of a fierce contest to take the helm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

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Warren to address liberals at weekend retreat - The Hill

February 3rd, 2017

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The Rise of Progressive ‘Fake News’ – The Atlantic

There is an enormous amount of crazy-sounding news right now.

President Donald Trump really did set off a diplomatic crisis with Australia, possibly out of personal exhaustion. The White House really did fail to mention Jews in their statement commemorating the Holocaustand then, bizarrely, refuse to even recognize the error in the following days. And the president somehow incited a feud with Arnold Schwarzenegger during the National Prayer Breakfast.

If progressives are looking to be shocked, terrified, or incensed, they have plenty of options. Yet in the past two weeks, many have turned to a different avenue: They have shared fake news, online stories that look like real journalism but are full of fables and falsehoods.

Its a funny reversal of the situation from November. In the weeks after the election, the press chastised conservative Facebook users for sharing stories that had nothing to do with reality. Hundreds of thousands of people shared stories asserting incorrectly that President Obama had banned the pledge of allegiance in public schools, that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, and that Trump had dispatched his personal plane to save 200 starving marines.

The phenomenon seemed to confirm theorists worst fears about the internet. Given the choice, democratic citizens will not seek out news that challenges their beliefs; instead, they will opt for content that confirms their suspicions. A BuzzFeed News investigation found that more people shared these fake stories than shared real news in the three months before the election. A follow-up survey suggested that most Americans believed fake news after seeing it on Facebook. When held to the laissez faire editorial standards of Facebook, the market of ideas fails.

Now the left has its own panoply of wishful thinking. Twitter accounts purportedly operated by disgruntled government employees@AltNatParSer, @RogueNASA, and the extra dubious @RoguePOTUSStaffhave swelled in number to become a shadow bureaucracy. Conspiratorially minded Medium posts insist to anyone who will read them that the real story of the Trump administration is even more layered and nefarious than it seems. And satirical news of poor quality has gotten passed around as a weird story more than once. (Queen Elizabeth II didnt actually say she could kill Donald Trump with a sword.)

Or at least thats how it seems to me. Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes, the English-speaking internets most important rumor-debunking site. It is her job to sit around and look at some of the most popular falsehoods on the web all day. Earlier this week, I asked her if she had seen a spike in the amount and popularity of fake news aimed at liberals.

She immediately replied: Of course yes!

Theres a lot of confusion, and people are profiting from the confusion on all sides of the continuum, she told me. She said she had seen a concerted spike in fake news aimed at liberals since the inauguration.

She emphasized that theres no equivalence between the falsehoods coming from the American left and the right in the past two weeks. Individual Democrats on Facebook may cling to pleasant stories and wishful thinking, but the Republican White House press secretary spouts off lies beneath the presidential seal. On Thursday, Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to the president, referenced a terrorist attack that never happened.

But a preponderance of fake information ultimately harms the political cause that absorbs it. Its also bad strategy: Michael Walzer writes that the lefts task at this moment in history is to help hold the center. A polluted information environment does little to preserve the consensus reality that permits democracy to work.

My conversation with Binkowski, edited for clarity and readability, follows below.

Meyer: First things first. Have you been seeing more fake news or hoaxes aimed at the left lately?

Binkowski: Yes, there has been more coming from the left. A lot of dubious news, a lot of wishful thinking-type stuff. Its not as filthy as the stuff I saw that was purportedly coming from the rightI dont think a lot of it was actually coming from the right, I think it was coming from outside sources, like Macedonian teenagers, for examplebut there has been more from the left.

Its more wish-fulfillment stuff. Trump About to be Arrested! Well, yeah, whens that gonna happen? And we know its coming from the left because I know its coming from known players. Bill Palmer used to run the Daily News Bin, and it was basically a pro-Hillary Clinton news site. It was out there to counter misinformation. Which, okay, fair enough. But then he started to reinvent it as a news site, more and more, and he changed the name to the Palmer Report. The stuff that he puts out there, its nominally true. When you click on it, its some innocuous story [with an outlandish headline]. That is very harmful, I think.

The right-wing stuff often has this element of racial fear, even if it is subtle. One of the best examples I can think of was from this otherwise innocuous hoax news website. They make themselves look like a legitimate local news site, although they dont specify where, of course, and then they steal mugshots from one of those sites that host mugshots, and then they write a story around them that has nothing to do with reality. I saw a steady drumbeat of that over the past year or so, preying on racial fears.

Meyer: You saw the number of stories like that go up over the past year?

Binkowski: Yeah. Big time. I saw that pick up a lot last year.

Meyer: Is there advice you have for readers about how to recognize fake news?

If it arouses an emotional response is youif you see the headline and go, I cant believe this, Im so angrythen its probably something you need to check against something else. News is going to be rage-inducing, its going to be terrifying, it will make you happy. But if you have that visceral a response to something, then it is written specifically to arouse that response so youll share it. Just say no.

But I really dont want to make this the responsibility of the person reading the news, when there are so many things that have been broken down and atomized and made into individual responsibility that should be a collective responsibility. [News] should be a public service, and that is how public services exist and maintain themselves. And it should be seen as such.

Meyer: Do you have a fairly dim view of human gullibility, because you sit around and look at this stuff all day?

Binkowski: You know, I actually dont. Sometimes my faith in humanity is severely challenged. I actually think that people in the aggregate, even now, are smart. I think humans are smart. I really do. I realize that were in a generally discouraging moment in history, but I dont think people are stupid, and I dont think people are necessarily gullible.

Have you ever read The Gift of Fear? The gist of it is, trust your instincts because normally theyre picking up on things that you arent consciously noticing. Its an interesting book, and its generally about crime and rape and violence.

Ive always wondered why we slow down for car accidents. And the author of the book, [Gavin de Becker,] says, We always slow down for car accidents out of an ancient impulse, which is that humans want to learn. Thats why we developed these enormous brains. People always want to learn.

And I thought, you know what, thats true. Even people who are sending around these stupid stories that are complete BS, they would latch onto actual news, not conspiracy theories, if there was more actual news out there. I think that people are going about the fake news issue the wrong way. Pinching off fake news isnt the answer. The answer is flooding it with actual news. And that way, people will continue looking for information, and they will find vetted, nuanced, contextual, in-depth information.

There will always be a subset of people who reject it. I think 10 percent of the population either way. But I really do believe that humanity, although we may destroy ourselvesI really do have a lot of faith in us as a species.

Meyer: That ties to another thread in the left wishful thinking, which is the fake Twitter account from the government insiders who are rebelling against Trump. The most-followed example is @RoguePOTUSStaff.

Binkowski: Isnt that a fun read? Its gotta be BS, but its such a fun read. Ive messaged them several times at this point, saying, I dont want to know who you are, but can you at least prove that what youre saying is true somehow? We can use the encryption tool of your choiceI dont care who you are, as long as you are who you say you are. Theyve never replied, but they havent blocked me like theyve blocked some of our writers.

Meyer: Is there any other kind of fake news that youre regularly seeing?

Binkowski: I think weve temporarily lost our ability to enjoy satire in the United States. Theres a few satire stories that have made their way to us. I mean, most people usually mistake satire for real stories, but now its really bad. I think the left has collectively completely lost its sense of humor for nowalthough, I mean, the left maybe never had one in the beginning.

I just edited a story an hour ago about how Trump allegedly replaced a portrait of George Washington with a picture of a character from Ghostbusters 2. People are like, Is this true? Is this actually true!? No, its not. Its supposed to be satire.

Meyer: It is funny to me that, just a few months after attributing the election result in part to conservative-leaning fake news, there has been a surge of it among the party thats newly out of power.

Binkowski: Its so disappointing. I know I keep saying that. But we have also always had this misinformation, weve always had propaganda, weve always had disinformation, and weve always had BS. This has been part of American media forever. Weekly World News, if people remember that. National Enquirer is still doing whatever it is theyre doing. I do think fake news is always going to be part of the media and information ecosystem. I just think it needs to be balanced out by actual news.

We have to bolster the immune system of journalism, because thats going to be the only way out of this possible authoritarianism and inundation with fake news. People are so fearful, and thats whats driving this. People are afraid. The world is changing. It has changed. Theres all kinds of people around with different looks and different names and they look different and they talk different and it doesnt help when you get this constant line of BS.

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The Rise of Progressive 'Fake News' - The Atlantic

February 3rd, 2017

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Why conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe false information about threats – Los Angeles Times

In an electoral season that has blurred the line between fact and fantasy, a team of UCLA researchers is offering new evidence to support a controversial proposition: that when it comes to telling the difference between truth and fiction, not all potential voters are created equal.

When alternative facts allege some kind of danger,people whose political beliefs are more conservative are more likely than those who lean liberal to embrace them,says the teams soon-to-be-published study.

Conservatives vulnerability to accepting untruthsdidnt apply equally to all false claims: When lies suggested dangerous or apocalyptic outcomes, more conservative participants were more likely to believe them than when the lie suggested a possible benefit.

Participants whose views fell further left could be plenty credulous. But they were no more likely to buy a scaryfalsehood than they were to buy one with a positiveoutcome.

In short, conservatives are more likely to drop their guard against lies when they perceive the possible consequences as being dark. Liberals, less so.

The new findings are especially timely, coming in the wake of apresidentialelection tainted by so-calledfake news and in which unfounded assertions by Donald Trump gained many adherents.

Slated for publication in the journal Psychological Science, the new study offers insight into why many Americans embraced fabricatedstories about Clinton that often made outlandish allegations of criminal behavior. And it may shed light on why so many believed a candidates assertions that were both grim anddemonstrably false.

Finally, the results offer an explanation for why these false claims were more readily embraced bypeople who endorse conservative political causes than bythose whose views are traditionally liberal.

There are a lot of citizens who are especially vigilant about potential threats but not especially motivated or prepared to process information in a critical, systematic manner, said John Jost, co-director of New York Universitys Center for Social and Political Behavior. For years, Jost said, those Americans have been presented with terrifying messages that are short on reason and openly contemptuous of scholarly and scientific standards of evidence.

Jost, who was not involved with the latest research, said the new findings suggest that when dark claims and apocalyptic visions swirl, many of these anxious voters willcast skepticism aside and selectively embrace fearful claims, regardless ofwhetherthey'retrue. The result maytilt electionstoward politicians who stoke those fears.

We may be witnessing a perfect storm, Jost said.

The preliminarystudy,led by UCLA anthropologist Daniel M.T. Fessler, is the first to explore credulity as a function of ideological belief. The pool of participants was not strictly representative of the U.S. electorate, and some of the findings were weakened when the researchers removed questions pertaining to terrorism.

Moreover, some argue that it is not ideological belief but feeling beaten that makes people more credulous. When parties are thrown out of power, or have been out of office for long periods, their adherents are naturally drawn to believe awful things of the other party, says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami.

Until the new findings have been replicated under the changed circumstances of a Republican victory, said Uscinski, they should be greeted with caution.

But the new results are in line with a picture of partisan differences emerging from an upstart corner of the social sciences. In a wide range of studies, anthropologists, social psychologists and political scientists have found that self-avowed liberals and people who call themselves conservatives simplythink differently.

All people range across a spectrum ofpersonality traits and thinking styles. But when compared to liberals, conservatives show a lower tolerance for risk and have a greater need for closure and certainty, on average.

Wired up to monitors that measure physiological changes, people who aremore conservativerespond to threatening stimuli with more pronounced changes than do their peers on the other end of the political spectrum: On average, their hearts race more, their breathing becomes more shallow and their palms get clammier.

Fessler started with a much more universal finding from evolutionary anthropology: When confronted with danger, humans are more likely to pay attention to the experience and commit it to memory than when theyre presented with cues that are neutral or pleasant.

Called the negativity bias, this inclination to give special weight to negative experiences has been powerfully protective, scientists believe. After all, failing to give such hazards their due could result in death, and humans who took a laid-back approach to such dangers were more likely to be purged from the gene pool.

As a result, a tendency to pay more attention to negative experiencesand even to scary warnings from othersis seen pretty much across the board.

Even so, Fessler reasoned, some peoplemay weight incoming negative information more heavily than others. Given the growing body of evidence for ideological differences in thinking styles, he and his team wondered whether conservatives and liberals would be differently inclined to believe assertions, including false assertions, when they warned of potential hazards.

In two experiments conducted in September 2016, Fesslers team recruited 948 American adults on websites designed to query subjects for research studies. To place each participant on the American political spectrum, the researchers asked for his or her views on a list of policies that generally divide conservatives from liberals. Then the study authors asked subjectsto rate how strongly they believed or disbelieved 16 assertions.

Some but not all of those statements were true, the researchers told participants. In fact, 14 of the 16 were false.

While six of the assertions dealt with outcomes that were generally positive (People who own cats live longer than people who dont), 10 made claims about potential hazards. Some of these outcomes were pretty serious: One stated that terrorist incidents in the U.S. have increased since 9/11 (not true in September 2016). Others declared that an intoxicated passenger could open an aircraft door while in flight (not true), that kale typically contains high levels of toxic heavy metals (not true), and that thieves could read encoded personal information from hotel keycards (not true).

Plenty of peoplewere taken in by lies about both hazards and benefits.And across the political spectrum, participants were more likely to believe scary pronouncements and a little less likely to believe cheery ones.

But when a bogus claim raised a prospective danger, the more heavily a subject leaned toward policies linked to conservatism, the more likely his or her skepticism fell aside. Meanwhile, the more heavily a subject leaned toward positions associated with liberalism, the more evenly skeptical he or she was toward claims cheery and scary.

The differences were not stark. But statistically, credulity toward dark assertions tracked with asubjects position on the political spectrum.

Using a statistical measure that gauges how widely subjects were scattered across the political spectrum, the researchersreckoned that for each tick rightward, the average subject grew 2% less skeptical of statements when they warned of bad outcomes than when they promised good ones.

That effect is pretty subtle. But spread over an electorate of 231 million eligible voters,the inclination of some to more readily acceptscary lies could make the purveyors of frightening falsehoods a more powerful force.

Fessler said his teams findings may help explain a curious phenomenon reported by those who fabricated fake news for profit: that stories aimed at liberal audiences were less likely to go viral than stories designed to draw in conservatives.

He also said the resultsmight help explain why social conservativeswere so inclined to support Trump.

When his team subdivided conservatives into three groups, he found that the trend toward dark belief was greatest in those who defined their conservatism largely in social and cultural terms. Among those whose conservatism was largely rooted infiscal policy, the selective credulity toward scary assertions was not evident.

The upshot, Fessler said, is that Americans across the political spectrum need a steady diet of truth. Sinceapocalyptic claims will always geta little more credence,they had better be factual.

You might be able to change peoples minds about issues, but you cant change their stable ways of responding to the world, saidFessler, who will tryto replicate his findings with a Republican in the White House.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @LATMelissaHealy and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

Liberals are the new Tea Party – Vox

Over the past two weeks, liberal activists have quietly and widely circulated a long Google spreadsheet. It contains the exact time, date, and location of more than 100 events that members of Congress will host in their districts this month.

Its titled Town Hall Project 2018, and it is a battle plan, borrowed from an old foe: the Tea Party.

In their efforts to pressure Republicans to save the Affordable Care Act, liberals are increasingly copying the tactics of the conservative activists who mobilized against the law in 2009.

We want to empower constituents to have face-to-face conversations, which we know from our organizing backgrounds can be powerful, says Jimmy Dahman, who runs Town Hall Project 2018. The goal of this project is to organize people in districts who are upset and frustrated.

Dahman used to work for the Clinton campaign. He got the idea for Town Hall Project 2018 when he was watching CNN and happened to see a clip of Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) leaving his office hours through a back door after a significant crowd of Obamacare advocates arrived. He started to wonder: What if we could make this happen all over the country?

The Obamacare protests are growing larger and more heated, leading to arrests on Capitol Hill and one legislator canceling an event altogether. Seasoned advocates on both sides of the issue say this looks a lot like the organizing against the health care law that gave rise to the Tea Party in 2009.

Eight years ago we were in the same boat, says Dean Clancy, who previously ran policy for Freedom Works, a Tea Party-affiliated group that advocated against the health care law. We were stunned, angry, fearful, besieged, paranoid, but we were also liberated. The feeling was wonderful, like you're the rebels in Star Wars.

Tea Party activists showed up en masse to Democratic legislators events during the summer of 2009, turning typically mundane meetings into heated shouting matches over death panels and pulling the plug on Grandma.

Dahman wants to harness the energy he now sees among liberals albeit in a slightly more organized way.

I remember those town halls; they have definitely come to mind, Dahman says. This kind of looks like 2009 all over again. Our bet is that we think a bunch of progressives, champing at the bit to organize, can make this spontaneous movement a little bit more structured.

The summer of 2009 was an especially challenging time for Democrats, as they found themselves besieged by protesters at local meetings. At one particularly memorable meeting, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) was approached by Mike Sola, who brought his wheelchair-bound son to the podium. Youve ordered a death sentence to this young man, he shouted before being escorted out by police.

These were the moments that helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party movement, as activists came out to protest what they saw as a government takeover of the American health care system. Tea Party activists became a force to be reckoned with in conservative politics, helping Republicans win the House in 2010, supporting primary challengers to the right of GOP incumbents, and cheering the 2013 government shutdown, an attempt to stop Obamacares rollout.

Tea Party activists have kept Obamacare repeal a top issue for the Republican Party and their early protests were key in making sure not a single Republican legislator supported the law.

Its unclear whether the liberal protests of 2016 will follow a similar trajectory but the opening battles are awfully familiar.

The town halls of 2016 have not gotten quite as heated yet, but the temperature is rising. In mid-January, Coffman left his regular open hours meeting at a local library early after hundreds showed up to discuss the health care law.

Rep. David Brat (R-VA) recently lamented how hes gotten bombarded by Obamacare supporters.

Since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go, Brat said at a local gathering of conservative groups, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. They come up When is your next town hall? And believe me, its not to give positive input.

Chants of save our health care drowned out an address that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) gave on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) did not attend two previously scheduled town hall meetings this weekend. That angered dozens of constituents who wanted clarity on the GOPs plan to replace Obamacare, Politico reported. The Chicago Tribune reported that Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) rescheduled a health care meeting, meant for constituents only, when a reporter showed up.

Protests over the past two weekends the Womens March first, followed by more spontaneous events at airports after Trumps immigration order have shown that hundreds of thousands of Trump opponents are interested in organizing.

And a few key, early victories, activists argue, can help keep those people turning out.

This includes the Trump administration sharply reversing course on a decision to pull down open enrollment ads for the Affordable Care Act after outcry from health advocates.

Its not clear whether that decision was made in response to the outcry or due to the logistical hurdles of taking down advertisements the previous administration had already paid for. Either way, it egged on health law advocates.

I was surprised, and I think there was a clear lesson: Activism, and outreach to others, can and already has had an impact, says Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a group that advocates in the laws favor. This is encouragement for people to be active and make a difference, even in the context of the Republican Party having the levers of power in the White House.

More such news came this week, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) tweeted that she would oppose the nomination of Betsy DeVos for education secretary after receiving a wave of negative feedback from her constituents.

After careful consideration, and hearing from Alaskans, I will vote against Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education: https://t.co/u7sNCPUH3d.

Obamacare repeal, Dahman said, is something legislators should be pushed to answer on in a similar way.

If theyre going to take health care away from millions, they need to have the input of constituents, he says. And if theyre not going to meet with constituents, that is going to draw some ire.

Dahman doesnt quite know where Town Hall Project 2018 goes next although its growing much faster than he expected. He now has 100 volunteers helping him update the spreadsheet, which grows day by day with new events.

Two days ago, I spent maybe a couple hours a day training volunteers and responding to volunteers, he says. The last two days, though, Ive been flooded by emails, Facebook messages, and tweets. Ive done 15- to 16-hour days, trying to respond to everybody in a timely fashion.

Dahman expects things will heat up even more when Congress goes on recess, a moment when legislators tend to hold more events in home districts. Again, this would be a parallel to the 2009 Tea Party protests, which got especially heated over the 2009 summer recess.

Clancy, the Tea Party activist, sees the appeal of the moment for liberals. There's nothing more American than protest, and few things more enjoyable, he says. I suspect Trump must appear to them as Obama appeared to us, as a threat to everything we believe and cherish. You have to respect them for resisting that.

Correction: Rep. Peter Roskam did not cancel his health care meeting, but rescheduled it as it was an event for constituents only and a reporter arrived.

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Liberals are the new Tea Party - Vox

February 3rd, 2017

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