#factchecking trump

[tomorrowusa]

Fact checking Donald Trump is a full time, even overtime job. He told over 30,000 lies just during his term.

The problem with live news coverage of Trump is that he gets to spew lies and that the factchecking has to wait until he shuts his porcine mouth or producers cut him off.

Low information voters are therefore likely to hear Trump's semi-coherent rants but miss any attempts to call out his lies.

Having said that, MSNBC on Super Tuesday night did a decent attempt at countering a few of Trump's main lies.

Joy Reid is pointing something out that Democrats need to do much more. Trump TOTALLY botched the US pandemic response right from the start. A reminder of what Trump said at CNBC on 22 January 2020 – the day the first COVID-19 case appeared in the US.

Of course it wasn't just fine under Trump.

The Obama administration, which limited the 2014-2016 Ebola pandemic in the US to under a dozen cases, had put together a pandemic playbook. You can read it here. Trump totally ignored it. He spent 50 days after the first US COVID case doing typically idiotic Trump stuff like criticizing 2020 Oscar Best Picture winner Parasites. And afterwards he became preoccupied with quack cures for COVID as it spread throughout the US.

People who claim they had it better under Trump are hoping that the memories of voters are as impaired as Trump's cognition.

We need to be prepared to offer clear fact checks to anybody hearing Trump's lies. Of course convincing MAGA zombies is a waste of time. But when around low information voters who may not be part of the Trump cult we need to be able to offer convincing short refutations. Pointing out that Trump did nothing for the first 50 days of COVID in the US is a good start. So speak up!

Trump's lack of a competent COVID response led to a cascade of acute economic problems which took several years to sort out.

[undergroundusa]

"…the most potent threat to free speech comes not from the communist Chinese or the Bolshevistic Russian oligarchs, the Marxist dictators of South America, or the Islamofascists of the Middle East. It is emanating from the far-Left of the Democrat Party…"

ORIGINAL CONTENT: https://www.undergroundusa.com/p/free-speech-under-attack-the-marxists

READ, SUBSCRIBE, SHARE & EDUCATE: PROTECT FREE SPEECH

Free Speech Under Attack: The Marxist’s March To Control Through Censorship

[factcheckdotorg]

Trump’s Latest False Claim About the U.S.-China Trade Deficit 

[alanfromrochester]

Fact checking during the Trump-Harris debate was good, calling BS on him in real time, to the point of rightwingers complaining that it was too easy on her. Is that true or does it just seem that way after factcheckers covering for Trump as this describes?

I have noticed nitpicking on something that's substantially true, and validating something substantially false because of weasel words, and I suppose bias could manifest that way.

Maybe it is a symptom of media playing both sides rather than portraying one negatively when they are being bad, or bending over backwards to avoid being accused of biased against him

PS

These problems with factchecking could be an issue with trying to regulate misinformation, though that sounds like a tempting idea

“Many of the purported “fact-checks” go beyond verifying Democrats’ statements and instead serve as political spin for Trump, giving him an unearned benefit of the doubt that almost ignores he actually was president and has an established record of deceit and malicious incompetence. The error that fact-checkers consistently make is taking Trump’s assertions and denials at face value. They still treat the convicted felon like someone who operates in good faith, which often results in wish-casting and the “sane-washing” of Trump’s blather. Democrats, meanwhile, are held to an impossibly literal standard where routine exaggerations and rhetorical flourishes are treated like whoppers. Trump’s statements are decontextualized, while those from Democrats are relentlessly scrutinized. The impact is a proliferation of false equivalencies that normalize Republican liars.”

— What’s wrong with the fact-checkers? - by Stephen Robinson

[sublimeobservationarcade]

Don’t Check The Facts: Inconvenient Scientific Truths

Imagine if Charles Darwin was still alive today and how his groundbreaking scientific work on evolution would be treated by neocons and MAGA types. Social media would light up like the site of an atomic bomb explosion. Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths. We have got to the stage where people are choosing which facts they will acknowledge, as if they are choosing from a range of colours for an item in an online store. Terms like ‘alternative truths’ have been invented to describe the current situation. If we cannot agree on what is fact and what is not we are in big trouble. President Trump Calls Astronauts During First All-Woman Spacewalk (NHQ201910180019) by NASA HQ PHOTO is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

Scientific Facts Vs Religious Beliefs

Of course, there are still folk out there arguing about the validity of evolution some 175 years since the publication of On The Origin Of The Species. Many of these Americans are a part of the Trump MAGA coalition. Human beings stubbornly believing in things, despite the evidence against them, is nothing new. Religion stands like an antique edifice, now in the shade, but still with zealous adherents handing down revised interpretations based upon ancient codices claiming to be the words of God. No evidence, no scientific evidence, exists for the claims made by these various religions. Supernatural entities stand outside of our base comprehension, apparently, which like a magic trick for the masses, is convenient for proponents. Why Fact Checking Is Inconvenient For The MAGA Faithful? Donald Trump leads a coalition of crooks, Christian Nationalists, oligarchs, and disgruntled Americans looking for someone or something to blame. Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths. This caveat is useful for all of these groups in different ways. The crooks want to mislead and defraud their scamming targets among the American and global populations. These business people do not want fact checking  and regulation getting in their way. Christian Nationalists live in a world of lies based on a blue eyed Jesus, where believers act as if the Nazarene was actually an American. Religion is a farrago of distortions and misrepresentations. Fact checking upon this world long ago hung out the ‘highly unreliable’ sign. Believers must check their doubting Thomas at the door prior to entering. jsc2020e031677 by NASAKennedy is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 The oligarchs, billionaires and Big Tech bros want to influence and shape the universe in their image. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk do not want the Lina Khan’s of this world to rain on their parade. Free speech concerns? What a load of manipulated crap this is. The freedom for the powerful to shout down the voices of those who do not agree with them. The freedom for religions to persecute those with different lifestyles to their Bronze Age sourced morality. The freedom to express hate speech on Facebook, Twitter or X, and the other social media platforms. The freedom for the dominant cohort to destroy what little diversity has managed to flourish within Anglo new world nations. Fact checking is not welcome in these realms. The Internet has had an interesting journey from its inception. It began via government funded defence research way back in the 1960s. “The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.” - (https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml) Thus, its origin is not some bastion of private enterprise as often claimed. Sure, we had the garage workshops of people like Bill Gates and his peers building on and developing software and hardware to take it the consumer market. The Steve Jobs and his ilk were wonderful self-promoters spinning the illusion that they invented the apple, rather than just gave it a new shine. Later, came the Google search engine phenomenon and this began a trend where Wall Street CEOs were brought into financialize these digital innovations. This is when the alternative culture of Silicon Valley tech is going to save the world theme faded away to be replaced by big corporations with a global monopoly sucking every dollar out of us kicked in. Bill Clinton failed to regulate this emerging behemoth and they have been getting away with financial murder ever since. The richest men in the world are all Big Tech bros now, worth hundreds of billions. Government in the US has been getting weaker and weaker over the decades and we are seeing a huge divide between mega wealthy and ordinary working folk. Still, numbskull Americans keep voting in those who are taking them to the cleaners. Stupid is as stupid does. Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths just get in the way. Global warming is a hoax in the minds of many. The other half of the MAGA coalition voters think it might be true, but buy the line that technology will sort it out. No need for behavioural change by the business world. Leave it to someone else to solve. These folk are taking a big risk on the lives of their kids; indeed, they are betting with their chips and not their own. Perhaps, if the religion thing turned out to be true, St Peter will quiz them at the pearly gates about selling their kids out and ruining their lives and their children’s lives. Don’t check the facts: Inconvenient scientific truths that a mob grown fat on fantasy and fast food ignore at their peril. They have elected their own phony billionaire President, who is still hawking Trump branded stuff just days away from taking up the top job again. The Teflon Don has managed to sidestep a sentence for his convictions with an unconditional discharge – I thought that might be an STI, when I first heard about it. Presidential immunity, thanks to SCOTUS, has cleared the rest of his many charges. Stealing classified documents and inciting a coup at the Capitol are merely par for the course for this infamous golf cheat. They call him the Orange Jesus for his fake tan skin and that these two figures share so many fictional characteristics – they are basically inventions for their cult followers. 79 YO and the octogenarian fan club are rubbing their wrinkled hands together in glee at soon having another representative in the White House. Role models for the elderly are a valued commodity in this select demographic. Hot air and compulsive lying will take you a long way in America, it seems. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump. ©MidasWord Read the full article

[southpauz]

I am genuinely frightened for the future of America, its people, and every other country that America imposes itself upon.

Trump's administration falls under literally EVERY defining characteristic of Fascism.

Far-right conservatives have completely overtaken our mainstream media, forcibly silenced them, or bought them out so they can praise and sane-wash Trump over fear of retribution.

His administration is owned by the ultra wealthy who control all of our social media apps/sites. Every large corporation owner was in attendance at Trump's inauguration, sitting in FRONT of his cabinet. Tiktok is spreading pro-Trump propaganda, Zuckerberg intends to "remove factchecking" from Meta platforms (like Facebook and Instagram itself), and Bill Gates just said he had a fascinating talk with Trump recently and was impressed by him.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought Twitter and completely turned it into an alt-right misinformation machine that spews hatred over diversity and acceptance and directly impacted people's impression of the election which lead to Trump's victory. He changed the algorithm on Twitter to boost nazi, transphobic, racist rhetoric alongside retreating similar posts to his audience and changed the algorithm to suppress democratic posts.

After Trump's inauguration Elon was on stage and he gave an enthusiastic NAZI SALUTE. TWICE. ON TELEVISION.

They're targeting our education to keep us dumb and complacent little worker bees so we don't learn how to critically think and see through the propaganda and lies they spew.

They are targeting minorities, especially the trans community and undocumented immigrants, to make people fight a different "enemy" than the people ACTUALLY harming them: the 1%.

They are targeting women's right to their own bodily autonomy in order to keep making sure they keep having worker bees to keep making them more money and to foster a disdain for human rights in our population by linking our government to evangelical Christian morals.

We are in danger.

Please do your proper research and make sure you take your information from multiple sources, including primary sources like court and governmental documents, to prevent bias.

Please look into local programs, volunteer opportunities, and social gathering events so you can get to know your community better and help build more solidarity and safety.

Please keep your eyes open to help your neighbor who may be targeted by this administration. Make sure to should "LA MIGRA" if you spot any ICE vehicles to alert your undocumented friends and neighbors, and remember that police can't come into your home without a warrant and you have the right to remain silent.

Most importantly: DO NOT GIVE UP. It feels so hopeless, but the only thing that can make it worse is if we give up. Becoming compliant in advance only speeds up fascist takeovers.

Resist. Be careful. Care for one another. I love you guys.

Unless you voted for or currently support Trump. Go fuck yourselves you pieces of shit.

[lizardsfromspace]

The factchecking this cycle has been so profoundly incompetent that it's finally getting some real backlash, but the extent of it really should be clear. So much of factchecking is not based in reality, but in a kind of contorted moon logic that can find true claims to be false and false ones to be true based on wildly inconsistent reasoning.

But this one really shows off some of the base assumptions of modern factchecking, and also bc it got a community note which is funny:

Let's take this one by one

The idea that quotes have any options but "he said it" or "he didn't say it". It is a binary, maybe with a third option of "it was clipped wildly out of context", but something you see constantly now is the idea that quoting someone's direct words without deceptive editing or removal of context can somehow be false

Pointlessly noting that it's from 2016, and that it's not clear if he currently believes it. What the hell does that matter to the question of if he said that in 2016? People understood that the "dig up someone's tweets from when they were 17" thing was inane, but they counter-balanced by apparently deciding that citing anything someone said more than about six months ago is Misinformation if we don't have objective evidence they would say the exact same thing now, even if there's no evidence they believe anything else. Analyzing someone's high school tweets and analyzing something the literal President said seven years ago are not equivalent

Noting that he walked it back following criticism. You see this constantly, too. Again, what does that matter to the question of if he said it? But this is just taken as a given now: if someone gets blowback and says "whoops I didn't mean it", that should be taken at face value. Effectively, Politifact is letting Donald Trump self-factcheck Donald Trump: their only evidence (and I read the article too) this is at all false is that Donald Trump said Donald Trump didn't really mean the words he said, so they must agree with the judgment of Donald Trump that Donald Trump was treated so unfairly here.

A general confusion over what factchecking is. If you're asked "did Donald Trump say this in 2016?", your sole job is to determine if he really said that in 2016. It's not to divine if he, deep in his heart, still believes it now. That's completely irrelevant.

The two guiding principles of modern factchecking are this: one, it's strongly rumored - and also, obvious to everyone literate - that the major factchecking sites have either standing orders to find equal numbers of lies on both sides, or are staffed by people who think it's their job to hold both sides equally to account (the exception is Snopes, whose writers are just terrible at their jobs). In the name of this, Donald Trump can say something on camera only for it to be judged false, while a Democratic politician can be excoriated for mildly rounding down a figure in a speech. A factchecking website once determined that saying climate change was a threat to life on this planet was a lie, because climate change won't kill all life on this planet. Politifact's lie of the year one year was a Democrat saying a Republican plan would "end Medicare as we know it", which was judged to be a lie because it wouldn't literally end Medicare completely. Figurative language needs to be scoured, comments said directly on camera need to be made fuzzy. This makes factchecking sites worthless at factchecking, because what even is this?

It's not true that Donald Trump will refuse to accept the election results, because he's merely said he won't accept, and has said if he loses, it's only because the election was fraudulent. Okay, what, do you demand that people prove he said his plans in exact words? What is the actual, functional difference between "he said he won't accept it" and "he said if he loses it's because he won and they stole it from him, and he won't commit to saying he'll accept it"? What are you talking about, who is this for? When you go to the Logic and Reason Site for Debunking & end up having to puzzle out their convoluted logic and reasoning to understand anything, the plot's been lost a bit

The other is the idea that context is exonerating. Any context at all. If they said they didn't mean it, partially false. If they walked it back, partially false. If they said it was taken out of context, partially false. If they said it a certain number of years ago, partially false. If there's a longer video, even if it shows functionally the same thing, pants on fire, five pinocchios.

Again, we have footage of Trump saying this, and the footage in the ad is unedited, and the factchecking website is declaring something that OBJECTIVELY HAPPENED WITH HARD EVIDENCE IT HAPPENED didn't really happen bc we don't know his heart, maybe he believes something different now, we simply can't know for certain. But we do know for certain. Because "false" at least used to mean "didn't happen". But factchecking sites are now on those Beyond Belief definitions of "true" and "false" I guess

But the real problem here is that they just accept anything someone being factchecked says at face value. Because, and I can't believe I'm saying this

It seems like the people paid to determine if other people are lying...have forgotten that people lie sometimes

[odinsblog]

Imagine being the loser ass tool, Yisha Raziel, who made a deepfake of Bella Hadid saying she supports Israel. 🤮

If you’re reading this, I am telling you right now, you better second and third guess what you see and hear on social media and the news. Stick to reliable news sources. Vet them. Require multiple, trusted sources. Validate links to sources. In the last several months, I’ve seen the deepfake of President Nixon talking about the failed NASA mission that never happened. I’ve seen a deepfake of Joe Biden hilariously using profanity to trash talk Trump - Biden’s deepfake, however, was made to be intentionally obvious that it wasn’t his words, or something he would actually say.

But imagine a viral deepfake video of Biden announcing a nuclear strike on Russia within the next 20 minutes? Or a deepfake of Biden reintroducing the draft to support Israel? Or a deepfake of Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election and endorsing Trump…

These kinds of things are going to begin happening a lot more, especially with the proliferation of troll farms, and especially since YouTube, Twitter (I refuse to call it X), and Facebook have all eviscerated their verification and factcheck teams that used to at least attempt to limit disinformation and misinformation.

Pay attention, peeps.

Don’t get bamboozled.

[thnkyoufrthevenom]

So all of our common social media apps in the US are just dickriding the president who goes into office tomorrow.

Meta stops factchecking because of Donald Trump

Tiktok is hoping to be restored in the US by Donald Trump

Twitter is owned by Donald Trumps best friend.

If donald fucking trump has a hand in everything, where is the freedom of speech going to be coming from? What is going to seperate "the land of the free" from just being another dictatorship?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

This is a very bleak moment for the United States and the world. Donald Trump takes office today promising to immediately start in on a litany of human rights abuses and other efforts to harm marginalized people. He’s promised a sweeping assault on immigrants in Chicago starting as early as this week. He’s said he will said he will sign executive orders to make trans people second class citizens (and effectively deny their existence). In recent days he’s indicated that he’s going to take his corrupt self-dealing to new levels by promoting numerous shady crypto schemes that will enrich himself and his family. And of course he’s pledged to pardon those convicted of violence associated with the January 6 coup attempt, reiterating his disdain for democracy and the rule of law.

The oncoming cruelty and horror is bad enough. But almost as painful has been the shameful rush by media, Democrats, and others who should know better to accommodate, palliate, and genuflect to the president-elect. It feels like those who oppose Trump, and those who he is about to target, have been abandoned by institutions and allies alike. The widespread resistance of 2017 appears to have vanished in a fetid wave of spinelessness. It's difficult to find much cause for hope right now. There is one mild glimmer of good news, though. The enthusiasm for Trump almost certainly won’t last. Trump has never had high approval ratings, in part because most of his policies are ill-thought out at best and deeply unpopular at worst. The beginning of a term is usually a honeymoon period when voters and other politicians give the president the benefit of the doubt. But that honeymoon is generally short, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that with Trump it will be even shorter.

The great nonresistance

The drumbeat of knees hitting the floor as Trump prepares to take office has been relentless and nauseating. Even before Trump won the election, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, spiked his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, did the same at his paper.

Since Trump’s victory, media oligarchs have accelerated the pace of their disgrace. As we chronicled in this newsletter, ABC doled out $16 million to settle an absurdly weak defamation lawsuit Trump brought against the network for George Stephanopoulos’s (accurate) coverage of the E. Jean Carroll case. The Washington Post killed an editorial cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes which depicted Bezos and other oligarchs prostrate before Trump (Telnaes, honorably, quit). Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Meta, ended factchecking to appease Trump and his movement, which thrives on lies. Meta also carefully removed anti-LGBTQ hate speech policies, since again Trump supports hatred of and discrimination directed towards LGBTQ people.

Many Democrats, too, have been eager to besmirch themselves in the name of Trump and Trumpism. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis rushed to praise nightmare anti-vax goon and conspiracy theorist RFK Jr., who Trump has terrifyingly nominated to be secretary of health and human services (HHS). Maine Rep. Jared Golden has called for Democrats to support Trump’s economy-crushing, xenophobic tariff regime. Democratic Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer popped up to say Democrats could work with Trump on his half-brained, nativist scheme to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Worst of all, Sens. Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman cosponsored the Laken Riley Act, a brutal anti-immigrant bill that mandates detention of undocumented people who are even accused of a crime. It’s a dystopian attack on due process — but that did not deter 10 Democratic senators from joining Republicans to advance it. The House still needs to vote on the Senate version, but Trump will likely be able to sign it in his first days in office. Of course, Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst have also abandoned any semblance of principle to vote for Trump’s unqualified nominees. Celebrities like Snoop Dogg, who have criticized Trump in the past, lined up to perform at his inauguration. Even voters seem to have forgotten everything they knew about Trump. His favorability was -8.6 on the day of the election. Now it’s only -1.1, according to 538.

Trump will lose again

The context here, of course, is that Trump just won a presidential election. That win was narrow, but definite. Media leaders feel like Trump is a voice of the people, and they don’t want to annoy his followers, lose access, or be targeted for harassment by his administration. Democrats feel like Trump is the voice of the people, and they want to be more like Trump in hopes of maybe poaching his voters. Voters, for their part, like to feel optimistic at the start of a presidential term, and tell themselves that maybe this guy will be better this time, even when it’s obvious he won’t. And none of this is helped by the widespread recognition that Trump may use the federal government to personally target anyone who defies him. Trump’s mandate wasn’t especially clear or impressive. But whenever a president wins, people tend to think he’s got some magical ability to channel the will of the voters. The fact that Trump as a candidate was so obviously unfit — he was convicted of 34 felonies just months before the election — only intensifies his aura of invulnerability.

But honeymoons don’t last, and we have a lot of experience with Trump indicating that his, in particular, won’t. Trump entered his first term with slightly positive approval ratings, but a month in he was already six points underwater, and things only got worse for him from there. This wasn’t some sort of accident. Trump tends to be unpopular because he has no discipline, no knowledge of or interest in good government, and supports wildly unpopular policies. His first year in office during his first term was defined by his unpopular Muslim ban, his failed effort to repeal the ACA and strip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans, and the Unite The Right rally, when he referred to rioting neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

Republicans are gearing up to push more unpopular policies and create more chaos and ugly stories of human rights abuses. In the abstract, people often say that they like the idea of deporting undocumented immigrants. But when people hear stories about actual individuals Trump is likely to deport — an “undocumented community volunteer who has lived in the US for 10 years and has no criminal record,” for example, or “an undocumented person who has lived in the US for 15 years and has US-born children” — deportations garner less than 25 percent support, according to surveys by Data for Progress. Similarly, people enjoy the nativist rush when Trump boasts about high tariffs. But they are unlikely to be enthusiastic when our main trading partners escalate a trade war, inflation spirals, and we end up in a miserable recession. And it goes without saying that slashing Social Security benefits, as per Republican plans, is going to be mightily unpopular — as will be any push to repeal the ACA or cut Medicare, both of which are very much on the table as Republicans try to figure out a way to pay for more tax cuts for the rich. In short, the nimbus of good feeling around Trump is unsustainable, for the straightforward reason that Trump is still Trump, the guy who has had dire approval ratings for virtually his entire 10-year public political career.

If you want good news: Illegitimate Felon Trump’s honeymoon period, if it exists at all, will be short-lived, just like his first term.

See Also:

HuffPost: Trump Now Has A Loyal Team, But Overreach Could Again Threaten His Success

[laundryandtaxes]

I think that maybe the worst impact that Trump's presidency made on the American landscape is that Trump Derangement Syndrome was 100% real and millions of American just never recovered- millions of liberals fully lost their minds and became incapable of reasoning along the lines of their own principles rather than according to sheer partisan reaction. They believed by the millions, and their serious journalists and talking heads regularly claimed to believe, that it made more sense that Vladimir Putin was holding a sex tape over the head of the US president than that liberals ran an election campaign against an embarrassingly bad candidate and lost. They became so allergic to disagreement itself that they regularly attacked the character of people generally on their side over minor and inconsequental political differences. They became so allergic to thinking and to the marketplace of ideas that many of them now legitimately believe that support for freedom of speech is itself a dogwhistle. They became so weak in their principles that they argued that any American, especially any conservative, who took issue with sending billions of taxpayer dollars into the black hole of a meat grinder of a war in Eastern Europe was a traitor and a lover of Vladimir Putin- being anti war, long one of the single best traits of American liberals, was tossed to the side largely just in reaction to Trump's personal desire to avoid new wars. They convinced themselves that feminists speaking up in defense of the ability of women to even discuss wanting to maintain some designated single sex spaces, facilities, groups, etc for women were not just similarly-principled women with whom they had disagreements on the definitions of basic terms, but actually fascists, purely in reaction to conservative dislike of gay, bisexual, gnc, and trans people. They became so accustomed to simply making the truth by speaking it into existence with their media heads and their factchecking bodies that mainstream media all but pretended there were no riots in the summer of 2020 when people could walk around and see them for themselves. They became so nostalgic for the platonic ideal of a president that they rehabilitated the image of George W. Bush despite his being a war criminal who outright lied to justify the illegal invasion of a country for oil that led to unthinkable amounts of destruction and death, and who grew the tendrils of the American security state until they reached into the personal email accounts of American citizens. They straight up forgot how to think and reason and even how to look at the world as it actually exists, and that's what we are stuck with.

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ Daniel Dale of CNN was almost breathless from reciting and refuting all the lies which Trump told at his Wisconsin rally a couple of days ago. Being a fact checker in the age of Trump is steady work.

Donald Trump is simply a diarrhea torrent of lies. He told 30,573 lies just during his administration. He's likely has told many more than that since leaving office in disgrace.

Washington Post counts 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years by Trump

One thing Trump didn't talk about at his lie-encrusted Wisconsin rally was his Foxconn fiasco near Racine.

Foxconn mostly abandons $10 billion Wisconsin project touted by Trump

Yet another business failure, this time with taxpayer money, by the frequently bankrupt "stable genius".

[mariacallous]

On Monday, January 20, just hours after being sworn in, President Trump signed an executive order for “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It declares that transgender people do not exist and instructs federal officials to “defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience” by eradicating any trace of these non-existent people from public life.

From passports to bathrooms to schools, the president ordered the government to misgender, deny, and denigrate all trans people it comes into contact with. And he singled out federal prisoners, the people most directly under government control, for abuse.

Six days later, one of those federal prisoners, a trans woman housed at a facility in Massachusetts, sued Trump demanding a halt to her forcible detransition and transfer to a men’s prison. She pointed out that putting trans women in a men’s prison does the opposite of “defending women.”

In fact, it virtually assures that they will be routinely sexually assaulted. And on top of that, it violates a whole passel of federal laws.

Weaponized hate

Trump didn’t wake up on Monday morning and suddenly decide to scapegoat a vulnerable population. Indeed, he based his campaign on demonization of trans people. Ads proclaiming “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” played during what felt like every commercial break during NFL games and NASCAR races, airing some 30,000 times in each swing state in the hundred days before the election.

Like George W. Bush using gay marriage as a wedge issue in 2000, Trump wielded fear and hatred as a weapon, whipping up visions of imaginary women in danger, desperate for sane adults to ride to their rescue. No appeal to decency or factcheck pointing out that trans women were not taking over sports could stop it, and, after spending tens of millions of dollars, Trump rode the wave of hate right into the White House.

Once there, he was quick to deliver on his promise to hurt the people he’d told his supporters to fear.

“Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself,” his EO reads, adding that “these sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

This is contrary to the findings of every major medical, psychiatric, and scientific organization in America, but that’s hardly relevant when you’re dictating objective reality by executive fiat.

Trump’s EO includes a biologically illiterate definition of “Female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and “Male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

The order instructs federal officials to “use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents … including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards,” misgender all federal trans employees and bar them from appropriate restrooms, and “assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.”

This last provision is reported to be the reason the federal government was functionally ordered to shut down earlier this week, in violation of the Constitution’s Spending Clause and thousands of federal contracts — the Trump administration wants to de-”woke”-ify all federal grants and contracts to ensure they comply with the newspeak and don’t promote “gender ideology” or DEI.

Perhaps most cruelly, Trump ordered the Bureau of Prisons to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” and “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

Performative cruelty

The order had immediate consequences for real people, including a transgender woman from Massachusetts going by the pseudonym “Maria Moe” who’s currently incarcerated at a low-security women’s prison.

Moe’s complaint contains heavy redactions to protect her privacy and safety, and indeed most of the docket remains under seal. But we do know that Moe lived as female since adolescence and has been prescribed hormones to treat sever gender dysphoria since she was 15.

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has always classified Moe as “female” and housed her in a women’s prison. This is consistent with the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which sought to stem the epidemic of sexual violence in America’s carceral facilities by establishing national standards to protect inmates.

The law required ongoing collection of data and instructed the attorney general to “publish a final rule adopting national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of prison rape.” Those rules were later codified at 28 CFR § 115, and § 115.41 requires that “All inmates shall be assessed during an intake screening and upon transfer to another facility for their risk of being sexually abused by other inmates or sexually abusive toward other inmates.”

When assessing the inmate’s “risk of sexual victimization,” the prison is obligated to consider “the physical build of the inmate,” “the inmate's own perception of vulnerability,” and “whether the inmate is or is perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming.” We may infer from Moe’s complaint that she was assessed according to this regulatory rubric and deemed to pose no danger to her fellow inmates. Indeed she continued to receive hormone treatments, as prescribed prior to her incarceration, and “has no violent disciplinary history, poses no threat to her female peers, and her presence in the women’s facility has not caused any disruption or interference with prison operations.”

But after Trump’s executive order, Moe was abruptly removed from the general population, placed in a segregated unit where she had no contact with other prisoners, and her record with the BOP was changed to refer to her as “male.” She’s been told that she will be sent to a male prison and forcibly detransitioned by being denied her medication and ordered to dress as a man.

As Moe notes in her complaint, trans prisoners suffer astronomically high rates of sexual violence — in some reports, 10 times higher than cisgender inmates. And Moe, because of her personal circumstances, will face serious danger if housed in a men’s facility:

In a men’s facility, Maria Moe will be at extremely high risk of rape and sexual assault. She may also be subjected to humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous circumstances like being strip searched by male correctional officers and forced to shower among men, with her female body, including her breasts, exposed and vulnerable to sexual violence.

These are exactly the harms that the PREA was enacted to prevent. Forcing trans women into men’s facilities will certainly increase the rate of rapes and sexual assaults, the theoretical harm which Trump’s executive order was designed to prevent. But, of course, he doesn’t actually care about sexual assaults. He cares about demonizing the tiny number of trans prisoners — roughly 2,000, according to the Marshall Project — so he can claim to have solved the non-existent problem he whipped his supporters into a frenzy about.

Moe’s case

Moe seeks declaratory and injunctive relief on several constitutional and statutory grounds. She claims discrimination on the basis of sex under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, noting that sex classifications trigger strict scrutiny, which requires the government to prove that the challenged action is narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest.

Sections 4(a) and 4(c) [of the executive order] require BOP to treat incarcerated people differently depending on their sex. Under section 4(a), women who are not transgender can go on living in a women’s facility, while otherwise similarly situated transgender women must be transferred to a men’s facility based on their birth sex. Similarly, under Section 4(c), women who are not transgender are able to obtain the same medical treatments that are prohibited if they are prescribed for transgender women.

She also challenges those sections of the order under the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment, arguing that transferring her to a men’s prison will “pose a substantial risk of serious harm, including an extremely high risk of violence and sexual assault.” She says that withdrawing her treatment for gender dysphoria constitutes deliberate medical indifference in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. And she claims that it violates the Administrative Procedures Act to arbitrarily cancel a duly propounded federal regulation by executive order, as Trump did when he instructed his (as yet unconfirmed) attorney general to replace § 115.41 with a new regulation that accords with his own bigoted edicts.

What Moe does not do is mention Bostock v. Clayton County, the 2020 Supreme Court decision penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, holding that discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation violated Title VII’s ban on discrimination in the workplace “because of sex.”

That’s likely because the Court has spent the past four years assiduously walking back that holding, cabining it to the context of employment only. The Court has not bothered to explain why discrimination against trans people at work is “because of sex,” but discrimination in healthcare is not. It allowed Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors to go into effect, though, and seemed entirely receptive to Tennessee’s claim that its ban on care was perfectly legal during oral arguments last month in a case called US v. Skrmetti. And so the lawyers for Moe took their cue from the Court and avoided Bostock entirely, grounding their claim in sex discrimination without invoking the most important sex discrimination case in the past five years.

Moe’s complaint was assigned to Judge George O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, and has been sealed since last week. It’s not clear what the status of the proceedings is as of this writing. But Maria Moe is not the only trans prisoner whose life will be uprooted by this order. And her case will be one of many that will likely wind up before the Supreme Court as the Trump administration levels its all-out attack on LGBTQ+ Americans.

Like the ban on gender-affirming care for minors, the forcible detransition and deliberate endangerment of trans prisoners is a performative act of cruelty with no purpose other than inflicting pain. Trump and his supporters are unbothered (to put it charitably) by trans prisoners being sexually assaulted if it furthers the goal of erasing trans people altogether. And if they have to pretend to be protecting women to do it, well, they certainly won’t be hindered by anything like shame.

[maaarine]

Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content (Robert Booth, The Guardian, Jan 7 2025)

"Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.

Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”.

The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said.

He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.

Meta has more than 3 billion users globally.

In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.

He cited Europe as a place with “an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative” and said: “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.”

[hummingbird-hunter]

Boy do I love it when American leftists make posts that get tens of thousands of notes by making it 90% leftists terms and buzzwords but when you take even a little bit of time to understand and factcheck you'll realize that it's a big ol' nothingburger at best and complete misinformation at most and by "love" I mean I'm gonna fucking shoot myself next time I see one. But sure keep blaming dems for trump's win babygirl keep telling people how they didn't do anything productive and are actually just as bad, even though one google search can disprove it. Keep blaming them so you don't have to take responsibility, it's not like this entire mindset caused the entire thing in the first place. But I'm sure if you throw in one or two "normalize" and "indoctrination"s it will make things cool and right, right?