Once upon a time this would just be a tabloid headline. Now it's a ‘serious’ talking point coming from one of the two major political parties we allow ourselves, and the vast media propaganda machine that supports them. But then, they are the same party that once put a B Movie actor in the White House, and now is lined up behind a reality tv show host with a long history as a sexual predator and con man. Yeah, the party of ‘values’.
Every day Donald Trump degrades America by his very presence in the Oval Office. Every day his administration is busy looting America and destroying our institutions. Every day the Republican Congress is fully complicit with all of this. And the media?
A Clinton email story with nothing of substance was the obsession of the media for months. Trump? Multiple scandals with a lot of hard proof — and they seem to come and go with little effect. The double standard is the default. There are multiple reasons, any one of which should be reason for Trump to step down or be removed from office — but the reality is the Republican grip on our government means nothing will happen. Where are the media headlines calling them out?
Indictments confirm what we’ve been warned about for months. Russia has been actively disrupting our elections and sowing division in this country — and Trump is AWOL. Russian interference is amplified by the Republicans own messaging to stir up their base and their strategy to skew elections in their favor. We are being warned Russian efforts continue — the 2018 elections are coming and nothing has been done.
Russia has been able to weaponize social media against us; Facebook has been a huge platform for them. Facebook tracks what users are interested in; it shows people what it thinks they want to see — not what they need to know. Facebook delivers them up to advertisers, slicing and dicing to serve them up by whatever criteria the buyer wants. They’ve automated it — and there’s no convincing signs that Facebook has found a way to deal with bad actors using Facebook for their own ends.
The ‘personalized’ news feed is a problem all by itself. It’s hard to bring America together on anything when everyone is working from a different set of ‘facts’. Internet search engines that use your search history to rank results for you (as well as what advertisers pay them to promote) amplify the problem.
We have a White House with multiple security issues. We have an administration with serious competency issues — if not deliberate criminal intent. We have a Congress whose first concern is to cut taxes on the rich. The rule of law is a joke — thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent by Conrgressional Republicans on hearings whose sole purpose was to delegitimize and discredit Democrats. Crickets, when it comes to Trump.
How do they get away with it? Here’s another part of the puzzle.
Right now I’m watching Sharyl Attkinson giving Devin Nunes air time to explain how the House Intelligence committee found absolutely no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — but they found evidence the FBI and the DOJ have been engaged in criminal activity for partisan ends. Nunes is lying through his teeth and Attkinson is spoon-feeding him cues to let him catapult the propaganda.
This is on Full Measure, a product of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group — the same Sinclair Broadcasting that the Trump administration is allowing to become the de facto source of news for a majority of America.
...The change will allow Sinclair — a company known for injecting "must run" conservative segments into its local programming — to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations. That’s nearly double the congressionally imposed nationwide audience cap of 39 percent.
That headline in the photo at the top of this post? Pretty much lines up with what Nunes was spewing just now. And now Attkinson has just launched a story to claim the media has always been at war with presidents, all the way back to Washington. In other words, ignore all the bad things that the press is reporting about Trump. It’s purely partisan and it’s ‘normal’.
It’s not just Russia we have to worry about. They are not the only ones attacking our system of government.