Why is this race even close? Because Fox News keeps lying to half the country.

A panel on Fox News' "The Five" erupted into chaos on Wednesday when resident Democratic commentator Jessica Tarlov chided the rest of the group for echoing the Trump campaign's attacks on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's military service, following his selection as Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate. (Screengrab via Fox News)

By sabrina haake

Community

Daily Kos

Sunday, November 03, 2024 at 8:01:47a MST

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

The stress of this make-or-break Democracy test feels cruel and unusual. Cruel because of what’s at stake, unusual because it is unrelenting.  

For people who inform themselves through fact-based media outlets, the most commonly heard question is, how is this race even close?  Of all the craziness we’ve seen and heard, the Nazi-adjacent rhetoric, the venomous threats, the crazed narcissist making the nation’s struggles all about himself, how can half the country still support him?  How can half our fellow citizens vote for him, knowing what they know about him? Are they crazy? Are they hateful?

The short answer, IMHO, is no. Most Trump voters are not Nazis, voting for Trump because of who Trump is. There are enough haters among them, of course, but MAGA mostly just wants to be entertained. They go to his rallies because they enjoy the carnival, the camaraderie. They don’t know who Trump really is, what his policies really are, because Fox News, again, is selling them false information. 

People who watch Fox News support Trump

Forty-three percent of the country watches Fox News, which correlates directly with the percentage of voters who support Trump over Harris.

More telling, most Fox viewers don’t diversify the information they consume: Viewers with consistently conservative political views get them from a single outlet—Fox News—to a much greater degree than independents and liberals, who inform themselves from a variety of sources. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half (47%) of consistently conservative Americans get their government and political news just from Fox News.

Fox News topped primetime viewership in August 2024. According to a recent Deadline Report, Fox News’ The Five was “the top regularly scheduled program in cable news, averaging 3.29 million viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime with 2.97 million, Hannity with 2.61 million, Gutfeld! with 2.55 million and The Ingraham Angle with 2.44 million.”

Voters can’t act on what they don’t know

The high percentage of Americans hooked on Fox entertainment-sold-as-news escalates the risks inherent in Fox’s pro-Trump propaganda from fraudulent, to dangerous, to a national security threat. It elevates the stakes from “political speech,” protected by the 1^st A, to weaponized disinformation.  The difference is substantive, and both legislature and courts need to deal with it in a meaningful way.  

For now, whenever there’s a news cycle unfavorable to Trump, Fox hosts either spin it in the opposite direction to help him, or, more frequently, they redirect their viewers to election topics deemed favorable to Trump, like the border.  Over the past several months, Fox has focused obsessively on our broken immigration system, featuring dog whistles meant to frighten white people, but Fox hosts almost never mention how Trump intentionally killed the border bill just so he could campaign on it.

When Fox tires of showing black and brown people committing crimes, and lying about violent crime rates that have actually fallen, Fox programmers switch to pablum like popular hairstyles, dog breeds, and who eats ketchup on their omelets. Meanwhile, ominous and unprecedented national security warnings about the dangers of a second Trump administration, coming in from Trump’s own advisors, are hidden from Fox viewers.

Fox buried warnings from Trump’s own brass

Last week when news broke that John Kelly, Trump’s own Chief of Staff, wanted to warn Americans about Trump, including that Trump wanted generals more like Hitler’s and exhibited fascistic urges, Fox News re-directed viewers to Trump’s publicity stunt where he cosplayed at McDonalds. Fox ran dozens of insipid articles about Trump at McDonalds (Trump standing at the fry counter, Trump claiming Harris never worked there, Trump charming the customers at the drive-through window, etc.) Meanwhile, they reported almost nothing about John Kelly’s warning.  

In one of two articles I saw about Kelly’s statements, Fox packaged it as a Harris ploy, reporting last week that, “The Harris campaign on Friday put out a letter penned by 13 ex-Trump administration officials seeking to bolster claims made by former President Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly…” The article then identified 13 fairly low-level Republicans who signed a letter warning about Trump, instead of the hundreds of high ranking Republican advisors issuing the same warnings. Fox focused on Trump smiling in an apron to bury dire statements from heavy hitters including Mark Milley, the highest ranking military officer and Trump’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fox News articles about other Republicans against Trump, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are mostly led with misleading headlines against Democrats and Harris because the vast majority of people- 70 to 80%- read only the headlines. Even after Trump said Liz Cheney should have 9 rifles pointed at her (execution squad style). Fox headlines spun the story against both Cheney and Harris.

Over 300 high ranking Republicans, including military and political leaders, have issued warnings against another Trump administration. As the NYT reports, the list includes “former defense secretaries Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, former World Bank president; ex-CIA directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; former director of national intelligence John D. Negroponte; and former Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld,” and former Trump administration officials Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye.

Or, as Fox described the letter from 13 Republicans, “Mike Pence who has signed multiple letters from Republicans attacking Trump, signed this letter, as well.”

No matter what happens Tuesday, we need fairness in the news

One thing we know for sure about domestic politics is that when the pendulum swings, it always swings back, the question is when, and after what.

When the day finally comes that our Supreme Court isn’t ethically compromised—and that day will come— voters will challenge Fox News (and likely Elon Musk) for aiding and abetting election fraud, as Dominion did. The next time around, the outcome for Fox won’t just be the cost of doing business.

We’ve legislated truth in the news before, and our nation was better for it. In 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Fairness Doctrine, which required all news broadcasters to give fair coverage and opposing views on matters of public importance. Balancing publishers’ first amendment rights against the right of the public to be well informed, the Red Lion Court ruled that the public’s right to access full information takes priority over the First Amendment concerns of broadcasters. “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market.” This is the same legal analysis that should be applied to today’s “political speech defense.” Bottom line, there’s a difference between free speech and weaponized speech, and the law needs to catch up with rapidly changing social media, AI, and monopolized town squares.

Legal change will eventually come, it’s not if but when. We aren’t meant to hate our neighbors, as much as Putin, Xi and Trump want us to. As Harris said, there’s a better way. In the meantime, take a walk in the woods. Leave your phone at home. Vote, speak up, write a column, drive your neighbors to the polls, then let it go.  

Kamala Harris for president.  Obviously.

Men Are Hopeless, but Don’t Worry: Women Will Save America. As Usual.

  Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. (photo: Noah Berger/AFP)

“Whether they like it or not.” Liz Cheney before a firing squad. He’s gone too far.

Michael Tomasky / The New Republic 02 November 24

 

At closing argument time, it turns out that Donald Trump is making Kamala Harris’s closing argument. What is it? That women should not vote for him. He is making the case better than she ever could. And it looks like it may be sticking.

Let’s start with what Trump said to Tucker Carlson about Liz Cheney at a forum Thursday night. It is, straight up, a very strong contender for the most shocking and vile thing he’s ever said. I know that’s saying something, but judge for yourself: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Cheney is a war hawk. I disagree with her about all that. But that’s neither here nor there. A candidate for president of the United States just called for a fellow American to face a firing squad. A firing squad! Who’s the last presidential candidate to do that? Maybe someone like 1820 also-ran William Crawford? More likely no one, ever.

Some might argue that Trump was merely noting that Cheney had never been in the literal line of fire in combat, because he went on to talk about the swagger of Beltway interventionists like Cheney and John Bolton: “They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building.” I’ve opposed most U.S. wars of my lifetime (I thought we were morally and legally justified in responding to September 11 in Afghanistan but worried that we’d overdo it, which of course we did), but I’ve always found that to be a real cheap-seats line—if you’re so crazy about war, why don’t you go fight it? No. If you oppose a war, oppose it on serious grounds, not on the basis of peanut-gallery arguments like that.

But Trump knew exactly what he was saying here—intentionally suggesting that Cheney should face a firing squad, but doing so in such a way that he could plausibly deny it. No prominent candidate for office has ever taken the next step of saying let’s put such a person in front of a firing squad. It’s a literal and specific sentence of death for a literal and specific human being, and that’s what makes it so outrageous.

And it’s not an accident that he said it about a woman. Trump has contempt for all of humanity, but his contempt for women is special, because women aren’t full human beings with intellect and agency in the same way men are. They’re there for sex, and if they’re not hot enough for sex, why are they hanging around taking up space, food, and water?

Which brings us to Trump’s second hideous comment of the week about women, that he’s going to protect them “whether the women like it or not.” Again, he pulled his usual trick of using plausible deniability language; what he meant, he continued, was that he’s going to protect them from migrants and foreign attacks (and I guess his rhetoric has become so offensive on so many levels that the clearly fascist nature of this pledge—that Dear Leader personally will protect them—is now worth only a parenthetical).

Whatever he meant, whatever was sludging through that sewer in his brain when he spoke the words, lots of people (not just women) took the remark as Trump reminding women of the power he has already exercised over their lives and will exercise again if he’s returned to the White House. And that properly freaks a lot of women out.

A month ago in Georgia, Candi Miller, a married mother of three who had lupus and diabetes, found that she was pregnant. She’d been warned by doctors that another baby could dramatically endanger her health. She ordered abortion pills online. They didn’t quite work. She was in need of a procedure that is fairly common—but that the state of Georgia had recently made illegal. She died. She didn’t want to visit a doctor, her family told the coroner, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”

That’s just one of many stories we now know about in which women and their doctors have been forced into impossible conversations and decisions because of the hideous laws passed after Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. These stories are abstract to men. I very much doubt they’re abstract to women.

And finally: Trump really said Thursday that he’s going to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of women’s health? Does he think women don’t hear this, and they don’t understand that Kennedy (before he ended his presidential campaign) said he’d sign a national abortion ban and that he might deny their children vaccines?

They do. And it seems they’re paying attention. The early voters so far are 54 percent women and 44 percent men. That seems an encouraging sign.

People are writing a lot of articles about the gender gap. Supposedly, it’s lower than expected. Supposedly, men are breaking for Trump by larger percentages than women are breaking for Harris.

Of course, this could end up being true. But two points: One, the margin of error on subgroups within polls is high. So say there’s a poll that shows Trump leads among men by 14 but Harris leads among women by only 11. But if the margin of error on those numbers is, say, five points, Trump could be winning men by as little as nine, and Harris could be leading among women by as much as 16. Such polls are not useless, but they’re also nothing to freak out about.

But second and more important: What matters more than the gender gap per se is what percentage of the overall electorate is female and male. In 2020, according to exit polls, the electorate was 52 percent women and 48 percent men. Isn’t it reasonable to think the female percentage might be a little higher? Might women not be a wee bit more motivated to turn out for Harris than they were for Joe Biden? Pollsters generally will not make that assumption; they tend to base their polls on past electorates. But let’s say women are, oh, just 53 percent of the electorate. If 180 million people vote, that’s 1.8 million voters. If Harris carries them with 55 or 56 percent (which I think is conservative), that’s one million more Harris votes. It depends on where they’re distributed, of course. But in a close election, that’s a lot of votes.

The media have obsessed over Black people and Latinos turned off by Harris and various other #Demsindisarray narratives. The enthusiasm of women for Harris is a storyline that has been entirely unexplored. Women, and Black women in particular, are invisible in the media, as I wrote two weeks ago. But they exist. And their votes count just as much as the votes of white working-class men in Wilkes-Barre.

It’s a close election. But Trump is getting weirder and more unhinged every day. Every hour. Who knows what he’ll be saying by Sunday? The true nature of the man is finally becoming unavoidable. And Harris is getting sturdier. A lot of men are too blinded by their prejudices or assumptions to notice this. I suspect women are noticing, in big numbers.

"C-Word": Trump and Musk's Sexist Closer

  Former President Donald Trump hugs Elon Musk at a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show on October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP) 

Nikki Haley is right that "bromance and masculinity stuff" — like wishing Taylor Swift dead — is politically risky

By Amanda Marcotte / Salon  

02 November 24

 

Much has been made out of the fact that Donald Trump's campaign did nix one "joke" in the now-infamous speech by podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe during the dizzyingly hateful MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday: calling Vice President Kamala Harris the c-word. As I wrote in the Standing Room Only newsletter, this shows that the campaign knew Hinchcliffe was planning a wildly racist set. I suspect the racism was a sick form of strategy, a continuation of Trump advisor Steve Bannon's infamous "flood the zone" tactics. Note that the Trump campaign only tried to distance themselves from the comments calling Puerto Ricans — who have a heavy voting presence in some swing states — "garbage," but not from the rest of his set or the many other vile things said by other speakers.

The censorship of the c-word likely happened because it's profanity, not because it's misogynistic. We know this because Hinchcliffe's other woman-hating "jokes" were left in, including fantasizing about the murder of pop star Taylor Swift. "I think that Travis Kelce might be the next O.J. Simpson," Hinchcliffe said of Swift's NFL-playing boyfriend. Swift has been the object of violent ire by many MAGA leaders, including billionaire Elon Musk, who issued an unsubtle rape threat after Swift endorsed Harris for president. And that is not out of character for Musk, who has purchased a spot so close to Trump's side it often looks like he's replaced Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. It's Musk who has shown, in the last few days before the election, that misogyny is right up there with racism as the Trump campaign's closing argument.

While Trump's team canceled the c-word "joke" from Hinchcliffe's set, they didn't seem to mind that Musk's political action committee, American PAC, ran an ad declaring, "Kamala Harris is a c-word." Or, they didn't mind until it started to dawn on them that Trump's hate rally in New York City may have backfired, at which point Musk quietly removed the ad. But it was too late, as progressive groups had captured the image. 

No one doubts, of course, the misogyny of Musk and Trump and the MAGA movement. Just last year, a civil jury found Trump sexually assaulted journalist E. Jean Carroll. He's been accused by countless other women, many of whom describe attacks much like the one he bragged about in the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape. Multiple former employees of Musk's have filed lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and gender discrimination. But what is a little strange is how the Trump campaign embraced misogyny, until this late-breaking scramble. Proud woman-hating is also a feature at Trump rallies, as we saw just a few days ago, when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson gave a speech where he rolled out an incestuous BDSM fantasy about "Daddy" giving "a vigorous spanking" to the "bad girl," imagined as a teenage daughter.

Even when promising to "protect" women, Trump can't help but sound creepy or threatening. Wednesday night, he told a Wisconsin crowd he wants to "protect the women of our country," and, "I'm gonna do it whether the women like it or not." Feminists have long argued that "chivalry" is just another form of male domination, disguised as benevolence. Trump, as he often does, proves the feminist case.

Adding to the creep factor, Trump continued with, "Is there any woman in this stadium that wants to be protected by the president?"

Former Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., complained on Tuesday about the Trump campaign's "bromance and masculinity stuff," saying that it is "going to make women uncomfortable," which is an understatement considering both Trump's proven and alleged victims both report being traumatized by his sex crimes. But it's unlikely that Trump will listen to Haley. First, she's a woman, so he doesn't care what she thinks. Second, toxic masculinity isn't a slip-up or a gaffe. It's a deliberate strategy by the Trump campaign.

The Trump campaign is well aware that the sexist antics, as well as the ending of abortion rights, led to a loss in female support that is shaping up to create a record-setting gender gap this election. As has been documented by numerous outlets, they believe they can make up for those losses by reaching out to men with implicit — though unrealizable — appeals about how they can bring women to heel. I saw the "women in the back" framework at the Republican National Convention, where once-rising female stars of MAGA world, like Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, were shoved off to the side, mostly ignored by both leaders and delegates.

It's tough to say if this bet was bad, as the polls remain in a dead heat in the last week. But it is a big risk for the GOP, for one simple reason: Women vote more than men. The Trump campaign hopes, by turning up the misogyny, they can get a lot of those infrequent male voters to turn out. That may happen. Still, it seems unwise because, in the process, they are running off the more reliable female voters. As Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times, Trump's gains "with young men are less striking than Harris’s enormous lead with young women." If Harris wins, he argues, "we may look back and say that we should have focused a little more on the women, young and otherwise, who most likely made the difference." Certainly, the head of one of Trump's "get out the vote" operations, Charlie Kirk, is worried. Wednesday, he fretted about women voting at higher rates, adding, "If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple."

Who knows if Trump's campaign managers think misogyny is a smart tactic or if they're simply trying to make electoral lemonade out of political lemons. The latter does make sense. Trump and the men he surrounds himself with are so wholly committed to woman-hating that there's likely no way to convince them to tone it down. In MAGA world, the only way to be a man is to embrace toxic masculinity. That much was made clear in a recent Q&A event, where Musk complained, "If masculinity is so toxic, how come the kids that are messed up don't have dads?"

There's no need here to rehash the lengthy debunkings of this myth, which you can read elsewhere. But it is telling that Musk ignores that when fathers abandon their children, it's usually a direct result of toxic masculinity. It's toxic masculinity that tells men it's emasculating to embrace caretaking duties. It's toxic masculinity that teaches that a man's role is to be an aloof "provider" who is barely around and who disappears entirely if the relationship with their mother ends. Musk should know this, as his daughter told NBC News, "He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there," and it's "generous" to say he was around "maybe 10% of the time." That is toxic masculinity embodied: believing "fatherhood" is about contributing the DNA and putting your name on a birth certificate, but nothing more.

Of course, in MAGA world they don't blame the men who abandon their children. They blame women. When a man like Musk walks away from his kids, the right wants to accuse the mother of running him off, usually by not being submissive enough. In the Trump/Musk worldview, men are to hold all the power, but they are never expected to take responsibility for their choices.

Trump ally and fellow Hitler-praiser Nick Fuentes illustrated this "childish kings" view of manhood in a nutshell in a recent tweet: "If Trump loses, blame women."

A better way to phrase this is "thank women." But this epitomizes the all-power-no-responsibility model of MAGA manhood. The GOP nominated a candidate who ushered in abortion bans and is, by his own account and according to a civil court of law, a sexual assailant. His favorite words for women are "nasty" and "pigs." On the rare occasion that he praises a woman, it's almost always for being sexually attractive to him, and not for any talents she may have. He's explicitly running a campaign of male grievance. That grievance is comically unjustified, mostly a long series of complaints that women aren't compliant enough or that they'd rather be childless cat ladies than partnered with MAGA men.

On Monday, Trump advisor and Project 2025 leader John McEntee doubled down by telling women explicitly their votes are not wanted.

MAGA men would throw a party with a big banner that reads "Women Not Welcome" and then complain that the shindig is a sausage fest. Hopefully, it will be enough to cost Trump the election.

 

Trump shares totally normal fantasy of Liz Cheney facing a firing squad

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tells an amused Tucker Carlson what he'd like to do to Liz Cheney during a Tucker Carlson Live Tour show Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Glendale, Arizona.  A couple of really sweetheart guys.

Cheney: "This is how dictators destroy free nations.  They threaten those who speak against them with death."

 

By Oliver Willis 

Daily Kos Staff

Friday, November 01, 2024 at 8:30:02a MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Donald Trump fantasized about guns being put in the face of former Rep. Liz Cheney during a campaign event on Thursday night.

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her where the rifle’s standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about—you know when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.

Cheney responded to Trump’s comments after the video was posted online.

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” she wrote on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Ian Sams, a senior adviser for the Harris-Walz campaign, slammed Trump’s remarks in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday morning.

“Think about the contrast between these two candidates: You have Donald Trump, who’s talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad and you have Vice President [Kamala] Harris talking about sending one to her Cabinet,” Sams said.

Trump’s comments come just days after he attempted to cast himself as a “protector” of women, “whether the women like it or not.” The venue for Trump’s attack on Cheney was an interview with disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has a long history of misogynist remarks.

Trump has expressed anger at Cheney for crossing the aisle and endorsing Harris’ presidential campaign. Cheney has said she backs Harris, despite disagreeing with her on a host of issues, because Trump represents a threat to American democracy.

At a campaign event in Wisconsin in early October, Cheney specifically called out Trump’s actions during and after the Jan.6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“He praised the rioters. He did not condemn them. That’s who Donald Trump is.”

Cheney was the vice chair of the Jan. 6 congressional committee that investigated the attack and was one of only two Republicans (the other was former Rep. Adam Kinzinger) willing to cross the aisle to do so. She was later defeated in Wyoming’s Republican congressional primary by a pro-Trump Republican, Rep. Harriet Hageman.

Both Cheney and Kinzinger also voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Capitol attack. The vote was Trump’s second impeachment.

The former representatives are joined by a host of former Republican officials—including some who served in Trump’s administration—who are now supporting Harris’ campaign.

Liz Cheney, whose father Dick Cheney also endorses Kamala Harris.