This post is a synthesis of: The New York Times article on the American fascist movement excerpted here yesterday FascismInAmerica; The New York Times editorial this morning TruthAndLies; an article cited to in the editorial at thinkprogress.org TrumpWinningWarOnReality; Bimbo Nellie Jo Tits; a Washington Post article on Russian influence in the 2016 American presidential election OpenYourMouthAndSuckMy Penis; Olivia Nuzzi; some others. It concludes with an overlong copy-and-paste job from thinkprogress on what we can do about it on accounta I got tired.
My synthesizer produced the following harmonies:
-Facts are not stubborn things, facts are malleable things. You have your facts, I have my facts; I'm okay, you're an asshole; The CIA has its facts on Russia's creation of America 2.0, the FBI has its facts; "Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus," what a Republican senator said to a Democratic senator on receiving both briefings and deciding to land on Mars.
-Lies are facts. Repeat a lie enough and it becomes fact. The drip, drip, drip lays down minerals that over time become stalactites of facts.
-Enough fact stalactites and you destroy the old reality of the cave and create a Strange New World.
-BUT, big but: "Race is real. Race matters. Race is the foundation of identity." (Richard B. Spencer, director of the "National Policy Institute" which is "dedicated to the heritage, identify and future of people of European descent.")
-In America, Big Lie-fact stalactite-Strange New World reality was first made a conscious strategy by William Henry Harrison. PoliticsForeverChanged
-In Russia it is Vladislav Surkov. In the Soviet Union it was Stalin.
-Karl Rove was an excellent creator of fact stalactites: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
-Steve Bannon is excellent.
-Donald Trump is excellent. "Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality..."
-If we hadn't been living on Venus we would have known all this about facts. We would have known that the spoken word is a verbal fact, thus malleable, not to be taken literally. "The media is always taking Trump literally, It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters...for Trump take him seriously but not literally.” (Peter Thiel) "They don't care" said Olivia Nuzzi of Trump supporters and Trump's policy proposals, they "trust" him to take care of, and protect them, from Mexicans, Muslims and Negroes because he's a white male fascist. "Facts aren't the point, trust is," says the Times editorial.
-There is, in this Strange New World nonverbal communication, "dog whistles," inaudible to Venusians, audible only to racist dogs. "Through irony, evasion, self-contradiction, and obviously ridiculous claims, [Trump] let his supporters in on the joke."
-Even with nonverbal communication you have to be careful in interpreting your fellow racist dogs so as not to "give the wrong impression." The Hitler salutes at Trump rallies? That was "very foolish," it should be interpreted merely as "their version of the middle finger. to the media, to the Trump haters, to everybody they feel alienated from." Just like the guy in South Carolina who said Trump supporters were "voting with our middle fingers."
-The most excellent architect of the Strange New World however is Vladislav Surkov. He's Russian. An adviser to Vladimir Putin. Trump had an adviser close to Putin, Paul Manafort. His new national security adviser is an excellent friend of Putin's.
-Surkov does not take Trump or the spoken word literally, believes with Tits that there are no facts, not like facts-facts, and since you're an asshole anyway and I work for the Leaders of Russia and America 2.0, I can make these elaborate caves of New Reality out of my drip, drip, drip fact stalactites and destroy your reality HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA. I will do this to serve my leader and to manipulate you but since I am very image conscious I call it "managed democracy," no diff, just sounds nicer. Facts are powerful tools. These tools keep my leader in power, me employed, and you on your heels, confused, and under our boots. “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”-Steve Bannon.
-Surkov, the documentary journalist Adam Curtis said in a 2014 film, is “a hero of our time.” He went on to describe the Surkovian method:
His aim is to undermine peoples’ perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.
Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.
But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it: “It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.”
According to a 2011 openDemocracy article by Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, Surkov is “considered the main architect of what is colloquially known as ‘managed democracy,’ the administrative management of party and electoral politics.”
“Surkov’s philosophy is that there is no real freedom in the world, and that all democracies are managed democracies, so the key to success is to influence people, to give them the illusion that they are free, whereas in fact they are managed,” writes Sakwa.
The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.
Because of the constant media focus on his campaign, Trump was able to bombard the airwaves with an unending stream of surreal falsehoods. At the same time, Bannon turned Breitbart News into a Trump Party organ and used it to disseminate further confusion.
...the sheer volume of these stories had their intended effect. When fake news becomes omnipresent, all news becomes suspect. Everything starts to look like a lie.
In a world where nothing is true, the only real choice available to voters is between competing fictions...Through irony, evasion, self-contradiction, and obviously ridiculous claims, he let his supporters in on the joke. If everything is a lie, then the man who makes his lies obvious is practicing a peculiar form of honesty.
For Trump, politics is a reality show.
-This is now America 2.0:
When political actors can’t agree on basic facts and procedures, compromise and rule-bound argumentation are basically impossible;
That’s where Donald Trump’s lies are taking us. By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible.
If the United States is to remain a liberal democracy, then Trump’s non-linear warfare needs to fail. Politics needs to once again become grounded in some kind of stable, shared reality. It’s not clear how that could happen. But there are at least a couple of steps that anti-authoritarians can make right away to ensure that the Surkov style of rhetoric does not go unchallenged.
First, social media companies need to be held accountable for facilitating the spread of misinformation. Men like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, through their greed and stupidity, have shepherded authoritarianism to power in the United States. By embracing a facile definition of “openness,” they’ve sought to reap the traffic benefits of right-wing propaganda while ignoring its disastrous social consequences. They’ve since taken some small steps to rectify their errors, but for now, at least, it’s too little too late.
Second, journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration. They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy. That is the choice every news outlet faces for the next four years: Subservience and complicity, or open hostility. There is no middle ground.
For the next four years, Donald Trump will seek to shred any institution that threatens his ability to unilaterally determine what is real. That will likely include the courts, universities, unions, and even executive branch agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If he fails, then the United States may yet keep its republic. But if he succeeds, then the very notion of political reality will have been reduced to little more than a bad joke.
My synthesizer produced the following harmonies:
-Facts are not stubborn things, facts are malleable things. You have your facts, I have my facts; I'm okay, you're an asshole; The CIA has its facts on Russia's creation of America 2.0, the FBI has its facts; "Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus," what a Republican senator said to a Democratic senator on receiving both briefings and deciding to land on Mars.
-Lies are facts. Repeat a lie enough and it becomes fact. The drip, drip, drip lays down minerals that over time become stalactites of facts.
-Enough fact stalactites and you destroy the old reality of the cave and create a Strange New World.
-BUT, big but: "Race is real. Race matters. Race is the foundation of identity." (Richard B. Spencer, director of the "National Policy Institute" which is "dedicated to the heritage, identify and future of people of European descent.")
-In America, Big Lie-fact stalactite-Strange New World reality was first made a conscious strategy by William Henry Harrison. PoliticsForeverChanged
-In Russia it is Vladislav Surkov. In the Soviet Union it was Stalin.
-Karl Rove was an excellent creator of fact stalactites: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
-Steve Bannon is excellent.
-Donald Trump is excellent. "Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality..."
-If we hadn't been living on Venus we would have known all this about facts. We would have known that the spoken word is a verbal fact, thus malleable, not to be taken literally. "The media is always taking Trump literally, It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters...for Trump take him seriously but not literally.” (Peter Thiel) "They don't care" said Olivia Nuzzi of Trump supporters and Trump's policy proposals, they "trust" him to take care of, and protect them, from Mexicans, Muslims and Negroes because he's a white male fascist. "Facts aren't the point, trust is," says the Times editorial.
-Even with nonverbal communication you have to be careful in interpreting your fellow racist dogs so as not to "give the wrong impression." The Hitler salutes at Trump rallies? That was "very foolish," it should be interpreted merely as "their version of the middle finger. to the media, to the Trump haters, to everybody they feel alienated from." Just like the guy in South Carolina who said Trump supporters were "voting with our middle fingers."
-The most excellent architect of the Strange New World however is Vladislav Surkov. He's Russian. An adviser to Vladimir Putin. Trump had an adviser close to Putin, Paul Manafort. His new national security adviser is an excellent friend of Putin's.
-Surkov does not take Trump or the spoken word literally, believes with Tits that there are no facts, not like facts-facts, and since you're an asshole anyway and I work for the Leaders of Russia and America 2.0, I can make these elaborate caves of New Reality out of my drip, drip, drip fact stalactites and destroy your reality HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA. I will do this to serve my leader and to manipulate you but since I am very image conscious I call it "managed democracy," no diff, just sounds nicer. Facts are powerful tools. These tools keep my leader in power, me employed, and you on your heels, confused, and under our boots. “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”-Steve Bannon.
-Surkov, the documentary journalist Adam Curtis said in a 2014 film, is “a hero of our time.” He went on to describe the Surkovian method:
His aim is to undermine peoples’ perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.
Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.
But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it: “It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.”
...
To men like Surkov, that is exactly as it should be. Government policy should not be set through democratic oversight; instead, the government should “manage” democracy, ensuring that people can express themselves without having any influence...According to a 2011 openDemocracy article by Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, Surkov is “considered the main architect of what is colloquially known as ‘managed democracy,’ the administrative management of party and electoral politics.”
“Surkov’s philosophy is that there is no real freedom in the world, and that all democracies are managed democracies, so the key to success is to influence people, to give them the illusion that they are free, whereas in fact they are managed,” writes Sakwa.
The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.
Because of the constant media focus on his campaign, Trump was able to bombard the airwaves with an unending stream of surreal falsehoods. At the same time, Bannon turned Breitbart News into a Trump Party organ and used it to disseminate further confusion.
...the sheer volume of these stories had their intended effect. When fake news becomes omnipresent, all news becomes suspect. Everything starts to look like a lie.
In a world where nothing is true, the only real choice available to voters is between competing fictions...Through irony, evasion, self-contradiction, and obviously ridiculous claims, he let his supporters in on the joke. If everything is a lie, then the man who makes his lies obvious is practicing a peculiar form of honesty.
For Trump, politics is a reality show.
-This is now America 2.0:
When political actors can’t agree on basic facts and procedures, compromise and rule-bound argumentation are basically impossible;
That’s where Donald Trump’s lies are taking us. By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible.
If the United States is to remain a liberal democracy, then Trump’s non-linear warfare needs to fail. Politics needs to once again become grounded in some kind of stable, shared reality. It’s not clear how that could happen. But there are at least a couple of steps that anti-authoritarians can make right away to ensure that the Surkov style of rhetoric does not go unchallenged.
First, social media companies need to be held accountable for facilitating the spread of misinformation. Men like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, through their greed and stupidity, have shepherded authoritarianism to power in the United States. By embracing a facile definition of “openness,” they’ve sought to reap the traffic benefits of right-wing propaganda while ignoring its disastrous social consequences. They’ve since taken some small steps to rectify their errors, but for now, at least, it’s too little too late.
Second, journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration. They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy. That is the choice every news outlet faces for the next four years: Subservience and complicity, or open hostility. There is no middle ground.
For the next four years, Donald Trump will seek to shred any institution that threatens his ability to unilaterally determine what is real. That will likely include the courts, universities, unions, and even executive branch agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If he fails, then the United States may yet keep its republic. But if he succeeds, then the very notion of political reality will have been reduced to little more than a bad joke.
