Present certain thoughts or objects
possessing no value or relevance at all.
Toss one of these to the masses,
and as you watch them tear it
and each other to pieces
trying to find some hidden meaning,
then you know its purpose is fulfilled.
Showing posts with label political manipulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political manipulation. Show all posts
Jul 4, 2024
Jun 25, 2024
Understanding The Daddy State
Splitting:
Everything is either
all and only good
- or -
all and only bad
Projection:
Rule 1 (Every accusation is a confession), mashed up with Rule 3 (Every dire prediction is a veiled threat).
Splitting per Donald Trump:
The economy's in the tank, immigrants are running amok, The FBI is out to get me,
and and and.
Nothing about America is good - everything is bad - so America is a shithole country.
Trump's Projection:
Trump tells us how awful everything is here in USAmerica Inc, and since everything Trump says is some sort of projection, it's not unreasonable to assume he's actually talking about how he intends to turn us into the fucked up place he says this country is. And he can count on the rubes to assume he's talking about making life miserable for everybody but them.
This guy's not the best speaker anybody's ever heard, but he knows his shit.
- When you're explaining the beauty of your elegantly nuanced position, you're losing.
- When the other guy is back on his heels because you've got him explaining his comment with the coded racist shit hidden in it, you're winning.
I'm sorry we've gotten ourselves into the unbelievably shitty spot where we have to accept the practicability of that kind of totally fucked up False Equivalence - but here we are. We have to learn how to deal with it, and (hopefully) turn it to our advantage.
May 12, 2024
Here It Is
... the gist of it anyway.
This is for everybody who loves to bitch about how "the Dems just don't know how to message, and blah blah blah.
Always remember we're fighting on three fronts - the GOP, and the Wingnut Media Cartel, and a gang of hostile foreign governments slipping in under the back of the tent.
Apr 29, 2024
Oy
Another perfect example of the glaring hypocrisy of the GOP - the "party of free speech" clutches its pearls and staggers backwards groping for the fainting couch as people exercise their rights under 1A.
And the obvious implication is that Trump would, of course, quell the protests by turning out the military to bust a few skulls and send some protesters to prison for a few years to make sure everybody gets the message and blah blah blah.
That said, I think it would be good to get straight with the protocols of protest and civil disobedience.
- You do your thing
- You get yourself arrested
- You stand for the consequences
- You go back and do it again
You don't throw rocks and then hide your hands.
Because, yes - there are rules about how you break the rules. That's how we need to do things in a civilized and democratized society.
Sick to death of this wingnut crap, and just as sick of Press Poodles who continue to make like GOP stenographers, giving endless oxygen to authoritarian assholes, and doing nothing to clarify and contextualize the events.
Democracy dies in the darkness that WaPo refuses to lift.
Trump, GOP seize on campus protests to depict chaos under Biden
Republicans highlight images of turmoil, though most of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been peaceful
Former president Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans are seizing on the eruption of campus protests across the country to depict the United States as out of control under President Biden, seeking to use the mostly peaceful demonstrations as a political cudgel against the Democrats.
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The pro-Palestinian protests at numerous colleges — including Columbia, Yale, Emory, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin and others — include encampments and barricades intended to highlight protesters’ denunciation of Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, as well as to push universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Beyond the disruption to campus life, top Republicans have highlighted the antisemitic chants that have occurred at some of the protests. The issue is complicated by a debate over what constitutes antisemitism — and when criticism of Israel crosses that line — while some student organizers have denounced the chants or said they are coming from outside activists.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has cited the protests to accuse Biden and Democrats of being unable to maintain order or quash lawlessness, an accusation he has leveled at the president on other hot-button political issues. He has also highlighted the protests as a way to air his own political grievances, including the lack of similar demonstrations around his current criminal trial.
On Monday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social, “STOP THE PROTESTS NOW!!!”
As the protests have mushroomed in recent days, numerous Republicans have sought ways to highlight them as an example of the country’s slide into chaos. Several Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), have visited the campus of Columbia University, the site of some of the most sweeping protests, to call for its president to resign for purportedly failing to contain the demonstrations.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, dispatched more than 100 state troopers to the University of Texas at Austin to clear out pro-Palestinian protesters, resulting in dozens of arrests. All of the charges against the protesters were later dropped for lack of probable cause.
The campus protests present conservatives with some of their favorite targets: elite universities, progressive activists, “woke” culture and civil rights leaders. In addition, attacking the protests allows Republicans to change the subject from less friendly political terrain, such as abortion rights and the war in Ukraine.
Their rhetoric is harsh in many cases. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) have demanded that Biden mobilize the National Guard to protect Jewish Americans on campus. Hawley compared the standoff to the battle over segregation in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower summoned the National Guard to force the integration of Central High School in Little Rock.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested that the college protesters were mentally unstable. “You don’t get to turn our public places into a garbage dump. No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them,” Vance posted on X. “If you want to protest peacefully fine. It’s your right. But go home and take a shower at the end of the day. These encampments are just gross. Wanting to participate in this is a mental illness.”
The GOP rhetoric has not been limited to campus protests, sometimes covering pro-Palestinian actions more broadly, including those that have shut down roads and bridges in some cities. Cotton, in a post on X, urged those who get stuck behind “pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic” to “take matters into your own hands.” Following criticism that some might read that as a call to violence, Cotton amended his post to say “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.”
Supporters of the campus protests say they are peaceful, and that accusations of antisemitism are often a pretext to shut down dissenting voices. Many of the Republicans criticizing the protests, they say, condoned or excused the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was far more violent.
The students are “peacefully protesting for an end of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” the group Jewish Voices for Peace, which supports a cease-fire in Gaza, said of the Columbia protests. “ … We condemn any and all hateful or violent comments targeting Jewish students; however, in shutting down public protest and suspending students, the actions of the University of Columbia are not ensuring safety for Jewish students — or any students — on campus.”
The Israel-Gaza war has deeply fractured the Democratic Party, posing significant political challenges to Biden months ahead of November’s presidential contest. Biden pledged steadfast support of Israel after Hamas militants stormed through the Israel-Gaza border on Oct. 7 and killed 1,200 people, many of them civilians, and took 253 hostage, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel responded with a punishing military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, imposing a siege that has created a humanitarian catastrophe as Gaza’s health system has collapsed and the population faces a looming famine. The resulting protest movement has electrified many younger voters and progressives, as well as others in the Democratic coalition that Biden needs to repeat his 2020 win, who have called for the United States to impose conditions for aid to Israel or suspend it altogether.
Democrats have voiced a range of views on the legitimacy of the protests, and Biden has sought a balance between condemning antisemitism and supporting students’ right to protest. Republicans, in contrast, are largely unified in casting the demonstrations as a disgrace, echoing conservative denunciations of the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.
Trump this week called a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville — which he said at the time had “very fine people on both sides,” prompting a bipartisan backlash — a “peanut” compared with the current protests on campuses. Speaking to reporters after attending his criminal trial in New York on Thursday, Trump repeated the comments he wrote on social media and went further. He called the Charlottesville gathering, where a counterprotester was killed, “a little peanut” and added, “it was nothing compared — the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here.”
Trump has contrasted the pro-Palestinian demonstrations with the lack of protests outside the Manhattan courthouse where he is on trial for an alleged hush money scheme. In seeking to blame Biden for the campus protests, Trump has accused the president of hating Israel, Jews and Palestinians, and accused Jewish Democrats of hating their religion. Many of the protesters are Jewish students, and progressive Jewish organizations have helped lead a number of protest movements since the war began in October.
“The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
The tone of the criticism is not new; since Biden took office, Trump and other Republicans have pushed the notion that America is descending into chaos and lawlessness on his watch. From illegal immigration to soaring inflation to violent crime, they have regularly painted a picture of a country out of control.
These assertions have often been exaggerated or without context, but Trump has seized on them to promise a fierce crackdown should he return to power.
And during his 2020 reelection campaign, Trump tweeted in response to the large-scale protests over the police killing of George Floyd, which were mostly peaceful but occasionally turned to looting, writing, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was widely criticized for potentially encouraging private citizens, or police officers, to take deadly aim at looters.
Trump’s own position on Israel has often been hard to pin down. He has tried to position himself as a firm defender of Israel, but he has also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war and sought to exploit the fissures in Biden’s coalition over U.S. support of Israel.
After the Oct. 7 attack, Trump insulted Israel’s leaders while praising the intelligence of the Hezbollah militant group. Faced with a backlash to that comment, the former president proposed harsh policies against Muslim migrants, saying he would reimpose his ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries and deport students involved in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
In the weeks after the Hamas massacre, Trump said his administration would revoke student visas of “radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.” Other Republicans still running for president at the time — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — and GOP members of Congress similarly called for the visas of “pro-Hamas” foreign students to be revoked.
The spread of the college protests has ignited a renewed Republican response. When word circulated last Wednesday that pro-Palestinian protesters were planning to occupy a lawn at the University of Texas, Gov. Abbott sought to show that his Republican-dominated state would not tolerate a repeat of the encampment at Columbia University, dispatching state troopers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said it responded to the campus “at the direction of” Abbott, who applauded the crackdown on social media. He said the protesters “belong in jail” and that any student participating in “hate-filled, antisemitic protests” at public colleges should be expelled.
Incidents at some universities have fed the criticisms, though pro-Palestinian activists say they are isolated incidents. Video re-emerged this week of a Columbia student who has taken part in the pro-Palestinian protest encampments declaring that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” The student, Khymani James, made the comments in a video posted in January, although he has since stated that they were wrong. Columbia said it had barred the student from campus, but it was unclear whether he was suspended or expelled.
In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp (R), following protests in several cities including Chicago and San Francisco, stressed that he would not tolerate anything similar in his state. Recounting a conversation with Georgia’s public safety commissioner, he said: “You know how I feel about people blocking bridges, airports and other things like we’re seeing around the country. I said, ‘If they do that, lock their ass up.’ ”
In New York City, Speaker Johnson and a group of GOP lawmakers visited Columbia’s campus on Wednesday, where they demanded that the university’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, resign for failing to quickly dismantle the pro-Palestine encampments and, in their view, for not doing enough to ensure that Jewish people on campus felt safe.
Their visit appeared to raise tensions, as Johnson was met with boos and pro-Palestinian chants. One student yelled at Johnson to “get off our campus,” while another shouted, “go back to Louisiana, Mike!”
And on Capitol Hill, Republicans last week urged the Biden administration to intervene in the demonstrations. Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), a top-ranking House Republican, sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling on them to deport students who she said “are brazenly endorsing Hamas and other terrorist organizations” by participating in demonstrations and related events on campus.
Separately, a group of 27 Senate Republicans, including every member of the Senate GOP leadership team, signed onto a letter to Cardona and Garland calling on the administration “to take action to restore order and protect Jewish students on our college campuses.”
“The Department of Education and federal law enforcement must act immediately to restore order, prosecute the mobs who have perpetuated violence and threats against Jewish students, revoke the visas of all foreign nationals (such as exchange students) who have taken part in promoting terrorism, and hold accountable school administrators who have stood by instead of protecting their students,” the letter said.
Trump this week called a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville — which he said at the time had “very fine people on both sides,” prompting a bipartisan backlash — a “peanut” compared with the current protests on campuses. Speaking to reporters after attending his criminal trial in New York on Thursday, Trump repeated the comments he wrote on social media and went further. He called the Charlottesville gathering, where a counterprotester was killed, “a little peanut” and added, “it was nothing compared — the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here.”
Trump has contrasted the pro-Palestinian demonstrations with the lack of protests outside the Manhattan courthouse where he is on trial for an alleged hush money scheme. In seeking to blame Biden for the campus protests, Trump has accused the president of hating Israel, Jews and Palestinians, and accused Jewish Democrats of hating their religion. Many of the protesters are Jewish students, and progressive Jewish organizations have helped lead a number of protest movements since the war began in October.
“The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
The tone of the criticism is not new; since Biden took office, Trump and other Republicans have pushed the notion that America is descending into chaos and lawlessness on his watch. From illegal immigration to soaring inflation to violent crime, they have regularly painted a picture of a country out of control.
These assertions have often been exaggerated or without context, but Trump has seized on them to promise a fierce crackdown should he return to power.
And during his 2020 reelection campaign, Trump tweeted in response to the large-scale protests over the police killing of George Floyd, which were mostly peaceful but occasionally turned to looting, writing, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was widely criticized for potentially encouraging private citizens, or police officers, to take deadly aim at looters.
Trump’s own position on Israel has often been hard to pin down. He has tried to position himself as a firm defender of Israel, but he has also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war and sought to exploit the fissures in Biden’s coalition over U.S. support of Israel.
After the Oct. 7 attack, Trump insulted Israel’s leaders while praising the intelligence of the Hezbollah militant group. Faced with a backlash to that comment, the former president proposed harsh policies against Muslim migrants, saying he would reimpose his ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries and deport students involved in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
In the weeks after the Hamas massacre, Trump said his administration would revoke student visas of “radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.” Other Republicans still running for president at the time — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — and GOP members of Congress similarly called for the visas of “pro-Hamas” foreign students to be revoked.
The spread of the college protests has ignited a renewed Republican response. When word circulated last Wednesday that pro-Palestinian protesters were planning to occupy a lawn at the University of Texas, Gov. Abbott sought to show that his Republican-dominated state would not tolerate a repeat of the encampment at Columbia University, dispatching state troopers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said it responded to the campus “at the direction of” Abbott, who applauded the crackdown on social media. He said the protesters “belong in jail” and that any student participating in “hate-filled, antisemitic protests” at public colleges should be expelled.
Incidents at some universities have fed the criticisms, though pro-Palestinian activists say they are isolated incidents. Video re-emerged this week of a Columbia student who has taken part in the pro-Palestinian protest encampments declaring that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” The student, Khymani James, made the comments in a video posted in January, although he has since stated that they were wrong. Columbia said it had barred the student from campus, but it was unclear whether he was suspended or expelled.
In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp (R), following protests in several cities including Chicago and San Francisco, stressed that he would not tolerate anything similar in his state. Recounting a conversation with Georgia’s public safety commissioner, he said: “You know how I feel about people blocking bridges, airports and other things like we’re seeing around the country. I said, ‘If they do that, lock their ass up.’ ”
In New York City, Speaker Johnson and a group of GOP lawmakers visited Columbia’s campus on Wednesday, where they demanded that the university’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, resign for failing to quickly dismantle the pro-Palestine encampments and, in their view, for not doing enough to ensure that Jewish people on campus felt safe.
Their visit appeared to raise tensions, as Johnson was met with boos and pro-Palestinian chants. One student yelled at Johnson to “get off our campus,” while another shouted, “go back to Louisiana, Mike!”
And on Capitol Hill, Republicans last week urged the Biden administration to intervene in the demonstrations. Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), a top-ranking House Republican, sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling on them to deport students who she said “are brazenly endorsing Hamas and other terrorist organizations” by participating in demonstrations and related events on campus.
Separately, a group of 27 Senate Republicans, including every member of the Senate GOP leadership team, signed onto a letter to Cardona and Garland calling on the administration “to take action to restore order and protect Jewish students on our college campuses.”
“The Department of Education and federal law enforcement must act immediately to restore order, prosecute the mobs who have perpetuated violence and threats against Jewish students, revoke the visas of all foreign nationals (such as exchange students) who have taken part in promoting terrorism, and hold accountable school administrators who have stood by instead of protecting their students,” the letter said.
Divide-n-Conquer, boys and girls.
It used to be we had a "generation gap" that politicians and pundits fretted over. Now we have several generation gaps that can be exploited by cynical manipulators in order to gain political advantage for some vaguely defined "they".
The Daddy State is tickled pink whenever one group is set against another group. And when several groups are all set against each other, the power of the people diminishes considerably, and we're that much closer to Rule By Minority.
Apr 17, 2024
The Truth Will Out
How did they go from "fuck your feelings" and "poor little snowflake" to being so absolutely terrified of words and ideas?
Or maybe the chest-beating alpha macho crap was all bluff-n-bluster the whole time.
It's risky.
It can feel like you're
betting your whole existence
on a single act of defiance -
but eventually, you have to kick
that bullying son of a bitch
right in the balls.
Dec 25, 2023
Nov 3, 2023
Connections
Sometimes, people go along with "theories", or religion, or other mythologies, not because they've bought into the stories, but because they want to belong - they need to fit in.
False witnesses
In my past life as an evangelical for social action, I had a much-photocopied dossier in my desk drawer from the Procter & Gamble corporation. This surreal document was the company’s sadly necessary response to the urban legend that the manufacturer of Tide, Crest and Dawn was some kind of satanic cult.
Briefly, the idea was that the CEO of P&G had at some vague point in the recent past appeared on some talk show — Phil Donahue, or Sally Jesse, or Oprah, the story mutated and adapted over time — and declared that he was a Satanist and that a portion of the company’s profits were donated regularly to the Church of Satan. (If you’re not familiar with it, Snopes has a good rundown of the history of this sordid, stupid lie.)
This is a mind-bogglingly silly story. It’s not just implausible, but inconceivable, impossible. It is unbelievable on its face for dozens of reasons that become clear from even a moment’s consideration, and it’s based on factual claims that are easy to check on and quickly disproved. But we don’t need to get bogged down here in the ridiculousness of this malicious rumor, so bracket that for now, that’s not the interesting part.
Procter & Gamble had prepared the dossier to combat this zombie rumor. The company had put together its own documents disproving the story and disavowing any connection to the Evil One or to his church. They had collected letters from Donahue, Sally Jesse, Oprah and several other talk show hosts attesting that no one from the company had ever appeared on their programs, much less attempted to use such an appearance to spread the unholy gospel of Satanism. P&G had also collected an impressive array of letters from religious leaders — the archbishop of Cincinnati, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, among others — all of whom urged their followers not to believe this stupid, stupid lie.
In retrospect, this desperate, shotgun appeal to religious authority demonstrated why the dossier itself was probably futile. It was an acknowledgment that the people they were attempting to convince were beyond the reach of mere fact or reason — people who did not find reality compelling. The only hope of persuading them, then, was to call upon religious leaders from across the spectrum in the hopes that the pronouncement of one of these random bishops and evangelical pseudo-bishops might be regarded as trustworthy.
If you’re forced to resort to such an attempt then you’ve got to realize that it’s not likely to work either. Any audience so far gone as to require this sort of argument is also likely to have already adopted the mechanisms of self-reinforcing stupidity. Thus if they read that Billy Graham denies the rumor, their response won’t be “Oh, OK, Billy Graham. I trust him,” but rather “OMG! Billy Graham is in on it too!” (cf. “biased media”)
So the dossier was hopeless, but I had yet to come to see that. Thus whenever I came across some group of evangelicals choosing to believe this rumor and spreading it to others, I would photocopy the dossier and send it to them in the hope that good information would correct their misinformation.
That was an old-school, pre-Internet method of doing something that I’m sure everyone reading this used to do via e-mail. You would receive one of those chain e-mails from a parent, friend or coworker, containing some breathless warning against a nonexistent threat. It’d take you a handful of clicks to find the Snopes page debunking the rumor and you would cut and paste the URL back into the e-mail and then hit reply-all.
I say this is something you probably used to do because, I’m guessing, you eventually realized that this approach doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me either when I sent out those photocopies of that slam-dunk, undeniable dossier from Procter & Gamble.
The dossier/Snopes approach doesn’t work because it attempts to apply facts and reason to people who are not interested in either facts or reason. That’s not a nice thing to say, or even to think, about anyone else, which is why I was reluctant and slow to reach that conclusion. But that conclusion was inevitable.
In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:
All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling — so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.
But it is the case. Let’s go through that list again. The following are all true of the people spreading the Procter & Gamble rumor:
Again, I’m not happy to be saying such things about anyone, and I’m only doing so here reluctantly, yet this is the appalling truth.
Maybe you’re also a bit reluctant to accept this. Maybe you’re thinking Hanlon’s/Heinlein’s Razor should apply — the axiom that reminds us to “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
I wish that applied here. As I said above, I spent a long time distributing that dossier on that assumption that I was, in fact, dealing with stupidity rather than malice. But the spreading of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. Stupidity alone doesn’t make one hostile to irrefutable facts. Stupidity cannot account for their vicious anger when the rumor is debunked — anger at the person doing the debunking, and anger at the whole world for not turning out to be the nightmare they wanted it to be.
But in any case, no one is stupid enough to really believe such a story. The coworkers or relatives who fill your inbox with urban legends and hoaxes may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but none of them is stupid enough to believe this. And neither are those people who claim that they do believe it.
Go back and unbracket all of the implausibilities and impossibilities of this story. It just makes no sense. Why would a member of a secret evil society of evil go on national TV to tell the world about it? And why would this proudly evil company now deny the very same thing? Why does the name of the TV host keep changing while the CEO himself is never named? And how come no one can seem to find anyone who actually saw this alleged broadcast? And …
And why are we even bothering to discuss the holes in this story? It’s nothing but holes. Any one of those holes should stop the hearer short, preventing them from passing this ridiculous story along and adding their approval to it.
If a person is smart enough to comprehend this story and then to repeat it, then that person is, by definition, not stupid enough to really believe it.
I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.
But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly — which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.
They are just plain guilty.
Which brings us to the interesting and complicated question: Why? Why would anyone choose to pretend to believe such preposterous and malicious falsehoods? What’s in it for them?
For some few of them, the answer to that doesn’t turn out to be all that complicated or all that interesting. They did it for money.
The P&G rumor seems to have originated among rival soap-sellers — people affiliated with a giant multilevel marketing scheme with roots in the evangelical subculture (it rhymes with “Spam Ray”). Their marketing model is based on old-fashioned social networking, which partly accounts for why the rumor remains so widespread among American evangelicals. It also explains why the rumor seems to have been tailored to appeal to evangelicals in particular — with the CEO allegedly declaring his allegiance to the Church of Satan rather than to, say, the American Nazi Party or the Klan or communism.
The people who created this rumor, in other words, employed it as a way of convincing prospective buyers to purchase their detergent instead of Tide because Tide worships the Devil. That seems hamfisted and over-the-top doesn’t it? A vaguer, less extreme rumor might have seemed likelier to work better — something subtler than the ultimate trump card of claiming that P&G was literally in league with Satan.
But the rumor was effective. Spectacularly effective. It went viral years before most of us had ever thought to use that term that way. And it lives on, still surfacing and resurfacing after decades spent trying to kill it through truth-telling dossiers and aggressive litigation.
Confronted with the runaway success of such an absurd and over-the-top claim, the reflexive response is to think something like, “Wow, a lot of people really are gullible and stupid.” But again — and this is my point here — this has nothing to do with either stupidity or gullibility. The widespread promotion and pretend-acceptance of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. It can only be attributed to malice.
This story, as with the many others like it, is spread maliciously. The people spreading it are not fools. They are not suffering from a mental defect, but from a moral one. They have chosen to bear false witness, and they do so knowingly.
So money was one motive for those who first created and began to spread the P&G rumor. Theirs is the easiest case. Greed is relatively mundane and uncomplicated. But what of the others, what of those who pretend to believe this rumor and enthusiastically spread it to others without the possibility of financial benefit?
Theirs is a far more complicated, and more interesting, situation. Too complicated to get into this morning, so this post will have to have a Part 2.
False Witnesses 2
“If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.”
— Thornton Melon
Commenters on the previous post about this rumor were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no “innocent dupes” involved in its spread. That’s too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale — the very young, the very old, the very insular — weren’t also among those most active in spreading the rumor. They heard it, and they may have believed it, but believing false witness and bearing false witness are not the same thing. It is those bearers of false witness I’m interested in here.
Those spreading this rumor can be divided into two categories: Those who know it to be false, but spread it anyway, and those who suspect it might be false, but spread it anyway. The latter may be dupes, but they are not innocent. We might think of them as complicit dupes. The former group, the deliberate liars, are making an explicit choice to spread what they know to be lies. The complicit dupes are making a subtler choice — choosing to ignore their suspicion that this story just doesn’t add up and then choosing to pass it along anyway because confirming that it’s not true would be somehow disappointing and would prevent them from passing it along without explicitly becoming deliberate liars, which would make them uncomfortable.
What I want to explore here is why anyone would make either of those choices. In both cases, the spreading of this rumor seems less an attempt to deceive others than a kind of invitation to participate in deception. The enduring popularity of this rumor shows that many people see this invitation as something attractive and choose to accept it, so I also want to explore why anyone would choose to do that.
To briefly review the details of this absurd rumor, the claim was that some nameless CEO of Procter & Gamble appeared on some daytime talk show and declared his allegiance to Satan. This unidentified and unidentifiable Fortune 100 executive told Donahue/Oprah/Sally Jesse that he belonged to a Church of Satan, and that a portion of the company’s profits — every dollar collected from the sale of Tide and Dawn and Crest — went to support its evil agenda.
The origin and organization of this slanderous tale seems to trace back to P&G’s would-be rivals in a cult-like multi-level marketing scheme that coveted the Cincinnati-based company’s market share. That’s a sleazy tactic — marketing by smear campaign — and it betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of the rival product line, but one can appreciate the perverse logic at work. There was money at stake. If the rivals could create a negative association with P&G’s product line, then it would make their own products seem more attractive by contrast.
Such whisper campaigns needn’t be terribly plausible. They work by connotation and association. For every possible X number of people who actually come to believe that P&G supports the work of Satan there will be 3X people who come away with some dim, unexplored sense that the company is “controversial” or vaguely associated with something unsavory (think “Swift Boat”).
The motive of this small core-group of rumor-mongers is thus not terribly complicated or difficult to understand. It’s not even terribly interesting. They were lying for the sake of money. Nothing novel or remarkable about that.
Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread this malicious and obviously false story. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what’s in it for them? What motivates someone to accept the invitation to participate in deception, to accept an obvious lie and then to voluntarily tie their own credibility to something so incredible?
To try to understand these cheerful gossips, I’d like to turn to an equally strange, if less malicious, group of enthusiasts — the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition.
Every once in a while, I am sorry to say, some sick bastard sets fire to a kitten. This is something that happens. Like all crimes, it shouldn’t happen, but it does. And like most crimes, it makes the paper. The effects of this appalling cruelty are not far-reaching, but the incidents are reported in the papers because the cruelty is so flagrant and acute that it seems newsworthy.
The response to such reports is horror and indignation, which is both natural and appropriate. But the expression of that horror and indignation also produces something strange.
A few years ago there was a particularly horrifying kitten-burning incident involving a barbecue grill and, astonishingly, a video camera. That sordid episode took place far from the place where I work, yet the paper’s editorial board nonetheless felt compelled to editorialize on the subject. They were, happily, against it. Unambiguously so. It’s one of the very few instances I recall when that timidly Broderian bunch took an unambiguous stance without their habitual on-the-other-hand qualifications.
I agreed with that stance, of course. Who doesn’t? But despite agreeing with the side they took, I couldn’t help but be amused by the editorial’s inordinately proud pose of courageous truth-telling. The lowest common denominator of minimal morality was being held up as though it were a prophetic example of speaking truth to power.
That same posturing resurfaced in a big way earlier this year when the kitten-burners struck again, much closer to home. A group of disturbed and disturbing children doused a kitten with lighter fluid and set it on fire just a few miles from the paper’s offices.
The paper covered the story, of course, and our readers ate it up.
People loved that story. It became one of the most-read and most-e-mailed stories on our Web site. Online readers left dozens of comments and we got letters to the editor on the subject for months afterward.
Those letters and comments were uniformly and universally opposed to kitten-burning. Opinon on that question was unanimous and vehement.
But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn’t seem to notice that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn’t seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.
If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you’d get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.
One came away from that comment thread with the unsurprising but reassuring sense that the good people reading the paper’s Web site did not approve of burning kittens alive. Kitten-burning, they all insisted, was just plain wrong.
But one also came away from reading that thread with the sense that people seemed to think this ultra-minimal moral stance made them exceptional and exceptionally righteous. Like the earlier editorial writers, they seemed to think they were exhibiting courage by taking a bold position on a matter of great controversy. Whatever comfort might be gleaned from the reaffirmation that most people were right about this non-issue issue was overshadowed by the discomfiting realization that so many people also seemed to want or need most others to be wrong.
The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.
Kitten-burners are particularly useful in this role because their atrocious behavior seems wholly alien and without any discernible motive that we might recognize in ourselves. We’re all at least dimly aware of our own potential capacity for the seven deadlies, so crimes motivated by lust, greed, gluttony, etc. — even when those crimes are particularly extreme — still contain the seed of something recognizable. People like Ken Lay or Hugh Hefner don’t work as signposts of depravity because we’re capable, on some level, of envying them for their greed and their hedonism. But we’re not the least bit jealous of the kitten-burners. Their cruelty seems both arbitrary and unrewarding, allowing us to condemn it without reservation.
Again, I whole-heartedly agree that kitten-burning is really, really bad. But the leap from “that’s bad” to “I’m not that bad” is dangerous and corrosive. I like to call this Thornton Melon morality. Melon was the character played by Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School, the wealthy owner of a chain of “Tall & Fat” clothing stores whose motto was “If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.” That approach — finding people we can compare-down to — might make us feel a little better about ourselves, but it doesn’t change who or what we really are. The Thornton Melon approach might make us look thin, but it won’t help us become so. Melon morality is never anything more than an optical illusion.
This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love — in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off.
Melon morality is why if the kitten-burners didn’t already exist, we would have to invent them.
And, of course, we do invent them. After a while the buzz of pride we get from comparing ourselves to the kitten-burners begins to fade and we start looking for a stronger drug. Who could possibly be even worse than the kitten-burners?
How about Satan-worshippers?
In the first post on this topic, I mentioned that the Church of Satan aspect of the Procter & Gamble rumor seemed a bit too outrageous and over-the-top. But while that outrageousness makes the story less plausible, it’s also what makes it so compelling. The pride that fuels Melon morality is an addictive drug, and the mythological Satan-worshippers of the P&G rumor offer that drug in its purest form.
Whether or not there actually is any such thing as the or a Church of Satan needn’t concern us here. This story has nothing to do with any actual religion or cult or the actual doctrines espoused by Anton LaVey or any other publicity-seeking character who has claimed the name of Satanism. This story isn’t about that. It’s about the idea of Satanism — the lore and legends of this enduringly popular bogeyman.
That lore does not arise from or relate to any actual belief system or actual believers. It is, rather, the stuff of legend as recounted in a hundred Jack Chick tracts and heavy metal album covers, in urban legends and campfire stories, in the flim-flammery of Mike Warnke and Bob Larson, and in low-budget Z-movies like the classic Satan’s Cheerleaders.
From sources like those, you already know the basic outlines of “Satanist” lore. Black robes, candles, pentagrams and strangely shaped knives feature prominently. Those knives, of course, are used for ritual human sacrifice.
The very idea of ritual human sacrifice is shocking and horrifying, which is why it tends to be included in stories told by people seeking to shock and horrify. When that is your aim as a storyteller the tendency is to constantly up the ante. What could be more shocking and horrifying than ritual human sacrifice? How about the torturous ritual sacrifice of children? And what could be even worse than that? The sacrifice of babies.
This is what “Satanist” signifies in the P&G rumor. It means people who kill babies — sweet, innocent, adorable little babies. Here, from the article linked above, is an excerpt from a 1991 fundraising letter from the Anti-Satanist “ministry” of con artist Bob Larson:
I watched them rip apart a newborn baby and take the heart while it was still beating. I can’t forget the screams. I still hear them every night!
That’s supposedly eyewitness testimony from someone saved out of the depraved Church of Satan thanks to the ministry of Bob Larson. It reads more like something out of a horror story than like something out of a fundraising solicitation for a Christian ministry. It’s not quite a horror story, but it works in a similar way.
Satanist stories, much like stories about ghosts or vampires, tap into big mythic fears — the sense that there is real evil in the world, that the innocent often suffer, that we may be powerless against the powerful. We tell such stories because we are afraid — reasonably afraid — of powerful, unnameable things. These stories give those fears a shape and a name and a horrifying face, and somehow that can be more reassuring than allowing such fears to remain amorphous and existential.
And just like vampire and ghost stories, Satanist stories have their own sets of rules, details and basic outlines with which we’re all familiar. These give the stories their own kind of reality. (Ask most people, “Do you believe in vampires?” and they will answer No. But ask those same people if vampires can be killed with a wooden stake and they’ll tell you Yes.)
None of these stories work as stories if we undercut their impact by acknowledging that there’s no such thing as ghosts or vampires or Satanic detergent executives. To tell these stories well, we have to pretend these things are real. To hear these stories well, our readers have to agree to go along. This is a familiar, but dramatically necessary, convention in horror stories from Sleepy Hollow to Amityville. This conceit usually involves only the willing suspension of disbelief, but for those who really get caught up in them — those particularly afraid already — that storytelling suspension of disbelief can turn into the expulsion of disbelief, the abandonment of skepticism in real life. The fearful and the fear-prone come to almost believe that the ghost stories and urban legends are really true. They come to almost really believe that someone out there is really killing the innocent little babies. (Almost.)
So maybe that’s all we’re dealing with when it comes to the P&G rumor — the same mixture of storytelling and suspension of disbelief, with the usual subset of listeners/readers who fail to make that distinction. Maybe the people passing along this rumor are no more malicious than that gullible friend of yours who still thinks The Blair Witch Project was a documentary.
Maybe. Maybe for some few of them. But the problem with this horror-story explanation is that the P&G rumor isn’t told the way we tell horror stories and ghost stories. It’s told in well-lit supermarkets and Sunday schools, not in dark rooms just before or just after bedtime. And it isn’t really told as a story at all. It’s presented, instead, as more of an argument or a lecture, the way someone might tell you, for example, why you shouldn’t eat foie gras.
In it’s usual forms, the P&G rumor is told and retold without any of the flair or artful detail that we expect from storytelling. I’m not sure it even qualifies to be grouped in with urban legends. Compare it to any of the stories we usually think of as urban legends — the subcutaneous spider-eggs story or the missing-kidneys and bathtub-of-ice story — and it just doesn’t measure up. Those stories are retold, in part, because you don’t have to believe them to appreciate that they’re good stories. The P&G rumor, by contrast, is implausible and unforgivably dull. It’s just not a very good story.
But while the P&G rumor can’t really be considered a horror story, it is clearly about horror or, at least, about fear. Consider, for example, the variation of the rumor that Snopes provides on their page debunking it. Try to count all the things the author of this particular lie is afraid of:
PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, “THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.”
That’s as pure a distillation as you will ever find of the nightmares and bogeymen that terrify the religious right, complete with the attempt to justify those fears because those people are really Satan-worshipping baby-killers.
Perhaps the deepest fear lurking in that e-mail has to do with the persecution complex of American evangelicals we’ve often discussed here before. The fear here is not that Christians in America might face persecution, but rather the fear of what it might mean that they don’t. The supposed effort to prove that there are ENOUGH CHRISTIANS … TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE is an expression of the fear — or the recognition — that the people sending and resending this e-mail are not CHRISTIAN ENOUGH TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. They’re shouting because they’re frightened — truly frightened of the truth about themselves, which is always far more frightening than any fear of what might be lurking outside ourselves in the dark.
The response to that fear is a desperate grasping at Melon morality in the most extreme form they can imagine — trying to prove to themselves that they are different enough to MAKE A DIFFERENCE by contrasting themselves with baby-killing Satan-worshippers. With baby-killing Satan-worshippers that they know are purely imaginary.
That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.
This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.
Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other.
You can’t be doing well if it seems like an improvement to base your life and your sense of self on a demonizing slander that you know is only a fantasy. To challenge that fantasy, to identify it as nothing more than that, is to threaten to send them back to whatever their lives were like before they latched onto this desperate alternative.
That suggests to me that if we are to have any hope of disabusing them of their fantasies, then we will need to recommend some third alternative, something other than the lie or the reality that had seemed even worse.
It all meshes with the phenomenon of Atheist Priests who know better than to believe in The Great & Powerful Sky Pixie, but want to make a contribution by doing good things that make miserable people a little less miserable.
There's also the pet theory of Leo Strauss - how a ruling elite have to put up a series of tales about the Great Nation, and the Great Nation's heroic past, and the Great Nation's noble fight against evil, and how a Great Nation needs good little citizens who don't question authority too much, even as they're being convinced they're the rebels, who somehow need to work diligently to maintain the status quo as planned out for them by their betters.
It doesn't have to make sense - because it's not supposed to make sense.
And the leaders don't have to believe what they're preaching. They should have pure thoughts and good intentions, but a little (or a lot) of deception in service of what's good for the unwashed masses is just pretty peachy. Cuz what the rubes don't know won't hurt them - until it's too late for them to do anything about it.
Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
From 2006: BBC, The Power Of Nightmares:
This is a good candidate for TLDR, but it's good to get a handle on this shit, and mark it for future reference.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2008 BY FRED CLARK
In my past life as an evangelical for social action, I had a much-photocopied dossier in my desk drawer from the Procter & Gamble corporation. This surreal document was the company’s sadly necessary response to the urban legend that the manufacturer of Tide, Crest and Dawn was some kind of satanic cult.
Briefly, the idea was that the CEO of P&G had at some vague point in the recent past appeared on some talk show — Phil Donahue, or Sally Jesse, or Oprah, the story mutated and adapted over time — and declared that he was a Satanist and that a portion of the company’s profits were donated regularly to the Church of Satan. (If you’re not familiar with it, Snopes has a good rundown of the history of this sordid, stupid lie.)
This is a mind-bogglingly silly story. It’s not just implausible, but inconceivable, impossible. It is unbelievable on its face for dozens of reasons that become clear from even a moment’s consideration, and it’s based on factual claims that are easy to check on and quickly disproved. But we don’t need to get bogged down here in the ridiculousness of this malicious rumor, so bracket that for now, that’s not the interesting part.
Procter & Gamble had prepared the dossier to combat this zombie rumor. The company had put together its own documents disproving the story and disavowing any connection to the Evil One or to his church. They had collected letters from Donahue, Sally Jesse, Oprah and several other talk show hosts attesting that no one from the company had ever appeared on their programs, much less attempted to use such an appearance to spread the unholy gospel of Satanism. P&G had also collected an impressive array of letters from religious leaders — the archbishop of Cincinnati, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, among others — all of whom urged their followers not to believe this stupid, stupid lie.
In retrospect, this desperate, shotgun appeal to religious authority demonstrated why the dossier itself was probably futile. It was an acknowledgment that the people they were attempting to convince were beyond the reach of mere fact or reason — people who did not find reality compelling. The only hope of persuading them, then, was to call upon religious leaders from across the spectrum in the hopes that the pronouncement of one of these random bishops and evangelical pseudo-bishops might be regarded as trustworthy.
If you’re forced to resort to such an attempt then you’ve got to realize that it’s not likely to work either. Any audience so far gone as to require this sort of argument is also likely to have already adopted the mechanisms of self-reinforcing stupidity. Thus if they read that Billy Graham denies the rumor, their response won’t be “Oh, OK, Billy Graham. I trust him,” but rather “OMG! Billy Graham is in on it too!” (cf. “biased media”)
So the dossier was hopeless, but I had yet to come to see that. Thus whenever I came across some group of evangelicals choosing to believe this rumor and spreading it to others, I would photocopy the dossier and send it to them in the hope that good information would correct their misinformation.
That was an old-school, pre-Internet method of doing something that I’m sure everyone reading this used to do via e-mail. You would receive one of those chain e-mails from a parent, friend or coworker, containing some breathless warning against a nonexistent threat. It’d take you a handful of clicks to find the Snopes page debunking the rumor and you would cut and paste the URL back into the e-mail and then hit reply-all.
I say this is something you probably used to do because, I’m guessing, you eventually realized that this approach doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me either when I sent out those photocopies of that slam-dunk, undeniable dossier from Procter & Gamble.
The dossier/Snopes approach doesn’t work because it attempts to apply facts and reason to people who are not interested in either facts or reason. That’s not a nice thing to say, or even to think, about anyone else, which is why I was reluctant and slow to reach that conclusion. But that conclusion was inevitable.
In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:
1. I assumed that the people who claimed to believe that Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan really did believe such a thing.
2. I assumed that they were passing on this rumor in good faith — that they were misinforming others only because they had, themselves, been misinformed.
3. I assumed that they would respect, or care about, or at least be willing to consider, the actual facts of the matter.
4. Because the people spreading this rumor claimed to be horrified/angry about its allegations, I assumed that they would be happy/relieved to learn that these allegations were, indisputably, not true.
All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling — so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.
But it is the case. Let’s go through that list again. The following are all true of the people spreading the Procter & Gamble rumor:
1. They didn’t really believe it themselves.
2. They were passing it along with the intent of misinforming others. Deliberately.
3. They did not respect, or care about, the actual facts of the matter, except to the extent that they viewed such facts with hostility.
4. Being told that the Bad Thing they were purportedly upset about wasn’t real only made them more upset. Proof that the 23rd largest corporation in America was not in league with the Devil made them defensive and very, very angry.
Again, I’m not happy to be saying such things about anyone, and I’m only doing so here reluctantly, yet this is the appalling truth.
Maybe you’re also a bit reluctant to accept this. Maybe you’re thinking Hanlon’s/Heinlein’s Razor should apply — the axiom that reminds us to “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
I wish that applied here. As I said above, I spent a long time distributing that dossier on that assumption that I was, in fact, dealing with stupidity rather than malice. But the spreading of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. Stupidity alone doesn’t make one hostile to irrefutable facts. Stupidity cannot account for their vicious anger when the rumor is debunked — anger at the person doing the debunking, and anger at the whole world for not turning out to be the nightmare they wanted it to be.
But in any case, no one is stupid enough to really believe such a story. The coworkers or relatives who fill your inbox with urban legends and hoaxes may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but none of them is stupid enough to believe this. And neither are those people who claim that they do believe it.
Go back and unbracket all of the implausibilities and impossibilities of this story. It just makes no sense. Why would a member of a secret evil society of evil go on national TV to tell the world about it? And why would this proudly evil company now deny the very same thing? Why does the name of the TV host keep changing while the CEO himself is never named? And how come no one can seem to find anyone who actually saw this alleged broadcast? And …
And why are we even bothering to discuss the holes in this story? It’s nothing but holes. Any one of those holes should stop the hearer short, preventing them from passing this ridiculous story along and adding their approval to it.
If a person is smart enough to comprehend this story and then to repeat it, then that person is, by definition, not stupid enough to really believe it.
I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.
But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly — which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.
They are just plain guilty.
Which brings us to the interesting and complicated question: Why? Why would anyone choose to pretend to believe such preposterous and malicious falsehoods? What’s in it for them?
For some few of them, the answer to that doesn’t turn out to be all that complicated or all that interesting. They did it for money.
The P&G rumor seems to have originated among rival soap-sellers — people affiliated with a giant multilevel marketing scheme with roots in the evangelical subculture (it rhymes with “Spam Ray”). Their marketing model is based on old-fashioned social networking, which partly accounts for why the rumor remains so widespread among American evangelicals. It also explains why the rumor seems to have been tailored to appeal to evangelicals in particular — with the CEO allegedly declaring his allegiance to the Church of Satan rather than to, say, the American Nazi Party or the Klan or communism.
The people who created this rumor, in other words, employed it as a way of convincing prospective buyers to purchase their detergent instead of Tide because Tide worships the Devil. That seems hamfisted and over-the-top doesn’t it? A vaguer, less extreme rumor might have seemed likelier to work better — something subtler than the ultimate trump card of claiming that P&G was literally in league with Satan.
But the rumor was effective. Spectacularly effective. It went viral years before most of us had ever thought to use that term that way. And it lives on, still surfacing and resurfacing after decades spent trying to kill it through truth-telling dossiers and aggressive litigation.
Confronted with the runaway success of such an absurd and over-the-top claim, the reflexive response is to think something like, “Wow, a lot of people really are gullible and stupid.” But again — and this is my point here — this has nothing to do with either stupidity or gullibility. The widespread promotion and pretend-acceptance of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. It can only be attributed to malice.
This story, as with the many others like it, is spread maliciously. The people spreading it are not fools. They are not suffering from a mental defect, but from a moral one. They have chosen to bear false witness, and they do so knowingly.
So money was one motive for those who first created and began to spread the P&G rumor. Theirs is the easiest case. Greed is relatively mundane and uncomplicated. But what of the others, what of those who pretend to believe this rumor and enthusiastically spread it to others without the possibility of financial benefit?
Theirs is a far more complicated, and more interesting, situation. Too complicated to get into this morning, so this post will have to have a Part 2.
False Witnesses 2
OCTOBER 8, 2008 BY FRED CLARK
“If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.”
— Thornton Melon
Commenters on the previous post about this rumor were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no “innocent dupes” involved in its spread. That’s too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale — the very young, the very old, the very insular — weren’t also among those most active in spreading the rumor. They heard it, and they may have believed it, but believing false witness and bearing false witness are not the same thing. It is those bearers of false witness I’m interested in here.
Those spreading this rumor can be divided into two categories: Those who know it to be false, but spread it anyway, and those who suspect it might be false, but spread it anyway. The latter may be dupes, but they are not innocent. We might think of them as complicit dupes. The former group, the deliberate liars, are making an explicit choice to spread what they know to be lies. The complicit dupes are making a subtler choice — choosing to ignore their suspicion that this story just doesn’t add up and then choosing to pass it along anyway because confirming that it’s not true would be somehow disappointing and would prevent them from passing it along without explicitly becoming deliberate liars, which would make them uncomfortable.
What I want to explore here is why anyone would make either of those choices. In both cases, the spreading of this rumor seems less an attempt to deceive others than a kind of invitation to participate in deception. The enduring popularity of this rumor shows that many people see this invitation as something attractive and choose to accept it, so I also want to explore why anyone would choose to do that.
To briefly review the details of this absurd rumor, the claim was that some nameless CEO of Procter & Gamble appeared on some daytime talk show and declared his allegiance to Satan. This unidentified and unidentifiable Fortune 100 executive told Donahue/Oprah/Sally Jesse that he belonged to a Church of Satan, and that a portion of the company’s profits — every dollar collected from the sale of Tide and Dawn and Crest — went to support its evil agenda.
The origin and organization of this slanderous tale seems to trace back to P&G’s would-be rivals in a cult-like multi-level marketing scheme that coveted the Cincinnati-based company’s market share. That’s a sleazy tactic — marketing by smear campaign — and it betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of the rival product line, but one can appreciate the perverse logic at work. There was money at stake. If the rivals could create a negative association with P&G’s product line, then it would make their own products seem more attractive by contrast.
Such whisper campaigns needn’t be terribly plausible. They work by connotation and association. For every possible X number of people who actually come to believe that P&G supports the work of Satan there will be 3X people who come away with some dim, unexplored sense that the company is “controversial” or vaguely associated with something unsavory (think “Swift Boat”).
The motive of this small core-group of rumor-mongers is thus not terribly complicated or difficult to understand. It’s not even terribly interesting. They were lying for the sake of money. Nothing novel or remarkable about that.
Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread this malicious and obviously false story. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what’s in it for them? What motivates someone to accept the invitation to participate in deception, to accept an obvious lie and then to voluntarily tie their own credibility to something so incredible?
To try to understand these cheerful gossips, I’d like to turn to an equally strange, if less malicious, group of enthusiasts — the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition.
Every once in a while, I am sorry to say, some sick bastard sets fire to a kitten. This is something that happens. Like all crimes, it shouldn’t happen, but it does. And like most crimes, it makes the paper. The effects of this appalling cruelty are not far-reaching, but the incidents are reported in the papers because the cruelty is so flagrant and acute that it seems newsworthy.
The response to such reports is horror and indignation, which is both natural and appropriate. But the expression of that horror and indignation also produces something strange.
A few years ago there was a particularly horrifying kitten-burning incident involving a barbecue grill and, astonishingly, a video camera. That sordid episode took place far from the place where I work, yet the paper’s editorial board nonetheless felt compelled to editorialize on the subject. They were, happily, against it. Unambiguously so. It’s one of the very few instances I recall when that timidly Broderian bunch took an unambiguous stance without their habitual on-the-other-hand qualifications.
I agreed with that stance, of course. Who doesn’t? But despite agreeing with the side they took, I couldn’t help but be amused by the editorial’s inordinately proud pose of courageous truth-telling. The lowest common denominator of minimal morality was being held up as though it were a prophetic example of speaking truth to power.
That same posturing resurfaced in a big way earlier this year when the kitten-burners struck again, much closer to home. A group of disturbed and disturbing children doused a kitten with lighter fluid and set it on fire just a few miles from the paper’s offices.
The paper covered the story, of course, and our readers ate it up.
People loved that story. It became one of the most-read and most-e-mailed stories on our Web site. Online readers left dozens of comments and we got letters to the editor on the subject for months afterward.
Those letters and comments were uniformly and universally opposed to kitten-burning. Opinon on that question was unanimous and vehement.
But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn’t seem to notice that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn’t seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.
If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you’d get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.
One came away from that comment thread with the unsurprising but reassuring sense that the good people reading the paper’s Web site did not approve of burning kittens alive. Kitten-burning, they all insisted, was just plain wrong.
But one also came away from reading that thread with the sense that people seemed to think this ultra-minimal moral stance made them exceptional and exceptionally righteous. Like the earlier editorial writers, they seemed to think they were exhibiting courage by taking a bold position on a matter of great controversy. Whatever comfort might be gleaned from the reaffirmation that most people were right about this non-issue issue was overshadowed by the discomfiting realization that so many people also seemed to want or need most others to be wrong.
The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.
Kitten-burners are particularly useful in this role because their atrocious behavior seems wholly alien and without any discernible motive that we might recognize in ourselves. We’re all at least dimly aware of our own potential capacity for the seven deadlies, so crimes motivated by lust, greed, gluttony, etc. — even when those crimes are particularly extreme — still contain the seed of something recognizable. People like Ken Lay or Hugh Hefner don’t work as signposts of depravity because we’re capable, on some level, of envying them for their greed and their hedonism. But we’re not the least bit jealous of the kitten-burners. Their cruelty seems both arbitrary and unrewarding, allowing us to condemn it without reservation.
Again, I whole-heartedly agree that kitten-burning is really, really bad. But the leap from “that’s bad” to “I’m not that bad” is dangerous and corrosive. I like to call this Thornton Melon morality. Melon was the character played by Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School, the wealthy owner of a chain of “Tall & Fat” clothing stores whose motto was “If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.” That approach — finding people we can compare-down to — might make us feel a little better about ourselves, but it doesn’t change who or what we really are. The Thornton Melon approach might make us look thin, but it won’t help us become so. Melon morality is never anything more than an optical illusion.
This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love — in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off.
Melon morality is why if the kitten-burners didn’t already exist, we would have to invent them.
And, of course, we do invent them. After a while the buzz of pride we get from comparing ourselves to the kitten-burners begins to fade and we start looking for a stronger drug. Who could possibly be even worse than the kitten-burners?
How about Satan-worshippers?
In the first post on this topic, I mentioned that the Church of Satan aspect of the Procter & Gamble rumor seemed a bit too outrageous and over-the-top. But while that outrageousness makes the story less plausible, it’s also what makes it so compelling. The pride that fuels Melon morality is an addictive drug, and the mythological Satan-worshippers of the P&G rumor offer that drug in its purest form.
Whether or not there actually is any such thing as the or a Church of Satan needn’t concern us here. This story has nothing to do with any actual religion or cult or the actual doctrines espoused by Anton LaVey or any other publicity-seeking character who has claimed the name of Satanism. This story isn’t about that. It’s about the idea of Satanism — the lore and legends of this enduringly popular bogeyman.
That lore does not arise from or relate to any actual belief system or actual believers. It is, rather, the stuff of legend as recounted in a hundred Jack Chick tracts and heavy metal album covers, in urban legends and campfire stories, in the flim-flammery of Mike Warnke and Bob Larson, and in low-budget Z-movies like the classic Satan’s Cheerleaders.
From sources like those, you already know the basic outlines of “Satanist” lore. Black robes, candles, pentagrams and strangely shaped knives feature prominently. Those knives, of course, are used for ritual human sacrifice.
The very idea of ritual human sacrifice is shocking and horrifying, which is why it tends to be included in stories told by people seeking to shock and horrify. When that is your aim as a storyteller the tendency is to constantly up the ante. What could be more shocking and horrifying than ritual human sacrifice? How about the torturous ritual sacrifice of children? And what could be even worse than that? The sacrifice of babies.
This is what “Satanist” signifies in the P&G rumor. It means people who kill babies — sweet, innocent, adorable little babies. Here, from the article linked above, is an excerpt from a 1991 fundraising letter from the Anti-Satanist “ministry” of con artist Bob Larson:
I watched them rip apart a newborn baby and take the heart while it was still beating. I can’t forget the screams. I still hear them every night!
That’s supposedly eyewitness testimony from someone saved out of the depraved Church of Satan thanks to the ministry of Bob Larson. It reads more like something out of a horror story than like something out of a fundraising solicitation for a Christian ministry. It’s not quite a horror story, but it works in a similar way.
Satanist stories, much like stories about ghosts or vampires, tap into big mythic fears — the sense that there is real evil in the world, that the innocent often suffer, that we may be powerless against the powerful. We tell such stories because we are afraid — reasonably afraid — of powerful, unnameable things. These stories give those fears a shape and a name and a horrifying face, and somehow that can be more reassuring than allowing such fears to remain amorphous and existential.
And just like vampire and ghost stories, Satanist stories have their own sets of rules, details and basic outlines with which we’re all familiar. These give the stories their own kind of reality. (Ask most people, “Do you believe in vampires?” and they will answer No. But ask those same people if vampires can be killed with a wooden stake and they’ll tell you Yes.)
None of these stories work as stories if we undercut their impact by acknowledging that there’s no such thing as ghosts or vampires or Satanic detergent executives. To tell these stories well, we have to pretend these things are real. To hear these stories well, our readers have to agree to go along. This is a familiar, but dramatically necessary, convention in horror stories from Sleepy Hollow to Amityville. This conceit usually involves only the willing suspension of disbelief, but for those who really get caught up in them — those particularly afraid already — that storytelling suspension of disbelief can turn into the expulsion of disbelief, the abandonment of skepticism in real life. The fearful and the fear-prone come to almost believe that the ghost stories and urban legends are really true. They come to almost really believe that someone out there is really killing the innocent little babies. (Almost.)
So maybe that’s all we’re dealing with when it comes to the P&G rumor — the same mixture of storytelling and suspension of disbelief, with the usual subset of listeners/readers who fail to make that distinction. Maybe the people passing along this rumor are no more malicious than that gullible friend of yours who still thinks The Blair Witch Project was a documentary.
Maybe. Maybe for some few of them. But the problem with this horror-story explanation is that the P&G rumor isn’t told the way we tell horror stories and ghost stories. It’s told in well-lit supermarkets and Sunday schools, not in dark rooms just before or just after bedtime. And it isn’t really told as a story at all. It’s presented, instead, as more of an argument or a lecture, the way someone might tell you, for example, why you shouldn’t eat foie gras.
In it’s usual forms, the P&G rumor is told and retold without any of the flair or artful detail that we expect from storytelling. I’m not sure it even qualifies to be grouped in with urban legends. Compare it to any of the stories we usually think of as urban legends — the subcutaneous spider-eggs story or the missing-kidneys and bathtub-of-ice story — and it just doesn’t measure up. Those stories are retold, in part, because you don’t have to believe them to appreciate that they’re good stories. The P&G rumor, by contrast, is implausible and unforgivably dull. It’s just not a very good story.
But while the P&G rumor can’t really be considered a horror story, it is clearly about horror or, at least, about fear. Consider, for example, the variation of the rumor that Snopes provides on their page debunking it. Try to count all the things the author of this particular lie is afraid of:
PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, “THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.”
That’s as pure a distillation as you will ever find of the nightmares and bogeymen that terrify the religious right, complete with the attempt to justify those fears because those people are really Satan-worshipping baby-killers.
Perhaps the deepest fear lurking in that e-mail has to do with the persecution complex of American evangelicals we’ve often discussed here before. The fear here is not that Christians in America might face persecution, but rather the fear of what it might mean that they don’t. The supposed effort to prove that there are ENOUGH CHRISTIANS … TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE is an expression of the fear — or the recognition — that the people sending and resending this e-mail are not CHRISTIAN ENOUGH TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. They’re shouting because they’re frightened — truly frightened of the truth about themselves, which is always far more frightening than any fear of what might be lurking outside ourselves in the dark.
The response to that fear is a desperate grasping at Melon morality in the most extreme form they can imagine — trying to prove to themselves that they are different enough to MAKE A DIFFERENCE by contrasting themselves with baby-killing Satan-worshippers. With baby-killing Satan-worshippers that they know are purely imaginary.
That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.
This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.
Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other.
You can’t be doing well if it seems like an improvement to base your life and your sense of self on a demonizing slander that you know is only a fantasy. To challenge that fantasy, to identify it as nothing more than that, is to threaten to send them back to whatever their lives were like before they latched onto this desperate alternative.
That suggests to me that if we are to have any hope of disabusing them of their fantasies, then we will need to recommend some third alternative, something other than the lie or the reality that had seemed even worse.
Jul 31, 2023
Jul 5, 2023
Today's MAGAt
Yup. Before the COVID vax, there were no strokes, no heart attacks, no deep vein thrombosis, no clot-related organ failure or pregnancy problems at all. Ever.
And, oh yeah - don't forget - everybody bled to death when they got even a minor cut or puncture wound, cuz - you know - no blood clotting.
I know, I know, she was just being a little over-the-top.
So maybe we can chalk it up to the very standard propaganda technique of Generalization.
Or maybe it's the obvious ...
That's probably not the case either.
Most of these Twitterati jagoffs are not stupid. But they are manipulative hucksters who play to an audience of rubes they don't respect, who either are actually that stupid and they swallow every little turd that floats by, or they're pretending it's just a big joke to get the Libs all riled up so as to keep all of us distracted while they're busy strip-mining everything from this and the next world - which they think makes them oh so gosh-darned clever. Wink wink nudge nudge. All the way to the bank. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
And never mind the middling probability that an awful lot of the big "influencers" on Twitter (and other social media platforms) are either bots themselves, or have had their popularity way over-inflated because of bots created specifically for the purpose of Band Wagon propaganda.
Whoa - it just now occurred to me that "social media" can be abbreviated as: S/M.
Coincidence? 🤨
May 13, 2023
The Republican Central Planning Committee
Having met with some "success" at legislating profits over the last 20 or 30 years, Republicans aren't trying to hide their shit anymore - on practically anything.
We're "anti-woman"?
Fuckin' ay right we are - here's 200 new laws that have been either proposed or passed making it illegal to seek an abortion, illegal to travel out of state for an abortion, illegal to buy an abortion pill, illegal to help a woman with any of the above.
We're racist assholes?
Damn straight. We're busing brown immigrants - no matter their status - out of state - cuz we don't like them and we don't want them here.
We "back the blue" whenever they're stomping on brown people.
We're anti-democracy?
What was your first clue?
Closing precincts where lots of Democrats vote?
Making it OK for the Texas AG to throw out the polling results in the single largest Democrat-heavy county?
Moving to kill early and mail-in voting?
Eliminating college campus voting?
And on it goes ad infinitum, ad nauseam, but particularly on economic issues the last few months.
So is it any wonder they're making moves to permanently ensure profitability in a few of their favorite kinds of businesses, while trying to put up a facade of "getting to the bottom of this", and actually making it illegal to consider anything but good little fascist criteria when deciding what investments are best for a given client?
Opinion
The day free-market Republicans became Soviet economic planners
Can you remember when Republicans still believed in the free market?
It was sometime before Donald Trump started routine attacks on the “globalists” of Goldman Sachs and the leaders of large U.S. corporations; before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used tax policy to attack the Walt Disney Co. because it dared to disagree with his “don’t say gay” legislation; before congressional Republicans harassed social media companies and book publishers over alleged “censorship” of their views; before they threatened Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Major League Baseball over their support for voting rights; before they vowed to use federal resources to retaliate against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for backing a few Democrats; before Republican governors enacted laws overriding private employers’ coronavirus vaccination policies; and before GOP-led states moved to disrupt interstate commerce to block abortion access and morning-after pills.
This week brought the latest evidence that the former party of laissez-faire capitalism has reimagined itself in the image of a Soviet State Planning Committee. Republican lawmakers are now telling investors which businesses they can and can’t invest in — and which investment criteria they will be permitted to consider.
The House Oversight Committee staged a hearing to denounce asset managers for using “environmental, social and governance” criteria, or ESG, when making their investments — and to plot ways to stop investors from doing this terrible thing.
“An unelected cabal of global elites are using ESG, a woke economic strategy, to hijack our capitalist system,” declared an overwrought Steve Marshall, Alabama attorney general and one of two GOP expert witnesses at the anti-investor hearing. For those who didn’t understand him the first time, Marshall used the word “elites” 13 times and “woke” 20 times in his opening testimony.
The other GOP witness, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, declared that there exists a “conspiracy” of ESG-minded investors. He was particularly worried that “asset managers who collectively own significant percentages of utilities’ stock are improperly influencing the operations of those utilities.”
Imagine that! The shareholders who own a company are trying to influence its operations! Will nobody rid us of this capitalist menace?
Legislatures in several red states have passed laws, championed by oil, gas and coal companies, that essentially pull state pension funds from investment managers unless they invest in — you guessed it — oil, gas and coal companies. Similar laws bar pension plans from working with investment firms that use ESG standards when deciding whether to invest in companies that trash the planet, abuse their workers or kill their customers. Led by Marshall and Reyes, 25 state attorneys general sued the Biden administration to block a regulation that allows retirement-plan investors to consider ESG standards. The rule doesn’t mandate that investors do so. It merely gives them the option.
The Democrats’ witness, Illinois treasurer Michael Frerichs, called the Republicans’ schemes “anti-free market and anti-investor.” The GOP officials would block asset managers from even considering whether a car company “is aligned with market expectations and preparing for the shift to electric vehicles,” whether a pharmaceutical company “has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic” or whether “health-care companies understaff their operations and jeopardize the safety of patients.” Said Frerichs: “ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects.”
Apparently, a lot of investors agree with him, because the accountancy PwC expects ESG-related assets under management to grow to $33.9 trillion by 2026, or about one-fifth of the worldwide asset-management total. ESG, lamented Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “is gaining ground on Wall Street.”
And Republicans are determined to stop the free market — no matter how much it costs.
A study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a Fed economist, for example, calculated that an anti-ESG law in Texas will cost the state $303 million to $532 million in additional interest annually. The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System said anti-ESG legislation there could cause more than $1 billion in losses from early sale of assets and reduce returns by $3.6 billion over a decade. Public pension systems in Arkansas said an anti-ESG bill there would cause them to lose at least $37 million per year.
In the end, the GOP’s anti-capitalist binge is about culture, not economics. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) expressed his concern that ESG considerations would work against “certain disfavored groups in our society. People don’t like men. People don’t like people of European background.” ESG investors, he argued, “are the type of people who judge people by where their great-great-grandparents came from.” Other Republicans on the panel used their time to denounce the perceived “woke” wrongs of JPMorgan Chase, Nike, Anheuser-Busch and others.
Frerichs, a Democrat, pointed out the absurdity “of me defending the free market against a Republican legislature trying to have a planned economy mandating what businesses have to invest in.”
But the irony was lost on Comer, who tried to draw a link between his anti-capitalist crusade and his simultaneous attempt to prove wrongdoing by President Biden and his family. “We just had a press conference and showed bank records that showed the Biden family getting millions of dollars from places like China,” he said. “I wonder what types of ESG policies China” has.
China doesn’t have ESG standards, Mr. Chairman. It’s an authoritarian country with a state-run economy. Our free-market economy, which lets investors make choices free of the heavy hand of government, is vastly superior. I remember when Republicans used to think so, too.
When he isn’t laying waste to the capitalist system as a whole, Comer has been trying his all to take down a particular subset of capitalists: those with the surname “Biden.”
The chief Hunter hunter in the House, Comer had for weeks been hyping his investigation into business dealings by Hunter Biden and numerous other Bidens, suggesting that he finally had the goods on the “big guy” himself, President Biden.
“Joe Biden’s going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Comer teased on Fox News on April 11, promising a blockbuster news conference within two weeks. He claimed his subpoenas of bank records had uncovered “influence peddling” at high levels.
A week later, he claimed to have evidence that “10 or 12 Biden family members” were involved in “taking money from our adversaries around the world” and that “these adversaries were getting something in return” from Joe Biden.
On April 23, he told Fox News that he would “very soon” have a news conference at which he would detail the “influence peddling scheme” that he now claimed involved “at least 12” Bidens. Tossing out the words “launder,” “deceive the IRS” and “foreign agent,” he said multiple Bidens should be indicted, and he teased that the president himself might be “compromised.”
Then, on Tuesday, Comer told Fox News that “tomorrow is going to be judgment day for the Biden administration, the Biden White House.”
And so, after a month of hype, Comer and other Oversight Committee Republicans walked into the House television studio Wednesday and revealed … a whole lot of nothing.
He had not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by the president. He hadn’t presented evidence that the elder Biden — “the big guy” — had any involvement in his son Hunter’s businesses. Comer’s months of digging through bank records had found more than $10 million in payments from companies run by foreign nationals that went to Biden family members and business associates and their companies. But Comer produced no evidence that these payments were illegal or that any official government actions were taken in exchange.
The only thing he had to offer was more innuendo. “It would be hard for me to believe” that there was no official quid pro quo, he said, and “we believe that the president has been involved.” Said Comer: “We’re going to continue to look.”
After unwrapping his nothingburger, Comer gave the first question to a friendly reporter from the Murdoch New York Post. But even he sounded skeptical. Comer gave the second question to the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that traffics in conspiracy theories.
The reviews, even from the right, were savage. “I’m not impressed with James Comer’s Biden bombshell,” tweeted former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka.
Geraldo Rivera said Comer and colleagues were “struggling to find direct evidence of criminal conduct or corruption.” He said the investigators need to “put up … or shut up.”
On “Fox & Friends,” Comer got a dressing-down from host Steve Doocy. The charge of influence peddling is “just your suggestion,” he told Comer on Thursday morning. “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is … there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”
Comer had nothing. “Make no mistake, Joe Biden was involved,” he promised.
Just take his word for it.
On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), another avid Hunter hunter, offered this explanation for the latest failure to produce evidence of wrongdoing: “People that commit criminal acts try not to leave a paper trail.” So the lack of anything incriminating merely proves that the Bidens were very good criminals! “You have to infer these things,” Johnson told Fox Business. “You’re not necessarily going to get necessarily hard proof.”
Of course, if Comer is going to “infer” guilt based on the $10 million in foreign funds received by Biden family members and business associates over 15 years, he would also have to infer that Trump family members, who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign payments since his election, are more guilty by orders of magnitude.
Alternatively, we can all infer that Comer is not very good at this, that Biden hasn’t done anything wrong — or, most likely, both.
Grand juries aren’t generally known for their comic timing, but you’ve got to give credit to the one that just indicted Rep. George Santos.
The jurors, sitting in Central Islip, N.Y., returned their indictment of the Long Island Republican on Tuesday, charging Santos with, among other things, “fraudulent application for and receipt of unemployment benefits.”
The very next day, House Republicans began debate on the House floor of H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act.
One of the 35 co-sponsors of the bill? George Anthony Devolder Santos.
“The Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act takes much needed overdue action to recover fraudulently paid covid benefits … and prosecute the criminals responsible,” proclaimed the irony-challenged Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
If House Republicans really wanted to take a stand against unemployment fraud, they could expel Santos, who is accused of defrauding taxpayers of almost $25,000 in unemployment benefits during the pandemic while he earned a salary of approximately $120,000. But they need his vote.
Outside the courthouse after his arraignment Wednesday, Santos thanked House Republican leadership for standing by him. “I appreciate leadership for being patient,” he said, telling reporters, “I have to go back and vote tomorrow.”
And that he did. The House passed the unemployment fraud bill Thursday afternoon on a mostly party-line vote. Among the “ayes” was Santos.
There are three weeks to go until the United States defaults on its debt. Let’s check in on where Republican leaders stand.
“The solution to this problem lies with two people, the president of the United States … and the speaker of the House.” — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the White House driveway on May 9.
“That would come down really to Chuck Schumer and the president.” — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the White House driveway, two minutes later.
“Well, you might as well do it [default] now.” — Former president Donald Trump, May 10.
Can you remember when Republicans still believed in the free market?
It was sometime before Donald Trump started routine attacks on the “globalists” of Goldman Sachs and the leaders of large U.S. corporations; before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used tax policy to attack the Walt Disney Co. because it dared to disagree with his “don’t say gay” legislation; before congressional Republicans harassed social media companies and book publishers over alleged “censorship” of their views; before they threatened Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Major League Baseball over their support for voting rights; before they vowed to use federal resources to retaliate against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for backing a few Democrats; before Republican governors enacted laws overriding private employers’ coronavirus vaccination policies; and before GOP-led states moved to disrupt interstate commerce to block abortion access and morning-after pills.
This week brought the latest evidence that the former party of laissez-faire capitalism has reimagined itself in the image of a Soviet State Planning Committee. Republican lawmakers are now telling investors which businesses they can and can’t invest in — and which investment criteria they will be permitted to consider.
The House Oversight Committee staged a hearing to denounce asset managers for using “environmental, social and governance” criteria, or ESG, when making their investments — and to plot ways to stop investors from doing this terrible thing.
“An unelected cabal of global elites are using ESG, a woke economic strategy, to hijack our capitalist system,” declared an overwrought Steve Marshall, Alabama attorney general and one of two GOP expert witnesses at the anti-investor hearing. For those who didn’t understand him the first time, Marshall used the word “elites” 13 times and “woke” 20 times in his opening testimony.
The other GOP witness, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, declared that there exists a “conspiracy” of ESG-minded investors. He was particularly worried that “asset managers who collectively own significant percentages of utilities’ stock are improperly influencing the operations of those utilities.”
Imagine that! The shareholders who own a company are trying to influence its operations! Will nobody rid us of this capitalist menace?
Legislatures in several red states have passed laws, championed by oil, gas and coal companies, that essentially pull state pension funds from investment managers unless they invest in — you guessed it — oil, gas and coal companies. Similar laws bar pension plans from working with investment firms that use ESG standards when deciding whether to invest in companies that trash the planet, abuse their workers or kill their customers. Led by Marshall and Reyes, 25 state attorneys general sued the Biden administration to block a regulation that allows retirement-plan investors to consider ESG standards. The rule doesn’t mandate that investors do so. It merely gives them the option.
The Democrats’ witness, Illinois treasurer Michael Frerichs, called the Republicans’ schemes “anti-free market and anti-investor.” The GOP officials would block asset managers from even considering whether a car company “is aligned with market expectations and preparing for the shift to electric vehicles,” whether a pharmaceutical company “has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic” or whether “health-care companies understaff their operations and jeopardize the safety of patients.” Said Frerichs: “ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects.”
Apparently, a lot of investors agree with him, because the accountancy PwC expects ESG-related assets under management to grow to $33.9 trillion by 2026, or about one-fifth of the worldwide asset-management total. ESG, lamented Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “is gaining ground on Wall Street.”
And Republicans are determined to stop the free market — no matter how much it costs.
A study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a Fed economist, for example, calculated that an anti-ESG law in Texas will cost the state $303 million to $532 million in additional interest annually. The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System said anti-ESG legislation there could cause more than $1 billion in losses from early sale of assets and reduce returns by $3.6 billion over a decade. Public pension systems in Arkansas said an anti-ESG bill there would cause them to lose at least $37 million per year.
In the end, the GOP’s anti-capitalist binge is about culture, not economics. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) expressed his concern that ESG considerations would work against “certain disfavored groups in our society. People don’t like men. People don’t like people of European background.” ESG investors, he argued, “are the type of people who judge people by where their great-great-grandparents came from.” Other Republicans on the panel used their time to denounce the perceived “woke” wrongs of JPMorgan Chase, Nike, Anheuser-Busch and others.
Frerichs, a Democrat, pointed out the absurdity “of me defending the free market against a Republican legislature trying to have a planned economy mandating what businesses have to invest in.”
But the irony was lost on Comer, who tried to draw a link between his anti-capitalist crusade and his simultaneous attempt to prove wrongdoing by President Biden and his family. “We just had a press conference and showed bank records that showed the Biden family getting millions of dollars from places like China,” he said. “I wonder what types of ESG policies China” has.
China doesn’t have ESG standards, Mr. Chairman. It’s an authoritarian country with a state-run economy. Our free-market economy, which lets investors make choices free of the heavy hand of government, is vastly superior. I remember when Republicans used to think so, too.
When he isn’t laying waste to the capitalist system as a whole, Comer has been trying his all to take down a particular subset of capitalists: those with the surname “Biden.”
The chief Hunter hunter in the House, Comer had for weeks been hyping his investigation into business dealings by Hunter Biden and numerous other Bidens, suggesting that he finally had the goods on the “big guy” himself, President Biden.
“Joe Biden’s going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Comer teased on Fox News on April 11, promising a blockbuster news conference within two weeks. He claimed his subpoenas of bank records had uncovered “influence peddling” at high levels.
A week later, he claimed to have evidence that “10 or 12 Biden family members” were involved in “taking money from our adversaries around the world” and that “these adversaries were getting something in return” from Joe Biden.
On April 23, he told Fox News that he would “very soon” have a news conference at which he would detail the “influence peddling scheme” that he now claimed involved “at least 12” Bidens. Tossing out the words “launder,” “deceive the IRS” and “foreign agent,” he said multiple Bidens should be indicted, and he teased that the president himself might be “compromised.”
Then, on Tuesday, Comer told Fox News that “tomorrow is going to be judgment day for the Biden administration, the Biden White House.”
And so, after a month of hype, Comer and other Oversight Committee Republicans walked into the House television studio Wednesday and revealed … a whole lot of nothing.
He had not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by the president. He hadn’t presented evidence that the elder Biden — “the big guy” — had any involvement in his son Hunter’s businesses. Comer’s months of digging through bank records had found more than $10 million in payments from companies run by foreign nationals that went to Biden family members and business associates and their companies. But Comer produced no evidence that these payments were illegal or that any official government actions were taken in exchange.
The only thing he had to offer was more innuendo. “It would be hard for me to believe” that there was no official quid pro quo, he said, and “we believe that the president has been involved.” Said Comer: “We’re going to continue to look.”
After unwrapping his nothingburger, Comer gave the first question to a friendly reporter from the Murdoch New York Post. But even he sounded skeptical. Comer gave the second question to the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that traffics in conspiracy theories.
The reviews, even from the right, were savage. “I’m not impressed with James Comer’s Biden bombshell,” tweeted former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka.
Geraldo Rivera said Comer and colleagues were “struggling to find direct evidence of criminal conduct or corruption.” He said the investigators need to “put up … or shut up.”
On “Fox & Friends,” Comer got a dressing-down from host Steve Doocy. The charge of influence peddling is “just your suggestion,” he told Comer on Thursday morning. “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is … there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”
Comer had nothing. “Make no mistake, Joe Biden was involved,” he promised.
Just take his word for it.
On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), another avid Hunter hunter, offered this explanation for the latest failure to produce evidence of wrongdoing: “People that commit criminal acts try not to leave a paper trail.” So the lack of anything incriminating merely proves that the Bidens were very good criminals! “You have to infer these things,” Johnson told Fox Business. “You’re not necessarily going to get necessarily hard proof.”
Of course, if Comer is going to “infer” guilt based on the $10 million in foreign funds received by Biden family members and business associates over 15 years, he would also have to infer that Trump family members, who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign payments since his election, are more guilty by orders of magnitude.
Alternatively, we can all infer that Comer is not very good at this, that Biden hasn’t done anything wrong — or, most likely, both.
Grand juries aren’t generally known for their comic timing, but you’ve got to give credit to the one that just indicted Rep. George Santos.
The jurors, sitting in Central Islip, N.Y., returned their indictment of the Long Island Republican on Tuesday, charging Santos with, among other things, “fraudulent application for and receipt of unemployment benefits.”
The very next day, House Republicans began debate on the House floor of H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act.
One of the 35 co-sponsors of the bill? George Anthony Devolder Santos.
“The Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act takes much needed overdue action to recover fraudulently paid covid benefits … and prosecute the criminals responsible,” proclaimed the irony-challenged Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
If House Republicans really wanted to take a stand against unemployment fraud, they could expel Santos, who is accused of defrauding taxpayers of almost $25,000 in unemployment benefits during the pandemic while he earned a salary of approximately $120,000. But they need his vote.
Outside the courthouse after his arraignment Wednesday, Santos thanked House Republican leadership for standing by him. “I appreciate leadership for being patient,” he said, telling reporters, “I have to go back and vote tomorrow.”
And that he did. The House passed the unemployment fraud bill Thursday afternoon on a mostly party-line vote. Among the “ayes” was Santos.
There are three weeks to go until the United States defaults on its debt. Let’s check in on where Republican leaders stand.
“The solution to this problem lies with two people, the president of the United States … and the speaker of the House.” — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the White House driveway on May 9.
“That would come down really to Chuck Schumer and the president.” — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the White House driveway, two minutes later.
“Well, you might as well do it [default] now.” — Former president Donald Trump, May 10.
Odd how the GOP is suddenly all in for the government picking winners and losers.
Apr 18, 2023
When Coincidence Is Not Coincidence
I try to be careful not to do a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc on these things, but I think I have good reason to say you'll never convince me that this:
New York Is a Hellscape, Republicans Say. A Cabby Told Them So.
A look at the stagecraft behind the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.”
Republicans Are Using Paul Pelosi Attack to Target Democrats on Crime
Republicans and conservative figures have taken aim at Democrats over crime following an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
84-Year-Old Is Charged in Shooting of Black Teenager Who Went to Wrong House
Lawyers for the family of Ralph Yarl, 16, said he was critically injured when he was shot twice in Kansas City, Mo.
A look at the stagecraft behind the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.”
... and this:
Republicans and conservative figures have taken aim at Democrats over crime following an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
... can't possibly be linked to this:
Lawyers for the family of Ralph Yarl, 16, said he was critically injured when he was shot twice in Kansas City, Mo.
... and this:
Kevin Monahan shot Kaylin Gillis, 20, when she and several friends wound up outside his house in a rural part of upstate New York, the authorities said.
When so many Americans are being pounded every day with the hatred and paranoia coming from outlets like DumFux News and OAN and Breitbart (and and and), we have to consider the probabilities for deliberate purposeful mayhem.
So we have to acknowledge that there could be a stochastic method to this madness.
ie: Somebody wants this shit to happen, and it's not just a matter of the NRA selling more guns, and buying political power thru the purchase of more Coin-Operated Politicians.
I can't shake the feeling there's quite a bit more to it than simply Commercial-Interests-At-Any-Cost.
Prove me wrong
Let's hash it out
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