Hate Sells category archive

Robert Reich, not one given to wild ravings, fears that there is method in the madness. Here’s how he opens his article; follow the link for his reasoning.

Ronald Reagan told Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Reagan is still revered, especially by Republicans, but his negative view of government has morphed into an authoritarian fervor within the Republican Party.

And that fervor has become the basis of a strategy — led by Trump — for seeking to persuade the rest of America that the nation is ungovernable as a democracy and therefore in need of an authoritarian strongman.

The Arizona Republic’s E. J. Montini makes a case that there a precedent for Kari Lake in Arizona politics. A snippet:

. . . she is Arizona’s (and America’s) new Joe Arpaio.

Follow the link for his reasoning.

Disinformation campaigns are nothing new. So too are disinformation campaigns on the Disinformaation Superhighway, particularly in the past two decades via “social” media.

At his website, security expert Bruce Schneier offers a thoughtful take on the effects chatbots and large language models on dis coarse discourse. Here’s a bit:

Generative AI tools also allow for new techniques of production and distribution, such as low-level propaganda at scale. Imagine a new AI-powered personal account on social media. For the most part, it behaves normally. It posts about its fake everyday life, joins interest groups and comments on others’ posts, and generally behaves like a normal user. And once in a while, not very often, it says—or amplifies—something political. These persona bots, as computer scientist Latanya Sweeney calls them, have negligible influence on their own. But replicated by the thousands or millions, they would have a lot more.

The entire piece is worth the few moments it will take you to read it.

In a longer piece springboarding off Mitt Romney’s decision to retire when his Senate term expires, Paul Krugman sums up how Richard Nixon’s loathsome southern strategy backfired on the Republican Party:

For the basic story of the Republican Party, going back to the 1970s, is this: Advocates of right-wing economic policies, which redistributed income from workers to the wealthy, sought to sell their agenda by exploiting social intolerance and animosity. They had considerable success with this strategy. But eventually the extremists they thought they were using ended up ruling the party.

I commend the complete article to your attention.

Michael in Norfolk highlights one of our most toxic fifth columnists.

At the Las Vegas Sun, Mary Blankenship looks at how our polity has become flooded with lies and falsehoods; she points out that

When false narratives become our identity and reality the problem immediately evolves into a tragedy.

Follow the link for her reasoning.

And, in a similar vein, Robert Jay Lifton looks at a recent book about Timothy McVeigh and explores the influences that led him to violence.

Given the state of dis coarse discourse, both pieces are worth your while.