“Not Serving Republicans’ Political Interests”: Facebook, The IRS, And The GOP’s Bullshit Feedback Loop
It is considered a historical certainty on the right that during President Obama’s first term, the IRS pursued a political vendetta against conservative advocacy groups seeking non-profit status. It is even common to hear Republicans imply that politically motivated targeting of Tea Party groups may have cost Mitt Romney the 2012 presidential election.
In reality, the IRS “scandal” was the unhappy byproduct of an agency being tasked with determining the validity of claims to non-profit status, but lacking the proper resources to do it or clear guidance on how. The fact that new Tea Party groups, many with dubious claim to non-profit status, had flooded the IRS with applications compounded the difficulty. The agency thus used watchwords like “tea party” and “progressive” to, in its words, triage the workload.
Mythmaking summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and more conspiracy theories.
For the purposes of ginning up voters, that story is much less useful than one in which a liberal agency leader masterminded a sabotage campaign against patriotic conservatives trying to rescue the country from Obama. And so the IRS scandal was born.
Flash forward to this week, when John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, launched an inquiry into Facebook’s “trending topics” after an anonymous, conservative former Facebook worker told Gawker Media that the social media giant empowered reviewers to suppress conservative news and blacklist conservative news sources on the basis of naked political bias. The GOP’s intense interest in imposing content neutrality on a private company has inspired comparisons to the defunct “fairness doctrine” that used to regulate public-affairs content on U.S. airwaves. Republican beneficiaries of conservative talk radio turned the fairness doctrine into a free-speech bogeyman, but they take a much kinder view of the concept if it can be used to reduce alleged liberal bias online.
At a glance, the IRS and Facebook “scandals” bear little resemblance to one another—but the imperative both organizations face to sort truth from fiction creates a key similarity. Facebook has denied the core allegation fairly strongly. But it is easy to imagine how a conservative Facebooker might see his coworkers manipulating Facebook trending topics, and walk away convinced of a conspiracy exactly like the one the right imagines unfolded at the IRS.
Much like the IRS, inundated with non-profit status applications from groups that by all appearances were created for electioneering purposes, Facebook is a vast dumping ground for viral political content, much of which is garbage, some of which is bigoted, and some of which carries information that is outright false. It would be irresponsible of Facebook to facilitate the spread of birther nonsense or September 11 conspiracy theories by letting an algorithm pull such stories into trending topics without override power.
Thus, like the IRS, Facebook needs to triage. And here the differences between mainstream and liberal political content on the one hand, and conservative content on the other, become critical. Facebook reviewers tasked with “disregard[ing] junk … hoaxes or subjects with insufficient sources” are going to ensnare more climate-change denialism, more birther stories, more racist Breitbart agitprop than anything comparably dubious that comes out of the liberal internet. And those dubious stories will come not just from fringe sites or content farms, but from prestige outlets of the online right. Presumably liberal hoaxes and inaccurate liberal news are also bumped from trending topics (would Facebook let a celebrity’s anti-vaccine story linger there for long?)—yet among the presumably liberal ranks of Facebook workers, this is probably seen not as suppression, but as obligatory empiricism and social responsibility.
Much of this is admittedly conjecture. But acknowledging the reality of what Facebook grapples with doesn’t serve Republicans’ political interests. If they really wanted to get to the bottom of the Facebook controversy, they would have to implicitly acknowledge that climate-change denial is crankery and Glenn Beck is a charlatan, and sacrifice the political upside: incensing conservatives by alleging a scandal. Mythmaking around both the IRS and Facebook flaps summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and conspiracy theories. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of bullshit.
The differences between the IRS and Facebook are numerous, of course. The IRS is obligated to use a neutral basis for sniffing out tax cheats, while Facebook is a lightly regulated Internet company that has the right to be a Democratic Party propaganda machine if it wants to. As a matter of principle, Facebook shouldn’t claim any of its features are fully automated, free from human meddling, if that simply isn’t true. But the fact that Facebook may have shaded the truth about trending topics doesn’t obligate anyone to give conspiracy-mongers with a rooting interest in stirring up right-wing anger the benefit of the doubt.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, May 13, 2016
“For 2016, Let Franken Be Franken”: Democrats Have The Perfect Trump Slayer: Al Franken
Now that the general election matchup is settled, the Democratic Party is starting to coordinate their anti-Trump strategy and messaging. As usual, their product is almost unbelievably lame: “Dangerous Donald.” Apparently that is the best slur they can come up with, so if you live in a swing state, get ready to hear that 900 times a day for the next six months.
But in the meantime, somebody else needs to actually come up with some decent Trump put-downs — something that at a minimum does not portray him as some sort of cool, leather-jacketed rebel. Elizabeth Warren has been putting together a reasonable first pass, getting in multi-day Twitter fights with Trump by ridiculing his pathetic business record and his extensive history of vile sexism.
However, there is one Democratic senator with the detailed, on the ground expertise this garbage reality show hellscape of an election requires. Someone, indeed, whose entire career has been leading up to this point. That someone is Al Franken, the junior Democratic senator from Minnesota.
The very obvious weakness of Trump when it comes to political trench warfare is that, like most bullies, he can dish it out, but he can’t take it. He can utterly humiliate a gutless patrician like Jeb Bush, but it’s extremely easy to bait him into undignified bursts of outrage. Alex Pareene managed it back in 2012 with a few paragraphs in Salon.
Lightweight reporter Alex Pareene @pareene is known as a total joke in political circles. Hence, he writes for Loser Salon. @Salon
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 15, 2012
On one level, Trump sort of thrives on this stuff. In the context of the Republican primary, stooping to his level of juvenility didn’t work for Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.
However, the general election will be very different than the Republican primary. First, none of the other Republicans were any better than Bush at trading barbs. Marco Rubio sounded like a panicky high-schooler reading from a memorized sheet of insults his dad wrote down for him, and Ted Cruz sounds like a smug oleaginous weasel regardless of what he’s saying. Anyone who’s even slightly creative and self-confident ought to be able to do far better than that.
The general election will also be before a very different audience than the Republican primary electorate. Before GOP base voters, Trump’s bigotry and sexism played pretty well, or could at least be looked past. But before the rest of the country, he can’t afford to stoop to the vile slurs that are quite obviously right below the surface. He needs to look presidential as much as possible, and one way to throw a wrench in that effort is to bait him into saying vile stuff.
As I said, Elizabeth Warren has a good start. But Al Franken is, so far as I can tell, the only former comedian in Congress from either party. He was on Saturday Night Live for many years, and wrote several comedy books, including Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right — both genuinely funny and full of quite nasty insults. He knows this stuff backwards and forwards.
One thing Franken could do, aside from baiting Trump himself, is teach Democratic politicos how not to sound like the bloodless technocrats who have long since had the personality crushed out of them. He could knock together a few slideshows, hold a conference or two, and teach at least a few how to perform a reasonable approximation of “witty.” Because it’s probably best if people like Warren and Franken et al take point in mocking Trump, allowing Clinton to stay above the fray.
During his Senate career, Franken has been relatively modest and quiet, probably due to the personality-crushing mechanism (read: constant begging of rich people for money) I described above. But he surely remembers how to be mean to Republicans.
This election’s GOP nominee deserves his special talents more than any other in United States history. So for 2016, let Franken be Franken.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 13, 2016
“The Morning After Donald Trump”: The Slogan “Make America Great Again” Didn’t Spring From Untilled Soil
Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee, and I am afraid.
Not of him. Not really. Trump is neither the first nor the last lying sociopath to walk the Earth — if America’s multitudinous anti-Trump forces do what we need to do between now and November, he won’t see the Oval Office. I will admit that I’m not unconcerned (I suddenly find that I intend to canvass just as hard for candidate Clinton, about whom I’m not particularly thrilled, as I once did for candidate Obama, about whom I was), but I’m not afraid of him. Not really.
Neither am I afraid (not really) of the campaign’s ugliness, though I know it will only get worse. The 2016 campaign is and remains appalling — but the campaign will end.
I’m afraid of the morning after. I’m afraid of what happens when Trump loses.
Trump is not (by any means or measure) the only misogynistic, bigoted xenophobe in the 21st century Republican Party, and in the process of winnowing its primary field, the GOP has given increasingly clamorous voice to a profoundly embittered, violently enraged, and often well-armed minority, in the process normalizing it.
Bitterness, rage, and violence have always been part of the American story, but since roughly the moon landing they’ve been at least nominally verboten in American politics. The dog whistles and code words with which we’re familiar came into common usage because Americans realized that it wasn’t always socially expedient to state their hate outright.
The head of the American Freedom Party (“arguably the most important white nationalist group in the country,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) and erstwhile Trump delegate William Johnson (who has said “the skinheads thought I was too extreme to run the organization”) recently clarified our new political reality for Mother Jones: “[Trump] is allowing us to talk about things we’ve not been able to talk about. So even if he is not elected, he has achieved great things.”
Indeed. For the first time in the decades since the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, we find that it is once again hip — or, at the very least, socially acceptable — to be awful. Supporters of the AFP told Mother Jones that Trump’s “honest discourse” has allowed them to feel “emancipated.”
We’ve seen in recent years how violent words once emancipated can lead to violent consequences — we’ve seen mosques attacked, women’s health care providers murdered, African Americans slaughtered with their Bibles open before them.
Many angry voters have legitimate grievances, and I certainly don’t believe the vast majority of Republicans seek violence — but they don’t have to. Chaos doesn’t require tens of millions of angry Americans. It only requires a few Americans who believe tens of millions support them. Those who commit politically motivated violence invariably believe they’re acting on behalf of people who are too afraid to do so.
Humans become more bold, not less, when they believe they’re not alone, and they’re particularly prone to bold violence when they find themselves backed into a corner. Trump’s supporters and fellow travelers have felt themselves to be backed into a corner for eight long years — as Trump’s former butler has made abundantly clear in a series of Facebook posts, one of which declares that Barack Obama “should have been taken out by our military and shot as an enemy agent.” The slogan “Make America Great Again” didn’t spring from untilled soil.
So what happens when the Great White Hope of angry, embittered, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic America flames out?
I don’t know, and that’s why I’m afraid. I think about the rage and resentment that are everywhere fanned, named, and given a place of pride in today’s GOP, and though I fervently hope Hillary Clinton is elected, I wonder where that rage and resentment will go if and when she is. I know my fear is a win for those who benefit from it, but I can’t do anything about that now. Here it is, rooted in my belly, climbing through my veins.
In truth I’ve felt something like it since the day President Obama announced his candidacy — though that fear has never been quite so amorphous, being laser-focused on a single life. I expect it will live in my belly until Barack Hussein Obama achieves a natural end to his days, or I achieve my own.
Many years ago, when I lived in a different country, I watched a minority of my fellow citizens demonize the leader for whom I’d voted. I watched as they and the opposition party wrapped him in Nazi imagery, I watched as they prayed publicly for his death. I wanted to believe it would come to nothing, that the peace he sought would be greater than their loathing of it, but then I watched as he was buried. It didn’t take all of Israel’s extremists to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin — it only took one.
The 2016 presidential campaign is ugly and appalling, but it will end. Then — if we’re lucky — America will find out what happens when the angry and the aggrieved are told to go home.
By: Emily L. Hauser, The Week, May 13, 2016
“Another Terri Schiavo Moment”: Are Republicans Falling Into A Democratic Trap On Transgender Bathrooms?
I first began to suspect Democrats of throwing chum into troubled waters on transgender-bathroom labeling upon reading reports that conservatives were determined to launch a platform fight at the Republican convention to make sure “bathrooms” were an important part of the GOP agenda. Yeah, bathrooms. Ridiculous, right? Not if you are a conservative religious activist who believes LGBT rights opened the gates of hell and are ushering in the End Times. I’m sure more than a few Christian Right folk heard about criticisms of the North Carolina bathroom access law and thought: This is what we’ve been talking about all these years.
So suddenly there’s a new issue on the horizon that has not only caused some problems between the presumptive presidential nominee of the GOP and its most important constituency group, but that is distracting Republicans into a fight most of them — and certainly Donald Trump — probably don’t want to participate in.
The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent takes a look today at the Obama administration’s directive to schools across the country to let transgendered students decide which bathroom to use, and discussion of the issue by other liberals, and concludes that Democrats are “leaning in” on the issue. Sure looks that way to me, too. Yes, the schools directive was bland and bureaucratic, and not really mandatory, but was nonetheless designed to set cultural conservatives off like a rocket, partly because of the subject matter and partly because it was an example of federal “meddling” with local control of schools, which a lot of these folks deplore as Big Secular Government getting between godly parents and their impressionable children.
It’s unlikely a whole lot of swing voters care that much about this issue one way or another, and those who think about it for five minutes probably figure the administration’s approach was a reasonable solution to a small but unavoidable problem. But even as they (and the schools, and the country) move on, conservative activists will remain transfixed, fighting for new bathroom labeling laws in the many states they control, fighting for platform planks, fighting with Republican politicians who are embarrassed by the whole thing, and maybe even fighting with each other on how to fight this new exotic import from Sodom and Gomorrah. This could even become a Terri Schiavo moment, wherein many Americans discover once again that the Christian Right and the political party in its thrall just don’t look at the world the way the rest of us do.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 13, 2016
“Multigenerational Wealth Is Best Hidden”: What Doesn’t Donald Trump Want You To Know About His Wealth?
This is what Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns says about America. We are a nation that can’t think straight about wealth and class. And Trump knows better than to puncture our delusions.
The American psyche is hyper-attuned to the trinkets of the wealthy: the right car, the right brand of clothes, the right vacation spots. We flatter ourselves with our circumscribed access to these status goods — or perhaps we only dream of that access — but we fail to understand that they do not equate to real wealth.
The very rich are different from you and me. They have something we never will: the power of money. Their money is the kind that doesn’t go away with a divorce, an extended sickness, a dip in the markets or even the death of a high income earner. Theirs is the kind that owns politicians and the laws they make.
Real wealth, the multigenerational kind, is best hidden. And even though a tax return won’t reveal all there is to know, it will reveal enough.
Trump told the Associated Press this week that nothing would be released until the government is through with its audit of him. The next day, Wednesday, he hedged a smidgeon to Fox News, saying he’d like to release the returns before the election. Don’t bet on that happening.
For one thing, if we were able to see how Trump’s fortune is structured and how much tax he pays on it, we would also be able to compute his liability under his proposed changes to the tax code. In other words, we would be able to approximate how much Trump stands to earn for himself and his heirs by pulling the strings of power. Is it any surprise he won’t go there?
Let’s take a closer look at the tax plan that he unveiled last fall. Plenty of experts have already done so.
As part of his populist appeal, Trump envisions simplifying the tax code and dismissing about 73 million households from paying any tax at all (most of those are already not paying). Those families will be able to submit a form to the IRS that says, “I win.” Yes, that is really his plan.
The cuts would lower taxes for people all income levels. But the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan but right-leaning watchdog group, noted “the biggest winners — in raw dollars and on a percentage basis — would be those in the top 10 percent of filers, particularly those in the top 1 percent.”
The top marginal rate for individuals would drop from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. The corporate rate would drop from 35 percent to 15 percent. He would do away with the estate tax. That adds up a lot of lost revenue — about $10 trillion over a decade, according to the Tax Foundation
Trump claims that the tax cuts would be made up for by closing some loopholes for the wealthy and corporations. But the Tax Foundation crunched the numbers and has deemed this to be wishful thinking. Severe cuts to spending would be necessary to avoid crushing growth in the national debt.
Wishful thinking is Trump’s stock in trade. Indeed, some speculate that another reason why he does not want the public to see his tax return is that his boasted wealth is squishier than he’d like to admit. Trump is notorious for overstating his attributes, and when it comes to his wealth he is especially touchy.
He sued former New York Times reporter Timothy O’Brien over the latter’s book, “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” which questioned Trump’s net worth. The book also explored if Trump convinced his siblings to borrow on his behalf from their trust funds to save him from financial ruin in the early 1990s. Trump’s lawsuit against O’Brien was dismissed.
Still, Trump is clearly rich to an extent most Americans cannot imagine. Oddly — and sadly — many tout this as an alluring quality. He’s so rich he can’t be bought, they say. This attitude reveals a pathetic inability to understand plutocracy, and its growing threat to our democracy. Americans continue to be suckered into unrealistic beliefs about their ability to upgrade their social class. Meanwhile, the policies and programs that are necessary to promote middle-class security are toppling one after another.
Donald Trump is not going to share his wealth with you, dear voter, or help you get rich on your own. He can’t. What worked for Trump will not work for you. His trick was the oldest one in the book: Have a rich daddy. And keep it in the family.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, May 14, 2016
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