PGT: President-Elect Donald J Trump

[CliffFletcher]

People need to look at the exit polls. A lot of citizens who voted Trump think he's an untrustworthy, unscrupulous dirtbag who is temperamentally unsuited to being a president. But they voted for him anyway, because they would rather a shady blowhard shake up the system than stick with the status quo. Trump was absolutely right that there was nothing short of committing murder that would turn the populist support away from him. But that wasn't because his voters all adored him - it was because his scandalous background and blustering demeanour didn't matter to them.

Originally Posted by GGG

I disagree that the medias job is to report news. They have an important role in being arbiters of fact in the same way that scientists due in their field. The question that I think needs to be answered out of this is how do you take a misinformed voter and turn him into an informed voter?

Historically, journalists were trusted arbiters of facts. Now they are not and merged into this infotainment medium that people choose the facts to match their opinions.

The media is broken in its function as the fourth estate and that leaves the masses open to propaganda.

As someone who studied and worked as a journalist, the decline of the fourth estate saddens me. You're right that it has largely abandoned its role as arbiters of facts. Some of the decline is a matter of resources - the business model of mainstream media has collapsed as they've lost their traditional sources of income (classifieds, print, and commercials). As a consequence, they made the foolish mistake of trying to beat online and social media at their own game by emphasizing opinion pieces, partisanship, and advocacy. The result is all heat and no light.

And it has become evident that there's a social gulf between the liberal, secular, and urban professionals who work in the media and their countrymen who live in an essentially foreign culture. To half of Americans (and British too, judging by how astonished the media there was by the Brexit vote), the people who work in the media may as well be Parisian or Viennese. Media and audience live in fundamentally different cultures from one another, in lifestyle, values, and worldview.

[Thor]

I obsess a bit about Putin and the balkans, Ukraine, Georgia, but here's a great article on what a Trump that is weak on NATO could mean for the same style of shadow invasion as with the Ukraine in Latvia (I think you could add a few more countries to that list of possible targets.)

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/16/...ampaign=buffer

Putin believes hegemony over Russia’s near-abroad is necessary for Russian security because of his beliefs about Russian nationhood and historical destiny. Putin (and, perhaps more so, his inner circle) isn’t merely nationalist. The Kremlin appears to be driven by peculiar form of Russian nationalism infused with religion, destiny, and messianism. In this narrative, Russia is the guardian of Orthodox Christianity and has a mission to protect and expand the faith.

A truly rational Russia would not see NATO and European Union expansion as a threat, because the liberal order is open and inclusive and would actually augment Russia’s security and prosperity. But, for Putin and other Russians who see the world through the lens of Russian religious nationalism, the West is inherently a threat because of its degeneracy and globalism.

In this view, NATO is not the benign guarantor of liberal order in Europe, but the hostile agent of the degenerate West and the primary obstacle to Russian greatness. Thus, Putin’s grand strategy requires breaking NATO. Specifically, he must make the Article V mutual security guarantee meaningless.

[AltaGuy]

It is going to be really interesting, and not a little scary, to see how Trump's disinterest in the world emboldens Russia and China.

Russia took the gloves off in Syria almost immediately, and I'm sure there are more bold moves ahead. While I don't believe Trump will have the US actively pursuing Russian interests, it does seem likely that Russia will take advantage of US isolationism.

I worry about what the world may look like in four years. Not going to be great for a lot of people if Russia and China are left to their own devices on the world stage, and especially in their own neighbourhoods.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by nik-

See, this is the disconnect. This was done. There was more than enough information presented that a person evaluating this election and making a decision on fitness for the job could use it to make an easy choice.

As much as I hate the term, this was very much a "post-truth" election. When a large part of the rhetoric is distrust of the media, what do you expect the result to be when they do a deep dig investigation on one of the magnitude of Trump deficiencies? All of a sudden, because they went in depth on a topic, people are going to drop their inherent distrust of them?

No.

I see where our disconnect is. I see infotainment as one of the causes of the misinformed voter whereas you place the blame on the stupidity of the voter being able to tell truth from fiction.

I thinks that's a reasonable position.

[Senator Clay Davis]

So Trump hosted Christie yesterday and apparently Chris is back in the mix for a cabinet post. Or he's being set up for even more humiliation by the Trump and his son in law. That set of Christie gifs from way back when have been worth it for us at least. Whether Chris getting constantly ####ed with by the Trumps has been worth it to him, don't really care. It's funny watching him get jerked around.

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by Thor

I obsess a bit about Putin and the balkans, Ukraine, Georgia, but here's a great article on what a Trump that is weak on NATO could mean for the same style of shadow invasion as with the Ukraine in Latvia (I think you could add a few more countries to that list of possible targets.)

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/16/...ampaign=buffer

It wasn't talked about in the mainstream media a lot, but Trump was recklessly stoking nationalism in Serbia during the summer.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/arti...ump-01-04-2016

https://theintercept.com/2016/08/16/...ally-belgrade/

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...aking-20160229

[CliffFletcher]

Of all the strange affiliations thrown together in these times of dramatic political realignment, maybe the strangest is the warmth between the American populist right and Putin's Russia. Any time Russia comes up on a forum all I see is right wingers defending them as unfairly maligned and the target of a sinister American campaign. No doubt some of the people on the forums are paid Kremlin stooges trolling english-language forums. But that doesn't account for how widespread the phenomena is. When did the right fall in love with America's historic rival?

[AltaGuy]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Of all the strange affiliations thrown together in these times of dramatic political realignment, maybe the strangest is the warmth between the American populist right and Putin's Russia. Any time Russia comes up on a forum all I see is right wingers defending them as unfairly maligned and the target of a sinister American campaign. No doubt some of the people on the forums are paid Kremlin stooges trolling english-language forums. But that doesn't account for how widespread the phenomena is. When did the right fall in love with America's long-standing rival?

This is a real thing? Wow, I had thought that Trump kind of was off on his own on it, but there's actually a real right-wing pro-Putin movement? That seems... crazy! The neocons must be losing it.

I wonder what Putin's long-term strategy actually is? If he gets an inch, it really does seem like he's ready to take a mile. I guess we're about to find out.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

When did the right fall in love with America's historic rival?

When the ideology of that rival began to closely mirror what they want for America - Christian authoritarianism allied with corporatism at home, and a foreign policy concerned above all else with homeland security.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Of all the strange affiliations thrown together in these times of dramatic political realignment, maybe the strangest is the warmth between the American populist right and Putin's Russia. Any time Russia comes up on a forum all I see is right wingers defending them as unfairly maligned and the target of a sinister American campaign. No doubt some of the people on the forums are paid Kremlin stooges trolling english-language forums. But that doesn't account for how widespread the phenomena is. When did the right fall in love with America's historic rival?

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by jammies

When the ideology of that rival began to closely mirror what they want for America - Christian authoritarianism allied with corporatism at home, and a foreign policy concerned above all else with homeland security.

And not to mention the desire for unrepentant force. Putin basically does what he wants. He doesn't ask for international permission or coalitions... if he wants to do something, he just does it. This sort of thing appeals to the alt-right since it removes the burden of restraint and humanity in warfare. Many on the right believe that the long drawn out quagmires in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are a result of international bureaucracy making it impossible to destroy their enemies.

[photon]

Trump was registering companies even during his campaign, including eight in Saudi Arabia that look related to a hotel project.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...5d0_story.html

Pence was on with Chris Wallace yesterday and was pretty dismissive about concerns about all the conflicts of interest, promising that it was all ok and that there'll be proper separation. Sure there will be.

[Senator Clay Davis]

The more I read about fake news, the more I want in. Sounds like some of the easiest money made, and if you know how to really push the buttons and tie several conspiracies together, you could probably really clean up. Also shows what a pariah social media really is.

Fewer than 2,000 readers are on his website when Paris Wade, 26, awakens from a nap, reaches for his laptop and thinks he needs to, as he puts it, “feed” his audience. “Man, no one is covering this TPP thing,” he says after seeing an article suggesting that President Obama wants to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he leaves office. Wade, a modern-day digital opportunist, sees an opportunity. He begins typing a story.

“CAN’T TRUST OBAMA,” he writes as the headline, then pauses. His audience hates Obama and loves President-elect Donald Trump, and he wants to capture that disgust and cast it as a drama between good and evil. He resumes typing: “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back… .”

Ten minutes and nearly 200 words later, he is done with a story that is all opinion, innuendo and rumor. He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, LibertyWritersNews.com, and then pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of page views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” Then he looks at a nearby monitor that shows the site’s analytics, and watches as the readers pour in.

“Down with the globalists,” writes a woman in Cape Girardeau, Mo., one of 3,192 people now on the website, 1,244 of whom are reading the story he just posted.

“Down with the globalists!” writes a man in Las Vegas.

Now 1,855 are reading the story.

“DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS !!!” writes a woman in Helena, Mont.

Now 1,982.

At a time of continuing discussion over the role that hyperpartisan websites, fake news and social media play in the divided America of 2016, LibertyWritersNews illustrates how websites can use Facebook to tap into a surging ideology, quickly go from nothing to influencing millions of people and make big profits in the process. Six months ago, Wade and his business partner, Ben Goldman, were unemployed restaurant workers. Now they’re at the helm of a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone and say they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it because they don’t want people to start asking for loans.

“Super great election sales,” he says. “There were some days where we were getting $13, $14 per 1,000 views.” Between June and August, they say, when they had fewer than 150,000 Facebook followers, they made between $10,000 and $40,000 every month running advertisements that, among other things, promised acne solutions, Viagra alternatives, ways to remove lip lines, cracked feet, “deep fat,” and “the 13 sexiest and most naked celebrity selfies.” Then the political drama deepened, and their audience expanded fivefold, and now Goldman sometimes thinks that what he made in the last six months would have taken him 20 years waiting tables at his old job.

Wade and Goldman now have a lawyer and an accountant, employ other writers and are expanding so quickly that they’re surprised to think the majority of their adult lives were spent scraping by. They graduated from the University of Tennessee — Wade in 2012 with an advertising degree and Goldman in 2013 with a business degree — but could only find unpaid internships and ended up working at a Mexican restaurant. On weekends, they would sell water bottles at college football games, and Goldman scalped tickets. Neither thought much about politics. Raised in liberal homes, they both voted for Obama twice, but as they struggled to find better jobs, they began to doubt those votes, their college education and the progressive values with which they were raised.

They moved to California, first Wade, then Goldman, and started an advertising business that quickly failed. But it did attract one client who ran numerous alt-right Facebook pages. He needed more writers, and in 2015 Wade and Goldman started doing stories and getting paid based on how many clicks they got. The first story Wade did aggregated a South Korean news report that claimed an anonymous source had said that a North Korean scientist had defected with data from human experiments. Wade knew he needed a picture to sell the story to readers. He searched online for an image of a human experiment that, as he describes it, would make people think, “What is that? I got to click.” He found what he recalls was a “totally misleading” photograph of a fleshy mass and made it the featured image. He wrote the headline, “[PROOF] N. Korea Experiments on Humans,” published the story and made $120 off 10 minutes of work. It was, he says, a revelation: “You have to trick people into reading the news.”

Now settled into the career that has grown from that revelation, Wade turns the television to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist with nearly 1.4 million followers on Facebook, who is the opportunist they would most like to become. Wade clicks on the LibertyWritersNews site, which says at the bottom, “You Can Count On Liberty Writers News,” begins typing a new story, and looks up to watch Jones yell into the camera. But it isn’t Jones’s monologue that Wade notices. It’s his setup. “We want to start filming in a studio like that,” Wade says. “That stuff works on Facebook.”

There are times when Wade wonders what it would be like to write an article he truly believes in. “In a perfect world,” he says, it would have nuance and balance and long paragraphs and take longer than 10 minutes to compose. It would make people think. But he never writes it, he says, because no one would click on it, so what would be the point?

Instead, as 4,000 people are on the website one night, Wade and Goldman keep writing and feeding, writing and feeding.

Wade writes about a rumor he has seen on Fox News’s website, which says “the new batch of anti-Trump protesters has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George Soros and groups like Moveon.org.”

“Dude,” Wade says. “The left has been, like, manufacturing the protest.”

Goldman, meanwhile, is typing a story — “It was a literal Hell Storm at DNC headquarters today” — and laughing at what he has written. “God, I just know everything about this statement is so wrong,” he says, and adds, still laughing, “What is a hell storm?”

He finishes it as Wade is putting an old headline on his story about Soros, one that has nothing to do with what he has written but once brought in a lot of page views. He shares it on their Facebook page and watches as readers stream into the website — first a few hundred, then nearly 1,000.

“Boom, dude, look at that,” Wade says. “That one is doing super well.”

Goldman scans through what Wade had written. “When are we going to go after this traitor!” it says. “It is time to take this traitor out! He should be pursued to the depths of hell and beyond.” He looks up and smiles nervously.

“Maybe there’s a less violent way to say that.”

“I’m going to change that one, actually,” Wade says, suddenly looking panicked as he grabs his laptop and moves to replace “take this traitor out” to “take this traitor down.”

“Down is so much better sounding than out,” Goldman says.

But the comments are already coming in fast. “Arrest and hang him for war crimes,” one woman writes of Soros. “This man should go straight to F@#KING HELL,” another woman posts. “I gladly volunteer to take this Traitor to America out,” another says. “Jail is way too good for him.”

Goldman and Wade often tell each other they aren’t creating anything that’s not already there, that they’re simply fanning it, that readers know not to take their hyperbole and embellishments seriously. And even if the comments suggest otherwise, they try not to pay them too much attention. People will say anything on Facebook, they remind themselves. They tell one another they’re only minor participants in a broader “meme war” between outlets such as The Other 98% (other98.com) on the left and Nation In Distress (facebook.com/NationInDistress) on the right, but then they see the protests in the streets, the divisions in America, and wonder if their work is making things worse. What if one of their readers actually does harm Soros? Would they be complicit? Is their website dangerous? Or is it savvy entrepreneurship? Their opportunity?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...mepage%2Fstory

[WhiteTiger]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

The more I read about fake news, the more I want in. Sounds like some of the easiest money made, and if you know how to really push the buttons and tie several conspiracies together, you could probably really clean up. Also shows what a pariah social media really is.

Fake social media dispersed news is the new snake oil...and the rubes are coming in droves.

[GirlySports]

Senator Clay Davis: You should totally make a fake news site for more clicks.

Start with: Democrats support another 9/11 attack on the US just to see Donald Trump fail.

[Senator Clay Davis]

I'll start the Canadian fake news site instead. I'm sure there's more rubes in Canada then we'd like to admit. So here goes headline #1

"Justin Trudeau's secret: He's really is a woman named Justine, and Sophie is just a phony to hide the truth: Those kids are actually born from Justine, who was inseminated by a lizard person backed by the globalists to ensure the enslavement of the white race, with serious financing from Saudi oil interests to annihilate Alberta and the oilsands, and make Canada take 78 million refugees"

I'll let you know how the royalty cheques look.

[GirlySports]

you have to save lizard person for after the website is established

[WhiteTiger]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

I'll start the Canadian fake news site instead. I'm sure there's more rubes in Canada then we'd like to admit. So here goes headline #1

"Justin Trudeau's secret: He's really is a woman named Justine, and Sophie is just a phony to hide the truth: Those kids are actually born from Justine, who was inseminated by a lizard person backed by the globalists to ensure the enslavement of the white race, with serious financing from Saudi oil interests to annihilate Alberta and the oilsands, and make Canada take 78 million refugees"

I'll let you know how the royalty cheques look.

Too much, too fast. You need to cast a wide net, then narrow the focus later. Have you never read a clickbait title? Never give away the sharp point of the hook in the first line. Make me click through 30 pages first.

Should have started with something like "Justin Trudeau's secret: A woman?" ;p

[DuffMan]

I think you can relate the news to general tv watching.
More people watch Duck Dynasty and Honey boo boo than Nat, Geo, or history channel or science programs. News is the same, most people are dumb, don't want to be challenged and want to be told something they agree with.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by DuffMan

I think you can relate the news to general tv watching.
More people watch Duck Dynasty and Honey boo boo than Nat, Geo, or history channel or science programs. News is the same, most people are dumb, don't want to be challenged and want to be told something they agree with.

I blame TLC (The Learning Channel).