Trump Campaign SLAPPs Voters

This week, a liberal PAC issued a rather stark political ad attacking President Trump, using his own words. The “Exponential Growth” ad is from “Priorities USA”.

As a response, the Trump presidential campaigned threatened TV stations airing the ad in a cease-and-desist letter. Among the threats is the possibility of revoking stations FCC license to broadcast. Here is a Reuters news report on the situation:



Yikes! Is this the End of Democracy as We Know It?

Not really. This is not as scary as it seems. PAC political attack ads are not fair and balanced commentary, although this one pretty directly uses Trump’s words against him. The sources of the quotes are detailed in this article by Politifact.org. A cease-and-desist letter is a threat of a possible future legal action—it’s not a court order and has no legal authority.

So, you need to calm down. But not too much. Because the campaign’s response to this ad says nothing good about the authoritarian tendencies of our most incompetent president.

For one thing, this ad, biased as it may be, is clearly not beyond the pale. It’s political opinion that’s fair to express. Conservatives who promoted “Hillary the Movie” and supported Citizens United have no standing whatsoever to try to shut it down. I don’t know that “rough” political commentary sets the right tone right now as our nation should unite to fight a pandemic, but the Trump campaign threatening broadcast licenses over this particular ad fits into a rather scary, systematic attack on political discourse that Trump has waged.

The president himself last week blasted an NBC reporter for a softball question—the reporter asked what words of comfort the president had for the American people. The bombastic Trump did not offer any, but instead lashed out, calling the reporter “terrible.”

It fits a pattern, described in this Slate article. Trump’s campaign has filed frivolous libel suits against pretty much every major media outlet over stories or commentary that it doesn’t like. The strategy of filing such doomed lawsuits has a name—they are known as “Strategic Lawsuits Against Political Participation,” or SLAPP suits, and have been used in the past by certain groups, such as the Church of Scientology, against negative media coverage.

Because defending yourself against a libel suit is expensive—and the whole point of a SLAPP suit is not to win a lawsuit, but to slience critics.

Sure, every American president plays hardball. Politics is a vicious game. But this president is special in his disregard for any political norms and the harshness of the attacks he makes against perceived media enemies. And he fits into a cultural pattern of anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-education and anti-discourse that is the political virus running globally amok right now, as recent years have seen a resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism.

Think of Trump’s threat to “open up the libel laws” during the 2016 campaign because he was unhappy with negative media coverage.

So now we are faced with a real existential threat. Whether it’s from the short-term economic slowdown caused by social isolation or a deeper, longer economic, spiritual, emotional and physical hit caused by pandemic deaths, 2020 is bound to be a year full of challenges caused by COVID-19.

And we have an election going on. To me, it’s pathetically sad that President Trump may yet be re-elected—in fact he stands a decent chance. He’s mishandled this pandemic from day one and the “it’s only the flu” crowd loves him for it.

His right-wing media machine and campaign can’t stand criticism of this president, especially criticism that uses his record against him. Yet, we all heard the quotes that the Priorities USA ad used. Ignorance and amnesia are not promoted by effective leaders who understand how a democratic republic or open marketplace of ideas are supposed to function.

So maybe this letter from the Trump campaign to TV stations is not, by itself, all that scary. It, however, fits into a very scary pattern: Trash the media, attack the media, sue the media—not for their lies, but to get them to stick to your version of truth.

I don’t have the heart for divisive politics at the moment. It is, however, important to all of us that critics of the president are free to say what they want. TV stations should be free to air this ad—it’s not beyond what the FCC should allow. After all, right-wing nonsense is a regular feature of the daily Trump Show.

No, I am not calling to censor the president, He should be more choosy in what he says, but he is free to say it. And we should be free to quote him and criticize him, even during a pandemic. And the Trump campaign, like Donald Trump himself, is once again revealing itself as a threat to democracy.

I do feel that we need to join together in this trying time. This ad doesn’t help. But what helps least of all is an incompetent, anti-democratic president and his sleazy re-election campaign.

So, share the ad. Make them mad. We are sitting on our couches and can't go anywhere--so let's make some virtual noise. The ad is already going viral, which is delicious under the circumstances.

Boost the signal. It's something we can do right now.

Is It Time for Grandma to Go?

From Wikimedia Commons.
19th Century portrait.

My stocks have taken a hit. Is it time for Glenn Beck to die?

Yeah, I know, he’s not grandma. But the same Republicans who got the vapors 10 years ago over imaginary “death panels” taking your grandmother when the Affordable Care Act was being passed are now ready for Coronavirus to take her in order to aid the economy.

The president is not wrong to say that the cure should not be worse than the disease—and no doubt this social distancing thing is incredibly damaging to the economy. But the economy is not everything. And medical experts are all telling us that the pandemic is real and the only way to fight a new virus that nobody has immunity to is to stop human-to-human transmission by social distancing.

So, no, it would not be beautiful to fill the churches for Easter. Flattening the curve does not mean bringing everybody together to celebrate resurrection by exchanging a new virus in ill-advised public gatherings. Yes, prayer is powerful. No, it’s not worth sacrificing grandma for. It feels like a very weird reenactment of The Lottery.

The tradeoff is magical thinking from a president whose grip on reality has always been iffy. He’s taking his cue from the same right-wing nutjobs who have whispered crazy stuff in his ears for three years. We desperately need fact-based leadership. A president who will understand what doctors report and not spout nonsense.

That’s not what we have.

And yes, a depression would be a high price, something that I hope we can avoid. But no, I don’t trust Glenn Beck on this false dilemma. I don’t think the only choices are tank the economy or sacrifice grandma. The problem is that I don’t think the president can grasp that. That’s not what Glenn is whispering in his ear.

If you’re listening to Trump and Beck at this point, your perceptions of reality have nothing to do with the marketplace of ideas—you are hopelessly lost in the mall of BS.

Jojo Rabbit: ‘(I) Probably Deserved That’

I’ll try not to give too many spoilers, because there are some unexpected, heart-wrenching twists in the movie that my wife and I watched while flying an almost empty plane from San Francisco to Dallas on our way home during a pandemic last week.

Have you seen “Jojo Rabbit?” If not, it’s a movie that is worth your socially isolated time. You’ll laugh, but dang, you’ll also cry. I’ve seen World War II through the eyes of a kid before (“Hope and Glory”), but never one through the eyes of a child like Jojo.

Not everybody who you grow to love in this strange, heartwarming movie about a fanatical Nazi in the Hitler Youth who has Adoph Hitler as his imaginary stand-in father friend will make it to the movie’s end. Wars are like that.

This is a movie about Nazi Germany, but mostly about how a child’s world is always warped and shaped by those around them, how their perceptions are different from ours, and how coming of age sometimes means learning that what you loved when you were young is not always true.

And I did not realize that Hitler in the movie was played by the Jewish actor who also wrote the script, based on a book.



And, although it was made in those happy days before Covid-19 was a thing, it felt to me like the movie was a decent analogy for our lives today. The war is the pandemic. The ghost in the walls is socially isolating. Not everything makes sense, and not everybody makes it to the finish.

But, if despite the heart-breaking tragedy you have to endure, you survive the crisis and come out into the world on the other side, what’s next?

Endure the slap, if you deserve it. Jojo did.

Then, dance.

Love in the Time of Corona

Social isolation. Puzzle time! Wife, son, daughter-in-law and I have been putting this together for a day.

 The media are under attack. What else is new?

On Fox News, Friday night, Sean Hannity was praising the president’s emergency declaration while decrying an unholy alliance between Democrats and the media that are trying to blame President Trump for the latest pandemic.

Well, Sean has a minor point. Trump didn’t cause the pandemic, and coverage of the disease in American media probably has focused too much on him and his failings.

Because the part of the story Mr. Hannity did not mention is this administration’s manifest incompetence in dealing with a national emergency. From downplaying the virus to spouting idiotic nonsense, the commander in chief has shown what leadership isn’t. And, as usual, he has sucked up the media oxygen, drawing attention to himself and making the story all about him.

Otherwise, a lot of the blame-the-media nonsense is nonsense. Just as Trump didn’t cause COVID19, neither did CNN. And if the media reports what health officials state about a virus, and people then rush to Wal-Mart to greedily stock up on toilet paper—I’m not sure you should shoot the messenger.

After all, many of those paper hoarders are not attentive consumers of news. They see what they see on social media.

Which, much more than traditional news media, has not always been a pinnacle of honesty and clear reporting. The oft noted problem with social media, compared to mass media, is that it creates information neighborhoods. What you see is driven by what you look at—in effect, you construct your media environment based on your clicks.

Thus, we get nonsense like those decrying the novel coronavirus as no big deal. True, most of us won’t die from it—but also true, it’s not a trivial threat. And as my oldest son observed the other day, if we manage to react appropriately and contain the pandemic, it will look like we over reacted.

The media are getting no love in the time of coronavirus. I get that. However, other than focusing too much on the politics of the virus—partly driven by a president who constantly makes it about politics—media aren’t our problem.

We have met the enemy. It’s a lack of information-seeking, knee-jerk-reacting, don’t want to hear it us.

I wish I new how long the national disruption will continue. I hope that the economy bounces back after the blip. And I hope, come November, that we'll all remember where we could turn for information and leadership and where we could not.