Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Yes, the GOP is a danger to us all. They are no longer the party of Reagan. They are a dangerous cult that worships and criminal con man and their goal is to turn America into a white supremacist dictatorship. Vote the GOP out up and down the ballot to save our democracy.     

America won’t reach its 300th birthday if the GOP isn't stopped: former Trump official

Speaking to Nicolle Wallace on Monday, former Trump administration official Miles Taylor revealed that he's so concerned about the state of the GOP that something must be done to take the party back.

Wallace, however, was skeptical of his efforts and said that the GOP of the past is long gone.

"Miles, I love you, brother, but I'm going to give it to you straight," she said. "The moment to do this was 2016 when some of us voted for Hillary Clinton and didn't go serve in the administration and put a patina of all of your stature on him. What is the hope? What can you do now?"

"Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think what we showed in 2020, though, Nicolle, is that this idea of coalition campaigning works," Taylor explained. "There's enough disaffected — Republicans did, in 2020, finally see the light, and rally to kick Trump out of office, but it was only by very thin margins, and our worry here is if those disaffected Republicans stay out of the game in this next cycle, then pro-Trump extremists will win in these key races around the country, and that's what we're trying to avoid. So, really, what we're arguing here is to go after the folks, the radicals in the GOP, who are basically writing the party's eulogy right now and to team up with Democrats to stop them."

He went on to say that some Republicans will have to support a Democrat, and some Democrats will have to support a centrist independent against the GOP in a deep-red state.

"So, what we're doing this week at the Renew America movement is releasing a slate of those candidates, a slate of Democrats, Independents, and a handful of courageous Republicans that should be defended," said Taylor. "On the Democratic side, it's people like Elissa Slotkin and Abbey Spanberger, and in other places, we're going to suggest that progressives, patriotic progressives, support folks like Evan McMullin, who's running as a center-right candidate against Mike Lee in Utah. So, that sort of coalition campaigning is what we're trying to do, and it did work to beat Donald Trump and we've got to stick to that model."

He went on to say that he's optimistic but that it will be an "uphill battle." It's something that must be done, he said because "I'm worried that American democracy won't reach its 300th birthday if we don't do this."

See the video below:

[Rick Plant]

Boy, what a disaster Criminal Donald was for 4 years. Notice all the disaster he caused us below, the right wingers are falsely trying to blame President Biden for. This is all Criminal Donald's mess that he left for President Biden to clean up. And it's a huge task to get done. Look at this total disaster Criminal Donald left us with. Massive job loss, destroyed manufacturing, increased massive debt, slow growth, high murder rate and high illegal immigration. That's why people will not vote for a Republican again. Criminal Donald is a total failure. President Biden got the unemployment rate back down to 4.8%, has record job creation and manufacturing growth in just 8 months, and the crime rate is down. That is real success. Now look at the Trump disaster we had to suffer with.   

Trump’s Final Numbers

The economy lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%

The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016.

The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.

The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.

Illegal immigration increased. Apprehensions at the Southwest border rose 14.7% last year compared with 2016.

Coal production declined 26.5%, and coal-mining jobs dropped by 16.7%.

Handgun production rose 12.5% last year compared with 2016, setting a new record.

The murder rate last year rose to the highest level since 1997.

Unemployment — As a candidate, Trump frequently criticized the monthly unemployment rates as “phony numbers.” But as president, Trump immediately began to take credit for driving down the unemployment rate, which at 4.7% was already close to full employment when he took office in January 2017. Two months into Trump’s term, then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer joked about his boss’s change of heart: “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly — ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.’”

During the pandemic, the unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April 2020, the highest since BLS began tracking the figure in 1948.

When Trump’s term ended in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.3% — which was 1.6 percentage points higher than when he took office.

Economic Growth — Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. economy began slowing down. The real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product went up in Trump’s first two years, peaking at an estimated 2.9% in 2018 — the highest since 2005. But the economy grew only 2.3% in 2019 and the bottom fell out in 2020.

The real GDP declined 3.4% in 2020 from the previous year. It was the largest drop since 1947, when the nation’s economy declined 11.6% after years of economic expansion fueled by World War II.

As a candidate and president, Trump promised the nation’s economy would grow on an annual basis by 4% to 6%. But it never topped 3%.

Crime — Murders and aggravated assaults shot up dramatically under Trump, while most other types of crime declined.

In his inaugural address, Trump darkly portrayed America as a country mired in poverty, drugs and crime. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he promised. But quite the contrary, the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report, released Sept. 27, shows 4,157 more homicides were committed in 2020 than in 2016, when Trump was elected. (See Table 1.)

That translates to a murder rate per 100,000 people of 6.5 in 2020, an increase of 1.1 points since 2016. The 2020 rate was the highest since 1997, though still well below the peak 10.2 rate recorded in 1980. The rate of aggravated assaults also rose under Trump — by 12.6%.

Trade— The international trade deficit Trump once promised to reduce grew larger instead, increasing three out of his four years in office.

The most recent government figures show that the total U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was almost $677 billion — the highest since 2008 and an increase of 40.5% from 2016.

Annual exports of goods and services decreased 4.6% in 2020 compared with 2016. Meanwhile, annual imports of goods and services were up 3.4% in 2020 compared with four years earlier.

Debt — Trump made no progress in erasing the debt, which the then-presidential candidate once said he could probably do in eight years.

Rather, the amount the federal government has borrowed from the public went up by 50% during Trump’s time in office — from $14.4 trillion on the day he was inaugurated to $21.6 trillion the day his successor was sworn in.

Deficits — Trump left office almost four months after the U.S. recorded its largest annual deficit of $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020.

Coal Mining Jobs — As a candidate, Trump promised to “put our [coal] miners back to work,” but that didn’t happen.

There were 8,500 fewer coal mining jobs in January than when Trump took office. That’s a decline of 16.7%.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/trumps-final-numbers/


U.S. manufacturers blame Trump-era tariffs for inflation’s rise
Last Updated: June 1, 2021 at 7:31 a.m. ET

Companies appeal to Biden administration to roll back the tariffs

WASHINGTON — Economists and policy makers are debating whether stimulus spending and easy monetary policy are fueling inflation. Many businesses say there is another culprit that should share the blame: import tariffs.

The Trump administration implemented tariffs on products including lumber, steel and semiconductors to shield American companies from a glut of cheap imported products from China and other countries.

The tariffs have long been opposed by U.S. companies that import the goods and pay the levies. They are making a new push for the Biden administration to lift them, on grounds that tariffs contribute to rising prices and product shortages that are accompanying the post-pandemic recovery.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-manufacturers-blame-trump-era-tariffs-for-inflations-rise-11622387247

[Rick Plant]

Big Country’s MAGA Bulletin
Visit businesses around Abilene, Texas and you might encounter this free local paper packed with conspiracy theories

Buffalo Gap, Texas

I'm in the Big Country visiting family, and we went to the Perini Ranch Steakhouse for dinner over the weekend. It’s a celebrated Texas steakhouse, and a personal favorite of former President George W. Bush.

When I travel, I like to pick up the local free rag at a restaurant, usually available in the alcove. Sometimes it’s a left-leaning alt-weekly, like the Cleveland Scene or the Riverfront Times. Other times, it’s adorable hyper-local paper ideas like the “Coffee News,” for which my mom, a former journalist, used to write book reviews in Cleveland. It’s a good way to get a little flavor of a place, and as a former local weekly paper-delivery boy myself, I kind of feel a connection to small papers.

So as I walked out of the steakhouse during a storm that blew through the region, I grabbed a copy of the Buffalo Gap Round-Up News. I was already familiar with this monthly paper and how nuts it was. Heck, one of the first things you see on the upper-right corner of the front page is a hammer and sickle with a line through it, like a No Smoking sign.  But now that I was here in Buffalo Gap, population 731, I wanted to read it not as an artifact from the political fringes but as a local paper.

Buffalo Gap is a small town just outside of Abilene, a cattle town where the biggest employer is the federal government. The Round-Up News is distributed all around the area. You can pick it up for free at restaurants and hotels or subscribe for $70 a year.

Usually the best part of local papers is the local coverage—reporting of news and controversies, personalities and celebrations, real estate transactions and business developments, and various civic goings on. With the Round-Up News, though, the extent of the local coverage seems to be a local monthly calendar, a PSA from the Taylor County sheriff, one article about visiting the West Texas rodeo from a lawyer who also has an ad in the paper, another article welcoming a new far-right group (the Abilene Freedom League) to Abilene, and three obituaries. That, and a recipe corner from a part-time West Texan, tech advice for the olds, and a handful of letters to the editor.

Combined, these local features would comprise maybe six pages. But the Buffalo Gap Round-Up News runs 32 pages. What’s the rest of it?

Here’s a taste from the October issue:

A front-page column from a couple from Cape Girardeau, Missouri on “Victory in Spiritual Warfare.”

A column from the chairman of the Taylor County Republican Party calling on “each state to decertify its electors.” The author is a lawyer.

An op-ed from a woman in Long Island—yes, the Long Island in New York—about “Media W**res.”

A conspiracy-theory piece entitled “Gates/CIA Plan From 2005 Exposed: ‘Vaccinate the Religious,’” written by an American who pleaded guilty to tax fraud and later fled to Poland.

“Unvaxed at Risk from Vaxed in Coming Dark Winter,” reprinted from conspiracy theorist Greg Hunter’s USA Watchdog website at the recommendation of a reader from Sydney, Australia.

A “Funny Paper” composed entirely of memes, including editorial cartoons that are syndicated and likely not used with permission, but mostly cartoons from the far-right Patriot Post website.

It is striking that restaurants and other businesses are allowing this sort of misinformation to be on prominent display on their premises. They are basically handing out 32 pages of Infowars material to their patrons. I was a little shocked that a steakhouse run by a friend of former President George W. Bush would have this at his establishment. Perhaps Mr. Perini hasn’t read it; I don’t know.

And it’s striking that so many local businesses choose to advertise in a conspiratorial rag like this. Among the advertisers are ones you might not be too surprised by: outdoor stores, gas station markets, a realtor, local attorneys, a butcher, country and Christian radio stations, an upcoming gun show, etc.

But other advertisers really stood out as odd: A Quality Inn franchisee. The Taylor County government. Numerous local healthcare providers. The local telecom provider.

It could be that some of these are “ad trades,” in which a local business might allow a paper free distribution in exchange for an ad. And maybe some of the ads, like the county government’s one for locally available jobs, are an act of civic responsibility. But unless the paper’s publisher is self-funding the Buffalo Gap Round-Up News as a hobby at probably a considerable loss, some businesses are actually paying for ads.

Buffalo Gap is in a very conservative part of one of America’s most conservative states. Lots of readers and advertisers and businesses who serve as distribution points probably agree with its content.

Abilene, fifteen minutes to the north, is also a far-flung place—hours from Houston or Dallas or Austin or San Antonio—but it’s not a tiny town: its population is a buck and a quarter, about 125,000. Ever since Abilene was founded 140 years ago, it has had a local paper, the Abilene Reporter-News. It’s a perfectly normal newspaper. It exists on the Internet in a way that smaller local papers like the Buffalo Gap Round-Up News generally do not.

Which means that stories in the Round-Up have less of a footprint and are less consistently findable in search results because the stories largely aren’t online. There aren’t fact-checking operations or Poynter pontificators dedicated to critiquing what the Round-Up runs.

On page A-2 of the October issue, a note reads:

The publisher does not guarantee the absolute correctness of all information available, nor the complete absence of errors or unintentional omissions/inclusions. Opinions expressed are those of the writer(s) and may or may not represent the opinions of the advertisers, publisher, or staff. We reserve the right to edit, make changes, and refuse any submissions.

Given the sort of stuff that actually appears in this issue, I’d be interested in seeing the submissions that were refused.

At least in theory, the Round-Up does accept corrections. Another note reads:

This newspaper will not knowingly print inaccurate information, and will run corrections if notification of error is received within a reasonable time after publication date.

I confess I’d really like to see what a corrections page for this sort of publication would look like. Sorry, it turns out that the nefarious secret plans of Bill Gates and the CIA that were described to us by a tax cheat who fled America weren’t quite as described. Alas, the only correction I see in this issue is to a byline: an author was misidentified in the August issue.

Chances are, the Buffalo Gap News Round-Up has a small circulation. For nearly everyone who encounters it, the Round-Up probably plays only a supplemental, rather than a central, part of their media diet. Compared to many web outlets—including some the Round-Up borrows from—that put far-right conspiracy theories in front of huge audiences, the Round-Up is negligible in its reach.

But here in Buffalo Gap, it’s a part of civic life, with local businesses and local government in some sense invested in the poison it peddles.

https://www.thebulwark.com/big-countrys-maga-bulletin/

[Richard Smith]

Today's schedule for Old Joe.  No events.  None.  Please pace yourself Joe.  You are nearly 80.  The less you do, the fewer the disasters.  Kamala can make a video or something while you nap.

[Rick Plant]

Today's schedule for Old Joe.  No events.  None.  Please pace yourself Joe.  You are nearly 80.  The less you do, the fewer the disasters.  Kamala can make a video or something while you nap.

 

President Biden is working hard for the American people. He doesn't need to do phony photo op events like Criminal Donald did. That's why we had 4 years of disaster. He had no clue how to do the job.     

[Richard Smith]

President Biden is working hard for the American people. He doesn't need to do phony photo op events like Criminal Donald did. That's why we had 4 years of disaster. He had no clue how to do the job.   

Working hard?  No events.  None.  Not even sucking his thumb in his fake WH replica doll house.  They won't even let him campaign in VA because he has become so unpopular.  They are sending Obama. 

[Rick Plant]

Working hard?  No events.  None.  Not even sucking his thumb in his fake WH replica doll house.  They won't even let him campaign in VA because he has become so unpopular.  They are sending Obama.

 

President Biden has a 50% approval rating. That's being popular. Obama is extremely popular as well.