The Right-Wing Disinformation Machine

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/donald-trump-is-running-a-disinformation-campaign/

As Donald Trump attempts to return to the White House, he is not operating a political campaign as much as mounting a disinformation campaign.

The rough and tumble of American politics often includes false statements and lies—what once was called spin. Unfortunately, there has always been a degree of tolerance for campaign dissembling. Trump is no stranger to this mundane practice. He freely tosses falsehoods at the electorate. The economy when he was president was the best ever. He did a great job on Covid. The current rate of inflation is the worst in US history. The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe. Every Democrat and legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. He was the smartest and most accomplished president the country has ever seen. And so on. It’s absurd braggadocio and a firehose of supposed but untrue facts—spewed to a degree far beyond what previous presidential candidates attempted to get away with.
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“Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”
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Trump was taught well - as a reminder this article from 3 years ago - quoted in part below

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book




The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian





Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
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Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’ intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”. 

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.
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I think at this point, it is beyond apparent  that that Trump, Musk, and MAGA are all wrapped up in and are involved in a Russian misinformation campaign.   Trump has been groomed for it since the 1980s and has been a useful fool for them since then.  Musk is getting stranger by the minute and is bat crazy.   Now meteorologists,  trying to deliver the message about storms, are the targets of death threats and sheer stupidity by MAGA adherents.  

Anyone on HB who is still voting for Trump, with all of the information many of us have given, need to have their head examined.  Doesn't mean you have to vote for Harris but for goodness sake - abstain from voting for the top of the ticket then.  Of course, if you still vote for Trump aka The Felon, perhaps there is no hope for you and you have already given your soul and mind away  :dunno

The article below highlights the issue.  My editorial comments in red. 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/11/meteorologists-death-threats-hurricane-conspiracies-misinformation

Meteorologists tracking the advance of Hurricane Milton have been targeted by a deluge of conspiracy theories that they were controlling the weather, abuse and even death threats, amid what they say is an unprecedented surge in misinformation as two major hurricanes have hit the US.

A series of falsehoods and threats have swirled in the two weeks since Hurricane Helene tore through six states causing several hundred deaths, followed by Milton crashing into Florida on Wednesday.

 
The extent of the misinformation, which has been stoked by Donald Trump and his followers, has been such that it has stymied the ability to help hurricane-hit communities, according to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, said that she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” Nickolaou said.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather. I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

One post aimed at Nickolaou said: “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.” She responded: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

“People have called me a plethora of curse words, people telling me to shut up and sit down, people who think it’s OK to take out Doppler radar because they think it is controlling the weather,”(TG: that is a whole new level of stupid :facepalm: ) Nickolaou said. “It is eating up a lot of work and free time to deal with all of this. It’s very tiring.”



A wide range of misinformation has been spread as Helene and then Milton gathered pace in the Gulf of Mexico, such as claims spread by Trump that Fema had run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants. Violent threats have also become common, with posts across TikTok, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter), alleging that Fema workers should be beaten or “arrested or shot or hung on sight”(TG: The jail isn't good enough for those who post such things).



More outlandishly, several of Trump’s closest allies have baselessly asserted that the federal government is somehow controlling hurricanes. “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” claimed a video shared by Michael Flynn, a former national security advisor to Trump.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman, wrote on X last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” (TG: She and Flynn will most likely have important roles in a new Trump administration.  Let that sink in)

This steep rise in falsehoods has drawn a sharp response from Joe Biden, who has blamed Trump for an “onslaught of lies” and told the former president to “get a life.”

 
Tell me why people are confidently wrong in this era of disinformation.  Here is what researchers say. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/science-think-right-rcna174691

There may be a psychological reason why some people aren’t just wrong in an argument — they’re confidently wrong. 

According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Plos One, it comes down to believing you have all the information you need to form an opinion, even when you don’t. 

 
“Our brains are overconfident that they can arrive at a reasonable conclusion with very little information,” said Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at Ohio State University, who co-wrote the study.

Fletcher, along with two psychology researchers, set out to measure how people make judgments about situations or people based on their confidence in the information they have — even if it’s not the whole story. 

“People leap to judgments very quickly,” he said.
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The researchers recruited nearly 1,300 people with an average age of about 40. Everyone read a fictitious story about a school that was running out of water because its local aquifer was drying up. 

About 500 people read a version of the story that was in favor of the school merging with another school, presenting three arguments supporting the move and one neutral point. 

Another 500 people read a story with three arguments in favor of staying separate, plus the same neutral point.

The final 300 people, the control group, read a balanced story that included all seven arguments — three pro-merge, three pro-separate and the one neutral. 

After reading, the researchers asked participants about their opinions on what the school should do and how confident they were that they had all the information they needed to make that judgment. 

The surveys revealed a majority of people were much more likely to agree with the argument — either in favor of merging or staying separate — they had read, and that they were often confident they had enough information to have that opinion. People in the groups who had read only one point of view were also more likely to say they were more confident in their opinion than those in the control group who had read both arguments. 

Half of the participants in each group were then asked to read the opposing side’s information, which contradicted the article they had already read. 

Although people were confident about their opinions when they had only read arguments in favor of one solution, when presented with all of the facts, they were often willing to change their mind. They also reported that they were then less confident in their ability to form an opinion on the topic.  “We thought that people would really stick to their original judgments even when they received information that contradicted those judgments, but it turns out if they learned something that seemed plausible to them, they were willing to totally change their minds,” Fletcher said, adding that the research highlights the idea that people fail to contemplate whether they have all of the information about a situation.
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However, the researchers noted the findings may not apply to situations in which people have pre-established ideas about a situation, as is often the case with politics. 

“People are more open-minded and willing to change their opinions than we assume,” Fletcher said. However, “this same flexibility doesn’t apply to long-held differences, such as political beliefs.”

Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, likened the findings to the “invisible gorilla” study, which illustrated the psychological phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” when a person does not realize something obvious because they are focused on something else. 

“This study captures that with information,” Rogers said. “There seems to be a cognitive tendency to not realize the information we have is inadequate.”

The study also parallels a psychological phenomenon, called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” in which people underestimate what they know about a certain topic, said Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and professor emeritus in social theory and social action at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

The idea is that if you ask the average person if they know how a toilet works, they will likely reply that they do. But upon being asked to explain how a toilet works, they quickly realize they don’t know how a toilet works, just how to get it to work by pressing a lever. 
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“It’s not just that people are wrong. It’s that they are so confident in their wrongness that is the problem,” Schwartz said. 

The antidote, he added, is “being curious and being humble.” 

The fact that the people in the study who were later presented with new information were open to changing their minds, as long as the new information seemed plausible, was encouraging and surprising, the researchers and Schwartz agreed. 

“This is reason to have a tiny bit of optimism that, even if people think they know something, they are still open to having their minds changed by new evidence,” Schwartz said. 
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This is not really new info but it is cool to see a study on it.

This is why I said it would be amazing to have articles published WITHOUT the authors name attached to it, people would have a hard time deciding if they agreed or disagreed with the article.  It would be a very interesting study.  

Hell, even a text message from a number you don't know changes the way you think about what you read on the text.  

 
TGHusker said:
Tell me why people are confidently wrong in this era of disinformation.  Here is what researchers say. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/science-think-right-rcna174691
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The issue America has is so many people are tied to a party. That party says something and it’s instantly believed and the other party is not just wrong, they are evil for even thinking your own party is wrong or lying to you. 
 

People just can’t fathom voting for or even believing something the candidate for the other party is saying. 
 

sometimes, I think it has to do with socializing with friends. I voted for Biden. I have been teased about that by friends ever since. Even though…. Those same friends claim Trump is bad now….but not when they voted for him. 

 
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