RFK and Trump are spewing bullshit about autism and misinforming the public.
RFK and Trump are spewing bullshit about vaccines and misinforming the public.
RFK and Trump are spewing bullshit about medicine and disease, misinforming the public.
RFK chose two less rigorous studies to justify his advice on Tylenol while ignoring larger, more rigorous studies that find no association between Tylenol and ADHD or autism.
Fever can harm the unborn child and even cause miscarriage. Tylenol can prevent that by lowering the fever. Because Trump told women to not take Tylenol, some women won’t take it when they should, with bad consequences.
“Our findings indicate that individuals from
both political affiliations are prone to believing and disseminating politically aligned fake news via social media. Despite
employing a stronger reflection manipulation in contrast to past research, we failed to replicate the mitigating effect of
the reflection on the acceptance of fake news. We observed that reflection reduced Democrats’ willingness to spread fake
news, yet it did not affect Republicans.”
Seems like Trump announced a ceasefire before many Israeli and Iranian government officials knew about the talks or agreement. There was a period between the announcement of a ceasefire and the time it went into effect when Israel and Iran struck each other while they still could. The ceasefire appears to have been broken, but may be holding now.
Claims that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated sound like silly propagandistic lies by the Trump administration. The nuclear program was greatly damaged, but not obliterated, and Iran can rebuild. Depending on how fast Iran can rebuild, this may have ultimately been a futile attack that only makes Iran more determined to get a nuclear weapon.
“Many accounts, knowingly or unknowingly, shared images that warped the reality of what was happening on the ground. An X account with 388,000 followers called US Homeland Security News, which is not affiliated with DHS but paid for one of X’s “verified” blue check marks, posted a photo of bricks that it said had been ordered to be “used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It’s Civil War!!” The photo actually originated on the website of a Malaysian construction-supply company. The post has nevertheless been viewed more than 800,000 times.”
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“Some online creators treated the L.A. clashes as a prized opportunity for viral content. On Reddit, accounts with names like LiveNews_24H posted “crazy footage” compilations of the unrest and said it looked like a “war zone.” On YouTube, Damon Heller, who comments on police helicopter footage and scanner calls under the name Smoke N’ Scan, streamed the clashes on Sunday for nearly 12 hours.”
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“Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said videos can play a uniquely forceful role in shaping people’s reactions to current events because they “encapsulate the emotion of the moment.”
“There’s a heavy dose of misinformation,” he added. “And, you know, people just end up getting angrier and angrier.””
Trump inherited money and business from his dad, and made a lot of money through his celebrity, but as far as his actual businesses, he mostly spent a lot of money and then used courts to not pay debts he owed. He was a bad and dishonest businessman, and his image as a successful businessman is mostly false.
Republican bill kicks millions of people off Medicaid. Speaker of House falsely claims that he wants to remove fraudsters from Medicaid when really he just wants the program to help less people. Rather than making the argument for having a less generous Medicaid program, he misleads.
The Democrats, universities, and media have their faults and have been too woke, but the lies, bullshit, propaganda, and poor error-correction instincts of Trump, RFK Jr, Tucker Carlson, and others is not a better alternative.
“Vance repeatedly downplayed the radicalism of Trump’s agenda by saying things that were not strictly untrue but which conveyed a (beneficially) false impression of the ticket’s positions.
He used this gambit most shamelessly when defending Trump’s commitment to democracy. Confronted with his running mate’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — in part, by fomenting an insurrectionary riot at the US Capitol — Vance declared that Trump told the protesters on January 6 to protest “peacefully,” and that he “peacefully gave over power on January 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
On January 6, 2021, Trump did call on his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol. But also told them to “fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And while the former president did eventually leave office of his own volition, he first attempted to coerce election officials in multiple states to help him retain power by nullifying results.
Similarly, in defending Trump’s proposal to put a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports, Vance suggested that the policy was bipartisan common sense, observing that Joe Biden himself had preserved some of “the Trump tariffs that protected American manufacturing jobs.” But this was virtually a non sequitur: Imposing tariffs on a select number of goods that one deems to be of strategic importance and imposing a 10 percent duty on all imports, including agricultural products that the United States cannot possibly produce domestically — are dramatically different propositions. Vance’s line is a bit like suggesting that it isn’t controversial for the government to nationalize all industries because both parties support the existence of public schools and veterans hospitals.
Finally, and most subtly, Vance muddied the waters on abortion by expressing empathy for his adversaries on the issue. The GOP vice presidential candidate said that a dear friend of his told him that she felt that she needed to have an abortion because carrying the pregnancy to term would have locked her into an abusive relationship. Vance said that he took from that conversation that Republicans needed to earn “the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us. That’s one of the things Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.”
To an inattentive voter, this could make it sound as though Vance was calling for the party to regain the public’s trust by rethinking its opposition to abortion rights when, in actuality, Vance was merely saying that Republicans should make life easier for the women whom they force to give birth — such as through public spending on child care, a policy Vance endorsed during the debate but which has scant support among other Republicans.”
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“Vance also utilized the more straightforward and time-tested technique of making stuff up.”
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“Finally, Vance attempted to steer the conversation away from policy proposals and toward various good things that happened while Trump was president and bad things that happened with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in power. Voters may be lukewarm on Trump’s economic proposals, such as cutting corporate taxes, but many do remember his tenure nostalgically, due to the fact that his first three years in office saw relatively low unemployment and low inflation.
Vance sought to spotlight this fact by saying that “Donald Trump delivered for the American people: rising wages, rising take-home pay, an economy that worked for normal Americans.” And he asked rhetorically, “When was the last time an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out” on their watch, before answering, “The four years Donald Trump was president.”
In reality, unemployment was already trending lower and wages were trending higher for years before Trump took office, and they did not dramatically accelerate upon his election. Meanwhile, Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian official, thereby nearly triggering another Middle Eastern conflict.
It is unclear why Kamala Harris bears responsibility for, say, the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine but Donald Trump does not bear any responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither had direct agency over either of those events, and Harris was not even president when the former occurred.”
“The embarrassment angle is the easiest to dismiss: Remember all those headlines, generated by damning admissions and documents from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch, that showed how Fox’s on-air talent and their managers knew they were peddling untruths to their audience about the supposed 2020 election fraud? You probably read those because you consume Actual News. (And, let’s be clear: If you’d thought about this at all, you weren’t surprised to see the deep cynicism that powers Fox spelled out in writing.)
But on Fox, the lawsuit was barely covered at all, and Fox’s media correspondent even said he was prevented from reporting on it. That’s not surprising, given the channel’s consistent commitment to presenting alternative facts, a practice which long predated the Trump era.
You may recall that in an effort to stave off lawsuits like the one Dominion filed, Fox grudgingly offered some non-apology clarifications in late 2020, then went right back to making things up. A few months later, they were providing cover for the January 6 rioters.”
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“Yes, the $787.5 million settlement is much less than the $1.6 billion the company initially asked for in damages. But it is a giant windfall for the small company and its private equity owners. It would be crazy not to take a deal like that, and let media critics worry about what happens to Fox.
And yes, $787.5 million is a lot of money, even for a big company like Fox: It represents about 20 percent of Fox’s $4 billion in cash, which means it could impact Fox’s ability to buy things or pay out dividends to its shareholders. On the other hand, Fox posted profits of $321 million in the last three months of 2022, which means it can build back up its cash pile pretty quickly.
That seems to be Wall Street’s take: 21st Century Fox stock opened down a few points the day after the settlement was announced, but as of this writing it has almost completely rebounded; the company remains worth about $17.5 billion.
In other words: Even after Fox agreed to pay nearly $788 million in a settlement (on top of the legal fees it has already spent), investors have decided the payout will have no impact on Fox’s operations.”
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“The most plausible threat to Fox News is the same threat facing every TV network in 2023: that its viewership erodes as TV viewers migrate to the internet. But Fox’s viewers, like other cable TV news operations, skew old, and that means they’re the ones least likely to give up their cable boxes. They’re also incredibly loyal, which is why Fox can charge cable TV operators — who pass the fees on to you, if you’re paying for cable TV — more money than anyone else in TV, with the exception of sports.
So until that audience, along with the revenue and clout it generates for its owner, dwindles, don’t expect Fox to budge at all.”