Dispatches

STUDY: DEBUNKING TRUMP LIES MAKES HIS BASE BELIEVE HIM MORE. A new study published in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review (9/11) found that fact-checks of lies from Donald Trump are more likely to make his diehard supporters believe in his falsehoods, Oliver Willis noted at DailyKos (9/23).

Researchers showed people Twitter (now X) posts from Trump that feature lies about election fraud, along with a note that said his claims were “disputed.”

“Trump voters with high political knowledge judged election misinformation as more truthful when Trump’s claims included Twitter’s disputed tags compared to a control condition,” the report revealed.

The study, conducted by University of Minnesota Duluth professor John Blanchar and Swarthmore College professor Catherine Norris, surveyed 1,078 Americans in late 2020.

Blanchar told The Guardian, “Instead of having no impact, the tags seemed counterproductive, reinforcing misinformation among this group.”

Lies and misinformation are central to Trump’s 2024 campaign. He has painted what the Washington Post described as an “imaginary and frightening world,” touching on several conservative obsessions.

Some of Trump’s go-to falsehoods:

• Democrats support “executing” babies after birth.

• Crime is so high that people “can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped.”

• Haitian migrants are “eating the dogs … eating the cats.”

In a story on Trump’s fake allegations, a 59-year-old Trump supporter told the Post, “I don’t think he does stretch the truth,” and said the stories about eating pets was “an absolute truth.”

Many of Trump’s fantastical claims can be traced back to right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Right-wing media has promoted election lies, falsehoods about LGBTQ+ people, and health care misinformation, among many other topics, while also running interference for Trump and the Republican Party on issues like immigration, guns and abortion.

Much of the audience for this distorted coverage also constitutes the core of Trump’s political support.

The study showed different results for people who didn’t support Trump in 2020.

“Although [Joe] Biden voters were largely unaffected by these soft moderation tags, third-party and non-voters were slightly less likely to judge election misinformation as true,” the report’s authors wrote.

The disparity in perceptions echo findings from a September poll from Civiqs for DailyKos. A majority of registered voters (54%) said they thought Trump was “weird,” as did 51% of those assessing his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Most voters did not think Vice President Kamala Harris or her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, were “weird.”

While majorities of Democrats and independents found the Republican ticket to be “weird,” Republican respondents were the outliers, with 87% percent saying Trump was not weird and 83% saying the same of Vance.

Despite Trump’s behavior during the campaign and since he became a public figure, his voters continue to stand by their man.

CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS ANNOUNE SHORT-TERM SPENDING DEAL AFTER SPEAKER DROPS KEY MAGA DEMAND. Congressional leaders Sept. 22 said they reached an agreement on legislation to fund the federal government for three more months, averting a shutdown and stoking right-wing ire and allegations that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson “caved” to Democrats by dropping a key demand by his far-right colleagues, Brett Wilkins noted at CommonDreams (9/23).

According to The New York Times, the deal, which extends federal appropriations through Dec. 20, includes an additional $231 million to help the beleaguered Secret Service protect candidates during the upcoming presidential election and into next year. According to the Treasury Department, the United States has spent about $6.3 trillion in fiscal 2024, which ends Sept. 30.

The timeline of the deal allows Congress to sidestep a government shutdown during the campaign season, but it all but ensures that spending disputes will dominate the lame-duck period between the election and the inauguration of a new Congress in January.

“While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement applauding the continuing resolution. “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the MAGA way and wasted precious time.”

Far-right Republican lawmakers had pushed Johnson to demand a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration as part of any deal. However, Johnson dropped his demand in order to secure an agreement, drawing attacks from MAGA Republicans—some of whom called on the speaker to resign or face an ouster similar to that of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) nearly a year ago.

Meanwhile, some more moderate Republicans praised Johnson. David Frum, a commentator and former speechwriter for then-President George W. Bush, said on social media that Johnson “bested” former President Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee.

Democrats also raked Johnson. MeidasTouch Network editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski said, “Just as I predicted, weak, feckless, and incompetent Mike Johnson has just surrendered again to the Democrats after Trump forced him into a public humiliation.”

“Republicans can’t govern,” he added.

UNDER REPUBLICAN STATE LAWS, US BOOK BANS NEARLY TRIPLED LAST SCHOOL YEAR. As Banned Books Week kicked off Sept. 23, a leading free expression group in the U.S. announced that the number of books that were pulled from shelves or “challenged” by right-wing groups and Republican lawmakers skyrocketed to at least 10,000 over the last year with state legislatures passing new censorship laws, Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams (9/23).

PEN America found that the number of banned books tripled from the 2022-23 school year, when it had been 3,362.

New laws passed in Iowa and Florida were major drivers of censorship in libraries and public schools in the last school year, with 8,000 instances of book bans in the two states.

Under Iowa’s S.F. 496, which took effect in July 2023, all materials containing descriptions or depictions of a “sex act” were determined to not be “age-appropriate” for K-12 students. The state banned 14 books from 2021-23, but the strict censorship law—which also bans classroom discussions of LGBTQ+ issues and gender identity—”led to thousands of book bans during the 2023-2024 school year,” said PEN.

Florida’s H.B. 1069 also focuses heavily on books that contain “sexual conduct,” and its statutory review process requires that books be pulled from shelves while the titles are being evaluated after being challenged.

While “coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors” that claim to fight for “parents’ rights” made for a “chilled atmosphere of overly cautious decision-making regarding the accessibility of books in public school libraries,” said PEN, state legislation especially accelerated book bans.

Laws like those passed in Florida and Iowa made it “easier to remove books from schools without due process, or in some cases, without any formal process whatsoever,” wrote Kasey Meehan and Sabrina Baêta of the group’s Freedom to Read program. “Over a dozen new laws and state policies used to ban books in schools have been implemented, as have a number of district policies at the local level.”

The organization identified Utah as having “the most extreme state book-banning bill currently in place,” with H.B. 29 establishing what PEN called a “No Read List.”

If any three school districts in Utah find that a title includes “objectively sensitive material,” the book must be banned in all schools across the state.

The law went into effect in July and “is expected to result in significant book bans during the 2024-2025 school year.”

PEN’s analysis came out as the American Library Association (ALA) unveiled its own preliminary findings about banned books for the first eight months of 2024. While PEN considers a title to be “banned” if it is pulled from shelves at any point, even if access is later restored after review, ALA counts books as banned only if they are permanently censored.

Using that criteria, ALA found that from January 1-August 31, 2024, 414 challenges were made to 1,128 unique titles—compared to 695 challenges over the same period last year, affecting 1,915 titles.

Both ALA and PEN said their tallies were likely undercounts of banned books.

PEN found that 13 books were banned in the last school year for the first time, including “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith, “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” by W.E.B. DuBois, “Roots: The Saga of An American Family” by Alex Haley, and “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez.

The two analyses came out days after the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center published a poll showing, as program director Colin Woodard said, that “Americans, regardless of party, really hate public library book banning.”

Sixty-six percent of respondents to the group’s poll said they strongly opposed the censorship of books, including 90% of Democrats and 64% of independents.

Fifty-three percent of Republicans said they either strongly opposed or somewhat opposed book bans.

Despite the unpopularity of the bans, PEN warned that Republican-controlled state legislatures are likely to forge ahead in the coming months with more laws blocking people’s access to books, particularly those that have themes related to LGBTQ+ identities, race and racism, and women’s sexual experiences.

In South Carolina, the newly passed Regulations 43-170 prohibit books with “sex-related content” and empower the state Board of Education to ban books across the state, while in Tennessee, the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 just took effect in July. The law “requires schools to remove books that contain nudity, ‘excess violence,’ or sex-related content,” and allows a state commission to evaluate possible book bans.

EGG ON HIS FACE: VANCE BUNGLES ATTEMPT TO BASH HARRIS OVER GROCERY PRICES. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance accused Vice President Kamala Harris of causing egg prices to spike to $4 per dozen—despite making his accusation in front of a sign advertising eggs for as low as $2.99 per dozen, Oliver Willis noted at DailyKos (9/23).

“Eggs, when Kamala Harris took office, were short of $1.50 a dozen. Now a dozen eggs will cost you around $4 thanks to Kamala Harris’ inflationary policies,” Vance claimed during a media availability at a Pennsylvania supermarket on Sept. 21.

Just over Vance’s right shoulder it can clearly be seen that eggs were available at the supermarket for $2.99.

The Trump campaign posted the video of Vance’s specious claim on its official “War Room” X account, amplifying the allegation to the account’s 2.1 million followers.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, egg prices are down from the spike in prices that occurred in January 2023, when the average cost for a dozen eggs was $4.82. The current average, as of August, is $3.20.

The rise in egg prices is not connected to policies of the Biden-Harris administration, either.

In 2022, there was an outbreak of avian influenza. The outbreak, which was the largest in U.S. history, resulted in the deaths of at least 52.7 million animals. That led to a shortage of chickens to produce eggs, and when the supply was reduced, the price went up.

The virus had a resurgence in November 2023, which has caused current price increases. The animal death toll is now over 100 million.

Overall inflation is down. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Sept. 11, the Consumer Price Index—which measures price changes for commonly purchased goods—increased 2.5% in August (year over year), the lowest annual increase since February 2021.

The positive economic news comes in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022. The legislation faced unified Republican opposition in Congress and advanced with only Democratic votes. Harris cast the deciding vote in the Senate that allowed the legislation to eventually become law.

The law locked in price reductions for many medicines covered by Medicare and allowed the agency to negotiate on drug prices for the first time ever, with the intent to cut costs for consumers in response to inflation.

The Inflation Reduction Act also sought to direct federal investment in job creation by providing tax credits for domestic green jobs. According to an analysis by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the law is projected to create 9 million jobs over the next decade.

Trump and Republicans have called for the law to either be repealed or severely curtailed, which could cause a spike in drug prices and cut back on job creation—which is vital to economic growth.

NEW FBI STATS REFUTE TRUMP LIES ABOUT VIOLENT CRIME WAVE. If you follow GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s social media or watch Fox News, you might believe that stepping out of your house means you’re plummeting into a dangerous, post-apocalyptic world, Morgan Stephens noted at DailyKos (9/23).

You’re probably paranoid that strolling down any major city street could result in being mugged, beaten, or murdered by the usual scapegoats—immigrants. Because according to the right-wing’s favorite talking points, immigration and homicide are wreaking havoc on major American cities.

But here are the facts: Violent crime fell 3% in 2023, while murder and manslaughter dipped by 11.6%, according to new data from the FBI. And as for those big cities that, according to Trump and his surrogates, are in anarchic free fall? Crime rates there are down for the second consecutive year.

Urban areas have long been a target for Republican ire and right-wing media criticism. But the FBI statistics show that cities with more than 1 million residents saw the most significant dips in violent crime, with a 7% decrease from 2022 to 2023.

While the homicide rate surged by 30% during the COVID-19 pandemic, that number has since fallen and violent crime rates overall are now back down to pre-pandemic levels from 2019—when Trump was in office.

The former president has made railing against “out of control” crime in deeply blue cities a 2024 campaign talking point, consistently blaming Democrats and their “soft on crime” policies as well as police reform efforts. That did not stop 100 law enforcement leaders representing the nonpartisan group Police Leaders for Community Safety from endorsing Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, for president on Monday.

These new statistics won’t stop Trump’s torrent of lies. In fact, as Daily Kos’ Oliver Willis reports, the more lies Trump tells, the further his supporters become entrenched in them. A new study from Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review revealed that if one of Trump’s claims is labeled as ‘disputed,” his voters are more inclined to believe it.

“With crime at record levels, with terrorists and criminals pouring in and with inflation eating your hearts out, vote for Donald Trump,” he said to thousands at a New York rally Wednesday. “What the hell do you have to lose?”

Trump reiterated this lie at the Sept. 10 debate against Harris.

“We have a new crime. It’s migrant crime and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible,” he said. When ABC host David Muir fact-checked Trump’s statement and clarified that violent crime is actually down, Trump pivoted to another false talking point, claiming the FBI’s data was faulty because it didn’t include the worst cities.

The latest FBI data includes Democratic-majority cities like Seattle, Portland, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, to name a few.

US HEALTHCARE FAILURES SHOW ‘WE NEED MEDICARE FOR ALL,’ JAYAPAL SAYS. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) responded to a new analysis exposing the failures of the for-profit U.S. healthcare system by renewing her call for Medicare for All, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (9/20).

Jayapal and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are the lead sponsors of the Medicare for All Act. When they reintroduced the bill last year, they highlighted research showing that it could save 68,000 lives and $650 billion per year.

The Commonwealth Fund report—titled “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System” and released Sept. 19—adds to the mountain of evidence that, as Jayapal said in a series of social media posts, “our healthcare is broken.”

Noting that “41% of Americans hold medical debt” and “millions are uninsured,” the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair declared that “we need universal, single-payer healthcare: Medicare for All.”

As Common Dreams reported, the latest Commonwealth Fund analysis focuses on 70 health system performance measures in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

“All the countries have strengths and weaknesses, ranking high on some dimensions and lower on others,” the report states. “Nevertheless, in the aggregate, the nine nations we examined are more alike than different with respect to their higher and lower performance in various domains. But there is one glaring exception—the U.S.”

Jayapal made her case for Medicare for All with some details from the report, pointing out that “despite spending more, the U.S. ranked last in equity, access to care, and health outcomes—including acute illnesses, chronic diseases, and death. Of the countries studied, Americans live the shortest lives and face the most avoidable deaths.”

“This is wholly unacceptable,” she argued. “America’s healthcare system is in dire need of an overhaul. It is largely run by private insurance companies who only care about increasing their profits and limiting choices for consumers.”

“They refuse to pay for certain doctors, even as the average American spends tens of thousands of dollars every year on copays, deductibles, and private insurance premiums,” she said. “Sometimes, they even have their own doctors override decisions about what you need for your own healthcare.”

FED ‘WAITED TOO LONG,’ BUT FINALLY CUT INTEREST RATES. Economists and working-class people across the United States on Sept. 18 welcomed the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point as an incredibly overdue and necessary move, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (9/18).

In line with signals from Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s speech in Augusst, the Federal Open Market Committee lowered the federal funds rate by half a percentage point to 4.74-5%, the first cut “since March 2020 when COVID-19 was hammering the economy,” as The Associated Press noted. Additional cuts are expected over the next two years.

“Finally,” wrote Kenny Stancil, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project, in a blog post. “The Fed should have provided interest rate relief months ago. While this overdue move is welcome, we must reiterate that Powell’s deferral of interest rate cuts has hurt the clean energy transition and inflicted other economic harms.”

Lawmakers and experts, including Groundwork Collaborative chief economist Rakeen Mabud, have long called for rate cuts and highlighted the harms of refusing to pursue them.

“Today’s rate cut is a step in the right direction, but only a first step,” said Mabud in a statement Sept. 18. “The Fed must continue to cut rates aggressively in the coming months to prevent a slowing labor market and provide much-needed relief to people who are bearing the brunt of high interest rates.”

Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker also welcomed that the Fed is changing course, saying: “This is a belated recognition that the battle against inflation has been won. Contrary to the predictions of almost all economists, including those at the Fed, this victory was won without a major uptick in unemployment.”

“Unfortunately, the Fed waited too long to make this turn,” Baker continued. “As a result, the unemployment rate has drifted higher. While there is little basis for concerns about a recession, if the unemployment rate is 0.5 percentage points higher than it needs to be, that translates into 800,000 people out of work who want jobs.”

“It is good that the Fed has now recognized the weakening of the labor market and responded with an aggressive cut,” he added. “Given there is almost no risk of rekindling inflation, the greater boost to the labor market is largely costless. Also, it will help to spur the housing market where millions of people have put off selling homes because of high mortgage rates.”

Liz Zelnick of Accountable.US similarly stressed the benefits, saying that “while it should have come sooner, the Fed’s interest rate cut will ease some burden for many Americans that found it simply too expensive to buy new homes or cars.”

“Fortunately, the Fed’s aggressive interest rate strategy defied odds and did not spur a recession as the economy continues to grow hundreds of thousands of jobs every month while wages are rising,” she said. “Persistently high interest rates were never going to get at the root of the corporate price gouging epidemic that has needlessly kept prices high on many necessities—a problem that is on Congress to fix.”

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2024

Populist.com