Tuesday, December 13, 2016

The "post-truth world" of Donald Trump and his followers already is being felt on our blog, thanks to reporting on Jeff Sessions and Bill Pryor


Alex Jones (right) and Donald Trump surrogate Roger Stone
(From mediamatters.org)
The evolving Donald Trump administration is leading us into a "post-truth world," according to a recent article at The Washington Post. We've seen signs of that here at Legal Schnauzer -- probably because of our reporting on Trump's Alabama allies, Jeff Sessions and Bill Pryor -- and Trump has not even taken office.

What exactly is a "post-truth world"? Reporter Margaret Sullivan, in an article titled "The post-truth world of the Trump administration is scarier than you think," pointed at Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes to explain it:

On live radio . . . Scottie Nell Hughes sounded breezy as she drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality:

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show.”

Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept defending that assertion, although not with much clarity of expression. Rehm had pressed her about Trump’s recent evidence-free assertion on Twitter that he, not Hillary Clinton, would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted illegally.

Sullivan seemed dumbfounded to hear those words come from the mouth of a fairly prominent political figure:

(The apparent gen­esis of Trump’s claim was Infowars.com, a site that traffics in conspiracy theories and is run by Alex Jones, who says the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six staff members at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., was a government-sponsored hoax.)

What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether (Trump's) fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.

“Mr. Trump’s tweets, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”

(Note: Longtime Trump surrogate and adviser Roger Stone is a regular guest on the Alex Jones program. Stone perhaps is best known as a dirty trickster from the Richard Nixon years and also is credited with launching the "Brooks Brothers riot" from the Bush v. Gore election of 2000.)

Bill Pryor, a Mobile native currently on the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, is considered a likely Trump nominee for a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a post dated November 17, 2016, we reviewed our reporting about the homophobic Pryor's ties to 1990s gay pornography via the Web site badpuppy.com and noted that a second nude photo of Pryor has surfaced recently. The next day, I reported on Trump's nomination of U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to be attorney general and noted the hefty baggage that Sessions carries -- some of it professional, which cost him a federal judgeship in the 1980s, and some of a more personal nature.

When those posts were published, along with notice that more alarming revelations on Pryor and Sessions were coming soon, it unleashed a deluge of nutty comments that, indeed, seemed to come directly from a post-truth world. Most of them were based on raw emotion, foul language (or both), and I deleted most of them or sent them to spam.

Given the timing of the comments, after the Pryor and Sessions posts, it seems pretty clear they come from Trumpistas. We even have some hard evidence that they came from folks associated with Trump.

I've pulled a few of the comments out of the dust bins to give you an idea of what a "post-truth world" might look like -- and it's not a pretty sight. We will take a look at the "mindset" of certain Trump supporters in an upcoming post.


(To be continued)

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

I support Pryor 100%. One of the best judges on the bench. I've appeared before him several times. Courteous, knowledgeable, and very fair.

Rds said...

Thank you, Roger!

Anonymous said...

Pryor I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for black people or the black culture....

I'm not saying he doesn't like black people, I'm saying he has a problem.

This guy is, I believe, a racist.

Anonymous said...

I would unmistakably like to believe that Pryor acts with our interests in mind. I really would. But Pryor sure makes it difficult to believe such things.

Anonymous said...

Pryor's most progressive idea is to feed us ever-larger doses of his lies.

If that sounds progressive to you, you must be facing the wrong way.

Pryor is the type of person that turns up his nose at people like you and me.

I guess that's because we haven't the faintest notion about the things that really matter such as why it would be good for him to attack everyone else's beliefs.

Davy Hay said...

In the USA, according to the 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics released by the FBI National Press Office, 19.3 percent of hate crimes across the United States "were motivated by a sexual orientation bias.

Moreover, in a Southern Poverty Law Center 2010 Intelligence Report extrapolating data from fourteen years (1995–2008), which had complete data available at the time, of the FBI's national hate crime statistics found that LGBT people were "far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime."

Pryor should hang, not be hung (as he is).

Anonymous said...

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

Anonymous said...

Time for Kanye. But still, a month after the election, and no time for a single leader from a national veterans service organization?...Four time draft dodger. I hope it only gets worse, America deserve him.

Anonymous said...

Michigan lawmakers are considering legislation to discourage futile recount efforts by candidates who lose their election bids by an incontestable amount, forcing the candidate to foot the bill for the recount. - See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/12/michigan-lawmakers-strike-back-jill-stein-may-be-forced-to-pay-for-her-frivolous-recount#sthash.iKUcldGd.dpuf

Anonymous said...

Julian Assange always said Russian hackers were not his source for the emails that took down Hillary. He has never wavered, never changed his statement. His close associate, former British Ambassador (Uzbekistan) Craig Murray, has said the same. It was an inside job. Not Russian hackers.

Anonymous said...

Catapulting their post truth bullshit!

Sessions Omits Failed Bid For Federal Judgeship From Senate Questionnaire

"President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Justice Department omitted a previous failed bid for a federal judgeship from a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire he submitted last week. He had been rejected for the judgeship in the 1980s by that same committee after racially charged comments came to light during confirmation hearings.

NPR flagged Monday that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) had failed to include his 1986 bid for a federal judgeship under a question asking for "any unsuccessful candidacies you have had for elective office or unsuccessful nominations for appointed offices."

Anonymous said...

Time for some Truth, Cuck Roger:

Clinton has a lead of 4 million in popular votes in California. In all the other states combined, Trump has a lead of 1.7 million. This is exactly why an Electoral College exists. America is a Republic, not a Democracy. California will not strongarm the nation!

Anonymous said...

HILLARY

What's worse than being a legitimate racist? Being legitimately racist but not being acknowledged as one.

What's worse than being a legitimate racist and not being acknowledged as one? Being lauded as someone fighting for equal rights when you denounce half of the country as irredeemable in the same breath.

What's worse than legitimately being an elitist bigot? Projecting that mentality onto the majority of Americans of all walks of life to try to absolve yourself from your own history in private and public life that speaks for itself and tells an entirely different story.

She has been a lifelong paragon of divisiveness because it helps her climb the political ranks at the expense of the ordinary American. When there are more people at each other's throats, there are more people to preach to about hope, change, and the future.

Her biggest opponent in her campaign was herself, not Trump. She projected her flaws onto him, so I say to all liberals sympathetic to her: think of how much you hate Trump because of what and who the media told you he was. Now realize that racist, homophobic, misogynistic, bigot who has done backdoor deals with Russia and is so rich that they can't relate to and don't care about the everyday American is actually Hillary.

legalschnauzer said...

@9:29 -- What's worse than having elections stolen by corrupt U.S. interests in 2000 and 2004? Having an election stolen by Russian interests in 2016.

legalschnauzer said...

@9:28 -- And Russian interference in a U.S. election, as confirmed by the CIA, doesn't bother you? As long as your favored candidate isn't being being cheated, that's OK -- democratic principles, be damned? And I assume you call yourself a patriot? Hah!

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you should read and take to heart this commentary at HuffPo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-lost-get-over-it-and-stop-blaming_us_584fba63e4b0151082221e8a

Anonymous said...

@9:28 - How provincial of you. The last time I checked a map of the USA California was still in the union and they were considered just as American as you and I are. It could be said that middle-America is the one doing the strong-arming. The founding fathers did not have a model of our type of government to go on, they sort of winged it and hope for the best of their great experiment.

I personally think that the Parliamentary system that the founding fathers wanted to throw off is better than the two party mess that we have today. As our system moves from hiccups to outright breakdowns we will see civil disobedience and even much worse. We are living in the last years of America as we see our personal freedoms taken away by the minority and government abuses and over-reach you had better believe you are living in the last years of what is known as America.

Unknown said...

@4:18...I have read books that suggest the Parliamentary system is more representative of all the people, rather than a two party system,which is controlled by the Hegelian Dialectic.