Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Holy hyperbole, a.k.a. ‘HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! … It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad’

Eric Feigl-Ding’s Jan. 20 tweet on Twitter was one of the first to set off COVID-19 pandemic alarm bells. He is a Washington, D.C.  epidemiologist and health economist, and is currently a visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” Feigl-Ding’s tweet read. “How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating.” The estimate of the virus’s contagiousness is captured in a variable called R0, or basic reproduction number for COVID-19, and is a key number used in infectious disease modelling for estimating pandemic growth rate. An R0 of 3.8 meant that every person who caught COVID-19 would transmit it in turn to almost four other people.

Feigl-Ding, 37, had tweeted after reading a paper called “Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions,” published on Jan. 23, and providing an early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions using case information from Chinese cities and other countries from Jan. 1-22 to fit a mathematical model to estimate outbreak parameters.

Still, there were problems with Feigl-Ding’s tweet, as Alexis C. Madrigal, a staff writer at The Atlantic, noted just eight days later in a piece headlined, “How to Misinform Yourself About the Coronavirus: Even if you avoid the conspiracy theories, tweeting through a global emergency is messy, context-free, and disorienting” (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/china-coronavirus-twitter/605644/), which appeared online Jan. 28.

Feigl-Ding is in no way an unintelligent man or incompetent epidemiologist; by all accounts he is quite the contrary in both disposition and abilities. Nor is this in any way to suggest the COVID-19 pandemic, which hadn’t even been designated a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Jan, 20 [that would come Jan. 30], much less a global pandemic [that would come March 11] was not worthy of a five-alarm fire bells general wake-up call or tweet even back then: it was.

His work focuses on the intersection of public health and public policy. Feigl-Ding has published in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and Health Policy. In 2018, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to run for the party in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, located in the south-central region of the state, and encompassing all of Dauphin County, as well as parts of Cumberland County and York County, including the cities of Harrisburg and York. But in his enthusiasm to tweet, he omitted some context, which he now regrets, he says. What he inadvertently omitted primarily were facts such as other infectious diseases, say measles for instance, also have very high R0 numbers (R0s for measles range from 12 to 18), and by the time he tweeted about the paper, the researchers had already lowered their R0 estimate from 3.8 to 2.5. “And R0, for that matter, is not the be-all and end-all of the danger of a virus,” Madrigal points out “Some highly transmissible diseases are not actually that dangerous.”

Madrigal also rightly observed that “one of the realities of the current information ecosystem” is that while “out-and-out conspiracies and hoaxes will draw some attention, it’s really the stuff that’s close to the boundaries of discourse that grabs the most eyeballs. That is, the information that’s plausible, and that fits into a narrative mounting outside the mainstream, gets the most clicks, likes, and retweets. Bonus points if it’s sensational or something that someone might want to censor.” When Twitter launched in March 2006, its timeline structure was simple: Tweets were displayed in reverse chronological order. In other words, each user’s feed contained tweets from their followers, from the most recent tweets onward. For “top tweets” now, Twitter uses an algorithm-powered feed organized by ranking signals. In addition to ranked content from followers, the feed will sometimes feature “who to follow” suggestions and, and content from other accounts. Users can also provide feedback on content shown in the feed by selecting “show less often.”

In an April-June 2017article in ASA footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association, R. Tyson Smith, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, who conducts research in the areas of health, gender, social psychology, criminal justice, and the military, suggested, “Twitter is arguably the best way to reach the greatest number of people, in the quickest fashion, and in the least mediated way.”

Probably still true, but not necessarily always a good thing for academics perhaps, as Eric Feigl-Ding quickly discovered to his chagrin.

In all fairness, who among us hasn’t hit the send button on a tweet, email, Facebook post, or other social media platform expression, a tad too soon in retrospect? Not I, I admit.

Think? Yes. Send? Maybe – but only after a very long pause, which on most social media platforms, and perhaps especially on Twitter, is about as likely as successfully asking a multi-line slot machine player to ease up to dampen some of the audiovisual feedback.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Steve Ashton: End of a Northern Manitoba NDP political dynasty?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A clever headline might say something like “Ashton fades to black” or “NDP  Orange: The New Black.” Clever perhaps. But not accurate. Because there is nothing about Steve Ashton that suggests fading away or going gently into the good night. That’s not who he is. Not quite House of Cards material perhaps, he is still one of the toughest bare-knuckle street-fighting politicians of any party in Canada, not just the NDP. Internal party opponents who underestimate his resolve do so at their own political peril.

In a two-way leadership race against 35-year-old rookie Fort Rouge constituency NDP MLA Wab Kinew, Ashton, 61, has decided on the high-risk gambit of revisiting two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when the leadership aspirant was 21 years old. The alleged victim has not been identified and both assault charges were stayed at the request of the Crown in 2004.  A charge that is stayed can be reactivated within one year of a judge granting a stay of proceedings, but seldom are, and such was the case with Kinew’s.

Wab Kinew, a former CBC Radio and TV reporter and host, author, rapper, and later acting associate vice-president of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Winnipeg, was born on the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation near Nestor Falls, Ont. in Northwestern Ontario’s frontier Sunset Country in the Central Time zone, but grew up mainly in suburban Winnipeg. Aside from the two stayed assault charges from the Spring of 2003, Kinew was no saint, a fact he readily admits.  Even before the later stayed assault charges, Kinew was convicted in February 2003 of failing to provide a breathalyzer or blood alcohol sample in a driving case, and was fined $922. After the stayed domestic assault charges, he was convicted in June 2004 of assaulting a cab driver and fined $300. As recently as October 2014, an unpaid speeding ticket eventually resulted in $606.50 of his wages being garnisheed by the Crown from his wages at the University of Winnipeg. Kinew has also apologized for several misogynist and homophobic tweets he made from his Twitter account, particularly back in June and July 2009, when he was actively rapping and by then 27 years old. And on Oct. 17, 2012, Kinew tweeted, “Riding in my limo back to my king size sweet [sic] feeling really bad for those kids in Attawapiskat #haha #terrible #inative.” Kinew was by now 30.

All told, CTV News Winnipeg reported Aug. 22, Kinew has been charged with more than a dozen offences, most dating back to 2003 and 2004.

So why is it such a high-risk gambit, one which clearly smacks of political desperation, some, if not many, would say, for Steve Ashton to go on the political offensive over those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when he was 21?

First, Kinew, if not in detail always, has nevertheless many times in many places in recent years, including on social media and in his 2015 book, The Reason You Walk,  apologized for his past behaviour.

Secondly, in April 2016, the voters of  Fort Rouge elected Kinew as their MLA, as he defeated then Manitoba Liberal leader Rana Bokhari, Progressive Conservative candidate Audrey Gordon and Green Party candidate Grant Sharp, to hold onto the NDP seat held by retiring incumbent Jennifer Howard, a former NDP cabinet minister.

Thirdly, the Manitoba NDP vetted Kinew, as they did Ashton, and sanctioned both their leadership bids.

The narrative that Kinew has apologized for his past and is a changed, albeit gradually, man is a powerful one for anyone who believes youthful indiscretions can and often are followed by remorse, forgiveness and redemption. Wab Kinew has clearly made something of his life and is a net contributor to society. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t make a good leader for the Manitoba NDP.

At the same time, it also true that much less is known publicly about those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 than the other matters, both criminal and non-criminal, that he has apologized for. Zita Somakoko, a Manitoba NDP member and domestic violence survivor advocate, has suggested to several media outlets this week that Kinew needs to be more forthright in explaining the stayed assault charges from 14 years ago. CBC News Manitoba reported today that Somakoko had “shared her dismay at Kinew’s responses with Steve Ashton….”

Several Manitoba media outlets received two anonymous emails last week containing previously-unreported details about Kinew’s legal history, including the two stayed assault charges against a woman from 2003.

Mohinder Saran, the MLA for The Maples, who was booted from the NDP caucus earlier this year as the result of sexual harassment allegations, which he denies, recently ordered copies of Kinew’s complete court documents.

Saran told CBC News Manitoba that he is unofficially working on behalf of Ashton’s campaign to attract delegates, but declined to comment about the court documents. Kinew currently has 588 committed delegates for the Sept. 16 leadership vote to Ashton’s 339 delegates. Saran denied sending documents to Ashton’s campaign or the media.

CBC News Manitoba compared the metadata — essentially, the file’s digital “fingerprint” — from the PDF document containing Kinew’s court records sent to media anonymously to that of the PDF containing Steve Ashton’s personal disclosure statement from last week, showing no involvement with the criminal justice system, which was sent via his campaign’s email account.

The two files were created using the same make and model of scanning device, CBC News Manitoba reports.

This does not prove that the two files were necessarily created on the same printer, however, CBC News Manitoba says it analyzed dozens of PDFs sent to media from various other NDP groups and sources, none of which were made using the same device.

Political analyst Christopher Adams, vice-president of Probe Research, and an adjunct professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Political Science, who has served as an election desk analyst for various media outlets in Manitoba, told CBC News Manitoba that while this is not proof of direct involvement by Ashton or his campaign, it does put his campaign under the microscope.

“If I were Perry Mason, this is strong circumstantial evidence,” he said, referring to the famous fictional lawyer.

“I am not a lawyer. I am a political scientist, but it does start showing you that maybe something is coming out of the [Ashton] campaign,” said Adams, who added “that sometimes supporters go ‘rogue’ and use tactics not authorized by a political campaign.

Ashton said Saran was not involved in his campaign and denied any knowledge of how the leaked court documents were sent to the media.

“I don’t know. I was a sent a copy [of the anonymous email received by media] last week, so I don’t know what the story is there,” Ashton told CBC News Manitoba.

“When the campaign received the [anonymous email] our decision was not to go public with it. Not to leak it, not to go public,” he said.

CBC News Manitoba says they requested a copy of the email that Ashton says his campaign received. “He has not responded to this request.”

“I think Ashton is right to ask about what were those things?” Adams told CBC News Manitoba. “Who was the person involved? What was the actual incident that caused this, that eventually led to the stay of charges? I think Ashton is kind of doing what we would expect him to do,” he said.

Ashton, who had been the marathon man of Manitoba politics, last year did what every political analyst and commentator in the province believed was impossible. He lost the supposedly safest NDP seat in Manitoba to Progressive Conservative rookie Kelly Bindle by 210 votes.

There have only been 13 provincial general elections since the Thompson constituency was created in June 1969. Progressive Conservative Labour Minister Ken MacMaster, who won the seat in the Oct. 11, 1977 election, and held it for four years until 1981, was the only Tory to ever hold the seat before Bindle. Before MacMaster, Ken Dillen, who ran against Ashton as a Liberal in the 2011 election, held the seat for the NDP from 1973 to 1977, while Joe Borowski held the seat in 1972-33 as an Independent NDP, and from 1969 to 1972 as an NDP member. Borowski defeated former Thompson mayor Tim Johnston’s father, Dr. Blain Johnston, by seven votes in the Feb. 20, 1969 byelection in the old provincial constituency of Churchill, which included the town of Thompson. He went on four months later to win the newly-created constituency of Thompson in the June 25, 1969 general election.

Ashton had won nine consecutive elections between 1981 and 2011 before going down to defeat in 2016 in his bid for 10 in a row. Ashton was first elected to the Manitoba legislature at the age of 25 in the Nov. 17, 1981 provincial election, defeating MacMaster by 72 votes.

He has a much less impressive track record to date, however, in his two previous bids for the Manitoba NDP leadership in 2009 and 2015. In a two-way race in 2009, NDP finance minister Greg Selinger took almost two-thirds of the ballots cast and sailed to victory in the two-way race with 1,317 votes to Ashton’s 685, while in 2015 Ashton finished third on the first ballot with a similar share of the vote totals.

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