Andrew Hall Productions

10/22/2024

The Fascist Playbook #3 - The language of dictators. Back in the 2016 election, Trump talked about using the U.S. military to secure the border against migrants. In the final months of this 2024 election campaign, Trump is now talking about using the military against "the enemy within". Turning the U.S. military against the domestic population, is what dictators do. Trump claims it is because the U.S,. is "occupied", that migrants have taken over places in Colorado and elsewhere. The strategy is to convince Americans that democracy is failing, that a strongman is needed to fix things, and that he can fix it. The American media obediently report these outrageous claims and the political class seems to be mute in response. The soul of America is in peril.

10/21/2024

The Fasicst Playbook #2 - encourage pessimism and hopelessness, promise stability and peace. Trump and Vance are claiming they champion traditional values while selling autocratic rule - dictator for a day, putting enemies in prison. The assumptions they promote with Make America Great Again, MAGA, is that American society and politics are "degenerate" but they promote traditional values. Promising peace instead of victory in Ukraine is 1930s appeasement dressed up for today's ignorant public with all the terrible consequences this will mean - accepting as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state and encourage Russian imperialism. The next target are likely the Baltic republics. How will Iran, North Korea and China interpret this American capitulation? Where will the United States draw the line?

10/20/2024

The Fascist Playbook - Go outrageously big with your lies. In the vice-presidential debate, JD Vance led off by claiming that President Trump had "saved" Obamacare while Trump was president. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump tried literally dozens of times to end Obamacare, or gut its provisions for pre-existing conditions. When the COVID pandemic began, Trump ignored advice and avoided taking action and the result was that within one year the United States had a rate of deaths two and a half times higher than a roughly comparable country - Canada. Over half a million Americans needn't have died.

01/22/2021

Right-wing influencers embraced extremist views, and Facebook rewarded them.

10/07/2020

Amid the swirling stew of alarm about social media, here is a sobering assessment by a Harvard University centre of the impact of the mainstream media in spreading Donald Trump's misinformation about voter fraud. It's an alarming look at the impact of the mainstream media on civic society, where the determination to appear even-handed means they blast Trump's false claims out in headlines, tweets and news alerts.

Working paper explores disinformation campaign about mail-in voter fraud

05/01/2020

The mainstream media are struggling to cover the COVID-19 story, a pandemic that is upending so many lives, and with no end in sight. This article surveys the fractured information waterfront and is spot on about the media's systemic limitation - "the media’s default rhythm of constant piecemeal updates is ill-suited to covering an event as large as the pandemic... the staccato pulse of reports merely amplifies the wobbliness of the scientific process, turns incremental bits of evidence into game changers, and intensifies the already-palpable sense of uncertainty that drives people toward misinformation." The difference in today's world is that social media offer easy access to an ocean of disinformation and paranoia.

A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend

01/02/2020

The Russian Gary Kasparov observes “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Those words are coming home in spades to America in this Age of Trump. This article by Jay Rosen is an excellent description of the crisis facing the media as they adapt, duck or confront Trump propaganda.

That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it.

12/27/2019

The media has traditionally ducked controversy by presenting "both sides" which implicitly means promoting false equivalence. Now take that up a few notches. "Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news."

That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it.

11/22/2019

The situation is no different in Canada. The loss of local news is having a major impact on civic engagement and just plain awareness of what's going on.

The loss of local news coverage in much of the United States has frayed communities and left many Americans woefully uninformed, according to a new report.

02/12/2019

The situation in the UK is depressingly familiar ".. many local newspapers which are vital to a functioning democracy are owned by debt-laden publishers which have cut investment and sacked hundreds of journalists in an effort to maintain profit margins.

".. the priority should be ensuring high-quality journalism continues to be produced in Britain rather than attempting to save the newspaper industry in its current form."

Cairncross review warns that closure of local newspapers threatens democracy

02/03/2019

A really well-done documentary about disinformation, fake news and hybrid warfare on social media. "Malware For Humans" is by James Patrick, a retired police officer, intelligence analyst, and writer.

https://www.youtube.com/watchtime_continue=3&v=A6gf5whRu

01/21/2019

It's the Issue of the Age - Why does Fake News work? And how to deal with it.

Are they blinded by their political passions? Or are they just intellectually lazy?