Gwyneth Paltrow reassures us that she is not talking bullshit by talking bullshit.

Earlier this year, the lifestyle corporation fell under scrutiny once more when nonprofit group Truth in Advertising accused Goop of exploiting women with products which claim to combat health problems.

And now Gwyneth has opened up about the controversy.

When asked by the Radio 4 Today Programme about the flack the company has faced about some of the health benefits the products claim to have, Gwyneth replied that she thinks the criticism is important.

“If we’re not criticised we’re not doing our job. What we’re here to do is trailblaize and try to move culture forward,” she said.

“If we’re not criticised we’re not doing our job”? What’s she talking about? If you’re a corporation that purports to sell products that promote “wellness” then why is criticism required to do the job? Why not just sell the correct stuff to promote “wellness” instead?

And then the trailblazing. Why should a movie star be “trailblazing” on medical products? She has no relevant education or training. She’s an actor. And what does she mean by “move culture forward”? Isn’t it, rather, backward? Back to a time when no one knew very much about medicine so guesswork was all they had?

When asked about the specific law suit the company faced she explained:

“In that case there was just a verbiage issue. As you grow as a company, you learn about claims. If you look a product that says this may help with wrinkles you can’t say this will eradicate wrinkles.

That is, you can’t if it doesn’t. If she weren’t peddling woo she wouldn’t have to be careful about the “verbiage” in that way. She can’t say it eradicates wrinkles for the simple reason that it doesn’t. Saying it “may help with” is legal because it’s empty…but, sadly, persuasive to the inattentive.

The interview went on to discuss the Carnelian crystal that claims to help treat infertility.

Gwyneth pointed out that though she’d never tried it she believed there are “ancient healing modalities that have existed the power of oils and crystals for thousands of years that people find really effective.”

Who cares what she believes? This isn’t Tinkerbell. And calling them “modalities” doesn’t make them work any better.

It wasn’t long before people took to Twitter to let their thoughts on the interview known.

Gwyneth Paltrow on BBC Radio 4 basically saying Goop is still learning how to write product descriptions for their bullshit products which won’t result in lawsuits they lose.

— Mike (@6byNine) October 9, 2018

“There was just a verbiage issue”
Gwyneth Paltrow on being caught out making false claims on her mumbo-jumbo products

— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) October 9, 2018

The Kavanaugh mess distracted a lot of us from the Times’s big story on the Trump empire’s vast tax fraud. Paul Waldman at the Post reminded us to be reminded of it.

It has been less than two days since we learned that Donald Trump and his family appear to have engaged in a years-long conspiracy to commit tax fraud on an absolutely gigantic scale, evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes they owed to the federal government. We learned this from a mother lode of documents obtained by the New York Times — including tax returns, business records and bank records.

And nearly everyone seems to have already forgotten.

I didn’t forget but I did put it aside for later. It is a very long story. Sarah Sanders said it’s 14,000 words.

If you haven’t read the (incredibly long) article, the quick summary is that, in the later years of his life, Fred Trump — the president’s father — with the help of his children, constructed an intricate web of vehicles to escape income taxes, gift taxes and estate taxes, passing more than $1 billion worth of assets to his children while avoiding the taxes that should have been paid on them. While wealthy people often take advantage of the tax code’s numerous loopholes to avoid taxes, what the Trump family did was, as the Times described it, “outright fraud,” including hiding transactions with shell companies, undervaluing properties, creating invoices with fake charges, and what amounted to hundreds of subsidiary schemes and scams.

Loopholes are legal; that other stuff not so much. These are crimes. Trump appears to have committed many crimes.

He will likely never be prosecuted for them because the statute of limitations has expired (though both New York state and the federal government can mount a civil case against him, which could force him to pay the taxes he evaded, plus fines). But the Times article contains documentary evidence — shell companies owned by Trump, his signature on documents — showing that he was an active participant in the scheme.

The paper obtained Fred Trump’s tax returns, but not Donald’s, so it’s entirely possible that, for instance, after Fred evaded gift taxes when he was showering Donald with cash, Donald also didn’t pay the income taxes he should have owed on the same money.

The only way to find out if that happened is to examine Trump’s tax returns. Which he has steadfastly refused to release.

It’s clearer than ever why he refused to release them.

To repeat, because we have to keep repeating this, we now have hard evidence — not allegations, not hearsay, not suspicion, but hard evidence — that Donald Trump and his family committed tax fraud on a massive scale. What should be done about it now? It has to be followed up by every news organization with the means to do so. It has to be investigated by Congress (though, of course, that won’t happen unless Democrats take back one or both houses of Congress). We have to get the president’s tax returns. And we have to never stop asking questions until all the facts are known, and Trump, one way or another, is held to account. No matter what else is competing for our attention.

Let’s hope we can do all that before he seizes absolute power.

Oh look, another  sighting of “womxn” already – this time in a piece at Vice explaining what “cis people” have to do to be allowed to live helpful to trans people.

Kai Isaiah-Jamal begins briskly.

Let’s cut the shit – there’s no positive way a cis person can dictate or speak on a life that you do not live and a world you do not have to navigate as a trans person.

Well, if that’s true, then nobody can say anything about anything, right? We can all come up with labels to brandish at the rest of the world by way of saying “don’t you dare disagree with me or dispute anything I say no matter how stupidly and irrationally and dogmatically I say it.” Nobody lives my life except me, and that’s a sentence that every human can say. It’s true, and obvious, and otiose. We all live our own lives, but most of us don’t want to live them entirely solipsistically, so we do our best to talk across the barrier of Self in order to communicate with others.

Isaiah-Jamal’s point is presumably that people who have “cis privilege” mustn’t dispute anything trans people say about trans rights, because the formers’ privilege blinds them to the reality of the latters’ experiences and needs, just as white people can be blind to the reality of racism. One problem with that is that the “just as” isn’t. Racism is not analogous to skepticism about some/much/all of the dogma around being trans.

In a world where misconstrued ideas about trans folk – what we need, what we deserve, how we should live – fall from the lips of so many cis people, we need to end the debate on whether trans womxn are womxn, whether we should be able to use the correct bathrooms and changing rooms, and whether we should be parents or teachers. Because it’s not a debate. We are entitled to our human rights just as much as everyone else.

Only the second paragraph, and already so confused.

There’s the “womxn” again.

Do women get this same “you don’t get to question me” privilege too? Are we denied it because we’re “cis”? Does being cis cancel out being female? Are women no longer an oppressed class, because we are “cis”? Is it only “womxn” who belong to the oppressed female class?

And why are we told to end the debate on whether trans womxn are womxn but not to end the debate on whether trans men are men? Or should that be whether trans mxn are mxn?

And do women get a say about whether or not we want to lose the word “women” and have to use “womxn” instead?

And what are the criteria for “the correct bathrooms and changing rooms”? What makes a bathroom or changing room “correct” and who gets to decide?

And who has suggested taking away the rights of trans people? And what rights exactly are we talking about? And is there any difference between familiar, well-described, clearly delineated rights, and brand new rights that apply to brand new categories and concepts, that many people haven’t even heard of yet? And is there a “right” to be a teacher, or does being a teacher rather depend on meeting certain criteria?

And so on. I could go on this way all day. In just the first two paragraphs Isaiah-Jamal assumes an enormous amount that is not in evidence, and proceeds as if there were no need to explain further. That’s characteristic of much of this type of “activism” and it doesn’t inspire confidence. I feel only a faint curiosity about the rest of Isaiah-Jamal’s demands, which go on for a very long way.

The Republicans are saying it’s all a matter of mistaken identity.

The politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker is now something like common wisdom for many Republicans.

President Trump explicitly endorsed the theory Saturday, shortly after Brett M. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed as a Supreme Court judge, telling reporters he was “100 percent” sure Ford accused Kavanaugh in error.

Collins said it, Manchin said it, Graham said it.

[F]or many cognitive researchers who study how memories actually form during traumatic events, the theory never stopped sounding ridiculous.

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” said Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory … If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level.”

As he and several other researchers told The Washington Post, being attacked floods the brain with chemicals, including norepinephrine, which helps people remember whatever they are focused on. (Ford, a psychologist herself, even mentioned it in her testimony.)

It’s essentially the same phenomenon that makes people forever remember what they were doing when planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, or when they learned John F. Kennedy was shot. It’s such a basic tenet of psychology and cognitive science that some researchers watched the mistaken-identity theory spread through the Senate this month with a sense of stunned dismay.

Because she already knew him. Misidentification of strangers is one thing, but he wasn’t a stranger to her.

Lila Davachi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University, analogized the traumatic memory formation process to cranking up the contrast on a photo — central details get heightened, while those in the background get washed out.

“If someone has a gun on you you’ll remember the gun. There’s a snapshot of critical features,” she said. “In this case it was a party with friends and she knew him. It is ridiculous to say she wouldn’t remember who it was.”

Ridiculous, but convenient.

It can always be worse. It always is worse somewhere. At least Republican senators didn’t attack Christine Blasey Ford with sticks. The Guardian:

Thirty-six Indian schoolgirls have been treated in hospital after they were attacked by a large crowd of teenage boys and their parents when they complained of sexual harassment.

Six boys and one woman were arrested in the north-eastern state of Bihar after the attack at a girls’ boarding school.

Police and witnesses said girls from the government school in Triveniganj – about 160 miles (260km) east of the state capital, Patna – had been playing in a sports area on Saturday night when a group of teenage boys began making lewd comments.

Welll, you can see their point of view. What business do school girls have playing in a sports area? Who do they think they are?

The girls argued back and some physically remonstrated with the teenage boys, who initially backed off. Police say a group of the boys and some of their parents returned about 20 minutes later carrying bamboo sticks and iron rods.

Some of their parents. That’s nice.

“They dragged us by our ponytails, assaulted [us] with bamboo sticks and kicked and punched,” said Gudia, one of 36 girls who were treated in hospital after the attack.

“We were totally unarmed and had nothing to protect us. I saw many of my friends lying on the ground and crying with pain.”

The girls admitted to hospital were aged between 10 and 14.

Gudia said the young men were angry “because we had protested [against] their sexual advances”.

“They had been always teasing us and scribbling dirty words on the walls of our school,” she said, adding that she and other girls had tried to report the harassment to local government officials but were not taken seriously.

They’re just girls. Why would anyone take them seriously?

Katha Pollitt talks about the way women have to be “likable” no matter what (and when they are it’s still not enough), while men can be as violent and belligerent and mendacious as they like and the world will still embrace them and say that was way back then.

These are the rules of The Patriarchy that the #MeToo movement has exposed: the education, extracurriculars, service projects, credentials—they were never what being a girl was all about. Being a girl is about pleasing men: What they think of you and want from you and how you negotiate that in a world that does not want to hear about the darker side of what that can mean.

And thus it’s also about pleasing women, but in a men-pleasing way. It’s about people-pleasing and man-pleasing and the ways they are entangled with each other. We’re all pickled in it; it’s the medium we grow in; we can’t get away from it any more than a daffodil can hop away from its soil.

This for me is the meaning of the Senate Judiciary Committee testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Whatever else a woman is—a PhD, a mother, a victim of a sex crime—the most important thing is that she be likable: attractive, relatable, unthreatening, nice. And Dr. Ford was so nice! Pretty—but not too pretty—educated, upper middle class, white, with glasses and a husband and kids and a house. She was just emotional enough—not detached, not “hysterical”—to conform to expectations about what a woman should look like when she tells the truth about being assaulted.

Imagine, Katha goes on, if she hadn’t been like that.

Others have said this, but it’s worth repeating that if Dr. Ford had behaved like Judge Brett Kavanaugh, she would have been dismissed as a liar and a crazy lady. Imagine if she had talked about how much she liked beer some 30 times. Imagine if she had displayed anger, hostility, arrogance, boasted about having gone to Yale, cried self-pitying tears, and thrown questions back in the senators’ faces, asking them if they ever had blackouts. Imagine if her high-school yearbook page were full of sexual slang and drinking innuendoes obvious to anyone who had ever been a teenager, and she had explained them away with obvious falsehoods.

In all fairness, that disgusted many of us when Kavanaugh did it, but the point of course that it didn’t disgust them enough to make them vote him down. The importance of forcing women to be “nice” and “likable” by bearing children they don’t want to bear outweighed the tackiness of putting a lying shouting assaulting sexist pig on the Supreme Court.

Does #MeToo have the power to change this narrative? Women’s anger is the topic du jour. Rebecca Traister’s brilliant and bracing Good and Mad could not have been published at a better moment and joins Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her and Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage on a lengthening shelf of books calling for women to own their righteous rage and use it to win justice.

I wish us all luck with the project.

China disappears the head of Interpol:

The detained Chinese head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, is being investigated for alleged bribe-taking, Chinese authorities have announced.

Mr Meng was first reported missing in late September after travelling from Interpol HQ in France to China.

His wife has revealed that he sent her a text message with a knife emoji on the day he went missing.

Mr Meng is the latest high-profile target to be ensnared in China’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign.

Actual corruption case, or China being China?

In a statement on Twitter on Sunday, [Interpol] said it had received Mr Meng’s resignation with immediate effect. Under its terms it has appointed senior vice-president Kim Jong-yang of South Korea as acting president.

A new president will be elected for the remaining two years of Mr Meng’s mandate at the general assembly in Dubai next month.

On Saturday, the international police agency urged China to clarify Mr Meng’s status, saying it was concerned about the well-being of its president. There has been no word from him on the charges he faces.

His wife is worried.

Grace Meng, speaking shortly before China’s confirmation of the detention, had told journalists she thought he was in danger.

She issued an emotional plea for international help to find her husband.

On the day he went missing, she said he had sent her a social media message telling her to “wait for my call”, before sending a knife emoji, signifying danger.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

The Times yesterday:

Turkish investigators believe a well-known Saudi dissident was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, five people involved in the investigation, or briefed on it, said on Saturday.

The critic of the Saudi government, Jamal Khashoggi, entered the consulate on Tuesday to obtain a document he needed to get married and never emerged, according to his fiancée, who had stayed outside.

Waiting for him inside the consulate, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation, were Saudi agents who had recently arrived in Turkey with the intent to silence Mr. Khashoggi. It was not clear if the plan had been to bring him back to Saudi Arabia alive, and something went wrong, or if the intention was to kill him there.

Well it’s not as if “bringing him back to Saudi Arabia” would have been okay either. People should be free to criticize their governments – especially when they suck as hard as the Saudi dictatorship (aka “monarchy”) does. People should be free to do that and to travel abroad and to decide for themselves when and if they go back, as opposed to being trapped and grabbed and abducted by thugs working for Mohammed bin Salman.

If confirmed, the killing could lead to an international scandal for Saudi Arabia and pose a daunting problem for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s 33-year-old day-to-day ruler, who has billed himself as a reformer committed to modernizing the kingdom.

Which is a joke. He’s no more of a reformer than Trump is, which is no doubt why Trump loves him and Saudi Arabia so much.

Mr. Khashoggi, 59, had worked as an adviser to senior government officials and was one of Saudi Arabia’s best known journalists. But since going into voluntary exile last year, he has written articles critical of Crown Prince Mohammed, who, since his father became king in 2015, has accumulated tremendous power inside the kingdom.

Despite orchestrating the kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister, waging a brutal war in Yemen and locking up hundreds of prominent Saudis in a luxury hotel on accusations of corruption, the prince has won Western supporters, including the government of the United States, that have embraced his economic policies and limited social reforms.

…

Turan Kislakci, the head of Turkish Arab Media Association and a friend of Mr. Khashoggi’s, told The Times that Turkish officials had called him and confirmed the death.

“They confirmed two things: He was killed and his body was dismembered,” Mr. Kislakci said.

The Arab government official also described Mr. Khashoggi’s body as having been dismembered.

I do not like the Saudi ruling family.

More from NPR on the Missouri one-abortion-clinic situation:

In 2008, Missouri had five abortion clinics, according to Planned Parenthood. The Columbia Health Center in central Missouri on Wednesday became the latest to stop providing abortions.

I don’t even understand this. Don’t big hospitals do abortions? If not, why not? Abortions should be a normal part of health care, not a rare bespoke luxury that only a few can have. As I mentioned, Missouri is not a small state, and five clinics is ludicrously inadequate.

Under the new requirements, abortion providers must secure admitting privileges at hospitals located within about 15 minutes from their health centers.

“The idea behind that restriction is that it somehow makes patients safer if they experience complications from the abortion,” Planned Parenthood Great Plains spokeswoman Emily Miller tells NPR. “But in reality, abortion is already incredibly safe, and a patient’s ability to access help at the hospital is the same, whether or not the provider has admitting privileges.”

Miller says that Columbia Health Center’s physician had her privileges revoked in 2015 by University Hospital and has been denied privileges by the other surrounding hospitals. “They won’t offer her admitting privileges because she’s an abortion provider,” Miller says.

So hospitals in the Columbia area do refuse to do abortions, and not satisfied with that, they prevent other doctors from doing them. Some of that will be because they are Catholic hospitals (and that should be illegal), but what about the others?

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that similar restrictions imposed in Texas were medically unnecessary.

And a ruling like that will not happen again for generations.

Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit against Missouri’s requirements in November 2016 and a legal battle has ensued. A federal appeals court ruled in September that Missouri could enforce state laws. The judges issued a mandate for the requirements to take effect Monday.

“No abortions for you, bitches. Hold still while I pin you to this bed and nearly suffocate you.”

Missouri is not the only state where a single facility provides abortions to women. Other states include Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Mississippi, according to a 2014 report by the Guttmacher Institute. Nor is 2018 the first time that Missouri fell into this category.

…

Samuel Lee, a lobbyist who has spent years campaigning for abortion restrictions in Missouri, said he thinks “when the district court looks at it again, they will uphold the law because it protects the health and safety of women who are seeking abortions in Missouri without imposing an undue burden on them,” according to The Kansas City Star.

Planned Parenthood said Wednesday that 20 states are “poised to ban abortion” if Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court — and that 13 abortion cases are “one step away” from the country’s highest court.

Forced childbearing for all.

There will be more of this, until they are all shut down and women will have to go to Canada or self-abort (which is often fatal). Missouri now has one (1) abortion clinic.

Missouri is down to one clinic providing abortions Wednesday, after the only other clinic in the state that performs the procedure failed to adhere to new state requirements.

Federal appeals court judges ruled last month that Missouri can enforce a requirement that doctors must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals before they can perform abortions. The judges issued a mandate Monday for that rule to officially take effect.

The Columbia Planned Parenthood clinic was unable to secure physician privileges to comply with the requirement, so it cancelled abortions scheduled for Wednesday, which would have been the first since the mandate was issued, Planned Parenthood Great Plains spokeswoman Emily Miller said.

Columbia is where the University of Missouri is.

Women seeking abortions can go to Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic — which is now the only facility in Missouri where abortions can be performed — or travel to neighboring states, she said.

St. Louis is all the way on the eastern edge of the state, and Missouri is an average-large state – it’s not massive like Montana or Texas but it’s not Delaware, either. Women in Missouri (and other states too) are in the situation Irish women were in before the referendum – having to make a long expensive trip to get an abortion. Worse, in fact, because Missouri is more than twice as large as Ireland: 69,715 square miles versus 32,595 square miles (but you have to add the Irish Sea). Early abortions are simple procedures which should be available in all general medical facilities, but they’re not, because so many people cannot abide seeing women in charge of their own bodies.

This day is the saddest & angriest of my time in the Senate. The Republicans have succeeded in confirming a dangerous & deeply flawed nominee only by breaking all the rules & norms. The damage done today will be enduring—to the United States Supreme Court & to our country.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) October 6, 2018

We’ve got men who sexually assault women enshrined in the White House and the Supreme Court.

So, basically, contempt for women has now become official government policy.

It’s just a tad alienating if you have the bad taste to be a woman.

Oh, fucking hell. Sums it up.

Trump on AF1 was asked about women angry about Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

“I don’t think they are,” he said. Women are “extremely happy," he said, “because they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles, and others.”

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 6, 2018

Of course. Women simply don’t care about their own well-being, even in the sense of not wanting to be assaulted and nearly suffocated by men who pounce on them when the mood strikes. Women care only about the well-being of men. This works out very nicely because men too care only about the well-being of men, so everybody’s happy.

Actually they don’t, lots of men do care about the well-being of women and girls, including their wives, their sisters, their aunts. But men like that don’t count because they’re wimps, they’re losers, they’re politically correct, they’re SJWs. Real men, men who matter, like Trump and Kavanaugh and McConnell and Graham, don’t give a rat’s ass about the well-being of women. If a nice Catholic school boy like Brett Kavanaugh wants to assault some slutty girl at a gathering with older boys drinking beer then he has every right to do that, and she should be thanking him for not smothering her.

So by god don’t come whining to us about any sexual assaults ever again, because we don’t have to pay any attention and we’re not fucking going to.

Welcome to the new reality.

Pig Kavanaugh is in, abortion rights and separation of church and state are on the way out.

Meanwhile…

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has received more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints in recent weeks against Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice Saturday, but has chosen for the time being not to refer them to a judicial panel for investigation.

A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — the court on which Kavanaugh serves — passed on to Roberts a string of complaints the court received starting three weeks ago, said four people familiar with the matter.

That probably happens with every nominee, right? There are always soreheads.

The situation is highly unusual, said legal experts and several people familiar with the matter. Never before has a Supreme Court nominee been poised to join the court while a fellow judge recommends that misconduct claims against that nominee warrant review.

Oh.

Roberts’s decision not to immediately refer the cases to another appeals court has caused some concern in the legal community. Now that he has been confirmed, the details of the complaints may not become public and instead may be dismissed, legal experts say. Supreme Court justices are not subject to the misconduct rules governing these claims.

“If Justice Roberts sits on the complaints, then they will reside in a kind of purgatory and will never be adjudicated,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School and an expert on Supreme Court ethics. “This is not how the rules anticipated the process would work.”

Yes but we’re in Trumpworld now, and the rules are whatever he chooses to do.

Henderson, whom President George H.W. Bush nominated to the bench, stepped in to review the complaints against Kavanaugh because Chief Judge Merrick Garland — whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama was blocked by Senate Republicans — recused himself from the matter.

When they go low, we go high, and how’s that working out for us?

Another thing – small, but so typical.

A comment on that post of PZ’s:

Silentbob

2 October 2018 at 12:11 am

@ 94 John Morales

(I did withdraw from her blog because I was contentious there, and annoying her, but still, it was not because I was banned there. Like this blog, to which I have returned, thanks to PZ’s (hopefully juditious) sufferance, mainly because I’m not insincere)

I was also contentious and annoying but lacked your circumspection and first got placed in perpetual moderation (for quoting Gloria Steinem) and then apparently banned (silently, sometime in the past couple of years) despite also being sincere (if sarcastic). So I suppose your obsequiousness with respect to anti-trans attitudes paid off.

The historian Christopher Browning in the NYRB discusses the Trumpists’ similarities to and differences from Nazis and other fascists.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Lies, Putin, Fox News, bots – it all adds up.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

We’re there now. He’s not talking about the potential future there, he’s talking about how bad it already is.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of TheWashington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

But in the end climate change will override all that.

Have a nice weekend.