We need to take a hard look at history. A Vanity Fair cover from July 1933 showing a despondent Uncle Sam seated on the Western hemisphere with storm clouds above can serve as a somber harbinger for our own times. Illustration by Paolo Garretto
History has never seemed more relevant.
That anti-Semite Steve Bannon who made white nationalism mainstream through Breitbart, is now to be President Elect Donald Trump’s Goebbels…er…Chief Strategist.
This past summer with the weight of history hanging heavy as the Republicans nominated Donald J. Trump as their candidate for president, historians spoke out as never before.
We didn’t listen then.
We need to listen now.
It’s a post worth repeating, so we don’t repeat history.
It’s Worth Repeating
A dozen distinguished historians from David McCullough to Ken Burns have bonded together to create a Facebook page called Historians on Donald Trump, dedicated to educating the voters…
Ever since Brexit, and probably during the build-up to it, I kept thinking, “this is what it’s like to live in history”. To live in a time when such monumental shifts are happening they will appear on a curriculum somewhere in the future, and people will be writing theses on 2016 in the way that they might write one now on 1066, 1918 or 1939.
Like most of the 48% of people who didn’t vote for Britain to leave the EU, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I’ve been living in a bubble (London – the biggest bubble of all). Seventeen million people in the UK didn’t think the same way as me or my friends. I’d already had an inkling that this might be the case during the election that brought our current Conservative government to power, but Brexit was still a mighty blow and wake-up…
US president-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday Ford Motor chairman Bill Ford had just told him the automaker had decided not to move production at a Kentucky plant to Mexico.
The Telegraph also posted that second tweet from Trump, a blatant lie:
“I worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. I owed it to the great State of Kentucky for their confidence in me!” Trump said on Twitter.
The Telegraph corrects the story and clarifies:
Ford has repeatedly said it has no plans to close any US plants and likely could not do so under the terms of the current United Auto Workers contract that expires in 2019.
The real story is that the The UAW, kept the Ford plant in
Louisville, not Trump.
The plant is not primarily a Lincoln plant — the MKC represents roughly 10 percent of its total output. The MKC is a more expensive version of the Ford Escape, which is a much bigger seller than the MKC. Production of the Escape alone is enough to keep the Louisville plant running at full capacity.
Moreover, the decision to keep the MKC in Louisville was made before the two men spoke on Thursday, not as a result of their conversation, according to Ford.
The only news that still carries the Ford story as a victory for Trump is fake news:
In a statement, Ford said the company “confirmed with the President-elect” that it would continue producing Lincoln MKCs at the Louisville plant and added that it was “encouraged that President-elect Trump and the new Congress will pursue policies that will improve U.S. competitiveness and make it possible to keep production of this vehicle here in the United States.”
Below are five fake news sites that regularly pop-up on Yahoo News and Bing as legitimate news media.
WorldNet Daily, founded in May 1997, purportedly to expose wrongdoing, corruption, and abuse of power. Wikipedia
World Net daily dismisses student protests against Trump as ‘childish’ — Go through the archives and find the World Net Daily endorsements of armed insurrection as an adult reaction to a Clinton presidency. Please note that I’m not using false moral equivalency. There no moral equivalency between peaceful protest and armed vigilantes threatening to kill people if their side loses.
The Washington Times defines diverse and White people and White people with tans.
3. The Weekly Standard, founded September 18, 1995 owned by MediaDC, a subsidiary of Clarity Media Group, itself a subsidiary of The Anschutz Corporation. Wikipedia
5. The Federalist, founded in 2013, purportedly rejects the assumptions of the media establishment” and says it is dedicated to discussing “the philosophical underpinnings of the day’s debate” Wikipedia
Apparently, the ‘Philosophical underpinnings’ of our debate over Trump’s election is that GLBT people, Muslims, Latinos, Immigrants and African-Americans must seek out and ‘listen to’ the straight white people who voted to use the power of the government to terrorize them. us.
These disinformation sites are lesser versions of Fox News which is the best organized and best funded fake news site in the United States.
Expect them to do everything they can to subvert fact based coverage of the Trump administration.
Expect right-wing disinformation media to do everything it can to subvert fact based coverage of the Trump administration.
We need to take a hard look at history. A Vanity Fair cover from July 1933 showing a despondent Uncle Sam seated on the Western hemisphere with storm clouds above can serve as a somber harbinger for our own times. Illustration by Paolo Garretto 
Art by Rob Goldstein 