Trump and dance of fake news

Underlying the larger discussion of Fake News is the fact that it has been a central element of Donald Trump's manner of gaining the White House. The Fake News ploy has been one of the trusted irons in his fantastic golf bag as he has run amok without replacing divots.

Evidence now shows that Trump re-tweets anything that helps his point - if it is planted misinformation, he doesn’t care.

*He took time out of his busy life style in 2011, to tweet that Obama wished America Happy Kwanza, but not happy Christmas. A lie.

*In 2012, Trump tells us Obama's birth certificate is a fraud. A lie. (Full disclosure: I was born at the same hospital as our first Black president, and I have a stat-foto replica of my own birth certificate, and heck if doesn't actually resemble Barak's.)

*Ted Cruz's father was part of the Kennedy Assassination.

*He didn’t lose the popular vote because the popular vote was a fake. And on and on.

Link Trump up with the retired KGBers over in Ruskie-land and you have a formula for an endless stream of total meaninglessness. Makes you want to start a commune.

Now, actually, I was prepared to give him some time to find his footing. But let’s throw that out the window. His first day on the job was sickening. As in to the point of nausea and puke that, hey, you could use to build a heck of a wall.

On his first day at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, he doubled down on the Fake News ploy saying comparative photos showing the Washington mall well-attended during Obama's 2008 inauguration and sparsely peopled during Trump's inauguration were false.

Then he went over to CIA HQ, and denied he ever criticized the CIA, and placed journalists among the most dishonest human beings on earth.

Fake new is often indistinguishable from basic Totalitarian propaganda. These things prey on mass psychology. Time to re-read Eric Hoffer – or Steve Bannon.

All this is very familiar to people who have studied the history of the world press. What's different today is Facebook - the number 1 arbiter of news. Ask yourself, what does the Internet do? It brings massive scaled computing to daily life, and it grabs the keys from the former gate keepers. Add one historical person ready to seize the day, and…

When in the late '40s Stalin published "Falsifiers of History" (It explained how the West goaded Hitler into starting World War II) or in 1964 when "None Dare Call It Treason" appeared (It was a rallying point for misinformation, more or less along the lines of Joe McCarthy blather), rumor and gossip spread largely by word of mouth between students, co-workers and families.

It is just so very odd to have a leader who has such delicate, loving appreciation for lying. - Jack Vaughan