- News today: Trump’s parade, No Kings demonstrations, and a dress-up cop shoots Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota;
- Charlie Warzel on the surfeit of information and how the right can invent via AI narratives to its advantage;
- Similar gaslighting about Alex Padilla;
- Sensing the deportation targets are absurd, Trump changes the targets (TACO!);
- David Barton lies again; Shane Vaughn celebrates an imminent arrival of the end times; and a new entry in “If the US press covered the US the way it covers other countries.”
Today is Trump’s parade; today hundreds, maybe thousands, of No Kings demonstrations are being held in cities across the nation; and today we woke to learn that two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses had been shot overnight by someone dressed as a policeman, killing one couple, with a list of other planned targets, include abortion providers and other Democrats.
One way of looking at this is that Trump is an egomaniac, Trump and MAGA have declared war on the blue states and Trump has had the US military invade California with the intent of displacing its elected leaders. Californians are protesting. Of course. And — I’m speculating here — elements of MAGA are taking to violence against those who oppose their king.
The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 13 Jun 2025: I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again), subtitled “The L.A. distortion effect”
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.
The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil (“I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,” The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. “One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,” my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote.
There’s an essential truth here. While hundreds of years ago, people had little notion of what was happening in the world beyond the next town, now there is so much information online that people can pick and choose whatever narrative they like to make sense of things.
What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown.
Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.
Choose-your-own-adventure. But the playing field is not level.
The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone.
He goes on about how X and Truth Social depict these events.
On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I’ve seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers’ market—and lots of pictures of the city’s unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it’s hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it’s unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters “to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.”
If the evidence doesn’t suit the right-wing agenda, they resort to lying via AI. After a few more paragraphs, Warzel concludes:
The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.
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Similar right-wing distortions of the Alex Padilla event.
LA Times, Anita Chabria, 13 Jun 2025: The gaslighting of Alex Padilla is already in full swing on the right
The writer gives examples of emails she gets, about how she should have described the event.
But the larger issue is the alternate reality the Trump administration is building to cultivate fear and build support for a military crackdown. The ask isn’t that we believe Padilla was a threat, but that we believe that America has devolved into an immigrant-induced chaos that only the military can quell, and that Trump needs the powers of a king to lead the military to our salvation.
And so on.
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Short items.
Slate, Shirin Ali, 14 Jun 2025: Even Donald Trump Is Starting to See the Absurdity of Stephen Miller’s Deportation Targets
I’ll key this to my observation that conservatives — because they align with base human nature, and not any kind of learning — are not good at proportions, or planning. They set arbitrary goals without any basis in past performance. (As my company was obliged to do to meet process maturity goals in the 2000s.)
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And so, Trump has changed his mind, again!
NY Times, 13 Jun 2025: Trump Shifts Deportation Focus, Pausing Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Eateries, subtitled “The abrupt pivot on an issue at the heart of Mr. Trump’s presidency suggested his broad immigration crackdown was hurting industries and constituencies he does not want to lose.” (via)
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Two more, from the religious fringe.
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 13 Jun 2025: David Barton’s Defense of ICE Actions in LA is as Wrong as His History Lessons
Of course, Barton defends this stuff! By claiming ICE targets only criminals. Which is demonstrably untrue.
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Another item about why the Christian extremists are dangerous people. They are caught up in a Revelation fantasy of imminent end-times, and so they *welcome* chaos and war — as long as Israel is on their side.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 13 Jun 2025: Shane Vaughn Sings In Celebration That Israel’s Attack On Iran Is A Sign Of The End Times
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One more item, on the theme of “what if the press covered the US the way it covers other countries.” All I have is this image, from Fb.
