|
 |
Politics and Culture in Plain Talk.
Subscribe for free to get straight-shooting commentary, zero buzzwords, and just enough humor from someone who’s writing what you’re thinking and don’t dare say.
 |
Boys will be boys. Locker room talk. All that jazz. All that stuff that harkens back to the Jim Crow South or Charlottesville, 2017, and young men marching with tiki torches: “You will not replace us . . . you will not replace us . . . Jews will not replace us.” It is so surreal and happens only under a very particular set of circumstances, or the general circumstance of MAGA in charge. Make that Republicans in charge, because my Republican representatives in Washington, DC are fine with all of this. Their silence is consent. Or is it repressed celebration?
Only under the current regime could my Ground News search for “Coast Guard” lead to swastikas and nooses.
 |
One of my sons-in-law is a Coast Guard officer. If you see him with a tiki torch, then you are at a lu’au. He and my daughter will not be decorating their Christmas tree with shiny swastikas and ribbon nooses. There won’t be an artificial burning cross at the top of their tree. They are with the Coast Guard, not the Patriot Front.
I hope it won’t be potentially divisive of me to take a look at the story with 182 sources instead of the 51-source story about the Coast Guard seizing ten tons of cocaine. Coast Guard leadership could have taken a lesson from Elon Musk’s experiment with making Grok, his A.I. chatbot on the site formerly known as Twitter, less woke. Grok then proceeded to call itself “MechaHitler” and spew antisemitic comments. It was not a public relations coup. Neither is pooh-poohing nooses and swastikas, it turns out. People are funny that way: If you mow a lawn and then plant a burning cross on it, no one notices what a fine job you did of edging and blowing the grass clippings off of the sidewalk.
 |
How about a quick summary of the facts before anyone jumps to conclusions? As I have said before, Ground News doesn’t claim to be unbiased; they make news organizations’ biases transparent. They are not a news organization themselves. One of the things I love about them is that they provide a bullet-point summary on each story in which they channel their inner Joe Friday and stick to the facts.¹ They also provide a link readers can use to report anything they think is wrong with the summary.
 |
The summary is great for me because I can get the big picture without going down a Pete Hegseth rabbit hole, which is where bloodhounds would lead you if misogyny and racism had a scent. Someone who takes exception to Hegseth being referred to as “Defense Secretary” instead of “Secretary of War” could click on the “Does this summary seem wrong?” link but should keep in mind that it is still legally the Department of Defense. (See also: Gulf of Mexico.)
Oh, jeepers! Where to go for an interesting take? I like to start on the right side of the Ground News bias distribution chart. Farthest to the right, we have Twitchy and The Thinking Conservative. (Source names pop up when I hover over the icons.)
 |
The Twitchy article is a gold mine if you teach a media literacy class and are looking for examples of logical fallacies. No surprise that Ground News gives them a low factuality rating.
 |
Strawman fallacy:
Grateful Calvin on Titchy:
“Yesterday, The Washington Post published a completely ridiculous article about how the US Coast Guard under the Trump administration was no longer prohibiting swastikas and other symbols associated with racial or other types of hatred.”
What the Washington Post actually reported:
“Exclusive: The U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify the swastika, nooses and the Confederate flag as hate symbols.
The military service drafted a new policy that classifies them as ‘potentially divisive.’”
The Post did not claim that the Coast Guard was “no longer prohibiting” those symbols.
Calvin’s article is mostly a pile of non sequiturs and ad hominem attacks, but such are the emotional outbursts of the traumatized right. The truth is that the Coast Guard did soften its language on swastikas, nooses, and other symbols of hate. It was an unforced error brought on by a culture of callousness in the executive branch and especially within the Department of Homeland Security.
The Hill—which Ground News rates as center biased and gives a high factuality rating—reported the Coast Guard and Homeland Security’s denials of the Washington Post story. The Hill’s headline is also less specific and carries DHS’s water in reframing the story compared to the Ground News headline.
 |
 |
My favorite is this denial from Tricia McLaughlin on X:
 |
But since then, we have this story:
 |
Tricia! Tricia! Tricia! The Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs should have known better. Not everybody is going to swallow your lies like Grateful Calvin over on Twitchy.
Grateful Calvin and Tricky Tricia are probably not grateful for Ground News, but I am. I never would have found Calvin without it, and now he might star in somebody’s media literacy class. Calvin and Tricia are stuck in an information silo where bias in their news stories distorts their understanding. It can happen to the best of us, which is why having a tool like Ground News to lay bare the biases and contextualize coverage is so useful. Punching Up readers can get 40% off the Ground News unlimited-access Vantage plan (what I have) using my link, groundnews.com/punch or by clicking the button below.
I hope you are having a joyous holiday season and that I don’t have to write a future post about Pete Hegseth wearing a mistletoe belt buckle to the Pentagon Christmas party, though that does not seem far out of the realm of possibility.
Joe Friday was a very straight-laced detective played by Jack Webb on Dragnet. He never actually said, “Just the facts, ma’am,” but he did say things very close to that.
You’re currently a free subscriber to Trygve’s Substack. For the full experience, including access to the archives, upgrade your subscription.
| ||||||||||
