Donald Trump Jr. the next day tweeted a picture of his 4-year-old daughter in a Halloween costume, ostensibly to illustrate the downsides of alternative economic systems. “I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to [sic] early to teach her about socialism.”
.. The president appears to get all his news and policy advice from “Fox & Friends,” a morning show that traffics in unsubstantiated rumor and echo-chamber thinking. On Twitter, he retweets bogus crime statistics and memes from alt-right message boards... We’re in the era of the chain-letter administration... Instead of justifying policy through facts and data (which are being deleted from government websites as we speak), the administration and its allies rely on viral stories and dubious parables to inform the public. And while allegory, anecdote and analogy can be useful in explaining complex policy issues, this administration uses them in all the worst ways... Except, that’s not socialism. The term has a specific meaning: government control of the means of production and of the distribution of goods and services. It’s not the same thing as coerced sharing... But the story conveniently elided both the mathematics of income distribution and Trump’s original promise that tax reform would focus on helping the middle class rather than the wealthy... Trump Jr.’s socialism tweet is meant to darken the public perception of any sort of redistribution, associating it with stealing candy from babies rather than undergirding a functioning health insurance system or social-welfare programs to help the less fortunate.Sanders’s beer story was less an explanation of how taxation works than an attempt to garner sympathy for the wealthy. The end goal is to persuade anyone listening in from the middle class not to grumble when the tax cut for those in higher brackets is larger than for them.
.. When all news is fake and all reporting is leaks and lies, people still need to be informed. That vacuum is filled by folk wisdom shared by family and friends, or rumors and information shortcuts circulated by those who seem as though they’re in the know.