Quora-Dumped Thoughts

Closing my EverNote

…account. Here’s what I saved.

Obama’s Team Arrests

Sid Plait, Retired, but not dead. (yet) (2017-present) - Answered Feb 1

How many of Obama’s team were arrested and convicted compared to Trump’s?

There are some really sad responses here. One simply says:

O - 6

T - 0

This shows us how bad the US’s education system truly is, especially in math. Of course, it could be that answer was simply backwards and a mistake. The original answer, well documented and written, shows that there were no (as in, “none”, “zip”, “zero”,” nada”, “not one”, “zilch”) Obama administration officials convicted of any crimes.

This is remarkable, given that, over a ten year period, the hundreds of millions of dollars and wasted time in, what? - nine investigations of one person by Republicans who desperately needed her to go away found, ummm, let me see.

(I have that number laying around here somewhere. Oh, I found it! )

None! No proof of any wrongdoing!

(The Republicans, while not able to find proof of any of the charges, still won the day. The election of 2016 showed us that.) The ten years I mentioned are the eight of the actual Obama administration and the first two since he left office. Then, you turn around and look back at the administration of just the last two years and see the destruction of the administration the Republicans voted into office.

I ask a question I have asked for many years now:

“How is it that, through all of those investigations, with the best investigators the GOP could put together to run all those investigations of one person (!) found that there was nothing to convict her of?”

Any critical thinker on the planet can claim that the Republican committees running the investigation (remember, these were the very best teams the GOP could put together!) were so incompetent that they were completely unable to find evidence of any serious wrongdoing!

Well, either that or the Democrats were so skilled at subterfuge that we managed to erase all evidence of wrongdoing.

So, which is it?

Incompetence of the GOP or the extremely organized, intelligent workings of the Democrats?

Or both?

Either way, the GOP comes out looking incompetent.

And the proof of that is plain to everyone of sound mind to see.

Oh, and, by the way, those millions of dollars spent on the investigations? Did that money come from the coffers of the Republican Party?

Nah. They stole it from the Mexicans.

After all, those south-of-the-border types make great scapegoats, don’t they?

ADDENDUM:

I see that Zahra Ardehali has shut down comments not only on his response, but mine, too. Seems cowardly, to me.

So, here is my response to him:

I am clearly qualified to be part of this discussion and to comment on your answer.

You are correct. President Obama did not come under any investigation such as Robert Mueller has brought against the current administration.

And??

There are really good reasons why that’s true. Why don’t you provide some evidence in your charges against our 44th President?

Congress was lousy with Republicans during those eight years, and they held control for six of those years. Not one of the charges brought against President Obama and his administration came out of hearings.

Not one.

So? Does that mean that the Republicans in Congress were so inept that they couldn’t find any charge that stuck? Seems so.

Could the Democratic Party have been so intelligent that with all those things the administration was charged with, they could find nothing?

Actually, I don’t believe either is true. I believe that the Obama administration was pretty much crime free. Occam’s Razor comes into play here. I don’t believe the GOP were lousy investigators. There are some pretty smart people with a lot of money running that show. I don’t believe the DP was that clever, to manage to hide ALL evidence of any crimes committed. I don’t care how deep the “Deep State” is.

(By the way, that term, “deep state” is a great invention! All you have to do is say those words, and I hear the GOP supplicants barking at the door. VERY clever!)

Your man, currently running this country into the ground, came to the office of the President of the United States with a criminal history! Almost immediately upon taking office, or maybe it was being elected, he was found guilty of fraud! (Well, not quite. He bought his way out. No conviction. Oh, well. I understand there are hundreds or thousands of lawsuits pending against him.)

So, explain to me your charges, with citations please from reputable sources, and I’ll listen. If you’re correct in your charges, I’ll concede.

Which is VERY gracious of me, because I suspect none of you, starting with Mr. Ardehali, would do that if I provided proof of their administrations crimes.

You would likely just fall into the party line - “Benghazi!”and “E-mails!”

Trump Gone Too Far

Exactly what would Trump need to do for his devout MAGA base to say he’s gone too far, crossed the line and choose away from DJT and admit he is corrupt?

Well, what do we have so far?

Raping women? Trumpians are fine with it.

Wanting to fuck his daughter? Trumpians are fine with it.

Bragging about sexually assaulting married women? Trumpians are fine with it.

Stealing money from a charity for kids with cancer? Trumpians are fine with it.

Stealing money from recent high-school graduates to run a fake university? Trumpians are fine with it.

Insulting a Vietnam vet who was captured and tortured? Trumpians are fine with it.

Insulting military members by calling them suckers and losers? Trumpians are fine with it.

Insulting the family of a US Army Captain killed in Iraq? Trumpians are fine with it.

Mocking a disabled reporter? Trumpians are fine with it.

Stealing money from the military to build a wall that fell down the first time it got rained on?

Trumpians are fine with it.

Calling the Covid pandemic a “Democratic hoax”? Trumpians are fine with it.

Taking credit for a VA bill that was actually signed by Obama? Trumpians are fine with it.

Giving huge tax cuts to large corporations so they could buy back their stock and build more plants overseas? Trumpians are fine with it.

Raising the national debt 34%? Trumpians are fine with it.

Putting children in cages, then forgetting where the parents are? Trumpians are fine with it.

Saying he wants to “terminate the Constitution”? Trumpians are fine with it.

Attempting to overthrow the government? Trumpians are fine with it.

Tried to blackmail the president of Ukraine to hurt Biden’s election chances?

Trumpians are fine with it.

Promised to become a dictator if re-elected? Trumpians are fine with it.

Promised to incarcerate his political opponents if re-elected? Trumpians are fine with it.

Sadly, I don’t think there is anything he could say or do that would alienate his MAGA base. They’re in a cult, think he’s Jesus, and nothing he does or says will sway them.

Trump’s Plans for a Coup Are Now Public

Some of the plots to overturn the election happened in secret. But don’t forget the ones that unfolded in the open.

By Adam Serwer

From The Atlantic.

Last year, John Eastman, whom CNN describes as an attorney working with Donald Trump’s legal team, wrote a preposterous memo outlining how then–Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election by fiat or, failing that, throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans could install Trump in office despite his loss to Joe Biden. The document, which was first reported by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, is a step-by-step plan to overthrow the government of the United States through a preposterous interpretation of legal procedure.

Pence apparently took the idea seriously — so seriously, in fact, that, according to Woodward and Costa, former Vice President Dan Quayle had to talk him out of it. Prior to November, the possibility of Trump attempting a coup was seen as the deranged fever dream of crazed liberals. But as it turns out, Trump and his advisers had devised explicit plans for reversing Trump’s loss. Republican leaders deliberately stoked election conspiracy theories they knew to be false, in order to lay a political pretext for invalidating the results. Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.

1. Trump tried to pressure secretaries of state to not certify.

Trump held early leads in vote counts in several states—not because he was ever actually ahead but because of discrepancies between when states count mail-in ballots and Election Day ballots. This so-called blue shift was written about long in advance of Election Day, and was partially the result of Trump’s own attacks on voting by mail. Nevertheless, Trump made this a key part of his election conspiracy theories (as many predicted he would), insisting that Democrats were somehow inserting fraudulent ballots into the vote count in the presidential election (something they apparently forgot to do in close House and Senate races, in which Democrats did worse than polls had anticipated). To help substantiate these falsehoods, the Trump campaign attempted to pressure secretaries of state to either not certify the results or “find” fraudulent ballots. In some states, spurred by the president’s fictions, pro-Trump mobs showed up at vote-counting sites and attempted to disrupt the proceedings.

2. Trump tried to pressure state legislatures to overturn the results.

Trump personally attempted to coerce state legislators to overturn election results in a few states that voted for Biden, on the dubious legal theory that such legislatures could simply ignore the results of the popular vote in their own states. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, Trump publicly urged Republican-controlled statehouses to “intervene to declare him the winner” and tweeted, “Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself.” As my colleague Barton Gellman reported last year, the Trump campaign discussed “contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

David A. Graham: Trump’s coup attempt didn’t start on January 6

3. Trump tried to get the courts to overturn the results.

The embattled attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, filed an absurd lawsuit demanding that the Supreme Court void the election results in Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, four states Biden won. The large majority of the Republican delegation in Congress, as well as nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general, supported this attempt to get the conservative-controlled Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election results by fiat. The justices declined to crown Trump—but the amount of support this bid received from Republican elected officials is itself alarming.

As part of this effort, we can include the baseless “Kraken” lawsuits, filled with conspiracy theories about vote changes. Trump attempted to coerce the Justice Department into providing him with a pretext to overturn the results, but his attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to do so. Had DOJ leadership acquiesced, it would have lent credibility to Trump’s other corrupt schemes to reverse his loss. In a meeting with the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, according to contemporaneous notes taken by Rosen’s deputy, Trump said, “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me.”

4. Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the results.

It is hard to pick the most ridiculous means of executing a coup, but insisting that the vice president has the power to unilaterally decide who won an election is up there. Trump publicly hounded Pence to reject the results prior to the traditionally ceremonial electoral-vote count in Congress, and Pence reportedly took that demand seriously enough to seek advice from Dan Quayle on the matter, “asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges,” according to Costa and Woodward. That this got so far is profoundly disturbing, but even more disturbing is Eastman’s memo, which shows that the Trump team had thought very deliberately about how this scheme would work.

According to the memo, Pence could refuse to certify the results in particular states, giving Trump more electoral votes than Biden, and Pence would declare Trump the victor. If Democrats objected (as surely they would), the vote would then go to the House. Because the Constitution gives one vote to each state in disputed presidential elections, and the Republicans were the majority in 26 of 50 state delegations, the Democratic House majority would be unable to prevent Republicans from throwing the election to Trump. The election-law expert Ned Foley writes that the scheme would likely not have prevailed, given the Democrats’ ability to prevent a joint session, but that seems almost beside the point, which is that a sitting president and vice president were considering how to keep themselves in power following an election they lost.

5. When all else failed, Trump tried to get a mob to overturn the results.

At the rally prior to the vote count in Congress, Trump urged the crowd to act, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The explicit goal of the rally and subsequent riot was to pressure Congress, and Pence in particular, into overturning the election results. Trump told his followers, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”

This scheme didn’t work on its own, but it certainly could have helped one of the others: Imagine if Pence had gone along with Eastman’s absurd plan, and a mob had been present at the Capitol to help enforce the decision and menace lawmakers who tried to oppose it — then what? As it stands, the mob ransacked the Capitol and forced lawmakers to flee. Had the mob succeeded at reaching any actual legislators, the consequences could have been catastrophic.

Trump was impeached for his incitement of the January 6 mob, but Senate Republicans dutifully prevented him from being convicted and barred from holding office ever again.

Virginia Heffernan: Trump’s campaign to overturn the election was inane

Those who attempted to subvert democracy have faced few political or legal consequences. As is typical, some rioters are facing prosecution while the elites who tried to overthrow the election through more bureaucratic or procedural means remain in good standing with their peers. The failure to impose accountability for an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order will encourage further such efforts.

Meanwhile, those rare Republicans who did stand up against this attempt to destroy American democracy are the only ones dealing with real political consequences from their party, facing primary challenges, being forced into retirement, or being stripped of their leadership positions. Republican officials who were unwilling to use their office to overturn the election results are seeing challenges from Trump devotees who will, should the opportunity arise again.

If Trump had succeeded, many of those downplaying the former president’s actions would today be rationalizing an American coup. No, you see, George Washington and James Madison intended for Donald Trump to be president for life. Read the Constitution.

At the core of these attempts is a dangerous ideology—the presumption that because Trump supporters represent “Real Americans”, the will of democratic majorities can be disregarded. This does not mean that the Republican Party is incapable of winning majorities, but that winning them is irrelevant to whether or not the party’s Trumpist faithful believe they are entitled to wield power. Win or lose, their claim to be the sole authentic inheritors of the American tradition means they are the only ones who can legitimately govern and are therefore justified in seizing power by any means. This is the modern incarnation of an old ideology, one that has justified excluding certain groups of Americans from the suffrage on the basis that their participation is an affront to the political process.

American traditions of unfreedom always represent themselves as democracy’s protectors, rather than its undertakers, and this one is no different. If Biden were allowed to take office, Eastman insisted in a longer version of his memo, “we will have ceased to be a self-governing people.”

The catastrophe is not only that Trump tried to overthrow an election. It is that so many Americans were cheering him on.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Project 2025 Goals

A lot of the writers were from Trump’s past administration. These are a few of it’s provisions and where in the document they are located. This is a partial list of proposed changes by Project 2025, with chapter and page references:

• Privatize Social Security (c22, p715)

• Privatize veterans’ healthcare (c20, p635)

• Privatize infrastructure projects (c19, p555)

• Privatize the Federal Aviation Administration (c19, p565)

• Reduce federal disaster relief programs (c16, p610)

• Reduce funding for federal research programs (c12, p415)

• Decrease regulations in healthcare (c14, p450)

• Reduce funding for public health programs (c14, p455)

• Repeal the Affordable Care Act (c14, p460)

• Promote free-market healthcare (c14, p465)

• Dismantle the Department of Education (c11, p365)

• Reduce federal student aid (c11, p385)

• Increase private sector role in public education (c11, p390)

• Limit federal involvement in technology standards (c28, p850)

• Reduce federal government intervention in various sectors (c1, p25)

• Cut federal support for renewable energy projects (c12, p405)

• Reduce regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency (c13, p425)

• Withdraw from international climate agreements (c13, p430)

• Reduce environmental regulations on businesses (c13, p440)

• Promote energy production on federal lands (c16, p600)

• Limit the jurisdiction of federal courts (c1, p40)

• Decrease the size of the federal workforce (c3, p95)

• Restructure the Department of Homeland Security (c5, p165)

• Reform the Department of Justice (c17, p565)

• Repeal Dodd-Frank financial regulations (c27, p800)

• Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (c27, p815)

• Repeal net neutrality regulations (c28, p845)

• Eliminate the Department of Commerce (c21, p660)

• Limit federal involvement in local policing (c17, p575)

• Reduce business regulations (c18, p520)

• Reduce federal oversight of labor standards (c18, p530)

• Implement a flat tax system (c22, p700)

• Lower corporate tax rates (c22, p725)

• Restrict the powers of the Federal Reserve (c24, p770)

Enter Authoritarianism, fascism. I didn’t write this, another member of Quora did. I salute their hard work.

Health Insurance, US-Style

Alessandro Ricci · Lives in İtaly (1975–present)var(–separator)Nov 20

Why can’t the rest of the world understand that we Americans would much prefer to pay more for our own health insurance as long as we don’t have to pay for someone else’s treatment & even some of them are not interested in insurance?

Because it’s so blatantly idiotic that we can’t fathom an entire country being that bad at math. Let’s try with an analogy.

You go to a restaurant, and order a great hamburger, exactly the way you want it. It costs 10$.

Now the guy ringing your order tells you they have a new promotion: you can pay your very same hamburgfer 8$ instead of 10$, but we will also give the same hamburger to a homeless man.

Here’s the catch. Most people in the world would jump on it: I get a cut AND I get to help others? Where do I sign?

You, instead, would rather pay more as long as your fellow men suffer.

See why we can’t figure you out? I can think of no reason, except classist spite, for one to prefer 10$ over 8$.

And in fact, the difference is much higher: so high that you can fly yourself to a european private (not paid by taxes that is) hospital, get your procedures, and fly back while still saving money.

But hey, you do what you want with your money.

Just don’t complain if the USA has 2 and a half more deaths by preventable disease per capita (238 per 100k) than Italy (91 per 100k), or Colombia (108 per 100k)

Who will Pick Crops

Russ Riutta · Former Tactical Communications Systems Operator at 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (1982–1984) · Mar 17

Why do liberals believe that if we deport the illegals nobody will pick crops? The reason illegals are hired in agriculture is because legal citizens are not hired, even if they want to work. As soon illegals are unavailable, citizens will be hired

Hi there, Janet. I have a question for you, Janet: Have you ever been to any of the major produce growing regions of the United States? I ask because I have. I used to be a sales consultant for a large foodservice distributor and I won a trip for selling more produce than anyone else in my division. The trip was sponsored by a company called Markon. We visited the produce growing region around Salinas, California, where the ground is extremely fertile thanks to the deep soil deposits there. I stood at the end of a strawberry field that was so long you couldn’t see the other end due to the curvature of the earth, Janet. I visited lettuce fields, celery fields, where those workers spent hours under a blazing hot sun engaged in back breaking labor. Picking lettuce and celery isn’t an easy job, Janet. I also noticed that all the workers had every piece of skin covered to protect it from the sun. The owners of those fields were also present, and they told us that they hired many people from other countries because, for the most part, they were the only ones willing to be hired. You’re right when you say those jobs are open to anyone, Janet, but your assumption that legal citizens would take those jobs if “illegals” weren’t doing them is total nonsense. The truth is this, Janet: The people working in those fields are working for a shit wage. Most of them don’t have anything we’d consider a “benefit”. The supervisors got some benefits, but that’s about it.

I visited those produce fields in September of 2005. Illegal immigration was just as much of an issue then as it is now, Janet. Who was the President who was letting all those illegals into the country, Janet? Who was “letting those immigrants come here and steal jobs from American citizens” as I recently heard another right winger ask? It sure as shit wasn’t Joe Biden, Janet. In fact, if I remember right, it was George W. Bush, affectionately known as “Dubya” to some. In 2006, illegal immigration was still very much an issue, Janet, with an estimated 11,000,000 “illegal immigrants” in the US.

“I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.

Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.

[Read: How the pandemic will end]

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

MORE BY DAVID FRUM

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No Empathy, Only Anger

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What If the President Gets Sick?

DAVID FRUM

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.

For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.

Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 and March 21.

[Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over]

Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.

Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory. Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.

This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country.

It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond.Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.

[Read: All the president’s lies about the coronavirus]

At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”

Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:

Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

Trump and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an excuse.

But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason. The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran. Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over Tehran on January 8.

The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18, Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping, The Washington Post reported.

Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed in Washington State.

Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the coronavirus as something external to the United States. He tweeted on January 22: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

[David Frum: No empathy, only anger ]

Impeachment somehow failed to distract Trump from traveling to Davos, where in a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he promised: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”

If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.

Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.

On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again, you know … that I closed the borders very early.”

Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.

The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on January 30, but recommended against travel restrictions. On January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February 2, the Italian ban applied immediately. Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump.

And Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.

At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”

That same afternoon, Trump’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to combatting the virus, but to the demands of his own ego.

The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally Roger Stone. On March 2, Trump withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller; McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. As the epigrammist Windsor Mann tweeted that same night: “Trump’s impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”

[Read: The pandemic will cleave America in two]

Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.

“Best usa economy IN HISTORY!” Trump tweeted on February 11. On February 15, Trump shared a video from a Senate GOP account, tweeting: “Our booming economy is drawing Americans off the sidelines and BACK TO WORK at the highest rate in 30 years!”

Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program February 24. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

[Read: Why does the president keep pushing a malaria drug?]

“We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.”

On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.:

The reason you’re … seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours … This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.

That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”

Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery. During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.

[Read: The four possible timelines for life returning to normal]

“If we were doing a bad job, we should also be criticized. But we have done an incredible job,” Trump said on February 27. “We’re doing a great job with it,” he told Republican senators on March 10. “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning,” he tweeted on March 18.

For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.

Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.

Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus as “their new hoax.” That line was so shocking, it has crowded out awareness of everything else Trump said that day. Yet those other statements are, if possible, even more relevant to understanding the trouble he brought upon the country.

[Read: The two states where Trump’s COVID-19 response could backfire]

Trump does not speak clearly. His patterns of speech betray a man with guilty secrets to hide, and a beclouded mind. Yet we can discern, through the mental fog, that Trump had absorbed some crucial facts. By February 28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length:

Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.

One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.

But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement.

So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA. It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to 100,000 people a year die.

And so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.

On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media’s fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”

By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first cases and halt their further spread—that opportunity had already been lost. It was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in sufficient time.

But on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.

[Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: Trump’s allies know he has failed]

So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.

On February 28, Eric Trump urged Americans to go “all in” on the weakening stock market.

Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

But the facade of denial was already cracking.

Through early march, financial markets declined and then crashed. Schools closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.

The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.

[Read: Why we’re running out of masks]

The White House had dissolved the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics? Not me, Trump said on March 13. Maybe somebody else in the administration did it, but “I didn’t do it … I don’t know anything about it. You say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”

Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call.

Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.

On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”

Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29.

Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009.

At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own separate stockpile. “They have to work that out. What they should do is they should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never happen.”

Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’”

[Fred Milgrim: A New York doctor’s warning]

Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.

As his medical advisers sought to dissuade Trump from proceeding with his musing about reopening the country by Easter, April 12, Deborah Birx—the White House’s coronavirus-response coordinator—appeared on the evangelical CBN network to deliver this abject flattery: “[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit.”

Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.

The weeks of Trump-administration denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.

[Mehrsa Baradaran: The U.S. should just send checks—but won’t]

In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French officials accuse the Trump administration of diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven facilities for 70 years.

Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead. Perhaps the only political leader in Canada ever to say a good word about Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, expressed disgust at an April 3 press conference. “I just can’t stress how disappointed I am at President Trump … I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime minister or president from any country ever again.” Ford argued for a future of Canadian self-sufficiency. Trump’s nationalist selfishness is proving almost as contagious as the virus itself—and could ultimately prove as dangerous, too.

As the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.

[Kori Schake: The imperial presidency comes to a sudden halt]

He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining. Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. An Arkansas pastor told The Washington Post of congregants “ready to lick the floor” to support the president’s claim that there is nothing to worry about. On March 15, the Trump-loyal governor of Oklahoma tweeted a since-deleted photo of himself and his children at a crowded restaurant buffet. “Eating with my kids and all my fellow Oklahomans at the @CollectiveOKC. It’s packed tonight!” Those who took their cues from Trump and the media who propagandized for him, and all Americans, will suffer for it.

Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.

Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.

Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.

Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

A Court Case

Guy With A Tie · Attorney (2013–present) · Feb 28

Some Trump voters are telling me no court has ever examined evidence of 2020 vote fraud and all the cases were dismissed on procedural grounds. Is this true?

That’s misleading at best. Think of this way:

Court: You must present evidence to support your claims.

Trump: People are saying—very important people, great people—that there was voting fraud. So much fraud everywhere, it’s terrible. They come to me with tears in their eyes. They say “Mr. President, what can you do about the voting fraud?”

Court: That’s hearsay. I should have been clearer. You must present “admissible” evidence.

Trump: Here’s a handwritten declaration from one of my supporters who swears she saw voting fraud.

Court: Unsworn declarations… look this is kind of bugging me, but it’s “voter” fraud, not “voting” fraud. Anyway, unsworn declarations are not admissible evidence.

Trump: Okay, here’s 500 people who signed a petition saying they saw Trump ballots being dumped into the trash.

Court: Great. Where is the chain of custody for this petition?

Trump: My people had it.

Court: That’s hearsay. Where is the documentation showing how this petition was generated? How the signatures were collected? The underlying identity of the signees?

Trump: So many people saw voting fraud, and you’re… these are good people… you’re trying to silence their vote.

Court: Sir, this is an evidentiary hearing.

Trump: — silence their vote by suppressing their voting fraud evidence.

Court: Mr. Trump, do you have any other evidence to support your claims?

Trump: Yes. Here’s my good friend Rudy Giuliani. Tell them Rudy.

Giuliani: Your honor. Look how many people came to Trump rallies. Biden can’t get that many people at his rallies. How can that many people vote for him?

Court: That’s hearsay and also wildly irrelevant.

Giuliani: Just look at the TV! Look at all those people who love Donald Trump. They don’t love Biden. Ipso facto fraud.

Court: Okay, I’ve heard enough. Defendant’s motion for summary judgment is granted for your failure to present any evidence in support of your claim.

Steal Our Jobs

Russ Riutta · Mar 17

I want to add something to my answer that everyone reading it needs to keep in mind.

Nobody considers what those people are being told that would have them literally walking here from another continent, many of them taking their young children with them. What are they being told by the coyotes who play on their ignorance and their desperation, on their fear that would compel them to make such an incredibly dangerous journey? And how utterly f*cked up must it be where they live that they’re willing to risk their lives and the lives of their children to escape it? The vast majority of these people are just like YOU. They love their kids. They worry about how to pay the bills. They have hopes, dreams, wants, needs. And their blood is just as red as yours.

Those people aren’t coming here to “steal our jobs”. And the ones who risk life and limb to get here, then wait patiently for their turn to appt for asylum, eventually being allowed into the country to wait for their asylum hearing ARE NOT IN THIS COUNTRY ILLEGALLY!! OUR LAWS STATE WE HAVE TO ALLOW THEM ENTRY WHILE THEY WAIT. This is common knowledge to every single Republican in Congress. This is also no secret to Donald Trump. When Trump was in office, he knew damn well what the REAL problems were, as well as what needed to be done to solve them. Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, they would’ve gladly gone along with whatever their Fuhrer demanded. What did Trump do? Did he ask Congress for the funds to hire more border patrol agents? Did he ask for funds for more immigration court judges so hearings could be held faster and decisions rendered faster, getting the bad guys out and the good guys straightened out? Did Trump ask them to make the changes in our immigration laws that he knew damn well were the cause of the whole mess? NOPE. All Trump wanted to do was talk about his wall that Mexico was gonna pay for. You MAGA fans would do well to take some advice: Before you take your cult leader or his enablers in Congress or his ministers or propaganda in the Radical Right media at their word, maybe educate yourself on the issue using objective, non-media sources. All of the information you need in order to know the real story is right at your fingertips, via the Internet, where you can access info from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Immigration and Naturalization, not to mention local sources of info from the border area. LEARN HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF ON THE ISSUE. LEARN HOW TO BE OBJECTIVE INSTEAD OF BASING YOUR BELIEFS AND OPINIONS ON HEARING ONLY ONE EXTREMELY DISTORTED AND INACCURATE SIDE OF THE STORY. Fox News isn’t even a real news source, and Sean Hannity and the rest aren’t real journalists who operate by some basic ethics and standards. They make millions of dollars by lying to your faces every night with no regard or concern for what might happen to you if you act based on the lies they’re telling you. They’re putting their profits and ratings before YOUR BEST INTERESTS. This has been proven beyond dispute more than once.

And finally: Learn how to be empathetic. Learn what’s really going on in the countries these people are risking their lives to escape, and put yourself in their shoes. Put YOUR KIDS in the shoes of their kids. Learn how to think and behave like a decent human being instead of a selfish, ignorant, small minded judgmental mean-spirited racist asshole. Show those fleeing poverty, starvation, war and gang violence the same compassion, kindness and empathy YOU would want to be shown. They’re not “poisoning the blood of our country” like that racist, hateful pathological lying neo-Nazi likes to say, demonizing and dehumanizing people who have more courage and humanity than that sorry sack of feces could ever hope to possess. Those people are willing to die just to get here and work 3 low paying jobs if that’s what it takes to get it done because they believe in America, which means they believe in US-and THAT means they believe in YOU. They’re giving US the benefit of the doubt in trusting we are the nation, the people, that we want the world to believe we are.

I can’t think of a better time to prove it, or a better way to prove we are. If you’re still with me, thank you for giving me some of your time and attention. Have a nice night. :)

Frozen Embryos

Bring Back Democracy · Answered by Steven Haddock · Feb 23

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are ‘children’ under state law. Do you foresee any unintended consequences to this ruling?

There was a good joke going around today that a couple claimed 23 frozen embryos as dependents on their taxes, and then re-filed their taxes going back to when the embryos were created.

Also, would frozen embryos be eligible for child tax credits, or child assistance payments?

Can you now take out a life insurance policy on a frozen embryo? Can you create a trust for the benefit of a frozen embryo? Can you place property in the name of a frozen embryo? You can do all of that for a child, even an infant. Can you leave money in a trust to an embryo in a will? You can do that for an infant child.

If an embryo is implanted and is born, and the embryo was created more than 21 years ago, can it start drinking right away? How about driving? How about entering into binding contracts? Has it reached the “age of reason” (7 years old) at which point it can be charged with crimes?

Trump is just a criminal

Dennis J Frailey - Semi-Retired Software Engineer, specialist in management issues · 8mo

I know this will be an unpopular question, but has it ever dawned on Trump supporters that maybe Trump is just a criminal? Saying you’re innocent doesn’t make it a fact. He was corrupt long before he got into politics.

Most Trump supporters that I know have very legitimate gripes. Many feel that the world has abandoned them or passed them by. Some feel that the morals they grew up with are no longer widely supported. Others believe that the world is changing too fast and not for the better. Most of them long for a return to the conditions of the past, where they were more comfortable and, often, where they built their lives and careers. Unfortunately, such people are frequent targets of grifters and con men. Trump is a very accomplished con man. If you read Bob Woodward’s book “Fear”, you will see how Trump identified a group of people with legitimate gripes and molded his public persona around them so that he could convince them he was their savior and get their loyalty.

Many who do not support Trump already know that he is a con man. His track record for decades, in the New York area, is famous for his shady deals, cheating on wives, and stiffing suppliers and contractors. The problem with Trump supporters is that they don’t want to believe the truth about Trump, so they just refuse to consider that what people who know Trump well say about him might be true. Even after it has been proven in court, they will buy into Trump’s claim that he is a victim of a witch hunt or some sort of biased government agency.

This is a well-known phenomenon that psychologists call “confirmation bias”. The idea is that if you want to believe something, you tend to discount evidence that goes against your belief and over-rate evidence that supports your belief. This phenomenon explains why con men, snake oil salesmen, populist politicians and grifters have succeeded throughout human history. Mark Twain famously commented on this, when he said “it’s easier to con someone than to convince them they’ve been conned”.

The Dr. Phil TV show often features guests who have been conned over the internet. In the typical situation, someone believes a person they met on the internet, but never actually met in person, is in love with them and will marry them as soon as they escape from wherever they are (usually they are purportedly stuck in some foreign country and unable to get out without bribing a lot of people, so they ask for money, and the poor victim sends them money). Some of these victims have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to their “lover”. Dr. Phil sends private detectives to search them out, usually finding that they are fraudsters, operating out of Nigeria or some other country where they are beyond the reach of US law enforcement. B ut even after he presents the victims with solid evidence of the fraud, some of them still don’t believe that they have been cheated. My point here is the same as that of Mark Twain. People who have been conned simply don’t want to admit it, so they refuse to consider the evidence seriously.

This is why it has often never dawned on Trump supporters that he is a criminal.

Many who argue for autocracy and against democracy, such as Vladimir Putin, have used this very issue to argue against democratic forms of government. It is too easy, they argue, for a populist politician to get out the old con man’s playbook, tell people what they want to hear, and convince people that he or she is their savior. Too many people will vote for what they have been conned into believing instead of for what is actually best for their country. Let us hope that these critics of democratic forms of government will be proven wrong in the case of the USA.

What bothers me the most about this whole thing is not Donald Trump or his supporters. It is the Republican politicians who have chosen to support Donald Trump, or to fail to speak out against him, knowing full well what a fraud he is. Evidence from insiders tells us that, when speaking in private, many of them recognize Trump’s incompetence and how dangerous he is for the country. But they don’t want to lose the votes of Trump’s supporters. These politicians are supposed to be leaders and statesmen — intelligent, competent individuals with integrity. But instead of leading by telling people the truth, they have put more priority on winning elections. Hypocrisy is rampant among politicians, but I’m especially disappointed in what I so often see today among Republican politicians for whom I once had more respect.

Good Things Obama Did

Mark Frampton - April 21

Hey Scott, allow me a moment to give you a little personal history about myself. I did not vote for Obama; either time. I voted Romney and McCain. In 2016, for the first time in my voting history I did not vote Republican and I threw my vote away and voted Johnson (Libertarian) because the Republicans did not have a viable candidate on the ballot. John Kasich was my guy, but I likely would have voted for nearly anyone else short of TeddyC. In 2020 I did not hesitate to vote Democrat as the party had shifted right of center over the years, and the GOP was clearly dead and no longer had any direction. I have no qualms with labelling myself a Democrat at this point, although the label still fits like a new pair of shoes.

With that said, you are asking me name 3 good things that Obama did. I would have to do some research because I gave him little notice until the Trump debacle. My immediate answer would be; 1) economy, 2) economy, and 3) economy. Democrats do not blame GW for the 2007 recession, History does. If you think that is unfair, you are not alone, as you and I agree on that much. The 2007 crash actually had roots stemming back to 1999 when critical portions of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed under Clinton. So, if you want to point fingers at a President for the ‘07 economic crisis it should be Clinton, right? Well, not so fast. Billy did not approve of the repeal, but the Republican congress voted it through, which effectively eliminated the fail-safes that protected the financial markets from the derivative markets. Maybe he could have vetoed, I honestly don’t remember, but if you need to blame something on a Democrat I would run with that… Clinton did not effectively stop the Republicans from another horrible economic decision.

Keep in mind, the economy of the first year of any President’s term is credited to the prior administration. There is very little that a President can do to create an immediate impact on the economy, other than to literally shove money into the pockets of the people. So, 2009 was under GW, 2017 was under Obama, and 2021 will be credited to Trump. Unfortunately for Bush, the 07/08 financial crisis was very much under his watch. You admit that the economy rebounded 2010-2016, but somehow believe Obama is not to credit. The speed of the recovery was astounding due to his actions. Countries around the world lagged well behind, but quickly took note of the steps the U.S. had taken to achieve such a rapid economic response. On top of the recovery, Obama drove new regulations into law under the Dodd-Frank Act. Naysayers (corporate interest groups buying Republican voices) voiced concerns that these regulations would stifle the economy. They didn’t. Could GDP have grown at a faster clip without Frank-Dodd? Absolutely! And the next bubble would have quickly formed.

I could write another day’s worth about this stuff, but I don’t think anyone really wants to read through it, so I will stop. I will give one more tidbit though… one of the weapons the Federal Reserve has available to counter economic recessions is the Prime rate of interest. During the 07/08 crisis, the Prime rate dropped to historic lows in order to stimulate the economy. The Fed spent the last couple years of Obama’s 2nd term slowly working the rate back up, which absolutely slowed economic growth, but it would have been irresponsible not to get the rates back up to ensure that weapon was available for the next inevitable downturn. Trump, on the other hand, immediately started putting huge pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates DURING A PERIOD OF ECONOMIC GROWTH! Are you kidding me? And his lies about his bogus tax cuts helping to reduce the national deficit? Well, Trump inherited roughly $19 trillion in national debt, by the end of 2019 his “efforts” to reduce the national debt resulted in over $23 trillion in debt. This was BEFORE the pandemic was even on the radar, so obviously it inflated even more from there. My point is that Trump’s economy was on a slightly slower trajectory than it was under Obama, but still respectable… until you realize that he bought the economy with a huge injection of debt spending and by strongarming the Fed to irresponsibly lower rates. Disgusting and a failure beyond words.

stubborn Democrats

I haven’t seen these stubborn Democrats you speak of. Maybe they just don’t want to tell you because they think you aren’t smart enough to understand?

But I’ll roll the dice and see if you can read on the fourth grade level or above.

Trade war. This increased the trade deficit, bankrupted American farmers as Russia supplanted the US as the chief importer of soy into China, shuttered almost 2,000 US factories and killed about 300,000 American manufacturing jobs by the end of 2018, drove up production costs, and created shortages.

Tax cuts for billionaires. This is the real pivot point from the Obama economy. In the two years after the tax bill (pre-pandemic), the annual drop in unemployment slowed by two-thirds. The Dow went flat in 2018 ending the longest bull market in American history. By 2019, the Fed was lowering interest rates for the first time since Bush was President to try to boost the lagging economy, and Trump himself complained that they wouldn’t commit to do more to prevent a recession. Border wall. Billions wasted on a pile of scrap that’s already falling over. And he shut down the government for the longest period of time in history because his own party wouldn’t fund it. But the bright side is it did help Democrats take the House as the midterms became a referendum on the wall, and every single Congressional district bordering Mexico went to a candidate who campaigned against the wall (all but one being a Democrat).

Covid. He downplayed the pandemic and refused to do anything the experts recommended. This led to a record deficit as well as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The OPEC deal. In April 2020 with gas prices at their lowest of his failed presidency (but still higher than a year before he took office) Trump threatened to withhold the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia if OPEC, the world’s largest oil producer, didn’t agree to slash production by 25% for two years. By the time that deal ended, gas prices more than doubled, contributing to global inflation that would outlast his presidency.

Afghanistan. It started with an invitation to the Taliban to come to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. And yes that’s so absurd I didn’t believe it at first either. Then he undermined the legitimate Afghan government by negotiating with the Taliban about the future of the country post-occupation. He committed to a withdrawal date about 100 days after he knew he would be out of office and promised and secured the release of 5,000 Taliban terrorists being held prisoner in Afghanistan. Then as one final act of sabotage, five days before leaving office he illegally withdrew 5,000 American troops in violation of the National Defense Authorization Act. And that one terrorist attack that all the Trump cultists wanted to impeach Biden for? Committed by ISIS terrorists that went free when Trump abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria. Is corruption a “policy”? Can we at least acknowledge that he repeatedly violated the Emoluments Clause and the Hatch Act before trying to steal an election? What about being an idiot? Can we at least talk about his plan to rake the forests, redrawing Hurricane maps with a Sharpie, or forgetting which country he bombed?

Oops. Sorry. You said one. But you also said Democrats, and I’m a conservative. So I guess I shouldn’t have answered at all.

Why people hate Trump

What happened that people hate Trump?

Originally Answered: Why do so many hate TRUMP?

Look, I’ve been critical of the Trump presidency these last seven years.

But to be fair, President Trump wasn’t that bad, other than when he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed nearly half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader, believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p—y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head of the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers, held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history, threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, told four Congresswomen of color to “go back to where they came from” even though all four are US citizens and three were born here, hired an advisor that called outright lies “alternative facts,” insulted Steph Curry on Twitter, insulted Meryl Streep on Twitter, insulted Madonna on Twitter, insulted Snoop Dogg on Twitter, insulted Chrissy Teigen on Twitter, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic response, used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government, falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cybersecurity after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID superspreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fucked up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

But other than that…

~ Jack L. Chalker

Well-regulated militia

Alexander Hamilton said a “well-regulated militia” would help safeguard the freedom of the new republic because it would make the creation of a professional, mercenary army “unnecessary.”

Can we please stop pretending that the Second Amendment contains an unfettered right for everyone to buy a gun? It doesn’t, and it never has. The claims made by the small number of extremists, before and after the Orlando, Fla., massacre, are based on a deliberate lie.

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution doesn’t just say Congress shall not infringe the right to “keep and bear arms.” It specifically says that right exists in order to maintain “a well-regulated militia.” Even the late conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia admitted those words weren’t in there by accident. Oh, and the Constitution doesn’t just say a “militia.” It says a “well-regulated” militia.

What did the Founding Fathers mean by that? We don’t have to guess because they told us. In Federalist No. 29 of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton explained at great length precisely what a “well-regulated militia” was, why the Founding Fathers thought we needed one, and why they wanted to protect it from being disarmed by the federal government.

The Second Amendment is an instrument of government. It’s not about hunting or gun collecting or carrying your pistol into the saloon. And there’s a reason absolutely no gun extremist will ever direct you to that 1788 essay because it blows their baloney into a million pieces.

A “well-regulated militia” didn’t mean guys who read Soldier of Fortune magazine running around in the woods with AK-47s and warpaint on their faces. It basically meant what today we call the National Guard.

It should be a properly constituted, ordered and drilled (“well-regulated”) military force, organized state by state, explained Hamilton. Each state militia should be a “select corps,” “well-trained” and able to perform all the “operations of an army.” The militia needed “uniformity in … organization and discipline,” wrote Hamilton, so that it could operate like a proper army “in camp and field,” and so that it could gain the “essential … degree of proficiency in military functions.” And although it was organized state by state, it needed to be under the explicit control of the national government. The “well-regulated militia” was under the command of the president. It was “the military arm” of the government.

Read: It’s time for Americans to stand up to the NRA

The one big difference between this militia and a professional army? It shouldn’t be made up of full-time professional soldiers, said the Founding Fathers. Such soldiers could be used against the people as King George had used his mercenary Redcoats. Instead, the American republic should make up its military force from part-time volunteers drawn from regular citizens. Such men would be less likely to turn on the population.

And the creation of this “well-regulated militia,” aka the National Guard, would help safeguard the freedom of the new republic because it would make the creation of a professional, mercenary army “unnecessary,” wrote Hamilton. “This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it,” he wrote.

That was the point. And that was why they wanted to make sure it couldn’t be disarmed by the federal government: So a future “tyrant” couldn’t disarm the National Guard, and then use a mercenary army to impose martial law.

The Founding Fathers didn’t call the republic’s new force an “army” because that term more than two centuries ago called to mind the British army, foreign mercenaries, tyrants and kings. So they said “militia” instead. But they meant a real body. Hamilton was scathing about the idea that the “militia” could just mean every Bob, Billy and Benjamin with his musket. Such amateurs would stand no chance in modern warfare against professionals, he wrote. And requiring every citizen to become a professional would be ridiculous, he said. It would be “a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss,” he wrote. Taking people away from their work in order to train them “would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country.”

The Second Amendment is an instrument of government. It’s not about hunting or gun collecting or carrying your pistol into the saloon. The Founding Fathers left it up to us to pass sensible laws about all these things. The Constitution is about government.

Today we have a professional army, anyway. Military matters have become so complex that no part-time soldiers could do it all. So you could argue that makes the Second Amendment null and void, like the parts in the Constitution about slaves and Indians being counted as “three-fifths” of a person in the Census.

But even if you still want to defend the Second Amendment, it should apply only to those who volunteer to join the “select corps” of their National Guard, undergo rigorous training to attain “proficiency in military functions” and perform the “operations of an army,” serve as ordered under the ultimate command of the president and be subject to military discipline.

So if you’re running around waving your AK-47 under the Second Amendment, and you haven’t shown up yet at your local National Guard headquarters, you’re not a “patriot.” You’re a deserter.

Cletus Sings

Franklin Veaux · Lives in Portland, OR · Mar 12

What are your thoughts on Jason Aldean’s song “Try that in a Small Town”?

I find the song a bit perplexing,.

Basically, the message of the song is “Small conservative towns are run by violent redneck hicks because the police are corrupt and incompetent, so if we don’t like you we’ll just get a bunch of our meth-head buddies to lynch you.”

Which, I mean, yeah, we know. That’s basically exactly what liberals think of small-town conservative America: incompetent cops and violent rednecks.

That’s not the part that perplexes me.

The part that perplexes me is why conservatives like the song. “Woohoo! We’re a bunch of meth-addicted thugs with corrupt cops! Booyah! Take that, liberals! Woohoo!”

I mean, okay, you do you, Cletus, but…really? That’s the image you’re going for? Well, good for you. Achievement unlocked, I guess? Cletus

On Covid and Vaccines

When “experts” say artificial immunity created by a COVID-19 vaccine is superior to natural immunity, are they lying?

Dave Haynie - Electrical engineer and part-time mad scientist

Real experts — the kind without quotes, finger or otherwise — they’re the virologists, the doctors, the immunologists, and biochemical researchers who actually do understand these things. And they will tell you, unequivocally, that the immunity your body gains from the various COVID-19 vaccines is better than that you obtain by letting your body become a breeding ground for 100 billion SARS-CoV-2 virions.

When you write “experts,” you’re suggesting, at least to educated people, the nutters and randos on places like Facebook and YouTube who seem to have been misleading you about the very nature of what immunity is.

Let’s start with the simple advantage to not getting the disease. When you contract a novel virus — something your body has no chemical memory of — your immune system slowly responds to the invasion. Your helper T-cells detects antigens — anything that doesn’t belong in your body. They send a chemcial signal — cytokines — through the body to activate immature B-cells and killer T-cells. The B-cells specialize and “learn” to create antibodies — tiny Y-shaped bits of protein that can ideally block the attack mechanism of the invading virions, and at the very least, mark them for later destruction by the killer T-cells and microphages.

This process takes 2–3 weeks or so. During that time, the virions are attaching to your lung and other cells, taking them over, manufacturing tens or hundreds of billions of copies of themselves — maybe a new, more effective variant, but hopefully not — and killing those cells.

One of the particularly bad things about the natural attack of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is that it can kick your immune system into overdrive, creating a thing called a cytokine storm. Too many cytokines add additional inflammation to your lung cells on top of those cells being destroyed by the virus. Worst case, it’s your immune system that kills you long before the virus itself does enough damage to your lungs to kill you. Most people who die of COVID-19 dies this way, killed by their own overactive immune system.

Some also die of lung damage, heart attack, or stoke. Or simply live with non-fatal versions of that damage for the remainder of their lives.

Another problem: contracting COVID-19 doesn’t always result in a useful immunity. About one-third of COVID-19 infections don’t seem to generate any protective antibodies!

When you get a COVID-19 vaccine, you don’t get any COVID-19 virus. Rather, you get either a strand of mRNA encapsulated in fat, or a bit of DNA in a modified, weakend, cold virus. In both cases, that bit of generic material presents just the antigen responsible for allowing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to attack your cells.

As seen in every image or drawing of the virus particle, the virion is surrounded by spikes made of protein. The very end of those spike proteins can bind to your lung cells (and other cells in your body) via a site on the cell called an ACE2 receptor. That’s the means by which the virus gains entry into your cell and can, thus, inject its own RNA stand into the cell to take over its protein production factories and set them on making copies of the virus. When your body makes the specific antibody that binds to that spike protein, the virus can no longer attack your cells, and it’s marked for destruction.

If you want to learn a thing, you can just go and start doing it. Pick up a guitar, pick up a barbell, jump in a pool and try to swim, etc. But for professional athletics, sports science has all kinds of knowledge on how to do these things most effectively, how to avoid wasted effort, and how to avoid injury.

When your body takes on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, aside from the damage it’s doing to you, your immune system is throwing everything it’s got at the virus. Some of that’s useful, some of it is not. Anything that looks like an alien presence to your Helper T-Cells will be attacked by B-cells and the antibodies they create. But it’s only the antibody that blocks the action of the spike protein that’s going to stop the virus from infecting you. Killer T-cells can find a virion marked by antibodies that’s attached to one of your body cells and kill that cell, preventing more new virions from being produced… but they can’t act until your cells are infected. You present a better defence against infection if all of the antibodies you create block the action of the virus. A few may still get through and get killed by T-cells, but shutting down most of the potential of an infection is the best response.

That’s what you get from the vaccines. It’s your body’s natural immune system, but programmed by human intelligence. It’s a natural immune response to an artificial infection. It’s expert training without risk, verus “learning in the school of hard knocks” … which often means learning things wrong. In mRNA vaccine is only present in your body for about 48 hours. Within two weeks or so, your body will have built up antibodies, just as if you had a real infections, but 100% of them are protective antibodies.

After the infection, artificial or natural, is gone, the level of antibodies is gradually reduced. Your body retains memory T- and B- cells, which understand the infection, as well as memory plasma cells, which reside in the bone marrow and produce low levels of the antibodies. All of these antibodies that are made by your body for this virus are protective, only some of those from the actual COVID-19 disease are protective. So with the actual illness, you have a bunch of your immune system programmed to react to your next infection, but doing a bunch of things that are not terribly useful in addition to making the one antibody that is protective, and thus useful.

Your immunity does fade over time, and since it’s weaker from an infection than a vaccine, it’s gone much sooner. If you’re re-infected while you still have a good immune response to the virus, your memory B-cells kick into production, make copies of themselves, and typically deliver a fast immune response: you might have 10x as many antibodies in 48 hours as you had when originally building immunity, and 100x within 4–5 days. But in the case of immunity from sickness, the majority of those don’t help stop the virus. In the case of the professionally trained vaccine response, they all do.

In the case of those one-third of COVID-19 patients who don’t generate protective antibodies, there are probably some with some kind of immune deficiency. But certainly not all of them. And of course, you probably did have an immune response: your body fought off COVID-19. But what happened, most likely, is that your body made a number of antibodies against the various antigens it detected on the SARS-CoV-2 virion, but none specifically against the ACE2 binders on the spike protein. So when you were sick, your B-cells generated antibodies, they bound to parts of the virion, and once attached to your body’s cells, your killer T-cells killed off those cells, and the virus with it. But your body didn’t “learn” to make the critical protective antibody. So when you’re re-infected, you’ll probably fight off COVID-19 faster than the first time, but you will get sick. A vaccinated person could well fight off the virus without even knowing it.

If you have been sick and recovered, there’s some evidence that getting the vaccine after that will give you an even better immune response. Just as a vaccine booster improves a vaccinated person’s immune response, receiving the vaccine an appropriate time after having COVID-19 disease, you’re reinforcing the memory cells in the body specialized to fight this specific virus. The vaccine will trigger protective antibody generation from existing memory B-cells, if your infection produced those, boosting up for antibody levels for a few months or more, making it very unlikely you’ll contract even a mild case of COVID-19.

Dominion voting machines

Chris O’Leary - Political News Junkie · Aug 23

Were the Dominion voting machines compromised in the 2020 election?

They were not. Not only were they not, but it is also not physically possible to do any of what is being alleged on any voting machine in the US.

My good friend and neighbor has every reason to hate Dominion and to bash them up and down the block with every breath he takes. Why? Because he is Collin County Tx’s liaison with Election Systems and Software, Dominion’s biggest competitor. There is no one I know (and likely no one any of you know) who knows more about how elections are run, how voting machines work, and what safeguards are in place, because he personally codes Collin County’s elections into the machines, tests them, gets them ready for the legally required 3rd party tests, and submits his machines for voluntary white hat hacking attempts to prove that it can’t be done.

Let me repeat that last. Yes. They submit the machines to 3rd party contractors for auditing, and for white hat hacking attempts to prove that it: Can’t. Be. Done.

If there is anyone who should be taking a potshot at Dominion, it’s him, because a Dominion contract win in his area could easily land him out of a job.

Whenever the subject of Election hacking and the Dominion machines comes up, the eye-roll that crosses my friend’s face is EPIC.

“Are these people even aware that there is an official from both the Republican and Democratic Party on-site at every single polling place overseeing the vote tally?” He commonly asks. “Are they aware that if there is ever a question of voter intent on a ballot that both the Republican and Democratic official examine the ballot and if they can’t come to a consensus on the voter’s intent, they bring it to an independent 3rd party for a judgment?”

“Do they have any idea how seriously the county officials take their responsibility to ensure every election is run without a hitch?”

“Are they aware that no machine in the country has a modem that can connect to the internet at all, and only 4 states allow modems of any kind on voting machines, and that those are only allowed to connect to a local secured network, not the internet? That in order to “hack” an election you would have to go to each and every one of about 20–30 Machines in all 47 polling places (in the case of Collin County) with a USB device, plug the USB device into each machine individually wait there while the hacking was done, not be noticed by any of the workers at the polling place and STILL probably wouldn’t be able to hack even one machine, we’re just talking about the only way it would be physically possible, not actually possible, but even if you managed it you would have managed a change in ONE county which would be noticed by the party officials running the elections as an anomoulous change from expected results and result in a hand count of each paper ballot, since, yes, the hacking would have absolutely no way of changing the printed paper records?”

“Dominion does this exactly the same way we do, they have to by law.”

Whenever I get into conversations here about the 2020 elections, I can’t help but wonder if the people I’m talking to have ever actually done their civic duty and voted. Especially in the last election, because the last election was the first Presidential election where new laws secured the process ever further than they originally were. When you vote, you see how the process works, and you’re much less susceptible to lies about cheating. You start to see how stupidly impossible those claims really are.

No, Satellites From Italy did not change votes, there are no modems in the machines for the satellites to talk to. No, China did not hack the machines, there is no way to enter a machine from 5 feet away, never mind from across the country. No, Millions of votes were not changed, we have a paper record of every vote tallied in the last election, and if you voted in that election you remember walking that paper tally over to the tally machine and examining it to make sure it said what you intended it to say.

We have absolute proof that Joe Biden won the last election fair and square, and that proof has never been refuted.

That absolute proof is the verified and certified tally of every single county in every single state in the United States. There is a paper record on file in each county of every single vote tallied, and in many contested counties, those paper records were counted by election officials overseen by officials from both parties.

No credible evidence exists to counter that proof, therefore that proof stands. Every single contention made by the Mike Lindell’s of the world had been thoroughly refuted time and time again. More than 60 court cases were filed and not a single one managed to convince any judge anywhere in the country that any of the suits had any merit whatsoever. The opinions of the judges dismissing the cases were often scathing. Take this Trump-appointed judge in Pennsylvania tossing out the Trump Campaign’s suit there and aiming a flamethrower at the “arguments” presented

Federal judge tosses Trump suit over Pennsylvania election resultsThe judge issued a withering opinion in his dismissal of the suit that Rudy Giuliani turned up to argue in a` small Pennsylvania city this week <https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/21/federal-judge-tosses-trump-suit-over-pennsylvania-election-results-439010>`_.

In part:

“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann wrote. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

The reason for this is the claims at their heart are absolutely bat-shit crazy and not physically possible. If Democrats were somehow able to do what people like Lindell claim, do you really think they would have lost ground in state Legislatures?

The reason we run elections at the county level in the US is to keep them LOCAL. To keep them free from State or Federal interference. The States and the Federal Government do what they’re supposed to do. They set baselines on standards, standards that counties are required to meet, they stay out of the way while each County’s Board of Election Supervisors works to make sure that every election run is run freely and fairly.

And yes. They rightfully get a little salty when you suggest they don’t take their jobs seriously.

The bottom line is this. No. It is not physically possible to “hack” Dominion or any other voting machines used in the US in the manner contended. No, Dominion does not change votes, they have a profit motive to do one thing and one thing only … Consistently run free and fair elections. It’s how they make their money. The idea that they would fuck with election results sounds as stupid as McDonald’s purposefully adding Ipecac Syrup into their Coke Machines because they like seeing customers hurl over the floors.

“Yeah, in this ONE election, let’s fuck with the results, and risk everything about how we appear to the market so that no one will ever do business with us again in this country or any other.” BRILLIANT.

It’s time to let it go. It’s time to face reality, even though you don’t LIKE the reality.

And the reality is that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and you have nothing credible to counter the mountain of evidence showing he did fairly and squarely.

Matt Mood · Jun 1

The important part of the Fox settlement was not that they lied or that they had to pay almost a billion dollars or even that the other far-right propaganda outlets are going to end up also paying. IMHO the most significant facet of the outcome of that case was that they were being honest about why they lied. They said out loud “we lied because our viewers prefer the lies” and then heavily implied the other part: “and the lies conservative viewers overwhelmingly prefer are based on fear, hatred, bigotry, and racism”.

You still have to connect the dots but at this point it’s just the two dots and they’re right next to each other. The biggest problem our country faces today (and likely for some time) is that over a third of our adult citizens are so cowardly and afraid of the world that they openly demand to be told comfortable lies. They demand their own ignorance. They’re so desperate to avoid confronting the fact that the time is rapidly approaching where they will have no value to society whatsoever, but the things they are doing are only accelerating it and shortening the time until they are actually discarded as useless quivering relics.

Rush Limbaugh’s Legacy

People are celebrating Rush Limbaugh’s death. How did we get to this level of ugliness where we cheer the death of political opponents? Can we recover from this mindset?

John Cate, Freelance Public Relations Specialist, Mount Airy, NC Answered February 19 · Upvoted by Arran Kleyman, M.A Politics & International Business, University of Edinburgh (1998) and Jonas Hellberg Hellberg, Masters Creative Writing & Politics, Lund University (2011)

Originally Answered: People are celebrating Rush Limbaugh’s death. How did we get to this level of ugliness where we cheer the death of politics opponents? Can we recover from this mindset?

I wonder if you wrote something similar when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and I saw social media posts from modern-day throwbacks to H. Erectus celebrating her death? (I’m not willing to drag the poor Neanderthals into this.) Or how about when a certain freshman Congresswoman made campaign signs of herself with a semi-automatic rifle superimposed over the Democratic Congresswomen known by conservatives as “The Squad”? That was classy, wasn’t it?

But if you want an honest answer, I can think of one of the major culprits who helped create this ugliness. It was this guy:

[pic of Rush]

You see, he’d been doing this since I was a teenager. I wrote about how I used to listen to him on the radio in the early 1990s when I was on my way to college classes. He’d been on the conservative talk circuit during the Reagan years, but he was preaching to a choir then. He really took off during the 1992 presidential campaign, when it became clear Bill Clinton would win, and he shot into the stratosphere when Clinton did win.

Like a CNN article about his legacy today said, Limbaugh was Trump when Trump was just tabloid fodder. He made all sorts of tasteless jokes and comments, racial dog-whistles with just a slight veneer of plausible deniability, conspiracy theories, the whole nine yards.

Analysis: The blueprint for Trump

Limbaugh’s website is proclaiming him “The Greatest of All Time” since his death. I hate to say it, but when it comes to his impact as a reactionary conservative shock-jock, and the impact he made, he probably was the GOAT.

But in so doing, he created this level of ugliness, and he normalized it for his readers. Having forged this chain in life, he will now have to bear it in death. He had many years of life to evaluate what he was doing and try to guide his loyal following in a more constructive manner. He never did, so one must conclude he believed the shit he was peddling.

You asked, “can we recover from this mindset?” Of course we can, if the will to do so is there. If you hate this type of ugliness, reject it. The only way to end it is for a consensus of the American people to say this is unacceptable. The First Amendment lets people be ugly. It also lets people ostracize those who are.

Democrats and basic facts

William Weir · Author, journalist, minister · Aug 6

Why do Democrats always get offended when they are told basic facts?

No. You’re thinking of Republicans. But let’s test. I’m going to throw out some basic facts, and we’ll see who gets offended. Let’s begin.

Over the last fifty years, every Republican President has seen a recession, while we have had only one recession begin under a Democrat, a short six month recession under Carter.

Over the last forty years every Republican President has created a deficit at least double the previous record. Over that same time, every Democratic President (including already Biden) has cut the deficit by half or more.

The last three Democratic Presidents (including Biden) have all seen unemployment effectively cut in half. The last two Republicans both saw it effectively double.

Over the last fifty years, despite holding the Presidency for only 22 years compared to Republicans holding it 28, stock market return has been just over 100% under Republicans and just shy of 1,000% under Democrats. Over 42 million jobs have been created under Democrats compared to only 24 million under Republicans. Income growth averaged 2.2% under Democrats compared to 0.6% under Republicans. GDP growth averaged 4.1% under Democrats compared to 2.7% under Republicans Going back to Truman, four of the five Presidents who have seen the largest increase in domestic oil production were Democrats (with Trump scoring the number five spot and Obama placing first). Only six Presidents over that time have seen domestic oil production fall, and five of them were Republicans.

Since 1980, The abortion rate held steady under Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43. It fell under both Clinton and Obama, and under Trump rose for the first time since the 1970’s. Since the Nixon Administration, 338 members of Presidential administrations have been indicted on criminal charges. Three of these were in Democratic administrations, 335 were in Republican administrations.

In the last century, only two Presidents have lost jobs during their administrations, both Republicans (Hoover and Trump)

Over the last 80 years, five of the six Presidents with the highest job creation were Democrats, with only Reagan making the list. (Current rankings are Clinton, Reagan, Biden, Obama, Johnson, and Carter, with Biden likely to move into second place before the end of his first term.) Ten of the eleven safest states in the Union are blue or lean blue with Utah the only red state. Fifteen of the sixteen least safe states are red, with Georgia being the only non-red state in that mix (and until recently we would have considered Georgia a red state). (Scores based on a combination of personal safety, road safety, financial safety, and emergency preparedness.) Four of the five states with the highest poverty rate are deep red (New Mexico being the only blue state). Four of the five states with the lowest poverty rates are blue or lean blue, with Utah the only red state.

The five states with the best education are all blue. Four of the five states with the worst education are deep red, with New Mexico the only blue state.

Four of the five states with the highest incarceration rates are deep red, with Delaware the only blue state. Four of the five with the lowest incarceration rates are blue or lean blue with North Dakota the only red state.

The ten states with a the best healthcare are all blue. The five states with the worst healthcare are all red. In fact ten of the bottom eleven are all red with Georgia being the only exception. Eight of the ten states who pay the highest Federal income tax per capita are blue. (That’s per capita, so population isn’t a factor.) Eight of the ten states who rely most on Federal funding are red.

The five states with the highest covid death rates were all red. Three of the five with the lowest death rates are blue with Alaska and Utah the only exception.

Okay. Those are just unbiased, easily verifiable facts. Now let’s see who gets their feelings hurt!

Cheating in the last election

Did the Democrats cheat in the last election?

No. But, for shits and giggles, let’s pretend they did. They planned this caper so brilliantly, they left no evidence. Imagine the scope of such an act. They would need to determine who the elections workers will be, determine if they would be willing to commit a crime, contact them, give them their instructions and make sure they follow through flawlessly. Sabotage voting machines, control the US mail, and mark the ballots. All without leaks, no letters, no email, no phone calls, no texts. No one contacted went to the authorities to report someone asked them to commit a crime. Any evidence of fraud was suppressed by the election officials, the head of cyber security and even the AG of the US-many of whom are stalwart Trumpers. The courts tossed the complaints and the Supreme Court refused to hear it. What a magnificent job of planning, operating and covering up the most scrutinized election in US history! All planned by a sleepy guy who never left his basement to campaign! This is the kind of guy we want! This is the kind of guy we need! A man of vision. A man of action. A man who calmly got down to business while the loser cries, pouts and plans an insurrection. Get real, people, the only cheaters caught were the ones who voted for Trump. You know, the guy claiming election fraud. The guy with a monumental history of lies, the guy who lost.

Some of 45’s Fails

David W. Rudlin · Author of the Inspector McLean Mystery series · Updated 8mo

Initial inflation was 1.5% when Trump left office. Can Democrats share what happened?

Not a Democrat, but happy to help. In January 2021 when trump left office, 77,400 Americans died of COVID. The vaccines were out, but trump didn’t have a distribution plan, saying that was up to the states. Schools, restaurants, and stores were closed. Few people went away for Xmas. Life was essentially on Pause. GDP shrank by 3.5%, making it pretty remarkable there was any inflation at all. No demand = no shortages.

Biden came in and immediately went to work putting jabs in arms. Confidence returned, more quickly than anyone expecting. The shutters were lifted, and people began to return to normal life. Meaning they wanted the stuff they were consuming before the pandemic began. Except COVID didn’t affect just the demand side of the equation, it also slammed supply. Other countries had done some version of what we’d done, meaning lots of stuff didn’t get made or harvested or shipped, and suddenly we had close to the usual level of demand, PLUS a need to build up inventory that had disappeared or rotted during the shutdowns.

For the past few decades businessmen around the globe had been adopting Toyota’s “just in time” approach to supply chains. That saves lots of money (at least for the companies on the buying end) when everything is working normally. But it left everyone standing naked when adult swim ended. For example, right now in Japan there’s a four-year wait for a new Lexus. Which is made in Japan. But it uses chips made in China, and China is still in lockdown. The same thing is happening in the US; have a look at what it costs to rent a car these days. None of this should be surprising. You can’t expect the world to stop and then suddenly pick up where it left off. So anyone paying attention would have known that a period of sustained inflation FOR THE WORLD was inevitable.

Then Putin, Ukraine, wheat shortage, etc.

I can hear you asking, “Isn’t it Joe Biden’s job to deal with all of that?” It is, and if you look at the US inflation rate compared with, say, the UK (10.4% headed for a forecast 18%), you’d have to conclude he’s outperforming his peer group. None of this is to suggest the current inflation isn’t anything other than tremendously painful. And it’s made worse by companies seeing an opportunity to jack up prices under cover of widespread inflation.

But the one thing it’s not is surprising. The same thing would have happened to trump if he hadn’t lost.

Last point, and again, I am NOT a Democrat:

If the Republicans have a better idea for how to handle the current nightmare, let’s hear it. I’ve heard endless criticism of Biden, but only for not giving everyone a bike for Xmas. I can’t think of a single GOP leader who has said, “He should stop doing X, and start doing Y.”

Can you?

Gloria Coup and Terror Attack

Nelson McKeeby · Updated January 12 - Worshiper at Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) (1966–present)

What would the mob of 1/6/2021 in Washington DC have to have done in order for the coup attempt to be successful? Or was there never a chance?

The Gloria Coup and Terror Attack of 2021

First, it was a coup attempt and a terrorist attack. Think of the elements. The crowd was armed. The crowd was wearing clothing that said Civil War. The crowd intended to take over a center of government to prevent its lawful operations. Pipe bombs were found. A vehicle full of molotov cocktails were found. People with devices to tie up and detain people were observed. A coup leader was communicating with people subject to the coup and making demands. Violence was undertaken that injured 20 defenders and killed one. Four coup members died, one by gunfire. the coup members were organized to the extent that the leader of the insurrection gave them instructions and scheduled a time and place.

I will say this in my disdain. If you intend to start your argument saying it is not a coup then you are required to disprove each of these events - I will not play endless wack-a-mole with traitorous cowardly Quislings the weekend after the coup was attempted. Bring your A game or not game.

As for it being successful, lets consider what its goals were and how it was organized.

Meet Donald Trump, the Quisling King and leader of the coup. On 6 January he arranges for a “Save America” rally at the White House elipse, knowing that the Congress with Mike Pence would be meeting down the street and that this itself would be provocative. Oddly enough he had taken several actions prior to this. He had refused requests by Capital Police to call on support by the DC police or Guard. He had widely advertised his speech calling on people across the country to come, and had known about and lauded merchandise being sold which called for civil war on the day - many in the crowd would wear shirts saying this. He had also done two more things - arranged for a tent with heating and multiple television sets to watch “the action” after his speech, and arranged for increased security of the White House.

He then, along with several other speakers, give the crowds instruction to take after the congress.

By 1230 the armed crowd is in front of the congress where an understaffed defense force is faced with violent chanting. Trump continues his speech until 1.30 then advises his people in the crowd to move forward, as do the other speakers. Like before the speech, Trump then returns to watching the mayhem in the tent, and then moves to the west wing where staffers report he is elated, talking about the next four years, and planning how he will bully the endangered congress people into submission.

At 1.30 pipe bombs are set up by Trump supporters at the DNC and RNC. It should be noted that many of the groups present have connections with Hezbollah and Hamas, and have been apprehending receiving money from these terror groups.

At 2.15 the Capitol is breached by terrorists who begin to chase Capitol police, restricted by orders not to shoot, through the halls. With reinforcements refused by Trump, he continues to call congress people and bully them as they take cover and as the secret service removes Mike Pence from the grounds - as the crowd has taken up shouting for his death in response to a 2.24 Trump tweet.

By 2.30 armed protesters are surrounding twenty-five capitals and violence is becoming wide spread. Trump continues to laugh as he sees this transpire and comments to staff that they will soon be talking to the protesters.

It seems Trump felt that the protesters would capture Pence and other congress people and that he would then negotiate with one foot in their camp and one foot in the Federal camp to bring a “peaceful end” to the standoff and hostage taking. The negotiation he felt would include his being declared president for four more years. THIS IS THE REASON FOR THE TERRORIST ATTACK.

It all started to go wrong. The Capitol police found at 2.30 the vehicle(s) interned to supply the terrorists - vehicles with guns, food, explosives, ammunition, water, and everything needed for a siege with hostages. At the same time the crowds struck the last cofferdam before the Capital would be overwhelmed. This was defended with gunfire when the first terrorist crossed it - she was killed, and then held long enough to evacuate the congress.

It was around this time that Trump moved from the West Wing to the bunker and back as his aids urged him to adopt another plan quickly. With no hostages the original plan would not work - who would he negotiate with and on behalf of whom? The rest is history.

So I present to you the plan - capture the congress then ride to the rescue by negotiating with a crowd he himself had let off its leash, could only have worked if McConnell and Pence had folded and if the Capital Police had been unable to evacuate the congress. The military was useless. There was no backup to save congress. Even now cowardly followers of Trump yell into the ether that it was a walk in the park - a perfect conversation.

Make no mistake Quislings - it was a coup and a terrorist attack and loyal patriotic Americans are not letting you forget it anytime soon.

stadium of white people

Mike Jones - Over 30 years in the technology industry. · 2y

When you watch a stadium filled with white people chanting “Send her back!” about a US Congresswoman and our President silently endorses it, what comes up for you?

Originally Answered: When you watch a stadium filled with white people chanting “send her back” about a U.S. Congresswomen and our President silently endorses it, what comes up for you?

Honestly? This.

This photo was taken sometime between May and December 1944. These people are enjoying a bit of “down time” before going back to work. At Auschwitz.

Not because I think what we’re doing is like what the Nazis were doing in 1944, but because this looks so normal. These people didn’t think of themselves as “evil,” any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do.

Here’s the point: the Holocaust didn’t drop out of a clear blue sky in 1941. The concentration camps had been operating since 1933.

The first people sent to the camps weren’t Jews at all. It was socialists, communists (remember that if you run across someone who tries to claim the Nazis were actually socialists), Jehovah’s Witnesses (because their faith prevented them from swearing allegiance to the Reich or serving in the military), homosexuals, and other people considered “socially deviant.” The camps weren’t awful places in 1933. Guards who abused prisoners were disciplined and sometimes prosecuted.

By 1935, this changed. As Hitler consolidated power, he pardoned the guards who had been convicted for abusing prisoners and made it clear that that behavior was now acceptable. Jews were now sent to the camps, starting with ones who had come to “civilized” Germany as refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe. They were described as “invaders,” accused of spreading disease and stealing jobs from Germans. I understand if that last sentence sent a bit of a chill down your spine.

There were dozens, probably hundreds of concentration camps in operation by 1937. Many prisoners died there from abuse or simply from being worked to death, but they still weren’t places people were specifically sent to die; it was just that no one cared whether they died or not.

By 1939, mass killings of Jews had started. Not in the camps; the Nazis weren’t bothering to round people up and transport them just to kill them. They would typically be rounded up by the Nazi army and shot en masse and buried in mass graves.

Mass killings of civilians proved to be bad for morale even for Nazi soldiers, which led to the Final Solution. Eight extermination camps were built and went into operation by 1941. None were in Germany proper, so the scale of what was happening could be more easily kept from the German people. Six were in Poland, one in Serbia, and one in Belarus. Some (like Birkenau, sometimes called Auschwitz II) were on the same site as concentration camps (Auschwitz), and some (like Treblinka) were completely separate. Most were in Poland because that was where the largest number of Jews in Europe lived.

These women worked as typists, telegraph clerks, and secretaries in Auschwitz, and were called Helferinnen, which means ‘helpers.’ Their racial purity had been established—should an officer be looking for a girlfriend or a wife, the Helferinnen were intended to be a “resource.”

The point of these photos is that the Nazis were not all Eichmann and Mengele. Their horror was possible because of the many, many people who went along with what they were doing or at least were willing to look the other way. And it didn’t start with Chelmno and Sobibor. It started with people being willing to vote for Nazis out of fear of the communists and responding to their appeals to “true Germans.”

This photo shows people reading the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker) in 1935. The sign above it reads “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”.

How far, really, are people who would chant “send her back” about an American citizen at a political rally from the people calmly reading that newspaper? Remember, that was still four years before the war, six before the extermination camps. It was when the groundwork for those things was being laid.

Let’s talk about our camps for a moment. Pro Publica recently published a long story about someone who works for the Border Patrol and spent time working at one of the camps. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June. Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned. Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.

At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.”

No one on the other end cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening. Let that sink in for a moment.

The CBP agent in the story is in his late 30s, a husband and father who served overseas in the military before joining CBP.

It’s kind of like torture in the army. It starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal.

This is how it happens. Step by step, we become the monsters. Look around the country. Try to remember how things were in 2012 or so. How many things that are simply accepted now, often with a “what can we do about it?” shrug, would have seemed possible then?

Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding centers, he said: “Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems.”

“What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they’re physically OK. I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.

“I might not like the rules,” he added. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”

When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: “Exactly, to a point that’s kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better.”

This man is a father. He watches hundreds of kids. He had to stop caring in order to do his job.

Let’s say that again: he had to stop caring in order to do his job. Just like, I imagine, the Helferinnen had to stop caring. To look the other way. To learn helplessness against the system.

I know, there are a thousand reasons why we can’t change this. They broke the laws. The President says so. What will we do with all of them if we don’t do this? It will encourage others if we don’t do this. Know this: those are all justifying inhuman behavior. I’m not saying the people running the camps or the people in the government are Nazis; every historical moment is different. But they’re using many of the same tools the Nazis used. And the same tools are being used against the Uighur in China. And the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist who has written extensively about the history of concentration camps. Here’s what she had to say on Twitter this morning:

When I went into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar in 2015, I also talked to people in town who were happy their former neighbors were in camps. Insisting they weren’t racist or bigots, many said all they really wanted was for the government to deport the Rohingya to another country.

They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe that Rohingya person wasn’t a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.

It was heartbreaking. I was there just after Trump had declared his candidacy in the US, and it was the same rhetoric, almost word for word. A little over a year later in Myanmar, the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border amid terrible atrocities.

Send her back. Send them back. We’re really not racists. Jews will not replace us.

Do you honestly believe it can’t happen here?

Note: Over 1k upvotes and 50 shares in two hours. Thank you all. I think this is the most important answer I’ve ever written on Quora, and I would ask you to share it if you think it is important. Two things I would like to add, which were brought out to me by thoughtful folks in comments. When I read the sentence, “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening” it struck me that we are all on the other end of the line. Please care. Please speak up.

I don’t know what our overall border policy should be. I have some ideas, but there are people who have made careers of studying such things and I am not one of them. But like a diner who may not know how to make a gourmet meal but knows when he has been served food that is spoiled, I know when wrong is being done in my name. We cannot allow wrong to continue being done in our name until we can solve the larger problem.

Natural Immunity

Our planet has 7.9 billion people. As far as we know, not one of them was born with natural resistance to the virus that causes COVID-19 — SARS-CoV-2. It seems that unchecked, it will get us all. It’s possible that out there somewhere is someone with a really weird ACE2 receptor or an immune quirk that makes them unable to get the disease. We haven’t identified such people yet, so they are likely really rare, if they exist at all.

Bats are naturally resistant to such viruses. They do have weird immune systems, and their viruses mainly just lurk, without causing too much trouble — for them. We are naturally susceptible to many of those viruses. People are not bats. So there are just two ways we know of to get immunity to the virus. Both involve ‘natural’ immunity. A better name for this ‘natural’ immunity is the term “acquired immunity”, and this is the term we’ll use from now on, just to dispel some of the confusion.

What is acquired immunity then?

Acquired immunity to a virus works as follows:

1. You get exposed to:

• the virus; or

• even just parts of a virus.

2. The body’s immune system hits the panic button — the details are quite spectacular, often involving sensors such as “toll like receptors”, all sorts of alarms and trip wires inside cells, and the production of virus-crippling proteins like interferon. Ultimately other responses kick in. B cells make antibodies, T cells do a various things, like helping B cells.

• This can go horribly wrong too. Part of the complex shitstorm that happens in some people—immunity losing the plot and making you very sick—is shown in the diagram above. Yes, SARS-CoV-2 + your own immune system can kill you.

3. With luck (or sometimes, a bit of help) you don’t die, and develop a degree of longer-lasting immunity to the virus. The next time the same virus comes by, your body is ready for it, and (at least sometimes) the virus might be eliminated quickly.

• A vaccine induces acquired immunity by presenting bits of the virus in various ways (or a whole killed virus, or a weaker form of the virus) that goad the immune system into doing the right, ‘natural’ thing. Even this can go wrong, but with vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 severe issues like myocarditis and clotting problems are far, far rarer than with infection, in the order of 1:100,000 people. They are damn safe vaccines. (Yes, I know your granny has a friend who told you otherwise).

“But vaccines are unnatural”

One of the reasons why I had my little lie-down above was all of the silliness that has been written about so-called ‘natural immunity vs vaccines’. Vaccines prod the immune system into doing the right, natural thing without all the inconvenience of having a near-death experience, and those common complications of actual infection.

Infections vary as to how often they cause short and long-term complications. Ebola kills about 50% of those who get it. The most serious form of smallpox (variola major) had a death rate of about 30%. Polio was mostly asymptomatic, and under one percent developed paralysis; even fewer developed total paralysis of the nerves that control breathing, and needed someone (or a machine) to breathe for them, sometimes for months or longer. But a rate of under 1% doesn’t make polio ‘mild’.

Even in the long term, polio is not kind. Some 15–40 years after you’ve recovered as best you can, progressive weakness can set in: post-polio syndrome. Measles is another bugger here — rarely, about 2–10 years down the line, the virus re-activates and progressively eats up your brain (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis). And chickenpox lies latent in your nerve cells for many decades, eventually re-activating and causing the hell of shingles, pictured above. About 30% of adults who have had chickenpox will get shingles in their lifetime. Ask someone who has had it about the experience.

The long-term complications of even mild COVID-19 may also be as high as 30% — unless you don’t mind a continual ‘brain fog’ and the inability to do more than light exercise. In some studies, Long Covid has been even more common; others report rates that are a bit lower.

With the initial infection, death is not rare. It’s unlikely that the death rate from infection with SARS-CoV-2 is lower than 0.5% overall, and in many circumstances, it’s a lot higher. Chubby people of all ages, for example seem more prone, as are those with diabetes, lung disease, heart disease and people on immune suppression. Older age is a huge risk factor, but even those under 30 years old can cop it.

This summer in the USA, 20% of COVID-19 cases were under this age, and in one study of 3000 people in the age range of 18–34 who ended up in hospital, one fifth ended up in intensive care and 10% were put on a breathing machine—one quarter of them then died.

Recent events have shown us that unvaccinated, right-wing radio hosts are a finite and diminishing resource. Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 regards them as ‘unnatural’.

Is immunity stronger after infection?

A common idea still punted by those resistant to vaccines is that immunity in those surviving infection (Only this do they call ‘natural’) is somehow stronger.

Initial data suggested low rates of re-infection[8][9][10]. These were enthusiastically greeted as ‘evidence of strong natural immunity’, e.g.[11]Unfortunately many of these studies are proxy studies (antibody responses and not diligent surveillance studies), are short term, or don’t adequately take Delta into account; some are just rubbish.[12]

Recently, we’ve acquired more solid data. The results don’t look good for longer-term immunity following infection:

1. If you’ve been infected and not vaccinated, on average you’ll get another infection in about 16 months time. We’ve known for some time that re-infection is not necessarily milder.

2. If your initial infection was mild (with lower shedding), you’re more likely to get re-infected.

3. In a Danish study of a first surge in late 2020 and a second surge between March and May, 2021, over the period of 3–6 months, initial infection provided about 80% protection against re-infection. This sounds impressive until you realise that after just a few months, there were 20% who were not protected. Similarly, a six-month pre-Delta study in England showed “84% protection” (i.e. 16% non-protection).

4. A Brazilian study found that 13.6% of all Gamma variant infections were re-infections (preprint).

5. In a recent, detailed analysis of breakthrough infections and re-infections from Oklahoma, the rate of breakthrough infections after vaccination was about 1% for the J&J vaccine (1077 per 100,000 people), and about half this for Moderna and Pfizer. Almost all of these avoided hospitalisation and death. In contrast, the ratio of re-infection rates to breakthrough case rates was consistently greater than one, even with re-infection defined as “after 3 months”. (As an interesting aside, in this analysis, half of those who died did not have even one ‘co-morbidity’.)

Why should SARS-Cov-2 infection not confer long-term protection?

Actually, this was expected from the start. To understand why, you need to understand its relatives. The bottom line—without help, our immune system is not very good at developing long term immunity after infection with coronaviruses.

The vaccines were specifically engineered to work better than just getting infected. As we’ve already found, immunity after infection is a bit hit-and-miss. This is likely because your immune system will sometimes mainly attack vital parts of the virus, especially the spike protein. Others will be less lucky, and attack other more boring parts of the virus that don’t confer strong immunity. And in all, the immune response will tend to weaken over time—even more rapidly than for other coronaviruses.

The vaccines concentrate on the spike protein and direct all of the efforts of the natural immune system to fighting just this protein. This not only minimises collateral damage, but also cripples the virus, as it needs the spike protein to get access to cells (The spike binds that ACE2 receptor I mentioned above). Even variants are generally covered well enough to protect you against severe consequences.

So what should I do?

Get the vaccine. It will strongly protect you against hospitalisation and death. It will also limit the spread of the virus (combined with other sensible measures like masking) and prevent new, even nastier mutants from arising. Pretty much all the data also agree that if you’ve already had COVID-19 and then get the jab, this provides very solid immunity against further infection.[24]Unlike ‘natural’ immunity after infection.

Just abandon the conspiracy theorists (those who are still alive) and get the jab. It’s also nice to see how increasingly those crazy posts about ‘natural’ immunity are being down-voted out of existence. You can do this too—it will make everyone just that little bit happier.

My 2c, Dr Jo.

Communism: a Synopsis

Floyd Aranyosi · April 28

The Dobe Ju//hoansi people of the Kalahari, and the BaMbuti of the Ituri forest have an economic system that Marx would have called “primitive communism,” and that system has been working just fine for them for tens of thousands of years. This is the case simply because, in a small population that relies on cooperative hunting and gathering their food, everyone can see the benefits of equal sharing of all resources. If you have food today and your neighbors don’t, sharing your food is a good idea, because it serves as a social investment that will benefit you next week, when the neighbors are successful in hunting and you are not.

The “industrial communism” that Marx proposed has never been achieved, and I doubt it is even possible, not because the idea is inherently illogical, but because humans are inherently irrational. Each of us is absolutely dependent upon others for our survival. The clothes we wear, the tools we use, the shelters we live in, etc. were all made by productive specialists, most of whom we will never meet. Lacking direct observation of the work of those “others,” we can easily succumb to the illusion that the products simply appear, independent of the labor of people. The result is that we don’t see the ways in which we are dependent upon others or they are dependent upon us. It’s a problem of scale, really. We are simply not capable of perceiving the entire system, so we are unable to accurately assess our own individual location within the system. We see the T-shirt, the car, the sack of potatoes, etc., and buy it, or not, without recognizing the connection between the product and the producer. The result is aconceptual disconnection between consumption and production. We don’t acknowledge that our behavior affects other people, upon whom we are dependent.

The USSR tried to account for this problem, although only half-heartedly and sporadically, by “glorifying the workers,” through state propaganda, but Stalin (in particular, but not exclusively) never really understood the idea.

Marx made the claim that he was a “materialist,” but included a lot of Platonic “idealism” without realizing it. He assumed that humans are more rational than we actually are, he assumed that history was a path of linear “improvement,” and that “progress” was a natural force, akin to gravity or natural selection (a very Victorian era ideology), and he made the mistake of assuming that the “average” person was clever.

If everyone was brilliant, industrial communism could work just as well as “primitive” communism. But we ain’t, so it don’t. “This works, on paper” is the famous last words of most economic systems.

Communism works just fine when everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It just doesn’t scale up.

Capitalism has similar flaws, of course.

Conservative blindspots

Chris Joosse · Updated July 8

Limited government, authoritarian-averse conservative.

What conservative blindspot would you remove for the conservative to see for themselves?

I would like to focus on the double-standard we (for context, I grew up conservative) have around spending money on things that benefit regular people vs. the kind of spending that benefits the wealthy or pedigreed or well-credentialed. (There are other reasons for this kind of double-standard as well- it’s not exclusively about rich vs. poor, or race, or religion, or class concern- we all have our reasons to accept this kind of double-standard or to decline to see into our blind spots)

When we talk about health care reform, (which could involve raising taxes, or issuing debt) the first concern we hear is “how are you going to pay for that?”, followed by “but socialism!”. If, on the other hand, we talk about increasing spending on military contracts or going to war or bailing out the banks after a depression-scale financial collapse (which could involve raising taxes, or issuing debt) we don’t talk about how it will be paid for, and it’s “not socialism”.

Reliably, we spend more in the USA on so-called ‘corporate welfare’ than we do on social welfare - but when taxpayer money goes to poor people, conservatives are upset. When our tax money goes into rich pockets…? we hear a resounding “meh” from conservatives. If you thought by listening to the news that America faces financial difficulty because it spends so much on the indigent and poor… you’d probably be a typical American- and in that regard, you’d likely believe that poor people are the biggest drain on American prosperity and financial resources. But, you’d be wrong.

The Sunlight Foundation investigated the correlation between corporate spending on lobbying and who receives money or business from the government… and they found that more taxpayer money goes to just the top 200 corporations in terms of lobbying than not: After examining 14 million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government. The $4.4 trillion total represents two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury.

Yep, two thirds of the money individual taxpayers paid in taxes… went to just 200 corporations (which also happened to be the top 200 spenders on lobbying and political campaigns). In a time and place in which we, as conservatives… are angry as hell about how we spend too much money and don’t seem to get value for it? Clearly, there is a double-standard at play.

Claims of election fraud

Franklin Veaux · November 16 - Professional Writer

I keep hearing claims of election fraud and counter claims that there is no evidence of election fraud. How do we decide what is true and what would be good evidence of election fraud?

Originally Answered: I keep hearing claims of election fraud and counter claims that there is no evidence of election fraud. How do we decide what is true what would be good evidence of election fraud?

How do we decide what is true what would be good evidence of election fraud?

One thing you might do is look at the people who are saying there’s election fraud, and what they’re doing.

The pattern we’ve seen so far is:

Go on social media and say “Election fraud!” Appear in court and under penalty of perjury say “No election fraud!” Go on social media and say “Election fraud!” Appear in court again and under penalty of perjury say “No election fraud!”

The people who are saying election fraud suddenly stop saying it when there are real penalties for lying.

Accurate and Honest Arbiters

Peter Kruger, Attorney, Mediator, and Part-Time Amateur Philosopher - Updated Nov 13

Originally Answered: In this age of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” how do we know that so-called fact-checking sources (snopes.com, politifact) are accurate and honest arbiters of what is true and what is false?

Dr. Julian Bashir: You know, I still have a lot of questions to ask you about your past.

Elim Garak: I have given you all the answers I’m capable of.

Bashir: You’ve given me answers, all right; but they were all different. What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t?

Garak: (slightly aghast) My dear Doctor, they’re all true! Bashir: Even the lies?

Garak: Especially the lies!

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “The Wire”

Back when I used to teach high school language arts, I did a unit with my sophomores on critical thinking and source evaluation that focused on essentially this very question. Not specifically Snopes or Politifact, but all sources.

How do you know that what you’re reading or viewing is credible and accurate?

I started the unit by asking how many of my students believed in the Grand Canyon. All of them raised their hands. I asked them how many had been to the Grand Canyon. Usually a few would keep their hands up, no more than three or so. I’d ask how much of it they had viewed. Whether they measured its depth or length personally.

By the time we were done, no student could ever definitively say for absolute sure that the Grand Canyon, precisely as described in scientific literature, existed for sure. Then I’d ask the students to find some event that they had all witnessed personally, usually something recent. I’d have them write down as many details as possible personally, and then go start comparing on the board.

They’d start to notice inconsistencies between themselves. “Why?” I would ask, while hiding a smile. They were all there, right? Why is it that they remember it different? What’s the truth? This answer will be long. There will not be a TL;DR version.

Pretty much everything in source evaluation comes down to credibility. You have to decide whether or not you trust that source. You have to decide whether the scientists who measured the length, depth, and width of the Grand Canyon were honest about it. You have to trust that any student had an accurate perception of an event.

There’s just one problem with that trust: human beings really suck at intuiting who to trust. We all routinely tend to overestimate our abilities to determine whether or not someone is telling the truth. We are very prone to disbelieving facts that do not correlate with our inbuilt implicit biases, or which challenge our core beliefs. And likewise, we are prone to automatically accept information that verifies our core beliefs without challenging it. Some people are more prone to this than others. This is why eyewitnesses to a crime are actually surprisingly untrustworthy. Our very memories are not necessarily as reliable as we’d like to believe. So, who should you trust? And what factors tell you that you can you trust them?

There are some important things to think about whenever evaluating sources.

1. Do I want to believe it?

Do you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now somebody’s gonna say, “I did look that up and it’s wrong.” Well mister, that’s cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. ~ Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, October 17, 2005

Ask yourself, do I want to believe this? Do I not want to believe this? Where are you predisposed? Is this another story that confirms your fears about Killary having those with evidence of her wrongdoing in Benghazi knocked off? Is this a story about some new horrible thing that Trump tweeted at 2:30 AM? Do you immediately dismiss it as nonsense because it says something unflattering about something you believe?

How do you feel about the story, right from the title? What is, as Stephen Colbert calls it, the “truthiness” of the story?

The stronger you feel about the story, the more critically you should vet it, either way. This is because of confirmation bias. I’ll talk more about biases in general later, but I want to address this specifically as a gateway question in source evaluation.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept information that corroborates our worldviews and reject information that is dissonant to our worldviews. The Oatmeal has an excellent strip about this and the “backfire effect” in debate, which is how confirmation bias leads people to entrench themselves more deeply in a belief when presented with contrary facts.

Confirmation bias is the single biggest reason that fake news goes viral. People read something, it agrees with their already-held views, and without even questioning it, they pass it along. Everyone that also already agrees with those views sees that, nods their head, and without questioning it, passes it along. People don’t do that when it violates their worldviews. That’s why the first check for evaluating any source ought to be “do I want this to be true or false.”

Being aware of your own predisposition is critical in actively evaluating a source, because it can lead you to overlook or place undue emphasis on other information that disagrees with or corroborates the source.

Intelligence professionals have this hammered into them constantly. It is very tempting to get a piece of intel and then only look to confirm it or dispute it - even when, especially when they don’t know it’s what they’re doing. It’s a great way to get people killed. This is how the United States got into the Second Gulf War in Iraq: when the intelligence community didn’t tell the administration what it wanted to hear, it created a specialized task force within the military to circumvent the rest of the intelligence community and find enough evidence to support what the administration wanted.

Attorneys like me also have this hammered into them. It’s very tempting to just look for case law or facts that support the client’s position. It affects the very way we construct searches for those pieces of information, and it can cause us to overlook contrary law or facts, and then get ambushed with it. Good attorneys learn to think antagonistically to their own case and look for ways to destroy their own positions, so they can defend against them. That requires being very aware of our own confirmation biases. (One mentor attorney I know routinely plays chess against himself to train his brain to attack his own preferred positions.) Before moving on to any other steps of source evaluation, this is the first and most critical one. Don’t let the wish be the father of the thought.

Now, some people are more susceptible to confirmation bias than others.

2. Levels of sources: primary, secondary, tertiary.

The next most important places to start with source evaluation is checking how close to the original fact reporting the source is.

Primary sources are sources that have direct, first-hand knowledge. Some examples of primary sources would be eyewitnesses, autobiographies, diaries, or photographs that can be authenticated by the person who took them. Audio or video recordings are primary sources. Original legal documents are primary sources.

Secondary sources are interpretations of those primary sources. Scholarly research would be a secondary source, while the data scholarly research relies on would be the primary source. Editorial commentary on a news story is a secondary source.

Secondary sources fall along a spectrum from original fact journalism that gathers up and reports primary source material to analysis of primary facts to outright opinion on the facts.

Tertiary sources are unrelated to the facts themselves and are tools to help interpret primary and secondary sources. Dictionaries, thesauruses, almanacs, fact books, encyclopedias, that kind of stuff are tertiary sources.

Now, the line between primary and secondary sources can sometime be a little fuzzy. For example, reporting itself can be a secondary source. Good, ethical journalism tries to refrain from editorializing as much as possible, and focuses on just reporting the primary source material without interpretation or commentary. However, good journalists also understand that just reciting facts without putting those facts into context is also problematic. Trying to add that context can sometimes end up interjecting analysis and opinion into the mix.

A critical reader understands how to sort out the primary source material from the secondary source material. This is where Fox News gets itself into a lot of trouble, where Politifact sometimes straddles the line, and where Snopes is generally quite good.

Snopes, Politifact, Factcheck.org, and other fact checking sources will cite the primary sources and follow up on those sources. They will link to online sources and vet those sources for verification.

Snopes is excellent at just checking whether or not there is primary source material, and whether that primary source material supports the conclusion. Snopes does a very good job at providing links and citations to the primary source material so that a responsible critical reader can follow up on that source material and verify it for themselves.

Politifact is also very good at linking to its primary sources.

Fox News, Occupy Democrats, Breitbart, Huffington Post, InfoWars, the Daily Kos, and others are not very good at this.

These sources tend not to link to primary source reporting or primary sources at all. If you follow those links, the original source might be buried five layers deep. Fox News cites to World News Daily which cites to Breitbart which cites to The Daily Mail tabloid which simply pulled it out of its ass to start with.

Or worse, these links are circular. Fox News cites to WND which cites to Breitbart which cites to InfoWars which cited to a Fox News article in the first place. In that game of telephone, the information got distorted enough that the new article becomes an amped up pile of steaming bullshit.

This kind of source burying and game of telephone is exactly how an Obama administration “scandal” got started that never actually existed. President Obama went on a trade summit mission to India in 2010. These kinds of visits abroad require a lot of staff and routinely cost several million dollars a day. On November 2nd, the website for New Delhi TV reported that this trip was going to cost the United States two hundred million dollars a day. It cited an anonymous Indian official. There was no other verification.

The Drudge Report picked up the story and posted a link to it, either believing the story or simply not caring whether it was or wasn’t. Rush Limbaugh, popular conservative radio host, picked up the Drudge Report story, and runs with it. Fox News picks up the Limbaugh broadcast, where then-Fox commentator Glenn Beck adds 34 warships or approximately fifteen percent of the U.S. Navy, and ups the staff count of folks coming along to three thousand people. This prompts the administration to put out a statement that these figures “have no basis in reality.”

Then-Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann ignored the statement, and restated to Anderson Cooper these entirely unverified numbers and now adding that President Obama’s administration had booked over 800 rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel - which has only 550 rooms total. When Cooper asked her where they came from, she simply said, “These are the numbers coming out of the press.”

It took less than 48 hours for this story, which was made up whole cloth, to make it up to a Congresswoman to be recited as gospel truth, because nobody in that chain looked for the primary source to verify its accuracy or credibility. It passed through at least six levels of secondary sources. And in that game of telephone, an inflated number of staff, nearly one-sixth of the United States Navy, and double-booking at least half of the Taj Mahal Hotel were all added.

3. What are the actual, verified facts the source contains?

There’s an old expression: trust, but verify. Look for facts.

Importantly: look for actual facts and not just opinions masquerading as facts. This is becoming an all-too-common problem today. Someone’s unsupported conclusion is taken as fact. Facts are verifiable. They happened, or they did not. They exist, or they do not. Opinions carry around a conclusion or a preference with them. A person who says that the color green is their favorite is stating what looks like a fact about themselves, but it’s a preferential opinion: green is the best color. This can’t be verified. This is merely a conclusion.

Facts, on the other hand, are simply neutral. That grass is green. How do you know that? We can verify it. Five people can look at the grass, and come to a consensus about whether it is green. We can settle the matter by using a spectrometer and determining whether the grass reflects electromagnetic waves at 560–520 nm (the accepted consensus definition of green.) This is one of the reasons that Snopes and Politifact are generally regarded as safe: they verify the facts that various statements rely on.

Some time back, a friend of mine posted an article she ran across in something called the Freedom Daily about Islamberg, New York being raided by a massive counter-terrorism task force who caught more than two dozen Muslim terrorists with various explosives and weapons. The problem is… it never happened.

The only thing that can be verified is that one Muslim person from a town nearly fifty miles away with no verified ties to Islamberg was arrested for stealing several boxes of ammunition, and in the subsequent search related to that investigation, it was discovered that he had several illegal firearms.

There is absolutely no verification of a Federal raid on Islamberg. Primary sources such as the county sheriff, someone that would have to be included in something like that, noted that it was familiar with the article and that there was “absolutely no truth” to it. There was literally no verification of the story.

But what if there’s proof, like photos, right? Surely they can’t be made up! But pictures can lie.

Graphic pictures are another area where untrustworthy sources can try to grab you and suck you in. For example, there was a photograph that was circulated in around several evangelical Christian blogs depicting a bloodied woman with her eyes and mouth sewn shut, and touted as a Saudi woman who had been tortured for her Christian faith. A reverse Google image search quickly reveals that this woman is actually Japanese, and is into “extreme body modification.”

Stock images or composite images are often used in many fake news sites. While some composites are difficult for the average person to detect, others are usually obvious - shadows or lighting that doesn’t match, that sort of stuff. If a photograph is reported in the news source, do a reverse image search if you’re not sure about it. And if it’s graphic or seems extremely damning, definitely you shouldn’t be sure of it.

Even reputable news sources can sometimes re-use old photographs or video, particularly of various natural disasters or extreme weather. A photograph or video of people walking through a blizzard could be years old.

Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck.org, etc., are excellent secondary sources when it comes to pulling out the verifiable, relevant facts from the primary sources. They follow up on the sources from other information outlets, internet stories, or statements of public figures, and find out what the verifiable facts are. The only opinion they make is whether the facts support the conclusions reached by these information outlets, and they’re up front about what their opinion is and how they reached it. They check whether photos are real or not. They do the reverse image searches. They follow the links. They make sure to vet the material before presenting it.

4. What inferences can reasonably be drawn from the facts, and do you have all of the facts to draw accurate inferences?

Inferences are conclusions that people make after looking at the facts.

This is where people mostly get into trouble. This is also where the spin doctors make their money. NPR, MSNBC, and FOX can all report the exact same piece of news, and all three of these sources could result in three entirely different and competing narratives. Why? Because of the why. Each will present the story slanted to let the reader come up with their own context about what those facts mean, why the story happened that way. The sources, the context, all of it is designed to lead you to a certain conclusion.

Facts on their own are just trivia. People naturally try to put facts into a narrative. It’s just how we think, how we operate as human beings. That is why people will make viral a Natural News article that shows that a study “conclusively proved” that there is usually 1 part per billion of glyphosate in wine. Why does that matter?

Because glyphosate is a boogeyman to a large group of people. It could (very disputably) be a carcinogen. Never mind that your typical wine contains approximately 130 million parts per billion of a known carcinogen (ethanol) because that’s not the story. The narrative is something sinister is amok. The article invites you to draw a conclusion from the facts they present, namely that Big Wine is in the pocket of Monsanto who doesn’t want you to know they’re spraying grapes with Roundup because Monsanto wants you to have cancer. Why? Because they’re eeee-ville!

What logically follows from the facts? Not what you want them to mean. Not what you wish them to mean. This is where you have to walk back over to step 1 and ask yourself what do I want to hear? Logical inferences are created by applying facts to rules.

For example, what happened here?

It probably seems pretty obvious to most people that this guy’s wife snuck up behind him, smashed him with a bottle while brushing his teeth, and then tried to make it look like he slipped on some soap coming out of the shower, right?

There is a whole set of rules about the evidence we see in this picture getting applied. What does a bathroom typically look like? How do shoe prints get there, and what rules do we have about the shape of shoe prints? What do we know about monogrammed towels and their typical usage? There are a whole host of rules that get subconsciously applied here: only women wear high heels. A man doesn’t use the “hers” towel - he uses the “his” towel. These rules are the critical link between the facts and the conclusions we can draw from those basic facts. The facts here are not in dispute. We can all look at those facts and agree what the facts are.

But the rules we impose on those facts to draw inferences might not be accurate. When assessing the credibility of a source, it’s essential to be self-reflective and personally critical of the rules that you are applying to reach a conclusion. This goes back to that confirmation bias that I referred to earlier. Even certain pieces of evidence might be inferred, or conclusions stacked on top of each other to make larger inferences.

For example, if there’s a missing person, a pool of blood, and drag marks, and you don’t have a body, would you not typically infer there was a dead person somewhere? So, if it’s somewhere, where is it? And what happened? It seems obvious that someone was murdered, right? But that’s merely an inference, which filled in certain missing pieces of evidence.

This is also why it’s important to have all of the facts before making an inferential conclusion. Are you using all the facts, or ignoring ones that go against the narrative you want to hear? During the 2016 U.S. election cycle, a black church was burned, and the words Vote Trump spray painted on the side.

Factually, this happened. Depending on how crazy you want to get, you could either trust the photos, or have bought a plane ticket and driven down to Mississippi to go see it with your own eyes. It’s verifiable, authentic. What came after that is the problem. Assumptions and inferences ran amok. Not without good reason, mind you.

It was a historically black church in Mississippi. It’s not hard to add a little into the fact pattern. It’s not a stretch to find a context. A lot of people wanted it to be Trump supporters. They wanted them to be as vile and deplorable as they were led to believe Trump supporters were. A few facts were enough data points combined with some historical precedence to reach a plausible conclusion. A lot of liberal people wanted that story to be true. Then, it turned out later that the church was burned down and tagged by a black man, who was a congregation member.

Immediately, conservatives went crazy. This was vindication, based on that one little fact alone. They tweeted and posted and blogged immediately, crowing their victory. They wanted a different story to be true, one in which they weren’t the bad guys. Black guy trying to set us all up, we knew it all along! See?! See?! Y’all called us deplorables, and look how mistaken you were! And so they ignored (or didn’t bother to look for) any other facts. They went straight from a little bit of fact to an inference about what those facts showed, because it supported their narrative.

I admit, when the story first broke originally, I wanted it to be true. Black church, Mississippi, plenty of white supremacists at Trump rallies, sure. It wasn’t a stretch. It wasn’t implausible. And it said something about Trump supporters that I personally liked, that some of them were terrible enough people to firebomb a church and tag the ruins with self-supporting graffiti. I wanted that to be true.

Still, I cautioned myself and others at the time after a day of thinking about it to wait for the investigation to come back. Let’s wait for the facts. All of the facts. Turns out, after we got those facts, everyone was wrong. Everyone drew inferences from scant facts, and every one of those inferences was wrong.

It turned out that the man arrested wasn’t doing it for racially motivated reasons at all. He was taking advantage of the charged, polarized environment around the election to cover up a burglary he committed at the church. It was a convenient cover for him. He would have gotten away with it, as well, if it weren’t for good police work that went beyond the initial theory of the case, and looked for all the facts. (And those meddling kids!) Not just facts that supported one version of events, but all the facts.

If all the police did was look at the early facts and didn’t investigate more, didn’t follow up on everything, they might very well have reached the same conclusions the internet did. They might have reached the same conclusions that many of their predecessors in the same town might have reached a hundred years ago, and those people a hundred years ago typically ended up lynching someone over it.

Remember: there are two parts to inferences, the facts and the rules. In my profession as an attorney, we talk about “garbage in, garbage out.” If there is a breakdown in the facts, either inaccurate or incomplete facts, or if there is a breakdown in the rules, either inaccurate or incomplete rules, then the inference drawn from those facts and rules will also be inaccurate.

When evaluating a source, evaluate the inferences it makes, and the inferences you draw from the source, and ask whether it is logically supported, whether it is based on incomplete or inaccurate data, or whether it is based on incomplete or inaccurate logical rules. Furthermore, you need to be self-aware of any rules that you are imputing into the situation. Again: go back up to the picture here and think about how you arrived at any conclusions. What rules did you apply to those facts?

Those rules didn’t come out of nowhere.

Our brains are constantly creating a framework of rules for how the universe operates. We literally couldn’t function without them. Many of these rules are intuited from our observations. In the Tragedy in the Bathroom, some of those rules might include:

Women are the ones who usually wear high heels, not men.

A man is likely to use the “his” towel and a woman is likely to use the “hers” towel. Bare feet don’t leave the same kinds of footprints as shoes and certainly don’t leave the kinds of footprints as high heels.

Additionally: high-heeled shoes leave a distinctive footprint pattern that looks like this. A person who suffers a slip-and-fall-injury leading to death would probably be facing parallel to the place where they would have slipped and fallen, not perpendicular.

You could chart these out like this:

If you have evidence and a conclusion, have you consciously articulated how you got there? If not, stop and think about that for a moment: what rule did you apply that bridged that evidence and conclusion?

And then ask whether that rule is valid. Is that rule an assumption? Or based on assumptions? For example, if you concluded that the poor schmuck in the photograph was killed by his wife, what assumptions did you likely make?

Did you assume that whoever owned these “his” and hers” towels were married? This assumes that only people who are married cohabitate. This assumption may or may not be true, depending on where you live and the culture there.

This also assumes that it was whoever used the “hers” towel that killed the guy. This neglects possibilities such as a jilted mistress who just found out that the guy was married, or that this poor schmuck was at the mistress’ place and his wife found out. The deceased might have even been at a crappy run-down motel for a tryst.

For that matter, maybe the guy was killed by a femme fatale assassin looking to set up another woman?

The key here is to be self-reflective: if you’ve come to a conclusion, do you have both verifiable evidence to support that conclusion, and valid rules? Make sure to think critically about those rules and whether they are built on any assumptions of how the world works. Question those. This is quite difficult in practice, and often best done by bringing in an objective third party to question those rules and assumptions.

5. What is the authorial bias?

I imagine most of you thought we ought to start here. If the source is biased, we can just dismiss it, right?

Absolutely not.

Every source is biased. And that’s okay.

Bias is not inherently a discrediting problem.

There are a couple of common forms of authorial bias.

Confirmation bias. I discussed this earlier. It’s the tendency to accept things we already like and reject things that we don’t.

Partisan or “statement” bias. This is what we most often think of as bias, or “spin,” where the author engages in active advocacy. This kind of bias is where the author goes beyond simple primary fact reporting and interjects a preferential or partisan slant on the material. They present the facts in such a way that it clearly favors a perspective.

Selection or “gatekeeping” bias. Some news sources go out of their way to try to be balanced in their presentment of a news story, such as NPR, but have a different kind of bias: what stories they present at all. This is selection bias. By cherry-picking only certain events or facts, even if the story is presented in a balanced manner, the overall source is biased.

A subset of this is “ventriloquism,” where a source edits experts or witnesses out of context so that their quotes agree with the author’s bias, or only show the parts of the expert or witness that agree with the author’s bias.

Coverage or “visibility” bias. Some stories are juicier or more popular than others, and so get more coverage. Hundreds of children are killed by their parents every year in shaken baby incidents or abuse. But the Casey Anthony trial ended up becoming incredibly high profile, dominating the national news for weeks and captivating the country, because it had a special twisted kind of appeal to it.

Concision bias. In the TL;DR culture today, sources are having a harder and harder time with complex, nuanced reporting and analysis. Investigative journalism can take months if not years of research; see the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s investigation of the clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church. There is a lot of information that needs to be put into context.

And people are less patient to read that. They want the quarter-page summary. The 140 character tweetable explanation.

The McDonald’s hot coffee case is a perfect example. The original story was long and complex. The jury found that McDonald’s was not only negligent, but actively reckless in how it stored and served coffee, having broken regulations on safe temperatures. The woman involved was not driving; her son was. They had pulled over into a parking stall; they were not in motion when she spilled the coffee. She had received third degree burns to much of her body. The jury award was not only for her medical bills, but punitive damages because McDonald’s had acted so egregiously.

But the story continued to get truncated and truncated as it was repeated by outlets until it was 250 words and a headline that made it sound like a frivolous lawsuit.

Sensationalism. This is bias for the extraordinary over the ordinary. Sometimes also called “yellow journalism,” it is the tendency of media outlets to hype up an otherwise less exciting story to get better ratings or circulation, thereby giving the impression that relatively rare events (such as an illegal immigrant committing a violent crime,) are more common than ordinary events (American citizens committing violent crimes.)

Modern mass media’s newest form of sensationalism is what we call “clickbait.” If you see articles about “X Politician Blasts Obama!” or “21 Unconstitutional Things Obama Did - You’ll Never Believe #17!” it’s just sensationalized clickbait.

The Spanish-American war was started because of a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. On February 15, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine blew up in the Havana harbor after what a Spanish investigation determined to be a spontaneous coal bunker fire that spread to the ship’s main magazine. The Navy tried to push the narrative that it was a Spanish mine, but openly ignored their own internal investigators that believed the Spanish conclusion was accurate and the explosion was initially caused by firedamp released by the use of bituminous coal over anthracite coal.

Decades later, further exploration of the wreck of the Maine and investigation of firsthand accounts leaned heavily to confirm the conclusion that the Maine had been destroyed by a coal explosion and not a Spanish mine, in part because many other ships of the same construction type and class using the same coal suffered similar nearly catastrophic explosions until the Navy quit using coal and switched to fuel oil.

But at the time, Pulitzer and Hearst hyped it up as an attack on the Maine by Spanish forces to sell more papers. Quickly, the chant “Remember the Maine; to hell with Spain!” became a rallying cry that shut down ongoing diplomatic negotiations and instead goaded a hawkish Congress into declaring war on Spain two months later in April of 1898.

False Balance or “fairness bias.” Sometimes sources try to present facts in a balanced manner to avoid the appearance of bias, but this can lead to giving the appearance of fairness at the expense of artificially making it seem like a side of the story is more based in reality than it is. There’s a good little exchange in the television show The Newsroom that illustrates this:

Maggie: How can you be biased towards fairness?

MacKenzie: There aren’t two sides to every story. Some stories have five sides; some only have one.

Tess: I still don’t underst…

Will: Bias towards fairness means that if the entire congressional Republican caucus were to walk into the House and propose a resolution stating that the Earth was flat, the Times would lead with “Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.”

False Timeliness. This can come in two main flavors:

Presenting an old story as new. This is more common to hoax sites or actual fake news, recycling old scaremongering and just updating the release dates. This happens a lot with crimes; something from five or ten years ago is brought out as having freshly happened.

Bringing up an old story as suddenly relevant because a similar event has now occurred, or without specific context and thus implying that the old story is new or timely.

The key to evaluating a source for bias is understanding what bias it might have, and then accounting for it when verifying the source material or judging the credibility of the source. I don’t ignore Fox News, but I know very well that if I see a Fox News article, I’m going to have to do a lot of extra digging to get the rest of the facts that they inevitably decided weren’t relevant (and usually are,) and spend a lot of time sorting out the spin from the primary source material and isolating the rest of the biases.

Now, most of the time I’m just too lazy to do that much work on it, so I don’t bother with Fox News in most circumstances.

There’s an excellent chart out there called the Media Bias Chart.

This is a good chart, but it really only covers partisan or statement bias, and where along the secondary source spectrum a source tends to exist on average.

This chart doesn’t tell you much about selection bias, coverage bias, or other authorial biases. Some of the sources at the top of that chart are highly reliable sources in terms of their partisanship and original primary source reporting. The AP and Reuters are some of the gold standard in journalism.

But the AP and Reuters can also still be subject to selection or concision biases without ever being partisan. The AP doesn’t often do extremely in-depth investigative journalism; it tends to report shorter stories of current events.

ProPublica, The Economist, USA Today, or even Time Magazine are all reasonably centrist in partisan bias, but these tend to interject a great deal of selection bias simply due to format of presentation. Most of these are periodicals for their long-format pieces. They don’t do much short reporting. They do more analysis. It might be non-partisan analysis, but because they only have so much space and time, they have to pick and choose what to write about. That inherently results in some selection or coverage bias.

That’s not necessarily anything bad. It just means you might not get other important, relevant facts or stories that could shed relevant context on the original story. Snopes, Politifact, and other fact checkers are also susceptible to these kinds of biases, particularly selection bias.

Politifact is criticized by conservatives as liberal-biased because of this. Politifact tends to fact-check more conservative claims than liberal claims. As a result, a broad survey of the site makes it seem like it is biased towards liberalism.

And conservatives sometimes gripe about the site simply not bothering to check on certain liberal claims. That can be a valid criticism.

Now, there’s also something to be said that conservatives might just also make more and more incendiary claims, and make more erroneous claims.

For example, conservatives argue that the bulk of the media outlets must be liberally biased simply because they tend to report much more negative press about President Donald Trump than positive stories.

But, that doesn’t inherently indicate partisan, selection, or any other bias. It could simply be that President Trump keeps consistently lying out every corner of his mouth and constantly picking fights with the press over policies that are generally criticized by a majority of the public figures out there.

If Republicans do a dozen crazy things and Democrats do one, it isn’t unbiased to make up eleven crazy stories about Democrats to balance it out. That would just be introducing a fairness bias, instead. As I said, every source has some degree of bias. That’s fine. Apply the appropriate corrective lenses, and evaluate the facts and inferences on their merits.

6. What degree of institutional integrity does this source have?

Good journalistic outlets know that the only resource they have is credibility. If a journalist is not credible, she is finished in the industry. Lying, just once, even by mistake, is (usually) a career death sentence.

Sources that are reputable and credible take this very seriously. If they have to issue a retraction, they have probably fired the journalist who reported the story and that guy is likely blackballed from everything with more integrity than Buzzfeed.

Look at how the source handles corrections and retractions when it turns out they’re wrong about something. That will tell you a lot about the credibility of the source right there. FOX virtually never issues corrections or retractions, and never for its flagship primetime shows hosted by what they go out of their way to call entertainers, such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Even if these guys are straight up factually wrong, provably so, they never issue an apology for getting it wrong. That should tell you something about the institutional integrity of the source; namely, that it has virtually none.

CNN is likewise slow to correct itself when it does. The Huffington Post doesn’t readily admit mistakes, either. I’ve never seen the Daily Kos issue a significant correction or retraction about anything. WaPo and the Times, in contrast? Generally, they’re quick to admit mistakes and issue corrections, updates, or even retractions. The AP, Reuters, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CBS, ABC, NBC, The Atlantic, really most major journalistic outlets are pretty good about this.

There are some red flags you should immediately recognize for any source, article, or media outlet that should alert you to credibility issues. Some can be “immediately discount this source and do not engage further with it,” while others can be “proceed with caution.”

You are barraged with advertising and pop-ups the minute you get to the site. Even reputable sources make money off of advertising, but if your screen starts to look like the house from Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation, especially if it’s advertising to lots of clickbaity things like “This one weird trick in your town can lower your insurance by 75%!” it’s less likely to be a reputable, credible source.

Run away and don’t come back to these sources.

Listicles and articles that require you to click through 15 pages to read all of it. If you’re in a source that requires you to wade through 30 ads a page and click on “next” a dozen times to read the whole thing, it’s a red flag that this is not a reputable, credible source, and is just a steaming pile of clickbait trying to extract advertising dollars from you.

Again, run, don’t walk, and never come back.

Number Seven Will Shock You! These are another form of clickbait closely related to listicles. Spoiler alert: number seven probably won’t shock you.

This is why sources like Buzzfeed, Twenty-Two Words, etc. are generally crap. Don’t use these for news or credible sources.

Headlines that don’t match the articles. You’d be amazed at how often shitty sources will try to grab you with a sensationalized headline that has little or nothing to do with the article. “Joe Biden Actually Registered Member of KKK!” turns out to be a story about some idiot that just happens to be named Joe Biden that lives in Mississippi and not the former vice president.

One time here or there and it’s minimal? Flag it and be skeptical of anything it publishes. If a source does this a lot, or it’s really egregious (like the Biden example above), just stop using it.

Headlines with graphic pictures or promises of graphic pictures. This is often clickbait. The source is trying to lure you in with the promise of a novelty. That picture may not even be in the article.

This is again why sources like Buzzfeed, Twenty-Two Words, etc. are generally crap. Don’t use these for news or credible sources.

Also, be really aware of photographs. Some of the pictures of kids in cages published during the Trump Family Separation Crisis were either from the previous administration or, when zoomed back, were random kids on a street behind a chain link fence who were not being held in detention at all. There are many sources, even reputable sources that as of August 2019 are using old stock images of forest fires for headlines about Amazon rainforest wildfires; at least two normally reputable sources used photographs that weren’t even of the Amazon.

Headlines that are questions. This is also clickbait. The source is trying to lure you in by offering a question, not a fact. The article probably doesn’t answer it. No, it’s not a “thinkpiece.” It’s usually just a pile of trash designed to generate ad dollars.

“Native advertising,” or pieces written by advertisers, not the actual content providers. These can be really hard to spot sometimes. They look like actual articles. They have headlines and graphics, sometimes infographics, and can very accurately mimic a real piece. But in actuality, they’re written by advertisers, not journalists.

Sometimes this is called “branded content,” or “sponsored content,” or “featured partners.” It’s the same thing.

Some sources try to take good care to make this very explicit. The Times usually has a big banner that reads “Paid Post.” But even this may be misleading to the reader, if they are not aware that not all content is written by the outlet itself, and these don’t look like ads at times - they look like articles.

If you see these kinds of articles, and you might have to look carefully, it may not be an instant disqualification for the source itself, but you can safely discount that entire article. Vague attacks or generalized references. If you see something about “Washington” or “The White House,” or “Trump supporters” or “Bernie fans,” you can safely discount it by at least 50%. Anonymous sources. Be careful with these. They can be reputable. Mark Felt was the whistleblower who brought down Nixon, and nearly until his death in 2008 was an anonymous source known only to the public as “Deep Throat.”

But anonymous sources can also be extremely disreputable. Look to see if any of the facts can be verified by independent sources. The “Deep Throat” information was all vetted very, very carefully through independent sources before the Times ran with it.

Future speculation. If the source is speculating on what might happen, be wary of it. Unless military scientists have something with time travel not generally available to the public, it’s pretty difficult to get accurate fact reporting from the future. Be wary of sources talking about what’s going to happen as if it were fact.

“Lawmaker says [insert shitty foot-in-mouth statement here]” or “Lawmaker proposes bill to [insert extremely stupid or divisive issue here.]” Turns out that “lawmaker” is a pretty generic term that can apply right on down to a city alderman somewhere that has about as much national level political clout as the secretary of the local PTA. Sources use “lawmaker” because it’s not a Congressman or Senator and it makes the person sound more important.

That “lawmaker” is probably a low-level junior freshman politician that has absolutely zero chance of passing his “ban breastfeeding for public morality” bill. But a disreputable source might try to make it sound like he’s the governor of New York or Speaker of the House.

There are over seven thousand state-level elected legislators, some of whom won their seats while getting fewer than 1500 people to vote for them. New Hampshire alone has over 400 elected legislators.

The same is true of “advisors” or “officials.” These are basically no better than anonymous sources. The source is trying to make them sound more important than they probably are. Take it with a salt lick.

The same is also true of [insert celebrity figure with zero expert qualifications here.]

Let me get this off my chest:

Ted Fucking Nugent is not a reliable source regarding literally any goddamned piece of information, including music. Ted Nugent is not a politician. Ted Nugent is not a policy expert. Ted Nugent doesn’t have any expertise in any area except how to sing “Cat Scratch Fever” and avoid getting drafted by the military. Ted Nugent does not hold a single degree above a high school diploma nor have any relevant professional experience that would qualify him to be a credible source of anything except for how to look like human-rat hybrid experiment that went horrifically wrong.

Stop giving this moron any sort of credibility. He is not a credible source of information.

The same is true of all sorts of other celebrities who have decided that for some reason or another, their opinion matters and should be taken serious. Just because you have a million followers on Instagram does not make you a credible source. Just because your parent was a senator doesn’t qualify you as an expert on foreign policy or politics.

It’s on the blog portion of an otherwise reputable source’s website. Forbes and Reuters are respected, usually highly credible news sources. However, both Forbes and Reuters have third-party-blog portions of their websites that are not vetted and edited by Forbes or Reuters. I could go get a blog on Forbes. Reuters has a section of its site dedicated to unvetted, unedited press releases that literally anyone can publish. Contributors are solely responsible for the content. These sources do no fact checking about these posts. Make sure its from the journalism side of those generally reliable, credible sources before trusting it, not Joe’s Totally Unbiased Blog hosted on Forbes.

Avoid these sources, or very carefully review them.

Look for weasel words. “Many experts agree” or “polls indicate” is often a way to weasel out and report something that isn’t really credible without actually saying it is. “Many experts” could turn out to be four guys in a bar in Djibouti. The source ought to tell you who those experts are and where they work.

Follow up and see if they’re actually credible sources and experts in the field they’re talking about.

Recent/new study shows [insert inflammatory conclusion or health benefit of otherwise unhealthy habit, etc.] This is another classic piece of clickbait. News sources are notoriously scientifically illiterate and rarely report on methodology, confidence levels, what “statistically significant means,” the fact that correlation is not causation, and a lot more. Take everything that involves studies with a salt lick unless it’s from a peer reviewed journal and you actually know how to read the published results. Which also leads to: watch out for “journals” that aren’t actually peer-reviewed, credible sources, or are actually just think tanks, foundations, and institutes that spout made up bullshit.

There is an ever-increasing number of sources that really look and sound like they would be scientific, prestigious journals, and are anything but.

For example, the American Journal of Engineering Research sounds like a pretty reputable source from the title, but it’s nothing more than a predatory journal that does not publish anything even approaching peer-reviewed quality scientific research.

There are also various organizations, think tanks, and “institutes” that sound like credible sources, but publish conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, hoaxes, and other entirely made up nonsense. It’s really easy to fall down the rabbit hole these days, especially on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

Avoid these like the plague on humanity they are.

Public Survey Push Polls. Unless it’s conducted by a reputable pollster who specializes in this kind of statistical work, polls are not always a very credible source of information. Worse yet if they’re a poll conducted by a local news outlet by putting a question up on Facebook or Twitter.

Discount them as credible sources of anything except how many really angry people use Facebook or Twitter.

Polls can be useful if they’re well conducted by otherwise reputable sources. Gallup, for example, is generally a pretty good pollster. Marist and Quinnipiac are fairly highly regarded. Zogby… not so much.

Fox News, surprisingly, is a pretty good credible pollster. They source this out to two firms, one Democratic and one Republican (Anderson Robbins Research and Shaw and Company research, respectively). These firms are quite respectable and their methodology usually quite sound. While Fox News itself might be a dumpster fire of credibility, their polls are usually fine. (With thanks to resident stats expert Mac Tan on this one.)

Check the URL. There are hundreds of fake websites that look almost exactly like actual news sites and are off by just a letter or two. ABC News is an actual source, and generally highly respected. There’s a website at the URL abcnews dot com dot co, and it looks very similar, but is loaded with actual fake news instead.

Conventional source evaluation used to hold that .edu or .gov sources were likely to be reputable. Many educational institutions today host web content that is not reviewed or fact checked, much like Forbes and Reuters above. Government sources are still likely to be mostly credible, but the current administration has a tenuous grasp at best of what constitutes credible, reliable fact-based information and those running various agencies are little better.

Your mileage may vary here.

Nobody else is talking about it. If your source’s headline or article isn’t reported literally anywhere else except a handful of blogs or some threads on Reddit, that’s a good clue that it’s not credible. There is no validity to the idea that there is a massive conspiracy to hide Teh Truth!™ from all of us by the mainstream media, only to be thwarted by a plucky band of YouTube commentors and Redditors.

Look for at least local news articles. Most small towns have at least a local radio station or weekly newspaper that publishes local news, even “Cow Crosses Road; Traffic Halted for Hour.”

If it’s something that seems nationally important and even the local herald doesn’t report on it, odds are it never happened.

View foreign government-run sources with a healthy skepticism. Some of my conservative friends have started sharing a lot of things from RT. RT is literally Russia Today, a Russian state-run media corporation. For the love of God, don’t. This is literally a propaganda arm of the Russian government.

Now, not all foreign sources are bad. The Times of India, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and Der Spiegel are excellent journalism and well-respected sources.

But don’t rely on foreign state-run media as a rule.

Edit: Al Jazeera is a bit of an oddity here. It’s generally pretty well-respected and credible, but it’s also the state media arm of Qatar. It’s not without controversy for that precise reason. I take it seriously as a source, but I always follow up to see if anyone else is also reporting it and whether there’s anything missing.

Edit 8/26/19: Some Indian residents are telling me that the Times of India isn’t what it used to be and has become far less reputable.

Snopes, Politifact, and other fact checkers are usually very good at avoiding these kinds of red flags.

Snopes, Politifact, and other fact checkers are generally accurate and honest arbiters of truth because they don’t engage in shady journalistic practices, verify and disclose their sources so anyone can decide that if they don’t want to take the fact-checker’s word for it that they can follow up and do the math themselves, and have reputations for correcting mistakes. They have good journalistic integrity and that is why they are regarded as high quality, reputable, credible sources.

Mostly Standard Addendum and Disclaimer: read this before you comment.

I welcome rational, reasoned debate on the merits with reliable, credible sources. But coming on here and calling me names, pissing and moaning about how biased I am, et cetera and so forth, will result in a swift one-way frogmarch out the airlock. Doing the same to others will result in the same treatment. Essentially, act like an adult and don’t be a dick about it.

Getting cute with me about my commenting rules and how my answer doesn’t follow my rules and blah, blah, whine, blah is getting old. Again, ornery enough today to not put up with it. Stay on topic or you’ll get to watch the debate from the outside.

If you want to argue and you’re not sure how to not be a dick about it, just post a picture of a cute baby animal instead, all right? Your displeasure and disagreement will be duly noted. Pinkie swear.

I’m done with warnings. If you have to consider whether or not you’re over the line, the answer is most likely yes. I’ll just delete your comment and probably block you, and frankly, I won’t lose a minute of sleep over it. Debate responsibly.

No Vaccine, no job

Franklin Veaux - Small business owner, serial entrepreneur · Sep 26

Can the employee sue the company to win if the company uses a policy “no vaccine, no job” to fire them in the US? Why?

Nope. “Frightened of vaccination” is not a protected class.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan (remember him?) held strongly the belief that government needed to get out of the way of business. He saw business regulation as an inherently burdensome thing that harmed business, so he advocated for the abolition of labor laws and fair labor relations boards.

American conservatives took up the call and campaigned ceaselessly for an end to government involvement in labor relations. The government, they argued, should have little or no say in who businesses hire or fire.

Result: 49 of the 50 states in the United States now have employment at will laws, which explicitly and specifically allow businesses to fire you for any reason whatsoever, or even for no reason, provided it is not membership in a protected class.

That means businesses cannot fire you for being black or Jewish, but they can fire you because:

You wrote a bunch of pro-Trump stuff on Twitter and your employer didn’t like that. You wore a MAGA hat to work. You are not vaccinated. You talk about how you like to go hunting and your boss is vegan. You have a gun rack in the back of your pickup truck and your boss is anti-gun. You wore yellow socks to work and your boss doesn’t like yellow.

This is all legal. Employment at will laws specifically abolished fair labor relations boards that would, pre-Reagan, have stopped companies from firing you for reasons not directly related to your job performance.

And I want to be absolutely perfectly plain about this: Employment at will laws were fought for, advocated for, and passed BY CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS.

This was a conservative deal through and through.

Liberals fought against this. We warned you. We told you these laws could be used against yoh. You didn’t listen.

Fox News is NOT NEWS

I only access legitimate journalism — which means I do not watch Fox News, at all.

P.S. — In case you were unaware, Fox News is not news.

——

The following resources all adhere to the Associated Press’ “Code of Ethics,” and also the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Guidelines to Ethical Journalism.” They are all excellent, as long as you stick to the journalism, and avoid the “editorial crap.” They are all careful to clearly label editorials, so it is easy to avoid those. Editorials – of course - are not written by the journalists.

The Wall Street Journal (as long as you avoid any editorials.)

The New York Times (just avoid anything which they label as “Opinion.”)

CBS News (avoid the Sunday morning talk shows, such as “Face the Nation,” and you are safe. Online, stay away from editorials. Stick to their two nightly news broadcasts, and you will find them 100% reliable.)

The Washington Post (they clearly label all editorials as “Opinions.”)

NBC News (stay away from editorial programs such as “Meet the Press,” and you should be fine. Stick to their two nightly news broadcasts, and you will find them 100% reliable.)

The New Republic (is among the strictest resources, fires any journalist who violates the rules.)

The Christian Science Monitor (do not let the name scare you off. The publication has nothing to do with the religious affiliation from which it originated, long ago.) Solid, unbiased, ethical journalism. Always.)

The Boston Globe (All editorials are labeled as “editorials.” The rest is excellent.)

ABC News (Steer clear of programming such as “This Week,” which is merely opinion. Stick to their two nightly news broadcasts, and you will find them 100% reliable.)

The Economist (is known for being very strict with all of their journalists, and fires them when they stray.)

CSpan – merely turns the cameras on, for hearings, Congressional sessions, etc. No commentator will try to sway you, or shove propaganda down your throat.

The BBC (including BBC America) (Rarely offers editorials, but always clearly labels them as such.)

Propublica (A new find, and a real gem). They are excellent; they adhere to the ethical rules of journalism. They still offer old-school investigative reporting (which is very expensive, and very tough to find). They have an incredible list of awards, and for good reason.

Reuters (Uses the word “Opinion” and “Analysis” and “Editorial” for the nonsense. The rest, is excellent.)

The Associated Press (obviously, because it offers no editorials at all, and strictly enforces guidelines.)

NPR News (web-based stuff is terrific, and clearly marked if it is editorial content.)

The Tampa Bay Times (Long history excellence in the actual journalism.)

Foreign Affairs (excellent journalism, top notch resource.)

The Atlantic (Avoid the articles which are labeled “Analysis,” and you know the rest is top-notch.)

The Miami Herald (Avoid the “editorials.”)

PBS News (Reporting follows the guidelines, but adds one of their own – balance. If there is any issue of dispute, they give equal space to both sides.)

The Los Angeles Times (Excellent solid reporting, but avoid any editorials.)

The Denver Post (Adheres to the guidelines, just learn how they mark editorials.)

How the World sees the US now

Martin Reyto · May 4

One Canadian’s thoughts about the US: How does the rest of the world view the United States during this pandemic?

The following opinion piece in the Irish Times, a daily newspaper published in Ireland since 1859, was emailed to me a few days ago with a request to “copy, paste, and share.” Since it’s a fitting answer to your question and eloquently sums up my own feelings and viewpoint on the subject, I will do so here.

Irish Times April 25, 2020 By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

They Outsmart Us Every Time

EVERYBODY… EVERYBODY… LISTEN! IT’S ENOUGH ALREADY… LIBERALS… CONSERVATIVES … DEMOCRATS… REPUBLICANS… OLD… YOUNG…RICH… POOR… MIDDLE CLASS… YES, ALL OF YOU, ALL OF US, EVERY ONE OF US… LISTEN UP, PLEASE!

It’s time to just admit it… they’re smarter than us, and they’re MUCH better at this game than we are… hell, it’s their game!

That’s why they have 2 trillion dollars and we have eight cents.

26 people now have as much money as half the world. 26 Billionaires Own as Much as Poorest 3.8 Billion: Report. Some argue it’s as high as 43 million people… either way, less than one percent of the world’s population control half the world’s wealth. Everytime one of us peels a banana, fills a stapler or flushes a toilet, one of them makes a penny… we hand them our money, and they build empires on the funds that we’re waiting for them to clear.

So let’s think about it for a minute - are they capable of inducing us into supporting ideas that run counter to our own self interest?

YES THEY ARE!

They’re smart enough to rig the game. They frame the argument, control the narrative, set the parameters, define the goals.

Are they that greedy, that dishonest?

How long did the tobacco industry (not person or company or corporation, but an entire industry) lie about the harmful effects of smoking? Big Tobacco finally forced to tell the truth about its deadly products through court-ordered ads

Why would we ever assume that Daddy Warbucks was Goody Two-Shoes? I’m sorry, but the idea is naive, patently absurd on its face.

Let’s come to terms with it, they outsmart us every time, have us running in circles, arguing against ourselves.

Now, maybe… they’re not smarter than you, or smarter than her, maybe not smarter than him… but they’re definitely smarter than us!

We have all the power but we have ceded that power to them and they have sought to rig the game to maximize their advantage at every turn.

That’s what we need to understand. They have all the advantages: the advantage of leverage, the means, the modes, the access, the information, the connections and the clout… and whatever they don’t have, like expertise or publicity, they can buy because, most of all, they have the money.

When’s the last time you hired a lobbyist to… let’s say, advocate for a raise of the minimum wage… the way McDonald’s (and many others) have for years been lobbying to keep the minimum wage stagnant? Exclusive: McDonald’s halts lobbying against minimum wage hikes Years later, the net result? The U.S. just set a new record for the longest time without a federal minimum wage increase

When’s the last time you used loopholes that allowed you to pay no income tax at all… and on the years you had more money come in than on any other? 60 of America’s biggest companies paid no federal income tax in 2018

When’s the last time you sat down with actual legislators to draft “model bills” that were submitted into state legislative houses and ultimately enacted into actual laws… the way, for example, the private prison industry collaborated with The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to conjure up The Truth in Sentencing Act, as well as many other laws that were specifically crafted to put more Americans in prison and keep them there as long as possible. Truth in Sentencing Act Exposed

When’s the last time you ever engaged in any of these activities… just a few reasons why 26 people have as much money as half the world… you think they’re stupid? Unmotivated? Unsophisticated? Lazy? Sloppy? Too ethical?

You think they’re not capable of devising a faulty premise that has a certain, basic appeal and then relentlessly pushing it down our throats until it has become a foregone conclusion, part and parcel of our constitutional fabric? A faulty premise, like, say…

GOVERNMENT IS OUR ENEMY!

Where did that idea come from? Why does it seem to make sense, until you really look at it? What are the consequences for everyday people when a populace comes to embrace this idea?

It fosters the notion that the government is not to be trusted and impedes its ability to fulfill its most fundamental duties: TO ESTABLISH JUSTICE, INSURE DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE

IN OTHER WORDS, TO HELP THE PEOPLE.

Sure, we should be wary of our government, but if the government is our enemy, then whom shall we rely on to guide us… and to be fair?

• Corporations?

• Billionaires?

• Those that would seem to gain the most from our acquiescence?

• The very entities and people who have been telling us all these years that the government is our enemy?

The most corrupt thing about our government is that it has been hijacked by the very interests that have been warning us about how inefficient and corrupt it is. These interests never cry inefficiency when they are awarded government contracts. They never scream intrusion when law enforcement, the civil and criminal courts, even the military, are used to protect their vast interests. Let’s come to terms with it, they outsmart us every time, have us running in circles, arguing against ourselves. You think they’re not sophisticated enough, or motivated enough, to formulate an economic philosophy within a political framework that uses enough specialized language and technical mish-mash to convince many of even the most intelligent among us to argue against ourselves?

No matter how many times it has revealed itself to be a failure?

Come on… it’s literally called the “The Laffer Curve.” The Laffer Curve Explains Why Tax Cuts No Longer Work. They’re smarter than us! They’re more clever than us, more proactive, more unified… and a hell of a lot more low down and dirty… See how they got us runnin in circles, see how they tell us there’s nothing up their sleeves but then pull down their socks…and see how we believe?

How we want to believe…?

They use our greed against us, and the greedier we become, the more their ideas make sense…

…and so we keep ourselves locked to our own chains… the chains are not even locked on to us, WE ARE LOCKED ON TO OUR CHAINS!

They’re smart enough to rig the game. They frame the argument, control the narrative, set the parameters, define the goals…and bet on this, the very last people who will call for a change are those who are the beneficiaries of the status quo.

If you were Incomprehensibly wealthy, of course you’d say cutting your taxes would be the best way to help society…of course you’d say that letting you do whatever you wanted would be to everyone’s benefit… CUT TAXES… you’d cry… TOO MUCH REGULATION… you’d scream, wouldn’t you?

Of course you would. Why wouldn’t you?

CUT TAXES… because then you could keep more of the revenue you generated… revenue you generated, thanks to the American infrastructure, the federal banking system, countless state and federal agencies and personal, the Department of Transportation, the FCC, federal and state law enforcement, highly lucrative government contracts, not to mention the judiciary and let’s not forget the American workforce with our ever dwindling wages…and, of course, an army of millions upon millions of American consumers, tennants and borrowers.

DEREGULATE… because then you could do whatever you wanted, like the banking industry and Wall Street did leading up to the 2008 worldwide financial crises, like Pacific Gas & Electric did for years in California that led to the deadly contamination of drinking water and the most deadly wildfires in the state’s history (take your pick).

In fact, wouldn’t you pay a bunch of flunkies to act as your surrogates to spread the word since your support for these ideas would tend to invalidate them… and wouldn’t you choose learned, respected people, professors, politicians, economists, to make your case… in fact, wouldn’t it be easiest to find like minded people in similar circumstances as you, band together, and establish think tanks and foundations where research could be done and philosophies developed… and disseminated, you might say, like… propaganda?

None of this is new, in fact… these people have always been with us. These are the people who thrived on slavery, not just in America but throughout the ages, built their economic systems around it, fought to keep it… and in America, continued to cling on to it, perpetuating it by changing and reforming it through prison labor laws, Jim Crow and segregation… they’re the very oppressors, the feudal kings and land barons of the old world, we sought to escape from when we formed this country. They are there; they’ve always been there… these people who have sought to rule us, who regard us as peasants and slaves… these people didn’t just disappear.

These are the people that own this country, they will take everything we surrender, and it would behoove us to stop fighting amongst ourselves and take our country back.

On the American Legislative Exchange Council’s website, the business leaders refer to themselves as STAKEHOLDERS About ALEC

How can you Stake Your Claim if you can’t even Claim Your Stake?

They outsmart us every time, runnin’ in circles and circles again… no matter, we’ll run faster this time… straighter… try harder… stretch our arms further.

One day we’ll grab the prize and win the argument…and finally make them understand…

Everyone understand…

It’s Reaganomics…

Voodoo economics…

Trickle down…

Trickle-dow…

Trickle…

Trickle…

Drip

Drip

Drip

Drip

IT’S A LIE AND A TRICK!!!

Living in a foreign country

Bruce Epstein · June 3 - Born in the US, lived 20 years in another country

In what way did cause you to now be unable to function in your own country?

Originally Answered: In what way had living in a foreign country caused you to now be unable to function in your own country?

Living overseas has forever soured our (my wife and I, unless otherwise specified) view of the US lifestyle and made it very hard for us to reintegrate.

We can’t fathom how people can’t see that the health insurance industry is badly broken, how they can just shrug off arbitrary insurance decisions and shelling out months of salary in copays and deductibles for healthcare. We are no longer docile and silent about this; as a result, we have been accused by some medical practices of being disruptive and uncooperative. Not at all, we just want to be treated properly for our (mostly inherited) chronic conditions without going broke. Is that really such an unrealistic expectation?

We insist on walking from place to place when they are literally so close that you can see one from the other, yet this has gotten us into trouble. People have pulled their cars off the road to ask us if we needed help; others have seemingly been blind to the fact that we were attempting to cross in a crosswalk with the light in our favor and have nearly run us over.

We can’t find enough of what we consider “food” and we refuse to lower our standards. We were used to a far greater variety of fresh produce and protein sources (just try finding something in the typical US supermarket that isn’t beef, pork, chicken, or turkey), higher quality prepared foods and certainly far fewer additives. Frankly we don’t use takeout at all, and before COVID-19, only went to restaurants when traveling or as a social gathering to be with others. [And yes, I know that there are a few food oases in the US, but we didn’t have the choice of living near them.] We use vocabulary that others find strange. Speaking another language every day for 20 years certainly does play tricks on one’s choice of words; we always did have a wide vocabulary, but now we throw around polysyllabic Latin words that elicit blank stares from those around us, and often we don’t even know the current monosyllabic equivalent. Nor do we recognize most references to pop culture, which astounds those around us.

We don’t know how to fit into the 2-party political structure, and can’t abide the misappropriation of well-defined political words. For instance, the last true Socialist in the US was Eugene V Debs. Really. We lived in a country where the entire political spectrum still flourished, from the extreme left nutcases to the extreme right nutcases. We don’t know how to deal with a choice between two right-wing parties, granted one being much farther to the right than the other. And we don’t know how to explain this to our friends in the US, that politicians who would have been considered moderate Republicans in our youth (e.g. the Clintons, Biden, Cuomo, even Warren who actually had been a Republican) are not “extreme leftists”. [Google José Bové or Die Linke if you are curious about what an actual 21st century leftist looks like.]

By the same token, we weren’t prepared for the tribalism. When we lived overseas (in a perfectly ordinary small town, not a diplomatic enclave), we were surrounded by a cosmopolitan rainbow of nationalities, religions, customs, cultures, values, all of whom welcomed us openly and vice versa. We tried reaching out to people here and were met with suspicion and skepticism for a long time, until we worked our way into some interesting circles of friends and acquaintances, which still raises eyebrows on some others we know, but too bad.

On the professional front, I have had business contacts who have literally told me that I was now “too European” to be effective in the US. Fortunately, I have been able to find just enough clients, most of whom are actual Europeans now operating in the US, to keep business going. But mostly, we just have trouble relating to the locals and vice versa.

Explain White Privilege

Yesterday I was tagged in a Facebook post by an old high school friend asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query, but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a few folks on Facebook.

Here’s his post:

To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this “White Privilege” of which I’m apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I’m now hearing. Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I’m somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I’m not saying I’m colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I’m missing what’s going on. Personal examples only. I’m not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.

Here’s my response:

Hi Jason. First off, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve quoted your post and made it part of mine. I think the heart of what you’ve asked of your friends of color is extremely important and I think my response needs much more space than as a reply on your feed. I truly thank you for wanting to understand what you are having a hard time understanding. Coincidentally, over the last few days I have been thinking about sharing some of the incidents of prejudice/racism I’ve experienced in my lifetime—in fact I just spoke with my sister Lesa about how to best do this yesterday—because I realized many of my friends—especially the white ones—have no idea what I’ve experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened.

There are two reasons for this: 1) because not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the ’70s and ’80s—it’s shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out, or rock the boat. To just “deal with it,” lest more trouble follow (which, sadly, it often does); 2) fear of being questioned or dismissed with “Are you sure that’s what you heard?” or “Are you sure that’s what they meant?” and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.

So, again, I’m glad you asked, because I really want to answer. But as I do, please know a few things first: 1) This is not even close to the whole list. I’m cherry-picking because none of us have all day; 2) I’ve been really lucky. Most of what I share below is mild compared to what others in my family and community have endured; 3) I’m going to go in chronological order so you might begin to glimpse the tonnage and why what many white folks might feel is a “where did all of this come from?” moment in society has been festering individually and collectively for the LIFETIME of pretty much every black or brown person living in America today, regardless of wealth or opportunity; 4) Some of what I share covers sexism, too—intersectionality is another term I’m sure you’ve heard and want to put quotes around, but it’s a real thing too, just like white privilege. But you’ve requested a focus on personal experiences with racism, so here it goes:

1. When I was 3, my family moved into an upper-middle-class, all-white neighborhood. We had a big backyard, so my parents built a pool. Not the only pool on the block, but the only one neighborhood boys started throwing rocks into. White boys. One day my mom ID’d one as the boy from across the street, went to his house, told his mother, and, fortunately, his mother believed mine. My mom not only got an apology, but also had that boy jump in our pool and retrieve every single rock. No more rocks after that. Then mom even invited him to come over to swim sometime if he asked permission. Everyone became friends. This one has a happy ending because my mom was and is badass about matters like these, but I hope you can see that the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a “nice” neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.

2. When my older sister was 5, a white boy named Mark called her a “nigger” after she beat him in a race at school. She didn’t know what it meant, but in her gut she knew it was bad. This was the first time I’d seen my father the kind of angry that has nowhere to go. I somehow understood it was because not only had some boy verbally assaulted his daughter and had gotten away with it, it had way too early introduced her (and me) to that term and the reality of what it meant—that some white people would be cruel and careless with black people’s feelings just because of our skin color. Or our achievement. If it’s unclear in any way, the point here is if you’ve never had a defining moment in your childhood or your life where you realize your skin color alone makes other people hate you, you have white privilege.

3. Sophomore year of high school. I had Mr. Melrose for Algebra 2. Some time within the first few weeks of class, he points out that I’m “the only spook” in the class. This was meant to be funny. It wasn’t. So, I doubt it will surprise you I was relieved when he took medical leave after suffering a heart attack and was replaced by a sub for the rest of the semester. The point here is, if you’ve never been ‘the only one’ of your race in a class, at a party, on a job, etc. and/or it’s been pointed out in a “playful” fashion by the authority figure in said situation, you have white privilege.

4. When we started getting our college acceptances senior year, I remember some white male classmates were pissed that a black classmate had gotten into UCLA while they didn’t. They said that affirmative action had given him “their spot” and it wasn’t fair. An actual friend of theirs. Who’d worked his ass off. The point here is, if you’ve never been on the receiving end of the assumption that when you’ve achieved something it’s only because it was taken away from a white person who “deserved it,” you have white privilege.

5. When I got accepted to Harvard (as a fellow AP student, you were witness to what an academic beast I was in high school, yes?), three separate times I encountered white strangers as I prepped for my maiden trip to Cambridge that rankle to this day. The first was the white doctor giving me a physical at Kaiser:

Me: “I need to send an immunization report to my college so I can matriculate.”

Doctor: “Where are you going?”

Me: “Harvard.”

Doctor: “You mean the one in Massachusetts?”

The second was in a store, looking for supplies I needed from Harvard’s suggested “what to bring with you” list.

Store employee: “Where are you going?”

Me: “Harvard.”

Store employee: “You mean the one in Massachusetts?”

The third was at UPS, shipping off boxes of said “what to bring” to Harvard. I was in line behind a white boy mailing boxes to Princeton and in front of a white woman sending her child’s boxes to wherever.

Woman to the boy: “What college are you going to?” Boy: “Princeton.”

Woman: “Congratulations!”

Woman to me: “Where are you sending your boxes?” Me: “Harvard.”

Woman: “You mean the one in Massachusetts?”

I think: “No, bitch, the one downtown next to the liquor store.” But I say, gesturing to my LABELED boxes: “Yes, the one in Massachusetts.”

Then she says congratulations, but it’s too fucking late. The point here is, if no one has ever questioned your intellectual capabilities or attendance at an elite institution based solely on your skin color, you have white privilege.

6. In my freshman college tutorial, our small group of 4–5 was assigned to read Thoreau, Emerson, Malcolm X, Joseph Conrad, Dreiser, etc. When it was the week to discuss The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one white boy boldly claimed he couldn’t even get through it because he couldn’t relate and didn’t think he should be forced to read it. I don’t remember the words I said, but I still remember the feeling—I think it’s what doctors refer to as chandelier pain—as soon as a sensitive area on a patient is touched, they shoot through the roof—that’s what I felt. I know I said something like my whole life I’ve had to read “things that don’t have anything to do with me or that I relate to” but I find a way anyway because that’s what learning is about—trying to understand other people’s perspectives. The point here is—the canon of literature studied in the United States, as well as the majority of television and movies, have focused primarily on the works or achievements of white men. So, if you have never experienced or considered how damaging it is/was/could be to grow up without myriad role models and images in school that reflect you in your required reading material or in the mainstream media, you have white privilege.

7. All seniors at Harvard are invited to a fancy, seated group lunch with our respective dorm masters. (Yes, they were called “masters” up until this February, when they changed it to “faculty deans,” but that’s just a tasty little side dish to the main course of this remembrance). While we were being served by the Dunster House cafeteria staff—the black ladies from Haiti and Boston who ran the line daily (I still remember Jackie’s kindness and warmth to this day)—Master Sally mused out loud how proud they must be to be serving the nation’s best and brightest. I don’t know if they heard her, but I did, and it made me uncomfortable and sick. The point here is, if you’ve never been blindsided when you are just trying to enjoy a meal by a well-paid faculty member’s patronizing and racist assumptions about how grateful black people must feel to be in their presence, you have white privilege.

8. While I was writing on a television show in my 30s, my new white male boss—who had only known me for a few days—had unbeknownst to me told another writer on staff he thought I was conceited, didn’t know as much I thought I did, and didn’t have the talent I thought I had. And what exactly had happened in those few days? I disagreed with a pitch where he suggested our lead female character carelessly leave a potholder on the stove, burning down her apartment. This character being a professional caterer. When what he said about me was revealed months later (by then he’d come to respect and rely on me), he apologized for prejudging me because I was a black woman. I told him he was ignorant and clearly had a lot to learn. It was a good talk because he was remorseful and open. But the point here is, if you’ve never been on the receiving end of a boss’s prejudiced, uninformed “how dare she question my ideas” badmouthing based on solely on his ego and your race, you have white privilege.

9. On my very first date with my now husband, I climbed into his car and saw baby wipes on the passenger-side floor. He said he didn’t have kids, they were just there to clean up messes in the car. I twisted to secure my seatbelt and saw a stuffed animal in the rear window. I gave him a look. He said, “I promise, I don’t have kids. That’s only there so I don’t get stopped by the police.” He then told me that when he drove home from work late at night, he was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car and they assumed that either it was stolen or he was a drug dealer. When he told a cop friend about this, Warren was told to put a stuffed animal in the rear window because it would change “his profile” to that of a family man and he was much less likely to be stopped. The point here is, if you’ve never had to mask the fruits of your success with a floppy-eared, stuffed bunny rabbit so you won’t get harassed by the cops on the way home from your gainful employment (or never had a first date start this way), you have white privilege.

10. Six years ago, I started a Facebook page that has grown into a website called Good Black News because I was shocked to find there were no sites dedicated solely to publishing the positive things black people do. (And let me explain here how biased the coverage of mainstream media is in case you don’t already have a clue—as I curate, I can’t tell you how often I have to swap out a story’s photo to make it as positive as the content. Photos published of black folks in mainstream media are very often sullen- or angry-looking. Even when it’s a positive story! I also have to alter headlines constantly to 1) include a person’s name and not have it just be “Black Man Wins Settlement” or “Carnegie Hall Gets 1st Black Board Member,” or 2) rephrase it from a subtle subjugator like “ABC taps Viola Davis as Series Lead” to “Viola Davis Lands Lead on ABC Show” as is done for, say, Jennifer Aniston or Steven Spielberg. I also receive a fair amount of highly offensive racist trolling. I don’t even respond. I block and delete ASAP. The point here is, if you’ve never had to rewrite stories and headlines or swap photos while being trolled by racists when all you’re trying to do on a daily basis is promote positivity and share stories of hope and achievement and justice, you have white privilege.

OK, Jason, there’s more, but I’m exhausted. And my kids need dinner. Remembering and reliving many of these moments has been a strain and a drain (and, again, this ain’t even the half or the worst of it). But I hope my experiences shed some light for you on how institutional and personal racism have affected the entire life of a friend of yours to whom you’ve only been respectful and kind. I hope what I’ve shared makes you realize it’s not just strangers, but people you know and care for who have suffered and are suffering because we are excluded from the privilege you have not to be judged, questioned, or assaulted in any way because of your race.

As to you “being part of the problem,” trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever. But what IS being asked of you is to acknowledge that white privilege DOES exist and not only to treat people of races that differ from yours “with respect and humor,” but also to stand up for fair treatment and justice, not to let “jokes” or “off-color” comments by friends, co-workers, or family slide by without challenge, and to continually make an effort to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, so we may all cherish and respect our unique and special contributions to society as much as we do our common ground.

With much love and respect,

Lori

This article was originally published by Good Black News and then edited for and published in YES! Magazine.

Believe scientists? or evidence?

Why should I believe something just because a scientist says it is true?

You absolutely, positively shouldn’t. You shouldn’t accept anything just because someone says it - not a scientist, not a preacher, not a has-been comedy movie star, not a former Playboy centerfold, not your favorite politician, not a talking head on Fox and Friends, nobody. You should go where the evidence is.

Now, having said that:

An argument is not evidence. Lots of people get this wrong.

Anecdotes are not evidence. “My aunt got acupuncture and her gout went away”? Not evidence.

Emotional manipulation is not evidence. “Mercury is poison! THEY WANT TO INJECT POISON INTO YOUR CHILDREN!!!!!!!” is emotional manipulation, not evidence.

Conspiracy theories are not evidence. (I kind of feel like this really ought not need to be said, yet here we are.)

Common sense is not evidence. Common sense is what tells us the world is flat, after all. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to humans. On top of that, when you do look for evidence, lots of things can steer you wrong. Confirmation bias is the tendency to remember what confirms your pre-existing beliefs and to forget or ignore what doesn’t.

Human memory is not like a video recorder. Your brain filters and discards huge amounts of input that never get written to your memory. You literally don’t remember things that don’t fit your beliefs even if they happen right in front of your face.

So-called “psychics” use this when they do cold reading. The spit out rapid-fire predictions and statements like a machine gun, and follow up on the ones the mark reacts to.

In my cognitive science class back in the day, we learned about a really interesting experiment. People who believed in psychics and fortune tellers had a psychic reading, then were asked to evaluate how accurate the reading was. Most of the test subjects called the reading “very accurate” or “extremely accurate.” They would say things like “the psychic said seven things about me and all seven were true.”

Then they were shown videos of the session, and they were completely astonished. The psychic didn’t make seven statements about them. The psychic made 50 statements about them, all guesses. 43 were wrong and 7 were right. The subjects literally did not remember the 43 wrong statements. Motivated reasoning. This is the tendency to search for evidence to support things you really really want to be true, and ignore or discard evidence that disproves the things you want to believe.

Motivated reasoning can lead to hypocrisy, especially in politics. Thing you want to believe: “Democrats are corrupt.” Evidence you make fit the narrative: “Democrats are hosting impeachment inquiries in closed sessions.” Evidence you ignore: “The rules requiring closed sessions were passed by Republicans, not Democrats, so they could host the Benghazi hearings in secret.” Science is not a system of belief. Science is not a collection of facts.

Science is a way of looking at the world. Science is an attempt to codify what qualifies as “evidence.” It has procedures in place to help guard against cognitive errors like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. (This is why many experiments are done “double blind,” for example by testing a drug against a placebo so that neither the patient nor the doctor knows which is the real drug and which is the placebo. If you know which is the real drug, and you believe the drug works, you might record data that shows it works but discard data that shows it doesn’t.) This is also why in science, statements often need to be falsifiable. You deal with motivated reasoning by trying to prove that your ideas are wrong, not by trying to prove them right. The more an idea resists being proven wrong, the more likely it is to accurately describe reality. Scientists are humans. They are imperfect. You should not just take any human’s word. Science as a system is better at answering questions about the real world than any other human system.

The concept of ‘freedom’

Why does the US have lower food standards than the UK and Europe?

Originally Answered: Why does the US have lower food standards than the UK and EU?

It comes down to the one, big underlying difference between the two continents that explains so many of the differences. The concept of ‘freedom’ is different.

In Europe we consider ‘freedom from…’ in the US they consider ‘freedom to…’.

For example in the US companies have the ‘freedom to’ use chemicals in foods unless they are proven detrimental.

In Europe we have the ‘freedom from’ untested chemicals in our food and they can only be added if proven safe.

The US has the ‘freedom to’ raise chickens in filthy conditions meaning they are washed in chlorine to make them safe. The eggs also have to be washed to make them safe, removing the protective layer that naturally preserves eggs, meaning they need to be refrigerated.

In Europe we are ‘free from’ chickens that are raised in such filthy conditions so our chickens and eggs don’t need to be washed to make them safe and our eggs don’t need to be refrigerated.

Senate Intelligence Committee

Roland Temmerman · August 19

What are your thoughts on the newly released GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee final report on Trump and Russia?

The report is a bombshell and far more devastating and more expansive than the Mueller investigation. Here’s a summary for you.

1. Paul Manafort worked closely with a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The report stated that Manafort was in close contact and had meetings with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian known intelligence officer.

Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik became an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia, serving as Manafort’s primary liaison to Deripaska and eventually managing Manafort’s office in Kyiv. Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.

And it noted: “On August 18, 2016, Kilimnik told a journalist in private that he had ‘almost daily contacts with Manafort these days on this ‘Ukraine crisis.’”

2. Kilimnik and Manafort are even potentially tied to the criminal hacking of Democratic emails.

The committee wasn’t able to determine why Manafort shared polling data with KILIMNIK but also suggested he might have been connected to the hack and dump of Democratic emails by the GRU. Which is arguably, the most significant aspect of the Russian attack on 2016:

Some evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation related to the 2016 U.S. election. This assessment is based on a body of fragmentary information.

3. Trump discussed WikiLeaks with Stone during his 2016 campaign

Trump told Mueller in written answers that he recalled no conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks. That’s false! So Trump likely lied to Mueller about it — which would be a crime.

Trump, in written responses to the SCO, stated: “I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [Stone], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks. with individuals associated with my campaign.” Trump further claimed that he had “no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone between June 1, 2016 and November 8, 2016.” Despite Trump’s recollection, the Committee ass~sses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.

4. Stone e-mailed draft tweets to Trump attacking Hillary Clinton for her anti-Russia views

From the report:

On Sunday July 31, at 9:15 p.m., the day after speaking at length with Manafort, Stone called Gates. Ten minutes later, Stone had two phone calls with Trump that lasted over ten minutes. Stone then emailed Jessica Macchia, one of Trump’s assistants, eight draft tweets for Trump, under the subject line “Tweets Mr. Trump requested last night.”1552 Many of the draft tweets attacked Clinton for her adversarial posture toward Russia and mentioned a new peace deal with Putin, such as “I want a new detente with Russia under Putin.”

5. Stone wanted WikiLeaks to drop new hacked emails after the Access Hollywood tape went live — and it did.

From the report:

At approximately 4 p.m. on October 7, The Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape. Witnesses involved in Trump’s debate preparation recalled that the team first heard of the tape about an hour prior to its public release. According to Jerome Corsi, however, news of the release also made its way to Roger Stone. Corsi and Stone spoke twice that day at length: once at 1:42 p.m. for 18 minutes, and once at 2:18 p.m. for 21 minutes. Corsi recalled learning from Stone that the Access Hollywood tape would be coming out, and that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.” According to Corsi, Stone also told him to have WikiLeaks “drop the Podesta emails immediately.”

…

Corsi recalled previewing the Access Hollywood tape with conference call participants during one or two calls that day: a WorldNetDaily staff call at 1 :08 p.m., or a 2 p.m. call involving Total Banking Solutions that included Malloch. Corsi remembered telling conference participants that the tape was a problem and to contact Assange. Corsi then “watched all day to see what http://Assap.ge would do,” and when the Podesta emails were released, he thought to himself that Malloch “had finally got to Assange.”However, Corsi later told investigators that he did,not call Malloch or Stone after the WikiLeaks release to convey this reaction because, in contradiction to his earlier statements, he was “doubtful” that Malloch had succeeded.

…

After the Podesta emails were released on October 7, 2016, Trump and senior Campaign officials acknowledged internally and to Stone that Stone had predicted the WikiLeaks release about Podesta.

6. Kilimnik helped push the story that Ukraine intervened in 2016, but the committee found no evidence to support that view.

The report explained:

The Committee observed numerous Russian-government actors from late 2016 until at least January 2020 consistently spreading overlapping false narratives which sought to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and spread false information about the events of 2016. Manafort, Kilimnik, Deripaska, and others associated with Deripaska participated in these influence operations. As part of these efforts, Manafort and Kilimnik both sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.s: election and that the “ledger” naming payments to Manafort was fake.

It added:

Kilimnik appeared to be under the impression that Trump believed that Ukraine interfered. Kilimnik made this statement in a private email with a journalist, making the accuracy of the statement is difficult to assess. The Committee’s efforts focused on investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. However, during the course of the investigation, the Committee identified no reliable evidence that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

Fiona Hill, Trump’s former White House aide specializing in Russian affairs, famously called the Ukraine allegations a “fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” PolitiFact - Fiona Hill and conspiracy theories about Ukraine and Russia: What you need to know

7. The committee believed that WikiLeaks was actively collaborating with Russia, despite its claims to the contrary.

“Although WikiLeaks seeks to portray itself as a legitimate media organization, its disclosures have jeopardized the safety and privacy of individual Americans and foreign allies because WikiLeaks has made only minimal, and sometimes no efforts to redact sensitive information, and does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value,” the report noted.

It continued:

The Russian government has pursued a relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that includes formal partnerships with state-owned media platforms, government assistance for WikiLeaks associates and sources, and information sharing. This relationship has existed since at least 2012 and reflects an alignment between the Russian government and WikiLeaks in seeking to undermine U.S. institutions and security.

And then, in one heavily redacted section, the report leaves one sentence uncovered: “However, the Committee found significant evidence to suggest that, in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials.”

8. The Committee concludes that Vladimir Putin is ultimately behind the DNC hack and leak of the documents

21. The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

Everything in blockquotes is attributed to:

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf

The UN was laughing at him

Garth Ware, Gnashing my teeth over the new normal - Answered Sep 30, 2018

I have watched this episode multiple times to try to interpret trump’s reaction to the audience’s laughter. Admittedly, I’m not an expert at reading body language. But what I read from his reaction is an agonizing clash between how he sees himself and how other people see him. He started his speech somberly, with the intent to highlight his plan for saving all of humanity. This was not a lighthearted attempt to warm up the crowd with a joke where the UN audience would be laughing with him.

He appears to be full of self-admiration for what he considers his administration’s accomplishments in foreign policy. And he caps off his introduction by using his oft-repeated line from campaign rallies that his administration has accomplished more than almost any other in U.S. history.

I think at this point in the speech, trump was actually expecting a reaction like what he receives at his rallies. Instead, at first, there were a few scattered reactions from the crowd that trump appeared to interpret as doubt, so he doubled-down as he so often does by stating “…so true.” At that point, he clearly felt he had silenced the few disbelievers in the crowd and could continue on with his speech.

But then the laughter in the crowd swelled. There was a clear break in his thought pattern while he tried to take in this reaction. It’s pretty clear in this moment that trump is trying to take in and get past a severe jolt to his certainty of how the world views him. He gives a quick shake of his head like he is warding off a physical blow, and his mouth and tongue twist in an awkward fashion.

It’s painful to watch. It reminds me of a kid who thinks he rules the playground getting taken down a few pegs by the little nerd who fires a barb at the bully which unexpectedly finds its mark.

To his credit, trump manages to regain some composure and laughs off the insult. But make no mistake—trump recognized it as an insult and it cut him to the quick. I shudder to think what retribution he plans for a world that mocks him.

Great associates you have, there

Let me start by saying that when I hear “Trump supporter”, this is what immediately comes to mind:

Now, I’m aware that not all Trump supporters are redneck trailer trash with an IQ less than 90, but these are your mascots. Great associates you have there.

But let’s move on.

We have the evangelicals. No, I’m not a Christian, but I have studied my Bible. And you could not find a better candidate for the antichrist if you tried. Trump embodies and exemplifies every one of the seven deadly sins. He can’t even quote a Bible verse when asked the majority of the time, and the one time he did, he favored a quote Jesus repudiated. How an evangelical can justify supporting Trump, I have no idea.

Next, let’s move on to my favorite guy, Jordan Klepper - The Daily Show. Now he really brings out the best of the Trump supporters, showing just how on the mark they are. If these aren’t your typical Trump supporters, hmm…Well they sure are loud and proud about loving Trump. And their intelligence is, uh - beyond the realm of understanding.

Okay, let’s get serious here. (Putting serious face on.) Let’s say you have an IQ over 100. Let’s say you can understand irony. Let’s even say that you made it through Klepper’s video above and realized just how dumb they are about anything and everything. But you aren’t one of them. Oh, no. You think rationally and critically. You actually read the transcript. (Ah ah ah! If you don’t get that reference, you cheated! You stopped watching the Klepper video before the end!)

Now, assuming you’re one of the “smart Trumpsters”, I’d like for you to answer two simple questions:

1. What has Trump actually accomplished in the past 3.6 years that shows he cares about ALL citizens of the US. Not just Republicans, not just 1 percenters, not just Big Business, not just himself (and maybe his offspring), not just Russia, not just white people, not just men. What has he actually accomplished for every American that we can all agree was a good thing?

2. When has Trump ever taken responsibility for anything he’s done wrong. Just one thing he accepts was due to his error. One single thing.

If you can answer both questions in a way that any progressive person can accept, then we can have discourse. We’ll still have to agree to disagree, and we can never discuss politics, but I’ll not consider you to be a sheeple. (Another video reference. You really need to watch the video.)

I’ve read the other answers to this question and I find the Trump supporters’ answers amazing. How liberals are the ones who divide this country with ad hominem attacks. How we’re the ones who are trying to ruin the country with our socialist ways. How we’re the ones causing all the problems and refuse to compromise or reach across the aisle. Oh, how quickly we forget history.

Obama. ‘Nuff said.

If you are intelligent and logical, you knowingly support a racist, misogynistic, know-nothing asshole. He was never any good at business, so saying you support him because he’s a businessman rather than a politician makes no sense. You knowingly support a man who stiffed hundreds of contractors and caused people to lose their livelihoods. You praise a man who commits assaults on women because he thinks he can because he’s rich. A comment on another answer said he would never need to rape a woman. I’m quite sure that isn’t true - there are many of us he’d have to rape to get what he wanted. That or he’d have to pay one hell of a lot, either in cash or gifts. Maybe that’s why there have been 25 (that I’m aware of) assault accusations made against him. And why he always settles out of court.

Trump refuses to listen to advisors and goes with his gut on things he can’t comprehend. That never turns out well for America. He spent a year calling Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man”, making fun of him, then does a 180 and not only legitimized him by taking a meeting with him, but even Kim now laughs at Trump as he keeps on playing with his nuclear toys. That got us nowhere. He stepped into a debate in Israel the US has historically stayed out of just to please his son-in-law. He killed a deal with Iran that was to everyone’s benefit, practically daring them to get back into the nuclear playing field. The US won’t be trusted by anyone for decades because they can no longer trust us to keep our word, or that we won’t again elect someone who would do the same.

He filled his administration with people who were actively against the departments they were put in charge of. He brags about deregulating laws put in place specifically for our protection. Waste and sewage are once again okay to dump in our water supply while Flint, Michigan, still doesn’t have drinkable water. He encourages fracking on public lands. I’m done with hearing that climate change isn’t a problem - when you’re the only one in the room denying it with 99 others saying it’s a problem, it’s likely you who are wrong.

He makes promises he never intends to keep. Protecting Social Security and Medicare? He’s actively defunding them with the CARES act. Oh no, people don’t deserve another stimulus check, businesses do. Let’s get rid of pre-existing conditions protections, something he promised not to do, while in the middle of a pandemic that causes pre-existing conditions. He promised to build a wall (where’s Mexico’s check?), a big beautiful wall. Only 3 miles have been built, part of which blew onto Mexico’s land because it couldn’t withstand high winds.[4] And he stole the money from the military to do it.

From the second he took the oath of office, he started giving the Constitution the finger. (Emoluments are a real thing.) He has continued to do so over and over again. Things that were assumed of Presidents past, he has refused to do because he’s a businessman used to suing people, not a politician following common practice. (Tax returns? Putting personal business into a blind trust? Not hiring family, nepotism to the nth degree?) It used to be that not appearing according to a subpoena was the biggest of no-nos. Trump has made it a firing offense TO appear.

The military. The rallies. The mass shootings. Saying he’d run into a building to save children then hiding in his bunker to avoid peaceful protesters. The parade. The Dakota Access Pipeline. The fireworks display at Mount Rushmore when there are clear warnings of wildfires erupting. The violence encouraged during the protests. There are so many things I see wrong with Trump.

And you defend him. You vote for him. You make excuses for him.

We’re no longer a country where we can agree to disagree. I am a huge believer in empathy. None of us are better than any of us. I don’t care who you are, if you need a helping hand and I’m in a position to give one, I will. I have no respect for people who can’t do the same. If you support Trump, you support what he says and what he does. Full stop. You support his racism. You agree there are shithole countries that we shouldn’t accept immigrants from. You believe his trade deals actually help us, when they actively harm us. You buy the theory that Mexicans send us their rapists and murderers. You actually believe that a single payer healthcare system would be more expensive than what we have now, when THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD proves it wouldn’t be. You think people should be left to die or go bankrupt if they get into an accident or come down with disease. You can’t allow yourself to care about anyone but yourselves - THAT’S what we hear when you say “All Lives Matter”. You use ad hominem attacks and whataboutisms when we point out the cognitive dissonance.

When I hear “my rights are more important than your health”,[5] I fear for society. It used to be common understanding that your rights end where mine begin. Not anymore. Self-entitlement has replaced empathy. The default has become to think only about oneself and your loved ones and fuck the rest of society. As long as you can get your haircut, the rest of us can go to hell.

Rational thinking is not what I hear from Trump supporters. It’s mean-spirited bullying which actively wants other people to fail. It’s attacks without even learning the meaning of the words you use to attack. It’s only using right-wing media to source your “truths”. It’s immediately believing anything negative about the man you support is “fake news”. It’s not factchecking before you believe something. It’s buying into Trump’s hatred for those who don’t support him, actually calling treason and witch hunts for those who call him on his lies. It’s believing him when he says “people tell him” things that are demonstrably false. (Remember all that talk about shower heads and dishwashers? Please explain what in the everloving hell he was talking about.) It’s buying into the idea that without testing, we’d have less cases of the coronavirus.

Taking all these things (and more - I barely touched the tip of the iceberg) into consideration, why would I want to be friends with a Trump supporter? Again, if you can give me answers to the 2 questions I posed, answers I can fact check and agree are things Trump has actually said or done, I won’t immediately dismiss you. But I’ll be honest, I don’t think anyone can.

Yes, Americans need to cross this divide. But we simply cannot with Trump in office. He encourages the divide and wants it even wider. And this is the man you support. Give me a conservative I can disagree with but still respect and yes, we can be friendly.

But give me a Trump supporter and the best I can do is be distant acquaintances.

About Trump supporters

Nikki Primrose, Donald Trump? God help us all. – Answered Oct 22

What bothers you the most about Trump supporters?

Their unwillingness to accept objective truths. You can tell me that you do not believe that Trump meant what he said, but it’s just bonkers when you claim that he never said it at all. The man said that Mexican immigrants are rapists, that he grabs pussies and kisses without consent, and he quite clearly expressed his disdain for military heroes. Tell me that he was trolling us all, that he has mini strokes fifteen times a day that causes him to make bigoted statements, but please stop trying to convince me that the sky is green with purple polka dots!

Their willingness to simultaneously praise Trump’s “straight talk” and dismiss his inconvenient remarks as jokes. What kind of magical device do you possess that allows you to divine that the man is being truthful when he denies collusion and corruption, promises healthcare, and says stuff that you like? And is this the same device that tells you when he was just fucking with us all when he bragged to the UN about his accomplishments, called himself a stable genius, or tried to dismiss an allegation of sexual assault by criticizing the accuser’s appearance? Don’t get me wrong, your pretense of psychic abilities is preferable to denying reality, but only just barely.

Their insistence that they cannot be held accountable for electing a bigoted president if they voted for him for different reasons. There are really only three possibilities: Either you had no idea that Trump had made countless remarks that showed prejudice based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion. In this case you are desperately uninformed and you are to blame for picking a president like you were trying out a mysterious new appetizer. The second possibility is that you liked what you heard when Trump voiced his own biases, and that leaves you with no excuse. The only other possible explanation is that you heard what he said, and you decided to tolerate it. If you are in this group, congratulations; You’ve enabled a racist, misogynistic, islamophobic, homophobic nationalist.

Which countries?

…have abandoned universal healthcare?

None.

In the US:

• Tens of thousands of citizens die each year because they can’t afford healthcare.

• Hundreds of thousands suffer long-term from treatable conditions.

• Half a million families go bankrupt each year due to medical bills.

• And millions are suffering from over-medication and over-treatment driven by the profit motive.

None of these issues occur in countries with socialised healthcare. Our (UK) systems have better outcomes, are more patient-centered and are much more cost-effective.

No country that has experienced socialised healthcare would vote to return to the barbarity of the US system.

Further

Ricardo Cárdenes - Jan 15

Throw maternal birth rate to the mix and it’s embarrassing. Quoting Wiki:

In the United States, the maternal death rate averaged 9.1 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births during the years 1979–1986, but then rose rapidly to 14 per 100,000 in 2000 and 17.8 per 100,000 in 2009. In 2013 the rate was 18.5 deaths per 100,000 live births.

So, not only the US has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the industrialized world, by far, it’s actually doubled in the past 35 years. The data in there doesn’t show that the US hit a peak at some point after 2003. By 2008 the rate was ~24/100k and going down. In 2015 it was under 15. In 2017 it had bounced back to a bit over 18 (I wonder what happened in the mean time). A rate like that means that in 2018, around 700 women died in the US due to circumstances related to or aggravated by pregnancy or its management (excluding accidents).

Meanwhile, the worldwide rate is going down.

The only other countries where the rate increased in the same period? Bahamas, Georgia, Guyana, Jamaica, Dem. People’s Rep. Korea, Serbia, South Africa, St. Lucia, Suriname, Tonga, Venezuela, RB Zimbabwe.

The list includes an alarming number of countries that the CiC wouldn’t doubt labeling as “shitholes”.

If that’s not an eye opener for everyone…

AND

Pay attention. This is important. Ready?

Universal healthcare is not a political thing. It is neither left wing nor right wing. The only country on the planet that thinks it is is the United States. Nobody else thinks that.

Nobody needs health insurance. Insurance is something you buy just in case. Like, just in case you’re in a car accident or just in case your house burns down. You will get sick. You will get hurt. You will have children (well, most people). You will grow old. There’s no “just in case” about it. People don’t need health insurance. People need healthcare.

Only Americans think that ‘life’ in ‘life, liberty, and property’ doesn’t involve being healthy. There is no life without health. It’s not political. Any sane politician will support universal healthcare. If the population isn’t healthy, it doesn’t work. It’s a right.

You aren’t a commodity, you are a living human. Your health should not be the source of someone’s profit. Sell your labor, but don’t sell your life.

Why can’t we have free health care in America?

Daniel Lee Halm disabled comments on his reply, so I’ll put my comments on his reply here: He said, “The USA has the second-lowest personal income tax rates in the world second only to Ireland.”

No, it doesn’t. There are 100 countries in the world that have lower personal income tax rates than the US. These are mostly third-world countries such as Mexico and Brazil, although they are moving into the first world and have “free” healthcare systems, although probably not as good as the US. There are ten countries in the world which have no personal income tax at all. These are tax havens like Bermuda or Arab oil states like Saudi Arabia. Most of these have “free” healthcare paid for by tourists and international businesses, or by oil revenues. The US likes to tax its citizens in those countries to avoid them getting away from its own tax system. The US is the only developed country that does that.

Disturbingly though, Canada now has a lower personal income tax rate than the US due to tax cuts over the last couple of decades. Of course, Canada has universal healthcare. One of the main reasons it can is that Canada doesn’t spend nearly as much on the military as the US does, and can put the tax money into social services instead. Another reason is that its overall healthcare costs are only half as high as they are in the US due to price controls, lower billing costs and lower fees paid to doctors and hospitals. The same is true of other countries which have “free” health insurance.

The US has by far the highest health care costs in the world, not to mention the highest military expenditures. Not the lowest taxes, though.

Dear White Evangelicals

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you.

They’re done.

They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why. They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.

They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence. They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.

And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

You violently opposed him at every single turn — without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him. And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth, the mind boggles.

And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.

With him, you suddenly find religion:

With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution.

With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission.

With him you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart.

With him, sin has become unimportant, compassion no longer a requirement.

With him, you see only Providence.

And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you — they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency.

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself. They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus — not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave these days; the grave of your very faith tradition. Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power — but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness.

You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation.

You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness.

You’ve lost the plot.

And most of all you’ve lost your soul.

I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you.

But I had to at least try to reach you. It’s what Jesus would do.

Maybe you need to read what he said again—if he still matters to you.

What Is White Privilege, Really

Today, white privilege is often described through the lens of Peggy McIntosh’s groundbreaking essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Originally published in 1988, the essay helps readers recognize white privilege by making its effects personal and tangible. For many, white privilege was an invisible force that white people needed to recognize. It was being able to walk into a store and find that the main displays of shampoo and panty hose were catered toward your hair type and skin tone. It was being able to turn on the television and see people of your race widely represented. It was being able to move through life without being racially profiled or unfairly stereotyped. All true.

This idea of white privilege as unseen, unconscious advantages took hold. It became easy for people to interpret McIntosh’s version of white privilege—fairly or not—as mostly a matter of cosmetics and inconvenience.

Those interpretations overshadow the origins of white privilege, as well as its present-day ability to influence systemic decisions. They overshadow the fact that white privilege is both a legacy and a cause of racism. And they overshadow the words of many people of color, who for decades recognized white privilege as the result of conscious acts and refused to separate it from historic inequities.

In short, we’ve forgotten what white privilege really means—which is all of this, all at once. And if we stand behind the belief that recognizing white privilege is integral to the anti-bias work of white educators, we must offer a broader recognition.

A recognition that does not silence the voices of those most affected by white privilege; a recognition that does not ignore where it comes from and why it has staying power.

Racism vs. White Privilege

Having white privilege and recognizing it is not racist. But white privilege exists because of historic, enduring racism and biases. Therefore, defining white privilege also requires finding working definitions of racism and bias.

So, what is racism? One helpful definition comes from Matthew Clair and Jeffrey S. Denis’s “Sociology on Racism.” They define racism as “individual- and group-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of racial inequality.” Systemic racism happens when these structures or processes are carried out by groups with power, such as governments, businesses or schools. Racism differs from bias, which is a conscious or unconscious prejudice against an individual or group based on their identity.

Basically, racial bias is a belief. Racism is what happens when that belief translates into action. For example, a person might unconsciously or consciously believe that people of color are more likely to commit crime or be dangerous. That’s a bias. A person might become anxious if they perceive a black person is angry. That stems from a bias. These biases can become racism through a number of actions ranging in severity, and ranging from individual- to group-level responses:

• •A person crosses the street to avoid walking next to a group of young black men.

• •A person calls 911 to report the presence of a person of color who is otherwise behaving lawfully.

• •A police officer shoots an unarmed person of color because he “feared for his life.”

• •A jury finds a person of color guilty of a violent crime despite scant evidence.

• •A federal intelligence agency prioritizes investigating black and Latino activists rather than investigate white supremacist activity.

Both racism and bias rely on what sociologists call racialization. This is the grouping of people based on perceived physical differences, such as skin tone. This arbitrary grouping of people, historically, fueled biases and became a tool for justifying the cruel treatment and discrimination of non-white people. Colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow laws were all sold with junk science and propaganda that claimed people of a certain “race” were fundamentally different from those of another—and they should be treated accordingly. And while not all white people participated directly in this mistreatment, their learned biases and their safety from such treatment led many to commit one of those most powerful actions: silence.

And just like that, the trauma, displacement, cruel treatment and discrimination of people of color, inevitably, gave birth to white privilege.

So, What Is White Privilege?

White privilege is—perhaps most notably in this era of uncivil discourse—a concept that has fallen victim to its own connotations. The two-word term packs a double whammy that inspires pushback. 1) The word white creates discomfort among those who are not used to being defined or described by their race. And 2) the word privilege, especially for poor and rural white people, sounds like a word that doesn’t belong to them—like a word that suggests they have never struggled.

This defensiveness derails the conversation, which means, unfortunately, that defining white privilege must often begin with defining what it’s not. Otherwise, only the choir listens; the people you actually want to reach check out. White privilege is not the suggestion that white people have never struggled. Many white people do not enjoy the privileges that come with relative affluence, such as food security. Many do not experience the privileges that come with access, such as nearby hospitals.

And white privilege is not the assumption that everything a white person has accomplished is unearned; most white people who have reached a high level of success worked extremely hard to get there. Instead, white privilege should be viewed as a built-in advantage, separate from one’s level of income or effort.

Francis E. Kendall, author of Diversity in the Classroom and Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race, comes close to giving us an encompassing definition: “having greater access to power and resources than people of color [in the same situation] do.” But in order to grasp what this means, it’s also important to consider how the definition of white privilege has changed over time.

White Privilege Through the Years

In a thorough article, education researcher Jacob Bennett tracked the history of the term. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “white privilege” was less commonly used but generally referred to legal and systemic advantages given to white people by the United States, such as citizenship, the right to vote or the right to buy a house in the neighborhood of their choice.

It was only after discrimination persisted for years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that people like Peggy McIntosh began to view white privilege as being more psychological—a subconscious prejudice perpetuated by white people’s lack of awareness that they held this power. White privilege could be found in day-to-day transactions and in white people’s ability to move through the professional and personal worlds with relative ease.

But some people of color continued to insist that an element of white privilege included the aftereffects of conscious choices. For example, if white business leaders didn’t hire many people of color, white people had more economic opportunities. Having the ability to maintain that power dynamic, in itself, was a white privilege, and it endures. Legislative bodies, corporate leaders and educators are still disproportionately white and often make conscious choices (laws, hiring practices, discipline procedures) that keep this cycle on repeat.

The more complicated truth: White privilege is both unconsciously enjoyed and consciously perpetuated. It is both on the surface and deeply embedded into American life. It is a weightless knapsack—and a weapon.

It depends on who’s carrying it.

Power of Normal

Sometimes the examples used to make white privilege visible to those who have it are also the examples least damaging to people who lack it. But that does not mean these examples do not matter or that they do no damage at all.

These subtle versions of white privilege are often used as a comfortable, easy entry point for people who might push back against the concept. That is why they remain so popular. These are simple, everyday things, conveniences white people aren’t forced to think about.

These often-used examples include:

• •The first-aid kit having “flesh-colored” Band-Aids that only match the skin tone of white people.

• •The products white people need for their hair being in the aisle labeled “hair care” rather than in a smaller, separate section of “ethnic hair products.”

• •The grocery store stocking a variety of food options that reflect the cultural traditions of most white people.

But the root of these problems is often ignored. These types of examples can be dismissed by white people who might say, “My hair is curly and requires special product,” or “My family is from Poland, and it’s hard to find traditional Polish food at the grocery store.”

This may be true. But the reason even these simple white privileges need to be recognized is that the damage goes beyond the inconvenience of shopping for goods and services. These privileges are symbolic of what we might call “the power of normal.” If public spaces and goods seem catered to one race and segregate the needs of people of other races into special sections, that indicates something beneath the surface.

White people become more likely to move through the world with an expectation that their needs be readily met. People of color move through the world knowing their needs are on the margins. Recognizing this means recognizing where gaps exist.

Power of the Benefit of the Doubt

The “power of normal” goes beyond the local CVS. White people are also more likely to see positive portrayals of people who look like them on the news, on TV shows and in movies. They are more likely to be treated as individuals, rather than as representatives of (or exceptions to) a stereotyped racial identity. In other words, they are more often humanized and granted the benefit of the doubt. They are more likely to receive compassion, to be granted individual potential, to survive mistakes.

This has negative effects for people of color, who, without this privilege, face the consequences of racial profiling, stereotypes and lack of compassion for their struggles.

In these scenarios, white privilege includes the facts that:

• •White people are less likely to be followed, interrogated or searched by law enforcement because they look “suspicious.”

• • White people’s skin tone will not be a reason people hesitate to trust their credit or financial responsibility.

• • If white people are accused of a crime, they are less likely to be presumed guilty, less likely to be sentenced to death and more likely to be portrayed in a fair, nuanced manner by media outlets (see the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown campaign).

• • The personal faults or missteps of white people will likely not be used to later deny opportunities or compassion to people who share their racial identity.

This privilege is invisible to many white people because it seems reasonable that a person should be extended compassion as they move through the world. It seems logical that a person should have the chance to prove themselves individually before they are judged. It’s supposedly an American ideal.

But it’s a privilege often not granted to people of color—with dire consequences.

For example, programs like New York City’s now-abandoned “Stop and Frisk” policy target a disproportionate number of black and Latinx people. People of color are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses despite using at a similar rate to white people. Some people do not survive these stereotypes. In 2017, people of color who were unarmed and not attacking anyone were more likely to be killed by police.

Those who survive instances of racial profiling—be they subtle or violent—do not escape unaffected. They often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and this trauma in turn affects their friends, families and immediate communities, who are exposed to their own vulnerability as a result.

A study conducted in Australia (which has its own hard history of subjugating black and Indigenous people) perfectly illustrates how white privilege can manifest in day-to-day interactions—daily reminders that one is not worthy of the same benefit of the doubt given to another. In the experiment, people of different racial and ethnic identities tried to board public buses, telling the driver they didn’t have enough money to pay for the ride. Researchers documented more than 1,500 attempts. The results: 72 percent of white people were allowed to stay on the bus. Only 36 percent of black people were extended the same kindness.

Just as people of color did nothing to deserve this unequal treatment, white people did not “earn” disproportionate access to compassion and fairness. They receive it as the byproduct of systemic racism and bias.

And even if they are not aware of it in their daily lives as they walk along the streets, this privilege is the result of conscious choices made long ago and choices still being made today.

Power of Accumulated Power

Perhaps the most important lesson about white privilege is the one that’s taught the least.

The “power of normal” and the “power of the benefit of the doubt” are not just subconscious byproducts of past discrimination. They are the purposeful results of racism—an ouroboros of sorts—that allow for the constant re-creation of inequality.

These powers would not exist if systemic racism hadn’t come first. And systemic racism cannot endure unless those powers still hold sway.

You can imagine it as something of a whiteness water cycle, wherein racism is the rain. That rain populates the earth, giving some areas more access to life and resources than others. The evaporation is white privilege—an invisible phenomenon that is both a result of the rain and the reason it keeps going.

McIntosh asked herself an important question that inspired her famous essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”: “On a daily basis, what do I have that I didn’t earn?” Our work should include asking the two looming follow-up questions: Who built that system? Who keeps it going?

The answers to those questions could fill several books. But they produce examples of white privilege that you won’t find in many broad explainer pieces.

For example, the ability to accumulate wealth has long been a white privilege—a privilege created by overt, systemic racism in both the public and private sectors. In 2014, the Pew Research Center released a report that revealed the median net worth of a white household was $141,900; for black and Hispanic households, that dropped to $11,000 and $13,700, respectively. The gap is huge, and the great “equalizers” don’t narrow it. Research from Brandeis University and Demos found that the racial wealth gap is not closed when people of color attend college (the median white person who went to college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black person who went to college, and 3.9 times more than the median Latino person who went to college). Nor do they close the gap when they work full time, or when they spend less and save more.

The gap, instead, relies largely on inheritance—wealth passed from one generation to the next. And that wealth often comes in the form of inherited homes with value. When white families are able to accumulate wealth because of their earning power or home value, they are more likely to support their children into early adulthood, helping with expenses such as college education, first cars and first homes. The cycle continues.

This is a privilege denied to many families of color, a denial that started with the work of public leaders and property managers. After World War II, when the G.I. Bill provided white veterans with “a magic carpet to the middle class,” racist zoning laws segregated towns and cities with sizeable populations of people of color—from Baltimore to Birmingham, from New York to St. Louis, from Louisville to Oklahoma City, to Chicago, to Austin, and in cities beyond and in between.

These exclusionary zoning practices evolved from city ordinances to redlining by the Federal Housing Administration (which wouldn’t back loans to black people or those who lived close to black people), to more insidious techniques written into building codes. The result: People of color weren’t allowed to raise their children and invest their money in neighborhoods with “high home values.” The cycle continues today. Before the 2008 crash, people of color were disproportionately targeted for subprime mortgages. And neighborhood diversity continues to correlate with low property values across the United States. According to the Century Foundation, one-fourth of black Americans living in poverty live in high-poverty neighborhoods; only 1 in 13 impoverished white Americans lives in a high-poverty neighborhood.

The inequities compound. To this day, more than 80 percent of poor black students attend a high-poverty school, where suspension rates are often higher and resources often more limited. Once out of school, obstacles remain. Economic forgiveness and trust still has racial divides. In a University of Wisconsin study, 17 percent of white job applicants with a criminal history got a call back from an employer; only five percent of black applicants with a criminal history got call backs. And according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, black Americans are 105 percent more likely than white people to receive a high-cost mortgage, with Latino Americans 78 percent more likely. This is after controlling for variables such as credit score and debt-to-income ratios.

Why mention these issues in an article defining white privilege? Because the past and present context of wealth inequality serves as a perfect example of white privilege.

If privilege, from the Latin roots of the term, refers to laws that have an impact on individuals, then what is more effective than a history of laws that explicitly targeted racial minorities to keep them out of neighborhoods and deny them access to wealth and services?

If white privilege is “having greater access to power and resources than people of color [in the same situation] do,” then what is more exemplary than the access to wealth, the access to neighborhoods and the access to the power to segregate cities, deny loans and perpetuate these systems?

This example of white privilege also illustrates how systemic inequities trickle down to less harmful versions of white privilege. Wealth inequity contributes to the “power of the benefit of the doubt” every time a white person is given a lower mortgage rate than a person of color with the same credit credentials. Wealth inequity reinforces the “power of normal” every time businesses assume their most profitable consumer base is the white base and adjust their products accordingly.

And this example of white privilege serves an important purpose: It re-centers the power of conscious choices in the conversation about what white privilege is.

People can be ignorant about these inequities, of course. According to the Pew Research Center, only 46 percent of white people say that they benefit “a great deal” or “a fair amount” from advantages that society does not offer to black people. But conscious choices were and are made to uphold these privileges. And this goes beyond loan officers and lawmakers. Multiple surveys have shown that many white people support the idea of racial equality but are less supportive of policies that could make it more possible, such as reparations, affirmative action or law enforcement reform.

In that way, white privilege is not just the power to find what you need in a convenience store or to move through the world without your race defining your interactions. It’s not just the subconscious comfort of seeing a world that serves you as normal. It’s also the power to remain silent in the face of racial inequity. It’s the power to weigh the need for protest or confrontation against the discomfort or inconvenience of speaking up. It’s getting to choose when and where you want to take a stand. It’s knowing that you and your humanity are safe.

And what a privilege that is.

Collins is the senior writer for Teaching Tolerance.

Will the USA remain great forever?

Jonathon Morningstar Hill, Graduate, University of Lebens Ursache und Wirkung, Ph.D. Answered Aug 23, 2019

As The Newsroom so eloquently put it:

Will: It’s NOT the greatest country in the world, professor. That’s my answer.

Moderator: …You’re saying?

Will: Yes.

Moderator: …Let’s talk about-

Will: Fine. Sharon, the NEA is a loser. Yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paycheck, but he gets to hit you with it any time he wants. It doesn’t cost money, it costs votes; it costs airtime, column inches. You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?

Sharon: Hey-!

Will: [without letting her finish, he directs his attention to Lewis] And with a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America’s so star-spangled awesome, that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. So 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.

Moderator: All right -

Will: And yeah, you, sorority girl. Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there’s some things you should know, and one of them is, there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force, and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined. 25 of whom are allies. Now, none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student. But you, nonetheless, are without a doubt a member of the Worst. Generation. Ever. So when you ask, “What makes us the greatest country in the world?” I dunno know what the fuck you’re talking about! Yosemite? It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons, we passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons, we waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors. We put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it, it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in our last election, and we didn’t [sighs] we didn’t scare so easy. Huh. We were able to be all these things, and to do all these things, because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. [Pause, then to the moderator] Enough?

Does anyone respect the US?

We used to. Then you elected Donald Trump.

The US has gotten to the point where it’s simply squandering the potential that made it a great nation. Your military strength doesn’t make you great: it merely makes you dangerous. Your economy doesn’t make you great: it merely speaks to how much you generate through trade (and fails to say anything about the shocking wealth inequality and national debt that you have). What made the United States great is that it had the potential to be a better place for everyone that sought it out. The American Dream was a possibility: that everyone could head to the US and improve themselves, better their circumstances and lives.

That potential has now been wasted. The US is a corporate oligarchy run by those rich enough to buy your politicians, and led by a corrupt individual who acts like a Mob boss, speaks like a ten-year-old, and has the fragile ego of a rampant narcissist that has never bettered himself.

The US could be a world leader. It could set a shining example for everyone, serving as a beacon of culture, social development, economic and technological innovation, and moral fortitude. Instead, it’s become a culture that embraces anti-intellectualism, dismisses truth as being inconsequential, and attacks those that are different. Not true of all Americans - but this is the US presented to us by the President.

Why do we laugh at him? It’s simple, really: he harps on about how great the United States is, and that is funny. Not hilariously funny, but funny in a sad way - because it could have been true.

Instead you have a nation that squandered any moral authority, abandons allies to massacre, threatens their friends with economic sanctions if they don’t do what the President wants, and puts their national security at risk for his personal gain. You have a nation where that same President (he who is supposed to unify the country) perpetually attacks his own people, encourages right-wing extremism, and flouts the rule of law - invariably imagining himself a King rather than a temporary appointee holding the trust of his office.

Damn right we’ll laugh in his face - it’s exactly the thing he hates, and what he deserves. As for the United States? We won’t laugh at you - we’ll roll our eyes, we’ll sigh in resignation, we’ll lament the lost potential, and we’ll slowly back away from you, and leave you to the isolation that the President desires, because we don’t want this nonsense to spread any more than we’d like to sign up for a fresh batch of Coronovirus delivered to our doors.

Although, of the two, we’d say that Trump’s twisted brand of jingoistic isolationism, blatant narcissism and anti-reality narratives is far more dangerous. The other can only kill us - Trump’s behaviour eats away at the very soul of your nation, and twists it into something it should not have become.

Trump loved by his base

Dale Ruff · Updated July 29 - Studied political science at UC Berkeley, Harvard, NYU.

How come Trump is so loved by his base? What did he do to them?

You will read answers to this question which make many different claims, but at its heart, his base is united by hatred. Trump, a past master of commercial propaganda, learned the ropes and tactics of political propaganda when he read Hitler’s New Order, a collection of his speeches and a textbook of Nazi propaganda techniques. This is not in dispute. In a Vanity Fair interview, it was reported that Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that Trump often re-read “My New Order,” a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches from 1918-1939. What’s more, Trump allegedly kept the book in a cabinet by his bed.

When Brenner asked about the book, Trump said, “Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.”

Later, Trump said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

The best part? While Davis acknowledged being Trump’s friend, and giving him a copy of “My New Order” (not “Mein Kampf” as Trump claimed), he isn’t even Jewish.” Did Donald Trump Keep Hitler Speeches By His Bed?

What does Hitler teach? That those who feel alienated, dispossessed, and wounded by history can be rounded into a mass movement unified by a shared hatred for scapegoats, whether Jews, Muslims, immigrants, or, to use Hitler’s phrase, “the lying press,” which Trump reiterated as “fake news” whenever the press expose one of his lies. Trump started his campaign following the principle of propaganda - ″Displace anger and aggression onto targets of hatred.” His first campaign speech first demonized the chosen target of hatred, Mexican immigrants, as “criminals and rapists” and offered to the white working-class Trump base a scapegoat on whom to heap abuse, a “target of hatred.”

In The True Believer, teamster/philosopher Eric Hoffer states that all such mass movements require a devil, and Trump, having studied Hitler’s approach, applied it to open his campaign. He provided someone to hate, someone to attack, someone to redirect aggression onto. Soon afterward, he added Muslims and gave the union of hatred a second alien target of hatred.

And then after that, he began to present domestic targets of hatred, “Crooked Hillary” who always brought about the hate-filled crowd yelling “Lock her up! Lock her up!” and then the media, whom he called “the enemy of the people,” just as Hitler had. This inventory of targets cemented the bond of the Trump base and gave them both foreign and domestic scapegoats on whom to vent their hatred, providing the basis for a mass movement to support Trump, and for the white working-class consumers of this Nazi tactic, a kind of therapy, a release and shared joy in hatred. Trump, personally despises the members of his base (they are, as he would say, losers that he persuaded could win by helping him, the cult leader, to win… and thus sharing in his victory, they would soon be winning so much it would become “boring.”) In his life he has had no contact with the working class except to serve him, and so he has transformed a disorganized and unhappy population, often racist and threatened by the advent of a multi-cultural society where white privilege was being challenged, into a “mean and vicious (Trump’s words)” mass movement that would vote for him, he famously stated, “…even if I shot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue.” This bragging insult to his base, portrayed as blind sheep with no morality other than to worship Trump, revealed both the contempt in which he holds his base and the fact that his base did not take offense at being so scorned as mindless true believers, because to the faithful, the leader can do no wrong.

This is why Trump’s base loves him, which is not the correct term, for they offer him not real love but rather adulation, a form of worship, the relationship of the obedient follower to a superior cult leader.

This relationship requires that we also ask what Trump gets out of the relationship: obviously, it has provided the votes to gain him power but it provides something else for which his power (for he has no desire to govern, only to disrupt and cancel) is a substitute, and that is genuine love. Trump, whose mother was cold and distant, and whose father was a KKK sociopath who made his two sons stay in the basement, would offer affection or approval (if not real love) only if they were successful That is why, for Trump, the ultimate disgrace is to be a loser, a person who does not deserve love.

The power that his base has given to Trump, through a mass movement, is his replacement for the love he never received, which he has never had in his three marriages (his current wife has a separate bedroom, even on Airforce 1) , and for which his power as a President is a kind of compensation, masking his inner emptiness and bringing happiness only when he can stand before a cheering crowd, even after gaining power.

So Trump gives his base permission to hate openly and to attack (Democrats are Demorats and libtards, Obama is Obummer, etc) which serves as a kind of mass therapy, and they give him a fake love, a jolt of admiration which leaves him, once the jeering and cheering is over, no place to go but back into the inner misery and self-pity which dwells in a man who can never recapture the love he missed as a vulnerable youth. If you doubt me, I urge you to Google images of Trump, both when he is elated (which comes when he insults someone or brags to build himself up) and when he is unguarded and looking morose, frustrated, miserable.

Why Propaganda Works

Are Russians isolated from the truth? Don’t they all have VPNs?

Consider the fact that here in America, with a free press, over 60 million voters believe that Trump won the last election, that Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen, that the world’s scientists are conspiring to lie to us about global warming so they can get research grants, that Democrats hate America and want to destroy it, that whites are better than blacks (along with the equally false belief that they don’t believe this)…need I go on.

So why should it come as a surprise that 60% of Russians back Putin’s war, in a country that has a puppet press and severe punishment of anyone who goes against the party line?

Propaganda doesn’t work on unwilling ears. It preys on people’s patriotism, prejudices and fears.