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El Paso and the Death Rattle of White Supremacy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...595438 white supremacy politics
shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I feel compelled to ask Trump supporters: Is it worth it? How many have to suffer for you to feel great again?
  • For them, our success is the American nightmare
  • white-supremacist terrorism is now the No. 1 domestic-terrorist threat in America. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that the FBI has recorded about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in 2019, most of them involving ties to white supremacy
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  • The FBI, for the first time, has also identified fringe conspiracy theories as a risk factor for domestic terrorism, citing QAnon, which says that an active deep-state conspiracy is trying to take down Trump.
  • As a Muslim American, I have been asked for 18 years to denounce violent Muslim extremism done by terrorists I’ve never met. My loyalty and patriotism are interrogated, questioned, and treated as suspect. So what do we say to those who enable and promote a white-nationalist ideology?
  • Finally, people of color can no longer shoulder this burden alone. We need all Americans to step up, to stand with those targeted for violence, because hashtags and tweets won’t cut it any longer
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Tucker Carlson says white supremacy is a 'hoax' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...macy-hoax-lie-not-real-problem white supremacy culture politics trump crisis fox news
shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Carlson argued that white supremacy is a fake crisis cooked up by Democrats as a campaign ploy. “It’s actually not a real problem in America,” Carlson said, adding later, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”
  • violence tied to far-right ideologies have killed roughly as many Americans since 9/11 as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State combined.
  • The president has often called Hispanic migration an “invasion” — language echoed in a manifesto police believe the accused El Paso shooter posted online decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
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  • Carlson has regularly said similar words. He’s used “invasion” rhetoric nine times on his show this year, according to liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, including describing a surge of migrants at the southern border as “an invasion, and it’s terrifying.
  • Carlson has also warned that immigrants could “replace” Americans — an echo, critics say, of the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that also motivated the deadly March attack in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 51 people at mosques.
  • Carlson framed his argument around the idea that few Americans belong to explicitly white supremacist groups, like the KKK.
  • But experts say white supremacist mass killers are more likely today to be radicalized in online forums like 8chan, where the alleged El Paso killer reportedly posted his manifesto, than at organized rallies with white hoods
  • FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said the agency had arrested about 100 domestic terrorism suspects in the previous nine months, and most were tied to white supremacist beliefs.
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Donald Trump Is Not Well - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...597640 mental illness trump crisis
shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • “I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
  • Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.
  • It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.
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  • n analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.
  • Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit
  • It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions.
  • above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.
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US is hotbed of climate change denial, major global survey finds | Environment | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ange-denial-international-poll climate change denial survey environment us
shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.
  • despite these views, the great majority of US citizens do accept the science of climate change, with nearly four in 10 saying human activity was at least partly responsible, potentially with other factors, and a further third taking the stronger view that human activity is the dominant cause.
  • Americans also appear unusually prone to climate-related conspiracy theories, the YouGov data suggests. A total of 17% of those polled agreed that “the idea of manmade global warming is a hoax that was invented to deceive people”.
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  • Belief in this conspiracy theory, which was previously invoked by Donald Trump, who falsely claimed climate change was made up by China, increases with age and also conservative political ideology. A total of 52% of Americans who described themselves as “very rightwing” to YouGov insisted global warming was a hoax.
  • In Europe, fewer than one in 10 people across the major countries surveyed thought the climate was not changing or not changing owing to human activity, with only Poland showing a slightly higher number, with 12% taking one of these views
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Medical Expert Who Corrects Trump Is Now a Target of the Far Right - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...i-trump-conspiracy-target.html
shared by nrashkind on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.
  • Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.
  • Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction
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  • A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak
  • That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters,
  • An analysis by The New York Times found over 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud
  • some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day.
  • Many of the anti-Fauci posts, some of which pointed to a seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had sent praising Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, have been retweeted thousands of times.
  • One anti-Fauci tweet on Tuesday said, “Sorry liberals but we don’t trust Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
  • It is the latest twist in the ebb and flow of right-wing punditry that for weeks echoed Mr. Trump in minimizing the threat posed by the coronavirus and arguably undercut efforts to alert the public of its dangers.
  • “There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively,” said Carl Bergstrom,
  • The Trump administration has previously shown a distaste for relying on scientific expertise,
  • “What this case will show is that conspiracy theories can kill,” she said.
  • “When you’re dealing with the White House, sometimes you have to say things one, two, three, four times, and then it happens,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with Science magazine this past week. “So, I’m going to keep pushing.”
  • A hashtag asking “Where is Dr. Fauci?” began trending on Twitter.
  • Two days later, Dr. Fauci put his head in his hand at the White House briefing after Mr. Trump’s remark on the “Deep State Department.”
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Nudging Towards Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule's War on Liberalism | Dissent Magazine - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/...nudging-towards-theocracy liberalism conservatism theocracy reactionary history culture crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • If power is to be delivered to the technocrats, it has to be taken away from someone else. For Vermeule, that someone is the judiciary.
  • Judges, in his view, are ill-equipped to adjudicate on the administrative and regulatory questions that, in modern states, so often come across their desks. Judges have no business, Vermeule thinks, meddling with technical or regulatory matters, and thus they seldom do. So whatever fantasy we might spin about living in a republic of laws, in reality we are living in a republic of administrators.
  • The abnegation of the law opens the door for the executive branch to assert its proper role. This has been the grand theme of Vermeule’s collaborations with Sunstein and Posner. His writings with Sunstein have focused on the need for government agencies to have wide leeway to intervene in and regulate the social order, without serious oversight from the legislature or the Constitution.
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  • a provocative 2009 paper titled “Conspiracy Theories.” As always, they begin with a genuine problem: in this case, the spread of harmful untruths like birtherism or trutherism. Their basic idea is that government agencies should be allowed to pursue a project of “cognitive infiltration,” anonymously mucking about in conspiracy circles in order to sow doubt and confusion
  • Who, in the end, has the capacity to employ the awesome powers of the modern state?
  • Schmitt showed, they believe, that the executive branch is the proper locus of sovereignty and the one that is most legitimately linked with the people. It is also the only one with the capacity and speed to act in times of emergency.
  • Vermeule and Posner published two books, Terror in the Balance (2007) and Executive Unbound (2009), that brought Schmitt’s insights into the context of contemporary America and its global War on Terror. The books mount a robust defense of executive leeway, including the right to use “enhanced interrogation”—or, in layman’s terms, torture.
  • it is hard not to place him into a recognizable genealogy of liberal Protestants, ensconced in the mainstream intellectual culture of their day, who found their way to Rome. Jacques Maritain belongs in this camp, as do G.K. Chesterton and Alasdair MacIntyre. Like Vermeule, they brought the zeal of the convert with them, and were often more radical than cradle Catholics
  • one can find quite similar trajectories: deep engagement in mainstream, non-Catholic schools, which brought them to unresolvable contradictions. The Church offered them answers to questions they already had.
  • His scholarship with Sunstein and Posner labored mightily to persuade us that shreds of paper, be they constitutions or laws, were irrational guides to social betterment. And yet what was to take their place?
  • How can the state make decisions about ethical matters, which it must do, and why ought those decisions be viewed as legitimate? What, in the end, do citizens share with one another? These are first-order questions
  • Liberal individualism had always relied upon, and was even a relic of, constitutional legalism. The whole idea had been that law could structure social relations, allowing different cultures and religions to live in relative harmony. By depriving the law of this sort of social function, the law and economics circle opened up a vast new set of questions about how the social order might cohere.
  • Vermeule’s co-authors looked to the individual and her preferences, as stewarded by a free market and enlightened administrative agencies
  • Vermeule, however, came to see liberalism as purely destructive: as a set of tools and procedures whose primary purpose was to reshape social reality in its own image, steamrolling the virtues of the people in the name of individualism and science
  • he has begun to entertain dark visions about how the administrative state might coerce the unruly people toward virtue. He positively cites Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic critic of the French Revolution and fellow defender of torture. Vermeule dreams of a world in which we will “sear the liberal faith with hot irons” in order “to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents.” A less honest thinker would be sure to remind readers that this is all meant metaphorically. Vermeule does no such thing and goes out of his way to assert that “coercion” ought to be on the table. There is only one way to read this: he is arguing that actual violence could legitimately be used to convert hearts and minds.
  • Vermeule’s theory, in Law’s Abnegation and elsewhere, has been that the modern state is not actually governed by law or courts but by administrative agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education. And his proposal in his more radical writings is that those agencies ought to be staffed by integralists who would bend the powers of the state in his desired direction.
  • “We have learned from behavioral economics,” he reminds us, that administrative agents can “nudge whole populations in desirable directions.” The theory that the state might “nudge” citizens toward more optimal outcomes, as defined by technocrats, is the famous theory developed by Sunstein
  • Vermeule is saying, if we are going to grant the administrative state the right to mold citizen behavior, why stop there? We might be nudged, he thinks, with hot irons; we might be nudged right back to the Inquisition.
  • He is not exactly a “populist” and is more committed to the reign of the Church than he is to that of the Republican Party. And yet, given his apologetics for the Eastern European regimes that are currently committed to gutting judiciaries and human rights protections, there is no doubt which side he will be on if or when the true moment of crisis arrives in our imperiled republic
  • Vermeule’s story shows us just how easily technocracy, by evacuating the moral center of our politics, can tip toward a moralizing authoritarianism that promises to restore one—how easily, in other words, Bloomberg might tip into Bonaparte.
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Trump Is Inciting a Coronavirus Culture War to Save Himself - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608638 trump culture war pandemic response morality racism analysis politics
shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump had a message for the Chinese government at the beginning of the year: Great job!
  • “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Trump tweeted on January 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
  • Over the next month, the president repeatedly praised the Chinese government for its handling of the coronavirus, which appears to have first emerged from a wildlife market in the transportation hub of Wuhan, China, late last year. Trump lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus,” and emphasized that the U.S. government was “working closely” with China to contain the disease.
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  • For months, Trump himself referred to the illness as “the coronavirus.” In early March, though, several conservative media figures began using Wuhan virus or Chinese virus instead. On March 16, Trump himself began to refer to it as the “Chinese Virus,” prompting commentators to charge that he was racializing the epidemic
  • Even before Trump’s adoption of Chinese virus, Asian Americans had been facing a wave of discrimination, harassment, and violence in response to the epidemic. The president’s rhetoric did not start this backlash, but the decision to embrace the term Chinese virus reinforced the association between a worldwide pandemic and people of a particular national origin.
  • Legitimizing that link with all the authority of the office of the president of the United States is not just morally abhorrent, but dangerous.
  • The president’s now-constant use of Chinese virus is the latest example of a conservative phenomenon
  • Trump and his acolytes are never more comfortable than when they are defending expressions of bigotry as plain common sense, and accusing their liberal critics of being oversensitive snowflakes who care more about protecting “those people” than they do about you. They seek to reduce any political dispute to this simple equation whenever possible.
  • “I want them to talk about racism every day,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
  • n this instance, though, the gambit served two additional purposes: distracting the public from Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and disguising the fact that Trump’s failures stemmed from his selfishness and fondness for authoritarian leaders, which in turn made him an easy mark for the Chinese government’s disinformation
  • Trump understands that overt expressions of prejudice draw condemnation from liberals, which in turn rallies his own base around him. Calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” not only informs Trump’s base that foreigners are the culprits, it also offers his supporters the emotional satisfaction of venting fury at liberals for unfairly accusing conservatives of racism.
  • The point is to turn a pandemic that threatens both mass death and the collapse of the American economy into a culture-war argument in which the electorate can be polarized along partisan lines.
  • Since that report, Chinese officials have engaged in a propaganda offensive, expelling American journalists, minimizing their early missteps, and putting forth a conspiracy theory that the virus was engineered by the U.S. military. Compared with all this, the president’s defenders argue, Trump referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” seems trivial.
  • Lost in that comparison, however, is the fact that the most effective target of CCP disinformation has been Trump himself.
  • According to The Washington Post, at the same time that Trump was stating that Beijing had the disease under control, U.S. intelligence agencies were already warning him that “Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.”
  • Administration officials directly warned Trump of the danger posed by the virus, but “Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China,” The Washington Post reported, “despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
  • The right’s rhetorical shift then, is not just another racism rope-a-dop
  • It is also an attempt to cover up the fact that the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign was effective in that it helped persuade the president of the United States not to take adequate precautionary measures to stem a tide of pestilence that U.S. government officials saw coming.
  • Now faced with the profound consequences of that decision, the right has settled on a strategy that does little to hold Beijing accountable for its mishandling of the coronavirus, but instead plays into Beijing’s attempt to cast any criticism of the Chinese government’s response as racism
  • The term makes no distinction between China’s authoritarian government and people who happen to be of Chinese origin, and undermines the unified front the Trump administration would want if it were actually concerned with countering Chinese-government propaganda.
  • Instead, the Trump administration has chosen a political tactic that strengthens the president’s political prospects by polarizing the electorate, and covers up his own role as Xi’s patsy, while making its own pushback against CCP propaganda less effective
  • This approach reflects the most glaring flaws of Trumpist governance, which have become only more acute during the coronavirus crisis: It exacerbates rather than solves the underlying problem, placing the president’s political objectives above all other concerns, even the ones both the president and his supporters claim to value.
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Opinion | What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-fake-news.html disinformation pandemic propaganda extremism conspiracy theory
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Public health experts like Dr. Emanuel tend to be cautious about predictions and transparent about what they don’t know. In the case of the coronavirus, that can cause a dearth of definitive information — and an opportunity for reckless information that’s partly true but politically skewed.
  • The dynamic is on display during the daily White House news conferences, where President Trump’s claims are often hedged or corrected by public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
  • much of the pernicious false news about the coronavirus operates on the margins of believability — real facts and charts cobbled together to formulate a dangerous, wrongheaded conclusion or news reports that combine a majority of factually accurate reporting with a touch of unproven conjecture.
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  • armchair epidemiology, which Slate described as “convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses.”
  • The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.
  • Conservative pundits, who’d spent weeks downplaying the seriousness of the virus, were drawn to Mr. Ginn’s conclusion that “shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.”
  • The Fox News political analyst Brit Hume tweeted the post, and then so did the anchors Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham. Within hours, the blog post was amplified across conservative media.
  • “I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.”
  • Epidemiologists disagreed, pointing to some of Mr. Ginn’s assumptions as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”
  • After a 31-tweet thread from the infectious-disease expert Carl Bergstrom debunking Mr. Ginn’s data as cherry-picked, Medium took the post down, prompting a backlash in conservative spheres. More than two million people had already viewed it.
  • Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.
  • This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,
  • “When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”
  • At first glance, the piece looked quite convincing. Mr. Ginn drew heavily from charts from the C.D.C., Johns Hopkins and the Financial Times. “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say,” he claimed.
  • Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.
  • “Statistical analysis is a black box to most of us,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “And it’s like, ‘I can’t challenge a multilinear statistical regression because I don’t know what that is,’
  • “And so a form of authority gets imposed on a reader and we tend not to challenge data the way we’ve learned to challenge words.”
  • Mr. Evans is concerned that ultimately important nuance will be lost and pro-Trump pundits will use the news to exclusively scapegoat China and divert blame away from domestic failings. “What’s scary is how smart the false stuff is,” he said.
  • Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”
  • The Trump administration and right-wing media watchdogs will weaponize changing facts about the virus, pointing to them as proof of a deep state bent on damaging the president or a media apparatus trying to swing an election
  • Others will try to pin the blame for the pandemic solely on the Trump administration
  • What we don’t know about Covid-19 will degenerate into ever more intricate conspiracies — some almost believable, some outrageous but all dangerous.
  • “We’re in a stream of ever-evolving data, and it’s being shaped around cognitive biases, partisanship and preferences embedded in our cultural identities,”
  • I called Mr. Pomerantsev because the information vacuum around the virus made me think of the title of his earlier book on Russia — “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.
  • In the absence of new, vetted information, reckless speculation takes its place, muddling our conception of the truth.
  • in crisis situations — especially early on — our desire for information exceeds our ability to accurately deliver it. Add to this the complexities of epidemiology: exponential growth; statistical modeling; and the slow, methodical nature of responsible science.
  • Together, they create the ideal conditions for distrust, bad-faith interpretations and political manipulation, the contours of which we’re only beginning to see.
  • “The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”
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Climate science deniers at forefront of downplaying coronavirus pandemic | Coronavirus ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...wnplaying-coronavirus-pandemic pandemic climate deniers
shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • DeSmog, a blog and organization that tracks the culprits behind false information about the climate crisis, identified about 70 individuals and groups questioning the deadliness of the coronavirus and pushing for an end to social distancing, along with protesters who have been encouraged by Donald Trump.
  • From the conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to the US-based Heartland Institute and UK-based James Delingpole, the review concludes that the same influencers trying to make the public question the severity of global heating are also discounting the science surrounding the coronavirus.
  • “The climate war has largely been about confusing the public and making people trust in science and government less,” said DeSmog’s executive director, Brendan DeMelle. “And here we are in a pandemic where science and global cooperation are critical, and that’s a threat to the ideology of a lot of these … organizations.
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  • “You end up with this conspiracy theory about big government taking over our lives, taking away our freedoms, subjecting us to stay-at-home orders that we have to liberate ourselves from,”
  • The Manhattan Institute, which calls itself a free-market thinktank, ran an article from Heather MacDonald in which she wrote: “Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of 0.000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to 0.12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic.”
  • Alex Epstein, the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress which DeSmog cites as associated with various groups connected to the rightwing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, called the current recession a “mild preview of the Green New Deal”, and said that “our biggest ally in the fight against coronavirus is the fossil fuel industry.”
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Making Ignorance Great Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-gop-paris-climate-accord.html post-factual post-truth gop trump ignorance crisis
shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • here’s the thing: What just happened on climate isn’t an unusual case — and Trump isn’t especially unusual for a modern Republican. For today’s G.O.P. doesn’t do substance; it doesn’t assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions. Facts and hard thinking aren’t wanted, and anyone who tries to bring such things into the discussion is the enemy.
  • On climate change, influential conservatives have for years clung to what is basically a crazy conspiracy theory — that the overwhelming scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is a hoax, somehow coordinated by thousands of researchers around the world. And at this point this is effectively the mainstream Republican position.
  • Do G.O.P. leaders really think this conspiracy theory is true? The answer, surely, is that they don’t care. Truth, as something that exists apart from and in possible opposition to political convenience, is no longer part of their philosophical universe.
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  • bear in mind that so far Trump hasn’t faced a single crisis not of his own making. As George Orwell noted many years ago in his essay “In Front of Your Nose,” people can indeed talk nonsense for a very long time, without paying an obvious price. But “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” Now there’s a happy thought.
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Trump plans to release classified JFK documents - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html JFK Trump Conspiracy US politics history assassination
shared by millerco on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to allow the release of classified government documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy "subject to the receipt of further information."
  • A White House official told reporters Saturday: "The President believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise."
  • "Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened," Trump said, appearing to leave open the possibility that some documents could still be withheld.
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  • Trump's tweet comes as he is staring down an October 26 deadline set in law by Congress mandating the public release of the still-secret documents -- including FBI and CIA files -- barring any action by the President to block the release of certain documents.
  • The White House said in a statement to Politico earlier this week that the White House was working "to ensure that the maximum amount of data can be released to the public" by next week's deadline.
  • Trump himself is no stranger to the controversies and conspiracy theories that have long swirled around the assassination of the 35th president.
  • During the 2016 campaign, Trump made the unfounded claim that the father of GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz was associated with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, a claim he has never reneged nor apologized for.
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Donald Trump Is a Real-Life Fredo Corleone - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549875 trump supporters gop elites media polarization Crisis
shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • the most important moment in Wolff’s book are words attributed at second or third-hand to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time of Donald Trump’s election. “He will sign anything we put in front of him.”
  • Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades.
  • Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host.
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  • Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime.
  • From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.
  • Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.
  • Michael Wolff has drawn the most indelible picture yet of Donald Trump, the man. But the important thing about Trump is not the man; it’s the system of power surrounding the man.
  • In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.
  • What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.
  • However crazy Trump may be, in one way he is indeed the “very stable genius” he claims to be: Trump understands how to mobilize hatred and resentment to his own advantage and profit. He has risen higher than Joe McCarthy or Charles Lindbergh or Theodore Bilbo—and he has lasted already nearly a full year in office, holding the approval of one-third of the country, more than sufficient to keep him there for a full term.
  • What we need to do now is widen the camera angle beyond Fredo Trump to the hard-faced men and women over his shoulders. Those are the people who put Trump where he is, and keep him there, corrupting the institutions of American democracy and troubling the peace and security of the world.
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A Collapse Foretold: How Brazil's Covid-19 Outbreak Overwhelmed Hospitals - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...virus-brazil-bolsonaro.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The virus has killed more than 300,000 people in Brazil, its spread aided by a highly contagious variant, political infighting and distrust of science.
  • More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.
  • At Hospital Restinga e Extremo Sul, one of the main medical facilities in Porto Alegre, the emergency room has become a crammed Covid ward where many patients received care in chairs, for lack of a free bed. Last week, the military built a tent field hospital outside the main entrance, but hospital officials said the additional bed space is of little use for a medical staff stretched beyond its limit.
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  • President Bolsonaro, who continues to promote ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs to treat the disease, has also said lockdowns are untenable in a country where so many people live in poverty. While several Brazilian states have ordered business shutdowns in recent weeks, there have been no strict lockdowns.Some of the president’s supporters in Porto Alegre have protested business shutdowns in recent days, organizing caravans that stop outside of hospitals and blast their horns while inside Covid wards overflow.
  • Epidemiologists say Brazil could have avoided additional lockdowns if the government had promoted the use of masks and social distancing and aggressively negotiated access to the vaccines being developed last year.
  • uch conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines have spread widely on social media, including on WhatsApp and Facebook. A recent public opinion poll by the firm IPEC found that 46 percent of respondents believed at least one widely disseminated falsehood about vaccines.Mistrust of vaccines and science is new in Brazil and a dangerous feature of the Bolsonaro era, said Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neurologist at Duke University who led a coronavirus task force in the country’s northeast last year.
  • The mistrust and the denials — and the caravans of Bolsonaro supporters blasting their horns outside hospitals to protest pandemic restrictions — are crushing for medical professionals who have lost colleagues to the virus and to suicide in recent months, said Claudia Franco, the president of the nurses union in Rio Grande do Sul.
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Hard and Soft Threats to Democracy - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-and-soft-threats-to-democracy democracy conspiracy misinformation
shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • an assortment of QAnon kooks has taken to claiming that Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20 was unconstitutional and that Donald Trump will be returning in splendor on March 4 for the real inauguration.The rumors swirling about the possibility of violence on March 4 were given legitimacy on Wednesday, when the Capitol Police released a statement saying, “We have obtained intelligence that shows a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an identified militia group on Thursday, March 4.”
  • Meaning that domestic terrorists have succeeded in shutting down the government again. This time it happened without anyone breaching a single security fence. The threat of another national security event, however remote, was enough for them to win
  • At Wednesday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, for example, instead of focusing on the individuals who planned the attack and the spectacular security failures that allowed it to unfold, senators spent much of their time promoting or refuting, depending on their party affiliation, the claim that Antifa was responsible.
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  • The fact that, for some reason, it took President Trump’s Department of Defense more than three hours to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6 doesn’t concern former Vice President Mike Pence, who was targeted by the mob. He finally broke his silence on Wednesday—only to push an op-ed based on the big election lie and blasting “leftists” who “want you powerless at the ballot box.”
  • the threat to our democracy is coming from conspiracy theorists in the Republican party
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Washington Post issues 'correction' on 2020 Tom Cotton story claiming COVID lab-leak th... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...m-cotton-covid-lab-leak-theory US politics
shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The Washington Post issued a correction 15 months after alleging Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was peddling a "debunked" "conspiracy theory" about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. 
  • "Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus," the correction read at the top of the report. "The term 'debunked' and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."
  • Associated Press White House reporter Jonathan Lemire accused former President Trump and his allies of "practicing revisionist history," while New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman blamed him and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for casting doubt within the media for withholding evidence to back their claims. 
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  • Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler similarly raised eyebrows for declaring that the theory is "suddenly credible." 
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Talk of overturning the 2020 election on new social media platforms used by QAnon follo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US politics Trump history crisis Culture policy Pandemic election election-overview
shared by aidenborst on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Online conversation among Trump supporters and QAnon followers on new and emerging social media platforms is creating concern on Capitol Hill that President Donald Trump's continued perpetuation of the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen could soon incite further violence, three congressional sources tell CNN.
  • "It's a great day when we start seeing evidence of the plan coming together! He just told us it won't be long now," wrote another.
  • Trump's comments to right-wing media outlets in recent weeks have played directly into the false belief among some of his supporters that he will be reinstated as president in the coming months.
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  • Officials are careful to stress that much of it falls under First Amendment free speech protections.
  • Major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts of influential peddlers of election conspiracy theories after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, including Trump himself.
  • "He doesn't have to wait until 2024 people, he's coming back this year, everything is going to be reversed," one Telegram user commented on the clip.
  • The social messaging platform Telegram has emerged as a particular source of concern among law enforcement officials, the congressional sources say.
  • "It's going to be a very interesting time in our country," he said. "How do you govern when you lost?"
  • "We The People will take action," one Telegram user commented in reaction to a clip of the interview.
  • "Trump knows what happens. Biden administration will be removed," commented another, while one warned, "He just told us things are about to get very ugly all over America. These thugs aren't going to take this news very well! Be prepared!"
  • Telegram was founded in Russia in 2013 and quickly became popular as a propaganda and organizing tool for members of ISIS. The company did take some steps to tackle ISIS content.
  • In the days before the insurrection, Watkins was retweeted multiple times by Trump. He was suspended by Twitter after January 6. Now, Watkins posts daily to his 200,000 followers on Telegram in Arizona -- continually casting doubt on the election result.
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Pride Month organizers to draw attention to anti-transgender laws | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ttention-anti-transgender-laws pride anti-transgender laws discrimination Biden
shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • Tuesday marks the beginning of Pride Month, and LGBTQ groups say they plan on drawing attention this year to the anti-transgender bills making their way through state legislatures across the country.
  • GOP-backed measures targeting transgender people have picked up steam in recent months, ranging from bills banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports to legislation prohibiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
  • By HRC's tally, 250 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year, including at least 35 blocking transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.
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  • “We have members of the trans and non-binary community that are living in a state of fear.”
  • Pride Month organizers and LGBTQ groups said Pride Month this year will also reflect the new administration in the White House.
  • David touted President BidenJoe BidenTexas Democrats stage walkout to block passage of sweeping election overhaul package DOJ adds four defendants to Oath Keepers conspiracy case Biden remembers late son Beau in Memorial Day remarks MORE’s support for the Equality Act, House-passed legislation that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, education and other areas.
  • More immediately, many Pride Month organizers are focused on holding either in-person or hybrid events during June after last year's gatherings were largely online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • “Because we’ll be having events throughout the month of June and throughout the year, folks should anticipate in-person events, some like we’ve been traditionally known for, but also many innovative, broader reaching, and more diverse experiences,” Gerald Garth, board treasurer for LA Pride, told The Hill.
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Michael Flynn and the endless insurrection - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The insurrection is far from over.In the same week, the sitting US President warned that US democracy is in peril, a group of scholars said the American experiment could fail and a retired US general -- who served, briefly, as national security adviser -- seemed to endorse a military coup.
  • On the one hand, the retired general -- that's Michael Flynn -- is disgraced in the eyes of his former colleagues, was prosecuted on charges of lying and foreign lobbying and then pardoned by Trump. He appeared this past weekend at a fringe conspiracy theory conference and said there's no reason what's happening in Myanmar (a violent coup by the country's military) shouldn't happen in the US.
  • "Let me be VERY CLEAR - There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort," he said. Read more from CNN's Donie O'Sullivan.
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  • At the same conference this weekend, he and Powell suggested Trump could just be reinstated. Here's a fact check on that from CNN's Tara Subramaniam.
  • A coup after an election, actually. What's happening in Myanmar wasn't just any coup; the military seized control of the country after the election in November. QAnon extremists have been fixated on it.
  • So is it sedition? Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, now a Democrat, argued Monday on CNN that Flynn should be prosecuted for sedition.
  • To them, it is the raft of restrictive voting laws being passed in key states by Republican legislatures around the country that threatens democracy.
  • Rebellion or insurrection: "Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
  • Seditious conspiracy: "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."
  • It's also not that Republicans in Arizona and Georgia are still trying to selectively audit their states' election results months after the elections ended and a shocking number of Republican voters question the legitimacy of Biden's win.
  • Treason: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
  • "Democracy is more than a form of government. It's a way of being; it's a way of seeing the world. Democracy means the rule of the people -- the rule of the people. Not the rule of monarchs, not the rule of the moneyed, not the rule of the mighty -- literally, the rule of the people."
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Official Confirmation Or No, Roswell, N.M., Believes In UFOs : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ufo-capital-roswell-new-mexico
shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Sci-fi enthusiasts, ufologists and conspiracy theorists have been eagerly awaiting a government report, due this month, detailing a Department of Defense investigation into Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.
  • Any hopes that the report would confirm alien visitors to our atmosphere have been dashed, according to reporting by The New York Times and confirmed by NPR through a U.S. senior official. Even so, ET-centric businesses in Roswell hope interest in the new report will lead to a boost in tourism.
  • At the International UFO Museum and Research Center, visits are already up 20% from 2019. Some of that is because of last year's closures due to COVID-19, but belief in UFOs has skyrocketed in recent years.
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  • Museum visitor and UFO enthusiast Ethan Anderson first got interested in aliens after attending Roswell's annual UFO Festival, and would love to know more about our cosmic neighbors.
  • "If you really have technology that's so great, you shouldn't hide it from people," he says, convinced of a government cover-up of alien tech.
  • "The government can't admit that there are extraterrestrials, because if they do, that'll open up a whole keg of worms," says Dennis Balthaser, a longtime Roswell UFO tour guide who has spent 35 years researching UFOs.
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Historians Clash With the 1619 Project - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...604093 slavery project 1619 history controversy US
shared by Javier E on 02 May 21 - No Cached
  • “They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of The New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic presidency edition,” Hannah-Jones told me. “I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”
  • For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project, the response has been deeply gratifying.
  • When The New York Times Magazine published its 1619 Project in August, people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies. Since then, the project—a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions—has spawned a podcast, a high-school curriculum, and an upcoming book
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  • U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom.
  • The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.
  • given the stature of the historians involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the 1619 Project
  • he letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.
  • Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere.
  • while some of the critiques can be answered with historical fact, others are questions of interpretation grounded in perspective and experience.
  • Both sides agree, as many of the project’s right-wing critics do not, that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life—an argument that is less radical than it may appear at first glance. If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project, though not necessarily with all of its individual arguments.
  • Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles?
  • The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society
  • The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize.
  • The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union.
  • Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism.
  • “The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all,”
  • The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”
  • The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.
  • “To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.”
  • Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.
  • On this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground. Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal, the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel abolitionism in the North.
  • it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.
  • The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union.
  • In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, Oakes said, “The function of those tropes is to deny change over time … The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?”
  • The project’s pessimism has drawn criticism from the left as well as the right.
  • A major theme of the 1619 Project is that the progress that has been made has been fragile and reversible—and has been achieved in spite of the nation’s true founding principles, which are not the lofty ideals few Americans genuinely believe in.
  • “The fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it's a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women's rights—everything. That's the glory of it,” Wilentz told me. “To minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical tradition in America.”
  • the question of whether black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “largely alone,” as Hannah-Jones put it in her essay, is subject to vigorous debate.
  • “I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.”
  • “The tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project. And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes American history,”
  • To Wilentz, the failures of earlier scholarship don’t illustrate the danger of a monochromatic group of historians writing about the American past, but rather the risk that ideologues can hijack the narrative. “[It was] when the southern racists took over the historical profession that things changed, and W. E. B. Du Bois fought a very, very courageous fight against all of that,” Wilentz told me. The Dunning School, he said, was “not a white point of view; it’s a southern, racist point of view.”
  • In the letter, Wilentz portrays the authors of the 1619 Project as ideologues as well. He implies—apparently based on a combative but ambiguous exchange between Hannah-Jones and the writer Wesley Yang on Twitter—that she had discounted objections raised by “white historians” since publication.
  • Hannah-Jones told me she was misinterpreted. “I rely heavily on the scholarship of historians no matter what race, and I would never discount the work of any historian because that person is white or any other race,” she told me. “I did respond to someone who was saying white scholars were afraid, and I think my point was that history is not objective. And that people who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as well.”
  • When I asked Wilentz about Hannah-Jones’s clarification, he was dismissive. “Fact and objectivity are the foundation of both honest journalism and honest history. And so to dismiss it, to say, ‘No, I'm not really talking about whites’—well, she did, and then she takes it back in those tweets and then says it's about the inability of anybody to write objective history. That's objectionable too,”
  • The problem, as Du Bois argued, is that much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.
  • Newt Gingrich called the 1619 Project a “lie,” arguing that “there were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves." In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo dismissed the Times Magazine project as a “conspiracy theory” developed from the “chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.
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