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Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”

Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”

Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.

Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.

Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.

Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”

In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.

both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.

In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton

Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.

he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”

“Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”

In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.

As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”

Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”

In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.

Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”

For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.

Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”

Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.

Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”

in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical

Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.

Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.

Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.

Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.

For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.

News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.

Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”

Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.

” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.

Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.

Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.

some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”

Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”

If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”

Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”

Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.

Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”

Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company

In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN

“There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”

Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”

“Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”

Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”

Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.

Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected

Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.

Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.

By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”

other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.

Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014

 ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”

Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.

Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.

a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”

Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.

Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo

White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.

According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him

Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.

For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”

“The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.

Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”

Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing

A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”

Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”

“It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”

For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.

Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”

“In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”

Twitter said, um what?

Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez noted how the U.S. government sought Guzman's extradition as early as June 16, before he escaped for a second time from a Mexican prison in July.

In an interview conducted for Rolling Stone magazine three months after he escaped from prison, he touted his drug trade, saying he "supplies more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world."

He spent hours talking to actor Sean Penn, who interviewed him for the magazine during a secret meeting in the Mexican jungle. He answered followup questions several weeks later while still on the run, the magazine said. Guzman received the followup questions through an intermediary and answered them in a videotape he sent to Penn.

The article posted online Saturday includes a blunt admission about his intricate dealings in the cartel world. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats," Guzman told Penn.

When he was not bragging about his drug trade during his time on the run, the kingpin was trying to make a movie deal.

Police and the military successfully hunted down Guzman and his henchmen this week partly because he or his representatives contacted filmmakers about making an El Chapo biopic, Attorney General Gomez said.

"Another important aspect that allowed us to pinpoint his location was having discovered Guzman Loera's intention to film a biographical movie through establishing communication with actors and producers, which formed a new line of investigation," Gomez said.

Hollywood will likely make a movie or even a series about El Chapo, as it has about other drug lords, such as Colombia's Pablo Escobar in "Narcos."But for now, Guzman won't have a direct hand in any.

His efforts to develop a biopic ends in a scene with an interesting twist: After six months on the lam, Guzman is now back in the same maximum security prison from which he escaped, according to a Mexican law enforcement official with knowledge of the case.

Conley acknowledged that his evasive answers "came off that we were trying to hide something" but said that "wasn't necessarily true,"

Conley acknowledged that the President has experienced "two episodes of transient drops in his oxygen saturation"

When asked if they had dropped below 90, he replied, "We don't have any recordings here of that." Pressed again on whether they had dropped below 90, Conley said the President's blood oxygen levels didn't get down into "the low 80s."

"There's some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern," Conley said, not explaining whether they were expected findings in a normal patient or a Covid-19 patient.

Some seven months into a pandemic that has killed more than 209,000 Americans, the nation is now facing a grave governing crisis with its commander in chief hospitalized

Conley failed to answer basic questions about the President's condition and admitted that he had omitted those alarming drops in the President's oxygen levels during a news conference Saturday because he wanted to "reflect the upbeat attitude"

"made substantial progress" since his diagnosis but "is not yet out of the woods."

Speaking from a White House that already has a huge credibility problem with the public, Meadows' statement capped a 24-hour period that served as a master class in opacity and contradiction that raised major questions about the President's health

Trump has been watching and critiquing coverage of his hospitalization from the presidential suite at Walter Reed

It "seems highly likely this originated at the SCOTUS announcement last week," a senior administration official told CNN's Jake Tapper of the outbreak among GOP officials. "It may have come from the Hill. The next major concern will be securing Capitol Hill and protecting lawmakers," the official added.

The President's construct crumbled Friday when he was airlifted to Walter Reed after contracting the virus,

The White House seemed to be continuing to downplay concerns about the severity of the virus Saturday morning when the President's physician, Navy Cmdr. Dr. Sean Conley, gave a news conference at Walter Reed where he described the President as upbeat and feeling good, without revealing any of the alarming developments with his oxygen levels the day before.

Many of the Trump aides or contacts who have recently tested positive for Covid-19 attended the White House festivities honoring Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on September 26, in the Rose Garden.

Those people told CNN that Trump seemed particularly upset when he saw a quote saying he was displaying "concerning" symptoms on Friday

The President said he was "starting to feel good" and that he was receiving therapeutics he said are like "miracles coming down from God."

"I had to be out front and this is America, this is the United States, this is the greatest country in the world, this is the most powerful country in the world," Trump continued in the video. "I can't be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe, and just say, hey whatever happens, happens. I can't do that."

The President tweeted that he had tested positive for coronavirus around 1 a.m. ET Friday, hours after attending a Thursday night fundraiser in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he met with a small group of donors indoors with no masks, before addressing a larger crowd outdoors. Trump got his first positive coronavirus test result Thursday after returning from that trip, a White House official said Saturday evening.

He declined to say whether medical tests had revealed any damage to the President's lungs.

Conley said Trump had been fever-free for 24 hours and had experienced an "extremely mild cough," nasal congestion and fatigue.

"The President's vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We are still not on a clear path to a full recovery," the source later identified as Meadows told pool reporters.

Once Trump was at Walter Reed, doctors initiated the antiviral drug remdesivir. He is receiving a five-day course of the drug, which has been shown to shorten recovery time for some coronavirus patients.

as for which of these groups makes America great, I’m not sure what criteria to use, but if it is generating wealth and contributing to gross domestic product, it’s not even close.

According to the Brookings Institution, the 500 counties won by Clinton produced 64 percent of U.S. economic output, while the 2,600 counties won by Trump produced just 36 percent of GDP.

It is blue states, which voted against Trump in 2016, that fund the red states that voted for him. From 1990 to 2009, Clinton states collectively paid $2.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received in federal spending, while Trump states altogether received $1.3 trillion more than they paid.

this is not the way I think we should look at America. It’s one country, and different parts and people contribute in different ways.

The goal should be to use politics as a mechanism to bring us together through both public policy and public discourse.

Most presidents begin their tenure by trying to reach out to their political opponents, signaling that they want to represent those who didn’t vote for them as well as those who did, and generally trying to bring the country together. Trump has made almost no such effort, simply asserting that the country was divided before he was elected and thus absolving himself of any responsibility for unifying it. In office, he has mercilessly attacked anyone who dares to disagree with him

The challenge for the media must be to ensure that we don’t mirror Trump’s attitude of hostility. We cannot absorb and reflect that negativity. We are not the opposition. We are a civic institution, explicitly protected by the Constitution, that is meant to hold government accountable and provide real information to the citizenry.

His ability to elude authorities was due in large part to the support he has among rank-and-file Mexicans. He was also able to pay off local government and military authorities and spread largesse.

“It makes us sad because he is a good guy and gives us security,” said Los Mochis resident Mariana Ocampo, 21.

In the end, it wasn't exhaustive Mexican detective work, nor sophisticated U.S. intelligence, that exposed Guzman's whereabouts. It was ego and a chance at Hollywood.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Arely Gomez said Guzman had been in talks to produce a movie about his life.

“He established communication with actors and producers, which has formed a new line of investigation,” she said in a late-night news conference as Guzman was being transported from Los Mochis.

One of those contacts was apparently actor Sean Penn, who revealed in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone, published Saturday, that he had held a secret interview with Guzman in October at his jungle hide-out in Mexico.

Surrounded by the drug lord's armed security troops, Guzman told Penn of his daring prison escape, in an interview translated by Kate del Castillo, an actress who had famously played a drug trafficker in a Mexican soap opera.

“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” he boasted. “I don't want to be portrayed as a nun.”

Gomez said authorities were able to track Guzman's meetings with lawyers and other associates and were close to capturing him in October, apparently after his meeting with Penn. He had been spied by helicopter, she said, but was accompanied by two women and a child, and so security forces decided not to engage.

Gomez also gave new details about Guzman's summer escape, saying his brother-in-law, two pilots and tunnel engineers were involved. Once he made it through the tunnel, on a motorcycle speeding over specially built rails, he was whisked to an airfield where his airplane and a decoy took off in the night.

In a statement Saturday afternoon, the Mexican government announced the beginning of extradition proceedings that would set the stage for Guzman to face trial in the United States.

The proceedings are in response to two formal extradition requests from the U.S. government for crimes including murder, money laundering and arms possession, according to the statement.

The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians.

Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights.  Your freedom is about to disappear.  Your religious liberties will be stripped away.  You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions.  Free choice will be gone.  Your children will suffer.

Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us.

And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful.  If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye.

why would the Republican Party devise such a strategy that has no hope of success? Well, it turns out that they did not devise this strategy. I

t’s not even a strategy at all. It emerged not as a result of a grand Republican master plan, but of market economics.

The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio was not created by politicians, and it is not funded by a political party.  It is not supported by donations from people seeking political expression.  It was created for one central purpose: to make money.

the business of peddling hate and anger is a fantastically profitable one.

An unholy alliance was formed.  The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party.

Fox News has dominated the ratings as the number one cable news channel for the last 14 years and reportedly earns over $1 billion in profits annually, making it a golden goose in the overall Fox corporate empire.  Fox itself is one of the most valuable brands in the world with sales of over $13 billion.  And the tycoon behind Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is personally worth $12 billion.

Corporate profits are greatly impacted by governmental policies.  Corporations, therefore, desire the government to be controlled by whichever political party is the most favorable to corporate profits.  And this, of course, is the Republican Party.

it is indeed a cozy little business model.  The network builds an audience by appealing to people’s fear, insecurity and anger, and simultaneously directs its audience to support the right-wing political party that best protects the network’s own profits.

From a political perspective, it is certainly not healthy to incite anger and hate within a nation’s own population.  And it is not very wise to inflame hostility and rage against a nation’s own government

from a political perspective of creating a cohesive society and maintaining peace and harmony among the population, this is disastrous.

politicians in the Republican Party could not resist.  The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support. 

Rush Limbaugh raked in $80 million for himself in 2015 alone. Sean Hannity was paid $30 million. Glenn Beck is personally worth over $100 million. Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” generates over $100 million per year in advertising revenue.

So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division.  And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon.  They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation.

It worked.The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry.  Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater.  Their sense of victimization became ever more acute.  Their fury at the establishment boiled over.

The base of the Republican Party became a Frankenstein. It became radicalized into an extreme movement that turned against the established order, including the leadership of the Republican Party itself. 

This is the reason behind the rise of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  The Republican Party establishment despises these candidates, but the party has no idea how to slay these dragons.

On Friday morning Andy Lack announced that Larry Edgeworth died Thursday after testing positive for Covid-19. Edgeworth was a veteran audio technician. He is survived by his wife Crystal and two sons. Lack said the network is "doing everything we can to support his family during this very difficult time."

Former W.H. press secretary Sean Spicer made a surprise appearance Friday in the briefing room. Spicer, who now hosts a Newsmax show, "appeared to become the first former White House press secretary to question the President that they once served from the briefing room," CNN's Betsy Klein and Caroline Kelly reported.

he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.

Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.

The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.

In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.

the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.

They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.

A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.

Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.

Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.

In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.

 Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”

The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.

We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.

As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores

In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”

as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”

Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”

That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.

Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning

Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers

this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.

Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms

internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.

The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.

then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.

Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say

as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”

After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.

Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.

there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result

If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.

Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism

Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans

Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.

But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”

“They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did

A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed

When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.

Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.

He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”

indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies

I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine

I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal

do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?

reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”

A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.

On the return trip, Mr. Trump slept as some of his advisers spoke about the condition of Ms. Hicks, who was isolated in the back of the plane.

News that Ms. Hicks tested positive for the virus came as Mr. Trump left the White House by helicopter around 1 p.m. for a fund-raiser at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

On a call with Iowa voters and in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Mr. Trump sounded raspy.Later that night, Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said.The president had a mild cough, nasal congestion and fatigue.

Close to 1 a.m., Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Later in the morning, Mr. Trump had a high fever and his oxygen saturation levels dipped below 94 percent, Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, said.

After about a minute on two liters of supplemental oxygen, Mr. Trump’s saturation levels were back over 95 percent, Dr. Conley said. The president stayed on the supplemental oxygen for about an hour at the White House.

Mr. Trump received an 8-gram dose of an experimental polyclonal antibody cocktail. He also took zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin and aspirin.

The president also was given his first dose of remdesivir, an antiviral drug that has an emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration as a Covid-19 therapy.

Mr. Trump has mild heart disease, similar to many men in their 70s. He also takes a statin drug to treat high cholesterol and aspirin to prevent heart attacks. His health summary, released in June, showed that he crossed the line into obesity at 244 pounds.

Mr. Trump was given a second dose of remdesivir and did not exhibit any known side effects, doctors said.

Doctors wanted him to eat, drink and be out of bed as much as possible.

Doctors were tracking any damage to his lungs for signs of pneumonia.“There’s some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern,” Dr. Conley said.

When the coronavirus death toll approached 100,000, this fact was largely absent from Fox prime-time programming. Now that it’s approaching 150,000, Fox personalities are claiming the original lockdowns were a plot to harm Trump and that things are actually going far better than expected thanks to his towering leadership.

studies suggest misinformation from Fox and other right-wing media outlets might be making audiences more prone to believing coronavirus conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, even as too-rapid reopenings are a big reason the coronavirus is surging again, his Fox propagandists continue to push the idea that hesitation to reopen schools is pure politics.

Yet according to Trump’s own advisers, these failures are now putting his reelection at risk.

Meanwhile, Trump is mainlining from Fox a daily picture of the protests that is highly distorted and narcotically numbing.

This is surely why Trump is sending in law enforcement in the first place — he believes inciting violent civil conflict will help his reelection. As one GOP strategist candidly tells the Times, Republicans are hoping to define Democrats “as being on the side of the anarchists in Portland.”

The crucial point here is that what Trump sees on Fox is surely persuading him that he’s succeeding in doing just that.

Fox personalities are claiming that electing Joe Biden will make civil violence “a staple of American life everywhere.” They are relentlessly doctoring Biden quotes to paint him as anti-police. And they are suggesting that Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, which conflated protests with “far-left fascism” to justify sending in more law enforcement, represented the greatest oratory since Cicero.

But in the Fox narrative of the protests, there is no room for any acknowledgement that Trump is functioning as a primarily inciting and destructive force, or that this fact might be further alienating the educated white suburban voters who are supposed to find Trump’s authoritarian displays reassuring.

a recent Yahoo News-YouGov poll found that a larger percentage of suburban voters say the country will become less safe if Trump wins (48 percent) than say the same about Biden (37 percent). Among women, it’s even worse for Trump (50 percent and 33 percent, respectively).

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

Globalization helps drive these patterns to new extremes. Money flows into suburbs like San Marino and Palos Verdes, where Asian immigrants buy up expensive properties and generously donate their time and money to the local schools. Money flows out of poorer suburbs like South Gate, Bell and Huntington Park, all heavily Latino, where disposable income is tight and many families export remittances to a home country. New poverty builds upon old impoverishment. Infrastructure is stretched as renters crowd into dwellings that were modest to begin with. The toxic footprint of departed industries is left behind for new residents to contend with.

Many of Los Angeles’s middling suburbs have also slipped, especially those ravaged by plant closures since the 1980s. The southern section of blue-collar suburbs was hit especially hard. Here, suburbia transformed from comfortable communities housing unionized workers with well-paying jobs in local factories that gave them access to a middle-class lifestyle to fiscally strained communities housing immigrants working in low-paying, nonunion jobs.

Outer suburbs have fared little better. As home costs skyrocketed in recent decades, families chased “affordable” housing to the exurbs. They took on outsize mortgages and monster commutes, and they took with them congested roads, smog and sprawl. Compounding these strains, tax revenues lagged behind the cost of schools, roads, parks and libraries — the very infrastructure necessary to sustain middle-class life. This edifice came crashing down in the recession.

Policies to redress suburban inequality must focus not only on factors like income but also on tax equity across metro areas and regional planning that fairly distributes resources and responsibilities (like affordable housing). We should limit the mortgage-interest deduction for second homes and for values above the regional median. These steps would reduce distortions that inflate housing prices and concentrate wealth in what are already wealthy places.