Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

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.

Norman Pattis, a lawyer for Jones, said an appeal of Bellis’ default ruling is planned.

Judge Barbara Bellis took the rare step of issuing a default judgment in the case because she said Jones and his companies, Infowars and Free Speech Systems, had failed to turn over documents including records that might have showed how, and if, they had profited from spreading misinformation about the school shooting and other mass killings.

Shortly after the judge’s decision, Jones went on his show and said he’d been deprived of a fair trial.

His lawyers have asked that Bellis be removed from the case, alleging she has not been impartial.

The ruling has the same outcome as a jury determining the case in favor of the families. A jury will now determine the damages.

The shooting was portrayed on Jones’ Infowars show as a hoax involving actors aimed at increasing gun control. Jones has since acknowledged the school shooting did occur.

Families of the victims said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy pushed on Infowars. They sued Jones and his companies for defamation and infliction of emotional distress. The hearing on damages before a jury is expected to be held next year.

In one of the lawsuits, a Texas judge in 2019 ordered Jones to pay $100,000 in legal fees and refused to dismiss the suit. And a jury in Wisconsin awarded $450,000 to one of the parents in his lawsuit against conspiracy theorist writers, not including Jones, who claimed the massacre never happened.

But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.

Oh, and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists perpetrating this hoax?

Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.

What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.

In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.

The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies.

But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.”

climate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work

There are three important morals to this story.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.

Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party

Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics.

And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.

But for him to stop and start talking about being a hoax is absolutely dangerous.

Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, whose newly released book Hoax explores how Fox News covered Trump, told an interviewer in June that the US had entered an environment “where the Fox base” prefers “propagandistic opinion shows [rather] than any semblance of news”.

“People want to be lied to, and it’s above my head to know what to do about that,” Stelter told the Washington Post. “What do we do about that, when millions of people want to be lied to every day?”

The hysteria is not limited to television. Last week Vice leaked video of a speech by Scott Perry, a Republican congressman and devotee of the false stolen election theory, in which Perry told the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference that they should “go fight them”, referring to Democrats.

Vice reported that Perry claimed many Democrats did not share the same American values as conservatives.

“We can acknowledge that maybe not every one of them is that way, but that doesn’t matter,” Perry said, before drawing a dark parallel.

“We’ve seen this throughout history, right? Not every not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and 40s was in the Nazi party. They weren’t. But what happened across Germany? That’s what’s important. What were the policies? What was the leadership? That’s what we have to focus on.”

The comments by Perry, an influential member of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus, add further context to what experts fear is the current state of the American right – dangerous, intensifying, and with no end in sight.

“A fake story claiming Pope Francis — actually a refugee advocate — endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible to tens of millions,” Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the social impact of technology, said of a recent post on Facebook. “Its correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had significant influence in this last election’s outcome.”

Chris Cox, a senior vice president of product and one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, has long described Facebook as an unbiased and blank canvas to give people a voice.

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

Almost half of American adults rely on Facebook as a source of news, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. And Facebook often emphasizes its ability to sway its users with advertisers, portraying itself as an effective mechanism to help promote their products.

More recently, issues with fake news on the site have mushroomed. Multiple Facebook employees were particularly disturbed last week when a fake news site called The Denver Guardian spread across the social network with negative and false messages about Mrs. Clinton, including a claim that an F.B.I. agent connected to Mrs. Clinton’s email disclosures had murdered his wife and shot himself.

Even in private, Mr. Zuckerberg has continued to resist the notion that Facebook can unduly affect how people think and behave. In a Facebook post circulated on Wednesday to a small group of his friends, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zuckerberg challenged the idea that Facebook had a direct effect on the way people voted.

Users will also be able to report potentially false stories to Facebook or send messages directly to the person posting a questionable article.

The company is focusing, for now, on what Mosseri called the “bottom of the barrel” websites that are purposefully set up to deceive and spread fake news, as well as those that are impersonating other news organizations. “We are not looking to flag legitimate organizations,” Mosseri said. “We’re looking for pages posing as legitimate organizations.” Articles from legitimate sites that are controversial or even wrong should not get flagged, he said.

The company will also prioritize checking stories that are getting lots of flags from users and are being shared widely, to go after the biggest targets possible.

"From a journalistic side, is it enough? It’s a little late.”

Facebook is fine to filter out other content -- such as pornography -- for which the definition is unclear. There's no clear explanation for why Facebook hasn't decided to apply similar filters to fake news. “I think that’s a little weak,” Tu said. “If you recognize that it’s bad and journalists at the AP say it’s bad, you shouldn’t have it on your site.”

Others said Facebook's careful approach may be warranted. "I think we'll have to wait and see early results to determine how effective the strategy is," said Alexios Mantzarlis, of Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network. "In my eyes, erring on the side of caution is not a bad idea with something so complicated," he said

Facebook is also trying to crack down on people who have made a business in fake news by tweaking the social network's advertising practices. Any article that has been disputed, for example, cannot be used in an ad. Facebook is also playing around with ways to limit links from publishers with landing pages that are mostly ads — a common tactic for fake-news websites

With those measures in place, “we’re hoping financially motivated spammers might move away from fake news,” Mosseri said

Paul Horner, a fake news writer who makes a living writing viral hoaxes, said he wasn't immediately worried about Facebook's new crackdown on fake news sites. "It's really easy to start a new site. I have 50 domain names. I have a dedicated server. I can start up a new site within 48 hours," he said, shortly after Facebook announced its new anti-hoax programs.  If his sites, which he describes as "satire"-focused, do end up getting hit too hard, Horner says he has "backup plans."

Presidential campaigns today are themselves, to use Boorstin’s famous term, “pseudo-events” that stretch from months into years. By now, most Americans know better than to take at face value anything candidates say or promise along the way. We’re in on the joke — or at least we think we are.  Reinforcing that perception on a daily basis are media outlets that have abandoned mere reporting in favor of enhancing the spectacle of the moment. This is especially true of the cable news networks, where talking heads serve up a snide and cynical complement to the smarmy fakery that is the office-seeker’s stock in trade. And we lap it up. It matters little that we know it’s all staged and contrived, as long as — a preening Megyn Kelly getting under Trump’s skin, Trump himself denouncing “lyin’ Ted” Cruz, etc., etc. — it’s entertaining.

The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping. The problem is not Trump and Clinton, per se. It’s an identifiable set of arrangements — laws, habits, cultural predispositions — that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics. As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly few Americans seem to mind.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.

He can do this because members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning

now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.”

Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

The relationship appears to be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House correspondent.

All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.

as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.

If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.

it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.

The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.

Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.

Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown.

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.

Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Charlie Beck defended the decision to close the schools, saying investigators did not know at the time whether the threat was legitimate.

He said the email included all Los Angeles Unified schools and mentioned explosive devices, “assault rifles and machine pistols.”

The district called and texted parents early Tuesday morning to alert them that schools would be closed — the first systemwide closure since the Northridge earthquake in 1994.

Although the school district could technically be subject to a loss of $29 million in per-pupil funding for closing campuses, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said that he is certain the district would not be docked those funds.

Alan Glasband, a substitute teacher at San Pedro High School, said he and several other instructors had not received notifications. He said he heard about the bomb threat through a text from a friend.Another friend, he said, had driven from his home in Norwalk to Orville Wright Middle School near Los Angeles International Airport before he heard the news.

By midday, elected officials briefed by law enforcement said the threat did not appear to be credible.Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Los Angeles), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, said the email lacked “the feel of the way the jihadists usually write.”

Sherman said the roughly 350-word message did not capitalize Allah in one instance, nor did it cite a Koranic verse. He said the elements of the threatened attack also seemed unlikely, such as the claim that it would involve 32 people with nerve gas.“There isn’t a person on the street who couldn’t have written this,” with a basic level of knowledge of Islam, Sherman said. “Everybody in Nebraska could have written this.”

Still, he added, the person did have a knowledge of Southern California, and the threat could not be immediately discredited.

The FBI is working to determine where the email originated and who wrote it. Officials said it was routed through Germany but probably came from somewhere closer.

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

“In your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype,” said King, whose church draws about 1,100 worshipers on a typical Sunday.

As questions of governance blurred last week with questions of politics and ideology, some who already mistrusted Trump decided they needed to take matters into their own hands.

In Takoma Park, Md., a liberal suburb of Washington, Elizabeth Tully and her husband decided on their own to begin working from home full-time in the name of “social distancing” — a term for increasing the physical space between people to reduce disease transmission.

Tully then looked to a familiar place for guidance: her neighborhood parenting email group. A thread she started was flooded with comments and questions from other parents, many of whom considered pulling their own children from school days before their districts made the decision to shut down

“To be frank, on Wednesday, we’d all decided, ‘Yes, we’ve got to go forward.’ On Thursday, we had all taken a 360-degree turn,” he said.

The crisis sparked by the virus is unlike any that has faced the United States in recent memory. While containing the virus is the priority, public health experts say repeated missteps by the federal government have left the country behind in its capability to manage its spread.

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde learned last Saturday that one of her most prominent priests had coronavirus, and four days later, she made the decision to close 88 churches, including Washington National Cathedral. Amid the flood of information and conversations, one thought continually rose to the top: Try not to get ahead of what public health officials are saying.

That mantra soon became untenable. She was in touch that Saturday with city health officials, but there were conflicting reports about how contagious the virus was.

“I’m not blaming them,” Budde said of the city health officials. “We had a person right there with us. We were in contact, but we weren’t getting definitive answers.”

Public health experts have increasingly voiced support for such measures in recent days. On social media, the hashtag #StayHome has circulated widely, tweeted by medical experts, members of Congress and nonexperts alike.

The president, who said two weeks ago that the coronavirus scare was a “new hoax” seized upon by his political rivals, has been criticized for failing at times to convey the seriousness of the situation. Taking the president’s comments at face value, some of his strongest supporters have expressed skepticism about whether the coronavirus was a real threat.

Alicia Kusky of Port Huron, Mich., said Friday she thinks the government has reacted swiftly and appropriately. Kusky, 39, said she believes the president had previously called the coronavirus “a hoax” because he was trying to prevent mass panic.

If Republicans are building the infrastructure to subvert an election — to make it possible to overturn results or keep Democrats from claiming electoral votes — then we have to expect that given a chance, they’ll use it.

Climate change, the Russia investigation, his own impeachment, the election he won four years ago, President Barack Obama's birth certificate -- Trump's said so many things are hoaxes or fakes that he may personally not know what is real and what is imagined anymore.

Certainly the news Wednesday that President-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter is under investigation by US attorneys in Delaware over his business dealings with Chinese nationals will fuel renewed efforts to smear the President-elect through his son. Misinformation needs a kernel of truth to flourish. Here's what we actually know about the investigation into Hunter Biden.

Dr. Anthony Fauci complained Tuesday about trying to reach people in communities where hospitals are nearly overrun, but denialists stubbornly reject masks and social distancing.

The Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservatives, shut the door on Trump's election fraud fantasy and his efforts to get state legislators to bypass the voters have so far failed.

"The fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinions is a powerful sign that the court intends to stay out of election-related disputes, and that it's going to leave things to the electoral process going forward," CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck said after the ruling.

The Texas lawsuit is concerned only with the ones in key states where Biden won, which has been described as hypocrisy, but that seems like not strong enough a word here.

If the Supreme Court's Pennsylvania ruling is any indication, this Texas suit is just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate last gasps as Trump hops from one dead-end lawsuit to the next.

The cliché descriptor for the internet is that the world's information is at our fingertips. Which is true. But it also means the world's misinformation is at our fingertips. If you want to make a lie seem legit, it's easy to find a handful of pieces of misinformation or out-of-context articles and videos to bolster pretty much any false narrative.

People have all different motivations for peddling misinformation. Sometimes it's political, sometimes financial, sometimes a mix of both -- and of course some people just share it and want to believe it because it confirms their biases. With Trump, for instance, his reasons for pushing misinformation are both political and financial -- he doesn't want to admit he lost and he is fundraising off the back of the lies.

a lot of Americans are dreaming of the post-Trump era where he fizzles out of their daily lives. I don't think that is going to happen on social media. Trump has too big a footprint.

He drives so much of the right-wing ecosystem and I still think he and his proxies, like his sons, are going to hold a lot of influence.

The covert nature of these operations means it's always hard to tell, but certainly the experts we have spoken to this year believe Russian trolls and their ilk have been amplifying existing divisive narratives in the US rather than creating their own

I think the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. It's depressing, but I think a lot of people do not want facts

When I printed these confessions in Hoax, I wrote that everyone at Fox was “profoundly afraid of losing the audience and the resulting piles of cash.” I cited the former morning-show producer, who told me, “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.”

why the new legal filing by Dominion is such a showstopper. We can read exactly what the leaders and stars of Fox News really think. This is my biggest takeaway: In the days after Biden won the election, while Trump tried to start the steal by shouting “Stop the Steal,” the most powerful people at Fox News were not concerned about the health of U.S. democracy. They were concerned about Fox’s brand and their own bottom line.

here were spontaneous celebrations in major cities and long faces across Fox’s airwaves. The consensus view both inside and outside the network was that Fox’s acknowledgment of reality—and specifically its early projection that Biden had won Arizona—had turned the audience against the network.

According to the Dominion filing, Carlson texted his producer that weekend and said, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We're playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”

One snippet of texts shows Scott telling Lachlan that viewers were “going through the 5 stages of grief.” Angling to impress her boss, she said the Arizona projection was damaging, “but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

inside Fox, which is first and foremost a provider of entertainment, respect meant something else. Reading the texts and emails, I was reminded of another thing the Fox & Friends producer had said. “We were deathly afraid” of the audience, he admitted, “but we also laughed at them. We disrespected them. We weren’t practicing what we preached.”

That’s what Dominion is arguing in the legal realm—that Fox’s leaders were saying one thing privately and another thing publicly.

The other crucial metric Fox leaders were watching, of course, was the Nielsen ratings chart. The Dominion filing contains snippets of conversations from later in November that showcase Hannity’s alarm. “The network is being rejected,” he texted Carlson and Ingraham, to which Carlson responded, “I’ve heard from angry viewers every hour of the day all weekend, including at dinner tonight.” So they each found ways to wink and nod to voting irregularities and unfair systems—showing “respect” to viewers by actively misinforming them.

In a separate thread, on November 24, one of Hannity’s producers cited minute-by-minute ratings from the prior week’s episodes and said, “Our best minutes from last week were on the voting irregularities.” The conspiracy-laden segments continued on Fox through December, the ratings improved, and the country’s political divide deepened

Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich. Fox’s postelection strategy, the texts and emails suggest, was to stop rubbing Biden in its viewers’ faces. But in their effort to show their viewers “respect,” they ultimately disrespected both their audience and the American experiment they claim to protect.

Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.

government support for many state schools has been steadily gutted

the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.

Discrimination, however, is only a small part of the picture. Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality

While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. Disparities widened between those living in poor localities and those living in rich suburbs — or rich enough to send their kids to private schools.

A result was a widening gap in educational performance — the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for those born 25 years earlier

there are other forces at play, some of which start even before birth. Children in affluent families get more exposure to reading and less exposure to environmental hazards. Their families can afford enriching experiences like music lessons and summer camp. They get better nutrition and health care, which enhance their learning, directly and indirectly.

the situation is likely to get even worse

Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.

students are crushed by giant student loan debts

at the same time that a college education is more important than ever for getting a good job.

Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink.

increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships. Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities

no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder

Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish — and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other — and contribute to economic weakness,

Policies that promote equality of opportunity must target the youngest Americans. First, we have to make sure that mothers are not exposed to environmental hazards and get adequate prenatal health care. Then, we have to reverse the damaging cutbacks to preschool education,

The right says that money isn’t the solution. They’ve chased reforms like charter schools and private-school vouchers, but most of these efforts have shown ambiguous results at best. Giving more money to poor schools would help. So would summer and extracurricular programs that enrich low-income students’ skills.

it is unconscionable that a rich country like the United States has made access to higher education so difficult for those at the bottom and middle. There are many alternative ways of providing universal access to higher education, from Australia’s income-contingent loan program to the near-free system of universities in Europe.

A more educated population yields greater innovation, a robust economy and higher incomes — which mean a higher tax base. Those benefits are, of course, why we’ve long been committed to free public education through 12th grade. But while a 12th-grade education might have sufficed a century ago, it doesn’t today

His son, in contrast, showed no such restraint in the weeks before he was fired, regularly posting on Twitter about conspiracy theories involving Mrs. Clinton and her campaign staff well after the election.He continued to push his support for the fake news about Comet Ping Pong after his messages on Twitter about Sunday’s episode began attracting widespread attention. It was not until shortly before 3:30 p.m. Monday that he went silent on Twitter.

In one of the last messages he posted, he shared a post from another Twitter user who sought to spread a conspiracy theory that sprang up on the right-wing fringes after the shooting: that the suspect arrested at Comet Ping Pong, Edgar M. Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., was actually an actor, and that the episode was a hoax cooked up to discredit the claim of a sex trafficking ring at the restaurant.